Seasonal Sawce: This 2017 Summer Animain’t No Bummer, Part 2

This is the second of three posts that will close out the 2017 Summer of Anime.  Don’t worry; I’m not cheating.  All of these have been finished.  I’m just slow when it comes to writing stuff.  *Looks at the Drafts tab and apologizes to Digi-Ramblings again.*

This time around we have seven anime to talk about.  No Elegant Yokai Apartment Life since it’s still going, though.  Without further ado, let’s get to the anime I watched during the summer season of anime and rank ’em from worst to best.

Knight’s and Magic

If only we’d gotten more D…wait.

This was a consistently underwhelming show.  I hate to say that because I normally really enjoy isekai and mech series.  Knight’s and Magic was just…there.  I guess the only thing that struck me as neat was depicting the two weapons engineers as the driving forces of the war.  Even then, there’s something a bit wrong with that, right?  Like, our main character, Ernesti, never bats an eye when he kills people.  He’s smiling and laughing and reveling at piloting a mech better than the soldiers he’s massacring.  And he’s a kid.  Everything rang dissonant in this anime.

Hell, the most fascinating character arc was relegated way into the background.  Dietrich “D” Cunitz ran like the coward he was in the first big fight of the series.  Thought he was just a spineless creep, but by the time the series ends he’s become one of the finest knights in his order.  Fleeing that fight haunts and drives him to become better and never abandon his allies again.  But he was the least important protagonist of the, like, ten or so.  The most interesting part about the show was a sidenote.

I dunno, y’all.  There’s nothing glaringly bad here, but it’s all mostly just been done before and better.  I’ll give it a 5.5.

My First Girlfriend Is a Gal

That’s the show.

Did I expect better?  Oh, heavens no.  Did I want better?  Well, yeah.  My First Girlfriend Is a Gal just didn’t succeed as the sex comedy it wanted to be.  Much like with Knight’s and Magic, pretty much everything the show has had been done much better elsewhere.  But, this anime actually entertained me.  I wouldn’t call it good, but I did look forward to it every week.  Sure, the girls are mostly great, but the main draw for me was the main couple.

Junichi is established early as a sh*tty dude who only asked out Yukana because she’s hot and his friends pranked him into it.  So, it was a little off-putting to see her being genuinely interested in him while he remained kinda sh*tty.  But, credit where credit’s due–he grows as a character and comes to love Yukana for the actual person she is on the inside.  Not the best start to a relationship, but I like where it’s heading.  Just wish it was in a better anime.

And, honestly, most of my disdain for this anime stems from Junichi’s friends.  Especially the fat one.  He’s a pedophile, and it’s played as a joke consistently throughout the show’s ten-episode run.  It’s not funny.  It’s gross.

It’s a 6.  Objectively, it’s worse than Knight’s and Magic, but subjectively, it had more than one character I cared about.

A Centaur’s Life

This is not the snake girl Monster Musume promised me.

The previous two anime on this list are ones I wouldn’t recommend to anyone.  Yeah, I gave them positive-ish scores, but I’m usually pretty nice when it comes to that stuff.  I would suggest checking out A Centaur’s Life, though.  Probably to very specific people, but still.  For such an easy-going slice-of-life show, it has some really cool world-building.  Everything looks like nice and pristine, and there’s so much put in there to accommodate the various body types of the world’s denizens.  But, it’s continually hinted that such order is only maintained through strict laws about racism and prejudice.  There’s even an episode that follows a young boy in World War 2 to see how it played out there, and another that follows a frog-man visiting his home country after he’d been raised abroad.  Legitimately solid world-building.  For reals.

That’s easily the biggest draw for A Centaur’s Life.  I do mostly like the characters.  They’re a fun cast of teenagers who happen to have tails, wings, horns, etc.  There’s just something missing, though.  I can’t put my finger on it.  Maybe it’s just not as funny or as feels-y as I like my slice-of-life shows to get.  I guess they just put all their efforts into building the world and forgot to give the characters the heart they’d need to carry the show.

I think I’ll go with a 6.5 leaning toward a 7 here.  I love the world-building a lot, but it doesn’t have that special something to make it fully click with people.

Restaurant to Another World

Amen.

