We've now got a genius detective, an immortal dragon deity and an anime about fishing even. What more could you ask for?

Greetings from the other side of the internet! I have returned with yet another ranking, for my audience to read.

This time around I've only picked 5 shows to watch, mainly because this season's selection was quite lackluster. Well, to be fair, they were 6 shows but sadly the sixth show on this ranking got delayed through the middle of its airing until February.

Since I have a personal rule not to talk about a TV series until its current season is fully aired and I finished watching it, I will be omitting that particular one from this list.

And, thus, we have only 5 shows here.

Also, the images that I will be using in this blog post will be more generic than usual, a trend that will continue into the future for all future postings on here. This is because I got a DMCA takedown request on this blog because of one of my images and, as such, I will be going out of my way to use images from either the public domain, or images hosted on other websites than my own.

So yeah, that's why this has happened.

Finally, as a reminder, all of these TV shows are available on Crunchyroll, if you have a premium subscription there. But, since this stuff is subject to regional licensing, I have to mention that these shows were available from Romania. Depending on where you are, some of them may not be available to you.

Anyways, without any further ado, let's get the ball running:

1. Ron Kamonohashi's Forbidden Deductions (Season 2)

It's finally here.

This will cover my thoughts for the second season of this TV series. I recommend you read my thoughts on the first season before you go ahead. You can find them here.

As I previously said in my review for season 1, I really wished that this new season will cover the origin of Ron's curse and how he ended up where he was.

And, thankfully, this new season decided to bless me with what I've asked for.

Well, I'm sure the plot for season 2 was already planned for well in advance of my review, so I take no credit for it, obviously, but still, I'm happy that things panned out the way that they did.

So, in this new season, we finally find out more about Ron's past, who his family is, what his connections are with a house of criminal masterminds that orchestrated a lot of the crimes that they investigated and, interestingly, we also learn about Ron's father figure in this one.

It's pretty much all I wanted out of this show and even more.

Yes, there will be some filler episodes that focus on menial murders that have very little relevance to the bigger plot; they are what I call “filler episodes”.

But, for the most part, this season was what I hoped the first season would be like.

The fact that the first season was composed almost entirely of what I would call “filler episodes” was very disheartening. It made me reluctant to recommend the show, mainly because it had a lot of inconsequential padding that was only there to gather an initial audience so that the staff could actually make season 2 interesting.

It took us a while to get there but, finally, here we are.

And in this one, we get even more interesting modus operandi explored for entirely new criminals, stuff that I find very nice to explore.

We get a surfer that ended up drowned at the beach, a mysterious kidnapper that kidnaps very talented people to make works of art for him and then releases them and, of course, we get into the details of Ron's past and why he ended up as the genius that he is.

The show seriously suffers from cliches, though, and just as before, Ron is still just as eccentric and weird, always making me roll my eyes whenever I see him appear on screen.

But, to make matters a bit better, we also learn why he is so good at deducing what other criminals do this season, as well as learn that the House of M is responsible for his curse.

And, finally, this season, Isshiki ends up being slightly useful towards the end (emphasis on the world slightly).

Either way, this was a good watch.

I genuinely enjoyed this new season and, if you watched the first season and thought it had an interesting premise but lacked in execution, I feel like this season may just be what you want to see.

This is a definite improvement over everything that was shown a year prior and I, personally, am definitely looking forward to a new season. Whether a new season of this will appear or not remains to be seen since, unlike last time, it was not confirmed.

2. Sengoku Youko (Season 2 part 2)

These will be my thoughts for the second part of the second season of this show (yeah, this has been a very long journey, looking back at it). If you wish to read my thoughts on season 1, you can find them here and if you also wish to read my thoughts for the first part of this second season, you can read them here.

I think this was the longest running series that I've written about, in this blog.

Granted, I consumed anime that were far longer than this one, since I was a fan of Naruto since I can remember (although I never finished watching Shippuden the way I originally planned to do), but I never covered the ones that I watched in this blog before.

As I said in my review for season 1, I thought that this anime was playing the long game since, even though I admit that it had good ideas and a very interesting world that it had built for itself in the first season, I thought it was going too slow and that it lacked a proper sense of identity for itself.

Well, I'm glad to say that, as of the second season, most of these issues have been resolved, and I'm thankful that I decided to keep watching this.

It was a long journey, but we got here.

The story continues with Senya's journey in trying to defeat the Void People who have only been causing him trouble, as well as Tama's journey in trying to revert Jinka back to his normal self again.

I cannot go into more details when it comes to this show, since there's really a huge amount of stuff that we have to talk about and, frankly, I just don't want to cover it, given how much story there is in this show.

Season 1 started as this simple journey of Tama's, Jinka's and Shinsuke's who wanted to make the world a better place (and for Shinsuke to become a better swordsman) and it eventually became so much more than just this.

As the plot continued to unfold, I will say, I was becoming more and more engrossed in our characters' journeys.

The closest anime that I did write about in this anime blog of mine that comes only slightly close to what this show managed to accomplish would be Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer which ran from summer of 2022 until winter. That show didn't have as many episodes as this one did (it only peaked at 24 episodes) but it was also an overly ambitious story with a semi-interesting plot, decently fleshed out characters, a large cast and an an energy to do great things that only a few could rival.

But, sadly, all good things must come to an end and that show suffered from a lot of technical problems which, in my opinion at least, were caused by an insufficient budget. Those problems hampered that show's quality a lot, to the point where the last episodes were subpar. And that's a real shame, since it had such a strong start that very few could rival.

This show, thankfully, did not suffer from the same issues and studio Whitefox knew to invest just the right amount of money to make this an experience that would be very memorable for all of us.

Like I said, my main gripe with this show was its very slow beginning, which was really doing it a disservice, but the story compensated for that by switching the protagonist of the show from Shinsuke from season 1, to Jinka in season 2.

That, in my opinion, was a monumental life changer that made this show stand out from the lot. Granted, I'm sure this is not the first anime that did this, and many might say that it's just a simple gimmick that, if overly exploited by other anime in the future will only serve to annoy future viewers, but, as of right now, that was a very interesting decision that did this show a lot of favors.

Senya's viewpoint was far more interesting than Shinsuke's and, thankfully, the time skip that aged up most of the characters also added a great deal of momentum towards the show's favor.

Not a lot of anime do time skips like this one nowadays. The last one I remember (which I watched, personally) was Twin Star Exorcists but, in that specific case, the time skip pretty much ruined the show for me, since all the events that happened afterwards were very much a genuine downgrade from the plot of when the main characters were children.

Here, the time skip was an upgrade, as the characters became wiser but, most importantly, more competent in what they did after they grew up, which allowed for some interesting fights.

But, what I liked the most about this show, was genuinely the theme about the passage of time.

This is very subtle, but the passage of time is a focal point around which the entire plot is focused on.

The ending was incredibly fascinating and it gave this show a timeless feel, with character growth unlike which I've ever seen before. It conferred me a sense of growth, of sadness and bitterness when I saw how certain characters had passed, but also of satisfaction and happiness when I saw how the world had evolved as time went on.

It was a fascinating watch.

This was an incredible experience. I cannot for the life of me recommend this show enough. It was an absolute masterpiece that I am so glad studio Whitefox decided to completely adapt. I sincerely believe that, had Whitefox decided to adapt only 1 season or only 2 seasons but without this last part, the story would have been sorely incomplete and objectively inferior to what we've just had.

The fact that the studio understood the greatness of this plot and said “You know what? This story needs to be told in its entirety” and burned so much money to make it happen, was something that I deeply appreciate.

This was an extremely reinvigorating experience. Was it flawed? Yes. There were times in which the plot became cliched and overly simplistic, plot holes do exist if you look closely enough and I do feel like there were issues with the pacing of the show, since the last episode had to cover so much ground, but it eventually ended in a manner that left me saying “I'm glad I watched this, but I don't wish for more. It's just complete as it is” and left me with a smile.

If you can stomach the 35 episodes that this anime has, I humbly suggest you give it a shot. I admit, the beginning is very slow, and you will get bored, but it's worth the wait. It will eventually grow and become something very special.

3. TsumaSho

Why are anime about families so good?

It used to be stuff like My Home Hero, then Buddy Daddies (not to mention incredible classics like Clannad as well), Grandpa and Grandma turn Young Again and now we have this. Is this just a coincidence or do Japanese writers are just exceedingly good at writing timeless and memorable stories about families?

Well, regardless, it's time we delve into this one as well.

Our story begins when an adult hard working husband loses his beloved wife, Takae Nijima, in a car accident.

This untimely death throws the man into a horrible depression, with their daughter alongside him, as their lives become completely ruined from this.

Fast forward ten years, and the two are still living miserable lives. The daugher, Mai Nijima, is working in a boring job and is suffering from having no friends or relatives she could talk to except for her father, whose name is Keisuke, who is emotionless and very quiet all the time.

The two regularly eat takeout foods that they microwave and they don't even bother trying to change their current lifestyles.

One fateful day, a little 10 year old girl named Marika Shiraishi, rings their doorbell.

Keisuke opens the door, only to be confronted by the furious Marika who yells at him for living an improper life.

She claims to be the reincarnation of Takae, and she wants to scold him for allowing his and Mai's life to go downhill like this after her death.

Naturally, Keisuke is very skeptical and unsure how to take this but he allows the girl inside his house where she continues to explain herself.

Both Keisuke and Mai eventually become convinced that Marika is indeed Takae's reincarnation after she reveals to them information that only Takae would have known.

This causes a lot of turmoil, as they are unsure how to deal with this.

Takae then proceeds to scold the both of them for living like that, her saying that she's very disappointed in them for taking this path.

However, they soon accept the current reality as it is and both Keisuke and Mai immediately agree to accept the young Marika into their family, happy that the Takae that they had always known had returned to them.

Takae decides to start visiting their household regularly (since she lives in a different household, now that she is reincarnated in a different family), while hiding her visits from her divorced mother, Chika Shiraishi.

Takae starts giving Mai advice on what to do so that she can find herself new friends and, possibly even, a romantic partner and she also starts visiting Keisuke at his job to give him bento lunches to eat in his lunch breaks, something for which he is very thankful for.

And so ends the first episode.

So yeah, this is another odd anime.

But, despite its outrageous premise, it is ripe with a lot of drama.

I can't call this a slice of life, for obvious reasons. Some might wonder if this is a mystery kind of plot, in which Marika just pretends to be Takae and fools her family into this ruse, but, really, that's not the case. This is a supernatural story, in which Takae's soul inhabits Marika's body.

It's as simple as that.

Granted, even with this supernatural element thrown in, the show is very down-to-Earth and tries to treat itself as seriously as it can, discussing issues about hiding information from your family, dealing with loss and mourning, and trying to make difficult decisions about sacrifices and compromising.

Really, when you get down to it, the show is very mature and simple in its life lessons.

It's a story about a family that has lost its core foundational member that was the one that made everyone smile but who, ten years later, reunited with said member and is trying to make the best of it, together.

I won't go into any more spoilers than this but, I will say, the ending was especially satisfying to watch.

I was afraid that they would chicken out and do a “everyone is happy” type of ending that leaves a lot of things ambiguous about how they will work out but, thankfully, that wasn't the case. The plot tied all the knots, no loose threads remaining. And sometimes tying all the knots implies that not everyone will be happy. Sacrifices have to be made.

As a fan of drama, this was just my cup of tea.

I loved every episode of this show, it was very much exactly what I wanted it to be.

If I had to nitpick, I will say that one plot thread towards the end got resolved in a rather unsatisfying way. I don't want to spoil what it is, but I will say that a certain scenario that Keisuke was making up turned out to be a lie that he did for someone else's sake, and that felt like a cheap cope out to me that left me very disappointed.

But, overall, the show accomplished way more than it left behind, and I can confidently say that I was happy that I watched it.

A season 2 is almost impossible to happen, given how it ended, but, assuming I am wrong and they do continue the story somehow, I am absolutely up for more of this content. I loved what this show was about and I definitely wish for more.

4. Negative Positive Angler

Do you like fishing?

Your answer to this question may, very well, be a resounding “no” but, even if that's true for you, you may still like this TV anime series that's all about fishing. “How do you know?” you may ask? Well, it's because I am one of those people that hate fishing but I still enjoyed this show.

The plot is as straightforward as it gets.

College student Tsunehiro Sasaki is struggling with a debt problem, as he is struggling financially every day, barely managing to make ends meet.

One day, he is diagnosed with a terminal illness, given a grim prognosis that he will only live another 2 years, and advised by the doctor to immediately seek medical treatment for his condition.

In spite of this, Tsunehiro decides to run away from his problems and spend the little remaining money that he has at a gambling parlor, ignoring all his problems.

But, as bad luck would have it, debt collectors that were specifically looking for him manage to find him there, and realizing that he's in trouble, Tsunehiro makes a run for it, only for them to give chase.

As he runs away through the city streets from his pursuers, doing his best to get away, he eventually gets cornered against a ledge above a large river flowing through the city and, while trying to get away from them, he slips and falls down into the water beneath and is immediately captured by a strong water current and carried out of the city, into the nearby gulf.

Not knowing how to swim, Tsunehiro closes his eyes, expecting to finally meet his untimely demise.

However, soon after, he wakes up on a concrete platform, surrounded by other people around his age: a girl named Hana Ayukawa (who's the one that swam out to save him), a pink haired fellow named Takaaki Tsutsujimori (who was the one that went out of his way to convince her to rescue him) and some others.

Tsunehiro then realizes that he is now on an artificial platform, close to where the city he lived in was, a place that was specifically there for fishermen to fish on.

Tsunehiro thanks them for saving his life, very grateful that he had finally lost the debt collectors that were after him, but realizes that he is stuck on that platform with Hana and Takaaki until morning, since the boat that is supposed to allow them to return to mainland was scheduled to arrive only in the morning.

Not having anything to do to pass time, Tsunehiro eventually agrees to grab a rod and fish alongside them, as they are all clearly enjoying their hobby together.

And so, Tsunehiro is slowly about to discover a new passion in his misery-filled life.

That's the first episode of this show.

So yes, this is, technically speaking, a sports anime, that's about recreational fishing. Unlike many other sports anime though, what stands out about this one is that it has very little competition in its plot.

For the most part, the show treats fishing as a hobby, something the characters engage in only because it's their favorite way to pass time.

There's no fishing tournament in this show (well, OK, there is one but only for one single episode and it's mainly used as a side-story more than anything else), the stakes are very low and it's mostly about having fun with your friends doing this outdoor activity.

And I think that's what this show does best: it's about life engaging in the hobby you like most.

The anime is a slice of life story about recovering from the depths of despair, when you're at the lowest point you can be in life and how you can make a recovery from it, even if it all seems hopeless.

I will admit: the whole premise of “it all seemed doom and gloom until I discovered this new hobby and all of a sudden I've found myself with new friends and a job and it all worked out in the end” didn't exactly strike me as something I would be fond of. And, while I don't wanna spoil how it ends, that's kind of the whole idea that this show is going for.

It's all about living your life to the fullest and trying to make the best of it.

Until recently, I genuinely wasn't interested in these types of stories. I always thought they were very cheesy and unrealistic..

But, now that I managed to sit down and take it for what it is, I realized that, if you simply look at it from a different point of view, it becomes quite nice. Its honesty and simplicity are actually quite refreshing.

It's basically the whole “Make the best of what you've got” Japanese mentality, distilled into a show about fishing. That is quite an interesting concept and, for what it's worth, this show did it fine.

And yeah, there's a lot of talk about fishing here. You will learn a lot about this hobby, whether you want to or not, but it thankfully doesn't overtake the plot of the show.

Fishing is the mechanism with what the show conveys its message, but the message itself is still there, in plain sight.

And if you're like me and don't care much for it, you can still appreciate it for its amount of depth and how fairly accurate it appears to look when describing this activity.

I never knew how many fish types there were in Japan, how many fishing techniques there were, the types of bait you can use, and so forth. Even for me, who's someone that's very uninterested in this hobby, even I've found the stuff that they were talking about quite fun to listen to, even if I still don't plan on picking up this hobby myself.

