Topic: Anime & Manga (NO SPOILERS PLEASE)

So every year on r/anime I get involved with one of the rewatch threads where every day people talk about the next episode of whatever anime the thread is about. And I die of exhaustion trying to stay caught up and having to regularly bring up my thoughts on every single episode, every single day! Yay!

Anyway this year was Spice and Wolf. Was not sure how much I'd be into it, based on what I knew about the series, but I'm enjoying it quite a bit so far. It has lived up to its reputation.

@kkslider5552000 My brother is also excited for Spice and Wolf. I haven't seen it yet though. I plan on watching it with him soon though.

Got a little haul in.

City Hunter the Movie: Shinjuku Private Eyes - I fell in love with City Hunter when I watched the first season on Retro Crush, so I decided to nab the recent movie. Watched it this morning & liked it.

New Cutey Honey - I first watched this about a decade ago on a YouTube channel that was uploading a bunch of old US Manga Corps/Central Park Media (which has been defunct) properties & remember really liking it. Needless to say I was excited to find out it had been picked up & remastered for Blu-Ray by a new licensor & am hoping to see if it still holds up.

Maken Ki season 1 - Similar story to the above, as in I watched it probably about a decade ago (though on some pirate site) and remember enjoying it (particularly this first season). I've been eyeing it for awhile and just haven't pulled the gun until now (no matter what I'll probably pick up season 2 eventually just for completionist's sake).

Bonus: Alternate art for City Hunter the Movie under the cardboard slip cover.

@RR529 That looks nice!

I am finally caught up on Chainsaw Man. I feel like it deffo did like what I would call a hard Tite Kubo in that it seems Tatsuki Fujimoto thought up a bunch of cool *****, threw it all together and then suddenly realised... oh *****, now I need a story to thread this all together, but I haven't got a single clue as to how to tell one.

Those early chapters really lull you in, just like Bleach did all those years earlier. There is strange sense of cool about everything, even though Chainsaw Man is way darker, grimer, grungier and dirtier. You get swept up as you are flooded with what feels like an endless array of imagination captured in weird and wonderful images.

But that stuff never lasts forever and much like with Bleach, there comes a point where Chainsaw Man descends into what feels like an endless series of almost completely incoherent battle scenes where the chronology and geography of the events was almost impossible to follow, it was just jumping all over the place.

In some ways I guess this is better than Kubo's work on Bleach, especially later portions where power systems had become so convoluted, I am not sure Kubo even really understood his universe any more. As he would continuously conjure up convoluted nonsense powers and the only rule seemed to be that there was always one person who happens to exist with the ultra specific niche counter power to thwart them. No, Chainsaw Man never does that.

But in other ways, it is somehow worse here, too. The rules of the universe are just as convoluted and impregnable, for a time this seems like a deliberate design choice, but later appears to be because th mangaka has written themselves into a corner. What eventually happens is everyone can just do everything, until they can't do everything as now the author has decided this is where the battle comes to an end.

It makes for an extremely unsatisfying second half of the story, even if I do enjoy a story that isn't afraid of killing major characters, in this case in often brutal and deeply disturbing ways, with oftentimes even more brutal and disturbing consequences. But like I say, those few genuine "oh *****!" moments are lost between what feels like an endless stream of hard to follow panels of people endlessly fighting until the author seems to get bored.

Hey everyone,
So I was mindlessly scrolling through Youtube one day when I came across what seemed to be a clip from an old-ish anime where there was a family of three and the toddler brother and sister were able to turn into half dogs whenever they got too emotional or excited or something like that, I don't remember the exact details (it was framed like a flashback as well if I'm not mistaken). Does anyone here know the name of it by chance? Because shows/movies like that (protagonist has an unwanted power they must control) are right up my alley.

Also, just to clarify: I swear I'm not a you-know-what, I just like this trope in anime is all.

@Fizza I've been looking for that one too! lol

@Link-Hero That's exactly it, thanks! Would you have any idea on where to watch it such as Youtube or Crunchyroll and whatnot?

@Link-Hero Sounds great, I'll see what I can do through sites like Amazon and Funimation like you suggested.

Honestly another really disappointing episode of Biscuit Hammer this week. It isn't a "horrible" adaptation, but it just feels very cheap. Lots of obvious cut corners, cost saving measures and classic action scenes which are closer to Power Point slides than actual animation.

