Topic: Anime & Manga (NO SPOILERS PLEASE)

My first ever physical anime purchase! It's actually pretty exciting, as before now my only legal anime have been what I've seen on TV & Netflix, and a few movies I have bought digitally on Amazon (which to be fair is most of the anime I've seen, but I'll admit I've used sketchy sites in the past).

@RR529 Hey I remember that anime! It was pretty good. Is it the whole show? I long since stopped buying anime DVD/Blue Rays because they were doing a mere 3-4 episodes a disc and it cost like 200-300 dollars just to get one show. I watch 99% of my anime on CR now and for the last 4-5 years or so.

@Link-Hero Here in Japan, today? I have no idea. I haven't bought a new anime DVD or blue ray in years. Back when I lived in the US it was like 25-35 dollars for one with 3-4 episodes on it.

@Heavyarms55, 25 episodes total (so I'm assuming the full series?) among the two collections. First collection has the first 13 episodes across two discs (so probably 6 on one & 5 on the other), and the second collection has the last 7 episodes on one disc.

After shipping & taxes it came to $71, but I had some Amazon credit I got from using one of those grocery rebate apps, so it only cost me $51.

Not a huge fan of Crunchyroll simply for the fact that their simulcasts are subject to Japanese TV broadcast censorship (I know it depends on series, but gore & or nudity, if applicable, can be edited out), and some series can have certain aspects of their animation touched up for the Japanese home release, which western releases are based on (though again this depends on series, and from what I understand isn't quite as common as it used to be). It's been years since I've tried CR though, so maybe they've added more options.

Plus, even Netflix has trouble keeping HD resolution during streaming, especially for anime in my experience (or at least the resolution drops are more noticeable with anime), so I'm looking forward to not being held hostage by image buffering, lol.

@RR529 71 dollars for a 25 episode long series isn't bad at all. 5-7 episodes per disk is so much better than it used to be!

I have slightly similar yet somehow opposite feelings. While it is annoying how often anime stop mid-story because of that, a lot of them are not series I feel I need to see the entirety of anyway. Like even the really good ones. I don't watch series just to see them reach an ending for the sake of reaching an ending, so its kind of an irrelevant point. And quite frankly, most long running series don't end as well as they could regardless.

By contrast, I'm sick of getting into anime that will be going on for like a decade while still not finishing (or still being ongoing) anime I watched when I was a teenager. Why should I care that much about the complete story of MHA that will go on for the next decade when I still haven't even finished half the shonen I've watched?

So, I just got confirmation that Toreba has shipped that Rei figure I won.

Outside of my brother, no one in my family even knows I watch anime, so how am I going to explain an 8 inch high figure of an anime girl in a swimsuit, lol?

Well, it looks like I'm not going to get that Rei figure I won on Toreba, though it's not their fault.

The Post Office tried delivering it yesterday, but for some reason my brother wasn't paying attention and failed to sign for it (he was awake before I went to work & brought in the mail before he went to work, so I'm not sure how he could have missed it. I told him I had something coming in that needed to be signed for, too), and then apparently the Post Office is expediting it's return to sender, so I can't make plans to get down to the post office to pick it up before it's returned.

Well, I think that question just got answered...

@CanisWolfred, well, my family knew I was supposed to be getting a package, they just didn't know what it was (and, other than my brother, they're all at work when the mail comes anyways, so they wouldn't have been able to recieve it anyways, unless the post office happened to deliver it on a Wednesday or Saturday, which are their days off). My backup plan was to have one of them take me down to the post office today to pick it up (since it's Wednesday) but they have something special going on at work today & had to go in.

Anyhow, in happier news, I'm really enjoying Captain Earth. Just started it Monday and have already watched through all 9 episodes on the first disc.

I just want to mention, once again, how much I am liking Dr. Stone. I find it such a cool and relatively original and fresh idea. It blows me away that it is based off of a Shonen Jump manga. Although it does explain the visual design of the main character.

While I am really enjoying the story and personalities of the show - visually it is honestly pretty ugly. The art style is a throwback to early 2000s anime which I think has a lot more bad than good. Namely the giant eyes that are too far apart - something I thought long since dead in the medium. Also the MC has the worst case of "main character hair" since Yugioh - made actually worse because literally everyone else has normal hair. And even in flashbacks they show him with the same hair, implying that it's not his style, he just is the only person in this world to have weird green two tone hair...

