Just a bunch of shows that don’t deserve their own post.

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Onmyo Kaiten Re:Birth Verse Ep. 5 & 6

So if you didn’t already know, our protagonist Takeru is trapped in a time loop. Every time he fails to protect the people he cares about, he gets sent back in time in hopes of getting things right for once. We’re only two months into the season, so he’s not quite there yet. Plus, it doesn’t help that Takeru is your typical loud and brash anime protagonist. Scream first, think later. Seriously, what kind of idiot goes back in time and grills someone for something they haven’t said yet? That’s my primary problem with this anime. I think it’s the only mecha anime of the season, and the production values ain’t bad. But somehow, the end product is less than appealing.

Takeru is enamored with Tsukimiya at first sight, which is probably my least favorite way for a romance to start. The world-building equally leaves much to be desired. But at the end of the day, it’s mostly Takeru that I beef with. I just can’t find it in myself to root for the reckless idiot. For example, at a later point in time, before he has even befriended his former friends — former as in they were his friends in the previous loop but not in this one — our protagonist sneaks into their home and cooks them a celebratory dinner. I’m sorry, but if some random jackass broke into my home, I don’t care how delicious those gyozas are. But one of those former friends is a blockhead, so the food works its magic. Apparently, you can’t be evil if you know how to cook.

We learn in these pair of episodes that the pretty boy anime character with long hair might actually be the villain. Quelle surprise. Anyway, Takeru has been isekai’d to a world where they sacrifice the weak in order to sustain society’s ongoing existence or whatever. Like with New Saga, I like time traveling stories as a concept. Time looping ones or okay too. But these stories still hinge on the main character being worth a damn. I couldn’t get into Re:Zero simply because I didn’t like Subaru. And likewise, Takeru is too stupid for me to fully enjoy Onmyo Kaiten.

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New Saga Ep. 8

I complained last week that Kyle’s friends never get to do anything meaningful, so right on cue, they spend the first half of this week’s episode defending Goh from kidnappers. Kinda funny in retrospect. I’m not going to feel bad for what I said though, because we’re already eight weeks in. This is maybe the second time they’ve been allowed to act without Kyle around?

It turns out Miranda isn’t Kyle’s lover in the previous timeline. Rather, she is actually secretly involved with Gazus the dwarf. It’s sad that this revelation actually defies expectations, because the bar is this low. You expect every MC to build a harem these days. In any case, Future Miranda blamed herself for Gazus’s death since she wanted him to become governor and thereby pitting him in danger. He wouldn’t have been targeted otherwise. But still, nominating your lover for political office? Sounds like a conflict of interest to me. Needless to say, Kyle’s next bout of heroics will involve saving the dwarf and preventing Miranda from becoming a cold husk of a woman. This will help them win the war somehow.

This arc has been rather exposition-laden, so I can’t say I’ve been super invested in the push and pull of the narrative. Onmyo Kaiten Re:Birth Verse might actually be the superior time-traveling story. Too bad I dislike its protagonist so much.

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Dealing with Mikadono Sisters Is a Breeze Ep. 5

Ah, it seems as though we still pump these shows out on a regular basis — shows where a singular protagonist goes and lives with a handful of beautiful maiden and eventually chooses one of them to be his bride. You don’t know which one, though! Place your bets, folks! Speculate to your heart’s content! I’m surprised the gambling industry hasn’t gotten in on this. Imagine if bookies started listing odds for whether or not anime waifus actually get to officially become one.

Unfortunately, when it is all said and done, the guys in these shows usually make the wrong choice. Watching them in action is like gambling but all you can ever win is disappointment. Think Nisekoi with the stupid locket. Think The Quintessential Quintuplets and the wedding scene they kept endlessly teasing. I guess Rent-A-Girlfriend also counts? Though in that case, instead of the guy winning over the girl of his dreams, however, she just find new ways to reject him over and over. The author’s living out his weird cuckhold fantasies, I guess. But nevermind him. To list off a few more examples, there was a similar show recently where a guy took over a restaurant where all the waitresses were waifu candidates. Then there was another one where a guy went to live with a bunch of shrine maidens. It doesn’t really matter who the guy is, nor does it really matter who the girls are. I can’t even recall the names of these anime anymore. All you gotta do is swap the setting around a bit, and tweak the characters’ background just enough to claim originality. Mikadono Sisters is no different: pair a supposedly average guy with a trio of overachieving sisters and voila!