I don't wanna be lumped in with the "just read the manga" crowds as I don't like them either, but when I see a manga I enjoyed - a manga I waited years to see adapted - with a stylish and energetic art style, turned into what borders on a glorified motion comic, I just can't help but feel really sad.

So halfway through Spice and Wolf, it has lived up to most expectations. That's good, I don't like being the odd one out in terms of loving a widely beloved classic, most times. Though I think part of my fondness of it is how utterly sick I am of adolescent anime nonsense made by people who aren't even good at it (the massive amount of time I spent playing Xenoblade 2 only enhancing that opinion). So this one that isn't full on WACKY at any point and has genuine and relatively subtle character interactions is a breath of fresh air.

So, Fly Me to The Moon now has 200 chapters! This is exciting, I hope that it'll have a lot more to come! Also, I hear that Tonikawa: Seifuku is coming out soon. I'm also looking forward for that. I remembered I had a Netflix account and started watching Komi Can't Communicate. I like it, though, I read all the manga before watching the anime, so I know exactly what's gonna happen before it happens. The Teasing Master Takagi-san movie is coming out in theatres in my state, but no anywhere near my city, and I'm kind of disappointed. And I'm still waiting for news on the Isekai Quartet movie. Right now, I've done nothing but hang out with my brother. He's the absolute best older brother in the world! He turned me into a weeb, and I like that. He also got me into programming, and now I make visual novels. I watched the Dr.STONE OVA with my brother a week or two ago. I really enjoyed it. Ryusui's voice is really deep though. I've been studying Japanese, and it's easy once you get the hang of it! I also watched A Silent Voice for the 500th time this week. I'm currently reading Hayate the Combat Butler, as it's by Kenjiro Hata, the author of Fly Me to The Moon. I found a flash drive that had the entire series of Nyanko Days installed on it. Now all we need is a Lucky Star season 2. That'd be nice.

Just discovered the anime adaptation of Muv-Luv: Alternative. Sigh.

Look, I'm not the biggest MLA fan. I'm not even the biggest visual novel fan. But even I know how big of a deal MLA is in the visual novel community... It's like, a super big deal. VNDB awarded it top visual novel of all time, while the Japanese version of VNDB, Erogamescape, placed it among the top ten VNs. It's like The Godfather of visual novels. You don't want to screw things up, period.

But how I stumbled onto the anime adaptation was through a meme, specifically the "Annoyed Bird" meme:

I thought it was a joke at first because... you know how certain books were said to be "unfilmable?" Yeah... MLA was unfilmable, at least not in the modern 1-cour anime landscape with their "12 episode" releases. So I thought, "Nah, this is just a meme. There's no way they could find a productive way of adapting this monstrous novel." But alas, reality be cruel.

It didn't help that the anime OP sounded like a generic one not so different from the countless lighthearted J-Pop OPs I've heard over the past decade of anime. Nothing in the song felt "MLA", so I didn't even really know what the meme was talking about in regards to MLA when I heard that song that could've came out of a dozen other shounen anime OPs.

But then Asu e no Houkou ("The Howl Towards Tomorrow") played... and I was filled with both dread and thrill. Of course I was thrilled about Asu e no Houkou playing. If you ever played or read MLA, you'd know what this song means in the context of the story, the way the catharsis was gradually built up over three games, such that when you finally hear the song in Alternative, you'd know what the emotional tone of it truly means, what the characters had to sacrifice (or in MLA's case, are going to sacrifice even more) just to get to this point in the story.

By the way, the PS3 OP is also another kind of epicness in its own right:

But anyway, going back to the meme. So I was also filled with dread because obviously, this means that the anime is a real thing. It's a real thing and it had that kind of generic, plucky, going on a lighthearted adventure kind of opening theme. So yeah, I was upset. To give you an idea what kind of story MLA was, let me put it this way: Hajime Isayama, creator of Attack on Titan, said AoT was inspired by MLA. Yeah. AoT. Remember? The anime that revitalized the horrors of war on anime? MLA is not a typical mecha or typical shounen story, so I feel like there's a discordance between what music we hear and what visuals we see. You literally see Takeru slicing an alien in half with all the explicit details in the OP itself, but you have this feel-good rock music playing in the background. Wut?

Speaking of the PS3 OP, I noticed that all versions of the MLA visual novel, whether it's the PC, PS3 or the XBox version, had two things in common: 1) the singer would literally shout in hot-blooded passion during the chorus, and 2) they all had a melancholy tragedy feel amidst the hard rock music blasting away. It's as if the singer was trying to encourage the fallen warrior who's drowning in despair to not give up and keep fighting through the carnage that's the warzone. Even the toned down "All Ages Version" OP on the XBox 360 had such a feel to it. What does that tell you?