If nothing else, the show was quite informative.

Maybe it's just me approaching middle age and starting to like stuff that most kids would find tedious and boring, but I've suddenly found myself taking a liking to these menial and straightforward stories about accepting reality as it is but still finding ways of making your life work regardless.

It's a fairly straightforward story about doing your best and allowing your friends to pull you out of your misery, even when you're at your lowest.

My only complaint for this show is that a lot of the stuff that it describes as tragic and horrible get resolved quite swiftly and conveniently; stuff like financial issues, not having a place to live, or even dealing from a terminal illness, they all get conveniently resolved whenever the plot feels like it makes sense for them to resolve for it to have the most dramatic impact on the audience.

Brushing off heavy things like that felt a bit too idealistic and shallow to me, personally, but I still understand why the show did them.

I would have liked for more drama and a far darker ending to the story than what we've got, since I felt like that would have had more impact on me, personally, but I still think that we got something decent here, nonetheless.

Could it have been a bit better? Sure. But what it ended up being was perfectly serviceable anyways.

Even if you're not into fishing, I would still recommend you give this show a watch. If nothing else, it will be a valuable lesson about appreciating what you've got.

5. Yakuza Fiancé

Alright so, we might as well get this one off our chest now.

This is one of those TV series where people will tell me that I'm wrong about, that everyone will try to defend and tell me that it's actually a very underrated masterpiece or what have you, and I will simply disagree with them.

But, at the same time, I don't want for this review to come across like I'm hating on this show. Granted, I don't love the show either.

I'm somewhere in the middle with this one. I don't like it enough to even call it decent, nor am I angry enough at it to say that I hate it.

I'm just indifferent to this one.

The show is about a high school girl from Osaka named Yoshino Somei, who grew up in a yakuza family.

Despite her family's ties to underground crime, she has tried her whole life to distance herself from them and tried to stay clean and safe, doing everything she could to live a normal life for herself.

One day, she finds out that her grandfather had arranged for her to marry the son of another yakuza family, a young man from Tokyo named Kirishima Miyama, who's also in high school.

Naturally, Yoshino is very much against this arrangement, especially since she had never even met the guy before but, at her grandfather's request, she eventually concedes and moves to Tokyo where she meets up with this Kirishima.

Kirishima, initially, presents himself as an attractive and earnest man, who claims he has little ties to his yakuza origins and that he's also doing his best to make an honest living for himself.

This puts Yoshino off at first, as he's the first person she has met outside of her family that also seems to have a dislike for the yakuza.

But, soon enough, Yoshino sees Kirishima return home late into the night with blood on his body, clearly indicating that he had lied and that he still participates in the less savory deals that the yakuza are known for.

Soon enough, Yoshino discovers that Kirishima is actually a very sadistic person and that his nice persona was actually just a facade to pretend to be a well mannered individual.

When seeing how Yoshino is not very willing to be cooperative with him, Kirishima drops the act and demands from her to sell her body to others, in exchange for money to give to him.

That, coupled with the fact that the girl is facing bullying at her new school in Tokyo, causes Yoshino to hate the new life there and want to return home.

When she gets to talk over the phone with her grandfather again, he advises her to try a new strategy: if she wants to get revenge on Kirishima, she should try to seduce him in the next couple of months and then, once she will have him at her fingertips, she should break up with him and leave him in the dust. That way, she will make him miserable.

Yoshino accepts this as a challenge for herself.

After that, Yoshino gives Kirishima the money that he wanted from her, her having revealed that instead of selling her body for sex to make it, she had sold a kidney for it.

Moreover, she's making it clear that she won't give up so easily and that she will put up a fight before she returns to Osaka, revealing a side of herself that Kirishima had never seen before.

This unsophisticated, combative and crass side of her causes Kirishima to suddenly proclaim that he had genuinely fallen in love with her and now he's even more interested in going through with the arranged marriage.

So ends episode 1.

OK so, a couple of things I want to make clear: I didn't care much for this show.

Initially, I said I would want to watch this show because it clearly had a dark edge to it, since anime about yakuza life are usually quite interesting and I wanted to see where this one was heading.

The show had an interesting premise, although I'm never a fan of the old arranged marriage romance cliches.

Nonetheless, I gave this show a chance and I powered through it, following the plot, the characters and everything about it.

And, the general takeaway for me was that, for better or worse, I got what I was hoping for: it does delve deep into yakuza life, into thugs and gangs, manipulation and criminals doing illegal things, and it goes quite hard into action scenes.

The problem is that the show is very underwhelming.

Much like Tasuketsu: Fate of the Majority, which is another show I've encountered that had a similar issue, there's a lot of dialogue and talking in this show that slows it down a lot.

This is clearly a mature show geared towards mature audiences, which is both a blessing and a curse for itself.

The plot advances at a slug's pace and, the few action sequences there are, they aren't very flashy or particularly well animated. In fact, they are very realistic and short, as far as I've seen.

The show doesn't even try to pretend that it has flashy action. And every action scene is padded out by many minutes of dialogue that surround it, in which characters are constantly strategizing, scheming, doing plot exposition or something similar. It's all that, non-stop.

And while this is still miles ahead of Tasuketsu since it at least has some proper action sequences, I would still have preferred something a bit less talky and more shooty.

When you get down to it, this is just a coming of age story for Yoshino. Yes, she hates everything yakuza and she hates violence, but the story will put her in the position of having to deal with thugs and people who are out to get her or Kirishima, to take matters into her own hands and get her hands dirty in the process.

In that sense, it is a bit of a feminist anime since Yoshino is arguably one of the most capable female characters I've seen in anime in quite a long time, which I really like.

On the other hand, it was that this show was constantly trying to shove romance between Yoshino and Kirishima down my throat, which was something I really disliked about it.

Granted, I'm usually all for having romance in an anime and trying to make things work in that sense but this was one that I really felt gross about.

Kirishima has a very sleazy personality, one that lies, manipulates, seduces and is also very sadistic and even blood thirsty at times. He is an incurable asshole that doesn't take “No” for an answer and likes to gloat and takes pride in every single win he gets.

But, with that said, I both hate and like those characteristics about him. For one, I miss this type of character. I wanted someone that's a genuine manipulator and liar, who tries to get into women's pants, who cheats on his girlfriend, has ulterior plans, and who's scheming all the time. I really like this about him.

I wish more anime male leads were this conniving and cold, at least for the sake of diversity. In that respect, this was a breath of fresh air seeing someone as heartless as him.

But, on the other hand, I really don't like seeing this guy trying to sweet talk an honest girl like Yoshino. Clearly he's infatuated with her and he wants to make her his, but I just feel dirty watching these two getting together.

But, then again, I've had to sit through genuinely terrible romance anime like A Condition Called Love (from the spring of 2024 anime), and that felt even more disgusting than this one, so I can at least say that I personally feel like I've seen worse.

Either way, your mileage may vary.

I really wish the anime focused more on the yakuza stuff and the plot developments and less on the romance portion of the series.

Lastly, I want to say that my other gripe with this show is the character designs. I really really hated the designs of these characters.

Visually, they looked like these people were into their 20s, like Kirishima and Yoshino were at least in college, and yet the story told me that they were still in high school. That felt very weird to me.

I don't know why the characters look as old as they do. Maybe it's just my brain playing tricks on me, but these people do not look like teenagers. I know that this is animation, and a character's apparent age is very subjective, but it just felt very wrong to me.

Oh and, another thing is that a lot of characters had very odd looking designs on their pupils. Like some characters had trapezoid shapes in their eyes, for no apparent reason. I don't know what those reasons are but they looked off putting and very distracting to me.

That and, the animation from this show is really choppy.

I don't know what budget this TV series had, but the animation looked very cheap. Maybe it's because it had a lot of action sequences throughout the series (they were very short lived though) and they had to burn a lot of money on that, but the moments of silence or just talking felt like there was very little money being spent on this. The animation was as bare-bones as it got during those moments.

Initially I didn't notice that but, when a friend of mine pointed out this to me, it became very noticeable and jarring.

I don't know why the show had such a lackluster animation, but it stood out after I began noticing it.

Oh well.

Those are my thoughts on this show.

Overall, I felt like the show was a bit too slow, the plot too dialogue-heavy and the animation and character designs off putting in more ways than one.

At times, it genuinely felt like the show was somehow an adaptation of a light novel, it had that much dialogue in it, which obviously isn't the case since this is adapted from a manga. So why there is so little action and so much dialogue in this one, I really cannot say.

I don't think I will be continuing this show, even if a season 2 were to come out. It just lacks the polish that I need and the style of storytelling is just not for me. But, with that said, I'm sure there are other people who would like a show like this one. So, who knows? Give it a shot!

This is a continuation of my thoughts from Part 1. I recommend you finish reading that before delving into this.

You can find part one here.

6. Mayonaka Punch

I've been waiting so long to talk about this one.

This is one of those entries in which I feel like most other people will accuse me of over-hyping this show, overpraising it and calling it “underrated” for no good reason, but I will stand my ground on this one.

Because, while I will admit that this is just a simple comedy that doesn't do much in terms of innovating the medium or tackling societal issues or debating heavy philosophical topics, I will argue that not every show needs to do those things.

Sometimes a good show can just be fun.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, let's discuss the plot of the first episode, shall we?

Young adult Masaki Sonoue is a popular NewTuber and co-founder of the Hype-Girls NewTube channel, a small channel that has been growing for the past months and has managed to garner a significant amount of success.

However, one day, after raging out and physically punching another one of the girls of their channel in the face, a huge amount of backlash from the fans of the channel emerges against her, a public online scandal that devolves so much that Hype-Girls ends up kicking Masaki out of their group just to quell the online hate.

Abandoned by her channel collaborators who were also, incidentally, her friends, Masaki tries to start up her own channel to try to find success again. She tries recruiting new members for her team but has little luck doing so, as the online hate against her continues and nobody is willing to associate themselves with her anymore.

Meanwhile, at Bonpai Manor, a manor in a different part of the city, a pink haired vampire girl named Live awakens from a 20 year long slumber after having a conspicuous dream involving a strange girl.

Live meets up with Ichiko, another vampire living at that manor and who's also Live's assistant, who has been awake that whole time and has tended for the manor and doing all the tasks necessary to keep their family still together there while Live was in her deep slumber.

Ichiko gives some brief information about what has happened since Live went to sleep, while also revealing that, since she had started trading stocks to make more money, she ended up going into debt and now they are penniless.

While doing so, Ichiko accidentally reveals to Live an image of Masaki on a NewTube video thumbnail from a video feed that she had been scrolling. Live realizes from that picture that the girl from her strange dream was, in fact, Masaki, for some odd reason.

Later on, the girls at the manor very quickly run out of blood to drink, as Live has consumed almost all of the blood bags that they had in storage, to recover from her long sleep. Realizing that they will be needing more blood for sustenance, Live decides to visit a nearby hospital to find a new supply.

As nighttime arrives, by pure luck, Masaki arrives at the same hospital as well, since she was reminiscing how that abandoned hospital was where she had shot her first video with the girls from Hype-Girls.

Masaki was walking alone on the hallways of that hospital, remembering moments of when they had filmed their first video there, until she stumbles upon a room where Live was searching for blood in, the two meeting seemingly for the first time.

Live immediately recognizes her from her dream again and also senses the blood dripping from Masaki's nose (a nosebleed that Masaki had accidentally caused for herself a couple of minutes prior after hitting her head), the scent of Masaki's blood driving Live mad with hunger.

Realizing that she's in danger, Masaki makes a run for it, trying to get away from a desperate Live until she reaches the rooftop of the abandoned hospital.

Seeing no other way out, Masaki walks to the edge of the rooftop, threatening to jump off if Live doesn't leave her alone.

Live doesn't go along with her, though, and Masaki accidentally slips, beginning to fall off the building. However, in the nick of time, Live saves her using her flying powers.

Seeing how Masaki had calmed down, Live begins pulling her along as the two fly through the night sky above the city, amazing Masaki with the gorgeous view.

After the two settle down again, Masaki decides to make Live an offer: she will agree to allow Live to drink her blood, but only after Live helps her get 1 million views on her new NewTube channel. Seeing that vampires exist and witnessing their powers firsthand, Masaki is convinced that that's the surest way to popularity that she can achieve for growth.

Live agrees to her request.

That's the synopsis for episode 1.

Now, let's start by stating the obvious: I'm a sucker for night shots of cities in anime.

The scene with Live flying with Masaki in the air above the city during nighttime reminded me of the first episode of Call of the Night, also an anime about vampires. While this show wasn't as gorgeous as Call of the Night was, not even close, it did have the same feeling of alluring promise of fun and wonder, of excitement and sense of discovery.

Given that this show is an original work that came out only recently, it wouldn't surprise me if they took inspiration from Call of the Night's first episode as well. I'm not saying that they did, and even if I did say that, I wouldn't have any proof of it, but it's just a hunch from me.

Outside of that, I just liked the general feeling of the first episode.

It was giving me good vibes, the type of vibes you'd expect to see from a laid-back, nonsense type of comedy TV series that doesn't care much for rules and just wants to take you on a ride, as the viewer.

And boy, was it a wild ride. I loved this show to a fault. It was wacky, filled with slapstick, color, energy and fun.

But, surprisingly, it also had some deep moments as well. They weren't many, mind you, but they were there and the few that I did see gave me a nice surprise. The show has some relevant things it wanted to talk about and some nice life lessons to impart. Granted, none of the lessons are very original or mind blowing, but they are important nonetheless; lessons such as “confront the people you need to confront early on, otherwise you might regret waiting for too long”, “learn to cherish the simple things in life”, “appreciate your family” and “don't be mean to your friends” are somewhat cliched and had been brought up in many anime before this one as well, but I've found them to be organically meshed well into the episodes here and have had a deep emotional impact on me.

The fact that the show didn't need to include those lessons into its episodes at all, since the comedy was already very well done, but it did so anyway, went a long way for me to appreciate it for what it was.

And also, the fact that Masaki, the protagonist, is a violent unhindered bitch that lashes out at anyone that pisses her off was such a nice sight to see. In the medium of anime where most protagonists are sterile angels that are seldom selfish or even assholes at all, it's such a nice breath of fresh air to see someone as unhinged as Masaki was. Her flaws felt very relatable, and the fact that she also learned her lesson by the end of the show and grew a very tiny bit since the first episode didn't get lost on me either.

And this was another show that flourished in randomness, which made it very difficult for me to predict any of the plot twists that the episodes would take. Simply put, whenever a TV anime manages to make it difficult for me to predict where it's going is, by itself, a very nice surprise. I love it when I can't put together where an episode is going, and this show managed to achieve that almost all of the time.

Simply put, the show was unpredictable in the best of ways.

And the characters were just so fun. I loved every moment of seeing them onscreen interact with each other. This is another one of those shows where, if you take any two characters and put them alone in a room with each other, you would get a funny script that simply writes itself without much effort. I love it when characters are written like that.

My only complaint was that the very last twist of the very last episode was a bit predictable (as I saw who was the mastermind of that plot before it was revealed), contrary to what I said earlier, which kind of lessened the impact for me a little bit, but I was still satisfied with it.

The show was very much what I wanted to see. It's these shows that come to mind whenever I ask myself what is the poster child for “anime” as a genre: raw, unadulterated, chaotic and full of energy TV series that need to unleash onto you, the viewer, all their maddness, while also bringing you into their colorful unhinged world.

This is what, I feel, anime should be like: it takes full advantage of the medium of animation, while also relaying important information and deep life lessons on the side as a bonus. And it does that while having a distinguishing and unique personality as well.

This is what I want from anime.

I want another season of this show. I genuinely feel like this show deserves more and that there's potential for even more fun to be had with these characters.

If a new season never gets greenlit, I will be sad but it won't be the end of the world, as the season wrapped up most of the important loose ends that it had. But if a new season does get greenlit, I will be sure to watch it.

