Archive for the English Anime Category


Project A-ko 2, 3, and 4 Blu-Rays

February 19th, 2025

A Blu-ray cover, a girl with a lot of red hair, in a yello tank top over white -t-shirt runs full speed, while a little girl in pink dress with a flower in her blond hair hangs on. A cool beauty with long blue hair and a glowering man with purple hair in the background.by Matt Marcus, Staff Writer

In the wake of the success of the original Project A-ko film, A.P.P.P. released three sequels, all of which now have Blu-Ray releases from Discotek. All three—running for around 50 minutes compared to the original’s 80—felt a little too scant to review individually, so I’ve opted to combine my thoughts here (much like their previous DVD release from Central Park Media, subtitled Love & Robots).

Project A-ko 2: Plot of Daitokuji Financial Group

Three weeks have passed since the end of the first movie. The defeated alien ship remains perilously perched upon the military command tower at the center of Graviton City, but now it’s been converted to a glitzy shopping mall and recreation center. Of course, this is cover for Captain Napolipolita and her henchwoman D to raise funds for repairs, after which they intend to fulfill their original mission of returning the lost alien Princess C-ko to her home planet.

But this time, the villain is the military industrial complex, in the form of B-ko’s weapon’s dealer mogul father Hikari Daitokuji (or, as I like to call him, Phoney Stark). He sees the alien ship as a goldmine of advanced technology he’d like to steal and exploit for his own ambitions, and so the Plot of the Subtitle are his machinations trying to hoodwink the defense force into doing the dirty work for him. (Notably, he’s been stealing mecha designs from B-ko.)

Meanwhile, our main trio are simply looking forward to a summer break of fun. They end up obstructing both the aliens and B-ko’s father’s schemes, mostly by blowing everything up. Graviton City is left a smoldering ruin again, but life goes on.

All of the elements of the first film are here. The A-ko/B-ko/C-ko triumvirate continue their schtick. There’s a decent amount of mecha and exploding shit. Surprisingly, the non-mecha fanservice is relatively tame; I found the fully-animated scene of A-ko changing into a bathing suit without exposing herself particularly funny, as if it were an intentional troll to those seeking more cheap thrills. Honestly, the funniest bit was how the Alpha Cygnans painted C-ko’s face on the front of their ship, goofy open-mouth grin and all.

The extras are notably sparser than those for the first film (no extra documentaries or feature commentaries this go ‘round). The only unique bonus are screenshots from the PC-88 casino game collection tied to the film, which included several scenes lifted from the film but drawn in that classic 8-bit style.

Overall – 6

Project A-ko 2: Plot of Daitokuji Financial Group Blu-ray available on Amazon and Crunchyroll

 

A red-haired girl in a red dress and a blue-haired girl in hakama and gi glower at each other over their shoulders. Behind and above a gaping blonde with a flower in her hair and a boy in black.Project A-ko 3: Cinderella Rhapsody

This film is based around Spring Break, and every girl in Graviton High School is thinking about romance. A-ko becomes obsessed with a dress she can’t afford, and starts working at a fast food restaurant to save up. B-ko is still using her posse to stalk her, and of course the two are still fighting before school every day. C-ko is starting to feel neglected by A-ko, 

All of this is thrown out of whack when C-ko runs into the street and is nearly run over by a hunky-yet-gormless guy named Kei. A-ko falls for him immediately, followed by B-ko, while the whole time, Kei has caught feelings for C-ko. So much for the Yuri.

Hijinks ensue, which culminates with a destructive showdown in the fancy hotel atop the yet-again-renovated alien ship, which is now a theme park. As the chaos expands, the commander of the defense force decides to neglect his duties this time (off screen, no less), so a group of under-cover protective public works employees mobilize, which turns into a cavalcade of mecha and sentai winks. They even included a cameo by BaBe, the idol duo who sing the film’s theme song “Get A Chance!” (The English Version plays over the credits, the lyrics of which are basically inscrutable.)

