Topic: Anime & Manga (NO SPOILERS PLEASE)

I've watched season 1 of Made in Abyss. Here's my overall impression of this series so far, regarding later scenes especially:

Happy New Years everyone, I always feel obliged to stop by here at least once a year (sorry lol, wish I could be a more consistent person lol)

I've been on a somewhat "retro-anime" binge as of late - currently watching Rose of Versailles and Urusei Yatsura, and I have plans to go back for further 70's and 80's shows next. I also was watching Zeta Gundam a while back, which really is a great show too. Honestly, I think some of my strongest interest in anime has become quite meta - like, I still adore watching anime for all the same reasons (ideas, character design, animation, characters and stories, directing, writing, dumb fun, etc) but I also have taken a lot of interest in trying to place anime I'm watching into the broader real-world picture. After all, no anime was ever made in a vacuum - they came out of a specific time and place, and what led to their creation and influences, and their subsequent influences on the industry and fanbase (Which are related but different categories - the history of anime fandom is not the same at all as the history of anime, but of course they are intimately related) going forward. It's all pretty cool.

Also I still want a Switch...trying to make a small living while at college and budgeting is not fun lol. Being an 'adult' is a weird existence. Come this Spring I'll have been a semi-constant anime fan for five years, beginning with when I began to take a big part on this very thread & watched Fullmetal Alchemist way back at the tail end of my freshman year of high school. Perspective is weird.

There was this one anime I watched recently that really bugged me, I won't name it because of spoiler reasons, but arceusdamn it, you set up a sort of love triangle between 3 characters and at the very end she ends up with a character who had maybe like 4-5 lines of dialogue and grows up to be the most generic looking person ever that when I first saw them I thought he was just a background filler character...
_{no profanity please...-Joey}

I finally watched Your Name. I'm glad this actually lived up to the hype.

Looks like Kyokai no Rinne has finally finished it's run with 398(?) chapters. Not sure if I'll ever get to finish it myself, though, as whatever fan group(s) were translating it stopped somewhere last year (or even 2016, it's been awhile) in the 210's.

Looking forward to whatever Takahashi's next work is, though. I'd actually like to see her retire from long running series, and focus on shorter length mini-series (maybe even returning to Ranma and/or InuYasha, for a short little "what are they up to X years later" kinda deal).

@RR529

Have you ever seen Urusei Yatsura? That was one of Takahashi's earliest works and the only one I've really tried to get into, and so far I really love it.

@Rocko52, while I'm certainly aware of it, it & Maison Ikkoku are her only two major series I haven't yet tried.

Last night I decided to watch Strike Witches again, just to see if Sanya would react to the characters saying her name. I got nothing, ah well...I'm watching it anyways. lol

Decided to buy the Attack on Titan bundle on Humble Bundle. I've been buying the volumes as they get released in Finland but we are few books behind. Read books 18-22 and I really liked how much the story progressed in such little time. It might have something to do with the fact I could read 5 books back to back instead of waiting 2 months but still. The bad thing about buying the bundle is that now I have to wait almost a year before Finland catches up to where I'm now. Going to read Attack on Titan: Junior High next which was also part of the bundle. I really enjoyed the anime adaptation.

Also just watched the two Fire Emblem OVAs from 1996. They were surprisingly good. I was anticipating worse, something like the Samurai Shodown movie (though I rather enjoyed the second movie). The movie was very faithful to the games and all the characters were easily recognizable, at least once they wore their battle armor. The animation was quite stiff but it didn't distract me too much. Although, there was that one scene where they decided to show Marth's face for literally 10 seconds. Couldn't help but laugh. I would've watched more but the anime stops after Marth recruits Navarre, Lena and Julian. Also, couple of fun facts. Marth has the same voice actor as in Smash and they dubbed and released the OVAs for America in 1997 even though the games weren't released in the west.

I watched Grave of the Fireflies for the first time today. I considered myself mentally stable and prepared for utter drama, now I know it doesn't matter when I watched the movie, I would be left in the same state of sadness anyway. It is a beautiful paced movie and it portrayed the aftermath of war in a very realisitc manner... but I'm not watching it a second time. Humanity can be cruel indeed.

Looking at people talk about the best anime of last year makes me sad at the amount of great anime I will probably never get to. Exact same thing with video games.