7. SHY (Season 2)

The SHY anime adaptation returns once again, in a brand new season on TV.

For those that are new here, just know that I've already covered the first season of this anime in my fall 2023 lineup blog post. You can read my thoughts on that season here, as I won't be repeating myself. If you want a TL;DR summary though, basically SHY is a Japanese manga that began being published in August of 2019 and is still ongoing as of the making of this blog post. It currently has 26 volumes and these opinions that I'm writing cover the manga's anime adaptation done by studio Eight Bit.

Specifically, this entry will describe my thoughts for the anime's second season.

To be frank, I wasn't very sure if this particular TV series was going to get a second season. Back when I finished watching its first one, I had my doubts that it would be popular enough to get one but, apparently, the studio decided to renew it.

This is interesting. Maybe they see the potential in superhero anime, as other TV shows like My Hero Academia highlighted how there's a large audience that the anime market can tap into; or maybe the manga is simply that popular in Japan, and there was high demand for a continuation of the anime.

Who knows?

The first season had a lot of potential, I will say, and I loved to see the story take dark and unsettling turns but also maintaining a sense of elegance and pride, never going too far with its sinister undertones and still trying to keep itself afloat with its lighthearted superhero theme.

This new season does the same, although the story didn't grab me as much this time around.

The plot here will focus on, believe it or not, the princess of a hidden ninja village named Ai Tennoji who ran away from her home after being sheltered for almost her entire life, in hopes of discovering and exploring the outside world on her own. She just so happens to meet up with Teru and Iko and immediately befriends them.

Ai is secretive about her village, though, and leaves out the true purpose for why she ventured into the outside world.

Amarariruku, in the meanwhile, will plan to take over the world using one of their new members, a strange and mysterious girl named Utsuro Karakururi.

I won't go into more detail, since I feel like that is unnecessary.

This new season has some good points, but also some weaker ones as well.

First things first, I will say, I feel like this show is still a very worthwhile watch.

One of the main highlights of this particular season is that circumstances will force Shy to take up a role of leadership for a rescue team, later on.

Teru, being very shy and socially awkward, will have to force herself to manage a team of other heroes and ensure the safety of others while in this mission.

I won't be trying to become too political in this, but I feel like this is the poster child for what a feminist anime should be like.

People generally take issues with Hollywood's implementation of feminist movies, very many arguing that it's too on-the-nose and loud in its messages, and I get that and I absolutely agree with this.

Anime, thankfully, has gone under the radar in these instances, mainly because, in my opinion, anime TV shows and movies are a bit more subtle in their political leanings and keep their affinities out of plain sight.

This show is no exception to that rule.

The show doesn't scream 'Girl power' every episode, nor does it shove in your face Teru's prowess as a perfect leader or abilities as a female superhero.

In fact, the show goes the exact opposite route and underlines her shortcomings and vulnerabilities all the time, but in a good way.

The point of the show is to present the protagonist's growth, both as a competent hero that saves others but also as just a human that needs to become functional in society.

Shy will have to learn to become a good leader. Sooner of later, she simply will have to become better at dealing with others and commanding forces to coordinate rescue efforts.

And this season puts her in that uncomfortable position, to force her to adapt.

Of course, she won't be alone, and she will have a team helping her along the way. Most of her other team members will also be female, which brings up my pointing out how this is mostly a feminist work.

But, like any good feminist piece should do, this season also shows cool moments with a couple of male characters as well, to complement its message. Characters like Ming Ming and Davie John will also get their spotlights, with John in particular appearing very cool and allowing us to finally get a glimpse into his powers.

The antagonists will also get their fair shake, with the introduction of Doki Baragaki, as well as the return of the joyful Kufufu.

And, finally, we will finally get to see Stigma's abilities in actual combat, assisted by a ghostly apparition of another Amarariruku member named Quabala.

Honestly, this show was a lot of fun.

The second thing about this new season that I wanted to point out, is how I like that we finally get new characters being shown in the spotlight. The old characters were absolutely fine, but I like how new arcs in TV shows sometimes decide to move the spotlight slightly away from the protagonist and onto new characters to bring in new elements and to spice things up.

Ai is a very fun character to show, and I was very fond of her personality.

But, as with the last time I talked about this show, there are some things I also dislike about it.

The most glaring issue I take with this show is its cheesy dialogue that constantly makes me think that this show was obviously geared towards a younger audience.

While I wouldn't say that the show is geared necessarily towards children under the age of 13 (although it's still accessible to them), my guess is that this is targeted towards teens, mostly to the female teen crowd even. The fact that wikipedia claims that the manga is Shōnen in nature (i.e. targeted towards teenage boys) feels a bit inaccurate to me. The reason I say that this is geared towards a younger audience is due to its cheesy cliched lines talking about one's “heart” and “purity”, filling the world with “love” and fulfilling “dreams”.

Then there's the boring anime cliches that are omnipresent everywhere, like how all the right people are there at the right moment to save someone, how someone has an long winded speech as they are about to die, how someone is struggling with deep regrets over their dark past, sorrowful and mourning over the road not taken.

And couple that with the happy-go-lucky ending that solved most of the problems and wrapped everything up as neatly as possible, and it felt somewhat too sterile.

Almost, although there was one aspect of the ending that at least tried to bring some sense of sourness to it which I cannot spoil. You'll have to see it for yourself to see what I mean.

Anyways, those are my thoughts on this show.

Would I watch another season of it? Honestly, yeah I would.

As cheesy as it is, it's still a fun and entertaining show nonetheless. This is exactly what I was hoping I would get if a continuation were to happen after the first season.

I genuinely am now interested in the saga of Amarariruku, and I wish to see Stigma's backstory as soon as possible.

This story has potential, it has interesting twists and fun yet relatable characters. I've never been much of a superhero anime fan but this show is rapidly changing that.

I am very much hoping that this will get the same treatment as My Hero Academia and continue being adapted for far longer, especially since there clearly is still a lot more manga to draw material from.

8. Pseudo Harem

You didn't think I'd have a full top 10 list without a harem anime sneaking its way in here somehow, did you?

Yes, this is a romantic comedy slice of life story in which the protagonist, a highly talented boy named Eiji Kitahama, is surrounded by a harem of exactly one girl. Confused yet?

The first episode shows us a first year high school student named Rin Nanakura who is walking around the school campus trying to find someone from the Drama Club.

She ends up meeting Eiji, a second year student at that school and, after hearing her desire to join the same club that he's already in, Eiji decides to pull a prank on Rin and pretends that he's currently the only member of said club, and that he's also the club president.

Rin is impressed and happy that she gets to work with him but, after they arrive at the Drama Club room, she realizes that he had pranked her when seeing how the room is full of other people and the actual club president (who actually isn't Eiji) welcomes her.

Later on, during PE class, Eiji confides in Rin while they are on the side talking to each other that he has always wanted to have a harem of girls that would be interested in him but is sad that he has no one like that.

Rin, realizing how sad he is, playfully decides to try out her acting skills (since she has always wanted to become a famous actress) and creates fake personas for herself, personas of girls that would actually be romantically interested in Eiji.

The fake characters she creates are Cool-chan (a girl who's always calm and calculated), Impish-chan (an outgoing girl that likes to tease him all the time) and Spoiled-chan (a little sister-esque character that constantly wants to be spoiled by Eiji). All of these characters are forthcoming and Rin makes it a point to play them as if they are interested in Eiji and are part of his personal harem.

Eiji is very much happy with this development (as well as impressed by Rin's acting skills), to the point where he gets a bit too much into it.

After that point, Rin will constantly switch personalities between herself and one of those girls to play around with Eiji, while also developing feelings for him in real life as well.

That's the gist of episode 1.

Yeah, the premise is very simple and straightforward. Honestly, I was expecting for the whole Rin using fake personalities to get across to Eiji that she likes him gag to get old very quickly but, surprisingly, it didn't.

The whole show is just a series of jokes about how Rin and Eiji are somewhere alone in a room, they talk about their current lives, and then Rin gets the idea of using one of her personalities to tease Eiji in one way or another.

The show likes to have fun with itself, and I can respect that.

It was getting a bit boring, seeing how Rin would almost always confess to Eiji but when he realizes what she's trying to say, she gets very embarrassed and backtracks by switching to one of her fake personas and pretending like it was one of them that did the confession instead, playing it off as a joke.

But thankfully the story doesn't do just that, and it eventually evolves the romance, as time goes on.

Seeing the characters like to spend time together, laugh together, act together, even participate in plays together and, eventually, kiss and confess to one another, reminded me why I like watching romance anime in the first place.

After such a long time of watching romance anime where the relationships are very much stagnant or evolve at a glacial pace (I'm looking at you Spice and Wolf) this was such a nice breath of fresh air.

In fact, I would even go so far as to say that this is a prime example of how I genuinely wish a slice of life high school romance love story would be done in anime: have two main characters that are semi-interesting and not complete stick figures, have them have great chemistry together, have them gradually grow and develop feelings with each other, sometimes teasing and joking about it but never completely discarding that idea and, eventually, have them realize their feelings and act upon them.

This is such a simple and mind numbingly straightforward formula to follow, yet for some reason so many anime seem to fail at it one way or another.

This one just follows that formula, without innovating or doing much to change it but, still, having a personality and style of its own.

And you know what? It worked.

Sure, the first couple of episodes, where the main characters weren't yet sure of their feelings, were a bit boring and slow but it picked up the pace as it went along.

By the time the show ended, and I saw the characters and where they ended up being, after the long journey from episode 1 to what became of them now, it felt like such a treat.

And this is also a nice example of how to do a romance anime without even needing to involve sex or fan-service in the story at all. You don't need that, a story can remain pure and family friendly and still be impactful, as this show highlights.

Not only that but the show also introduced some excellent drama towards the end as well, with a very important decision to make in which Rin had to make on whether she wanted to continue a relationship with Eiji or if she should follow a proper acting career and part ways with him, as that had been her dream all along.

I won't say how they solved that dilemma but, what I will say is that I was very much satisfied with the conclusion of that arc.

Overall, this was an excellent experience. I could talk about everything I liked about this show but, really, the only thing that I genuinely think needs to be said is just “Go watch it!”.

There are very few reasons why you might dislike this show and I feel, generally speaking at least, most people would like it unless, for whatever reason, you genuinely hate slice of life romance stories.

I doubt this will ever get a second season, since pretty much everything got wrapped up pretty nicely and I don't think there's anything else left to say. If a new season does get announced, though, I'd be sure to pick it up again without any hesitation.

9. Love Is Indivisible by Twins

This was another entry in which I had high hopes for. On the outset, this looked like a very interesting idea that I haven't seen done for quite a while (the last anime with a premise similar to this that I watched would be kiss×sis). Thankfully this show treats the characters and plot more seriously than kiss×sis did, though.

Episode 1 shows us the life of a young boy named Jun Shirosaki. He and his parents move into a new neighborhood when he is a young child and there he gets to meet their new neighbors: the Jingūji family. While doing so, he gets to interact with the two daughters in said family, Naori and Rumi Jingūji, two girls that are fraternal twins.

Given that he shares an interest in reading, like the way Naori does, he immediately hits it off with the twins and they quickly become close friends.

Naori and Rumi look very close to each other, but their personalities couldn't be any more different: Naori is a nerdy girl that's the top of her class, has a high affinity towards reading and being an otaku geek, and has a very devious and feminine side whereas Rumi is a tomboy that likes sports and playing basketball, is quite shy and very cautious but likes making friends all the time. Still, the two love each other as siblings and they try to keep a cordial sibling relationship with each other.

Fast forward to the end of their middle school and Rumi decides to confess to Jun, asking him to date her, despite knowing that Naori also has romantic feelings for him.

Jun is taken back by this but, reluctantly, he agrees to go forward with this and he and Rumi become a couple.

However, at Rumi's insistence, the two keep their relationship a secret from everyone else to not attract unwanted attention, the only exception being Naori, who Rumi confides in.

They all enter the same high school, Rumi joining the basketball club while Naomi simply spends her days with her best friend and Jun tries to maintain a healthy balance between his studies and his secret relationship with Rumi.

But, one fateful day, while talking alone to each other, Rumi reveals to Jun that she wishes to end their relationship abruptly, which comes as a complete shock to him.

Jun is shaken by her inexplicable desire to part ways with him but, knowing that he doesn't really have any choice in the matter, begrudgingly accepts the new state of affairs, choosing to still continue being friends with Rumi nonetheless and watch over her from the shadows.

So, just as suddenly as it started, Jun and Rumi's relationship comes to an end.

Naori is surprised to learn from her sister that Rumi decided to severe romantic ties with Jun, but still goes ahead trying to be supportive of her. Deep down, Naori suspects what the reason for the end of their relationship could be.

So ends the first episode.

So, to cut to the chase, this is another high school slice of life teen romance story.

I've seen other stories that have a similar premise before, although I will say that the way this show told its story felt surprisingly fresh to me, nonetheless.

The way the family drama is done in this show reminded me of a similar anime called Domestic Girlfriend, back from 2019.

Also, the fact that this anime is based off of a light novel series is blatantly obvious here as all the episodes are filled with so much quirky dialogue between the characters that it's very clear that the conversations are the focus of everything.

My general thoughts of this show are that I actually really like it.

Setting aside the cliched premise of two sisters that are close to each other but are forced into an unpleasant rivalry to get the attention of the same man, I liked the execution of the drama.

And while, technically, this is a romance anime, it hitting all the beats that a romance would take, at its core, this is pretty much just a teen drama.

There were times when I said that I'd gotten bored by slice of life teen dramas and that I would never watch them again but, even so, I would always change my mind and decide to continue watching them anyways.

Some teen romantic dramas I like and others I hate for being too boring and realistic. This was one of those instances where I actually liked the execution, thankfully.

A big reason for this is the dialogue between the characters. This, in my opinion, is the perfect example of what realistic human dialogue looks like: it's long, filled with unnecessary trivia and pop culture references but also filled with personality and quirkiness; this is especially true for instances where the people speaking are teens.

Moreover, another big reason I loved this show is the realistic sibling relationship between the twins. Naori and Rumi are constantly at odds with one another, while still trying their best to be courteous and supportive and allow breathing room for each other, avoiding being overbearing.

And, even when it becomes very clear that they both have feelings for Jun, they do their best at trying to not allow their jealousy for the same boy get in the way of their own relationship to each other.

Personally I found that to be a unique but also very realistic way of handling these issues.

And while things do eventually escalate to a serious fight between the two, it never goes too far and the conflict only goes to show the humanity that these girls have and how their struggles are very real and relatable, which made me sympathize with them.

However, with that said, there are issues that I also have with this show.

For one, I've come to really hate Jun.

The show tries to pass him off as a simple and earnest guy that's trying to build a life for himself but he really ticked me off towards the end, when it became obvious that all of the drama in this show eventually is caused by his indecisiveness. Yeah, this is another one of those anime that likes to bring about a romantic triangle with only one guy in it, where the guy cannot pick which girl he wants to end up with.

Harem anime are notorious for always leaving things ambiguous towards the end, which sometimes is done right, but a lot of other times it just pisses me off because it's too scared to pick one pairing to finish off with.

With romantic triangles, this is even more of an issue, simply because the realistic and relatable human characters that are the focus of the story make it even more painful for me, as a viewer, especially when the protagonist says that he can't choose only one of them. I get that sometimes it's unfair to make a choice, but this show makes a good point how not making a final commitment can sometimes be worse than making one that's unpopular.

The ending felt so disingenuous and whatever-ish that it felt very unsatisfying.

I genuinely feel like taking your time to make a proper choice is, most of the times, a good thing, but that can only go so far before it becomes ridiculous. This genuinely became almost ridiculous towards the end, how non-committal it wanted to be and how long it was taking for Jun to make a decision (spoilers: he still doesn't make one by the end of this first season).

But alas, it is what it is.

Would I watch another season of this show if it was to ever air?

Yeah, I would.

