Wherein I review a pair of old-school series, a new-school series, and an OVA that wonderfully mixes old and new styles.

As part of a little “classics” journey to watch some things I missed back in the day, Dragon Half is token nineties anime material through and through. It has that nineties style, with the sharper angles than your softer digital fare today, as well as plenty of color, reliance on visual glow effects, and lots of SD to keep animation costs lower. It’s wacky, silly, and doesn’t resolve much of anything, but hey it’s just a little two-shot OVA adapted from a much longer running manga. What it does have is good ol’ fashioned style, humor, and just that “different” feel that is so nice to get after the myriad cookie-cutter high-school-based slice-of-life/rom-com series.

Does it stand up to two decades worth of evolution in the world of anime? Well, sorta. The animation is good enough (mostly) that it won’t stand out as atrociously “pre-digital” like some of the TV series from the nineties do (I love you, Kodomo no Omocha, but I’m talking about you). The music, if anything, is probably the biggest indicator, with some boopy MIDI fare and a synth-heavy remix of a Beethoven piece complete with nonsensical Engrish-sprinkled lyrics. The cartoony nature of the action might also be a bit dated, but I think this is only because so many series now fail to really utilize this strength of animation. Sure, they might have some sweat drops, colossal punches with flying through the sky, or giant pink head bruises, but so few really make use of the malleable nature of drawn characters like so many old Warner Bros. or Disney cartoons did. I suppose this is less a generational thing and more just stylistic differences, and today anime tends to lean heavy on the on-model easy-to-reproduce drawings.

At any rate, Dragon Half is a fun hour-or-so long diversion about a cute half-dragon half-human girl and her weird predicaments being a half-breed. It hardly stands above much today but if you stop and consider the timing of its release, especially in the US, then you can maybe appreciate a little the impact it had on Western fans and why it is, for those few older anime veterans, more than just a little nostalgic.

On the more serious end we have the wonderful little three-part OVA Gunsmith Cats, which trades cartoonishness for a Western-style hard-nosed crime-fighting girl-duo setup. The nineties is still strong with this one, though, as evidenced by the heavy stylization on guns, girls, and the mean-streets of Chicago, replete with thugs, goons, and hoodlums that need shooting. Don’t forget the lusciously detailed and faithful Shelby Mustang GT they drive.

Gunsmith Cats makes me happy, because it is a series that has a strong sense of style and identity and purpose and it sticks to that and delivers well. It’s got action, a bit of comedy, and yes even sexiness, and it manages to do this without feeling like pandering garbage. The music is fitting, the animation (especially the driving chase scenes) is often gorgeous even by today’s higher standards, and the whole package just feels solid.

Is it short? Well, yeah, but OVAs were common and more easily localized in the US being conveniently on one VHS tape. But what’s there is definitely good and worth checking out sometime. And does anyone else think the GSC opening maybe, just a little bit, influenced the later Cowboy Bebop opening?

Although not another nineties series, it’s the late 2000s six-part web-series Time of Eve, later made into a full theatrical movie. ToE takes place in the near future, where everyday androids exist to serve all sorts of roles, from construction, teaching, childcare, and of course general housework. The show focuses on a specific teenage boy’s relationship with their “houseroid” and the world of android ethics. What rights should they enjoy? Do they actually care? Have personalities? Should we treat them like impersonal tools or more like humans? Where does the line get drawn? The bigger ethics questions form the basis for both the backdrop of the world as well as the primary struggle for a lot of the cast. Even so, it manages to still be very character-driven as well, as we see our protagonist come to terms with how he should treat his android and how he should let its presence affect him as well.

The plot hinges on him finding a secluded café, eponymously named Time of Eve, where the one house rule is “no discrimination”. Androids don’t have to play “robot” and can relax and act, well, human. As a result, he quickly finds that the robotic talking androids he normally see are perfectly capable of acting like normal people, to the point that he cannot tell who there is a human and who is actually an android.

ToE is a fairly good looking piece too, with tons of little futuristic details to the environments, which are often given very nice sweeping 3D camera treatments. Character designs tend to be a bit more realistic than is typical (lots more roundness, for instance) and the CG stuff tends to be well integrated. Music is also pretty good and fits the style, sweeping shots, and futurism vibe.

The length is just right, too, as it gives plenty of time to explore a lot of interesting questions and have some real character growth without ever really dragging at all. The ending sort of feels abrupt, but I think they did a good job of hinting at the greater change that will inevitably occur in several of the characters, even if it isn’t shown. If anything, I’d still definitely go for a sequel or something, though it might be better if it focused on new people or something. Unless you just cannot get over the lack of moé or whatever, you probably won’t regret trying this one. And heck, it’s short enough it won’t feel like a huge time investment.

For a real short and sweet treat, there’s the beautifully produced Little Witch Academia, a mini-movie of sorts that expertly blends the cartoony power of animation with imagination, style, and spectacle. It evokes a mix of old-school Disney feel to the animation but yet distinctly still modern and anime.

The story is a bit simplistic and the characters are exaggerated but this tends to be more useful than not given its short 20-something minute run. There isn’t a lot of time to develop characters, so the fact that they all are mostly caricatures allows them to ooze their personality with every movement and line delivery and speeds up the whole “getting to know the cast” bit. In fact, it lets them do this while setting up the plot. This proves to be a good use of time, so there’s nary a bit of drag and lots to absorb despite the brief length.

And did I mention that animation? Colorful, fluid, fun, yet detailed. The mix of Western and Eastern styles is such a refreshing pleasure to behold, and the expertise with which the designs and movements of characters explain their character before they even utter a word is something you usually only see Disney pull off so well (admittedly, their renaissance phase more so) with Don Bluth a definite close second.

If there is anything negative to be said it is the length again. Too short! Rather, the whole thing feels like a test run, a preview of what could be possible. In fact, this seems to be just the case. Trigger is a relatively new animation company founded by some industry veterans and they just recently wrapped up a successful Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for something more. So far, it is planned to be another 20-ish minute short, but I get the feeling this is all to raise awareness of their skills and to garner interest with the goal of a feature length piece some day. Here’s to hoping that day comes sooner rather than later because Trigger seems too talented to let it to go to waste.

As of this writing, you can watch Time of Eve and Little Witch Academia for free on Crunchyroll. For the nineties OVAs, of course they are long since out of print I’m sure, so either find an old VHS tape, maybe there is a DVD re-release, or they’re probably on YouTube or something these days.

Anime centered on MMORPGs aren’t anything new, especially in the wake of the highly successfully Sword Art Online and the less recent but still very influential .hack franchise. So it was with a little hesitation that I ventured into Ixion Saga. Our hero, Kon, is your average sixteen year-old virgin-locked male gamer. One day while playing an MMO he gets hit on by an impossibly hot elf babe and eagerly agrees to help her (without even asking about the specific details, naturally). The next thing he knows he’s been transported to the high-fantasy world of Alma, still sitting in his cheap computer chair.

A lot of fantasy shows in general, beyond just anime ones, spend a lot of time “world-building”. You know, showing off creatures, races, magic, and political details, all as part of the fantasy appeal. A good one will weave this into a story, allowing these bits to be revealed while still primarily focusing on characters and plot in the short-term. Ixion Saga is a show that doesn’t give two shits about all that. Sure, it seems like somebody over there did write and come up with a lot of those typical fantasy details, be it about the world, the various political entities, and even an ancient race of powerful beings called Ixions. But 95% of the time, all of that fluff, even including the fact that Kon is in a different world and should be more distressed or eager to get back home or at least figure out why he’s even there, gets ignored in favor of comedy.

This would be more of a problem if the comedy wasn’t pretty good. Ixion Saga is a show that likes to goof around, both in antics as well as the bizarre cast. Even so, it manages to still feel mostly MMO-ish, with the ridiculous AlmaGear weapons, the adventures, the princess, and the Incognito. But it does fumble a bit trying to juggle mostly-comedy with just a teensy bit of drama. It doesn’t happen too often but occasionally the show tries to build a bit of tension or drama, usually with the politically-motivated wedding of the princess or more often with the Incognito’s attempts to capture said princess before she can have her diplomatically-influenced marriage. Since nobody is ever seriously hurt or in danger it can get a little tiresome when they try this. Thankfully, it isn’t often, and the focus is far more on the antics and encounters and adventures and so on.

For Ixion Saga, you must come for the laughs. If you find yourself getting frustrated that they still haven’t explained why Kon is there, how he can get home, or why the Incognito has been ordered to capture them, well… you’re obviously missing the point. The plot is secondary to the comedy. For the most part, this is acceptable because the show is quite funny. Sure, it relies a bit too much on situational humor and slapstick and the occasional episodic venture, but it’s never bad or boring. Animation is consistently decent, managing to be colorful and accentuate the cartoonish violence and humor, but pleasing and detailed enough when it needs to be.

The cast makes up a big part of this humor, too, and they straddle a fine line between cliché and parody. Sainglain is your typical brawny fighter, the princess is more than a little snooty and tsundere (which Kon points out), and Marian is a bubbly fanservice vehicle… except for the fact that “she” has balls. In fact, balls come up a lot more than you’d think in this series, as there is the early gag that runs the entire series with Kon directly responsible for the permanent testicular damage of their main antagonist (thus giving him an undying vengeful rage motivation). I mentioned Marian was a tranny, and while this does get used in a lot of jokes it is thankfully never the joke itself. Ixion Saga never says “hey look, trannies are funny, let’s laugh!” It’s always “it’s funny that Kon is so conflicted being simultaneously turned on and disgusted by Marian!” The respect, if you want to call it that, for her being transsexual is appreciated, and most of the characters besides Kon tend to shrug it off as if it is nothing special, and even Kon isn’t so much freaked out by her being a dude as he is uncomfortable that said dude turns him on.

Ixion Saga is a lot of fun, though it fails to really ever be stellar. It’s funny and amusing and worth giving a shot, but it never really aims to be much more. This might be a safe decision on their part, as any attempt at more, if not done well, would undermine the humor and disappoint. In light of having a really original plot it favors the jokes and that’s probably smart. The sole season’s worth is just enough to have plenty to watch but without overstaying its welcome. You will either laugh or you will move along. Don’t feel bad, though. I liked it but it isn’t too memorable, really. Still, if it sounds like your kind of humor, do give it a try.

As of this writing, you can watch Ixion Saga DTfor free on Crunchyroll.

Three mini-reviews for series that probably deserved full reviews, but for various reasons I’ve just got less to say.

Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae o Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai (loosely officially translated as Ano Hana: The Flower We Saw That Day) is, aside from a stupidly long title, actually a pretty decent watch. It’s the kind of soap opera that has enough nuances of story and character and so on that generally garners longer, more thought-provoking reviews. But, alas, I can’t find a lot to say about this one.

The story follows Jinta as he is “haunted” by what seems to be the ghost of a childhood friend, Menma, who died in an accident many years ago. Interestingly, only he can see her, and yet she seems to be a very real ghost as she is able to physically interact with the tangible world, though he still suspects it is his long-harbored regret. Soon after her death, their little posse of friends drifted apart, but ghost-Menma is ignorant of the last few years’ developments and is fixated on finding them so she can be reunited. If only things were that easy, right?

AnoHana is well regarded in the anime community and it’s not hard to see why. It is written like a J-drama and directed like one, too, shot-for-shot. There’s really not much reason for it to be an anime. But, that isn’t bad per se. It is still well done, well acted, and well animated, too. It’s short, to the point, and focuses on the plot and characters, all of which are pretty good even if you’ve probably seen their various archetypes before. I liked it overall, although, as one Redditor described it, the ending was a lot of “crying and yelling”.

It can be a bit heavy-handed with the drama at times and your enjoyment will probably heavily depend on how much you like (or can tolerate) Menma’s childishness. Her child-like manner is explained and justified, though, but it does kind of undermine any romance I think. Thankfully, while the show dwells on his past crush on Menma, it doesn’t try to force it in the present so much, which would be really cringe-y due to her being so kid-ish compared to him now. Mostly, it is a story about friends reconnecting as well as coming to terms with a lost loved one, which suits the whole package well. Anyway, if you like good dramas give it a shot. It’s certainly worthy of checking out and you may find it has for more meaning in your own life.

Hentai Ōji to Warawanai Neko. (The "Hentai" Prince and the Stony Cat.) follows the hijinks of the eponymous prince, Yokodera Youto, as he makes a wish at a cat altar and surprisingly it comes true… sort of. As a result, he loses his façade and begins blurting out everything à la Jim Carrey from Liar Liar. Meanwhile, our lead girl, Tsutsukakushi Tsukiko, loses all her visible emotions behind a poker face. And it goes from there with the cat statue’s wish-granting providing the main driving force for what eventually becomes a bit of a past-revealing intertwined relationship thing. It’s actually not a terrible premise and it allows the show to have a lot of fun with its characters.

