Anime Review: Tanaka-kun is Always Listless

Before the spring season, Tanaka-kun was a maybe on my list, then it went off my list, and then it went back on my list after I saw people still talking about it a few episodes in. The three episode rule is a great guideline guys, if you still see other people talking about a show after three episodes then by golly, then you gotta check it out at that point!

Tanaka-kun is Always Listless (Tanaka-kun wa Itsumo Kedaruge)

Anime Review: Kiznaiver

My original plan was to talk about both this show and Little Witch Academia 2 back to back since it's really interesting to look at a story that has all of the typical Trigger hallmarks and one that doesn't, even though they're both original stories! That didn't quite work out, and I'm not going to compare the two of them since they're more dissimilar than alike, but I still find it interesting that Trigger tries every year or so to make a more typical anime series and yet never quite hits that mark.

Kiznaiver

Anime Review: My Hero Academia

Back when the spring anime season was getting underway, I talked on the OASG podcast about how I still wasn't sure what shows I would end up liking but I was sure Concrete Revolutio and Flying Witch would be among them. I was right but imagine my surprise when I also really ended up liking the "populist" hits My Hero Academia and Kiznaiver! My tastes usually don't like up that way but this time they did and I hope that Funimation found a whole slew of fans for MHA since I can't remember the last time I saw this much pre-airing hype for a new anime (as in, Funimation was even making dubbed character spots to advertise for the show even before the first episode, that takes money!). I have seen a lot of buzz for it online and I have to say folks, I've considered getting a Weekly Shounen Jump subscription before but held back (not enough series I like/the series I like are monthly) but if I can figure out a way to catch up with this series (ie, library please hurry up with my holds!) this might be the manga that makes me do it.

My Hero Academia

Manga Review: Bokura wa Minna Kawaisou (volume one)

This review originally appeared on OASG

Title: Bokura wa Minna Kawaisou

Genre: Slice of Life

Publisher: Shonen Gahosha (JP), Crunchyroll (US)

Story/Artist: Ruri Miyahara

Serialized in: Young King Ours

Reviewed: Volume 1 of 6

Review copy provided by Crunchyroll.

As I mentioned last time, there are many different kinds of slice of life manga out there. Some rely on character growth to move the story along and others use the passage of time to keep the story flowing. Bokura wa Minna Kawaisou, which was adapted into an anime titled The Kawai Complex Guide to Manors and Hostel Behavior, doesn’t use either of those methods and in this first volume it’s hard to believe that any time is passing at all since nothing in the story seems to change.

Anime Review: Classroom*Crisis

Okay, baby-steps to getting these reviews back on time, baby steeeeps. Oh and I'd like to note, while I still have over half of my summer shows to review, this is the last of the "this was good for sure" tier of shows. Nothing else was terrible, I don't have the time to finish terrible, full seasons of anime, but going forward I had quite a few more problems with the next few shows on the list.

Classroom*Crisis

Book Review: Tokyo Demons volume 2

"Alright Helen, what's your excuse for not having this review up on time?" Well, it was one I was having some trouble with this review which is never a good sign. Plus, I'm trying to cut back on caffeine but had a soda at work Friday and spent literally nine hours trying not to bounce off of the goddamn walls, made focusing on writing a little hard! And with the fall anime round-up coming up on Monday it's been a little chaotic around here.....

Tokyo Demons: Add A Little Chaos by Lianne Sentar, illustrated by Rem

Anime Review: Yamada and the Seven Witches

I think this was actually my most-anticipated anime for the spring season since I already adore the manga, although the short runtime was making me pretty nervous. It was fun to see all of my friends react to the promotional images however, a lot of them were familiar with black and white comic pages or the drama so it was amusing to see everyone realize what the characters' real, rainbow like hair colors were.

Yamada and the Seven Witches

Manga Review: Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches

Sorry for the lateness here again, as I said in my round-up post yesterday I actually did finish writing this on Monday but my late work shift left me too drained to do all of the copy editing. And this is going to be the last of my manga Mondays, the winter anime season ends this week so next Monday I'm diving back into the anime reviews with new shows and comics every other week (well, and manga reviews every week on OASG, at this rate I'm set to review about 70 different comic and manga series this year which is a bit of a terrifying number).

Yamda-kun and the Seven Witches by Miki Yoshikawa

Manga Review: Orange

As an aside, this review was supposed to go up on OASG first but is going up here first. This only matters since I did read this manga using the press account with Crunchyroll so "a review copy was provided". This won't apply to my other two manga titles this month however, I read both of those thanks to many guest passes from friends!

