Topic: Anime & Manga (NO SPOILERS PLEASE)

Yeah, longer Blu-ray shows (as in, more than 13 episodes) tend to have less features unless they're massively popular. Most shows I got rarely have much of any bonus features.

...Unless I'm just bad at picking them...

Toonami is airing an Uzumaki miniseries next year. It looks like the comic in motion, if this trailer is anything to go by.

OMG

@Link-Hero Uzumaki is a good choice. It's arguably his most well-known work internationally, and it fits the mini-series format well. Anyway, while some of the imagery is grotesque and horrifying, I don't recall much in the way of actual explicit content.

Gyo would be another good choice, I think, if they can get away with all of the gore in that.

The art in the trailer makes me hopeful for this. And the fact that they apparently brought the person who did the music for the excellent horror film Hereditary onboard. Even if it's not perfect, though, it's hard to imagine this being worse than the Junji Ito Collection.

While we're on the topic of Ito, I wish TPC would do more collaborations with Ito in the future.

I am kinda shocked more people aren't talking about Dr. Stone! The show has easily skyrocketed to the top of my list of on-going anime. This week was yet another great episode!

Arriving earlier than expected is my copy of Godannar!

I first ran across this one a few years ago back when I was still using questionable sites, so I'm glad to finally support it. It's been long enough that I've forgotten the core details, so it's a good time to rewatch it. While it has a ton of over the top fanservice, the show is a love letter to the silly nature of the "Super Robot" genre & is tons of fun from start to finish.

Ooh man! I'm excited for this! Finally Junji-Ito's work is going to get justice. If this turns out to be great i hope they do Tomie or Gyo next.

Well, I just won another figure on Toreba. Let's hope I don't miss this one, lol.

Got in the Nami figure I won on Toreba. I'm not even the biggest One Piece fan, but it's pretty exciting nonetheless as my first anime figure.

A little fuzzy because of my phone's camera quality, or maybe I'm just not that good at this, but here she is!

Not bad for free (it's much larger & higher quality than I was expecting, TBH).

If you want to know what Toreba is, it's an app that let's you remotely play real crane games in Japan (you can win plushes, figures, and other goodies), and if you win anything they'll mail it to you for free.

They operate it like a FTP game, so you get 5 free plays upon sign up, and if you spend at least ¥1,000 (just under $10) on it just once, you indefinitely get 1 free play a day (sometimes during special events they'll give out more. The most I've gotten since the initial sign in was 4 in a day). I earn Google Play credit by using the Google Rewards survey app, so I didn't have to spend any of my own cash to hit that ¥1,000 limit either.

I just got back from seeing Fire Force: The Movie: The Musical PROMARE in the theaters.

I can't remember the last time I saw a movie where the audience felt the need to give it a standing ovation, but the this film most certainly earned our applause. A wild ride from start to finish, with wonderful animation (I mean, the heavy use of 3D CGI made it look like a video game cutscene most of the time, but with clever uses of coloring techniques and camera movements, they really made it work), backed by an excellent score that perfectly punctuated every scene (I was only half-kidding about the "musical" part, Sawano truly outdid himself this time), all to tell a tale that admitedly treads a lot of the same ground Trigger has relied upon since their days at Gainax, but told at just the right pace so it hits all the right notes without losing the audience or feeling out of place.

If anything, it feels like a greatest hits of everything Trigger has delivered so far, while still remaining its own thing - It has the visual flair of Little Witch Academia, but with grand stakes to back up the grand visuals. It has the humour and thematic weight of Kill La Kill, but with better-paced scenes and less of an emphasis on cramming insanity as possible into every single shot, so the quieter moments get a chance to breathe despite the shorter run time. It has the callbacks that we're used to by now, without beating the audience over the head with them so much like Darling in the FranXX did.

Also also, the visual designs sorta reminded me a lot of Space Patrol Luluco, which made me happy.