A generous helping of ecchi icing spread fully on this giant moe cake, HenNeko knows what it is (it’s in the damn title!) and it does it… surprisingly well. Sure, the story is barely adequate, but the humor is good enough often enough and the art/cute factor is definitely pleasing. But, if you hate moe pandering then run away now. At least it sticks to a solid, if a bit simplistic, story and isn’t as pointless or random as shows like GJ-bu— not that they are worse, but if you prefer a cohesive story and such to follow along with then HenNeko will probably appeal to you more.

It seems like only yesterday I was complaining about the male-fantasy-driven anime industry. I feel like a broken record having to keep lumping shows into the can’t-make-up-its-mind category. Once again we have a show that has a story and actually sticks to it with little to no filler, but yet sprinkles all that time with egregious boob shots, oops-I-fell-on-you scenes, oops-I-walked-in-on-you-changing scenes, blushing, crying, belly-buttons, and oh so much more. It seems determined to pander to every damn male fantasy whim about cutesy doll-like girls. It covers all bases. And damn is it good at it, too.

If I had one major complaint it would be the two leads: I just never really felt much chemistry between them. Oh sure, they interact well, and their personalities bounce off and provide lots of humor and enjoyment. But as a romantic couple? I dunno. I get that she is obviously into him, though. Props for doing a great job of conveying her emotions despite the poker face she’s forced to display all the time. It just seemed liked he was focused on too many other things most of the time for there to be a lot of gooey satisfying romance, despite how much the show kept trying convince us otherwise. But, really, this isn’t a big problem, but it did irk me.

Little Busters! is another Key production, based off a visual novel (as per the usual for Key), and it is… well… ugh. Normally I don’t review anything I didn’t completely finish watching. But, I also don’t normally have to drop a series. On the rare occasion that I do, I usually do so early and don’t feel I have enough material to write anything more than “didn’t like it.” Even the mediocre ones generally have enough redeeming qualities such that I can limp through to the end. The really bad stuff can be fun in a b-movie MST3k way. But the truly bland? They are the absolute worst. They just don’t really have anything going for them. Nothing to get glad or mad about. They’re just immediately forgettable and boring. It’s sad, really.

So there are these five childhood friends and one is a year older and so will be graduating and leaving them soon and gets the idea in his head that they should form a baseball team and go all out on last time. But they only have five members so they convince the effeminate runt of the pack to recruit four more members while the rest of them… don’t appear to do much else about it? I dunno. It ends up being mostly cute moe girls (go figure) of varying you’ve-seen-these-archetypes-a-million-times flavors. Stuff happens. Things meander at an agonizing pace. We learn about some of the girls’ backstories. There’s mildly amusing comedy, weak attempts at tear-jerkers, and mediocre drama. Nothing ever really seems to amount to much.

But it’s never really bad. It’s just so damn bland. Animation, voices, and music are all fine, but feel very by-the-numbers. The story is half-hearted and the characters, while many of them are cute, feel incredibly shallow and cliché. Part of it is the much too large cast leaving most of them as bit-players in the script. LB! is based off of a dating sim by the same name, so it suffers like they all do from the “gotta get every girl’s story shoe-horned in!” problem where the original game has diverging narrative paths meant for multiple play-throughs. And what the hell is with casting Horie Yui as the “male” lead Riki? I tend to really like Miss Horie, but here she’s just doing a bad “guy” voice that just ends up sounding exactly like another one of her roles Raika from Papa-Kiki (which you’ll note in that review I called her out on being miscast there too). I get that this is apparently a very well-liked and popular game and anime, so fuck me for not finding any appeal I guess.

I tried. I really did. I watched seven episodes of LB!, stopped, then decided to give it a second chance and watched the eighth. After giving it more of a shot than it deserved, I realized something: I need to stop watching anything made by Key. You'd think I would have known better after Angel Beats! (what is with ending our titles with exclamation marks, Key?) but here I am. I won’t say it should be avoided, though. Obviously, a lot of people like this one and I guess I can see why… maybe.

As of this writing, you can watch AnoHana, HenNeko, and Little Busters! for free on Crunchyroll.

The older I get the more I dislike the oft venerated Repository Pattern— at least as it is usually implemented and suggested. In fact, I’ve gone through just about every attitude, from ignorance, indifference, mild interest, eager learner, ardent supporter, frustrated friend, disillusioned, and now to somewhere close to outright disdain. Yep, I’ve become a hater, which isn’t something I like to be about anything… but here I am.

Here’s the typical scenario I’m talking about when I say the “repository pattern”:

interface IRepository
{
	object Find(int id);
	void Add(object item);
	void Remove(int id);
	void Remove(object item);
	void Update(object item);
}

Or something along those lines. Some languages, like C#, let you do a Generic Repository (IRepository<T> for instance) and then at least have some concrete types in place of just object. There are many other slight variations but the basic idea remains the same. It is a class for manipulating data objects without having to know how or where they are stored. So in practice, you’ll likely create a DbRepository with method implementations that access your database to retrieve and save objects.

The goals are noble and what originally attracted me to it. I started, like I imagine most coders, being quite naïve about best practices. I did a lot of bad stuff with DataSets and other bizarre DAL creations. I was eager to learn better ways, both to improve my skill as well as to solve all of the headaches associated with working with data layers. Which got me Googling and reading, inevitably on the repository pattern.

It looked like a lot of boilerplate up-front work, but the folks that constantly beat the drum and sang the praises had me convinced. I was slow to actually adopt it, as it does take discipline and dedication (as well as a new project; I was not about to re-write an entire working DAL, however monstrous, in an ongoing project).

It decoupled the implementation details from the many other classes that needed data but shouldn’t be accessing databases directly. It made things more testable, something else I was slowly warming up to and trying to incorporate. It even just read better: what could be simpler than add, update, remove, and find?

Lately, though, I had been getting frustrated with things. It begins simply when you realize you lose most of the nifty features that modern ORMs have been adding: lazy loading, change tracking, connection pooling, foreign-key fix-ups, and so on. Well, you don’t necessarily lose these always, it does depend on your repository, but it becomes difficult if not impossible to actually use them or you have to re-implement the features in the repository itself. All in the name of abstracting things. Well, yes, abstractions can be good, but it also means that nobody else can know about these specific features since the interface must be a “one size fits all”. A lowest common denominator of all possible data access implementations.

What usually happens is people write repository classes and use Entity Framework and then either lose a ton of features or they use them anyway breaking the abstraction by “knowing” that in this case it’ll work. It’s rare that anyone ever actually rips out EF and replaces it with NHibernate or something so the chances of them running into problems with the many times they dodged the abstraction is slim to none.

Except when it does crop up. Case in point. Somebody at some point innocently changed some code to make ToListAsync calls. Turns out, this is an Entity Framework specific extension method on IQueryable. Well, it worked, because the code is set up to use an EF-backed repository implementation. But, of course, if you change it to anything else (as I stupidly did), it breaks immediately.

I believe it does matter, a lot, how you’re getting data. That doesn’t mean you can’t still abstract things somewhat but not so far that you lose all knowledge of what’s going on. It matters that the repo is a database or other remote resource because that has async/threading implications sometimes, whereas an in-memory one would not have the same disk/network I/O or CPU considerations.

So what do you do in this specific case? Changing it back to ToList wrapped in a Task.Run, as I naively knee-jerk suggested, makes it async but it bypasses the true EF async implementation. Presumably, this was the desired optimization, which is then not used. Other than that, what? Do we change the IRepository interface to add explicit XxxAsync methods and force all implementers to provide async calls (or pretend to, in the in-memory implementation case)? I don’t have a good answer other than: guess you don’t get to use EF async improvements. Sorry. You lost that feature as soon as you decided to be “persistence agnostic” with your repository abstraction.

I don’t think you can truly have your cake and eat it too. Either you get to use all of the nifty features your chosen ORM provides (in this case, true asynchronous enumeration of entity queries) or you aim for the lowest common denominator and forfeit it. Not every persistence method will have such a feature. Even if several do, it is likely they have very real and meaningful differences in implementation.

If only there were another way…

It’s cathartic and whiny and all to bemoan the repository silliness as I have, but what about a real alternative? What is one supposed to do? Is there a better way? I’m glad you asked that!

While I don’t claim to have all of the answers here, I do have something I’ve been shaping over the last few months that is in real working code on a real enterprise project. Let’s first take a look at the benefits that the repository pattern typically brings and decide which ones are actually worth having in practice and how we can still get them without aiming for the lowest common denominator by hiding everything in a highly abstracted interface.

Isolating the actual data access code from the rest of the system

It’s important that you aren’t creating SqlCommand and SqlConnection objects in your ASPX files or ViewModels or whatever. This is just bad, bad, bad and we all know it. One of the main benefits of wrapping it up in a DAL of some kind is to keep all this database crap (or whatever it may be) in one place instead of littered throughout the code base. If only just for the sake of re-use, so that we don’t have to manually spin up connections, build/execute SQL, or whatever. Better to be declarative about what we want and let some DAL do the actual work of materializing it.

It is here where the repository methods of Find and Get and whatever shine. Our controllers, services, and whatnot know what they need and can just ask for it from a DAL service. Even better, when using Entity Framework or NHibernate or other ORMs, it becomes even easier since really they do most of the work. Our DAL thingy can just create a context, do some includes and wheres, and then ToList that baby. Done! So easy, right?

Generic repositories make this super simple: just get yourself an IRepository<Customer> and off you go.

Bottom line: isolation, encapsulation, separation of concerns, etc., are definitely all good things.

Testability, mockability, or whatever you want to call it

Part of the reason for using an interface abstraction is for the “program to a contract” paradigm and so we can easily replace it with something else. Number one reason for this is for unit testing purposes. If we write tests for our service, we’d like to isolate the tests to just the service itself and mock its dependencies (thus removing them as a variable for why the result is wrong). It’s really easy to do this when your service expects an IRepository<Customer> and not a CustomerRepository.

Bottom line: testing is definitely a good thing, so if you can make that easier all the better.

But what we’re really talking about is the larger feature of…

Modularity, replaceability, or injectable dependencies

What we’re really wanting is to leverage a dependency injection container that can provide concrete implementations for everybody at run-time. This typically requires you stick to the “program to a contract” bit to really work well and it also has the effect of making things much more testable since your tests can provide dummy dependencies with deterministic pre-defined behavior suited to the test at hand.

Bottom line: you had best be doing this already, not just for your DAL stuff

Plug-and-play persistence layer

Some might try to also tell you that it’s good in case you want to rip out the Entity Framework implementation and replace it with something else. Technically, you are doing this in the unit test but in a very rigidly defined way that suits the needs of the test and no more. A true “replacement” would need to be a full alternate implementation.

And while it is true this is a powerful ability you gain by using the interface, my bet is that this is extremely unlikely to ever happen in the real world. I’m not saying it never does, though. But you will probably have a good idea whether that is even a remote possibility or real need for your project. My guess is in 90% of cases or more it isn’t. As we’ll see later, this “ripping out” process won’t be as bad as it sounds even without the lowest-common-denominator way of doing things. And in fact, as I’ve already said once before, there are likely to be subtle (or not so subtle) differences in implementation that will require a rewrite anyway.

Just as an example, if you were to switch from ObjectContext to DbContext (we’re not even talking about shifting away from Entity Framework here), there are differences even there: DbContext has a lovely little Find method that can take params key values, making a generic repository Find method super easy. ObjectContext on the other hand does not, requiring a bit more work to support such a method. So much so that you may not have included such a method in your IRepository interface when you originally wrote your DAL with ObjectContext in mind.

Bottom line: extremely unlikely to actually be needed or used, so almost always not worth the trouble

Decorators, adapters, strategies, and other advanced patterns

Another benefit to isolating things to a single repository class implementation behind an interface is that it becomes easier to do advanced fanciness like writing a CachingRepository<T> decorator class. It is often enough you’ll want to do this sort of thing and it’s a very powerful ability even though there are still many times it isn’t necessary. Still, if we can keep the door open to having them should the need ever arise with hardly any extra effort to keep that possibility open then why not?

I like to think of this as the “accretion” pattern more generally. Architect things in such a way that you can add on new things as specs and features change during development, with little to no rewriting of existing things. If you find that performance is bad, well just add in a new caching decorator or whatever. If you need better logging or you’ve got a new fancy logging service then slap together a logging decorator or an adapter to get your existing Log4net calls to go to the new centralized company-wide logging server.