But that's just nitpicking. So far this sort of post apocalypse story has been really good. I always enjoy a main character who wins with brains instead of brawn or random surprise hidden super powers. Which is yet another reason I am shocked this came from shonen jump - a publisher that usually, obsessively, goes the route of the dumb screaming protagonist who awakens hidden powers whenever he is about to lose. (And yes, always a "he". Shonen literally does mean "young man" but it wouldn't kill them to have a female protagonist on occasion. )

I really hope this doesn't turn into another That time I was reincarnated as a Slime where they start real strong and then realize they want to reach a certain point in the story, don't have enough episodes, and bum rush to get there in the last few episodes.

I kinda see what you mean about the art style in Dr. Stone, but I feel confident in saying that you're underestimating how mediocre most anime from the early 2000s look like.

I mean okay, yeah, it's not that bad, but stylistically it is similar. I've watched anime since the 90s and there was a point when anime kinda went off a deep end a bit in the early to mid 2000s. Dr. Stone kinda has Yugioh level crazy hair and those real big, too far apart eyes. It's not nearly as bad to be sure, but it's there.

But all that is just nitpicking because everything else about the show I really like. The idea is great, the VA has been on point, I love all the science and the random video game and anime references have been fantastic. The friendship between Senku and the other two was set up so well that I didn't even care it was mostly flashback.

I just need to see Dr.Stone for that YuGiOh level hair XD

Another week, another great episode of Dr. Stone! Man I am really having a blast with this one! I'm watching a few anime this season but Dr. Stone is the main one I find myself looking forward to all week long! I just love the set-up and idea. I've always thought the "what if" idea about what would happen if you took someone with modern day knowledge and dropped them into the stone age would make a good story - but it always involved time travel and not wanting to change history and such. Dr. Stone finally found a scenario where this idea can play out without the time travel aspect complicating things!

In a somewhat distant second is Danmachi 2 (Is it wrong to pick up girls in a Dungeon 2). A series that left off on a cliffhanger years ago, I am glad to see it back. The War Game stuff was really cool but went by very fast. This new season hasn't yet had an amazing scene like when Bell fought the Minotaur in season 1 - a fight I still go back to as one of my favorite fights in anime of all time.

Yu-No, the anime of that visual novel coming to Switch is a serious mixed bag. It's got lots of cool ideas but it's not built very well and in the last couple episodes has taken such a sharp turn that it feels like an entirely different show! Imagine watching the first 2 Harry Potter then the 3rd film is Star Wars Return of the Jedi, only it's still Harry as the main character alongside Han, Leia and Chewbacca. It's THAT jarring.

Fairy Tail's fine season has consistently been... "just okay". After how awesome the series has been in the past this final season just hasn't lived up to it. Yes we're finishing things up. Yes a lot of story lines are getting worked out and we are learning how it all tied together but... the fights have been real basic and underwhelming. Not bad... just okay. But a final season, final battles with the most significant antagonists in the series should not be "just okay". But hopefully they wont pull a Bleach or Naruto and have the series continue after its conclusion. Nothing in it will top the Tartaros arc anyway.

The rest of the anime I am watching is just okay. I dropped that mother themed anime - way too much implied incest. Granbelm can't decide if it is directed at little girls or fans of psychotic thrillers. Are You Lost? Is fun brain junk food with a blatantly mistranslated title - I assume on purpose.

Finished up Captain Earth (Blu-Ray) recently. It's a mecha/super robot series that sees high school student Daichi recruited into the ranks of "Globe", a seemingly "NASA" like space exploration organization (of which his father was an astronaut, before dying during a mission), but soon learns that it's true clandestine goal is to protect Earth from an alien invasion.

What I Liked:

• While it doesn't really do anything new with the typical character archetypes, I enjoyed the cast and thought they played off each other well. Also, narratively it mixes things up as they have to deal with a competing faction of their own organization in addition to the aliens.
• It has a good amount of variety. It has the typical "Super Robot" battles, here in space, where their mechs take on massive forms, smaller scale, more traditional mech battles on Earth itself, and even confrontations with competing factions from within their own organization that either see them facing off against unmanned war machinery or situations where jumping into their mechs really isn't the solution.
• I really liked both the Earth & Spacebound designs of the "Engine" series (the heroes' mechs), Machine Goodfellows (the enemy Earthbound mechs), and I really enjoyed the sciency facade they had going on with the whole "NASA" like theming (in order to battle in space, a character's mech would be carried up via rocket, detach, then dock with it's oversized components on it's way through a series of space stations).
• I also want to point out that this is simply a very beautiful looking show. Everything is well detailed, the colors really pop, and it's well animated.