In the end, everyone’s heart gets broken. Kei confesses his love to C-ko, who harshly rejects him, while A-ko and B-ko see their fantasies shatter along with the floor of the hotel. Everything resets back to the status quo again. Hooray.

This one definitely feels like a step up from the previous film, but having the central conflict shift to center on Kei was honestly a bit deflating even if, as the trivia notes say, this would have been expected by the audience at the time. I know that the joke is that his cool surface image is actually the result of being too shy to talk, but it’s not quiet a strong enough joke to hang an entire plot on. I also wish more came out of the extensive mobilization scene; having Graviton City secretly be a hotbed of superheroes and super robots could have been used more for the comedy besides “look, an off-model reference!”

As with the previous release, the bonuses are relatively slim, though the trivia section is always a fun treat. I did notice one omission, though, which led me down a bit of a rabbit hole. In the film, we see a brief segment of a porn flick, where a girl with short blue hair (and no clothes) is about to, uh, impose herself on a red-haired girl. The scene is interrupted by the mobilization call (somehow within the movie!) by a girl with orange pigtails. Turns out, these three are the animated versions of an idol group Lemon Angels, a multimedia project that was an offshoot of the Cream Lemon hentai series, much like what Project A-ko began as. Seems like an odd thing to leave out from the otherwise exhaustive trivia notes, especially since they are even explicitly credited.

Overall – 7

Project A-ko 3: Cinderella Rhapsody is available on Blu-ray from Crunchyroll and Amazon.

 

Red haired girl in a school uniform, blue-haired girl in black dress and cowering little blonde girl with a flower in hair are backed by a mecha that looks like the redhead, a pair embracing in wedding clothes of a guy with brown hair and a teal-haired girl.

Project A-ko 4: Final

The aptly-titled fourth film of the mainline series is about two impending threats: a new alien invasion, foretold by ancient inscriptions found in Iraq, alongside the teacher Miss Ayumi’s engagement to…Kei??!?!

Out of all of the sequels, this one has the strongest set-up for farce. Phoney Stark is back as the facilitator of the omiai between Miss Ayumi and Kei. Since he is basically in charge of the military, he orders them to protect the bride and groom from terrorist threats (read: B-ko, who is back on a rampage to steal Kei for herself). This provides cover for the defense force to mobilize against a massive alien fleet that is approaching earth (circumventing the cowardice of the commander who bailed in the previous film).

A-ko is, for her part, is also trying to wreck the wedding, again leaving C-ko feeling abandoned; in fact, her crybaby friend begins to fear that A-ko and B-ko’s love of fighting is going to turn into feisty romance, leaving her alone. When it turns out the fleet is helmed by C-ko’s long-lost mother, C-ko decides willingly to leave. (We are led to believe that Ayumi is tied to the aliens, but that turns out to be a fakeout.) A-ko and B-ko fail to take her back, only for C-ko to unceremoniously show up at A-ko’s door the next day, having changed her mind on leaving. C-ko asks A-ko not to fight B-ko anymore, to which A-ko happily agrees.

To be honest, this one might be my favorite of the bunch. Seeing A-ko and B-kos fights become so regular that even their friends see it as just another ordinary morning got a good chuckle out of me. C-ko getting Yuri-goggles was a fun twist that I wish the movie leaned more into. Still, the plot AGAIN is centered around Kei, who is even less charismatic here than in the previous film.

The extras here match what we saw in the previous releases. Would you know that there are a lot of Lupin cameos??

Overall – 7

Project A-ko 4: Final Blu-ray is available on Amazon and Crunchyroll.

 

All in all, none of these films reach the heights that the first film did, and in some cases detract from it (*cough* Kei *cough*). That said, if you wanted to see more bubble-era OVA hijinks chock full of parody, none of these are an awful time.

 

Matt Marcus is a cohost of various projects on the Pitch Drop Podcast Network, as well as the writer for the blog Oh My God, They Were Bandmates analyzing How Do We Relationship in greater depth.





Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury, Season 1 Blu-Ray Steelbook, Disc 1

January 30th, 2025

I managed to get through two of the 6 episodes on this disk without being enraged. Good for me!

In Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury Season 1, Blu-ray Steelbook, Disc 1, Suletta Mercury comes from provincial Mercury to Asticassia School of Technology. Suletta is sincere, a lot nervous and excited about this new experience and the people she will meet, but of course she has stepped into the middle of a class war. She is immediately sucked into duels for the hand of a girl who very much has no interest in being anyone’s prize. The mobile suit she pilots with skill is branded illegal and, of course, she is treated with disdain by both the elite Spacians and the downtrodden Earthians.

This story begins as many anime do – a young person wholly unsuited to a elite and codified environment shows up and sets everyone’s teeth on edge, upends the school rules and becomes the new punching bag of everyone who has an agenda…which is everyone. In this anime, all of that is accompanied by corporate misbehavior and intrigue, so that the duels fought by the children are a reflection of the machinations of the parents. Abusive parents creating unkind children who will forced to battle for no good reason whatsoever, at the risk of their mental and physical health sounds like more than one anime…but it is still absolutely enraging. Nonetheless, we cannot stop ourselves from rooting for Suletta and by extension, Miorine because that is how these things work.

The nods to Revolutionary Girl Utena are very loud here at the beginning of the series. The opening credits borrow at least two visuals from the opening of Utena – The scene where Suletta and Miorine walk in opposite directions closely mirrors the same cuts in the Utena OP, the two protagonists spinning in the show logo – and the duels to become the fiance’ to a girl with no agency who grows things in a greenhouse loom rather large. Know your meme has a few related items, as well.  And Chuchu, of course. Chuchu is the wind beneath our wings. Chuchu’s rage is our rage and when she snaps, it’s the best moment on the whole disk. I was able to breathe again for a few minutes and stopped ranting at the absolutely shitty people around Suletta Mercury, who only wanted to make friends at school.

And finally, read your Shakespeare for other key references you don’t want to miss. The Tempest has it’s fingerprints all over this series. Suletta’s mother is Prospera, her Gundam is Ariel,  Gundam pilots get wrecked in a “data storm.” It is not subtle, but it doesn’t have to be. Prospero’s story isn’t his own, either.

The art of G-Witch is how these wildly different elements, all the back-and-forthing of every Gundam “the ruling body changes constantly and so do the rules and allegiances,” Utena and The Tempest are brought together. The series may not make sense, per se,  but it at least has us caring enough about the characters to keep us coming back. Even though we know that pain and suffering is the main plot point.

The steelbook itself is nice enough, but wow am I annoyed that we’re back to 5 episodes per disk, two discs per set and two sets for a season. I remember clearly when DVDs were sold as being able to hold way more than a measly few episodes. Capitalism, yay! We’re paying for the packaging here – there are no extras, either physical or digital.

But there is Yuri, even if it is borrowed whole from Utena at this point. Miorine Rembran is an angry Bride, but so was Anthy, who had has ages to learn to hide her rage behind a smile. As the Holder, Suletta is the worthiest of fiancés, but it will take them both time to figure that out.

Ratings:

Art – 9
Story – grumblegrowlgrrrr
Characters  –  Deep breath….8
Service – The service here is largely the Gundamy stuff. The different build, the launch sequences, all the mecha stuff being mecha stuff. For that audience – 10
Yuri – 2
Rage – 10

Overall – 8

More than a year has gone by since I watched this series and I’d forgotten how angry the child soldier hurtfest of Gundam is NOT FOR ME (TM). But I’m going to stick it out to see what is the closest thing to a happy ending that I can remember in a Gundam series.