Bottom line: always a plus, even if not always exploited, especially if we get the option for basically free

Well! Not a bad list. Lots of these are really more general guidelines for all of your architecting anyway, but they certainly apply with regards to your DAL and the Repository Pattern does give you all of these great benefits. What we want is a way to get the worthwhile benefits without the additional limitations that taking the typical repository pattern usually entails…

The answer has actually been right in our programmer faces for a few years now.

Modern object relational mappers have come a long, long way since the dark days of writing DataTableAdapters, CRUD stored procedures, or worse inlining dynamic SQL strings. In fact, they are so good now and come packed with so many fancy features it’s almost surprising people are still hung up on using the same old generic repository pattern that abstracts it all away and aims for the lowest common denominator.

It’s true that they didn’t use to support all of these features, and the “lowest common denominator” was basically the status quo anyway. At that time, the problems with the generic repositories weren’t really apparent or all that serious. Nowadays, with lazy loading, change tracking, and so on, we’re feeling the limitations more and more. Everyone is. I know, because I keep seeing them jump through a ton of hoops to still be able to use these advanced features without abandoning the noble IRepository. This is where mind-bogglingly complex systems of Specifications and such come in to allow for advanced filtering, pagination, and other things. They also have to come up with crazy ways of abstracting simple things like making joins. For every Order I also want the associated Customer. This is super easy in most ORMs (in EF it is context.Orders.Include(“Customer”)) but usually requires Expression fetch paths or other nonsense craziness to get it to work in an abstracted-to-all-hell repository pattern.

It’s all because while modern ORMs are powerful and many have overlapping features they are usually different enough in implementation that we cannot easily make a one-size-fits-all interface “glove” for them. It may be as simple as calling Include on an EF set, but what about specifying a child of a child? How is that different in OData/Data Services? NHibernate?

Some try to solve this by just writing pre-baked queries (GetOrdersByCustomerId) but you’re still stuck with odd problems. What child tables to eager-load? Do all consumers of this query actually need all that? And what about the fact that we now have multiple reasons to change since the query must attempt to satisfy all consumers? What if a new class needs it but also needs more child tables included but now that means another class that was using this heavily, assuming it was a small and fast query (which it previously was), is now performing slowly. It’s not pretty.

As I said before, the answer has been right in front of us.

Just use the ORM.

Let it work its magic. Let it be a powerful and useful tool that actually saves you time and headaches instead of forcing you to write a lot of confusing architecture just to end up calling Include anyway in your EntityFrameworkRepository implementation class. Just use the damn DbContext directly!

But! What about all those benefits we talked about? DbContext isn’t mockable! How would I decorate it? And what if I need to switch to Entity Framework 6 or, worse, NHibernate or something else entirely? What if…

Relax. It’ll be okay. Watch:

interface IModelDbContext : IDisposable
{
	IDbSet Customers { get; }
	IDbSet Orders { get; }
}

class MyEFModelContext : DbContext, IModelDbContext
{
	// blah blah
}

Oh. Look at that. It’s our old friend the interface! I guess that means we can inject mock implementations just fine now. And look, we can even fake the DbSet that EF uses (in fact, EF itself defines the IDbSet for us). We can even use practically the same T4 that generates the DbContext to generate the interface for us!

Wait, so does this mean I need a reference to EntityFramework.dll in all my projects? And a using System.Data.Entity at the top of my classes?

Well, yeah. So what? Is that really so bad?

Look, if you ever decide not to use EF then you’re looking at needing to rewrite things anyway. And, also, will it really be so bad? I don’t think so. I recently did just that when we switched from using EF directly (via an interface like the one above) to using OData via WCF Data Services. The entire “rewrite”, after getting all of the new OData service stuff set up of course, wasn’t that bad really. I made a new IDataServiceContext interface with a different type than IDbSet, fixed up my projects to reference Data Services Client dlls instead of Entity Framework, and then changed a few other minor differences in usage (for instance, DS uses Expand instead of Include). Sure, there were a few other significant differences that required more work to rewrite (it’s much easier to do a WHERE IN style filter through EF than DS, for example) but it wasn’t that bad really.

And besides, with the new data access method it was worth re-examining how we were getting data now that it was going to go through WCF and HTTP rather than an intranet connection string to a database directly. That’s a pretty fundamental underlying difference that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Just as another example, the amount of data being transferred matters more now since WCF and http bindings have limits on response/request length. Sure, it’s probably bad to be transferring 50 MB over EF anyway but now it will actively fail if WCF isn’t configured to explicitly allow such large transfers. Like I said, the differences matter.

But look at what we gain now. We still get injection and testing support via the interface, we can leverage T4 easily to make this extra piece on top of the T4s that we already get. The ORM manages what to connect to, the schema, and all of the translating to SQL for us, so the nitty-gritty DAL work is encapsulated and isolated from the rest of the app. We can even still decorate our context implementation at run-time if need be. But it’s still, fundamentally, exposed as a DbContext-like interface first and foremost, so we don’t have to cater to the lowest common denominator. We get Include. We get ToListAsync. We get Attach, Create, Find, Remove. All for free. All with the power of a modern ORM. Heck, the DbContext is already a Unit of Work, if that is something else you normally like to layer on top of your IRepositories.

Are we wedding ourselves a bit close to a specific ORM and persistence method? Well, somewhat. Certainly EF in this case, but thankfully EF supports some flexibility on the underlying persistence via Providers, so we aren’t wedded to a specific database type (SQL Server, Oracle, or whatever).

And really, how likely is it you will change it? More so, how likely is it you will be too far into the project when it becomes apparent that, for whatever reason, EF isn’t going to cut it? My guess is that in most cases that won’t actually happen. And yet the benefits you’ll gain, the simplicity in your architecture you’ll see, are all well worth the “sin” of using a specific ORM so directly.

But, even so… if IRepository is working for you, if the limitations I’ve described don’t apply or aren’t a big deal in your specific project, then use them. At the end of the day, the real point here is to have the flexibility of mind and knowledge to bring the right tool to the job. The best skill of all is knowing when to use which pattern in which case. It’s about remembering that the Repository Pattern is considered a “best practice” because it is infinitely better than a lot of alternatives and is so often a good [enough] choice. But it isn’t always the right tool. Don’t be slave to these guidelines and practices as if they were hard and fast rules. Repositories can be powerful and useful too, but please stop treating them like an inviolable law of programming.

Three more short reviews for three short yonkoma-based series.

Aiura is a series I almost forgot to review because it was so short. Is it forgettable? Well… I guess so. That’s kind of a bummer since it isn’t a bad little series. But, it is extremely short. One thing that does stick out in my memory is the intro. Steve Jobs and crabs. I’m not making this up. You’ll just have to see it for yourself. It is total wut. The show itself? Not so much. It’s a very simple, laidback slice of life show about a trio of girls. It’s an enjoyable little diversion, with some very pleasing and cute animation and characters. Backgrounds are simple but colorful and charming and the character movement tends to be very well done without nary a bit of corner-cutting.

But the short airtime really hurts here, as the mood and ambience and so on is pretty damn good yet the credits always seem to start rolling right as the episode gets rolling. That and it wastes a good third of its incredibly brief episode time on the intro and outro. While the outro isn’t so bad I guess, the intro is… well, I already mentioned how weird it is. It’s good for a little weird snort at first but after the tenth time seeing it you’ll probably start to get a bit annoyed since the humor wears itself out fast, the music isn’t that good, and it doesn’t really fit the rest of the show’s style or mood, especially when you’d love to just see more of the show itself and less of the bizarre intro montage.

I would, however, rename the show to Thighs: The Animation (or maybe Thigh-ura?). If you are a leg man, well… you’ll be that much more frustrated every time the credits song starts up. If this ever gets picked up for a full treatment, I would definitely watch it, but as it is you’ll probably forget to review it like me.

Ishida & Asakura is one of the weirder super-shorts I've watched, with only 2 minutes per episode (just like the similarly silly Teekyu). It seems to be frequently compared to Sakigake!! Cromartie Koukou and I can definitely see why, although I feel Sakigake!! is a far better watch (though far longer, admittedly). And boy, do its yonkoma roots really show.

The basic gist is two male friends in school, one is incredibly over-the-top and the other is a childlike simpleton with an afro and is somehow generally well-liked. Toss in a few other weirdos and you have a cast ready for loud and zany “Total Japan” bizarre humor. It’s a 100% WTF kind of show, the kind you could easily make clips of and make your friends watch to leave them terribly confused.

At any rate, it's good for a handful of laughs and like most super-shorts its brief stay helps to prevent it from getting tiresome. It never really manages to expand beyond its few weird joke styles but they are amusing and then it is over. And I'm okay with that.

Sparrow’s Hotel takes another yonkoma and attempts to briefly adapt it kind of expecting it to be an experiment, a sliver of its much longer running source material. Thankfully, its focus on just a few characters and its silly simple charm make it work better than you’d expect.

As the name implies, the setting is the Sparrow’s Hotel, where a trio work the front desk and attend to customer needs and generally run the place. It’s situated downtown and so is a bit small for a hotel but is near bars and such. Tamaki is sort of the manager and a short, blue-haired tsundere type; Misono is your typical nerdy fellow who spends most of the time being weirded out; and Sayuri is usually the reason for that as she is a tall, attractive, naïve, and bubbly type who also happens to be an incredibly strong and skilled ninja-like fighter.

There’s not much to really follow since it is another incredibly short series, but what is there is mildly amusing and cute at times. The biggest hurdle to enjoyment, other than the length, would probably be with the painfully obvious low budget. The animation is… not great. But, helpfully, it isn’t terrible either. It is cheaply made but it tends to do well enough with what it can, without ever really being just outright bad in skill. By that I mean it seems like they just needed to do it quickly and on the cheap not that the animators were bad or incompetent. It also dramatically changes style halfway through. Likely the second batch of six episodes were made months later.

It’s short and yes, again, I must say this leaves it being little more than a brief diversion. But the quirky animation style (both of them) gives it a strange charm I cannot dismiss. There’s far better stuff out there, to be sure, but this is simple, easy, and not bad. But it’s still really forgettable.

As of this writing, you can watch Aiura, Ishida & Asakura, and Sparrow’s Hotel for free on Crunchyroll.

Classically animated in style but with plenty of modern technical prowess, this series takes us through “that fateful summer” as our protagonist meets, falls for, and inevitably gets tangled up with a new transfer student who is as beautiful as she is eccentric. If that synopsis sounds a bit too familiar, that’s because it is. But don’t let that turn you off! While it isn’t anything new, the quality of animation, direction, music, and screenplay combine to make a solidly excellent series with only a few issues. Been itchin’ for another good romance/drama? I suggest you keep reading. (Note: haters should keep reading too, because… because don’t leave me…)

What feels like only a little while ago but was actually shockingly a decade ago for me, I watched a little series called Onegai Teacher (and its follow-up sorta-sequel Onegai Twins, but let’s focus on the teacher one today). Boasting pretty good animation for its time, it had a delightful soundtrack by I’ve Sound, a touch of sci-fi (the eponymous teacher was actually an alien from outer space!), and a notably more “adult” take on high school romance. The protagonist was physically an adult, already 18 due to health problems earlier in life that held him back though unbeknownst to his high school peers. His relationship, too, was both “thrillingly taboo” (in love with his teacher!) but one that he and the series approached with maturity. He was serious about her, forming a relationship, and understanding each other. It lacked a lot of the typical teenage bullshit. They even got married! Overall, it was a pretty decent little series.

But why do I bring this up now?

Ano Natsu de Matteru (translated as Waiting in That Summer) is a story about a similarly kinda nerdy glasses-wearing boy who develops a crush on a girl older than him that also happens to be an alien from outer space. Not only is he smitten, but he is very serious and determined and approaches it with a lot of maturity. Though she isn’t a teacher, she is also red-haired, wears glasses, is very polite and kind, and is at first unwilling to consider him a romantic prospect. Two episodes in and I was positively convinced this was a knowing rip-off of Onegai Teacher, particularly when I heard the blatant reference during the next episode preview segment. But no, it is actually an adaptation of a light novel series, whereas Onegai Teacher was an original work. Turns out, the lead screenplay writer and character designer on AnoNatsu both were involved in the Please! franchise… so, not-so-mystery solved!

In all seriousness though, AnoNatsu is most definitely a sort of version 2 of Onegai Teacher. Ten years later with more experience (and more money/tech in the anime studios) it is a let’s-try-that-again sort of thing. And it manages to mostly out-do its spiritual predecessor. Anyone who has seen Onegai Teacher will be hard-pressed to ignore the glaring similarities, but probably won’t be able to deny that it works well on its own, derivative/influenced or not.