I enjoy watching these characters, seeing how vibrant and full of energy they are, seeing them interact and work off of each other and, especially, I want to see more drama between Jun and the girls.

Also, I want to see the girls continue to slap Jun every chance that they get, because I do feel that he very much deserves it.

10. Tasūketsu: Fate of the Majority

And we now arrive at this entry.

Before I begin, I just wish to state that this is my review of the first ten episodes of the anime, as those are the only ones I have watched. I have not watched any episodes beyond the first ten (the first eleven, actually, but the eleventh episode is mostly a recap episode, so I don't think it counts). Please be aware of that.

This one's going to be probably another one where I see a lot of people disagreeing with me, especially the fans of this show.

I have some stuff to say about this particular TV series, but I'll start by describing the plot of the first episode for now.

Young teen Saneatsu Narita is a regular high school student that's trying to live his time alone, with his father working overseas and his mother gone from his life.

He's a particularly intelligent individual that is quite adaptable and clever but is not very good with using computers.

One day, at school during computer science class, he sees his computer screen light up with a strange text being displayed on it saying “You can read this message” (I don't remember the exact text from that episode but it was something along those lines).

Saneatsu finds that message strange but ignores it and moves on with his life.

The next day, Saneatsu realizes that something is off when the TV doesn't seem to work at all for no apparent reason.

Before heading to school, he decides to visit his best friend's house, to pick him up as well so that they can go together, only to notice that he was dead in his own home.

Saneatsu panics, unsure what was happening, only to then receive a phone call from a classmate informing him of what's going on and asking him to come to school.

He does so and there he meets up with other students, a group of survivors that were all sharing their stories of what had happened that day to each other. Apparently, they had all woken up to the sight of their families and friends dead in their own homes that morning. The cause of death is unknown, since they all seemed to have died out of the blue. In fact, the majority of the city's population had seemingly died this way, to the point that there were no emergency services to rely on, no authority to declare a state of emergency nor anyone to help them at all.

As they discuss further what was going on, they discover that all the people in that room had one thing in common: they had all seen that same ominous screen at one point the previous day, the same weird screen that Saneatsu had seen during computer science class.

But just as they were thinking that, the laptop that they had running in that room turns on out of the blue as well, with a new message being shown on the screen: “You live in Tokyo”.

Suspecting that these strange messages on computers might be behind the sudden deaths of other people, everyone in that room pay close attention to that message, although they don't know what to do about it.

The next day, all the remaining survivors gather at school once again, in the same room, to discuss what they should do next again.

But, as they gather up again, they discover that even more among them had gone missing (most likely have died). This time around, even the phone network has gone down as well, so now they can't even get in touch with each other by mobile phone if they ever decide to split up.

When assessing who was missing, they soon come to the conclusion that those that have gone missing since the previous day were people that did not live in Tokyo (again, obviously having something to do with the ominous computer message they had seen the previous day).

Seeing how they cannot contact anyone by phone anymore and how there's no TV, they start verifying what little resources they have left: electricity still seems to be running, there's also clean water still running and the radio still seems to work.

But as they try to make a plan of action, a new broadcast is made through all the computer systems everywhere across the city, in which a digitally modified voice begins speaking. The voice calls itself the Emperor, and it claims that the testing phase of his game has completed.

The voice then proceeds to describe the game that he is talking about: Tasūketsu, a death game in which all the remaining survivors living in Tokyo have to find a specific postbox or a specific laptop hidden in a designated area of the city every day. A new designated area gets chosen each day. If a postbox or a laptop is found by a player, that player can then use it to submit a question of their choice that may only have one of two answers, to the Emperor.

If no valid questions are submitted that day, the Emperor will choose a random question from among a list of his own instead.

At the end of each day, at midnight, the chosen question will be displayed on computer screens across the whole city, and all the players whose answer to said question would be the majority answer among the two options, will die, thus shrinking the group of survivors each day by at least half.

In order to survive, the Emperor told them that there are envelopes scattered across the city which, when opened, will confer whoever opened them supernatural powers called Rights and Prime Rights.

Prime Rights are more powerful than Rights but, in order to accept them, whoever wants to acquire them will end up sacrificing a random part of their bodies in exchange.

Once a user has already received a Right or a Prime Right, he may not receive another one.

Finally, the last survivor standing will get the privilege of meeting with the Emperor face to face.

Then, the broadcast ends, and the designated area for the next day is displayed.

Seeing no other way of surviving, everyone there agree to cooperate with each other so that they can improve their chances of survival.

However, the next day, after finding a gun, one of the survivors begins threatening the others and taking matters into his own hands, which prompts everyone to flee by car and leave him behind.

Saneatsu, while searching for a postbox or a laptop, finds an envelope with a Right in it but decides putting off opening it for now.

Instead, he asks another survivor from their group, a young girl around his age called Saaya, who is their leader now, to have a private conversation with him.

Saneatsu tells Saaya that, since she's their group's leader, he will confide in her that he intends to kill the Emperor.

Saaya agrees with his reasoning, saying that she'll do everything in her power to support him.

For now, though, they will need to participate in the game just so they can ensure their own survival.

As they bond with each other by taking a selfie, later that day, it's revealed that the question that had been submitted to the Emperor was “Male or Female”.

Seeing how one of them is now bound to die by midnight, Saneatsu and Saaya decide to promise to each other that, whoever will get to survive, they will do their best to kill the Emperor to stop this madness.

Midnight arrives and the entire male population of survivors, including Saneatsu, collapse to the ground all of a sudden, dead.

Saaya cries in silence as she hardens her resolve to get her revenge on the Emperor.

So ends episode 1.

OK so, that's the gist of things.

Basically, you've got a death game in which survivors post a selection criteria with only two answers, and the players who end up in the category with the majority answer will die.

That's pretty much it.

Who the Emperor is is shrouded in mystery, as nobody really knows.

The Rights and Prime Rights system is quite interesting.

Various survivors will end up with various supernatural powers, such as the power to divide anything into slices, the power to turn body parts into weapons, the power to turn inanimate objects into dolls that do their controller's bidding etc.

Honestly, the idea is quite cool.

The premise itself is not half bad, and I really like the potential that such a setup has.

Sadly, this is where all the nice things I have to say about this show end.

The synopsis of episode 1, which I just described to you, may make it sound like a genuinely interesting plot with very many twists and turns that might seem very compelling, at first glance. Trust me, I thought the same after watching that episode.

It looked so cool and interesting that I was hyped to see more.

But then, as more and more episodes came out, and as I watched one after another, I soon began to realize one crucial flaw with the show: the fact that it's very boring.

This particular show has a very good setup, with a highly interesting premise. The problem with this plot, though, is its lackluster execution.

The way the story is written, it feels like it was a deliberate choice from the author to make the beginning to be so compelling and interesting, just to attract a lot of newcomers to the story. But as the plot evolves, you soon realize that there's not much more it has to offer, beyond an interesting beginning.

My main gripe with the show is that it's constantly about strategizing. That's it. That's what all the characters do in this show: they talk a lot and they strategize at each and every corner, whenever a new piece of information is revealed. That's all they do.

With a premise like this one, you'd expect for there to be a lot of action, a lot of cool fights using supernatural powers and inventive techniques.

But really, that's just wishful thinking. There is very little action in this anime, with the very few fights that there were in the first 10 episodes being very dull, short and unimpressive.

In fact, I, for the life of me, cannot recall any action sequence from this anime, despite me having just finished watching its first 10 episodes. The fact that it had such little impact on me is very concerning.

Most of the conflicts in this show are resolved by simply talking. That's it. It's just talking. All they do is talk things over. Even when it's with an enemy or an obvious threat, they either talk it out to reach a common consensus or they just run away. That's how most of the conflict resolution works in this show, at least until the tenth episode when they deal with the Emperor.

Some might say that that's the realistic approach, as most human conflicts in real life resolve through talking most of the time, but I will argue that realism isn't always a good thing. In fact, realism is usually a very bad thing, especially in fiction where the entire purpose of it is to escape reality in the first place.

I don't want realism in a show where the characters acquire supernatural powers. I want epic fights. And this show did not deliver on that front.

Strategizing might also seem like a good approach to take with a premise like this, since I believe that there are many people that like stories with a sophisticated plot where you have to follow the plans of the main cast, but even that doesn't really work here. The issue is that a lot of rules of the game are hidden, with Prime Rights allowing players to change the rules of the game at their will, when they want to.

This pretty much means that the author of this story can pull out anything out of their ass whenever they feel like it, and use the It's a Prime Right so anything is allowed card as an excuse. I don't want to get into specific examples, since that will bring about spoilers, but I will say that using this rule, even death was reversed at one point, which nullifies any impact that dying has in this show (which is a problem when the entire selling point is this being a DEATH GAME).

And the characters are genuinely so one-dimensional as well.

Saneatsu has no real personality, outside of being intelligent. That's his whole personality, besides wanting to stop the Emperor. That's what defines him.

His friends aren't much better, all of them being generic characters that are one-note and bring little to the table.

The only good thing I can say about this anime that genuinely entertained me were the last couple of episodes that led up to Saneatsu's team confronting and eventually defeating the Emperor.

That last confrontation, as well as Saneatsu's plan, were well thought out, although a bit fragile as well. That plan seemed to rely on a lot of things being just in the right place at the right time for it to work. If anything was misplaced or mistimed in any way, it feels like it wouldn't have worked at all. The fact that everything lined up just right at the end felt a bit convenient but, honestly, I was so glad the show ended that I didn't care anymore.

But wait! Did I say ended?

Funny you say that. Because, after the tenth episode ended, I was pretty much certain I was done with this show.

But then, next week came, and I soon realized that the show continued to be updated on Crunchyroll. And, to my horror, I saw another eleventh episode being added. Horrified, I went ahead to watch it, only to discover that it was a recap episode.

Yes, this means that the show wasn't close to an end. There were still more episodes to come into the future.

The show decided that ending it at the point where the antagonist was defeated wasn't good enough for a finale, so it said Let's add more to the story by adding new characters and a new antagonist as well in the most contrived artificial fake-out of an ending I have ever seen.

Why, oh why do you torture me so, show?

I'm just....done. That's all I have to say. I'm so done with this BS.

The fake-out ending that it had, while contrived and not very satisfying, was a good point to call it quits. Why prolong it any further than that? I haven't seen a show so desperate to pull the curtain at the last second and shout But wait! There's MOOOOREEE like that since the Code Geass anime ended its first season.

Like, why are you doing this?! Who are you trying to impress?

If it's me the show was doing this for, I'll tell you one thing: I wasn't impressed. In fact, I quit watching this show entirely after episode eleventh.

Had this show ended at the tenth episode, I would have said that it was serviceable (not good but serviceable). Now, I cannot even say that.

I'm sure fans will say that this is the point from which it gets better (and, for all I know, they might be right), but I don't care anymore. If the first half of a show is crap, I see no reason to keep watching it just in the hopes that it might get better. If you want me to spend my time on you, you have to earn it, and this show didn't.

After watching the first episode, I went to Wikipedia, only to discover that this anime is actually an adaptation of a manga that's been around since September of 2013. At first, I was very surprised by this discovery, and I was asking myself what took it so long to get an anime adaptation, after more than a decade later.

But now, after watching the first ten episodes, I now see why. This makes too much sense to me, now.

This is a manga series and it makes sense that the manga author would try to prolong this story to infinitum. After all, this is how the guy makes a living for himself. So I can see how he'd stretch the story as much as possible, to keep earning money from sells of his manga.

My only issue with that is, though, that if this was indeed the work of a manga story that keeps getting stretched and elongated continuously, then the execution really needed to be better, to entice me to keep watching. Long running anime series that are adaptations from manga do exist, and they are for manga that have been longer running than this one has. Obvious examples include One Piece and Naruto, who everyone know quite well, although you can point to many others as well if you want to.

The point is, those other series did a better job at managing an interesting story and keeping the readers invested. This one didn't do that for me.

I've rambled enough. I'm done with this show.

This is the very first time since I've began covering anime TV series in this blog that I ended up dropping a show. I genuinely avoid dropping TV shows because I think it's in poor taste to do so.

However, I just couldn't force myself to go through with this one. In fact, it was an effort to even get to the tenth episode and not drop it earlier. The fact that the show decided it wanted to keep on going after that while using a fake-out ending no less, felt like a spit in the face to me. I just couldn't take it.

So yeah, I didn't finish this one, nor do I plan on doing so. I don't care if it's unprofessional of me to write about a TV show without finishing it. To me, the show itself was unprofessional even for existing. So no, I have no regrets.

It's that time of the year again; the time where I rank all the anime that I have watched in a given season and tell you how much I (subjectively) enjoyed them.

This time around, I've decided to watch 10 anime series once again, so this can technically be called a top 10 anime list, although, obviously, it's not much of a top 10 list when 10 is all that I have watched at all.

In all fairness, though, not everything on this list is worth a watch and I would personally say that the 10th item on this list (i.e. the TV show that I enjoyed the least out of this whole ranking) is a series that everyone should avoid watching at all costs, in my humble opinion. Maybe I am wrong about this, given how I haven't even watched the entirety of that TV show (yes, I dropped it while it was still airing; it was that bad), but I'll get to that when I get to that specific show's occurrence in this list.

With all of that said, my last note that I want to leave you off on before I get to the actual ranking is, again, the fact that all of these anime are ones you can find on Crunchyroll as of the making of this blog post (or at least, they are accessible on Crunchyroll from Romania, specifically, given how geoblocking is a thing).

Now, let's get down to it.

1. Atri: My Dear Moments

I don't think it's a surprise that I picked this show from Crunchyroll's 2024 summer lineup.

There will be many people that might not have heard much about this show, who aren't aware of what it is or who might not even care much for it. Hell, before watching it, I wasn't very knowledgeable about it, myself.

But, the moment I saw the short preview for the show on Crunchyroll, I had the feeling that this was going to be something special.

I don't know how to put it in any other way but, sometimes it's very obvious, even from the preview of a show, that the staff working on the project had put their heart and soul into making it and that it will be a very special treat. It's hard to describe that feeling but, after watching enough anime, you'll get to understand it eventually.

This is one such special show.

Even from episode 1, I though to myself “Yeah, this is different than all the other anime from this season” and, lo and behold, I was right.

But let's not get too ahead of ourselves! I'll start out by describing the first episode now.

A young 17 year old boy named Natsuki Ikaruga awakens, one day, at the sight of Catherine, an adult woman that he's acquainted with, in his room, smiling at him in anticipation for the good news she's about to convey.

Catherine informs him that she had been informed by a trustworthy source of a possible treasure that they can get their hands on, quite easily, to make quick money.

Natsuki, knowing full well of Catherine's shady past and unreliable sources, is skeptical of this news but decides to humor her nonetheless and goes along with her request.

Later on, Natsuki's childhood friend, Minamo Kamishiro, also arrives at Natsuki's ship (where he lives at), and tries to convince him to join her in going to school, something which Natsuki adamantly refuses to partake in.

Natsuki had been living an unfulfilling life. He had lost his right leg in a tragic childhood event.

Moreover, the entire planet had become victim to a strange rise in sea levels that had engulfed most of the land and continents, leaving behind only a small fragment of humanity who are now struggling to survive by living in whatever small land areas are still above the waters.

No one knows what the cause of this mysterious sea level rise is, but it's quite clear that it's had a devastating effect on the entire planet.

The island that Natsuki, Minamo and Catherine are currently living on is only a small land mass that's also slowly being devoured by the sea, everyone merely waiting for the inevitable to happen and for them to lose their homes too.

Natsuki had traveled, back when he was younger, to the mainland to study so that he can learn how to potentially fix the planet but, sadly, he had given up on doing so when he realized how difficult this would be. He eventually would end up blaming his missing right leg as the reason for his failure and him having returned to the island, even though his grandma, who was a marine geologist and who had predicted the sea level rise but nobody believed her at the time, would scold him for having turned out to be a failure.

