Anime – Page 28 – Wis[s]e Words

Houkago Saikoro Club — First Impressions

Published on October 9, 2019Leave a comment

High school girls get very excited at winning a not very exciting board game:

Houkago Saikoro Club: winning is fun

This first episode spent a fair bit faffing about before it finally got around to any actual board gaming. We only get to see the actual game store halfway through the episode. First we have to deal with blue haired girl (shy, bit of a loner) bonding with the twin tailed transfer student new to Kyoto (energetic, dumb but enthusiastic) for the first half as they have adventures in and around the town. When they spy the glasses wearing class rep out after curfew (six PM and is this really a thing in Japan?) they get suspicious and follow her. All of which ends with the three of them playing a game of Marrakech with the store’s owner.

Houkago Saikoro Club: real board games

And yes, that is a real board game, as are the other games shown in the store. Which is unusual, as normally manga and anime series are very very scared of anything that could be seen as a trademark infringement. It helps ground the series to have real games being played. Just as long as we don’t get any Catan. Or worse, Monopoly. This was a fun first episode. The girls are all a bit cliched but let’s see how’ll they develop over the series.

Shinchou Yuusha — First Impressions

Published on October 8, 2019Leave a comment

Ristarte has only two facial expressions when looking at Seiya. Horny:

Ooh, six-pack

and disgusted when having to deal with his personality:

Ristarte responding to something outrageous Seiya said

Both are understandable, because while Seiya is fine, his personality is warped, overtly cautious and paranoid, convinced everybody is out to get him. The kind of man who’d buy three suits of armour: one to use, one for back up, one as back up for the back up. Yet his stats looked so good when Ristarte — a Healing Goddess who had gotten the responsibility of freeing a super hard mode world from the forces of darkness — chose him as her hero. That turned out to be a mistake, as the first thing Seira did when summoned was to spent weeks and most of the episode doing push ups to level up. Nevertheless she’s stuck with him and together they have to rid their new world of the demon lord.

As you may have guessed Shinchou Yuusha – Kono Yuusha ga Ore Tueee Kuse ni Shinchou Sugiru (Cautious Hero: The Hero Is Overpowered but Overly Cautious) is yet another isekai/trapped in fantasyland anime, with a bit of a Konosuba flavour as both our protagonists are idiots, though Seira moreso than Ristarte. I like having her as the point of view character rather than Seira. Her expressions are great too, both horny and disgusted. This was a solid first episode, I hope it keeps up.

Review: Sounan Desu ka?

Published on October 8, 2019Leave a comment

This screenshot from its last episode sums up Sounan Desu ka best:

we will drink this through our anuses

Four school girls get stranded on a deserted island with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Luckily the girl from the screenshot has been trained by her father from an early age in the fine art of survival, which quite often turns out to be something mildly or not so mildly humiliating. In this case it was because two of the girls were stranded on a raft with only bat guano polluted water to drink. They had the choice of drinking the water and getting sick to the point of diarrhea and vomiting, or not drink and get dehydrated to the point of collapse. Luckily our survival expert had a third option: ingest water through the anus, which involves taking a gulp and pushing it into the other girl’s butt. Ray Meirs never had to do that…

It’s this sort of humiliation play that the series derives most of its humour from. The contrast between the matter of fact Homare, who sees nothing strange about all this and the other three girls, ill prepared for life on an inhabited island is what makes this series. It can all get a bit much as in the last episode and if you don’t like this style of humiliation based gross out humour, this isn’t really a series for you. Apart from that what sets this series apart from any other cute girls doing cute things is the survival aspect. Every episode has Homare teaching the others some handy little survival trick or two and usual grossness apart, it’s always interesting. In all, I liked this series, something fun that at half length episodes never outstayed its welcome.