Kaito is a kind but nerdy guy who has a hobby of playing around with his late grandfather’s old 8mm handheld video camera. He happens to be out filming one night and gets fatally wounded during our lead alien girl Ichika’s crash landing on Earth. Fortunately, she has spiffy space medicine to heal him and he wakes up the next day in his own bed feeling like it was a dream. Lo and behold, Ichika shows up as a transfer student the next day at school and he is instantly intrigued and also feels she is vaguely familiar. On the way home, he offers to let her stay at his place since it turns out she is oddly homeless. And so it goes from there…

As good as this series is it is incredibly predictable. Of course his sister leaves for three months (basically the entire summer) so he gets to live alone with the new girl he has a crush on. Of course he has a friend who’s secretly liked him for years. Of course his other friend is her childhood friend and has liked her for years. Of course one of their other friends likes said male friend. Yes, it quickly becomes quite the love polygon as drama builds and feelings and secrets start to get confessed. There are no real twists or surprises and you will easily anticipate everything. It ends up being mostly forgivable though, because the characters make it all still work. They are well developed, distinct, and the dialogue and scene execution is both enjoyable and strong.

Aside from the predictability, the other major issue I had was with the ending. Now, no spoilers of course, but I just gotta rant about it because it irked me so much. Up until the final climax, I was quite pleased with the way things were going and the general style and direction of the series. But, kind of like how the Revolutionary Girl Utena movie takes a left turn towards Wackyville during the final act (if you’ve seen that movie, you know exactly what I’m driving at), the final episode or so of AnoNatsu also does a pretty dramatic sudden tonal shift with all of the grace of a truck doing eighty on the interstate until the driver accidentally shifts into second gear.

See, I get that she is an alien from space. I get the sci-fi angle. But I also note that the previous ten or so episodes barely cared about that. Beyond the plot point of her being able to heal his injuries with her hand-waving nanomachine medicine, the story did not need her to be an alien at all. The entirety of it all would have worked just as well if she had really been, as she bluffs, a foreign exchange student and that’s why she cooks weird food, doesn’t understand common cultural things, and so on. And that’s just it… because the plot didn’t actually need any of the sci-fi stuff until the end when it gets aggressively thrown at you it feels jarring and out of place to say the least. As a result, it tore me out of what was supposed to be a bittersweet tear-jerker ending. (And don’t get me started on that cop-out in the last twenty seconds basically undoing it all. Saw it coming, of course, but aggravating nonetheless.)

Still, it looks really good, sounds really good, has some great performances (not so much Ichika, though my problem is her take on performing the character not the quality of her acting). The ending song/sequence is delightfully woven into the episodes. It's well directed and produced, no doubt about that. So overall, it still manages to be an excellent series well worth checking out if it sounds like your cup of tea.

As of this writing, you can watch Ano Natsu de Matterufor free on Crunchyroll.

Thus continues the tale of our violent model-by-day otaku-by-night heroine and her frustrated and confused brother. Kirino has returned from America ready to get back into her semi-secret hobby. What’s that? You don’t remember her actually leaving for America? Season two here picks up after the “True Route” extra four episodes, which weren’t televised (and thus sadly aren’t on Crunchyroll), the first of which is a replacement for the last televised episode.  Just like the first season, there’s more hijinks, incest overtones, nerdy anime fandom, with a dash of S&M and Lolita. So, basically, more of the same, which could be a good or bad thing depending on how well you liked the first season.

I’ve delayed writing a review on this one for months now and it is mostly because I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Way back in the stone ages of 2011 I wrote a short review on the first season that I expanded a year later into something more like what I typically do now. I was fairly positive in it, citing the likable lead brother, the very pleasing animation quality, and its playfulness with otaku culture and lighthearted themes of identity and acceptance. So when season two finally wrapped up (I’ve really got to stop watching things as they are airing; I hate waiting a week between episodes) I revisited that old review. It was then that I realized most of what I originally liked didn’t make it into the much anticipated follow-up.

Ore no Imōto ga Konnani Kawaii Wake ga Nai. (note the period there, it's part of the title and the sole bit distinguishing it from the first season) is by no means bad. It retains the same good quality animation and sound work, with all of the great voice actors reprising their roles. ClariS returns as well singing another catchy song courtesy the guy from livetune. It even switched animation studios but you can’t really even tell because the quality is still there. If anything it is a well-produced show with sporadic moments of fun, cuteness, and laughs.

But for all the good things there’s too much that it stumbles through or outright fails at. Most of them have to do directly with the plot and characters, so I’m afraid I must reveal a few of the episode premises though it shouldn’t be anything too spoiler-y. That’s kind of a problem as well: there’s really nothing much to spoil here, precisely because not much progress is made.

We get a baker’s dozen episodes but they waffle between expanding on backstories or engaging in mostly filler fripperies. The backstories for the most part are not bad, as they helpfully expand on side characters, but the issue is they’re “nice-to-haves”. In a season that is sorely lacking in character progression it’s a bit irksome to have so much of its limited time devoted to exploring side characters. I’m struggling with it though, because again they aren’t badly done. Saori in particular is much improved as a sympathetic character as a result. But, even so, it’s all just “nice to have” stuff.

The primary story arc takes a backseat and that’s a real shame. Finding out whether Kyosuke and Kuroneko will get together fo’ reals was the initial motivator but the series (well, Kuroneko herself) instead decides that resolving the long-standing rivalry between the primary siblings is more important. I’m actually okay with this turn as it probably is, realistically, the elephant in the room that must be dealt with if Kyosuke (or Kirino even) is to have any kind of serious relationship in the future. It really is a problem endemic to their current attitudes and personalities. Closet skeletons if you will.

But while there is some time devoted to all that, a lot of it is sucked up by mostly filler stuff. We get the arrival (and subsequent departure in the same episode) of a girl Kirino met in America who looks and acts like a mixture of Chika from Ai Yori Aoshi and Kaolla from Love Hina. Then there’s some random dude met at one of the many anime cons who Kyosuke immediately assumes must be Kirino’s new boyfriend. Then there’s a minor plot involving another Meruru concert that seems to exist solely to give Kanako and Bridget a reason to return as cosplayers. Then there’s a two-episode tangent with Kyosuke living alone in an apartment that seems to be just an excuse so the writers can have the half-dozen or so girls show up at random times in a controlled fashion without needing to find contrived ways to get him and a girl (or girls) alone together as they would normally at his home. None of these ever amount to much more than mildly amusing diversions that interrupt the primary narrative, which ends up dangling in a painfully obvious manner.

And then it ends with another backstory episode, this time on the siblings, and that’s it. No real resolution of anything and we’re left to wonder what the hell the point of all that was. A lot of the otaku charm is missing, we get far less of the eroge fun, and even the ol’ comedy muscles seem to have atrophied a bit in the time between seasons.

But worst of all is the deterioration of Kyosuke as a character and the increasing harem-ness of it all. As someone who I applauded in the first season as being respectable and level-headed even if occasionally a bit obnoxious (but realistically so for a teenage boy in his predicament), here he seems to descend slowly into wickedness. It’s by no means a plummeting descent like in School Days but it is troubling all the same. He seems even more obsessive about his sister now, in that unsettling possessive boyfriend way and less the protective brother way like before. He’s also increasingly lecherous, being less and less averse to the weird eroge stuff as well as delighting in teasing the girls (especially poor Ayase who I also can’t figure out if she secretly likes it or not). Speaking of the many girls, they are increasingly falling for him left and right to the point of ridiculousness — I’m guessing it’s just that none of them ever meet or hang out with other guys, like ever. And I probably don’t have to reiterate that Kirino is still a complete bitch who despite being cute at times is still mostly an unlikable character. This is somewhat explained in the final backstory episode about their childhood but still doesn’t excuse how incorrigible she is.

It’s definitely not all bad. Just mostly a letdown. An unsatisfying continuation to a series that is known to be better. The episodic nature, the lack of much meaningful character progression, and the generally unsavory direction it has taken the protagonist make for a disappointing sequel. Like the first season, a set of bonus episodes were released that finish things up (why they couldn’t just air these is beyond me), but having read the episode summaries I’m not sure if I’ll ever get around to watching them given the disheartening incest route ending it describes. (Look guys, this is fun, fan-pandering comedy not Koi Kaze, so you’re not gonna be able to pull it off.)

As of this writing, you can watch both seasons of Ore no Imōto ga Konnani Kawaii Wake ga Naifor free on Crunchyroll.

Yet another triple batch of mini-reviews!

Okay, seriously, I can’t review this one. It’s been months and months now and I don’t know why but I have struggled to find anything to say at length about Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. I’m not even sure why, either! I liked and enjoyed it just fine. Good animation, music/voices, characters... there’s lots to like and talk about here actually. It’s a solidly good series throughout.

But you already know that, have heard it countless times over the years from all the fanboys, so you don’t need me to tell you that. And maybe that’s just it? One more review of TTGL is kind of redundant at this point.

Instead, you can read THEM’s review here. I mostly agree with it, except for some of the Nia complaints (though I can understand why, I personally wasn't bothered by her character or voice actress).

I was pleased to find the adaptation of Watashi ga Motenai no wa dō Kangaetemo Omaera ga Warui! (No Matter How I Look at It, It’s You Guys’ Fault I’m Not Popular!) to be quite good. One of the admittedly few series I’ve seen after reading the manga, WataMote has been a kind of quickie schadenfreude to me for some time. Of course, I’m sure it is for most people as that is the point. The basic premise, if you aren’t familiar with it, is the cringe-worthy misadventures of an incredibly pathetic human being named Kuroki Tomoko. She is truly a sad sack of a person. Not depressed or mopey, per se, but just… well, pathetic doesn’t even begin to describe her.

Of course, the cringe factor is the entire point: her boneheaded attempts at getting popular, creepy plans at finding tons of friends, and all of the other dumb crap she sets out to do make for a train wreck you cannot look away from. Unless you find her aggravatingly annoying, which I can understand (sorry, honey, we’ll watch something nicer together later, okay?). A lot of folks seem to find her repulsive… and yeah, she is. She is infuriatingly dumb. But that’s the point, so you either enjoy watching her be bad at life or… you find it stupid. There’s very little gray area here.

But if you are into that, well… are you, sir, in for a treat. The anime follows most of the manga adventures fairly closely, with a few deviations and new tangents. There’s even plenty more manga material should they pursue a second season, since the manga is currently working through her second year of high school.

The transition into animation is very well done. Tomoko is creepy and grungy and her voice actress is amazing at pulling off the pathetic whisper and the angry spiteful loser and every cringe-worthy inner monologue in-between. Animation quality is fairly good, too, though it’ll rarely directly impress. There are few sweeping camera scenes that are effectively used and the show does a great job of highlighting her disgusting side versus the fluffy cuteness of her best friend from junior high.

Of special mention, though, is the intro. I was quite surprised by it and strangely attracted to it over several viewings (one of the later episodes even transitions into the intro so nicely it had me exclaiming “hell yes!” at the TV). It’s a kind of harsh Linkin Park type number, with a pleasing female vocalist over fast drums and a gritty male screamo backup. It fits the suppressed frustration vibe of Tomoko extremely well, I think.

“Fun” is about the best that can be said about the retardedly named Mondaiji-tachi ga Isekai Kara Kuru Sō Desu yo? (Problem Children are Coming from Another World, aren’t they?). It’s got just enough style to make it entertaining and the animation ain’t too shabby either. The characters waver between being genuinely interesting and intriguing to stupidly shallow (mostly this is the fault of dialog and scripting).

The show sort of jumps right in, does a little explaining, and then does some brief arcs before stopping suddenly. You get the feeling that this was merely a slice of a much larger pie and sure enough it’s an adaptation of a nine volume and counting light novel series. Three kids, each from slightly different time periods even, get “invited” to leave their world to participate in special games. Each of them have special powers and they eventually unite to overthrow tyrannical Demon Lords in this alternate universe.

Yeah, the premise is fairly silly but the show just runs with it and actually it works. There’s plenty of good animation, good style, and good execution to make the ridiculousness of it all just sort of work. It keeps a good enough pace (save for maybe the first episode), it has a decent mix of action and comedy, a set of decently varied and interesting characters, all with a decently inventive backdrop to set things in. The three main kids, too, have compelling powers, personalities, and pasts, which is a rare combination in action-comedies like this.

You definitely can tell there’s a lot more to the world and mythos but unfortunately most of it doesn’t have time to get divulged. Its biggest problem is the incredibly short length— a mere 10 episodes. Although when one considers its penchant for fights and endless “games”, more seasons may never be enough to finish it. It’s this factor alone that severely diminishes the lasting appeal of this series. For all of its strengths they are but momentary and then it just sort of sputters and dies.

