Fall 2017 – First Impressions

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Whew, what an intense first two weeks for Fall 2017. There are many reasons to be excited for the offerings this time around, but as usual I tend to be a little cautious given this is a honeymoon period of sorts for all of these shows. On a different note, I’ve bumped up my viewing palette to whopping eleven titles — twelve if we include March comes in like a Lion, which will be premiering later this week. Long week-in-reviews, here I come…

Anyway, same ‘ole applies: shows are ranked in descending order of interest. So sit back and relax as we run ’em down! Continue reading

Winter 2017 – Mid-Season Round Up

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It’s that time of the season again folks!

As usual, I’ll be giving a short synopsis of the shows I’m currently watching, ranked in order of my personal preference. Hopefully some of these titles might be appealing to you, should you be one of those that likes to wait things out before binging on sure-hit titles. I don’t blame you if that’s your style, in fact I commend you for being able to binge watch in the first place. But yeah, that’s the general mechanics of this mid-season round up.

Also, if you’re lazy, look for the tl;dr in bold at the end of each entry. Lastly, I highly recommend the Top 4 of this season. And with that said, let’s do this! Continue reading

Summer 2016 – Initial Impressions

Okay, so let’s go through what we’ve got this Summer. To be honest, I wasn’t very excited for this season. Perhaps the only thing that really caught my attention was Food Wars! since it’s a manga that I’m actually following. Everything else is pretty much a wild card – even the “venerable” Psycho Mob 100 which is, apparently, the show “to look out for” (most likely because of its OPM roots). Times like these are pretty much shooting in the dark, and though I wasn’t exactly thrilled with the results, there weren’t that many shows that I could honestly say weren’t very good save for a few. And these shows were probably just formulaic and, well, not very engaging. I’ve wondered for a while if it’s because I’m getting older (one of the shows I decided to drop was a Visual Art’s/KEY work, which used to be a non-negotiable probably 10 years back), but either way it’s been a steady first week, but really just one wild card after another.

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But before everything else, I’d like to apologize for disappearing last season. I mentioned in my previous Spring impressions that I was utterly floored at how writers are able to do the things that they do every season — and that still holds today. The difference is that I’m not a professional writer — I just like to rant about anime and share my thoughts. With that put into perspective, I’m a little more pragmatic as far as how frequently I can update the site. Either way, all that matters is the anime — so enough talk, and let’s do this! Continue reading

Summer 2016 – Previews (Part 1)

I wasn’t able to provide a list of shows that I was planning to watch, but you can check it out over at my MAL. Either way, it’s still a pretty formidable list that will likely get knocked down a couple levels as the days go by — but that doesn’t mean I won’t try to watch as many first episodes as I can to help navigate you guys through the busy Summer season. So let’s get started then, shall we?

 

ReLIFE

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The premise is simple enough — given the chance to relive your high school life, how would you do it? For Kaizaki Arata at least, he doesn’t have much of a choice after signing up for a fishy experiment whilst being half-drunk. Though I’m pretty sure most people will be split between actually enjoying the carefree adolescent life versus the dread of reliving the labors of puberty, ReLIFE successfully navigates its way through this hypothetical question in its pilot episode. Continue reading