This was an absolute rollercoaster ride of a film that I definitely enjoyed watching. This season has been an exciting time for me as far as anime goes (when I can watch it), yet this really takes the cake. I'll be thinking about this one for quite a long time to come, that's for sure.

Promare is probably the best movie I've seen where I didn't care that much about what actually happened in it. Which made it a very weird experience. Because it was awesome and I loved it but for me, it was missing something compared to...anime where I cared a lot about the characters. Most obvious examples being Kill la Kill and LWA. But to be fair...those had the time necessary to make me care.

Yeah, plot and character development was pretty rushed and by-the-numbers. Easily the weakest aspect of it. But I dunno, I still managed to stay engaged the whole time. It may not have been a captivating story, but it keept me engaged purely from its visual creativity.

Since Ni No Kuni is Studio Ghibli, does it count....?

That's mostly where I'm at. The story and characters worked enough that everything else could carry the movie no problem.

Dr. Stone just wins this season of anime. It has been a consistently fun and interesting show every week. Danmachi 2 (Is it okay to pick up girls in a Dungeon? 2) has been a welcome sequel but hasn't lived up to the first season. Fire Force is definitely cool and I'm glad I gave it the chance after initially brushing it off. But it still has not had a single episode to really blow me away yet. Though the fight with the traitor from the first company was pretty cool. I'm most disappointed that the cat-girl, who was introduced as being just as strong as the protagonist, has already been reduced to just harem member.

Fairy Tail's final season has been a mixed bag, at times clearly rushing and the fight with Zeref was a serious let down - considering how built up he was over the series. However this final confrontation with Achnologia is proving to be a lot better. The show's reputation for rarely if ever killing anyone is also well earned...

Granbelm is a flop. It doesn't know what it wants to be. Gundam for little girls? The next shockingly dark Madoka Magica? It tries to do too many things and ends up not doing any of them terribly well. But it has some cool visuals and sound direction.

Yu-no ... wow. I have never seen a show go so completely off the rails in my life! It's not even the same genre it started as, and the most recent episode was basically just "Sorry, we ran out of time, so here's 20 minutes of rushed exposition that sort of ties everything together? Maybe?" I think if the show hadn't been constrained to 24-25 episodes it totally could have been really good. If they'd had the time to properly develop characters and situations that led to such an extreme change in sitting and story it could have been worked out. But they just didn't have the time. The anime has actually turned me off to the VN coming to Switch - though I might still pick it up on sale at some point.

Are you lost? was just a silly fan-service bit of fetish fuel. Junk food for your eyes and brain. Watched for the same reason one eats junk food.

A Certain Scientific Accelerator has proven itself better than the horribly, insultingly bad mess that was A Certain Magical Index 3 but has been way too heavy on exposition and technobabble. It fails to capture the humor or characterization of earlier seasons in the Index/Railgun/Accelerator franchise. Even the action has only been okay.

@Heavyarms55 Yu-no is 26 episodes. Just in case you thought that rollercoaster ride was over. Wouldn't want you to lose your head.

@CanisWolfred Oh, so there's a little more. Well that's good, but I don't know how they could possibly pull it back together at this point. Not without a whole season's worth of rebuilding a coherent story.

Woot! Just won another anime figure on Toreba with today's free plays!

Following on from my last post, the Rei figure I won came in recently.

Oh this is going to be a VERY good season of anime I think! For starters, Dr. Stone my favorite from last season is continuing and still proving to be excellent every week! Fire Force has restarted after a couple weeks off and is really solid still too!

Then returning this season we have Sword Art Online: Alicization, War of the Underworld which has started strong, the second season of Bokutachi ha benkyo ga dekinai "We can't Study" which I absolute love! And the TV adaptation of the Legend of Galactic Heroes second season too! And of course Food Wars: The 4th Plate too!

AND several new anime which look good too! A couple Isekai parodies, a comedy about a kid sold to a demon by terrible parents and a new Fate/Stay series too!

I just spent the entire afternoon watching anime and the hype is through the stinking roof!!!

I completely forgot that season four of My Hero Academia began last weekend.