Besides the brevity problems, my only other substantial complaint would be with the boy Izayoi. He’s too good and for no apparent reason or explanation other than he is apparently unbeatable. This has the expected effect of killing the tension in any of the serious encounters because who cares, wonderboy will easily best them soon enough (and he always does). Add to that he brings an intolerable arrogance everywhere he goes and you have a dude who’s a bit grating on the nerves. That and it’s difficult to sympathize with Black Rabbit much when she is constantly used as fanservice and comic relief.

As of this writing, you can watch Gurren Lagann, WataMote, and Mondaiji for free on Crunchyroll.

When I last spoke of TWGOK, I labeled it “the Bruce Springsteen of anime”. My reasoning was simple. In full disclosure I am not a Springsteen fan (not out of dislike merely ignorance), but to me Springsteen represents a kind of musical phenomenon that is easy to like because it does what it does so well. He's not that innovative, really, but damn if he isn't charming and fun and catchy and makes you feel good. TWGOK is that: it takes the harem genre and puts a nice spin on it without really deconstructing it or innovating otherwise… but it's so wonderfully executed it doesn't even matter.

The first two seasons of TWGOK are great and I even re-watched them entirely as lead-up to this long overdue continuation. The structure is solid despite being incredibly contrived. It’s awfully convenient that his conquers get amnesia afterwards, but it allows the show to move on and not get bogged down trying to juggle lots of characters. Even with this luxury, it finds ways to weave in the characters sometimes still. However, this does limit progress in that the end never seems to be in sight and the story ends up being mini-arcs around a girl to conquer with the show as a whole becoming a sort of buddy flick with Keima and Elsie. By the second season there are hints at internal politics in neo-Hell but none of it ever seems to impact the story too terribly much. Even so, the first and second seasons are consistently well done, with great pacing, characters, humor, animation, and plenty of polish. It’s a show that is good from start to finish and it easily finds a place in my top 10 series.

Season three is a mess, to be as harsh as possible. That isn’t to say it is bad, I still enjoyed it, but it is noticeably different in execution and construction. First is the most obvious one: a lot of time was skipped. Time that is covered in the manga, however, consisting of many new girls and events. In fact, if we look at the season to manga chapter relation it goes something like this:

• Season 1 – [1 – 16]
• Season 2 – [17 – 41]
• Season 3 – [114 – 189]

Yeah. Wow. Essentially, the first two seasons cover roughly 20 chapters each, each spread out over about 12 episodes leaving about 1.5 chapters per episode script. Not bad! Season 3 skips 73 chapters of material, or, going by the first two seasons’ precedent, three or four more entire seasons worth. Yikes. To top it off, this third season manages to fly through as much as was skipped, covering 75 chapters in only 12 episodes. Lots of condensing and cutting must have happened.

And you can tell. Episodes are densely packed with dialogue, new plot elements, and tons of new characters. It doesn’t help either that it quickly glosses over the huge amount that was skipped so coming from the end of the second season there are several new major characters all with established dynamics and relationships that we’re not privy to (unless you read the manga or possibly got your hands on the few OVAs put out in the intervening months). It is more than enough to leave you lost as a casual viewer.

Instead of the usual mini-arcs for a girl we have a lot more drama. Shit is going down and the balance between the new Hell and the old guard are coming to light, plus it introduces goddesses from Heaven and lots more intrigue and plot twists. It starts to get serious and it’s no longer about simply fulfilling a job-like contract of finding souls. Instead lives are at stake, the balance of forces are in flux, and Keima is juggling several conquests at once while also trying to keep previous conquests from figuring things out. Did I mention that convenient amnesia thing has worn off on some of the girls? Did I mention this season was a total mess?

But, despite all of these glaring issues, it is quite a thrilling ride. It manages to really break free of the shackles of its predecessors and get serious, dramatic, and downright tense at times. It lacks the consistency and the confidence of the past seasons but it manages to branch out and grow as a story and it benefits greatly from it, as it feels like finally things are starting to matter. More importantly, it feels like the hearts Keima is playing with are starting to matter… and not just to them.

Do you remember Chihiro? Yeah, her. The plain girl with the umbrella. That was one of the more subdued conquests from season two, wasn’t it? Well… she has a bit of a role in this third season, you could say. I won’t spoil anything but suffice it to say her growth as a character is a straight up smash of bittersweet feels. It is a wonderful progression and really speaks to the strengths of this third season despite the structural mess.

And then there is the ending. Our hero Keima has always been a lovable anti-hero. He’s calculating, manipulative, and arrogant beyond belief, all despite being nerdy, anti-social, and generally dismissive of real life. But he’s good at what he does, regardless of all of the complaining. But he’s only ever been doing it to prevent losing his head (remember the necklace he’s stuck with). But with the ending to this season we’re aware that he’s not able to completely disconnect himself and it’s a hell of a final scene.

And there will never be a fourth season. The statistical likelihood that we would ever see a third was dismal at best and it also explains why they chose to skip ahead and just get to the most popular arc of the manga because they figured this was their one-in-a-million chance anyway. It’s too bad, really. But capitalism is capitalism. There’s still the ongoing manga. I should really start reading it…

TWGOK Goddesses is a fantastic continuation but it’s great in a very different way from its predecessors. That said, it is a bumpy ride what with the speeding and the skipping, but if you can handle that by all means jump in. If you love Haqua, you’ll be pleased to know she’s basically Elsie’s replacement for the entire season. If, like me, you like Haqua okay and everything but Elsieisbest, well… it’s still a great season.

As of this writing, you can watch all three seasons of The World God Only Knowsfor free on Crunchyroll.

It’s been well over a decade since I was a fairly hardcore To Heart fan. I had the whole series, the omakes, all of the soundtracks and singles, and even the making of interviews and stuff. I still have both of the official TV series art books on my bookshelf right now. I even drew fanart — yes, honest to god-awful fanart. Have I mentioned yet this was over a decade ago and I was barely out of my teens?

I’m going to try something here. I’m going to try to do a retrospective review of something I saw a long time ago and, maybe more importantly, was very fond of. I’m going to try to be as objective as I can while still being honest with my obviously still-rose-colored view of it. Because in case you don’t already know, To Heart is rather infamous in the eroge/harem world, and its appeal is more than a little polarizing. More so especially its TV animation adaptation.

I still to this day have a huge soft spot for this series. While looking over some of the art in those books as well as on GIS, the nostalgia was drowning me. But, I’m older and wiser and I’ve seen way more shit since those days. I like to think that I can be a bit fairer about its many, many shortcomings. I’ve read highly critical reviews by folks I respect and I can’t say I totally disagree with them, either. But, just in case you’re oblivious or (more likely) a younger lad who can’t remember anything older than Naruto Clannad, let me explain the premise and characters before I go any further.

To Heart is based on a popular-for-its-time eroge that got several platform releases over the late nineties and early aughts. It spawned a bit of a following and was eventually re-released in erotic-less form which was the basis for the TV animation adaptation in 1999. (That’s right, fifteen damn years ago!) Honestly, I’m not really sure why it was ever that popular. It isn’t a remarkably good VN and it doesn’t really do anything all that special in terms of writing, plot, or characters. It’s a lot of clichés mixed with the standard high school tropes. But… it did have pretty good art. And the TV series is generally regarded even by detractors as having some great visuals for its time. Produced at the tail end of the “hand-drawn” era before everything became digital (but before they actually got good at doing all-digital animation somewhere in the last seven years), it sports a very “old-school” feel while still being very detailed.

The story is a fairly standard harem with Hiroyuki as our male lead and a gaggle of diverse girls at his school. Hiroyuki is… well, bored is probably the best description of him. He’s slow moving, not an excited talker, and usually complains of being tired. Not surprisingly, he doesn’t make for a particularly good lead but he’s also not a bad guy and even has a sort of calm warmth to his interactions with the various girls. It’s comforting and subtle but rarely engaging; for the most part he’s a barely likable limp lead.

Most episodes tend to heavily condense what I imagine is the much longer route in the game for a particular girl. The majority of the show then tends to be a “girl of the week” kind of affair and unfortunately mostly they become background characters after their time in the limelight is over. This is an extremely common problem with harem game adaptations but that doesn’t make it any less lame here. It’s especially unfortunate since some of the girls aren’t too bad but they get dumped by the plot just as things get started with them.

I can’t explain it. The show is incredibly episodic with subtle hints of continuity for a long while before it sort of combines things into a semi-sweet ending. It is meandering, churns through girls with alarming speed and regularity, and its pace is at best plodding, but… it has a calm sense of stability that is boring to most but still manages to be relaxing and warm. It is slow, it is slice of life, and it is subtle. The charm is entirely in its characters and languid pace and you either (mildly) enjoy that laidback ride or you get bored extremely quickly.

Because there’s no dramatic climax, no big romantic d’awwplosion, or anything resembling drama really. It’s slow, subtle, and semi-sweet at best, and boring, monotonous, and bland at worst. But it does have some great quality pre-digital hand-drawn filmed animation. And it’s worth mentioning that the soundtrack is one of the best orchestral sets out there for any show. Seriously, it combines live instrumental pieces (not MIDI), with cohesive melodies that form leitmotifs and such, set the mood perfectly, and are generally just very sweet and well done. It’s still to this day one of my favorite anime soundtracks, one that can be enjoyed by anyone. “Ever Green Days” and “Yoake” are the very definition of heart-warming.

For me, I guess the massive appeal at the time was mostly my youth and ignorance of better shows, but also my strong desire for the childhood friend romance and subtle relationship building. I also really liked the style and animation and it was impressive for the time, as I already mentioned. As a result of my limited access to other things and my longing for romance, I’ve probably seen the entirety of it at least a half-dozen times.

It is a show that over the years has been easily out-classed by much better romance anime, making it impossible to recommend. But I still to this day have a huge soft-spot for Akari, damnit.

To Heart is by today’s standards a rather old show but I’m sure you can watch it someplace if you search around for it.

I know there was a sequel of sorts later in the mid 2000s but… I vaguely recall watching part of the first episode and then immediately stopping. I can’t remember anything about it anymore but it was enough to make me not want to see the rest. So, there’s that.

Cheesecake shows like this are a guilty pleasure of mine. They are the empty calories of anime, and just like a Twinkie they’ll leave you feeling disappointed with them and yourself. For all of the fancy packaging and appearance it rarely satisfies like you hope and it just makes you feel a bit ashamed since, let’s face it, this isn’t your first pre-packaged pastry. You knew better, but you thought maybe this time it would be different.

Hailing once again from that annoying land of stupidly long-named adaptations of light novels, Ore no Nōnai Sentakushi ga, Gakuen Rabu Kome o Zenryoku de Jama Shiteiru (My Mental Choices are Completely Interfering with my School Romantic Comedy), or Noucome for short, arrived late last year to fill the gaping hole left by HenNeko earlier in the spring. If you know anything about that show then you already know what to expect in this one. Lots of impossibly cutesy girls, one guy, and more fanservice than you have tissues to deal with nosebleeds.

As far as fluff series go, though, Noucome manages to be pretty damn cute I gotta say. The animation isn’t inspired but it’s quite good quality and always makes sure that the girls look good (most of the time). Lots of color, vibrant backgrounds, and all that. Unfortunately, beyond the pretty faces there’s not a lot to recommend. Even HenNeko had better writing and funnier characters than this one, and it wasn’t exactly swimming with originality and talent. Oh, the writing is never bad but it’s only ever just adequate. It’s mildly amusing and safe and shows glimmers of potential here and there but won’t ever surprise. But it knows it isn’t anything deep and so focuses on the cute-factor overwhelmingly so. And well… I can’t exactly complain about that…

Our hero boy suffers from some weird-ass affliction where he will randomly hear and see two choices (far less commonly it’ll be three or more) and he must pick one or face massive mental anguish until he does. Usually, it is a command or something he must say. Until one day where it causes a girl to fall from the sky and live with him claiming she’s there to help cure him but she got amnesia (TEEHEE) when she fell so all she really does is mooch off him, eat all his food (SO SILLY), and wear skimpy sleep clothes around his place (PARENTS ARE CONVENIENTLY OUT OF TOWN OF COURSE). Yeah, it’s one of those shows.

Unsurprisingly, it becomes a harem and the main character seems like he’d be alright but they never really do much with him or his forced choices. Oh sure, they happen a lot, but mostly it is just for awkward/silly comedic effect. He’s depicted as being attractive and popular but everyone finds him unapproachable because he’s always doing weird stuff (aka those wacky choices). The concept of the “Reject Five” is also a neat idea, that being a set of five infamous kids at school who are attractive but have something wrong with them that makes them undateable, but again this is never really utilized well either. Worse, their anti-group, the actual top five most dateable kids in school, are a painfully uninteresting lot.