Fast-forward to the present and now Natsuki, after having recently gone through his grandma dying a month prior and struggling to use a malfunctioning artificial limb to compensate for his missing leg, is in desperate need for money just so he can buy a new prosthetic leg for himself and replace his current one.

As such, even though he dislikes it, he has to go along with Catherine, for even the slightest chance that she might be on to something.

Catherine tells Natsuki that the treasure she was talking about is something that was hidden in his now-deceased grandma's house, which had been engulfed by the waters.

The only way to reach the house now is by using Natsuki's submarine.

Minamo, worried that Catherine might eventually backstab and kill Natsuki the moment he does recover his grandma's treasure, decides to join them in their adventure, to protect him.

As such, they embark on a journey and Natsuki uses his submarine to descend into the ocean waters and travel to the underwater area where his grandma's house used to be, while Minamo and Catherine wait on the ship above the waters.

As Natsuki descends into the deep water and reaches the house, he doesn't find any treasure but, instead, finds a strange glass capsule that seems to hold a big doll in it.

As Natsuki approaches it to inspect it closer, the doll opens her eyes and it turns out that she is conscious, startling him.

Natsuki realizes that the doll in question is actually a robot in human form, also known as a humanoid in that world.

As he ascends back to the surface, the young boy slips when exiting his craft and falls into the water, beginning to drown when the humanoid from earlier swims up to him and gives him mouth-to-mouth to share air with him to keep him alive, effectively saving his life.

After the girls save the two and bring them onto dry land, the humanoid reveals to everyone there that her name is Atri and that she is an old generation humanoid, a model that's been discontinued in the past, and that she had been built and kept alive by Nonko, Natsuki's grandma.

Atri is a very cheerful, 14 year old looking girl, very energetic and a self proclaimed “high performance” humanoid.

She wishes to be reunited with Nonko, her master, to continue to follow her orders but, it's then revealed to her by everyone that Nonko had already passed away and that, because of this, her new master should logically be Natsuki, her grandson.

Atri agrees and so she designates Natsuki as her new master. Since she's a humanoid, she's programmed to follow her master's orders, at all costs.

Not having much use for a humanoid, though, Natsuki and Catherine decide to see if they can sell her instead, seeing how this was most likely what was actually the treasure that Catherine had heard about.

So, Natsuki and Catherine travel to a local wares market where Natsuki, taking notice of Atri's worn down legs, decides to buy her new shoes to wear.

After consulting with an expert about how much she is worth, they learn that Atri, due to being a discontinued old model that cannot be acquired anymore very easily, is actually worth a lot of money, which makes Catherine very excited.

Natsuki, however, is a bit hesitant to the idea of selling her, seeing how she had just saved his life.

Atri then reveals to them that they should wait before selling her, since she apparently has a very important mission that she has to fulfill first, a mission that's been instilled into her by Nonko since she was created.

When they ask Atri what that mission is, Atri, while trying to remember it, claims that she had forgotten and she can't remember what that is, yet.

Both Natsuki and Catherine are in disbelief, seeing how Atri is a robot and yet she actually forgot her most important mission, prompting Natsuki to call her a “piece of scrap”, which apparently was used as a racist slur against robots in that world, making Atri very angry at him.

Still, because of this revelation, they decide to not sell her that day just yet, but wait off until tomorrow.

As they are traveling, Catherine insists on continuing to sell her, since they need the money, and Natsuki reluctantly agrees with her.

Catherine asks Natsuki to give Atri the order to join her to her house, since she's worried that Natsuki might run away with her and sell her on his own.

Natsuki agrees, gives Atri the order, and she hops onto Catherine's motorcycle to follow her home. As Catherine accelerates and the both of them leave Natsuki behind, Natsuki notices how one of Atri's shoes, the ones he had bought her earlier that day, had fallen off just before they left, prompting him to try to run after them, only to fall behind due to his defective prosthetic limb.

He laments at how pathetic and worthless he is, having to sell his grandma's property for money, and decides to return home to his ship and sleep for the night.

There, he has one of his recurrent nightmares that forces him to awaken, scared, only to find Atri, for some reason now in his bedroom, trying to comfort him after that nightmare.

So ends the first episode.

With a summary like this, it's pretty clear that this will be a plot heavy show.

Even from the first episode, it was packed with a lot of content that it had to go through, revealing the characters, the world, their motivations and their personalities, and also setting up the story.

I will admit that I felt that this episode was a bit rushed, seeing how choke-full of content it was and how quickly it seemed like it wanted to burn through it, but I get it. This is a 13 episode anime, after all, and there's only so much plot you can fit into those few episodes.

That, and given the huge amount of backstory that needs to be filled in to describe the characters, their backgrounds and their life, is also a huge task that needs to be accomplished.

I recently had gotten a brand new OLED TV just before I started watching this show and boy, I will say, this anime is gorgeous to look at on a big screen; the shots of the sea, the sunsets, the crisp clean quality and the vibrant colors popped right off the screen. I might say that this was the best looking show of this lineup, or even the best looking anime TV series that I've personally seen, in recent years.

This ain't movie quality budget, but it's as good as you can get for a regular TV series. I really hope I can get my hands on a Blu-ray for this show, when and if it gets released for region B.

Besides this, when looking up this show on the web, I noticed something peculiar about this: this anime is based on a visual novel of the same name, developed by Frontwing and Makura, the creators of another visual novel series named The Fruit of Grisaia which, incidentally, I did play.

The story for the visual novel was written by Asuta Konno, who had also wrote the plot for another visual novel called If My Heart Had Wings, although I am not familiar with that one.

I tried to look up the visual novel that this show was based on, only to discover that, among other things, it isn't technically an eroge, mainly because the original game did not contain any sexual content in it, whatsoever. Normally this isn't a big deal with visual novels sold on Steam, since developers of said novels usually publish patches that add the missing content into the game after it's already been installed on the system, but there was no such patch here, to be found.

This means that this visual novel was made, from the ground up, to have no erotic content in it whatsoever since day one.

This might seem like an unimportant bit to focus on, but, seeing how one of the developers of this game was Frontwing, who is famously known for their selection of eroge, this feels like an outlier.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but I have a special kind of appreciation for these types of games, the kind that are visual novels but that also have zero erotic content in them. Given how over-focused and hyper-fixated the modern Japanese visual novel market is on erotic scenes and mature content, it feels so special seeing one example of such a game that said “No, we're not doing that. We have an important story to tell, and we can't risk botching that over some shallow crap like that” and set itself apart, when doing so.

I tip my hat to that. They have earned my respect.

That and the other developer for this game, Makura, is also the developer of another visual novel called H2O: Footprints in the Sand, an old game that was adapted into an anime by Studio Zexcs back in 2008 and which, incidentally, I have watched and I consider an old underrated gem, from a bygone era of the anime industry.

So yeah, I knew just by seeing those that developed those predecessor games, that I was going to like this story. All the signs were there, pointing me to it.

And yeah, no surprise, I was hooked on it.

If I had to boil this show down into its most basic idea, it's the old tale of the forbidden romance genre, one which I'm also very fond of.

The idea of a human falling in love with a robot is an old trope in literature, and has been for a very long time, but this adds some new spins onto it.

The main thing that this show does that I find to be quite original, is the fact that the show puts into perspective what it means to “love” and have a “heart” in a new way.

I won't go into spoilers, since I feel like this definitely needs to be enjoyed by oneself, but I will say that I like how they handled the fact that Atri is a robot and would have a difficult time understanding human emotions.

The conclusion that they made and how they explain away her behavior, while still making a romance involving her work, is quite clever.

Also, I did find it very ironic that she was arguably the most colorful and charismatic character out of the whole main cast, despite being the only one who was a robot.

Initially I wasn't expecting this to turn out to be a romance though. I've seen instances where an anime would feature a kiss in the first episode of a TV series, but then abandon the whole romance plotline and instead focus on something different while conveniently ignoring it (I'm looking at you, Isuca) , but this thankfully didn't do that. It said that it was going to pursue a romantic arc and it went ahead and did it.

Granted, I will complain a bit about the romance in this show by saying that it was very rushed and felt artificial.

The relationship between Natsuki and Atri felt very spontaneous, considering how they only allocated 2 episodes to it to get it established and then went ahead and used it as a source of drama, later on.

I don't want to sound unfair towards the show, since I understand that budget limitations probably meant that they couldn't extend this anime to more than 13 episodes in length, so some compromises had to be made, somewhere.

It's just that, when the whole structure of your story relies on that one element, I kind of want it to be treated more organically and given more time to develop.

But alas, you can't have everything.

Then there's the elephant in the room that was so subtle that I didn't even realize it myself until the show had to point it out to me but there's a significant age gap between our romantic leads, Natsuki and Atri.

Natsuki, in the show, was 17 years old, while Atri looked like a 14 year old girl. For what it's worth, Atri is actually way older than 14 years, seeing how she was a robot that was created by Nonko to be Natsuki's mother's partner when she had been a child, but I know that most people won't care about that excuse.

Frankly, an age gap of only 3 years didn't bother me and, while Atri was clearly shown to be shorter in height than all the other characters in the show, that was so subtle my mind didn't even register it until they mentioned her apparent age.

If you are someone that finds these issues too glaring to ignore, I advise you to skip this show. The age gap thing wasn't that big a deal for me, personally, but I've also been desensitized to it in the past before, usually with way larger age gaps than this one, to the extent that I didn't even notice this one.

And if the issue is that Atri is too young-looking for you, I can absolutely understand that but, then again, I've seen way more mainstream support for couples like Kazuma and Megumin from KonoSuba, and Megumin in that show was even younger looking than Atri is in this one (and yeah, I am one of their supporters).

But I'm leaving that out in the open so that you can make an informed decision for yourself.

But aside from the seemingly rushed romance that the show had, my other complaint is that it's still full of cliches that have been used before, many times.

Cliches like how generic the villains in this are. There was one villain that made only a brief appearance in the beginning but was quickly forgotten about later on, that felt so terribly one-note and so shallow that I was rolling my eyes with all the scenes with him in it.

Like, his character was so over-the-top evil that it was actively taking me out of the show and boring the hell out of me.

Or how, in a flashback scene, the reason why a young character is on the verge of dying is due to bullying from her classmates.

Don't get me wrong, I understand that these types of things happen and they should be very much called out and discouraged; it's just that, the people in that flashback were so nonchalant and shallow that they were actively cheering on suicide, which I found too over-the-top and ridiculous.

I'm all for calling out bullying as evil, but the show goes to great lengths to have straw-man arguments that feel so shallow that they don't even apply to real life anymore. I found that scene so implausible (especially since it was taking place at a school, with at least one teacher there) that it was ruining the illusion for me.

Or, even the romance part suffered from cliches as well, since the show needed to squeeze in the fact that Atri was actually the mysterious unknown girl from Natsuki's distant past that had saved him and made him fall in love with her, just so that they can manipulate his character into falling in love with her faster in the present.

It's cliches like these that bother me, since I feel like this show is above them but still ends up relying on them to save time, since there's only so many episodes it has in its budget.

Then there's the plot holes and inconsistencies that normally I want to ignore, but then when I actually think about what's going on, I realize that there are glaring issues with this story. Stuff like how, towards the end of the show, we finally find out Atri's true mission, her true purpose that she had, and yet for some reason, despite her having to fulfill this very important role, her creator, Nonko, had set her up in an underwater capsule to be discovered by others, which would allow her to go astray and wander around while interacting with other people, including her grandson (something that could have caused her to be killed, injured or sold to the point where she wouldn't be able to fulfill her mission any longer, as was made obvious over the course of the anime). Why not just set her to wake up on her own in the place where she always needed to be to fulfill her purpose, from the very beginning, so that she wouldn't have to rely on others to help her? Why go about this convoluted way to get her to arrive there?

Or how Nonko, despite having this very important thing she needed Atri to do, kept her grandson in the dark rather than employing his help in assisting Atri to do her job, which would have been way easier, rather than keeping all of this a secret from him and having Atri reveal this to him herself, in the future.

It's little tidbits and inconsistencies like these that really annoy me, since I genuinely feel like this plot could have been so much better, had it only gotten a couple of more rewrites.

But, either way, I still loved it.

I've always been a big fan of the forbidden romance genre, and I did enjoy the drama that came up when discovering why Atri's model was discontinued. I like the angle that they were approaching it from, and I've been a big fan of seeing this style of romantic drama done well.

This is basically what Vermeil in Gold had wanted to be, had it been written with more forethought put into it. This show did it right, Vermeil did it wrong, and I'm so glad to finally see an anime attempt to do this trope justice after so many years of waiting.

Granted, like I said, this show still has its flaws and inconsistencies, but it's miles ahead of what Vermeil and so many other romances before it, did.

However, with that said, because of the issues that I've mentioned, I still won't say that I like this show more than other romance anime that I've taken a liking to, over the past years, like Call of the Night (which, sadly, isn't on Crunchyroll). Those other shows did the romance aspect far more organically and enjoyably than this show did, it didn't rush things and it evolved the characters in a way that made me actually root for them.

Here, I was also rooting for the main couple, but it felt a bit artificial and forced, a feeling that I was pushing to the back of my mind, but was still there, nonetheless.

Hell, even on Crunchyroll, I feel like there are better romance anime than this one as well, that are less cliched and take their time to develop things properly, like Tonikawa: Over the Moon for You, where the romance felt more believable once again, and more natural.

But, still, I enjoyed this show and respect it for what it is.

And the ending did left a very nice taste in my mouth, a feeling which I wasn't expecting to feel to the extent that I did. It felt timeless, almost like it was a very unique and satisfying ending to a tumultuous and exciting story that went full circle. Seeing how much the protagonist had progressed from being the shallow husk of a human being that he was in episode 1 to what he had become in the final episode made me smile and appreciate the journey that he had taken.

That and, as a final compliment to this show, I respect how little pandering and focus it spent on the whole environmental aspect of its story. With a story like this, this felt like prime ground to talk about how important climate change is and how we should all work against global warming, cutting down emissions, and doom tripping us into how this could become our world if we don't take action now.

The fact that the show didn't take that route and never became preachy or self important about these issues didn't get lost on me, and I appreciate it for having the maturity and self restraint to not fall into those lesser obsessions.

Overall, this was a very enjoyable experience.

I have a feeling that I will remember this show for years to come, maybe even decades. It's one of those shows that, despite its flaws, was executed very well and it had the right heart to get across a timeless message. The same way that I still remember to this day H2O: Footprints in the Sand and how memorable and impactful it was, the same way I remember watching Yosuga no Sora and remember how traumatizing it was and yet how pure and emotional, I will probably remember this show as well.

For all its flaws and inconsistencies, it had one thing going for it, and that's the fact that, at its core, it had a beautiful, yet flawed heart.

2. Sengoku Youko (Season 2)

Well, I'm happy to announce that this show has finally got a new season.

I was afraid that Studio Whitefox might pull another Re:Zero on us and take their sweet time to make a new season of this show as well, but thankfully the wait was mercifully short this time around.

If you wish to hear my thoughts on the first season, you can read them here.

Basically, a TL;DR of the first season is that this swordsman-in-training named Shinsuke joins a wise fox girl named Tama and a young sage named Jinka in their quest to make the world a better place and, on their journey, they will encounter many difficult to deal with supernatural creatures named katawara and will, sometimes, also have to fight against a group of spiritually powerful Buddhist monks named the Dangaisyuu.

The ending of the first season really left a mark on me, and I was intrigued and wanted to see where this story will go.

This, I'm happy to report, is a worthy continuation of that story that elevated it to new levels. To keep it short, I will say, I am glad that I continued watching this TV series.

This continuation covers the life of Senya, a young boy that is incredibly strong, for having thousands of creatures embedded in his body that he can control at will.

Back during season 1, Senya was a minor character and an enemy to our main cast.

In this new season, he's the protagonist who, for some unknown reason, woke up one day and realized that he was suffering from amnesia, him having forgotten his own identity and his entire past life.

He is guided by Shinsuke, the protagonist of the first season, who acts almost like a father figure to him, keeping him under his tutelage despite them having been enemies before Senya had lost his memories.