What I Disliked:

• I wasn't a big fan of the "Kill-T-Gang" design (the enemy Spacebound mechs).
• There's no naming convention to any of the enemy terms, which can be confusing at first. Their organization is the "Planetary Gear", their human avatars are referred to as "Designer's Children", their Earthbound mechs are "Machine Goodfellows", and Spacebound they are "Kill-T-Gang".
• I wasn't a big fan of Molkin's human avatar design (one of the prominent enemies). I have no issue with sexy designs on principle, but her gaudy, very revealing shibuya fashionista outfit (for lack of a better term) doesn't really fit the tone of the rest of the series, IMO. A more subdued sexy outfit would have fit better (a la Faye from Cowboy Bebop or the Major from the first season of GitS: Stand Alone Complex).
• Narrative spoilers up next. An Earth company created the Planetary Gear's human avatars, as well as their Machine Goodfellows, but seem to be completely oblivious to their connection to the invading Kill-T-Gang. Their main ship is stuck in orbit around Venus, so I have no idea how they set that up, unless I missed it. I guess they may have sent instructions to the company on how to make these things, and the company was completely oblivious to the fact that they were setting up for an invasion?

Overall: Despite some issues, I really enjoyed this series and recommend it to anyone who enjoys mecha or even broader sci-fi anime. Also, as it took place during summer vacation, it's a great time of year to watch it.

Content Guide:

• Violence - Mild: People do get bloodied up from time to time, but it's not a particularly gory series. Mostly robot on robot action.
• Sex - Mid: It has nothing explicit, but there's quite a bit of mild content, which in total is enough to bump it to a Mid, IMO. In addition to Molkin's overall look, you have Hana (the female lead), who'se not used to human company at first so she inadvertently exposes herself to others a couple times early on (nothing is shown to the audience), the camera focuses on her cleavage for a few seconds each on the couple episodes they're at a pool/beach and she's in her swimsuit, and for narrative purposes she's nude for a long period of time later on (though they get around this by simply deciding not to draw nipples). You also have another main female character, Akari, who as part of a running gag (that only happens twice), will try to cheer up a male character by performing a "Navel Forte", in which she exposes her midriff to them. Lastly, there is a shower scene involving Hana & Akari, though the camera is placed in just the right position that nothing explicit is ever shown.
• Language - Mid: Mostly just PG-13 level offences, but I bumped it up to Mid due to one suprise F-bomb. Not sure if it's there in Japanese, but it's there in the English subtitles.

@RR529 As to your comment about language, Japanese doesn't really have curse words the way English does. Outside of a few obscure and becoming antiquated racial terms that you will never hear in an anime (because it's illegal to have them in a broadcast medium). Many of the words that get translated to English curse words carry the impact of terms like "shoot" "darn" "jerk" etc... Despite that detail, many localization will still go with curse words in the English because they think it fits.

It's actually really difficult to explain to a Japanese person why English has "bad words" that are inherently rude to use. Big cultural difference.

BTW, I enjoyed Captain Earth too and now that you mention it, a lot of the naming of things did just seem like names picked to sound cool with no more rhyme or reason.

@Heavyarms55, yeah, I understand that Japanese doesn't have cussing, at least not in the same way English does, which is why I said I don't know how the line was worded in Japanese.

It was when Akari (the team hacker, who refers to herself as a "Magical Girl") freed herself from enemy capture. Before she stepped out, she looked back at the enemies and said "Don't **** with a Magical Girl!"

It was suprising because it's one word you usually don't hear in anime translations (especially in more shonen oriented offerings), and honestly made the scene a bit more funny than it was supposed to be, simply because I wasn't expecting it.

@RR529 It's been a while since I watched it but I can probably guess what she said in Japanese. That phrase usually does get translated as swearing. Contextually it does make sense to do so.

Just made my next physical anime purchase!

I'll hold off on what it is until I have it, then I'll post a picture (like I did last time). Pretty excited though, as it has tons of special features in addition to the full series (stuff like character profiles, concept art, it's Japanese TV commercials, clean opening/closing animations, and a few more).

In comparison, Captain Earth only had the clean opening/closing animations.