Anime Review: Encouragement of the Climb and Senyuu

As I've mentioned before it can be a bit hard at times to make sure I've watched/read enough so that I have enough material to make four full reviews every week and for this week, well, I just didn't have time to watch another full series. I realized this in advance and when I was wracking my mind for alternatives I hit upon one, how about I try out some of the shorts (series that have episodes which are five minutes or less) that crunchyroll is streaming and see if any of those tickle my fancy and talk about multiple ones to make up for a full review. So that's what we're doing this time, since crunchyroll only started picking up those shows in the past year or so (or perhaps studios only started making a lot of shorts a year or so ago) I doubt I'll be able to do this again any time soon but it was a change of pace and it was nice to be able to get through an entire series in one evening and still have time to do other things.


Encouragement of the Climb

Encouragement of the Climb is a series with 3:30 minute long episodes that focus on Aoi, a quiet high school girl who wants to live her high school life quite unadventoursly but is reluctantly dragged back into mountain climbing (really hiking) by an old friend from middle school and she finds herself enjoying the sport again. I saw the first episode back when it first aired in the winter and I was rather lukewarm on it then but now that I had a chance to watch all the episodes in one go I really warmed up to it and it ended up being a really cute show. Bear in mind that it's not a sports show, rather it's a "cute girls do cute things" show and the cute thing in question (usually) has to do with mountain hiking. It never gets overly saccharine and I think that the 3:30 length is perfect for it, the episodes do feel a bit short but something happens in each one and during it's quick 30 second outro the show even shows a still or two advancing the story a little longer. So I give this a recommendation and would certainly watch a second season of it, just in one batch like I did with this, not week to week.

Senyu

A long time ago there was a demon named Satan Rchimedes and he caused trouble for the human world until he was sealed away. Now there are demons running amuck and causing trouble again so all  of the descendants of the hero who sealed him have been sent on a quest to defeat this new evil.  Now I know this doesn't sound like a bad premise, especially since the story doesn't take itself seriously at all and I know that a lot of people liked it but I just did not like this show at all. The humor got overly repetitive, was forced, the situations were rarely amusing, and even though the story was trying to break/invert some common fantasy tropes the problem is that genre-aware fantasy has been around long enough that it has it's own stereotypes and tropes which the series followed too often. I know this one has a second season coming out this summer but I won't be checking it out at all, even  if the episodes are just four and a half minutes long.