Anyway, it’s clear that some of the sisters have started to develop crushes on Yuu even if they’re in denial about it. In the fifth episode, the tall, prince-like one accidentally kisses Yuu. Yep, she literally fell on his lips. See, it does happen! Your man didn’t cheat! He just tripped and fell on that woman over and over. Anyway, Kazuki subsequently gets all flustered about it. Unfortunately, the protagonist is still currently too busy doing his best Dom Torretto’s impression to really notice. I have faith, however, that the anime will eventually get there. I feel like Palpatine cackling at Skywalker to embrace the dark side. Soon, you will take your place on my dubbed-only watchlist as yet another generic harem anime!

(This, by the way, is the reason why I’m still only on episode 5. If you suck, I’m not gonna waste my effort reading subs.)

Well, we like our options, right? Eh, I’m not so sure about that. Between a deep dive into one relationship or four or five shallows one, why would I ever choose the latter? There are shows that don’t even dare to introduce a third party, i.e. a potential interloper, to muck things up. I’m talking Nagatoro, Uzaki… you can certainly also lump My Dress-Up Darling in with these shows. These anime can be just as generic and filled to the gills with fanservice as the harem romcoms above, but I still vastly prefer to watch them instead. No love polygons, and certainly less robotic drama where the protagonist goes from healing one character to the next like some sort of harem assembly line. I always hated that. New arc? New female love interest with a mental trauma! Even the worst of the bunch I listed above, i.e. Nagatoro, is infinitely more enjoyable to me than watching a gormless anime protagonist ping-pong back and forth between saving multiple girls like some sort of Harem Jesus.

By the way, the sisters’ hyper-competitive father reminds me of all those parents I so often see around me. The sisters are great. They’re talented enough to potentially change the world for the better. But I suspect that this doesn’t matter the slightest bit to their father. Rather, he embodies the sort of parent who would rather see his kids on top of a broken world than have them try and lift anyone else up.

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Welcome to the Outcast’s Restaurant! Ep. 8

I didn’t expect this week’s episode to open with a visit to the onsen. I know we all need a vacation from time to time, but it’s hard not to be cynical when an anime takes a trip to one of the primary locations for shameless fanservice. What’s next? Are we going to open a restaurant on the beach? More importantly, outside of Dennis, everyone else in the cast is simply too young, and as such, these slow panning shots are very uncomfortable to watch. Welp, prepare yourself for tired-ass tropes like boob envy. Atelier, a goddamn child, ends up being disappointed that — wait for it — she looks like a child. Anime is too much sometimes, man. We also get other weird bullshit like Polvo being jealous over Atelier feeding Dennis. Why? Who wants this?

Initially, everyone appears to be going their separate ways. It mostly boils down to the kiddies suddenly finding new jobs or parties. Dennis and Atelier, however, are not so lucky. Basically, our protagonist has made a lot of enemies over the course of the series despite being a humble restaurant chef/owner: Atelier’s evil uncle, Dennis’s former party leader, Bachel’s abusers, so on and so forth. The kiddies want to fight back, but Dennis would rather pack things up and reopen up his restaurant somewhere far away. I get it. He’s basically a father now. Sure, Dennis can retaliate, but that might just make things worse. Plus, he can’t guarantee Atelier’s safety if he’s busy fighting evildoers. But running away doesn’t sound very heroic for an anime protagonist, so I imagine something or someone will soon convince him to change his tune. In the meantime, more evil bastards show up and thus we end on a bit of a cliffhanger.

Again, the first half of the episode feels like a waste of time. The narrative gets back on track in the second half, but I still feel ripped off.