Noucome’s dialog is good enough often enough, and while it doesn’t quite have the comedy chops of, say, Oreshura, its characters are far less annoying. Predictable? Obviously. Face-palming in its blatant fanservicing? You bet. It never quite has the execution I kept hoping for but it was never bad either. And, admittedly, as much as I eye-rolled about the constant in-your-face fanservice, the girls and animation overall are delightfully adorable. It doesn’t require a lot of close attention or brain power and it’ll easily push all of your moe-buttons. Plus, some of the humor is pretty good. The running gag with Chocolat being a closet fujoshi is usually worth a few chuckles. And the sight-gag of the Flippant God’s image on his phone being the infamous botched Jesus fresco restoration tickled me to no end.

But, and I know I end up saying this a lot, the short length here hurts. Ten episodes is not much and the story that is there really needs more time to fully resolve itself. Plus, it would probably allow them to, maybe, just maybe, do a little more relationship building. As it is they have, wisely or not, opted to keep things extremely light on the romance (except where comedy permits) since there isn’t enough time to really get into a true love triangle. It still probably counts as a harem show, but… not in the Love Hina way of really trying to justify each girl’s attraction.

This is, overall, a short, easily digestible fluff piece that is easy on the eyes and mind. It never takes itself too seriously and as long as you just want some simple fun and stereotypically cute girls then you’ll be pleased as pie. But its lack of originality and short length prevents it from standing out in the heavily crowded school comedy genre.

As of this writing, you can watch Noucomefor free on Crunchyroll.

This time around I review three very different comedies.

Kotoura-san is bright, colorful, fun, and sweet. It’s all around a decent show, though I wish it had more confidence. It seems scared to lean more on its drama/romance side and instead relies on far too much run-of-the-mill silly antics you’ve seen a hundred times before. Oh well.

The basic gist is the eponymous main character Kotoura Haruka who was born with the ability to read minds. Nothing earth-shattering there but it does provide for a lot of easy humor and it does attempt to address the ol’ trust issues thing with this twist. But none of the characters are at all that interesting outside of the very likable Kotoura herself so it’s all kind of a waste. Especially given that the first episode is killer good… then it gives up on that for the most part. You see, it starts out explaining her growing up. How her family doesn’t catch on to her mind reading and how she doesn’t understand why everyone gets mad/frustrated when she blurts out secrets because until she is older she doesn’t realize that reading minds isn’t normal. It’s an incredibly powerful initial bit of drama that manages to be downright tense and emotionally brutal as things escalate over the years. It does a tremendously good job of setting her up as a sympathetic character with trust issues as a result and then…

Then the mind reading, family issues, and trust aspect mostly fade into the background as it focuses overwhelmingly on the same comedy high school antics you’ve seen countless times. Worse, it is mediocre comedy for the most part, and the plot disappears and it meanders for awhile until in the final episode when it tries to bring back a smidgen of the drama from the first but it can’t quite muster the same skill. Still, it’s very cute and when it's dramatic and sweet it can be really effective at it… it still probably isn’t as good as stuff like Toradora but it is far from bad.

Manabe is the goofy single-track-minded boy that initially is the only one who doesn’t find her mind reading disturbing when he finds out. Instead, he finds it amazingly cool and becomes a bit obsessed with her, eventually crushing on her like a fiend. Of course, she knows all of this since she can read his mind, and it is amusing and kinda cute I guess. It’s good that he’s such a faithful idiot too, as he brings stability both to the character dynamics and to the relationship, especially early on when Kotoura is still mostly in a moody funk. Their dynamic works well and is the strongest part of most scenes. (And the fact that he intentionally fantasizes about her knowing she can read his thoughts just to push her buttons is always fun.)

There is a slightly confusing though not that bad arc with a vengeful girl but after that it focuses on her joining a really dumb club with some really boring characters (okay, there’s like one or two good scenes where they strongly hint at their backgrounds together and it’s kinda nicely done but other than that not so much). Near the end is an unfortunately poorly executed arc with the gang trying to use Kotoura’s powers to track down a criminal. Meh. The series does so much better when they focus more on the relationship stuff.

Aside from the glimmers of goodness and the stand-out first episode it’s hard to recommend that strongly. As a result, Kotoura-san quickly becomes very forgettable. Music, animation, and voice work are perfectly adequate though notably a great job on Kotoura. While it never overtly impresses, the animation is still very clean, colorful, and well done. If only there was more interesting things for them to do… It’s all a shame since you can see the better show it could have been had they the balls not to just do another school rom-com. To echo my opening paragraph: oh well. But don’t let that stop you if it sounds a little cute and/or interesting, you’ll likely enjoy it well enough just as I did.

Teekyu continues the crazy in two follow-up seasons. It is more of the same, which is to say still funny with dialog going Mach 2. Everything I said in the first review still applies. Which is perfectly fine with me because I enjoyed it thoroughly and its brief stay makes it all the more enjoyable to breeze through. But, alas, it is after all just a silly gag reel essentially. Nothing too memorable even if it is fleeting fun. Even after 36 2-min episodes I can’t really remember any of their names or what really happened (I think it did have a few mini-arcs in there, didn’t it?) but I distinctly remember chuckling and smiling a lot so what the hell.

Recorder and Randsell is another one that I previously reviewed (at the time it was for the first two seasons) but this third season of the painfully dumb RecoRan was… different. Animation style was vastly changed in addition to the general feel (perhaps a new director?) so it made for a much better experience actually. It seems they lost some budget and thus rely more on barely redrawn photography shots for backgrounds and things but still… the overall feel now is more cozy, simple, and rough but it gives it a lot of nice character actually. The plots, too, while still full of a lot of dumb humor and too short for anything meaningful, seem to be slower and more subtle. It’s less about punctuating each short episode with another tired police-chase-on-the-suspected-pervert gag and more on exploring some new (and old) characters a bit more closely… in their head.

Is it good? Ehhh. It’s still mostly pointless and lacks any punch or purpose. But it isn’t nearly as dumb as before. Even so, it isn’t really worth your time… probably. But if they made a full length season like this, even a one cour? Perhaps. With some time to develop more and with decent writing it could be not bad. Alas, this is all we will likely see as I get the feeling this was the finale.

As of this writing, you can watch all of Kotoura-san, Teekyu, and RecoRan for free on Crunchyroll.

I hope you like images because I’ve got over a dozen this time spread out over three more reviews. (Dial-up warning!!)

Arata: The Legend is Fushigi Yuugi for boys. Oh wait, shit, it’s actually by the same author? I knew it! Enjoyable, typical, but cuts off before anything is really resolved. You can tell they were hoping it would sell well so they could do a few more [much needed] seasons. As it is, it is woefully incomplete but what little is there isn’t too bad.

Arata mirrors the plot of the author’s other work by having another school kid (this time it’s a boy!) get transported to a parallel world. Instead of ancient China it’s a… uh… non-specific fantasy world! Swords, magic, and warring factions! So basically the same just less racist perhaps. Admittedly, it is a much better attempt at an original world than her other series, as the hero-soul-infused swords and powers and so on are much more fun and action-y, if entirely predictable. There’s lots of good animation, colorful vistas, and well designed fantasy buildings, costumes, all that jazz. You’ll be positively shocked to hear that said boy is fated to be the wielder of the ultimate sword. I’ll wait while you pick your jaw up off of the floor.

Unfortunately, the author/writers/whatever chose to follow the annoying, pathetic, wimpy, and uninteresting Arata from Earth rather than the infinitely more likable, cool, fun, and interesting Arata from the fantasy world. Occasionally they’ll show what he’s up to and he’s instantly a better lead but maybe 5-10% of the show is spent observing him… too bad! And this is all despite that fantasy Arata, now on Earth, spends time mostly doing the “oh look how strange his behaviors are! Earth Arata’s friends and schoolmates are so confused!!!!1” cliché thing. He’s still awesome and I wish he were the lead.

Whiny Earth Arata is boring and wears a similarly drab yellow-brown school outfit like FY’s Miki (probably as a nod). At least he has a decent supporting cast to help him limp through the script. Kotoha is unfortunately the shallow love interest but damn if she isn’t a delightful cutie, just don’t hold your breath for her to develop a personality beyond “faithful puppy”. Most of the rest of the Evil Dudes end up being a mix of cliché badassery that is fun if mostly uninspired. Even so, the animation and sound work and so on are quite good and it’s an overall enjoyable ride but… well, like I said, you can tell they were hoping to pick up viewership to fund sequel seasons because just like FY the story is drawn out and would probably need a few dozen more episodes to really resolve things.

If it ever gets picked up for more I’ll likely put it on the queue to continue it but I highly doubt it’ll get the chance. Instead, they’ll keep churning out Naruto shit-pudding seasons. (I guess at least Bleach finally ended.)

Kanamemo has an all-star cast that can’t save it from mediocrity. Which is a real shame, too, because it can be kinda cute at times. It’s subtle, that’s for sure. You either like its simplistic mixture of slice-of-comedy and light fanservice/yuri, or you will either be bored, annoyed, or both. The story (what little there is) follows this young girl Kana after losing her parents and then finally last remaining relative and so is a bit lost in life and without a place to stay. She takes up a live-in job at a newspaper delivery place and it’s mostly then just following her getting acquainted with the weirdos that work and live there already. I mean, they have to be pretty weird themselves to openly take in an underage girl off the streets, right?

If that sounds almost like a bittersweet kind of darkly slice-of-life premise, well that’s because it is. But that’s it. The premise is slightly dark but the show is far more concerned with weak comedy and slice-of-life fripperies with characters that aren’t the least bit original or interesting all dusted with a nice powder coat of yuri. True, the dark humor seems to stick around sometimes as the show likes not making life easy for poor Kana but it’s just not my bag, baby. I don’t dig it. And yet, I watched the whole damn thing hoping it would get better. It was never outright bad but always feeble and always meh, especially when compared to better comedy-yuri blends like YuruYuri. Worse, glancing over the manga source material it seems a lot of the rosy artistic character was washed away in the translation to anime as they’ve opted for an incredibly generic style in which nobody is all that cute/appealing like they should be.

Well, maybe all except for the pink-haired side character Mika, voiced by the expert-at-one-role actress Kugimiya Rie. Here she’s playing a more subdued tsundere (well, subdued for her) probably mostly because she’s not being a bitch to some boy this time around. She’s really the best character by far and steals all the scenes but is barely a side character. And even then it’s an incredibly cliché stuck-up prideful rich-girl-turned-poor-but-is-ashamed character.

The cast is strong, though, did I mention that? Especially the ending song being heavy-lifted by the great Horie Yui. You’ve even got heavy hitters like Kitamura Eri and the always delightful Endō Aya. But, even so, I found the main character Kana’s voice grating. Her voice actress, Toyosaki Aki (you chumps probably know her best as Yui from K-On!) is certainly skilled in plenty of other roles but here she’s having to do too much falsetto to appear much younger (playing a thirteen year-old after all) and it just made my ears bleed after awhile.

But despite all the VA strength everyone is stuck with pretty bland characters to play and an even blander script. We get a seemingly endless onslaught of older girl Haruka is a lesbo-perv jokes, Saki is a precocious kid-boss isn’t that ironic, Hinata is boyish and too concerned with money, Yuuki and Yume as the token girl couple, and Kana is… well, Kana is the biggest problem here. She’s just a boring as hell character. She’s plain looking, has barely anything resembling an engaging personality beyond timid and clumsy but that humor well dries up fast. Mostly she is just dull and lacks charisma and yet she’s on the screen so much. Did I already mention that her voice is also super annoying? The tsundere Mika would have been a million times better as a lead and it’s painfully obvious every time she’s involved in an episode and we get glimpses at how much more interesting of a character she is. Or, I guess, could be.

I dunno, I feel like I’m ragging on it a lot but it kinda deserves it. Should have, could have been a lot better. Instead, it’s a lukewarm slice of life comedy with adequate animation and so on but with the genetics of a much better athlete.

Morita-san wa Mukuchi (lit. Morita is Reticent) really is quiet and it turns out that doesn’t make for a particularly interesting lead. Oh, it’s a slightly cute and mildly amusing little series of three-minute episodes. But then it is over and… yeah. Well. That’s that. Kinda nice but dreadfully forgettable. I appreciated the Poyopoyo references, though (guessing it’s done by the same animation studio). On the bright side, the animation is, while simplistic and a bit cheap, adequate and colorful.