I've watched 5 2017 anime, and I feel like I've seen 1/3 of the ones I should watch. But I have other things to do so I can't.

BYE FOREVER RE:CREATORS
SORRY FOR NEVER WATCHING YOU IN MY ENTIRE LIFETIME, DIES IRAE
ENTIRELY OK WITH NOT BOTHERING WITH IRON BLOODED ORPHANS 2

One of the best anime I've watched in 2017 was Trigun, I love how they mix humor with action (though it gets darker halfway though) and the soundtrack is amazing.
And it turns 20 this year, I think.

I have fond memories of watching Trigun in the summer of 2004, I believe.

I remember that's the summer I really first started to watch Adult Swim for the first time (mainly for InuYasha, but Cowboy Bebop, Lupin the 3rd, and I believe Trigun, were the other shows in the lineup). I was 13 at the time, how the years fly by...

Hey! It turns out Space Battleship Yamato 2199 is available on Crunchyroll & Funimation under the title "Star Blazers." And it has an English dub on Funimation! I dunno when that happened, but I'm just glad that I have a legal venue to rewatch it and its ongoing sequel now! (Well, maybe not the sequel yet. But Hopefully it'll come eventually! Probably after the TV version comes out, since it started as a bunch of feature films...which were still split up into 24-minute episodes. That really confused me for a while...)

So far, the dub cast has been fine. I mean, the captain in the original version had a pretty iconic voice in the Japanese version that I never expected anyone to match, but at least what we got is serviceable. If anyone's looking for a good Space Opera series to watch, I'd highly recommend it. Aside from a point where it slows down maybe a little too much at the start of the second act, I felt like it hit all the right notes while consistantly making me go, "Oh man! I can't wait to see what happens next!" Right up until the end credits rolled.

For those interested, the live action Fullmetal Alchemist film that released in Japan last year has popped up on Netflix (in the U.S.) as an exclusive.

It follows the early parts of the story pretty faithfully (with some modification of course. For example Scar hasn't shown up yet), and the ending definitely hints that they're going to continue.

The special effects are actually pretty good for the most part (especially all the particle effects from the transmutations), though they show their limitations when being used to animate a living being (though this may be in part because they try too hard to recreate how things look in the anime. Even some the actual actors look like they're wearing a, highly detailed, cosplay of the character they're playing, rather than being the character, if that makes sense. The Humonculli especially.)

Overall it was a pretty decent watch.

@RR529 Interesting, I didn't know there was a live action FMA film. I'm a bit cautious about live action adaptions, but I might give it a watch.

I'm currently rewatching Brotherhood, which I dipped into it again after my girlfriend made me watch Attack in Titan. I thought it was a bit pants, so I restarted FMA to see if it was just AoT I didn't like, or whether I'd completely gone cold on Shounen anime in the last few years.

Anyway, I'm really enjoying Brotherhood, so it seems I simply don't like Attack on Titan very much. Both shows have got their shocking moments, but I feel that FMA uses them to ask interesting (if uncomfortable) questions, whereas AoT just uses them reinstate the point that rampaging flesh-eating giants are... a bad thing. Which was never really in question to begin with. In the 15 episodes I've watched, that seems to be the only real point it's established: monsterous giants are bad.

I also watched Your Name for the first time, and I liked it. @Ralizah did his own synopsis a few weeks back, which I remember finding interesting, so I'll give it another read again now that I've actually watched it. I won't post anything nearly as detailed, but I think it's fair to say I enjoyed it, and felt Shinkai left his question marks in much more satisfying places than some of his previous films. Looked gorgeous too. Really wish I'd been able to watch it in a cinema. There's just so much detail and depth to the scenes.

Movies that don't really make sense are usually the best ones though

So...yeah, last night I finished the first season of....erm...Sailor Moon.
Yeah, I like the anime now, get over it. TwT
_{I'll get around to R later, lol}

Finished watching Nichijou, it was a lot of fun. It was a lighthearted show that perfectly captured the everyday life while also being weird and wacky.

I started watching Robotics;Notes, which I've been planning to watch basically since it came out. I'm not gonna assume it's gonna be as good as Steins;Gate but I'm interested in where it's going to go nonetheless.