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Scooped Up by an S-Rank Adventurer! Ep. 8

Yay, another anime series with a hot spring episode. I’m so excited. Go on, go on. Start comparing boob sizes or mentioning how smooth someone’s skin is. Do it like you always do. It’s practically anime law.

Yep, there it is.

So dumb. Whenever you want to take a break from any sort of creativity, just do one of these episodes. For at least a good five or so minutes, the episode practically writes itself. I don’t even know why people pay top money for generative AI chatbots when we humans have been entertaining the masses with cookie-cutter shit since the dawn of civilization. No rounds of funding needed here! As a bonus, Silica gets nasty with Yui for no reason:

It’s sad how the one thing I didn’t expect from an onsen episode turned out to be fat shaming.

Elsewhere, Lloyd is overthinking as usual, but this gives the narrative an excuse to have him fuck off for a tiny bit. We thus focus on the rest of the party as a change of pace. Unfortunately, nothing too exciting happens. Daggas is interested in upgrading his equipment. In order to get his hands on a nice shield, however, he has to assist a shopkeeper with a couple of “chores.” Meanwhile, Silica not so quietly hones her fire spells in a nearby forest. To make a long story short, this is a pretty low stakes episode. There’s little here that I care to talk about. I already made fun of the hot springs portion, so I’m good.

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Kaiju No. 8 Ep. 18

Right off the bat, we see Soshiro talking to a massive kaiju inside a tank that is filled to the brim with fluid, and yet, the kaiju’s voice is not distorted at all. That really bugs me.

Anyway, this week’s episode is my favorite kind of anime episode: chumps sitting in a room, yapping about numbers.

“9 created 10!”

“We can handle five 9s, but 9.5s?!”

“The average has gone from 2.x to 4.x!

“We need someone who can synchronize with Number 6!”

“6 was a 9.6!”

Bruh, gimme a break. Well, Number 6 gives Reno an opportunity to be an important character again, so maybe our eager. boy will reunite with Kafka soon.

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Gachiakuta Ep. 6 & 7

The extended, multi-episode battle against the bad guy isn’t really remarkable enough to talk about. It’s… normal. The fight choreography is normal, the voice acting is normal, the animation quality is normal — it’s all within the realm of expectations. Basically, it’s nothing you haven’t seen before and better from Bones. Normal’s not necessarily bad, but I mean, at the time of writing this sentence, I had just devoured a normal bowl of white rice with Thai green curry. You wouldn’t expect me to write something up about that, would you?

(I asked them to make it Thai spicy, but I guess I didn’t look Asian enough to the waitstaff. What a shame.)

Afterwards, it would’ve been slightly more interesting if Rudo actually did get taken away. At the very least, it’s a narrative direction I wouldn’t have expected out of a show like this. But of course, the Cleaner squad finally rolls up at the last second to prevent that. The villain — uh, I think his name is Jabber — has some weird boner for fighting to his death, so he was gonna keep going until a girl magically appears out of a portal via a manhole…? She then basically tells him, “Yo, you’re a recurring villain, so you’re not allowed to die here! And to make the audience speculate as if this show has an interesting plot, I’ll just mention something vague and cryptic like how our boss is smiling.” Well, that’s good enough for Jabber, so he agrees to leave. The most aggravating thing about this scene is how everyone stays on their respective sides, doing diddly squat. Uh, you wanna try stopping the bad guys from running away or anything? Naaaaaah.

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Apocalypse Bringer Mynoghra: World Conquest Starts with the Civilization of Ruin Ep. 8

Since Takuto kinda did nothing last week — as well as in previous weeks since the start of the series — you’ll be surprised to learn that this episode also has him doing mostly nothing. Instead, we focus on the dark elf twins and their diplomatic excursion to Dragotan. To keep them safe, Takuto assigns a trio of Medic units that look like plague doctors. How kooky. I forget sometimes that he got isekai’d into his favorite video game. Moreover, the season is almost over, and I feel like the story hasn’t really gone anywhere? It’s like I’ve been watching eight episodes of setup.