When the isekai genre meets the food porn genre, you get Restaurant to Another World.  I never necessarily looked that forward to it every week, but I enjoyed every episode.  The world-building isn’t as in-depth as A Centaur’s Life.  Restaurant succeeds with its characters, though.  They have the heart, stories, and lives that the former anime was missing.  I appreciate the history and culture in Centaur, but Restaurant always knew to give enough to get me interested in pretty much everything in the other world.  That’s unfortunately a double-edged sword here.

The little snippets of the characters’ lives and homes are good.  But, you always want more.  Not enough happens.  Everyone has a little story of how they find the door to Nekoya, they eat some food, they love it, and then they leave.  That’s pretty much every episode.  Each of the cultures the beings come from are neat from what we’re given.  It’s just never enough.  I desperately wanted to see more than two of the legendary dragons and to explore more of their world.  This isn’t that kind of anime, though.

I’m giving Restaurant to Another World a 7 because I really like what it did right, but I can’t get over how much I wish it would’ve done.

Fastest Finger First

Nerding is serious business.

First sports anime I’ve ever watched where I actually competed in said sport…even if it’s just quiz bowl.  It’s still real to me, dammit!  Yes, obviously Fastest Finger First struck a chord with me, which might explain why I loved it much more than I assume most people did.  It made me remember the days of memorizing questions from year to year, trying to predict how certain questions will go, and practicing every week with my school’s academic team.  Fun times, y’all.  Fun times.

I thoroughly appreciated the unique rules of the tournament in the show’s second half.  The written exam, the two-person teams, the semi-free-for-all where you could subtract another competitor’s points, and then finally, the classic fastest finger first showdown.  Loved it.  Loved the characters, too.  Pidge (I’m just calling him Pidge) is a solid lead whose background makes him both well-suited and a little handicapped when it comes to competing in quiz bowls.  I’m glad Mari is more than just the romantic interest in that she can more than hold her own in competitions, but I wish her voice actress had more experience.  Too often her line delivery felt stiff.  I also love all the rivals that are set up in a dominating yet reachable fashion.

Since I lived the life of a high school quiz bowler, this one’s an easy 8 out of 10 for me.  I love the subject matter and characters, but I wish it’d been longer and had more time to develop its whole cast.

Classroom of the Elite

He’s not exactly a people person.

You could accuse Classroom of the Elite of being up its own butt.  I, however, had a lot of fun watching it.  I don’t think Kiyotaka is the best “better than everyone else at everything secret badass” main protagonist out there, but I do think he holds his own.  He’s not really out to help people (or he believes he isn’t), and he’s not looking to make friends.  He’s here to win.  However he was raised, he seems to have this compulsion to succeed at any challenge presented to him.  I’m genuinely curious to see how his story–and those of his classmates–plays out in a second season I really hope happens.  Given his tactic of remaining in the background while allowing others to take credit for his victories, you can’t help but compare him to Hachiman of Oregairu.  Actually, the two main-ish female characters seem to be subversions of Yukino and Yui’s character types.  Probably wasn’t intentional, but they are strikingly similar.

As much I love the characters, it’s the miniature battlefields they compete on that really sucked me in.  There’s so much politicking and strategizing going on, it’s fun to figure out what exactly all the students are up to.  Hell, it looks like even the teachers are playing a larger game.  The second half’s big story sees the four first year classes left on an island to survive for a week, and it was great wondering how each of the leaders were trying to out-maneuver the others.

I’m actually gonna leave this one at an 8.  I enjoyed it and Fastest Finger First about the same amount, so I had to struggle deciding which one to put ahead of the other.  Classroom just edged it out because of best girl Airi Sakura.

Gamers!

Where is the lie, though?

And to think I wasn’t gonna watch Gamers!.  Yeah, it stayed my favorite show from beginning to end.  I love rom-coms, but the tropes can get tired after a while.  Keeping true to its name, Gamers! plays with all the cliches and ups them as far as they can go.  And the misunderstandings that would normally make a drama instead make this a genuinely funny comedy.  Different characters think there’s a love pentagon when there’s only a love triangle…or love square, really.  Like I said last time, Gamers! is Shakespearean.