I went to the Crunchyroll Manga panel at Katsucon a few weeks back (and ran out of the room to take a phone call AND ended up sitting next to some other people from "Anitwitter") where Dancia and Evan spent part of the panel talking about some of the manga they personally liked. Orange was brought up and Danica said something to the effect of "the Japanese editors had no idea people were even reading it overseas since they didn't think it would appeal to anyone else". That made me giggle a bit since a few months earlier I had mentioned in passing that I hadn't read it yet and wanted to I immediately had friends offering me guest passes for the express purpose for reading the series. I am sure that that the editors are completely correct that the overseas fanbase is small but at least it's a dedicated one!

Orange by Ichigo Takano

Anime Review: When Supernatural Battle Became Commonplace

Sorry for the delay on this one folks, I've been busy although the missing book review from last week wasn't because I was busy, it was because I sat down and realized I just had nothing to say on the book. That's always a problem here, sometimes I just read something all the day through, find it passable, but just have nothing to say about it. I've also been reading quite a bit of middle grade recently and I'm still debating if I want to review that here as well since again, shorter books, less to talk about and these reviews are already pretty short.

Thankfully that's not my worry here tonight, this show wasn't on my radar as the fall season began but after I saw quite a few people talking about how great the new Studio Trigger show was (no one could decide on a nickname for a few weeks, even the licensors it seemed, many people seem to have adopted "Inou Battle") I gave it a shot and what do you know, it's actually a pretty fun light novel adaptation!

When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace

Anime Review: Free! Eternal Summer

This should be the last of my summer anime reviews which is slightly ironic since it's the most summer of the summer anime I watched and I'm seriously contemplating wearing long underwear to work tomorrow (curse you polar vortex). I didn't start out the summer watching this show but I had a feeling I would get around to it sooner or later and I finally did when friends told me it was actually better than the first season which was an odd thing to hear. I never thought that the first season was particularly good or bad, it had it's good and bad parts but was ultimately a bit bland, to hear that the staff decided to do actual character development and build upon the first season was a bit shocking more than anything else!

Free! Eternal Summer

Manga Review: Paradise Kiss

This series falls into the "I've been trying to read this for years but have had the worst luck finding it!" category of this blog which seems to be exclusively dominated by well-regraded shojo stories (heck, I've got a post from years back when I got ahold of the first volume again so that I could finish it!). I did discover reading this that I must have gotten quite far along in one of my previous attempts since there was less new material than I remembered but even if half of this was a reread it didn't diminish just how good this story is.

Paradise Kiss by Ai Yazawa

Anime Review: Monthly Girl's Nozaki-kun

These days I get most of my manga recommendations from tumblr, although "recommendation" makes it sound as if people are specifically telling me to read them. This time around I was following a blog for another series altogether, saw them posting a group of strips from this series and fell head over heels for it, I had to make sure I didn't just reblog every single one I came across! I immediately started hoping for an anime since I knew it would be a tough sell to convince my friends to read scanlated 4koma and thankfully one was announced quite soon after I first discovered it and I then proceeded to hope that I wasn't hyping up the series too much. Fortunately it seems like my friends have all fallen harder for this show than I did and I'm still seeing new people every week, people who don't even watch a lot of anime, picking up the show and falling in love.

Monthly Girls Nozaki-kun (Gekkan Shojo Nozaki-kun)

Anime Review: Riddle Story the Devil

Back when this show started airing in the winter I didn't give it a second glance since the premise seemed, well, dumb. But as with One Week Friends the longer it went the more it seemed like I was only hearing positive things about it so I decided to give it a shot anyway. I was watching it a bit slowly and so I was about halfway through when it ended and then I heard all of those same people start grumbling about the ending. And I decided that oh well, I haven't gotten to a part where I dislike the story yet so I might as well keep going, even if I'm probably also going to dislike it considering that I haven't seen one person remain positive about the ending....

Riddle Story the Devil (Akuma no Riddle)

Manga Review: Mars

Long time readers probably recognize this title because it's one where I've been trying to find a complete collection of it to read for years, I seem to recall I first came across it in high school which even for me was quite a few years ago now. Once I finally discovered that one of my library systems had the complete set I carefully set up my request for when I would have a ride (since I 1. wasn't going to request one book at a time again, heck now and 2. was not going to walk over a mile each way in the DC heat with 15 books) and then over the course of many nights spent babysitting worked my way through the series to see once and for all just what actually happened in it.

