• Tag Archives Urban Fantasy
  • Dorohedoro & Kabukichou Sherlock

    The gory CGI action-comedy Dorohedoro appears to have been the inspiration behind Kekkai Sensen, as they have a remarkable number of similarities between them in terms of atmosphere and character behavior. So I’m not really sure why I ended up so ambivalent about it. There are the obvious problems of course, such as the brain-damaged ecchi child, Hakata Ramen-esque baseball episode, cringey late-series mind-control developments, and both Nikaidou and Noi bearing a curious resemblance to Goku… but in the end I think it may have just been that the style of CGI animation they used disagreed with me.

    Kabukichou Sherlock is another comedy series which would have been better off named ‘Rakugo Sherlock‘. I hate rakugo. While I’ll grant that making Sherlock a rakugo addict rather than a drug addict goes a long way toward making him even more eccentric, I’m not sure there are all that many people out there who can stand that level of eccentricity. Especially when almost every other character in the series besides Watson is neurotic in some manner. And that’s ultimately all this series has going for it; neurosis. If you don’t enjoy laughing at outcasts there won’t really be anything for you here.

    If you happen to be in the mood for a cute parenting-themed traveling show however, you can instead check out Somali to Mori no Kamisama without fear of it developing romantic elements.


  • Cast In Wisdom & A Killing Frost

    Back in Cast In Oblivion you may remember that the protagonist finally decided to learn more about how to use her powers. Well, the 15th book (not including Cast In Moonlight) in Michelle Sagara‘s Chronicles of Elantra series take the necessary step of introducing a new location filled with characters who can advance that goal. It ends up one of the better installments (despite a continued lack of weight to the action scenes) thanks to both not getting bogged down in metaphysics and Kaylin’s continuing maturation as a character; for those saying she never changes you really need to read the first book (Cast In Shadow) again and then realize that less than 2 years have passed since then.

    Seanan McGuire’s A Killing Frost, the 14th October Daye entry, also advances its goal… far more than I thought it would after the meandering prequel. Not only is the titular ‘Search for Simon’ subplot resolved, but one of the series’ major overarching plotlines gets spontaneously resolved as well. Perhaps a bit too spontaneously. Presumably that event will be examined in more detail in the future, put aside here as it was in favor of wrapping up Simon’s arc, and I hope the author can come up with a believable enough justification for it.

    As for the bonus novella included within: It’s a perfectly fine prequel focusing on the Lordens’ relationship with Simon, which adds some useful context to Killing Frost‘s developments.


  • Carole & Tuesday & Toaru Kagaku no Accelerator

    For the most part, Carole & Tuesday is a variation on the classic A Star is Born sort of story; you have two amateur musicians from vastly different backgrounds connecting to overcome early adversity and make music that moves the masses. The characters are mostly fun, but the core problem here is that much of the music the show features is pretty generic (particularly the songs in the first half or so) and doesn’t match the characters who are supposed to be singing them. Listened to on their own without the visuals some of the songs are surprisingly good, but almost none of them work within the context of the show.

    It also has a number of other things going on as subplots, such as anti-immigration politics and corrupt businessmen, an obsessive stalker, fame-based breakdowns, a conniving manager, parental abandonment, and advanced AI supplanting humanity. All of these end up more engaging than the main story… which is more damning than praiseworthy.

    As for the Index Accelerator spinoff, it appears to take place sometime before Index III and mostly features a bunch of new characters who don’t really have much going for them. Accelerator himself is a pretty annoying/one-note character (albeit not as bad as Touma), so its weird anyone would make a series nominally centered around him to begin with. Another oddity is the rather large amount of situational ecchi; girls wandering around and/or fighting in their underwear is quite common.

    Speaking of ecchi: Don’t watch Plunderer unless you’re fond of sexual-assault level harassment guised as cartoonish comedy.


  • Assorted Non-Comedy Anime

    Fairy gone: I can’t think of a single good reason to keep watching this series beyond the pilot episode; the characters are awful and the fairies are Persona ripoffs.

    Katsute KAMI Datta KEMONO-tachi e: This show does not make a good first impression. While it amazingly enough manages to overcome that handicap by focusing on the corruption of various characters’ personal desires, by the halfway point that effort turns out to be for naught when it goes all-in on the battle shounen angle. The (thankfully rare) bits of comedy are also uniformly terrible.