I love the main characters and want the best for them.  Even while I’m rooting for Keita and Karen in their odd relationship where they clearly like each other but they’re both convinced the other’s just going through the motions, I can’t help but hope Chiaki can somehow win over the impossibly desirable Keita.  And Aguri and Tasuku’s budding love (even though they’ve been dating for some time before the show begins) is delightful fun to watch.  Chiaki’s little sister Konoha showing up as her wingman was also a welcome addition.

Although a lot is taken to extremes for comedy, Gamers! remains one of the more realistic shows I’ve seen since teenagers do always misread each other and try to figure out what everyone’s up to.  Gamers! also has my favorite soundtrack and art style of all the shows featured in this post.  It gets a 9.  Everything just clicked for me here.

That’s it for all the shows I started and finished this season.  There are still a few short series I plan on checking out now that they’re over, and I’ve got one more post on the way to wrap up this year’s Summer of Anime.

Plus ultra, y’all.

Peace out, and stay bizarre.

Seasonal Sawce: This 2017 Summer Animain’t No Bummer, Part 1

Ah, summer.  The best time to watch anime because the sun punishes those who dare step outside their doors.

Since every anime I’m watching is now at least six episodes in, it’s time to take a look and list them from the one I’m least hype for every week to the one I’m most hype for.  Essentially, my least favorite to most favorite.  This season I almost got an Amazon Anime Strike subscription, but those greedy SOBs can suck it.  Also, Netflix seems to hate their subscribers who like anime, so nothing from there either.

Let’s get to it.

8) Knight’s and Magic

Because poor literacy is cool.

Some nerd dies in a car accident in our world, but–as in so many other anime–that’s not quite the end for him.  He winds up being reincarnated as the androgynous son of a noble family, Ernesti Echavalier, in another world where knights pilot mechs called Silhouette Knights to fight demon beasts.  Somehow Ernesti’s vague recollections of his past life building mech model kits make him a savant of sorts as he designs, builds, and pilots these magic mechs better than everyone else.  And he’s 12.

Okay, so, on the plus side time passes quickly.  I think over a year has passed in the first six or seven episodes of Knight’s and Magic (that title will never not bug me).  Also, whenever the kid surprises everyone with his magic and mech mastery, it can be cool.  Other than that, this is pretty basic.  It’s an isekai show.  Down to the letter.  Nerd becomes surprisingly cool badass in fantasy land and all kneel before his superior nerdery.

I guess it’s harmless for the most part.

7) Restaurant to Another World

In Soviet Russia, restaurant goes to you!

There’s a quaint little eatery called Western Restaurant Nekoya situated in an unimpressive nook in a shopping district.  The patrons love the food, though, thanks to the owner’s impressive cooking skills.  Nekoya’s closed to its normal clientele on weekends because every Saturday the door to the restaurant appears in various locations in another world populated by elves, demons, dragons, and the like.  These denizens of this fantasy world also love Nekoya’s food and treat it as a neutral zone if usual enemies happen to be dining at the same time.  This is all extremely fascinating to Nekoya’s first waitress–a demon girl named Aletta–since she’s never been met with such kindness nor tasted food so wonderful.

Don’t let its spot so close to the bottom discourage you.  Restaurant to Another World is a perfectly competent show.  It blends the isekai genre with the fresh, flourishing food-porn genre of anime.  It looks good, and the characters are all likable.  (Especially the dragon Red Queen…. What?  I have a weakness for redheads.)  The reason it’s this low is that nothing really happens.  People come in and eat.  We get some backstory to flesh out the magical world a bit, but that’s it.  There’s no story or development so far.  And yeah, you could argue that’s just slice of life, but even that genre has a goal or a growing relationship that brings the audience back.  This just has fantasy beings eating omelets and cutlets and whatnot.

It’s a fine cooldown anime, but I just wish there were more meat on this bone.  (Get that?  That’s a food joke right there!)

6) Elegant Yokai Apartment Life

I keep thinking he’s wearing a soccer jersey.

Three years ago, Yuushi Inaba moved in with his uncle’s family after his parents died in a car accident.  Although they loved him, Inaba knew he was a massive strain on his uncle’s family.  Now that he’s entering high school, Inaba has chosen a school with a dorm so that he can move out of his uncle’s house.  As luck would have it, though, the dorms are burnt down and will take six months to be rebuilt and reopened.  The poor kid is finally able to find an affordable apartment in the old building Kotobuki-so.  It almost seems to good to be true.  His room is cozy, the food is delicious, there’s a cute girl who lives on his floor, the ghosts are friendly, the…wait.