Best anime of the season — First Impressions

Published on July 14, 2019Leave a comment

If you haven’t done so yet, go watch the first episode of Araburu Kisetsu no Otome-domo yo so you can appreciate the clip below in its full glory:

Sex in anime usually is done on the same level as a raunchy eighties comedy, utterly incapable of any thought beyond “boobs are awesome”. Cheap tittelation and fan service is everywhere but it’s frustratingly rare for anime to move beyond that. I didn’t have high hopes for Araburu Kisetsu no Otome-domo yo because its MAL description made it sound like just another ecchi comedy. Which it is, but what I didn’t realise it was one written by Okada Mari. She always delivers something interestingly and it’s the same here. This series has the most honest depiction of puberty, sex and the attraction to it and fear of it I’ve ever seen in anime.

and drank every last drop of the sweet juices pouring forth from her

Not series start by having one of the main characters narrate a description of eating out a girl, to the mixed reception of her fellow Literature club members. While Sonezaki the club president is revulsed by it, the narrating girl herself, beautiful and melancholy Sugawara wants to experience sex for herself. Of the other three members, the stoic Hongō is writing eroica herself and sees all this as reserve, while the main protagonist Onodera and her shy friend Sudō are both fascinated and embarassed by it. Onodera may or may not have a crush on her childhood friend, who has grown up to be a popular football player at their high school, with his fan girls giving Onodera a hard time for even talking to him.

Samurai hair

She herself though keeps seeing the dorky boy she grew up with, still fascinated by trains and thinks he’s just grown bigger, hasn’t changed. She just cannot see him in a sexual light. That is, until one night she goes over to bring some leftovers her mother had made for him and runs into him, well not watching videos of trains anymore… Childhood friend discovers her crush’s hidden porn stash is an anime cliche of long standing, but I can’t think of any series in which she walked in on him having a wank. And he’s actually watching online porn, meaning anime finally caught up with the late nineties. His response, her response, the music playing through it and her final denial on the railroad bridge with the train going underneath between her legs: it’s all perfect.

This is my anime of the season.

Why you should’ve watched Hitori Bocchi

Published on July 7, 2019Leave a comment

Pefect comedic timing.

Every episode of Hitori Bocchi managed to make me laugh at least once, which is not always the case with adaptations of comedy manga series. It’s easy for the transition from four panel manga gag to animation to fall flat, to get that timing wrong, but Htori Bocchi delivered week in, week out. The clip above shows that perfectly. You know exactly what’s coming, you know that Aru will botch that serve, but despite that it’s still funny because it gets the buildup and timing exactly right.

It also works because it fits in with Aru’s character to flub it so badly. She’s the type of person to want to present herself as perfect, but unfortunately ends up failing miserably most of the time. But she doesn’t let this get her down, she keeps doing her best and even has her own theme tune to sing to cheer herself up(the full version of which was released as a single). She’s far out my favourite character of this series that’s full of likeable characters. Apart from Aru there’s the blonde ‘yankee’ Sunao Nako, who frightens their home room teacher who is sure she’s some sort ogf juvenile deliquent. There’s Sotoka Rakitā, the obligatory foreigner with strange ideas about Japan, who came to the country to look for ninjas. And then there’s the protagonist herself, Hitori Bocchi, who suffers from an incredibly amount of social anxiety to the point that she thinks her friends will forget her if she stays home sick for a day.

Bocchi’s social anxiety is what drives the series. It all started when she graduated from elementary school and her only friend turned out to go to a different middle school. Worse, she said they could no longer be friends until Bocchi had befriended her entire class. So Bocchi does the only logical thing: trying to cancel her class, because if she’s the only one in it, she’s technically fullfilled the quest. When that doesn’t work, she sets out to make friends and ends up with Nako, Aru and Sotoka. Her attempst to make and keep her friends are both adorable and hilarious and a lot of the humour revolves around how her social anxiety makes her over react. It’s never mean spirited though; Bocchi’s fears are taken seriously, it’s just the way that she reacts that makes it funny. What’s more, she has the support of her friends. Which is one more reason why this was the series that I wanted to watch first each week last season.