Tama and Jinka are nowhere to be found yet, at least in the first episode.

Also, a new girl character around Senya's age gets introduced, named Tsukiko, who Senya immediately befriends.

Unsure of what to do next, Senya listens to Shinsuke and follows him everywhere they go.

One fateful day, all the children in the village where they were living in get kidnapped, during the night, by a group of katawara that wanted to eat them but Senya immediately defeats them using his powerful morphing body, which he discovers that he can control.

The children are impressed by his abilities and Tsukiko's own family are happy to welcome Senya into their home, her father even suggesting that he should consider marrying her.

After that happens, the village gets visited by a corrupted mad god that attacks Senya, out of the blue, forcing the latter to defend himself.

During their combat, Senya gets thrown back and, one of the blades protruding from his body, accidentally slices Tsukiko's father, killing him.

Eventually Senya defeats the mad god but is very remorseful, seeing how he had been the cause of Tsukiko's dad's death.

The next day, trying to avoid causing more commotion there and suspecting that the reason why that mad god had appeared in such a remote place was because of their presence there, Shinsuke decides to take Senya and leave the village with him but, before they exit, they find Tsukiko begging them to allow her to join them in their journey and train her so that she can also become stronger.

Thus ends episode 1 (of season 2).

I liked this continuation.

I was a bit put off, initially, when seeing that this new arc changed the protagonist to Senya, a character who I didn't care much for during season 1, but I quickly grew to like him. Senya seems like a good kid, a bit of a stick figure initially but he eventually shows that he has many sides to his personality.

The personal conflict that he ends up having, hating his own body and pledging to find a way to turn his body into a normal human was very interesting to me, especially since it was literally the opposite goal that Jinka had had during season 1.

The eventual relationship that will grow between Senya and Tsukiko was a bit cliched, though, since I didn't feel like this show needed a romantic component to it, but it was still passable. Tsukiko turning into a damsel in distress later on, felt unnecessary and boring but I like how, after a time skip, she becomes stronger and manages to hold her own in battles, especially since she has a strong desire to become more powerful after seeing her father die before her eyes.

There were more things that I liked in this season than I did in the first one. For one, Senya has more interesting things happening to him, given that he is a very strong individual that holds a lot of power, so naturally he will end up living an eventful life.

The battles that Senya has are very impressive and the fluid animation from the first season thankfully carried over to here.

I also liked the age progression that some of the characters had. Yes, there is a time skip this season where a lot of the characters age up a significant bit, and I liked how they end up being.

Tama felt just as mature as she was before, although she did change her personality ever so slightly after the time skip.

I also like how her love for Jinka didn't fade at all.

If I were to nitpick at all, my only gripe with this new season is that very little is revealed about the antagonists and their goals, although that's going to be delved into in the future, I'm sure.

And also, just before I end this review, I want to commend this season for having the best opening and ending of the entire 2024 summer lineup that I'm reviewing in this blog post, by a lot. I adored both the songs and the visuals of the opening and the ending, they were incredible.

Clearly Studio Whitefox wanted to make something special here, and that shows.

I can't wait to see more. I want to see Senya's journey and find out what will happen to everyone and their lives in this universe.

3. Too Many Losing Heroines!

This one was a very interesting one.

Out of all of the shows of this particular lineup, this one was the one I had the least amount of expectations for.

After the first episode, I was even more confused than before about where this show would be heading but I still decided to continue watching, hoping that it would go in interesting directions.

So, let's start with a look into the first episode before anything else.

First year high school student Kazuhiko Nukumizu is enjoying reading one of his favorite novels at a local cafe when he, out of the blue, just so happened to notice the voice of one of his classmates, Anna Yanami, talking with a friend of hers at a different table nearby.

Yanami was speaking to Sōsuke, a childhood friend of hers, who was having trouble getting over the fact that another girl that he was having feelings for was planning on moving to another country.

Feeling sorry for him and wishing to be supportive of his feelings, Yanami advises Sōsuke to pursue his feelings and encourages him to go after her nonetheless, so he can confess to her properly and let her know of his feelings for her.

Emboldened by her encouragement, Sōsuke promptly runs out of the cafe to chase the girl at the airport, leaving behind a heartbroken Yanami who was very conflicted with herself, since she also had romantic feelings for Sōsuke.

Seeing how Sōsuke had left, Yanami glances at the soda cup that he had been drinking from and, after a moment of hesitation, she grabs it and begins sucking the remaining soda out of it through its used straw, effectively having an indirect kiss.

However, while she was doing that, she just so happened to notice Nukumizu's shocked and disappointing stare at her, as he had witnessed the whole scene from a couple of tables away, unbeknownst to her.

Feeling the social judgment of having a classmate catch her in the act of desperately engaging in an indirect kiss after, effectively, being dumped by Sōsuke, she immediately moves to Nukumizu's table and starts defending herself to him, as a last ditch effort to prevent him from spreading weird (albeit truthful) rumors about her in their class.

Nukumizu is now in the awkward position of having to be supportive and kind to this girl that had just been rejected by her childhood friend, while also trying to cut the conversation as short as possible, since he doesn't want to get involved in Yanami's love life.

Seeing how she's desperately trying to explain herself in great detail to him, unloading all of her frustrations and feelings about her failed relationship with Sōsuke, Nukumizu offers to lend her money for her food there, at the cafe.

However, he soon starts to regret this when he realizes that Yanami begins ordering a large amount of food for herself, him finding out that she's actually a glutton despite her slim figure.

The next day comes and Nukumizu gets summoned by a member of the literature club, another girl from his class named Chika Komari, to their room. When inquired why he was being called for by that club in particular, Komari (who's very socially awkward and has social anxiety when talking to other people) reveals to him that he, apparently, is also registered officially as a member of their club and that the club president has recently become more intolerant of club members that don't participate in the club's activities.

It's then when Nukumizu remembers that, indeed, he had signed up for that club in the beginning (or, more accurately, was pushed to sign up) but had forgotten about it.

In the meanwhile, another girl, Lemon Yakishio, who's also Nukumizu's classmate and a very prolific runner in the track club is trying to get Nukumizu's help in finding out more about Mitsuki Ayano, one of Nukumizu's male friends who she also has a love interest in, despite Ayano already being in an established relationship with a different girl called Chihaya Asagumo.

During lunch break, Yanami complains about how Sōsuke and his love interest eventually got together after her having encouraged him to confess to her, and is now very angry that the couple is asking her to go out with them, her hating the idea of that since she still hasn't gotten over Sōsuke choosing a different girl from her.

Nukumizu tries to console her but he then shares the receipt for the food that Yanami had ordered at the cafe, the previous day, where he had lent her money.

Yanami, after hearing the huge sum of money that she owes Nukumizu after that day, seeing how she doesn't have money herself, decides that the best way to pay him back is to make bento lunches for him for the next couple of days, with Nukumizu having to estimate the monetary value of each bento that she would make for him, until it'll pay off her entire debt to him.

Nukumizu agrees and so begins their strange (and mostly platonic) relationship with each other.

That's the gist of episode 1.

I'll start my review by first saying that, if you're generally put off by harem anime and are scared that this might turn into one of them, I'm happy to tell you that this isn't the case.

Nukumizu doesn't turn into a harem protagonist and this, thankfully, doesn't devolve into that (not that there's anything wrong with harem anime either).

I think that it's pretty safe to say that, by the end of this first season at least, Nukumizu is straight up friend zoned by all of the heroines in this show. He doesn't get to develop any romantic relationships with any of the female main cast, although he does befriend all of them and is supportive of them.

There are some points in the show where it's hinted that Yanami and Nukumizu might, one day, evolve to become closer together than mere friends, but that's just a false flag that gets planted.

At least for now, there doesn't seem to be any push towards that particular relationship and that idea is merely treated like a comedic gag more than anything else.

Now, with that said, the show is still worthwhile to watch.

This is a slice of life high school drama with a lot of jokes in it, pretty much. The main subject that this show tackles is how a girl of their age should handle rejection from their romantic interest; not the most mind boggling of premises, nor particularly intellectually stimulating, but it's still a pretty important subject that's very relevant to young people nonetheless.

Yeah, that's where the title of the show comes from. It's about “losing heroines”, i.e. girls in Nukumizu's class that get their hearts crushed by boys that aren't interested in them (or can't reciprocate their feelings for them).

I love character deconstruction plots, especially those that take drama seriously and explore how various characters deal with rejection in various ways.

That and I love that the show portrays women as being more than simple love hungry plot devices. The heroines in this show (that is Anna, Lemon and Komari) all have various personalities, hobbies, strengths and weaknesses, and they are all, for better or for worse, very quirky and unique.

Nukumizu grows to learn all of these and respect each and every single one of them, albeit while also trying to maintain boundaries and not get romantically involved with any of them.

Simply put, Nukumizu is a good friend that tries to be there for all of them.

The show covers 3 arcs, one for each of the heroines, and how they deal with their insecurities and sadness after being rejected.

I won't go into detail but I will say that it was a very good and mature story, that was tasteful and showed how to deal with a loss but still come out of it without harboring toxic feelings for oneself or for other people.

Overall, it was an interesting drama.

My one complaint is that Nukumizu was a bit bland and uninteresting but that's pretty much by design. The story treats him as a mere witness to the lives of those around him, while the true protagonists are the girls that he surrounds himself with.

I'd love to watch another season of this show, if it were to ever get greenlit.

4. VTuber Legend: How I Went Viral After Forgetting to Turn Off My Stream

Are you surprised that I'm talking about this show?

It's not very well known that, for a small window of time, I was a follower of VTubers on YouTube and, even today, I may still try to watch some stream if I'm in the mood and I have nothing to do.

As such, I felt like it would be fitting to also watch an anime TV series about VTubers like this one.

I'll get straight into the plot of episode 1.

Kokorone Awayuki is an underappreciated VTuber working for the VTube company Live-On. She's part of Live-On's third generation of VTubers, a generation that has many quirky and fun female characters like Hikari Matsuriya who likes to hold gaming endurance streams, Mashiro Irodori who was the artist that designed Awayuki's 3D model and is very interested in drawing sexually suggestive sketches of her character and Chami Yaganase, who does ASMR streams.

Awayuki herself made her character seem like a very feminine snow princess that's always in a dress, delicate and fragile, and who tries to attract an audience using these characteristics.

However, in reality, she is a very crass and nervous person that needs to drink a specific brand of chūhai called Strong Zero just to have the courage to do live streams and who is also, incidentally, sexually attracted to some of her coworkers' models and who masturbates to them during their streams in secret.

Yeah, the show never explicitly acknowledges this, but Awayuki is a pervert and a closet lesbian.

This is in stark contrast with the persona that she's trying to play during her streams, always trying to deceive her audience by pretending to be a very innocent and pure maiden.

This persona, unfortunately, isn't producing good numbers for her, as she's among the lowest performing Live-On VTubers of her generation, which is causing her an inferiority complex.

One fateful day, however, while streaming, she gets very inebriated off of drinking too much Strong Zero, the alcohol causing her severe sleepiness, and she falls asleep before she can turn off the stream, leaving her mic on and snoring and talking in her sleep across the entire night.

During this time, she reveals hints about her true unhinged personality and how she “goons” to other Live-On VTuber's models, which shock her audience.

The next day, Awayuki is awoken by her phone ringing, her realizing that she was being called by her manager. Her manager reveals to her that she had fallen asleep with her mic and stream still on the whole night, and asks her to immediately close them, before she accidentally reveals personal information across the internet.

Awayuki, very surprised and shocked by this development, does this but, at this point, it's too late, as everyone is now aware of Awayuki's true personality.

However, to her surprise, her accidental stream has also caused her to go viral on the internet and now she has garnered a new following.

Awayuki, later on, apologizes to her manager for her indecent accident, feeling very remorseful about what had happened and scared that she may lose her job at Live-On but, surprisingly, her manager seems very receptive to the fact that she had gone viral and is finally blooming in her career as a VTuber, even though it's entirely by accident.

Her manager encourages her to keep producing content for their company and, to Awayuki's surprise, also suggests that she embrace the new persona that the world is now aware of and double down on her raunchy attitude, since this seems to be what her new fans are fond of.

Awayuki is initially very reluctant to take that advice, her having worked months on building the pure and innocent feminine persona for so long only to have it all shatter in just one night but, after contemplating on the matter a bit, (and after receiving supportive comments and encouragement from her fellow coworkers that were surprised to discover this new side of her, especially that she was gooning to some of them in secret), she decides to follow her manager's suggestion and decides to “free herself” of the shackles she had set up, and instead become true to herself and be honest with her fans, at long last.

And so, with renewed vigor, she pops open another can of Strong Zero and starts a new stream where she's finally honest and direct with her followers.

Despite the occasional troll comment and some haters that dislike her change in character, the majority of her followers seem happy with the change and they affectionately call her new character “Shuwa-chan”.

Thus ends episode 1.

Now, there's a lot to unpack from that synopsis but, the basic gist of it can be understood just from the title of this show.

This is the classic girl is faking her persona to gather a following –> she's very unpopular for being fake –> something happens that reveals to the world of who she really is –> she goes viral –> she embraces her new fame and realizes that all that matters is to be honest with her fans and coworkers –> she becomes free and popular.

This is a telltale story that's been done and redone so many times in the past that it's not even worth talking about, anymore. The only original spin that this TV series did was that it's doing that from the context of VTubing, which is a relatively modern phenomenon.

But, then again, while the formula is very cliched and unoriginal, the reason it's still widely used even to this day is because it's very successful and popular. And, well, this is no exception.

I like this show for having an unhinged female protagonist that likes to drink alcohol and get loud during her streams.

Granted, the show likes to think that she is unhinged but, I hate to be the guy that says this, I've seen real life VTubers that are far more unhinged and unapologetic in how controversial they are than Awayuki could ever be.

But I get it. This is a TV series and they could only go so far in making her into a degenerate, before they would get in trouble for having a crazy main character that could be perceived as a bad role model for young people.

The fact that she is a lesbian is also gonna be a point of contention to a lot of people, I'm sure, but the show purposefully only marginally addresses that and then moves on, never actually focusing on it or making any big deal out of it.

Personally I have no qualms with a lesbian protagonist and I liked the fact that the show wasn't overbearing about it and just glanced over it, almost like saying “Yeah, that's the way she is”, but never bringing that into the forefront, since it's not conducive to advancing the plot.

I also loved the cast of the show.

All the girls in it were very lovely and fun to watch. Besides the third generation VTubers that I've already mentioned above, there's also Sei Utsuki who's very sexually forthcoming and likes to play eroge on her streams, Nekoma Hirune who plays comically bad video games and, later on, we also get introduced to the fledgling fourth generation that includes Alice Sōma who is very much obsessed over idolizing Awayuki, Eirai Sonokaze that is suspiciously very knowledgeable about vulgar animal trivia and Kaeru Yamatani, who's been so heavily traumatized by the adult world when doing job hunting that she likes to psychologically regress into a baby whenever she gets the chance to.

To be honest, all of these characters were so fun to watch and their antics made me smile more times than I can count.

The episodes that they get featured in were also very creative. Some of them feature the girls playing various games on stream including horror games, in another they are doing a pop quiz trivia kind of game, in another they are in a survival game in which two of them are traitors and are trying to sabotage the whole group and, of course, there's the final episode that's about doing a collaboration with a coworker that's always been against doing collabs at all but decided, out of the blue, to do one with Awayuki anyways for some (initially) unknown reason.

To put it simply, it was a lot of fun.

I loved the show for how colorful it was, how vibrant the entire cast was and, sincerely, how much it seemed to love the very idea of VTubing as an art form.

My only complaint is the fact that the show felt a bit directionless since there really wasn't any real overarching plot that this season seemed to want to follow. It was just various events in the lives of these VTubers and having them play off of one another. That's it.

I don't particularly mind that since, if you know anything about VTubing you know for a fact that the craft is intentionally aimless by design, but I can imagine that there are people who might take issue with that.