Mars by Fuyumi Soryo

Anime Review: Nanana's Buried Treasure

This was a disappointing noitaminA season for me, I ended up not finishing Ping Pong since nothing about it grabbed me enough and then this other show has nothing in common with other noitaminA shows. Sure plenty of shows have deviated from it's themes before (which I recognize as either "artsy-ier than normal" or "specifically aimed at the josei demographic with some crossover appeal") but this one defied than grouping even more than other shows as of late.

Nanana's Buried Treasure

Anime Review: Tokyo Ravens

Given how far behind I fell with my reviews, I've opted to just start over this week following my regular schedule and not exhaust myself trying to catch back up (since the spring anime season just ended I didn't have any reviews I could pop up instead last week but I think I'm set for now!)

As I've said about half my reviews lately, this one must seem like it's coming out of left field to people who read my season round-UP posts, spring was  an odd season for me in more ways than one. I actually did completely drop this show last winter but was a bit bored and checked back in on a discussion thread got it every now and then (since no blog I followed had kept up with it, the problem with only following people with the same tastes) when I noticed a friend with similar tastes to mine was still watching and once it was done asked if it had been worth it. They said that they had been meh on the show when they started but it had ended up being one if their favorites and that's exactly what I needed to hear and then jumped back in right where I left off. 

Tokyo Ravens

Anime Review: Silver Spoon

There seem to be two reactions to this show, complete love for it (coupled with loudly wondering why the manga isn't licensed yet) and simply not being aware it exists. I fall into the former category (well, I understand why the manga isn't licensed) and I'm a bit sad that the buzz for this series seems to have died off by the time this second half started. I've seen people explain it as "if you know something is going to be good you're less surprised when it turns out well" but still, I think when anything is do consistently good that it should be talked about even more, even if it's not good in a flashy sort of way. 

Silver Spoon

Anime Review: Blue Drop

Another Sentai title that I've wanted to see for a while, although this one has been streaming on crunchyroll for years and I could have gotten around to it much sooner. What I didn't know is that there are apparently several manga series also connected with this title (at least two of them set after the end here), obviously you don't have to read any of them to understand this story but they do seem to make the story a bit weirder and creepier than it was here.

Blue Drop

Anime Review: The Daily Lives of High School Boys

This is actually a show I've meant to get around to watching for a while now since I heard a lot of good buzz about it but it actually hasn't been on the internet legally streaming until just recently. With the way my anime watching schedule is these days (one show on Tuesday, four on Thursday, and one on Friday) I'm finding myself with a lot of time early on in the week to catch up on older shows and since this was a short one I decided to see if I could just knock it out before NISA put out their box set.

The Daily Lives of High School Boys

Summary: Tadikuni, Yoshitake, and Hidenoir are three classmates who are more or less friends and do what high schoolers do everywhere, really strange hijinks that don't make a lot of sense in retrospect.

The Good: For people who have seen one too many "cute girls doing cute things" shows and are feeling jaded check out at least the first episode of this show, you'll feel much more balanced afterwards. I've often felt like those cute girl shows were a bit odd since they were nothing like the high school life I had (or that any one I knew had) but this show feels a lot closer for capturing the just plain weirdness of high schoolers, heck some of my friends probably could have one-upped the characters from here at times (although the reoccuring after the credits bit, high school girls are funky, felt too strange to me a lot of the time, too chunni). And that's where the fun of the series comes in, the sheer absurdity of the skits and gags, and a lot of them are connected as well so the show has a pretty good sized cast by the end, for some people this will be just the kind of series they need to see.

The Bad: Humor is hit or miss for everyone and sadly this show was largely a miss for me. I did like one or two skits in each episode but simply didn't find most of them funny. It wasn't that they were too weird or random (well, a few were but that wasn't the reason for the majority of them), I just found that I didn't really care about the characters and when you don't care it's hard to care about what they do. Also, I know that there are times when repeating a joke to death becomes a gag itself but it's not one that I found funny and sadly the show did, we just had very different ideas of humor and I even contemplated dropping the show a few times since I was getting too bored by it.

The Production Values: I will probably annoy a number of fans out there but I didn't really like the voice acting in this series. Why? Because it's a series about high schoolers yet nobody sounds a day under 22 and that's being generous, it just got really disconcerting and some of the characters were taking me out of the story every time they talked. I imagine you could write that off as a gag in and of itself but it just didn't work for me in the end.




So while it's not a bad show, tedious at times but not bad, this just wasn't my thing in the end so I'm giving it a 3 out of 5. For those who want to check it out it's streaming on hulu currently (which means US only sadly) and the US anime licensor NIS America has picked it up and will be releasing a box set sometime in 2014.