    Assassins Pride: Questionable beginning aside, this briefly fooled me into thinking it was going to be a fairly standard ‘academy tournament’ or ‘rise of the underdog’ type of story… only to turn into a discordant mess of unrelated ideas instead.

    Granbelm: A magical mecha battle royale series with Madoka-like characters and an early streak of comic relief centered on the protagonist’s airhead façade. The problem is that it starts when the battle has been raging for a year, so instead of exciting early eliminations you have an extended see-sawing stalemate that wears out its welcome before the series is even half over and big dramatic moments that come across as arbitrary. What’s really annoying though is that episodes 10 & 11 (which have an almost completely different theme) are pretty damn good.

    How disappointing. An almost complete wash, I’m wondering if I should just stick to comedies.


  • Lord El-Melloi II Case Files: {Rail Zeppelin} Grace note & Maou-sama, Retry!

    The Lord El-Melloi II Case Files series turned out to be a direct sequel to Fate/Zero that ends shortly before the beginning of Fate/Stay Night. Making it a perfect choice to watch between the two. Even better, it features two notable characters from Fate/Apocrypha and Prisma Illya (making it easier to watch those series afterward).

    Content-wise it’s something like a detective mystery series infused with some standard Fate/-style action and occasional comic relief. The first episode is not representative of the series as a whole (the stand-alone episode 0 serves that role far better), to the point that if the backstory revealed within weren’t somewhat necessary I’d suggest skipping it entirely, while the rest of the episodes are split between an early episodic focus and a plot-driven remainder. There’s also a bit of a subfocus on philosophy, which would’ve probably ended up as boring as Zero‘s couch scenes had they not decided to keep the camera moving here. Even the most dialog-heavy sequences always have something to look at.

    Maou-sama, Retry! unfortunately doesn’t compliment anything. It’s nothing but a pale imitation of Overlord with a worse protagonist and more gratuitous ecchi. Just ignore it.

    Continue reading  Post ID 8477


  • Deus Ex: M△NKIND DIVIDED & Mary Skelter: NIGHTMARES

    The sequel to Human Revolution, Mankind Divided got an extremely hostile reception upon its release. Mainly due to its monetization aspects and what at the time was considered an overly heavy-handed depiction of police vs. activists… neither of which appear to be particularly egregious in retrospect.

    Sure the existence of the Breach minigame and QR codes is immersion breaking, but it’s not like you have to play it or use them to progress. The in-game depiction of police in the face of a legitimate threat meanwhile is, if anything, too restrained when compared to the ongoing real-life police response to imagined threats. Greater issues than either of those are the general clunkiness of the character interactions/movement, and the incredibly annoying energy system. Everything needs energy and there’s apparently no way to recharge it (beyond the basic minimum ‘1-bar’ level) aside from limited consumable items.

    Unlike Dishonored 2, while you can use stealth to get past any obstacle here, you’re equally able to go in guns blazing and play it like a conventional cover-based FPS. That should be a good thing, but instead it ends up clashing a bit with the highly non-linear layout of the various maps; going from peaceful exploring to bullets flying everywhere causes enough whiplash to sort of force you into a stealth mindset in order to keep things consistent. It’s a weird combination and I didn’t end up getting very far before uninstalling out of disinterest.

    And now for something competently different:

    When I first saw Mary Skelter: Nightmares pop-up on GOG, for some reason I thought it was going to resemble the dungeon portions of Tokyo Xanadu. As it turns out, that was completely offbase. Instead it’s a dungeon-mapping game like Elminage & Labyrinth of Lost Souls with an FFT-like job/skill system and a few galge elements. There’s a lot going on here in terms of character/equipment customization, to the point that (at the start of Chapter 2) I’m really not sure learning the upgrade systems’ intricacies will be worth the effort… particularly since the character interactions are so frequently cringe-inducing.


  • LEGIⓧN & THE ALIENIST

    Based off of a Marvel Comics’ character, the 3-season television series Legion is a study in high-concept insanity. It takes guts to make something so deliberately incoherent, to essentially thread together one concept episode after another until you have a consistently inconsistent schizophrenic tapestry… that I can’t deny. Doesn’t mean it’s worth watching though.

    The Alienist is something quite a bit different. A Victorian era thriller with police procedural elements set in New York City, its first season mainly busies itself with highlighting police corruption and reminding people that prostitution is a gender-neutral profession. I’m not at all surprised that it had a middling reception (though I liked the first half or so), especially since the narrative basically falls apart once the focus shifts to ‘the west’.