Overall, it was a fun watch. If there would ever be a second season of this show I'd love to follow up on it. I simply love these characters and I want to see what shenanigans they might get themselves involved with again.

5. Spice and Wolf: Merchant Meets the Wise Wolf (Part 2)

And now we'll talk about the second half of this anime. If you're curious about my thoughts on the first half, feel free to read them over here.

To give a very quick summary of my thoughts on the first half, basically I thought it was a fine beginning to a very interesting story. I genuinely liked the setting and the impeccable world building of the show, although I didn't care much for the extremely slow romance between Holo and Lawrence.

This second half will continue with two new arcs.

The first is about a new character named Fermi Amati, who is a very influential and talented fish broker, who, by pure random chance, meets up with Lawrence and Holo. Holo tells him a fake story that the reason she travels with Lawrence despite them not being married or related in any way is that she owes Lawrence a huge amount of money, so now she's forced to accompany him until she pays off the debt.

Smitten by Holo's youthful charm and feminine appearance, Amati decides to take matters into his own hands and makes a contract with Lawrence in front of multiple people in the merchants guild in which he pledges that he will pay off all of Holo's debt to him, in exchange for her hand in marriage.

Seeing this as an easy opportunity to make money, as Lawrence has faith in Holo's loyalty to him and hoping that she would choose to still stick with him even after her fictional debt is payed off, Lawrence signs the contract.

However, later on, things take a turn for the worst when, due to an ugly misunderstanding between Holo and Lawrence, this loyalty is put to the test and Lawrence realizes that he may have legitimate cause for concern.

That's one of the arcs.

The other is about Lawrence and Holo traveling to a new, small and reclusive village named Tereo, in search for information with regards to Holo's hometown, only to discover that the priest there that may have been able to aid them in their travels is suspiciously missing and, in his place, is a young girl named Elsa Schtingheim that's clearly hiding something.

Worse, the town chief also seems to be harboring secrets that he wishes to keep from these two outsiders.

Lawrence and Holo will have to discover this particular town's mysteries, as well as get involved in the town's politics and also have to perform a miracle just to save the townspeople from being persecuted by the church for paganism, later on.

So yeah, that's the gist of this second half.

The world building from the first half still remains a strong point here as well.

The way the show depicts this world, its inhabitants, their beliefs and loyalties, the social structure and economics, and just the feel of the anime, is impressively done.

The show stands out for taking its time to flesh this world out to a high degree.

There's also a genuine air of mystery in this second half, since Lawrence will be forced to interact and also do business with some fairly peculiar individuals, one of which is a female alchemist with a particular knack for the supernatural and pagan stories.

So yeah, this second half is a bit more detached from reality than the first half, with more supernatural elements playing a role, although thankfully they are very much shrouded in mystery and are kept in the shadows.

There are a lot of questions that remained unanswered by the anime with regards to these elements, and I like how that is done to never reveal too much.

And, like I said for the first half of this show, but I absolutely love the rituals and the devotion that the people in this story have for what pretty much is this universe's version of Christianity. While I don't care much for religion in fictional stories, I genuinely believe that you have to have a heavy focus on it if your story has a medieval setting, something which so many fantasy anime, as of late, get wrong.

I can't say for certain but, to me at least, it seems that isekai anime try to avoid the topic of religion to stay as inclusive and politically correct as possible, to not roughen any feathers. The issue is, medieval Europe was a very Christian-focused historical setting, and omitting this particular aspect from their fictional universes can very genuinely make the world that they inhabit seem very hollow and soulless as a consequence.

This story, for better or for worse, doesn't do that and portrays religion as a key point in these people's lives, it being brought up constantly and highlighting the amount of influence that the Christian church has in this world, much in the way it had in real life medieval Europe.

I find that particularly realistic and, regardless of your personal thoughts on Christianity as a real life religion, it would be disingenuous to argue that it didn't play a heavy role in medieval times, pre-Renaissance era.

That and I still adore this show's focus on portraying merchant life and how to make (or lose) money in this world.

It explains things in a very approachable manner, so that anyone can follow the plot points made in each episode about various topics, such as supply and demand having impacts on prices. These things are still very elementary for anyone and, by modern day, they are considered common knowledge, but the show still shows how they can play key roles in various circumstances and make or break someone's career, especially if you're a merchant in that world.

My only complaint about the show is, again, the love story between Holo and Lawrence. I cannot emphasize enough how shallow and slow it develops.

Back when I wrote my opinion piece on the first half of this show, I made it a point to highlight how the romance wasn't grabbing me and I was hopeful that this second half will fix that. It did not.

The romance in this second half moves at pretty much the same glacial velocity that it did in the first one.

The interaction and dialogue between Holo and Lawrence feel specifically designed to act as teases, hinting very playfully that there might be something blooming between the two but never committing itself to any particular direction.

Worse, in this second half, the whole Amati arc left a very bad taste in my mouth, because it showed how brittle their relationship actually is and how easy it is to become undone over a pretty obvious misunderstanding.

Granted, the show tried to patch that by showing that Holo was still leaving clues behind for Lawrence to pick up on, because she still had somewhat of a faith in him that he will come to get her, but it still felt extremely shallow and unnecessary. I dislike when shows introduce a breakup moment in the story just for the sake of padding. Yes, they eventually did patch things up and correct the misunderstanding, but it just felt disingenuous, forced and, most importantly, cliched.

This left me severely disillusioned with regards to the quality of the romance in this story.

And, to make matters worse, this is the end of this season. Unless the studio decides to renew it for another season, the inconclusive state of the romance will remain permanent. The fact that this season had 25 episodes and yet it was still incapable of giving us a happy ending with regards to their relationship proves to me that this is just a bad TV series, at least as far as being a romance is concerned.

Some might say that the fact that the light novels are still ongoing to this day should have made it obvious that the romance was never going to conclude yet as there's still much much more story left to tell, but, even then, that doesn't make me feel any better, and in the off chance that this will never get renewed for another season, it won't change the fact that it was just a horrible tease that had no satisfying conclusion whatsoever.

But I digress.

Honestly, if you're merely wanting to watch this show for the romance, I will heavily suggest that you quit. There just isn't any here; or at least, none of any real substance.

Honestly, I haven't felt so disappointment in a romance anime not delivering since Shikimori's Not Just a Cutie, and while I will say that this is still far better than that atrocity of a TV show, by a long margin, it's still very shallow and dissatisfying.

However, with that said, if you plan on watching this anime for its world building or its topics of trading and focus on merchant life, then I will say that it is absolutely a worthwhile watch. Its medieval setting is very well fleshed out, the mysteries and supernatural elements add a nice spice to it and the characters are somewhat fun and quite intelligent and resourceful.

It's a nice break from the overload of high school anime that are everywhere nowadays and, at least compared to a lot of isekai shows, it does a better job at portraying a realistic universe with genuinely interesting arcs and thought provoking dilemmas.

So yes, I do feel like this show is worth a watch nonetheless.

Would I watch another season of it if it ever came out? I do think that I would. I just wouldn't watch it anymore for the romance aspects though, since I have since given up on that. But for the world building and the characters that inhabit it, I would gladly spend more time in this universe.

This is just part 1 of this ranking. For part 2, please click here.

This is the second part of my ranking. If you also want to read the first part, click here.

6. Kaiju No. 8

And now we arrive at, arguably, the most popular show from this ranking.

I'll be honest, I had high hopes for this one.

Not because I was a fan of the manga that this was based off of, but mainly because Crunchyroll was hyping this anime up, big time.

When the first episode of this anime came up, Crunchyroll introduced this streaming feature, as well as a countdown, where it allowed its users to watch the anime live, as it was being aired. The countdown was there to let users know exactly when the episode would air, as up until then, Crunchyroll users would have to patiently wait for new episodes to roll in, since there was no exact schedule for when they would appear.

Leaving aside whether these features were any good or not, as the userbase on Crunchyroll seemed to have mixed feedback towards them, it was also a big event.

Crunchyroll was hyping this show up like it was the next Attack on Titan, and I was a bit worried whether it would live up to the hype.

Still, given that it was being hyped as much as it was, I eventually felt compelled to at least give it a shot.

And, well, it's time to let you know of my feelings towards it.

But before I get into that, let's start this ranking off with a brief summary of episode 1, first.

Basically, the show introduces us with a big kaiju attacking the city and with the Anti-Kaiju Defense Force successfully eliminating it.

Kaiju are giant monsters that occasionally attack human cities and are treated pretty much like natural disasters. They are pretty mindless, without any rational thoughts or emotions and they simply seem to wreak havoc around them for no reason whatsoever.

The Anti-Kaiju Defense Force is a military group whose sole purpose is with dealing with them whenever they attack and getting rid of them, while trying to minimize the amount of casualties in the process, as much as possible.

Soon after this particular kaiju is dealt with, Hibino Kafka is introduced. He's a 32 year old single man that works for the cleanup company that has to get rid of the dead remains of kaiju.

He is quite experienced at his job, working quite diligently and fulfilling his tasks very well, but is dissatisfied with the way he turned out to be.

Mina Ashiro is the 27 year old captain of the Defense Force's Third Division and is among the most talented members of said Defense Force. She is renowned in Japan for her work in getting rid of kaiju swiftly and without many casualties, with everyone around her recognizing her for her hard work and accomplishments in life.

She and Kafka used to know each other back when they were young kids, with the two of them promising to each other to become members of the Defense Force once they become older, so that they can fight kaiju together.

Kafka still remembers that promise, and yet he is filled with remorse, knowing that, unlike Mina who was very talented, he had applied many times to join the Defense Force alongside her but was rejected every single time.

Now, at the age of 32, Kafka is too old to be eligible to join the Defense Force, and has to resign himself to living the rest of his life working as a regular and underappreciated cleanup worker, who has to clean smelly dead kaiju corpses for a living, while Mina is treated as an overly competent hero that saves lives.

One day, as Kafka goes to work like usual, he meets up with an 18 year old young man named Reno Ichikawa, who also got hired at the same cleanup company and will be joining Kafka's team in disposing of corpses.

Reno is aspiring to also join the Defense Force, and is disappointed when he hears how Kafka was forced to give up on his dream because he eventually got too old.

After a long day at work where they have to dispose of another kaiju corpse left dead in the middle of the city, Reno informs Kafka that the minimum age eligible to join the Defense Force has very recently been raised, so now Kafka can once again apply if he wishes to.

Kafka is happy to hear this and thanks Reno only to then, out of the blue, have another yoju (a smaller kaiju) appear out of nowhere while the two of them were alone and attack Reno.

Kafka saves Reno at the last second, and orders him to run away from them so that he can call the yoju in while he will distract it.

Kafka grabs the yoju's attention and runs away with it following him, trying his best to survive even though he's a mere civilian, but he eventually gets caught by the said yoju, who tries to eat him.

Reno returns and saves Kafka from the yoju in the nick of time (after having called it in), and they both get saved by Mina and her squad that have been dispatched to get rid of it.

Later on, at the hospital where Kafka and Reno are being looked at after their encounter with that yoju, Reno commends Kafka for saving his life from that yoju and says that he was very cool, and recommends he still give joining the Defense Force one last try now that he has become eligible for it again.

Kafka decides to listen to him and vouches to give it one last try but, at the last second, a flying insect-like kaiju appears out of nowhere in their hospital room and shoves itself inside Kafka's mouth, Kafka effectively being forced to swallow it.

A couple of seconds later, Kafka's body transforms and he becomes a humanoid kaiju, complete with an exoskeleton and the full appearance of a human-sized kaiju, but with Kafka's mind controlling it.

Not knowing that said kaiju is actually Kafka, another patient that was passing by immediately phones the kaiju in, and Kafka is forced to flee from the hospital, knowing that they would be after him, while Reno joins him.

Thus ends episode 1.

So yeah, that's the premise.

Episode 1 wasn't very compelling for me. It felt very cliched and slow and it followed all of the beats that most Shonen Jump anime would usually take.

The whole “old man that missed fulfilling his dream and now is sad” trope wasn't grabbing me at all, mainly because, ironically, I am of Kafka's age, and I felt like the show was insulting me for “being old”.

I can understand the idea of wanting to live a better life, regretting the “road not taken” cliche, and all of that, but for some reason it just wasn't pulling me in.

Not helping matters is the entire premise of the show, too. I'll be honest, I've never understood the whole “giant monsters that attack cities” Japanese thing. I was never a fan of Godzilla, I never understood the appeal to it, and this show wasn't doing it for me either.

I just feel like, if giant monsters that would occasionally appear out of nowhere to attack human settlements was indeed a thing in that world, then society and the nature of cities would be very very different to how they are in our world, since humans would naturally build other types of structures that would be more resilient to such attacks, most likely have underground bunkers and other means of adapting rather than having conventional regular cities with tall buildings that are fragile and easy to get destroyed all the time.

The lack of imagination and world building that this show exhibited, as a result, was turning me off a lot.

Moreover, if kaiju were indeed a thing to exist, I would have many questions like “How did they appear? What do they want? How did they evolve?” honestly I would treat it as entirely new species of animals being discovered and I would want a documentary style breakdown to learn how they work.

The show doesn't do that, though, it treating these creatures as mere monsters to be slaughtered, with no emotion, no habits, nothing of any substance about them. They are just killing machines that are plot devices to get the story going. I found that to be so very unimaginative and boring.

The only thing which was kind of grabbing me, to some extent, was the fact that the show was trying to portray Kafka as having the potential and personality of a true hero.

Even though he has a slow body, is unfit and generally not as athletic as his younger peers, Kafka is shown as having the right personality to become stronger and be willing to put himself into danger in order to save others.

I liked that idea.

Honestly, I was hoping for an underdog kind of story, where the moral would be “If you have the right state of mind and the heart for it, anyone can be a hero, regardless of how old or physically unfit they are”, and it would use Kafka to prove that point. That was my hope, at least.

But no, obviously it wasn't going to be that unconventional.

The first episode didn't even end yet and Kafka had to transform into an overpowered kaiju with the strength to decimate an entire city at his will, and the entire point of “even small guys can be heroes” went right out the window with that. All my hopes were smashed into smithereens, just like that.

I've seen other anime like this one, where the protagonist had incredible powers and had the potential to change the course of a war. Anime such as Attack on Titan, Seraph of the End and others where the potential lied in the protagonist, but ultimately what mattered was his heart rather than his powers.

But what made those other shows stand out was their world building, combined with their story and characters. Here, the world building is almost non-existent. It's all about Kafka keeping his kaiju identity a secret (since he later discovers that he can turn back to his human body at will), deciding to join the Defense Force along with Reno, and then be treated by everyone like crap initially for being old and unskilled, only for him to have to prove his worth to everyone and also, in the meantime, have to save his fellow Defense Force companions using his secret kaiju powers every once in a while.

That's the show in a nutshell, and I feel like this story is pretty much Attack on Titan but diluted into just the standard cliches, with nothing new added to it.

The point of the show was to have cool epic fights, that's kind of the highlight of it, and maybe that could have worked but, again, I've seen the overpowered protagonist trope done before. Given the amount of isekai anime that I've seen, that should surprise no one. Just having an overpowered protagonist isn't doing anything for me, anymore, as I've seen epic fights where the protagonist overpowers his enemies so many times already that I'm numb to it.

And the only show that managed to pull off the overpowered protagonist being overpowered and actually being entertaining was One Punch Man; and that's solely because that show was creative in how overpowered a single punch could be, and it was having fun with it.

Here, the show doesn't even seem to want to have fun with how powerful Kafka seems to be in his kaiju form. It just plays it 100% straight, treating it as this cool never-before-seen idea that will blow our minds, even though this isn't the first time I've seen this, and probably won't be the last time, either.

Another example of this idea done right would be Chainsaw Man, where these ideas were utilized to a great extent but there, at least, it felt like the show was having fun with itself and the fights taking full advantage of Chainsaw man's skills.

