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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!
Started the Kaguya-sama: Love is War manga at the recommendation of @Trobador since I liked Death Note, and it's been really fun so far! Nearly through volume 2 and it's very cute, each of the protagonists + their third-wheel feel very fun and believable as (dramatized) naive teens.
Aha! I'm glad I could bring you to something enjoyable. Have fun! Let me know what you think when or if you ever get to volume 9, that one has an arc I particularly like.
Friend recommended "Lord of Mysteries" to me. And when I say "recommended," I mean he was like "YOU HAVE TO WATCH THIS SHOW." So I started it.
And it's pretty good! I like the aesthetic and art-style a lot. It reminds me of Steampunk without the steam. So I guess that's just Victorian. Either way, it's cool.
A little lost on the story even though I'm like 6 episodes in, but my friends says that's normal *shrug*
I'm also watching Lord of Mysteries as part of this season's Chinese animation dive.
The first thing which strikes me about the show is that the animation is remarkably good.
The action scenes are all very dynamic, and they don't skimp on frames or art consistency even for less important scenes, small movements or characters who aren't in the focus of the shot. The character designs also lean towards the realistic and have a pleasantly chunky, thickly-shaded style to them which makes me think a bit of the Netflix Castlevania show.
However, the show does have a heavily post-processed look (lots of gradients, filters, particles and CG effects) which people may or may not love.
On top of the animation, the backgrounds are unusually detailed and I suspect that most of them are actually just composed out of 3D CG models, as there's a lot of sweeping camera work showing them off from different angles. It wouldn't surprise me if they used AI in the workflow, as it would require a tremendous amount of effort to produce this level of detail by hand, but if that's what they did, none of it leaps out to me as looking bad (other than some of the models for things like carriages and buildings looking a bit janky due to unusually low texture detail compared to the surroundings).
In terms of the story, it's basically Chinese isekai progression fantasy, complete with jobs, levels, skills and so forth.
This isn't usually my jam, but at least it's not the usual "light novel JRPG Europe" setting, instead being more of a 1900s Lovecraft / Aleister Crowley occultism / "revealing the arcane" sort of deal with a bit of SCP Foundation thrown in. The usual genre tropes with the protagonist planning out his character build and using his knowledge from Earth are definitely there and kind of obnoxious, but there's enough of a proper plot outside of that stuff to make it worth watching.
Speaking of the plot, the first episode has to be one of the worst on-boarding episodes I've ever seen. There's literally zero time devoted to establishing who the protagonist is (or even the fact that he comes from our Earth) or what the rules of this setting are. Instead, it launches straight into four or five separate storylines and the introduction of a dozen different characters and locales, the relative importance of which are not even hinted at.
However, the show does narrow its focus into a much more manageable single storyline from episode 2 onwards, so it's worth pushing through to at least that point before deciding whether it's for you.