 





From Bureaucrat to Villainess, Dad’s Been Reincarnated! streaming on HIDIVE

January 27th, 2025

In front of an oversized portrait of a middle-aged Japanese salaryman, with comb-over and glasses, stands the cast of a typical otome game. The protagonist character with pink hair in the center with the villainess, with long elegant blonde curls and a fan - both wearing fantasy school uniform of red jacket and white skirt, while the male love interested are arrayed around them.Are we tired of Isekai stories yet? Well, yes, and no. ^_^ The basic zero-reincarnates-as-a-hero premise was always pretty sad and got tired quickly,but that had more to do with the nature of their sad little power fantasies.   We’ve seen many stories, which still have room room for creativity. Even aside from a blockbuster like I’m In Love With The Villainess, there are  number of isekai and reverse isekai stories we’re reading now that have some cleverness or kindness or both. And, when a story both leans into its premise with gusto and has fun doing it, we’ll definitely make time for it.

Which brings us to From Bureaucrat to Villainess, Dad’s Been Reincarnated! streaming on HIDIVE.  This anime is based on a manga written by Ueyama Michiro  for Young King Ours magazine. Tondabayashi Kenzaburo is a 52 year-old salaryman who, after saving a little boy from being hit by a truck, finds himself in the body of Grace Auvergne, the villainess of the game his daughter is obsessed with, “Magical Academy: Love & Beast.”

Kenzaburo may not know much about otome games, but he has a lifetime of formal office manners, and with Grace’s “Elegance cheat” everything he does is translated flawlessly into faux European-esque, courtlyish, noble-like behavior.

Unlike the game’s original high-handed, cruel Grace as villainess character, Kenzburo practically adopts the game’s main character, Anna Doll, showering her with Dad advice for life and propping her up, so that the game villainess quickly becomes a beloved mentor. And, as a result of this new Grace being so kind AND beautiful AND talented Anna (and the other characters) develop an open crush on Grace that Kenzaburo doesn’t really see as a crush, so he is not opposed. Nor are we. The opening credits give us a glimpse of a uniformed Grace and gushing princess Anna at a formal dance and yes, I would like that, please. ^_^

This could easily be a creepy, tiresome story, but instead, it is wholesome and incredibly charming. This new Grace is making a positive impression all around the school, creating fans at high and low places. There are two running gags –  that Kenzaburo/Grace can’t remember the male love interests’ name  and that Kenzaburo is a HUGE otaku. Both are harmless, giggle-making fun.

The end credits deserve some explanation. Matsudaira Ken aka, Matsuken, was an actor who became popular in the late 70s’ who was best known for his samurai roles. He later had a hit song with Matsuken Samba II which you should totally watch the video of, so you can get an idea of what is going on with the end credits.  ^_^ The anime version leans away from the samurai towards the samba and is performed with perfection by the voice actors for Grace and Kenzaburo, M.A.O and Inoue Kazuhiko, respectively.
 
All in all, this series is very silly. An entertaining spin on the Anime->Isekai->Villainess sub-sub genre. And very welcome for finding one more new spin on an already played out trend, with just enough Yuri to get our attention here at Okazu. ^_^

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 8
Characters – 9
Service – 0
Yuri – 2 for Anna’s crush

While I’m waiting for *good* Sci-fi Yuri to be the hot new sub-sub genre, I can definitely live with this. ^_^





Flower and Asura, streaming on HIDIVE

January 24th, 2025

Anime title poster of girl with medium-length dark hair, wearing a grey smock-style school uniform reads out loud from a book while a blonde girl in a large jersey jacket watches her with a smile, Other members of the club stand around the school room watching.In a season full of women supporting one another, let us take a moment to reflect on Flower and Asura, streaming now on HIDIVE.

Haruyama Hana is a young woman who, after being moved by a performance of  reading on television, begins doing recitations. She lives with her mother on an island in, I’m presuming, the Seto Inland Sea, commuting to school by ferry and entertaining local children with her recitations. When she is scouted by the ebullient Usurai Mizuki to join the high school Broadcasting Club, Hana will confront her limitations and hopefully, break out of her shell.

This is an anime adaption of a manga series written by Takeda Ayano, who is already well-known for another high school club series, Sound! Euphonium, illustrated by Musshu, an artist who has been contributing to Yuri anthologies, such as the Éclair anthologies, and who is currently illustrating the There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover…Unless manga.

