10
votes
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!
Watching One Punch Man. I unfortunately read some of the drama of the animation quality earlier so it came in expecting it to be horrible. I don't know that I have ever really paid attention to animation quality, as I'm happy to sacrifice it for solid story. But it really is extremely sloppy and cheap. It's almost like they sacrificed story flow itself in an effort to make animation easier.
There was a sad comment on Reddit with all the manga panels that would never be animated, at least not soon, and how sad it was as a fan that much will not come to pass. It's real bad.
I've not watched the new season but I have read that section of the manga, and honestly it gets really boring really fast IMO. It's a single arc that starts around chapter 96 and it goes on for nearly 80 chapters by itself. It takes up nearly half of the entire manga. Even One Piece arcs don't go on for that long. There's a lot of extremely good stuff in it, but I think it suffers immensely from the fact that it takes zero breaks; at some point it all just started to blend together and I just wanted Saitama to stop stalling and punch the bad guy already so the manga could move on. I'm fortunate to have only started reading the manga once it was all over and done since I could not imagine being drip-fed that over the course of 4 years.
I have no idea how an anime could possibly adapt it all in a single season (or if that's even their plan), it's 2 season's worth of non-stop action and very little comedy compared to the rest of the show. That's a difficult thing to adapt at the best of times, and with how much of OPM's popularity is centered on its comedic elements, I'm not sure what the best approach to take would have been.
Of course this is all made rather moot by the fact that they've proceeded to doom the adaptation from the very start by giving them a budget of like $30 and cutting so many corners that there's basically nothing left. They could have just gotten the VAs together to do a reading of the manga and it would have ended up 10 times better.
Spoiler-y aside for manga readers and/or people who don't care
I'm counting the end of the Garou fight as the end of the arc, but technically they leave the Monster Association like 20 chapters before then or something. I'm still counting it all as the one thing since the MA part leads seamlessly into the Cosmic Garou part with zero breaks in between, and I think it all happens literally in one in-universe day (time travel shenanigans notwithstanding).
Binged the entirety of the Medalist anime in 2 days and it's one of the more inspiring and wholesome stories I've watched lately, following a former ice dancer slightly past his prime coaching a young girl who is determined to become a figure skater despite being several years past prime starting age (which apparently is 5 years old, that's crazy to me). There's even a very wholesome story with the creation of the anime itself - the mangaka, Tsurumaikada, is a big fan of the voice actor Natsumi Haruse and tweeted back in 2018, "I would also like to draw a figure skating manga that would someday be made into an anime, and have Natsumi Haruse play the main role!", and sure enough, she is the VA for the main role. On top of that, apparently the manga is also Kenshi Yonezu's favorite manga, so he offered to create the opening song for the anime, which is an absolute banger. ON TOP OF THAT, Yuzuru Hanyu, one of the greatest figure skaters of all time, is also both a long-time fan of Kenshi Yonezu and a fan of the manga, so he offered to skate in the MV for the song, and even created and skated a short program with it.
Highly recommend this one, though there is some use of 3D CGI models during skating sequences. I personally think it's done well enough to not detract from the experience but some folks just have real high standards for that kinda thing. The second season is also going to start airing in January next year so you won't have to wait long to continue where season 1 leaves off.
I've been watching One Frame Man (aka One Punch Man season 3) and Digimon Beatbreak. Digimon Beatbreak has been a bit of a slow burn so far but it's spent its time setting up characters and their relationships with each other. OPM S3 has been dreadful.