After listening to the anime OP, I just needed ear-bleach to wash it out, so I went and looked up Asu e no Houkou again for old time's sake. And man, just listening to parts of it made me think, "THIS should've been what the anime OP should be like."

Thankfully, my prayers were heard:

Oh man. So good. I literally cried. I cried because watching MLA in anime form with "Asu e no Houkou" playing brought me this emotional catharsis, making me think "How far we've come as MLA fans to witness this moment in history." It's hard to describe the feeling exactly. You know how, you've read Tolkien books your whole life, and to see it on the big screen for the first time? It's kinda like that feeling. Watching the OP above feels like a celebration of MLA by people who cared about the fans and knew that this epic poetry of blood, tears and sweat in the battlefield is what we loved about MLA. It gets MLA. It understood the deep sorrow within the characters, the vengeance burning in their heart as they fought the aliens that have taken the lives of their many, many fallen comrades.

'Tis a shame that it's a fan-made opening, not the real thing. But still, it's not all bad. I heard from some fans, including those who've read the VN, that the anime isn't the worst thing in the world (only a few groups of people have said this, while the rest pretty much dissed the anime, so I don't know). I highly doubt I'd watch it though tbh, because 1) again, not really the biggest MLA fan to begin with, even though I understand the epic scale it represents in the visual novel world, 2) not enough time to watch anime nowadays, and 3) if I do find time, I'd much rather watch Attack on Titan first since I never got to finish the entire series (abandoned it after the first season), and also because it had better reception than MLA's adaptation, and also because it was created by someone who actually respected MLA and knew what made it appealing.

Ah well. Better luck next time, VN fans.

Are any of the Nintendo IP manga(s) on any streaming services?

Just finished the Komi anime. It was good, but now I gotta wait for season 3. Started watching Machikado Mazoku with my brother.

Some anime I got in over the weekend.

Lupin the 3rd: Jigen's Gravestone - the first in the "Koike" trilogy of Lupin films. Watched it on Saturday night and other than being a tad shorter than I typically expect from a movie (it's just about an hour long), I thought it was excellent & will definitely check out the other two (the way the villains tried to execute Fujiko certainly was... something, though).

Tekkaman Blade II - Like New Cutey Honey in my last batch, this is an old 90's OVA series I last watched on YouTube a decade ago, and was thrilled to see it available remastered on Blu-Ray. It was pretty short (6 episodes) so I binged it over the weekend, and still thought it was fantastic.

Maken-Ki season 2 - If season one was any indication, this is just going to be more fan service guilty pleasure than anything else, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Bonus: alternate box art for Jigen's Gravestone under the slip case.

@Kermit1, unfortunately I don't think they're available digitally (at least in the west). I prefer to buy my manga on my Fire tablet, but I've never seen any of the Nintendo series available on the Kindle store (I bought a physical copy of Mario Manga Mania though).

@RR529 Okay, I bought _The Minish Cap) manga yesterday and I wonder if Nintendo ever put them on any digital services.

#NSOneedsMangalol

I finished Spice and Wolf, I kinda never want to do episode by episode discussions, every day, on an anime ever again. I don't recommend doing it, especially for a series like this.

I thought the series was great but its a great thing to watch like once a week. Especially the episodes that are mostly just people talking, and often about...trading. I can do that once in a while, but its shockingly not the first thing I want. But I do appreciate it despite that. Also despite relying on certain cliches that can be really annoying, excellent relationship between the two main characters. I love that aspect of it in particular, I get why people absolutely love Holo.

@RR529 The sleazy bits with Fujiko and the robot thing in Jigen's Gravestone were the worst part of that movie.

I didn't watch the other follow-up movies, but, in general, I feel like the people who created them took the wrong lessons from The Woman Called Fujiko Mine. The show's erotic elements weren't there simply to add cheap titillation.

@Ralizah, yeah, that was definitely the weirdest part of the movie & didn't even tonally fit the rest of it IMO. It's mostly a slickly animated guns & car chase kinda film, then you have this giant robot trying to kill Fujiko in a very suspect manner (seems like an idea that in a different form would have worked in one of the more silly Lupin adaptations, but they shoehorned it in here & made it extra shocking for the "mature" tone the film was otherwise going for).