Maybe it’s just me, but Elegant Yokai Apartment Life feels like it was supposed to come out in the early aughts.  The designs for the humans and otherworldly beings, the music, the tone, the eyecatches, etc.  Like, this is something I would’ve seen on Adult Swim or Tech TV or something.  Anyway, I’m enjoying it so far.  I admire Inaba’s drive to strike out on his own, and the residents of Monster House are a lot of fun.  I also appreciate how the show is not afraid to get super dark at times.  I do wish the animation was better and that everything would just flow more smoothly.

If you’ve been hankering for some cute occult anime, then you could do a lot worse.

5) My First Girlfriend Is a Gal

Dress code at their school must be pretty lax.

Junichi Hashiba isn’t exactly a piece of sh*t, but he’s pretty close.  His friends are actual excrement, and even though he frowns on their shenanigans, he tends to go along with them.  One such shenanigan sees his three sh*tty pals put a fake confession letter in the locker of the gal in their class, Yukana Yame.  Junichi shows up to the promised confession location hoping to at least get pity sex from the allegedly easy gal, but there is no such luck for him.  She pretty much sees right through him and taunts him for being a virgin, but there’s something about the way he carries himself and the way he acts that Yukana can’t help but find funny.  To the shock of Junichi and the school the next day, the beautiful Yukana actually agrees to go out with him, so now both of them have to figure out how the whole relationship thing is supposed to go.

Full disclosure here, My First Girlfriend Is a Gal might objectively be the worst show I’m watching this season.  There’re not really any fan-service, jokes, or characters here that haven’t been done better elsewhere.  But, somehow, the show has a certain charm to me.  Despite the super dubious base of their relationship, I do enjoy seeing Junichi and Yukana get closer.  Yukana obviously likes him, and Junichi is finally seeing past her looks and realizing he likes her as a person, too.  Then the other characters happen.  Two of the other three female characters are fine, but the giant-breasted loli is a trope so tired it should be put to sleep.  Also, Junichi’s friends can just f*ck right the hell off.  The show would actually be good without them.  Especially the fat guy.  I don’t know who thinks he’s funny, but they should nix that character.

At no point can you call it good, and I don’t even think many could call it entertaining.  I can’t say I don’t look forward to it every week, though.

4) A Centaur’s Life

Is a joke here really Nessus-ary?  (I am hilarious.)

In a world not vastly different from our own, evolution took a different path.  Everyone the world over has horns or tails or wings or just straight up resembles what we consider mythological creatures.  Even here, the high school centaur girl Himeno Kimihara just lives her normal life.  She worries about her body, finding love, and doing well in school.  Nothing too major.  Just hanging out with her winged friend Nozomi Gokuraku and her horned friend Kyouko Naraku.  That’s her life.

I know I didn’t sound that enthusiastic last paragraph, but I do legitimately look forward to A Centaur’s Life every week.  I genuinely never thought I’d care for the monster girl genre, but here we are in 2017 and some of the most interesting anime we’re getting fall under that umbrella.  The art style was the first thing to get me, the characters are fun enough they interested me, but the world-building is what’s kept me.  There was a great amount of thought and care put into figuring out how this society works and how these races co-exist.  Every little bit of info we get just fascinates me more and more.  Plus, the Antarctican snake people are really cool.  I do wonder why the mermaids have thighs before they have fishtails, though.

I know slice-of-life and monster girl anime aren’t everyone’s bag, but there’s so much love and charm put into this world.  It’s a great cool-down anime.  Even if it does have some pretty dark implications casually thrown out every now and then.

3) Fastest Finger First

GET SMART, SCRUB.

Pidge…er…Shiki Koshiyama has always preferred books over people.  This has left him with a great deal of knowledge but not much in terms of people skills.  That’s why when he’s randomly selected to compete in a quiz competition at the beginning of his first year of high school he’s unable to buzz in despite knowing the answers.  Furthermore, he’s impressed and intimidated by his classmate Mari Fukami who is able to buzz in long before some of the questions finish!  Shiki quickly realizes she’s determining the answers by listening for key phrases early in the questions and winds up answering an extremely difficult one himself to everyone’s surprise.  The thrill was nice but Shiki goes back to his books as soon as it’s over, but Mari’s seen his potential and tries to recruit him for the school’s competitive quiz team.  Sit down and buzz in if you want to become The King of Quizzes!