This is yet another case where the script and characters fail them as Morita-san also has some fairly veteran skilled actresses involved but it’s just not enough. The yonkoma roots are incredibly apparent, too, which wouldn’t be so bad if the comedy weren’t so tepid. It’s got a few decent chuckles but eh. Fortunately, the twenty-six episodes go by quickly and it remains a weakly entertaining diversion while it lasts but no more. I have to imagine that stations are funding these low-budget little adaptations to fill time or something. I’m sure niche fans of the various works that get picked up are of mixed feelings but the rest of us just wonder what the point was.

As of this writing, you can watch Arata: The Legend, Kanamemo, and Morita-san wa Mukuchi for free on Crunchyroll.

It’s difficult to place this show. On the surface it is an episodic wacky slice-of-life comedy. Only it eschews most of the cliché settings in favor of taking place under a bridge and starring a dozen or so weirdos. And they really are weirdos in the strongest sense. These aren’t your typical characters who are portrayed as “wild and zany” but still lead relatively normal lives going to school/work and so on. No, these people live under a bridge so you know already there is something wrong with them as they willfully choose not to participate in normal society. And it is a deliberate choice because none of them seem to be poor hobos either. Well, probably.

But let’s back up for a minute. Our main guy Kou is introduced to us as probably what would normally be a bit of a weirdo in any other series. He’s the heir to a wealthy conglomerate business and has been raised with extensive schooling and discipline as well as a tradition of never taking favors from anyone. It’s even written on his tie. Yeah. As a result, he comes off as a bit of a rich boy with an inflated ego because he’s always been successful at everything. He takes the “don’t be indebted to anyone” mantra very seriously.

After losing his pants to some hoodlums and falling off a bridge while attempting to retrieve them, he is saved from the Arakawa River by a girl named Nino. He hastens to ask her to make any request of him she wants so that he may clear the immense life debt he now owes her. She initially resists, not really thinking much of it, but eventually nonchalantly requests they become lovers. This comes as a bit of a shock to Kou but he is determined to repay the debt so he agrees. Thus begins his life under said bridge.

And it only gets weirder. It turns out a lot of people live down there, not just Nino, and each one is weirder than the last. They seem to have a sort of communal structure too, even with an appointed “chief”, who by the way wears a kappa outfit that is clearly plastic (complete with a zipper on the back) but insists he’s actually a several hundred year old kappa. There’s a cross-dressing nun who seems to be a former military nut and so is constantly brandishing MP5s, pistols, grenades, as well as an unhealthy paranoia about bombs and enemies in the trees. There’s a guy with a star for a head who plays guitar and sings songs all day and is really bad at both. There are two boys who wear metal helmets because they claim it protects them from the signals of the laboratory that is trying to abduct them because they have psychic powers only the helmet blocks their powers making them invisible to the scientists’ detection but also unable to demonstrate said powers. And lots more besides them.

This is all simultaneously the greatest strength and weakness of Arakawa UTB. It manages to be extremely good at introducing quite a few bizarre characters that never cease to elicit WTFs. But that’s all it seems to want to do. It’s a lot of episodic comedy, mostly as Kou (now renamed Recruit by the kappa chief guy) is introduced to these weirdos and tries to integrate into their make-shift society under the bridge. Kou is our straight man in this sea of insanity and it’s a fun ride to be sure. But it starts to get almost tiring, like it never gets beyond the introductions phase despite being a relatively short 1-cour season.

The humor is there, the fun is there, and it’s an enjoyable ride, but I kept wanting something else. There are flashes of progress between our newly joined couple Kou and Nino but it never really gets anywhere despite them claiming to be a couple. There is a brief arc that halts (somewhat) the extremely episodic nature for a bit when it looks like they might all get evicted from the area but it resolves itself soon enough without much fanfare.

Fortunately, a lot the kinks begin to smooth out during the second season, titled Arakawa Under The Bridge x Bridge. Kou no longer feels like an outsider and is practically too comfortable with the bunch. More importantly, the introductions are long over as there aren’t but maybe one or two new characters, which gives the show time to finally sit back and just cruise with its now well established weirdos. The humor improves as it no longer feels the need to one-up itself on the wacky scale and instead relies on its already wacky characters to provide the zany.

Our star couple even start to finally kind of start to really understand each other in the second season. They are perfect opposites, with Kou constantly worrying about his performance, appearance, and debts to others, and Nino caring perhaps too little about herself, choosing instead to find meaning in the “family” she’s come to live with under the bridge. It manages to be a nicely sweet b-story to the hijinks in the foreground. Sadly, it never grows beyond poetic hints and such, with the series ending before anything really resolves, romantic or plot-wise, despite the season dropping lots of threads.

Animation quality is fairly good, it’s never super high quality but the SHAFT art-sense is there, with good use of color, movement, cuts, and scene transitions. Voice actors all do just fine, helped along due to there being quite a few big names in there (the much loved Sakamoto Maaya is Nino, for instance). Music also tends to be well-used and appropriate. Most of all though is veteran SHAFT director Shinbo’s easily recognizable style. if you’ve seen any of the Monogatari incarnations, for instance, you’ll probably notice the similarities right off the bat like I did. It’s all squarely in the “good” sector for sure.

Despite how perfectly adequate everything is the whole is still just… I dunno. I can’t get all that worked up about it. The second season is a noticeable improvement if you stick around long enough, but even so I can’t really heartily recommend it. It’s a lot of wacky fun that is well directed for sure, but it seems to hold itself back to episodic bouts and so it kind of never amounts to anything long-term. But if it sounds interesting check it out, most likely you will at least laugh and mildly enjoy it like I did. And damn if the openings aren’t just weird as hell (though I suppose the crab one still tops the list of incongruous). Oh, and did I mention the next episode previews typically entail some cringe-worthy live-action kappa suit guy?

As of this writing, you can watch the first six episodes of Arakawa Under The Bridgefor free on Crunchyroll. Subscribers get all of both seasons.

Comedy’s the name of the game today, boys and girls, in yet another triple batch of mini-reviews.

Servant x Service is basically Working!! if it was set in a government welfare office instead of a family restaurant. In fact, it’s not really surprising there are a lot of obvious similarities in style, humor, and so on, because both are based on manga by the same author. I was quite positive in my review of Working!! so it should come as little surprise that the author’s same formula basically works just as well here. But I can’t help drawing the comparisons because the ever present specter of the “spiritual predecessor” looms over SxS at every turn for me. So while it ends up being an enjoyable (if short) series I cannot help but feel like they should have just done a third season of Working!! instead. Because for all of the strengths and pluses of SxS, all of them end up being the same strengths of Working!! except not quite as good.

SxS follows roughly three new hires as they join a social welfare office of the government which ends up being a weirder place than they thought possible. Hasebe is a compulsive slacker, Miyoshi is a timid worrywart with an amusingly sharp perception (and, unintentionally, tongue!), and the last is the clear standout who we’ll just call Lucy. In fact, as we quickly learn, the primary motivator for Lucy joining was to get revenge on the government employee who approved her birth certificate so many years ago, leaving her with a baker’s dozen first names because her parents couldn’t decide on one. As a result, her nametag subsequently reads “Lucy (abbreviated)”.

The weakest area here is definitely in the characters. Make no mistake, Lucy is definitely a standout and a huge reason the show is still solidly good as she is instantly likable and expressive all while being fantastically voiced and animated. It also doesn’t hurt that we’re following twenty-somethings post-college or so in the workplace instead of yet another high school setting. There are a handful of others besides and none of them are particularly bad, but the similarly sized cast of Working!! just seems to develop much better with stronger dynamics, broader and more interesting personalities, and so on.

If I seem awfully critical it’s merely because I saw its better cousin of a show first and adored it. SxS is fun, it’s got good comedy, and it has a surprisingly effective romance sub-plot that really kicks into gear in the last third or so. I kinda feel guilty because I really don’t have anything bad to say about it specifically only that it wasn’t quite as good as another similar show, which I admit seems a bit unfair of me. So if you like good comedies, especially ones a bit fresher in setting and such, with a splash of good romance (eventually), then look no further. Despite my grumblings it’s no surprise to me this show got an overwhelmingly positive reception (anecdotally, of course; just me skimming through the comments on CR at the end of episodes).

GA Geijutsuka Art Design Class works despite itself at every turn and was a delightful little series overall. Its animation is adequate at best, it’s a very simplistic slice-of-life show full of standard archetype characters, and it’s an adaptation of a yonkoma. But it manages to find ways to do fun artistic things despite the mediocre budget, weave together some fun and amusing character dynamics, and blend its erratic four-panel narrative roots into full episodes held together by cohesive themes and events. No small task, that’s for sure, and I applaud it for making such a tasty dish despite starting with suspect ingredients.

It follows the antics of five girls at an art-focused high school as they learn about art and things. It sounds way too simplistic but the direction and writing makes it work. The girls, while nothing original, work well together and the writing is unoriginal but well executed. They are a fun group to follow around for twenty-ish minutes. Additionally, each episode tends to focus on different art concepts and manages to fit bits of actual real art education of the topics into the narrative without feeling like a lecture. (I went to college with a bunch of art majors so a lot of it wasn’t new to me but it meant I recognized they were actually fitting in real lessons.) The entire package ends up being pleasantly amusing with a solid cast and even a bit of learning along the way.

The charm is certainly on the characters, the mild silliness, back-and-forth dialog, and daily life. It never aspires to drama or intrigue or anything resembling excitement, so look to this one for something easy to kick back to during your lunch break (like I did).

Dai Mahō-Tōge (released here as Magical Witch Punie-chan) is a show that feels like it almost should have been released a decade before it was. A mid-2000s era title, it has the wacky parody-filled nonsense of a lot of silly things I remember seeing so long ago. It does have a bit more modern polish style-wise, which is the primary indication it’s not actually from the nineties after all.

The story is… well. There’s only four OVAs (each split into two 12-minute-ish episodes) and so not much time to get a full story going. It does a fair bit of world-building but gets distracted constantly with random comedy vignettes or other amusing tangents. By the end, it doesn’t feel like an end so much as a “Well, hope you had fun, our time’s up folks!”

Okay, but seriously, it stars Punie, a girl from a magical kingdom, as she visits earth. She does the typically sugary Sailor Moon-esque transformation only spouting lines like “Kill Them All” in a cutesy voice as she dances around burning buildings. She has the power to control vegetables and excels at wrestling submission moves. There’s the rival tough girl and a timid girl playing the straight-man what-have-I-got-myself-into role and even a cutesy magical girl mascot pet with a split personality trying to kill its master. I’m only scratching the surface here, though. Did I mention the Initial D parody complete with authentic primitive CG? I swear this was made in the mid-2000s, though, honest!

In the end, it’s a fun and bizarre enough ride but the disjointed nature makes it a bumpy one. Ultimately forgettable? Yeah, pretty much, except for one scene that will forever be on my favorites list…

As of this writing, you can watch Servant x Service and GA Geijutsuka Art Design Class for free on Crunchyroll. For Dai Mahō-Tōge, well… you’re on your own.

All three of these probably warrant longer reviews but… I procrastinated so long I’ve forgotten too much to say more. I’m ashamed to say it’s been since sometime last year when I finished watching these.

Shin Sekai Yori (translated as From the New World) is nothing short of a fantastic piece of science fiction anime. While it can be a bit slow here and there I didn’t much care because it spent its twenty-five episodes building up a fair number of characters and a world to put them in. And boy, what a world. One of its strengths (and damn near a requirement if you’re setting out to do sci-fi) is its richly realized world, history, races, and so much more. It gives just enough exposition at the right times to keep you going but without explaining too much too soon, letting instead the plot hint or reveal the rest. It even does all this while skipping ahead in time at least two major times, covering the main cast at the ages of roughly twelve, fourteen, and later their mid twenties.

Don’t let the sci-fi tag dissuade you: this isn’t a space opera like Mobile Suit Gundam or a cyberpunk thriller like Ghost in the Shell. While those are fine and laudable series/genres themselves, I know they aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. SSY is rich, thought-provoking, dramatic, with splashes of cleverness and intrigue. It is simultaneously a character-driven and story-driven plot, focusing on a core group of friends and their relationships but at the same time placing them in a world that is far bigger in scope than them with political maneuvering, ethical quandaries, and so much more. And, like a good sci-fi story, it’s all used to explore concepts and ideas that are very much present today, like slavery, racism, sexuality, and individuality.

SSY is set in an alternate timeline where around what would be our present day telekinesis was discovered violently. The story primarily takes place about a millennium later, where the course of history has resulted in humanity much reduced in number after those with the telekinetic powers eventually revolted over their powerless brethren, easily taking control of all major governments and countries. Now far beyond that, society is incredibly advanced and peaceful yet tightly controlled and most are oblivious to what really happened in the past. The series does a great job of making it all feel foreign and futuristic without the usual clichés, forcing you to pick up on some of their now different customs and such.