The premise of this series is a typical “high school club helps a low-self esteem character find themselves” and it is a bit worn at the edges from the get go. Hana has already been performing recitations for years when Usurai-sempai sees her. The locals think of her more as an act to keep the children occupied, but Hana clearly loves what she is doing. So her bouts of social anxiety feel a bit overblown, since we are given little insight to her as a person beyond her genesis as a performer. But if we accept that publicly shy / confident performer personalities are not that uncommon, it becomes easier to understand accept.

As a sempai, Usurai is the perfect catalyst. Seeing Hana’s skill, she is persistent about getting her into the club, without being annoying. She’s all about fostering her team’s abilities – even though she has a specific goal of winning a major competition. This is a soft enough conflict for the early episodes as Hana asks the question I keep asking through all these “we gotta be the best!” series – isn’t just having fun enough?

I have no doubt that Hana will  find her answer to that question and it will undoubtedly be that working with a group towards a goal is the more than just enough. But I trust Takeda to do that in a way that allows the characters to mature into themselves.

On the animation side, the recitations allow the animators to play around a little with the feel of the scenes, expressing the sentiments of each of Hana’s recitations in a visually resonant way, adding a component to a skill that has no inherent visual quality. A bit like the animation of mah jong strategies in Saki.

For yet another great sempai-kouhai relationship that is about emotional support and growth, Flower and Asura, streaming on HIDIVE is a very decent skill-based anime.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 7
Characters – 7 This early on, they are types, rather than fully developed
Service – See above
Yuri – 0 and not likely to be any, outside people’s personal headcanons

Overall – 7

The whole series feels a bit sponsored by the NHK National University Broadcasting Contest contest to drum up interest. ^_^





Momentary Lily Okazu Staff Review

January 15th, 2025

Colorful image of tables in a restaurant, with six girls colorfully dressed, eating and drinking, and smiling with banality.It appears that Okazu Staff huddle together when they encounter a trashfire in media, so once again, we are here to debrief and detox.

Today we are gathered together to memorialize our sanity, lost via Momentary Lily, streaming on Crunchyroll.

 

 

 

Christian LeBlanc

My first impression of the new GoHands joint was that it felt like being grabbed by the shoulders and shaken violently by someone vomiting glitter everywhere. And this is coming from someone who generally enjoys GoHands’ output, in defiance of people who point out the flaws in their animation.
 
Admittedly, I’m not particularly literate in cinema, and so online discussions will often illustrate to me why a scene in a movie works as well as it does. Likewise, people online can point out how GoHands is using an ambitious camera angle or perspective in the wrong place, but I may not always notice something’s off, and simply enjoy seeing the camerawork go absolutely ham for someone walking up a flight of stairs. And why not? Anime is generally exaggerated anyway, right?
 
Well, let me explain in terms of music. Momentary Lily is like a slow ballad where someone starts shredding on their axe like crazy halfway through the first verse. Yes, it’s an impressively face-melting, blisteringly-fast guitar solo, but what is it doing after a line and a half of lyrics? Some people will be open-minded enough to simply enjoy the guitar solo, and won’t be bothered by how out of place it is. Conversely, some listeners won’t understand why the gentle singing was interrupted by a piece of music from a seemingly different tune, and will be taken out of the song because it’s so jarring and distracting.
 
My colleagues will expand on how all the different elements of this show make it less than the sum of its parts, but let me pass the baton with this: one character’s death lacks gravitas because we haven’t gotten to know them well enough over two episodes, while another girl’s breasts defy gravitas even as she’s sobbing over her impending doom. Please learn to read the room, Erika Koudaji’s breasts.
 