So, I might be a little bias here.  I was on my school’s academic team for three years (and captain for the last one of that three), and Fastest Finger First is essentially just that.  We met up, answered questions, went to competitions, and buzzed in to answer questions.  This is the first sports/competition anime I’ve watched where I have a legitimate connection to the subject matter.  But hey, this is definitely a sports anime.  Ragtag group that our hidden master protagonist joins, a whole new world of events to win, rivals appearing out of the woodwork, and so and so forth.  It would be higher if the last couple episodes hadn’t felt so filler-y, but them’s the breaks when going by the first half-ish (you know what I mean) of an anime.

Quite a bit more academic than other sports anime, but it is sports anime nonetheless.  Also has a cool OP.

2) Classroom of the Elite

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Advanced Nurturing School was established by the Japanese government in order to educate and foster the future generations who will be responsible for supporting the country.  Within the walls of the giant school, the students are almost completely autonomous.  They live by themselves, can wear whatever styles they choose, and they even receive a monthly stipend of points that can only be used on school grounds.  There is a catch, though.  The points a class receives depend on how well those students are doing.  First year D-class–the lowest of the classes for all three years–finds this out the hard way when they get no points their second month after goofing around for the first.  This is the predicament protagonist Kiyotaka Ayanokouji finds himself in.  He aims for average and often attains it in order to stay out of everything.  The determination of his desk neighbor, Suzune Horikita, to move up to A-class by any means necessary begins to rub off on him, though.  Operating from the shadows as best he can, Kiyotaka begins making D-class look a whole lot better.

Can’t remember who, but I saw someone describe Classroom of the Elite as Assassination Classroom but starring the core cast from Oregairu.  As a bare bones premise, yeah, that’s pretty close (they even have a smoking-hot smoking teacher).  It’s kinda hard for me to explain why I like this show so much, though.  I think Kiyotaka walks that fine line of self-insert protagonist and legitimate compelling character you want to know more about.  Same with Suzune, Kikyou Kushida, Sakura Airi, and most of the rest of the cast.  The tension inside the school is also built really well, and the mental games of chess the students play as they try to out-gambit each other are tons of fun.

The set-up is pretty cookie-cutter, I’ll admit.  Watch the first couple episodes, though, and there should be enough things to get you hooked.

1) Gamers!

It’s all about the game and how you play it.

In his second year in high school, Keita Amano still doesn’t have any friends…but he has his games!  He plays games of all sorts and loves them for all their different aspects.  This is what catches the eye of the most popular girl in school and president of the Gaming Club, Karen Tendo.  She invites him to join her club, and the poor kid is just awestruck by his crush asking him to join anything.  Little does he know Karen kinda has a thing for him, too.  The other players waiting in the lobby to join the game are the top guy in Keita’s class Tasuka Uehara, Tasuku’s adorable girlfriend Aguri, and super gaming nerd Chiaki Hoshinomori.  Press A to begin and get ready for a true comedy of errors.

This is one of those I wasn’t going to watch because the premise sounds about as basic as a rom-com can get.  Gamers! relishes in that, though.  The anime takes the tried and true tropes of the genre and, well, plays with them.  Everyone is almost completely mistaken about everyone else’s motivations and actions, but it’s played for so very much comedy.  I have found myself laughing repeatedly in every episode.  Also, the cast is an immensely likable group of dorks.  These goofballs and their misunderstandings are just wonderful.  The art style is really cool as well, and the soundtrack is solid fun.

This is easily the anime I look forward to the most every week.  I adore everything about it.  If Shakespeare made an anime, it’d be Gamers!

And that is gonna be it for this time around.  I am so happy to see one of these Seasonal Sawce posts not dominated by second seasons and the like.  This is all stuff I wasn’t familiar with at all before starting this season.  Hell yeah.

Hopefully my next post will be a continuation of the Summer of Anime, but until then….

Peace out, and stay bizarre.