    The second season, subtitled Angel of Darkness, puts a greater focus on Sara and women’s suffrage in general with the murder victims being babies this time rather than adolescents. The corruption elements here come across as excessive/overwhelming and the work as a whole almost feels less like a thriller and more like soapbox preaching. Meaning I can’t really recommend watching this series either.


  • WITCHBLADE & HOMELAND

    The turn of the century TV adaptation of the comicbook series Witchblade begins with a movie. Being almost entirely an action-drama (there’s some supernatural mystery in there as well), it suffers rather severely from the fact that the action scenes are mostly ridiculous. More than anything they bring to mind a super sentai series… making it prohibitively difficult to take the drama seriously.

    Homeland is also a TV series, one which thankfully doesn’t appear to suffer from unintentional comedy (just frontloaded gratuitous nudity). The first season is a combination of thriller and familial drama which comes across something like “Hex: The Early Years”. On the face of things that shouldn’t have been much of a problem, but the early ‘fuck people’s privacy!’ theme is taken to Stalker-ish extremes and almost ends up a deal-killer.

    The second season is a continuation of the first, following a timeskip, which slows things down with more of a focus on secret-agenty behavior and personal trauma. The third picks up shortly after and amps up the personal drama quite a bit. At this juncture the re-occurring psychiatric issues subplot (and accompanying mental institution committals) becomes actively aggravating. It also happens to be the point the series starts focusing a hell of a lot more on Saul than Carrie.

    Season 4 is something of a soft reboot which makes the odd choice to replace the adultery-related drama with childcare drama only to almost immediately drop the topic completely, while also going well out of its way to shoehorn in more psychiatric issues. Seriously… what the fuck? And if that weren’t bad enough, the 5th season (picking up two years after S4’s conclusion) goes completely off the rails.

    It’s strange… the show makes so many odd choices and sends so many conflicting signals that it’s tough to get a read on it. The early seasons are both good and bad. Regardless, if you do decide to give it a chance, you should definitely stop watching at the end of S4 (if you can make it that far). Maybe go watch Jormungand after for the Hex/Bookman parallels.


  • COP CRAFT & Kyokou Suiri: In/Spectre

    After seeing a comment that made it sound like Red Data Girl, and noticing the rather large disconnect between the early (edgy) and current (goofy) promotional imagery, I decided to finally get around to watching In/Spectre… and I’m undecided on whether it was a mistake or not. While the beginning is enjoyable, the remaining two-thirds to 50% is for the most part pretty boring and/or distractingly implausible. Rather than an engaging mystery/thriller, exciting action series, or amusing romantic comedy it just ends up something like the second coming of Kyoukai no Kanata.

    Cop Craft on the other hand I didn’t have any particularly strong desire to see, but the ‘odd couple’ relationship angle seemed like it might complement the previous series. It did not. Rather, it reminded me rather acutely of why I mostly stopped watching Anime in the first place. While the series has a lot of ideas and messages to impart, some of them even pretty good, it never manages to sell any of them. Stuff is just sort of thrown at the wall and then forgotten an episode or two later.

    What’s interesting is that both of these series (despite their source material having been written 11 and 9 years ago, respectively) seem tailor-made for current events. In the former’s case you have the central theme of using lies and ‘questions’ to obfuscate and/or distract from the truth, while in the latter you have democracy being boiled down to ‘not choosing which one is good, just which one is better’ and corrupt police. So in the end these two series did end up complimenting one another… just not in the way I had expected.

    Continue reading  Post ID 8477


  • Indexing: Reflections & Wayward Children

    The second entry in Seanan McGuire’s Indexing series does not appear to have any reason to exist. Oh sure, the foreword says something about people asking “What came next” and that this was the answer… but basically nothing is resolved here, a few additional things are now unresolved, and it ends in pretty much the exact same place the first book did. Just skip it until/unless a third entry is ever written.

    Speaking of things that should be skipped: Wayward Children.

    I know better than to buy something just because I liked some of the creator’s other works. I know better. Worse, I even have a long history of bad experiences with young adult works by authors normally known for writing standard novels. And yet, I still bought the first four of these books and forced myself through them. There are so many negative things I could list about them, ranging from their physical length to their themes to their structure, but ultimately it’s probably best to keep it as succinct as possible and just say “They are young adult novels through and through”.