Eleanor Walker

I watched this while nursing a tremendous hangover and I’m genuinely not sure if it improved the experience or not. The main thing going through my mind was “she breasted boobily” every time a certain character was on the screen. I still don’t know why these collection of walking stereotypes, sorry, characters are doing what they’re doing, what the “Wild Hunt” is and where they’re getting the ingredients for the random cooking segments. It’s like one staffer wanted to make a cute girls doing cute things cooking show and another wanted to make a monster fighting explosion show and the studio just shrugged and said “eh, whatever, we can only afford to animate one pair of breasts so work together”. The voices are particularly grating, I’m not generally one who notices particularly bad voice acting, especially in Japanese (I didn’t notice Hideaki Anno in The Wind Rises, for example, which was widely complained about online) but dearie me the voices in this one make me want to gouge my eardrums out with a melon baller.

 

Erica Friedman

This project is infamously animated by GoHands, a group that takes their work as animators VERY seriously, as everything in this anime moves, constantly. Even things that do not actually ever move.

In a post-apocalyptic world in which humans have been hunted by “The Wild Hunt” – over-animated kaijuu – a girl with a mysterious ability to call up a magical, science fiction-y, mega weapon finds a small group of other teenage girls with similar abilities.  Whether you consider these girls to be special forces, or refugees or just plain child soldiers, don’t worry about the details…their misery and trauma will be mined for laughs and pathos and boob jiggles. And cooking lessons, so even at the end of the world, we can make a nice meal of rice and canned mackerel. We got to get our priorities straight.

As for the service – to quote the great Pamela Poovey, “Inappropes.”

Grab a Dramamine and watch Momentary Lily, with a cast of girls with verbal tics that stand in for a personality.

 

Frank Hecker

Fans of the anime Shirobako may recall a scene in which two animators are discussing a new technique for making reflections off eyeglasses look more realistic, followed by a shot of one person’s glasses illustrating that very technique. Watching Momentary Lily is like watching that scene on infinite repeat, but without the self-reflexive humor. After viewing the first couple of minutes of episode 1 in the conventional way, I turned the sound and subtitles off so I could appreciate Momentary Lily for what it really is, a SIGGRAPH demo with fighting girls. (I originally wrote “magical girls,” but they don’t have transformation sequences—more’s the pity.)

Watching the show this way helps make sense of some of the shot and plot choices. Why does one of the girls show off her moisturizing regimen in the first scene? So that we can see how well GoHands can model shiny skin (presumably using Phong shading or some more recent technique). Why do the girls take a break from fighting monsters to have a meal? So that the animators can take a break from animating kaijū and relax themselves, modeling various foods, plastic packages, tin cans, utensils, and so on. (They even show a cousin of the famous Utah teapot.) And most notably: why does the girls’ hair fly around so much? It’s simultaneously a plea to the production committee and a boast to the viewer: “If we had a bigger budget, we could animate every hair.”

I guess there’s a story here somewhere and presumably some attempts at characterization, but really the girls are to GoHands what the Madonna and child and other Biblical scenes were to Renaissance painters, a conventional set of stock images used to demonstrate mastery of their craft. (My using the word “craft” and not “art” is deliberate; there is little art here.) Watching Momentary Lily like I did highlights those demonstrations: the omnipresent lens flare that shifts position depending on which way the light is coming from, the focus pulling and bokeh, the way the clouds constantly moving across the sky are reflected in the windows of the buildings in the background. For me, the emotional climax of episode 2 was not the foreground scene of a girl in extremis, but rather the background shot of a tree with all its leaves rippling in the wind.

I especially loved the shots of buildings shown in dramatic perspective, whether during the day or at night, viewed clearly or enshrouded in fog. Which brings me to my recommendation to GoHands: forget plot, character, and dialogue. Ditch the monsters, include more scenes with buildings and benches, erase the girls from every shot, and create what the world has been waiting for: a true masterpiece of “yuri of absence.”

 

Luce

Well that sure was an eye workout. Ow.