All of this, however, is merely the backdrop setting to six childhood friends now entering school to begin to learn to control their mental power and the events that get them involved way over their heads in truths long hidden and forgotten. There’s a lot of character dynamics, relationships, and drama as their friendship and love is tested both by growing up but also by the larger story happening around and to them.

The animation quality isn’t ever bad but you can tell they did not get a great budget to work with, however it is effective and well used, with great directing and so on to make up for the lack of polish. The voice actors all do a splendid job and the background music is often above average. Combine all this with the very well realized story and dialog and you’ve got yourself a sleeper hit for sure. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Gen'ei o Kakeru Taiyō (translated as Day Break Illusion) feels like a good mix of Itsuka Tenma no Kuro Usagi and Puella Magi Madoka Magica. In fact, it’s a bit unfortunate that the last analogy with Madoka is so obvious, as most folks seem quick to try to compare the two. And true, both are hyper-stylized magical girl series with a bit of a grittier twist, but despite this I never felt like DBI was truly trying to compete with Madoka. And let’s not kid ourselves, it would be folly anyway; Madoka had a big budget, big execution, and created an even bigger fanbase. It’s foolish to challenge a juggernaut.

DBI feels like a solidly good magical girl show without a lot of sugary trappings typical of the genre in the past. Sure, like gritty Marvel/DC reboots, “darkening” historically sparkly genres seems to be a trend these days, but if it’s well done I don’t know if I can really knock it for being stylistically fashionable. It benefits from having a more than adequate animation budget, some damn fine character designs and effects, as well as having an original enough setting and story to tell. The characters are the same tropes you’ve seen a thousand times (the bubbly naïve lead, the cool one, the gentle one, the moefang, etc.) but they look good and stand out visually and are acted well enough.

If it falls flat anywhere it is, sadly, in the length. A short 1-cour is woefully inadequate to resolve too terribly much and the whole thing feels a bit rushed as a result of introducing far too many ideas and characters than it has time to properly develop. Which is a shame because, again, it has some good ideas and characters in there, all delivered in a delightfully stylized package that I found quite appealing. I at least have to applaud it for not having much in the way of filler, choosing to wisely stick to its guns and tell a complete (if, again, a bit rushed) story arc.

Overall it is colorful, cool, and has some of the most refreshing magical girl character designs I’ve seen in a long while. But it isn’t trying to deconstruct the genre like Madoka nor is it attempting to capture every genre at once like Dark Rabbit. That is to say it doesn’t quite shoot for the moon but it does keep itself grounded and competent.

Love Lab turned out to be far better than I anticipated as well as not being the YuruYuri-esque show I was expecting. In fact, it’s decidedly not a yuri show at all, though you’d be hard pressed not to be absolutely certain it is at the three minute mark of the first episode. You’ll just have to trust me that it isn’t! Instead, it is a solidly good comedy series that, while set in high school, spends most of its air time not actually in typical classroom stuff (much like, say, GJ-bu). In fact, as far as comedies go it's got humor in spades, proving to be witty and well-timed, with all around good pacing and direction.

The story involves Riko, nicknamed “Wild Kid”, a popular tomboy who ends up selling herself as a bit of a romance expert. She gets involved with the well-loved but secretly-weird princess of the school, Maki, who is engaging in some experiments of which the show is so named. Through the course of the show, Riko ends up becoming great friends with the small club of girls all endeavoring to learn the ways of love and romance from Riko and as a result she ends up digging herself deeper and deeper into the lie the more she cherishes their friendship and thus the more afraid she becomes of finally coming clean.

The series benefits from great banter and dialog, likable characters, and the good sense to make some welcome and downright realistic choices such as having the nerdiest and least attractive yet most level-headed girl of the bunch be the only one with an actual boyfriend. I particularly enjoyed when it started toying around with adding some male characters to the mix to up the romance ante, but as it is merely a 1-cour show it never really has the time to enter true rom-com territory.

All of this is delivered in a perfectly adequate package, with solid yet simple animation that makes up for its lack of pizazz with fluidity and not cutting many corners. Voice acting is good, music is fine and even occasionally pretty good, and the whole thing feels like it lasts just long enough to get a whole story arc told to satisfying completion. And is it sad that I have to point out that it manages to do all of this with nary a bit of fanservice, sexual innuendo, or other cheese? Sure, it’s nothing ground-breaking, but it’s definitely worth your time if you like cute character comedies.

As of this writing, you can watch Shin Sekai Yori, Day Break Illusion, and Love Lab for free on Crunchyroll.

I’m only a year late to the party, especially considering my undeniably positive review of the TV-aired portion, but the additionally adapted LN of Kokoro Connect released in OVA form is definitely cause to say “More please!” If there was ever an indication that a second season is warranted it’s this. I realize, of course, that doesn’t make it financially viable but… well… I’m a fan not a financier.

This four episode continuation adapts another arc of the story, this time dealing with an emotional transference phenomenon, aka random unintentional telepathy. The major plot point hinges upon Iori completely breaking under this new pressure and turning into an apathetic wise-cracking jerk-off. This ends up being the second weakest part of the arc, as a callous Iori is both an uninteresting and annoying Iori, even though it makes sense and fits her character’s development thus far. But that’s another problem: of course Iori would be unable to deal with true feelings being made known to the other five randomly, and of course at the worst possible times. It’s not like that facet of her personality wasn’t made painfully clear to us in the first (if not second) arc of the TV series. But okay, unsurprising but logical I can’t exactly fault them for. Yet it spends so much airtime showing the other four cast being baffled at her sudden 180.

But I said it was the second weakest aspect: really, it is that this is the entire antagonism of the arc outside of a really stupid first half of the fourth episode. You see, we’re basically just waiting three episodes while Iori acts like a dick and everyone just keeps being appalled by it until the eventual showdown and things resolve in the fourth episode. There’s very little development outside of that, to be honest.

Although, the little that does happen outside of Iori being a bitch is quite satisfying. If there was ever any doubt that Sawashiro Miyuki was an absolutely fantastic voice actress and that, correspondingly, her character Inaba was hands down the most interesting of the five main characters on Kokoro Connect this OVA arc seals the deal. (You’ll note I said just as much when reviewing the TV series as well.) To be clear: of the non-Iori drama bits, Inaba proves to be delightful and endearing. I don’t want to spoil anything but damn, she already was my favorite of the bunch and this extra story just sends her way above that even.

Not to say the rest are slouches: granted, some of the cast just don’t really manage to get their time in the limelight and so don’t stand out so much (this would be, unfortunately, Aoki and to a slightly lesser extent Kiriyama). There’s a lot of excellent drama and well written dialog, which is what made me praise the original televised series so much. It’s still just as spot-on but, admittedly, the phenomenon and the tension this time around are a bit secondary and forced, respectively. Most of the focus isn’t on the far more interesting telepathy bit and what is the focus is a much too dumb “Iori is being difficult because... stuff” angle.

Look, I get that her story is she feels compelled to be the person that others expect. As I said before, we learned that early in the first season after all. I also agree that it is entirely believable that she would just snap and not want to bother anymore. It’s believable, but that doesn’t make it an entertaining point. Unfortunately, Iori just comes off as a cunt the whole time who won’t fucking stop being a difficult ass until she finally has an “epiphany” conveniently in the fourth episode and just decides to get over herself. It’s like we’re all waiting around for her to get out of a bad mood. Which is a disservice to the serious point about getting sick of pretending to be what everyone expects all the time. That’s a legitimate and sympathetic point but the execution is just… eh.

Despite that major complaint, I still enjoyed the hell out of re-joining my beloved five friends and getting another [short] ride on the drama-coaster. If anything, it reminded me again why I enjoyed the TV series so much. It’s too bad then that this ends up being one of the weaker arcs (even compared to the weak third and last arc of the TV series with the age regression bit). This is despite having some truly delightful performances and the development of Inaba.

Granted, even as the weakest of the four animated arcs so far, Kokoro Connect: Michi Random is still probably a lot better and more satisfying than a lot of the fluff I’ve seen lately.

Unfortunately, this additional arc was a home release only so Crunchyroll doesn’t include it with the TV broadcasted episodes. But you seem like the resourceful type so I’m sure you’ll have no trouble finding it.

The synopsis of this movie is woefully inadequate. No, really, go read it. It’s bland sounding other than the eating paper thing. Normal high school student joins literature club. May have had issues in past resulting in not wanting to write. You’ll have to just trust me that this is also a fairly misleading account as this leaves out psychotic ex-girlfriend that makes up the majority of the drama and running time.

So yeah, the milquetoast lead Inoue gets roped into joining the lit club despite vowing to “never write again!” Considering the title of the movie, Bungaku Shoujo, basically translates to Literature Girl, you can probably guess he’s going to change his mind on this due to the eponymous girl. She is, unsurprisingly, the sole other member of the club: Touko, a girl a year older than him whom you’ll be hard pressed not to immediately peg as his new love interest since they pair so well. But, well, you’d only be sort of right. You see, even though the first half hour of this over hour-and-a-half adventure seems to suggest a romantic drama, it’s not… no, it’s more of a drama. With weird surreal stuff. And a crazy girl. And then a lot of confusing as hell stuff.

I wanted to like this movie a lot more (esp. after the spoilers that was JadeCharm’s AMV that originally clued me into this movie even existing). Dialogue is a huge mix of confusing and cliché and the direction and animation is rather by-the-numbers. It seems like it wants so badly to be heartfelt and innocent and pure and a bit quirky fun but it’s not great at much of that to be honest. Oh, and remember that whole paper eating thing? Yeah, it’s never really explained and instead comes off as just sort of there for quirkiness’ sake. I get the feeling it probably had a lot more meaning and explanation in the source material.

I was damn near sure Touko was not real and only existed in Inoue’s mind like a literature muse or something. She never really interacted in the movie with anyone else for most of the running time, like some sort of Sixth Sense thing. It isn’t until the planetarium scene near the end… but then she’s suddenly not there and the prior love confession seems… to have… not happened actually? What? I was so sure she was just in his mind. And the train scene. And so much else… what… And I love Hirano Aya’s performances, so it’s too bad her ex-girlfriend character here was annoying and confusing (yes, again). The two leads are void of much personality. Lead boy Inoue is limp and pathetic and even gets called out on being no better than acting like a supplicant dog. Everything is so disjointed, who knows what anyone’s motivations are, and since none of it manages to coalesce into anything concrete the “big payoff” third act stuff just falls flat and comes off as awkward, embarrassing, and confusing. Which is made all the worse by the fact that I was trying so hard to figure out if there was a twist or catch and I thought I almost had it figured out (her being not real) and in the end it was nothing of the sort, leaving me feeling cheated and misled.

The entire movie plays out like a visual novel on auto-pilot but misleads you at every. step. of the way about which girl’s path we’re on. You’ll be sure this is about how Inoue and Touko are gonna hitch up over their shared passion for literature if only he could get over his old vow of non-writing. But you’d be wrong. Then you’ll be sure he’s gonna fall for the adorkable Nanase and they do that New Year’s thing and it’s kinda cute but cliché but you can dig it since it sure beats the alternatives so far. But you’d be wrong because here she is slapping a bitch up and then there’s this wheelchair girl. So then you’ll be sure, oh, it’s how he’s going to either get back together or at least resolve things with this past flame, Miu, and whoa she’s hospitalized so let’s all board the sympathy train! But you’d be wrong. Then things get all weird, then they get weirdly mysterious, and then they get straight up hallucinogenic, and then it’s… sigh… running after a train like in every damn romance story ever.And then it’s over? With what looks to be a typical cop-out epilogue scene but even then I’m not sure. And you’ll wonder what just happened, who were you supposed to be rooting for, did anyone actually get together, or did they just take you for a rollercoaster ride that was all uphills and straights but somehow, defying physics, arrived back at the gate without any exciting descents.

Oh well. It’s not utter shit but it’s just plain confusing, may or may not have a more interesting idea behind it (but damn if I can find any confirmation/explanation anywhere*), and does a really piss-poor job on executing the tearjerker scenes. I didn’t care much for it as a result. Shame. It looked like it would be a lot better. Seriously, though, if you want sappy romance that focuses on the seemingly mundane go watch Shinkai Makoto’s stuff, like 5 Centimeters per Second. It’s infinitely better written, way better animated, and manages to nail all of the high notes Bungaku Shoujo wanted to hit.

As of this writing, I’m not aware of any US release (other than the light novels it’s based on) so you’re on your own.

* On further reading, in the original light novels Touko is supposed to be some kind of ghost, so… yeah. I guess she’s pretty popular, too. While this does help explain things none of that really made it into the movie. Boo.