So what do we learn? Well, the inhabitants of Dragotan are hungry and scared, the mayor is terribly overworked and probably incompetent at her job, and finally, an evil merchant has made his coin by dealing an illicit drug. It’s all kind of dumb. See, said evil merchant wants to broker a deal where he and Mynoghra join hands in producing the aforementioned illegal drug. A shrewd business man would try and suss out his potential partner in crime. For example, would the king of Mynoghra even want to work with me? But this guy can’t even do something that simple. Instead, he tries demonstrate his business acumen on a pair of kids on a meet and greet. He assumed that, because Mynoghra is evil-aligned, anyone from the nation would just automatically agree to work with him. And when they don’t immediately give him a response, rather than taking a step back to reassess the situation, he hires only two thugs to try and enslave the twin emissaries. It’s such a hare-brained scheme.

There’s no threat or tension in this anime. It’s just stupid people doing stupid things while our passive MC sits back and observes. He wins by default, because his enemies can’t help tripping over their own feet. None of the unit stuff matters, because the stakes pitifully low. Case in point, we cut to Takuto and Atou yapping on and on about how summoning the Medics was such a perfect move, because those plague doctors excel at killing humans and demi-humans. You couldn’t find a better bodyguard for the twins! Sure, it makes sense to be this heavy-handed if you’re up against, I dunno, an entire gang of thugs. Or maybe a crime syndicate. But two thugs? Two whole thugs? That’s the best imminent threat you could come up with?! Did they run out of budget to animate more?

And then to top it all off, the mayor pisses herself. I know authors will often fill stories with their thinly-disguised fetishes, but c’mon, control yourself a little. It’s not even a healthy color. Give that poor woman some water.

I plumbed the depths of my memories to try and remember if I’ve liked a kingdom management isekai before. As it turns out, I didn’t really have to go that far back. I actually kinda enjoyed How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom. Naturally, its biggest drawback was that it had a harem MC, but it really felt like it took the challenge of governance head on. It’s a shame how that show never got a follow up sequel adaptation, but we’re currently on what season of hate-watching Rent-A-Girlfriend? Ah well, it’s probably for the best. I hear the MC just starts collecting wives, so I probably would’ve been terribly disappointed in a potential follow-up series. And maybe Takuto can remain loyal to his Atou. I still think it’d be more interesting if the latter had stayed in her monstrous form or at least brought it out more often.

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Tougen Anki Ep. 6 & 7

What do you do when zombies attack? It’s easy. Just whip out your gun and start capping people. Between this bit of ridiculousness and the ugly character designs, Tougen Anki has to take the crown for worst shounen of the season. Maybe the whole year. I’ve never seen a less inspired show in quite some time.

In good shows, characters will simply do stuff. No faffing about. If we’re going to fight, we fight. If we’re not going to fight, let’s go do something else. Like, I dunno, putting out fires started by a volcano. The setting is constantly shifting as characters have clear objectives. Everyone has an urgent goal in mind, and they’re not going to waste time doing a monologue in their head.

In bad shows, however, characters do exactly that while everyone else stands completely still as if it would be dishonorable to interrupt a speech they can’t even hear. “Oh no, there are no other escape routes. Oh no, the only combatants we have left are students. Oh no, no reinforcements will come. Oh no, our enemies are really strong. Lemme stare at the ceiling as I ponder our predicament. It’s okay, I have time. The bad guys who just randomly stabbed me earlier with no warning will now respect my need to finish this inner monologue. Oh wait, did the bad guys just ask me a question? Lemme whip out a syringe and explain to the audience exactly what it is and exactly what it does.”

For the rest of the seventh episode, I went and did some personal bookkeeping while listening to a lady strip down to her skivvies and hammer a monster with her fists. And even though everyone else is being hunted down and slaughtered by the enemy, the anime makes sure to inform us that our buxom young lady also happens to be a mega clingy waifu. Someone just got murdered nearby, but the author’s desire to be spoiled by a sugar mama is way more important. I’m sure I didn’t miss out on much by not having my eyes glued to the screen.