Setting aside the camera for now, this is distinctly mediocre. Sci-fi and post-apocalypse isn’t my thing, but this wouldn’t sell me. The five characters we see initially are unmemorable, apart from ‘onee-chan’ with the big bouncing boobs that are totally unnecessary and look like they’re about to float her off to space. (One character says ‘too much jiggle’. Don’t call it out and flaunt it at the same time.) Renge, the ‘main’ character, is screechy, then apologising for the weirdest things, like ‘imposing’ on the group with a awkwardly cut cooking ‘segment’, as they refer to it. Wow, she’s amnesiac, has a cool weapon and can one shot the big robots. Great, sure sounds like a plot thread right there. Too bad I’m not interested.

Sadly, even if I was interested, watching this feels like an attack on the optic nerve. Aside from over-animated hair and one set of boobs, the animation is middling, but not awful. But it’s like someone heard ‘dynamic camera angles’ and decided this meant ‘camera must move every two seconds’. It’s at odd angles, or moving, but in really jarring ways that almost follow characters but not quite. There’s more lens flares than Star Trek. And what is with the split screens?!

If you have a tendency to migraines, or any visually triggered illnesses, avoid this. I promise it’s not worth it. I’m off to have a lie down.

 

Matt Marcus

When my friend and cohost Sibyl sent me the trailer for Momentary Lily, my first thought was “someone must really like RWBY.” As the announcement began circulating in my online spaces, I had only seen dismissive, but not illuminating, comments about the studio that made it. It wasn’t on my radar, but between my friend’s excitement and the reactions from the folks in the Discord after episode 1 dropped, I figured I would give it a shot.

Y’all, I was not prepared.

I could go on about the visually chaotic and cacophonous opening, but that’s just where it begins. From opening to ending, watching Momentary Lily is like reading one of those giant posts of text with three emojis after every sentence, but also the font is Wingdings.

The script feels like it was written by ChatGPT trained using the dialogue of every lady-led shonen show, but dumber. There’s the gamer girl who chugs energy drinks and calls them her “buffs” in every sentence she speaks. There’s the chipper leader with a verbal tic. There’s the serious dark-haired girl with glasses with a verbal tic. There’s the “big sister” archetype with absurd breast physics. There’s the gyaru girl. And, of course, we have the overpowered amnesiac lead who is so obscenely shy that half her dialogue is in pantomime. The characterization is so thin I’m surprised that their models are not literally transparent.

But we’re not here for deep ruminations on the human soul, are we? No, we’re here to see some overly-stylized teenagers do some high-flying ass-kicking! So that part must be good right? I got bad news for you: the action is messy, hard to follow, and extremely headache inducing. The characters don’t match the garish, hyper-saturated 3D backgrounds in both visual style and, worse, in framerate. Even in shots where the background isn’t moving as if the camera is being controlled by a drunk crane operator, the point of view zooms in and out and bounces around like a nap-skipping toddler on caffeine. It’s as if GoHands was afraid that if they didn’t jangle every key in front of our face for the entire scene, we’d lose interest mid-sword swing.

But beyond all that, the biggest sin is the pacing. Characters only have space to do schtick between the barest of exposition. Tone shifts rapidly from “badass” action to cutesy cooking segments where Amnesia Girl shows her new pals how to make otaku struggle meals. (Each episode is named for the dish said girl makes, so I guess this was The Thing GoHands decided the show should be About.) Scenes are smashed together with no sense of time passing. A character is killed in episode 2, and the previews of the next episode suggest that the show is going to tell us why we should’ve cared about this girl in the first place. It’s jarring and exhausting and boring at the same time.

And don’t get me started on the worldbuilding. Almost every human on earth has been vaporized yet social media still functions! Can’t wait for the plot to hinge on the crew posting their 7-Eleven survivalist stews on the ‘Gram. GOD this sucks.

The thing that strikes me the most about the show is that there is clearly effort and skill on display, and yet it is applied in the most artless way I have ever seen. It’s fascinating in that way: a show ostensibly about cooking that lacks taste. For all the “flavor” tossed in, this is very thin gruel.

Ratings:

Story – eh
Characters – verbal tics and trauma
Animation – LOL
Service – too much jiggle
Yuri – no thank you

Overall – canned fish