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What have you been watching / reading this week? (Anime/Manga)
What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.
If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!
Took a break from gaming to clean out some of my backlog:
Kaiju No. 8 Season 2 - It's good old shonen action, story isn't complex but engaging, characters aren't complex but relatable, the action's good, the tropes are all present, just an easy and enjoyable watch. Only 11 episodes and it ends on a massive cliffhanger though, so it does feel a little short.
My Dress-up Darling Season 2 - High school romcom but cosplay-flavored. Cute characters and a generally wholesome vibe, and thankfully none of the characters or voice acting are overdone to the point of being annoying, which happens too often in this genre. You get to learn a few things about cosplay culture in Tokyo too.
Lazarus - An action thriller made by none other than Shinichiro Watanabe of Cowboy Bebop fame, it's pretty solid overall. I think most people that were excited for this were expecting something on the level of Bebop but it's a completely different kind of story so comparing the two isn't fair. It tells a cohesive, linear story that's just as long as it needs to be, the action scenes are excellently choreographed (they got Chad Stahleski, the John Wick director, to direct them), the characters are all interesting enough, it's not really complex and there's not much subtlety. Probably won't be a timeless classic but it's still good.
Secrets of the Silent Witch - Didn't really expect much from this one but I ended up watching the whole thing because the main character is a socially awkward small animal that's animated as such and I'm a sucker for simple cute humor. It's got some Konosuba or Princess Connect vibes, that kinda thing. It's otherwise just fine, story, characters, and animation are all fine with nothing really standing out.
Also finished some rewatches:
Delicious in Dungeon - Man I love this show. The character building and world building is just meshed together so well, and it's always great when the main party interacts or is mentioned by another more "normal" party because it highlights just how strange the main cast really is. I really respect Studio Trigger for having maybe the best standards for working hours and quality among all the big-name animation studios and only doing one project at a time, but I neeeed another season of this.
Hakumei and Mikochi - This might be my favorite show to just relax to. A lot of iyashikei shows I've watched end up being a little too slow paced or quiet and I end up getting sleepy going through those, or I just drop them altogether from boredom. This one hits it just right. There's no unnecessary forced drama, just people living their lives and sometimes going on small adventures. It's fantasy, but it's not fantastical. The characters feel real and relatable, even when they're animals or bugs. There is a notable appreciation of alcohol, one character even makes their own limoncello. The soundtrack is made by Evan Call (Violet Evergarden, Frieren) and it does a perfect job of capturing the energy of the show - sometimes calm, sometimes playful, sometimes nostalgic, always very wholesome.
Secrets of the Silent Witch was a series my wife and I watched together. The show felt like it started off with a reasonably interesting premise and then ultimately ends up entirely forgetting about it. She supposedly is antisocial to the point that she can't even bring herself to speak incantations in the presence of others so she invents entirely new techniques to not need to speak them, but when shown it seems more like she's just a little shy. The reality is she has tons and tons of lines, I think maybe even more than many generic loner characters in other series that are never presented as having issues talking. Even trying to write it off as character development felt so flimsy due to her age and some of the flashbacks themselves. By the end I felt like every episode I was making the same comment to my wife: "she sure talks a lot for being silent, they should've just made her mute." It turned out to be more like Secrets of the Slightly Shy Witch.
It also kind of dropped the ball on things that could have been cool within the magic system. For example, incantations put a speed limit on casting and effectively prevent parallel multi casting just due to how fast a mouth can move. They could have went with her not using incantations letting her bypass that restriction, effectively making her powerful due to impossible to match scale. Instead she just seems vaguely more powerful in ways that don't seem related to her silent casting.
Just going to pick something airing. https://myanimelist.net/anime/60303/Shinjiteita_Nakama-tachi_ni_Dungeon_Okuchi_de_Korosarekaketa_ga_Gift_Mugen_Gacha_de_Level_9999_no_Nakama-tachi_wo_Te_ni_Irete_Moto_Party_Member_to_Sekai_ni_Fukushuu___Zamaa_Shimasu it is.
This show is... weird. It has a bunch of the standard cliche anime stuff. Power fantasy. Loyal and obsessed harem. Dungeons. Fantasy races. Unique special skills. Adventurer guild with letter ranks. Numeric levels that appear as text that floats in the air. But it also has some odd decisions.
As an example, the whole second episode feels entirely out of place. Practically none of it serves any purpose. And then the next episode just completes a multi-year time skip before it seems to want to get back into the story. By a few minutes into episode 3 something like 3 years have passed.
Spoilers
It seems that the main character intends to use his special power to go to war with the entire world. He seems perfectly content with mass murder. I have to give the show that a main character not only not caring to be a good person, but to be an actively hostile force toward basically the entire planet, is pretty rare.
We went to see the Chainsaw Man Reze arc movie over the weekend. It was alright! In some ways it was different than what I expected going in, and the vibe I got from the other theatergoers was the same. Then there were other parts that were exactly what I expected, for better or worse. I fell for all the cinematic tricks and ended up liking Reze's character! I want to see Season 2, and based on this one movie, my gut says Chainsaw Man fits better in a TV episodic format, to split up the episodes by tone, and they could add soem cliffhangers too, and the fight scenes could be shorter! On that note, some of the special effects were literally seizure-inducing, with those bright white strobe lights on the big screen, that wasn't my favorite lol
Spy×Family had just about its best episode yet, I think. I'm pretty excited to see where the rest of the season goes.