Here, it's entirely just “Kafka can do an incredibly powerful punch” or “Kafka is super fast and can evade all attacks” or other such tired nonsense. It was just so lame. I mean, grow a tentacle! Spit firebombs! Turn Giant! Do something original!

And the violence in Chainsaw Man was another point that was keeping me glued, because all the punches felt like they had weight and it was bloody and gruesome on every corner. Here, nothing was registering to me. I was seeing the violence, but there was no gore, no blood, no nothing.

It was just....I don't know, it just wasn't doing it for me.

Maybe had I never seen other shows that did these tropes before, like maybe had I never seen Attack on Titan, Seraph of the End, Chainsaw Man*, One Punch Man or anything like them before, maybe, just maybe, I would have felt like this was original and worth a watch. But as is, I didn't.

After seeing enough anime, this one just felt like it didn't bring anything new to the table. It felt like just another Shonen Jump anime that wanted to do the overpowered protagonist idea all over again, reinvent the wheel but doing nothing to make itself stand out.

Honestly, I just didn't enjoy it.

By the time this show was done, I couldn't muster the power to care.

I know there will be fans of this show, particularly people that don't watch a lot of anime and aren't used to seeing these tropes be overused, like they actually are, and that's perfectly fine. Everyone needs to have their junk food, and I feel like there's value in shows like these, regardless of how cliched and recycled they are.

It's just not for me. The action sequences felt weightless and without any impact, the protagonist that wanted more from his life and became overpowered felt cliched, the constant bonding with his fellow Defense Force cadets was boring, the occasional overpowered minor character was cool but I've seen that done better in Seraph of the End or Attack on Titan (where, incidentally, the characters felt cooler), it was just all around a boring experience.

Would I recommend this show? Sure, if you like kaiju or what I described up until now, you might like watching the show. It wasn't doing it much for me, but I will admit that I am a bit of an outlier, since I watched a lot of anime in my life, so I could immediately sense these recycled tropes and realize how tired it was, but for the average occasional anime enjoyer, I feel like they might enjoy this show more than I did. So I'd say at least give the first two episodes a shot, since I feel like it could be worth your while, and then see what you want to do from there.

And would I watch another season of this show if it came out? Honestly, I think I would, just because season 1 ended on a high note and it does make me wonder where the story can go from there, but I won't be as hyped for it as other people might be.

It wasn't a bad watch per se, but it wasn't as great as Crunchyroll was making it out to be, that's for sure.

7. Gods' Games We Play

And now it's time we talk about some games.

This is another one of those shows that I didn't know what to think of when I started watching them, but I was hoping they would turn out to be better than what they ended up being.

Honestly, while Kaiju No. 8 was the most underwhelming show of this lineup, simply because Crunchyroll kept hyping it up as the next big thing that they had, this one didn't even get that much attention.

Sure, it had its fans, but I felt like most people didn't watch this show on Crunchyroll, and that left me wondering why. But, as the episodes of this went by, I soon realized why that was. And the reason was because this show sucked.

So, what's it about?

The show is about a dragon goddess that woke up from a frozen slumber at one of the poles, and broke free from the ice that kept her there.

Immediately after coming out of her hibernation, the goddess, named Leoleshea, asks to meet the greatest Apostle of that world.

Apostles, in this world, are humans who have received Arise, which is a special power that they become capable of controlling, and which confer that Apostle the right to play in the Gods' games, a series of games that Gods have created so that Apostles can compete in them.

Gods have descended in this world onto humanity because they were very bored and have challenged Apostles to play in the games that they created, so that they can prove their wit and intelligence against them. Any Apostle that loses any three Gods' games will lose the right to play in these games for the rest of their lives.

However, any Apostle that manages to win at ten such games will trigger what's known as a “Celebration”. Nobody knows that this Celebration entails, but humanity has agreed to send their Apostles to compete in these games nonetheless.

Fast forward one year, and Fay, a teenage boy Apostle that's very intelligent and talented, returns to his employer, Miranda, after complaining that he had ended up in another dead end in his search for a missing person.

Fay has been searching all his life for a young girl that he remembers to have been his games instructor, who had gone missing some time ago and whom he had never seen since.

Once he returns to their base, Miranda takes Fay to meet Leoleshea, as Fay is believed to be the best and the brightest Apostle that's currently still alive, as he is a rookie at the Gods' games that he, nonetheless, has already won in three times already.

Fay meets this Leoleshea goddess, only to be completely amazed at the fact that she seems to 100% physically resemble the young girl that Fay remembers having played with during his early childhood and which had instilled a love for games to him since then. Leoleshea resembles the person he had been looking for, his whole life, to his amazement.

The problem is that Leoleshea doesn't seem to remember Fay at all, her acting like this is the first time they have met.

Fay is tasked by Miranda to act as Leoleshea's caregiver, as she is extremely dangerous given the fact that she is a god in that world, and has incredible powers that can destroy the entire human race at her whim.

Fay takes up this task and says he wants to introduce himself to Leoleshea, only for her to ask him not to.

Instead, Leoleshea had devised a game for them to play together, in which they would get to know each other.

The game is like the game of Memory, in which players have to pick face down cards on a table and, for every two cards that they pick, those cards get to be turned face up and then, if they match, then that counts towards that player's score. The player with the higher score, at the end, wins.

This game would be similar, except for a couple of differences.

• Instead of using regular deck cards, the cards used in this game will be pieces of paper on which Leoleshea had written key subjects to introduce yourself with (i.e. "Name" or "Blood type"). Each of these subjects come written in pairs, so if a pair is successfully matched by a player, the other player has to truthfully introduce themselves on that subject
• There is one pair of blank cards which, when matched, allows the player that matched them to ask the other player any question of their choice and they will have to answer truthfully to it
• The cards will be flying through the air in circles rather than being placed on a table, with each card having a different orbit and speed, to make memorizing the placement of particular cards more difficult for both of them
• Finally, unlike the traditional game of Memory where, for each time a player successfully gets a matched pair from their picks, they get to have another turn after that, to have the chance to pick a new pair, this game will not have that rule. Instead, the players will only get one single chance to get a matched pair before the turn advances to the next player, regardless of whether they get a match or not

Using the above rules, Fay and Leoleshea start playing the game against each other, to get to know each other better.

Fay quickly proves to be very skilled, as his memory is so good that he can still remember the exact positions of the cards that had already been revealed previously, despite the cards literally flying in circles through the air.

Using this skill, Fay strategically picks the pairs of cards that allow him to find the pieces of information that he was interested in, about Leoleshea.

Leoleshea, for her part, is also very good at this game and she ends up picking the blank cards pair, which allowed her to ask Fay any question of her choice.

She asks Fay, directly, what his end goal is with being her caretaker and, since Fay is bound by the rules of the game to answer truthfully to her question, he admits that his end goal is to figure out, as a god, why she doesn't just return to her realm and what she's doing in the humans' realm.

Satisfied that he had answered her honestly, Leoleshea stops the game and reveals to him that she had come to the human realm to play games with the humans.

After playing a game of tag with humans in antiquity, Leoleshea had hidden herself underwater but, after waiting for so long, she fell asleep and, eventually, the water around her had frozen over, trapping her in ice for millennia, until she had woken up a year prior to these events.

Now, she discorvered, she is unable to return to the gods' realm as the connection between the gods' realm and the humans' realm is only one-way, which means that she is now trapped in the human realm for the foreseeable future and, the only way for her to return to her realm, is to win at the gods' games as well.

Consequently, she wants Fay, who is the brightest Apostle of his time, to team up with her and for them to play the gods' games together, so that they can win together so she can return to being a god once again.

After hinting that she knows what will happen when the first Apostle will win ten times at the gods' games, and after Fay presses her on to explain, Leoleshea reveals that humanity will get to have a wish granted to them (it's actually any number of wishes, as many as they want, given that the games are almost impossible to beat).

Seeing how Leoleshea wishes to participate in these games and how Fay, himself, had already been playing in them as an Apostle and had already beat three of them, he agrees to team up with Leoleshea (or Leshea, as she agrees for him to call her), and they both embark on a journey to play these games together, as a team. Leshea wishes to win all 10 times so she can return to being a god and Fay wishes to find out why Leshea looks so much like the girl from his childhood that had gone missing many years back.

And so ends episode 1.

OK so, right off the bat, I want to say that, just from episode 1, I feel like this show had a lot of potential.

The story intrigued me, a lot, but there were some small issues that I had with it which, while they didn't ruin the episode for me, they did raise a bunch of flags in my mind, that was difficult for me to ignore.

My biggest issue with the show was Fay. He had all the potential to be a truly genius player, and the show likes to portray him as a prodigy of his generation, however, that already made me worried, since I've always hated the overpowered protagonist trope in isekai anime.

Granted, I know that this isn't an isekai anime but, still, the trope is still unchanged, so that caused me issues.

And yeah, I was right to worry, as the “invincible and incredibly powerful protagonist” trope continued to be a severe problem that hampered my enjoyment of this show, all throughout its first season.

I hate it when protagonists are overly fit and talented in the story, so much so that they never even fear the possibility of losing.

Fay has this uncanny characteristic that he's always optimistic and analytical at all times. He's friendly and always has a smile on his face and he never gives up or show any weaknesses.

While that's all nice and cool, it really caused a disconnect, for me at least, when I just didn't see him as human after a point.

Real humans have weaknesses, they have doubts, fears, insecurities, especially in games where the stakes are so high and when, supposedly, the entire human race is putting their hopes on your success.

The fact that Fay never loses hope, never once doubts himself and is portrayed to always be right and come up with the correct solution to the problem at just the right time, it really made me feel like Fay was less of a character and more of a plot device, rather than anything else.

And the simple fact that he was able to literally memorize the placements of the cards in the Memory game against Leshea, despite the cards literally flying in circles in the air at different speeds, made him look so very inhuman to me.

I don't doubt that there are geniuses with incredible visual memory in this world, photographic memory is indeed a thing, but I feel like even those people would have some trouble in a game like this, yet Fay performed flawlessly at it.

That made me feel like he was more of a robot than an actual human being.

And it won't get any better later on, either.

Fay will simply be treated as the always right hero, that always solves the puzzle at the right moment, with the right solution, all the time.

And again, I've said this many times in the past and I'll keep saying it as many more times as I need to: if the protagonist doesn't worry that they might lose in the face of adversity (the way Fay never worries), then I, as the audience of the show, don't see why I should care about said challenge either.

And that, pretty much sums up this show quite nicely for me: I just don't see why I should care about Fay, nor his challenge.

The fact of the matter is that, also, the stakes are quite low.

Yes, Fay is humanity's best bet at winning ten gods' games, so him winning is something I'm supposed to be in support of, but I really couldn't muster the energy to care at all.

The reason why I didn't care for this end goal is that Fay, hilariously enough, has no dreams or wants that he's fighting for.

Literally, the show says that if any Apostle ever manages to win at ten gods' games, then humanity will be granted infinite wishes, yet, ironically enough, Fay is never shown to have any wish that he wants to be granted.

Leshea is the one that is portrayed as wanting to beat the games, but that's simply because she wants to return being a god (and even then, it's implied in the show that she plays the games more for the fun of it, rather than the sole purpose of returning to her original realm).

One could argue, maybe, that Fay's end goal is to find out why Leshea physically resembles the girl from his childhood, but even that plot point got entirely sidelined after episode 1 was over. Why? I don't know. This was only briefly mentioned again in the last scene of the last episode of season 1, to remind the audience that yes, that's still a thing apparently.

I don't get it.

A protagonist that is just an emotionless husk that has no desires, no fears, no insecurities, but is just a genius that likes to play games just for the fun of it, was not doing it for me.

I was constantly asking myself why I should care.

And the sad answer to that is that I shouldn't. And I didn't.

Some might say that the games themselves would need to provide for the reason to care, as Fay may lose his life if he's not careful in the games that he plays but, it's quickly established that Apostles don't even die in these games; in the event that they would normally die, they instead get teleported back to the human realm and receive a loss in their record. If an Apostle receives three losses in total, they lose their rights in playing in the gods' games for the rest of their lives.

And yeah, Fay losing the right to play in the games would be a big deal, since humanity would lose their most talented Apostle and, probably, never get to have their wishes granted, except for the fact that, again, nobody in this show makes a big deal out of needing for their wishes to be granted, in the first place.

Had humanity been on the verge of extinction, starvation, had Fay been living in poverty or anything like that, then maybe I would have a reason to care and want for him to win the right to have his wishes granted. But that's never done, Fay just plays for the fun of it, not out of any necessity.

That just killed it for me.

And couple that with the fact that Fay now has a literal almighty god in his team (namely Leshea), who can pretty much do anything almost, and the odds became very much stacked against the games.

Granted, the way Fay wins is usually through his incredible wit and strategizing, rather than relying on Leshea helping him, but her assistance was really dissipating any sense of impending doom, seeing how powerful she was.

And Leshea won't end up being his only ally: there will be other girls that join him as well, one that can teleport herself or other people that she had recently touched anywhere she wanted, another that has super powered foot kicks and then another, this time another god, that decides to assist him later on.

Oh yeah, did I forget to mention? Most of Fay's allies end up being girls around his age (or female gods that just look like they are his age). Yep, that's right, this is a harem anime as well.

This show felt sleazy with its fan service, I'm not gonna lie.

It tries to put Fay's allies in dubious positions, exposing parts of their bodies in the weirdest of moments. A good example is how they shoehorn a swimsuit episode, in the middle of a gods' game, for no reason other than fan service.

Usually I'm quite forgiving of fan service in anime, seeing how they are done for my pleasure by definition, but, for this show at least, it just felt out of place.

Like, the entire point of the show was to take it seriously and constantly wonder how Fay and his allies are going to win in the current game, only for that tension to immediately evaporate when the story decides that it's time for a swimsuit scene with the girls because, why not? Those are popular, right?

And, I mean, if the fan service was notable, at least, I might give it a pass, but it's the most held back, watered down, fan service I've seen. Like, they show the girls in bikinis for two episodes, just for a couple of seconds each time, with nothing more than that.

I mean, it's nice seeing them in swimsuits, I guess, but this is by no means groundbreaking. Anime has been doing these types of scenes for decades by now. If you're going to be raunchy, at least be raunchy and push the envelope. Be unique!

The fan service feels almost like a studio mandate, a checkbox that executives behind the scenes wanted to check, just for the sake of doing everything they could to gain even the slightest bit more audience for their show. The fan service had no soul or heart behind it.

I was hoping for there to be some romantic progression between Fay and Leshea, but there is none. The story doesn't feel like it wants to commit to anything serious like that.

Literally, the only reason why one would want to watch the show is for the gods' games in it.

And yeah, I will admit, there are some cool ideas behind the games, like games where you have hidden victory conditions, hidden losing conditions, hidden rules, video game mechanics, card games, gambling games, pretty much anything and everything you can think of.

I do like that the games were getting quite creative, although I do feel like certain times, the game should have been over had Fay just asked Leshea to do something specific that would have shortened the game specifically.

There was this one game, where Fay needed to put a flower on top of a pyramid, where I feel like, had he relied on his ally that can teleport, the entire game should have ended very quickly, but the staff deliberately ignored that to prolong the adventure more.

Another time, there was another game where Fay needed to roll a bunch of 20-faced dice in such a way as to have all of them roll to the number 1 to unlock the next event.

Fay literally admitted that it would take hundreds of millions of times to roll all the dice until they would get to that specific outcome, as rolling dice is supposed to be, by design, entirely random, and there were like 5 or 6 dice there.

And yet, even when the story admits that it's impossible, one of Fay's allies manages to roll those 20-faced dice in the correct way just once, and they got the correct outcome of rolling them all to 1. Like, I feel like the story is cheating, whenever it tries to pretend that it's very down-to-Earth logic based but then it resorts to pure incredible luck like that to advance the plot.

I just....I don't get it.

This feels like another one of those anime that, had I been younger, I may have enjoyed it a bit more, given the focus on games, but as a grown adult, I just lost interest. With low stakes, no real end goal from our protagonist, lack of a plot and the occasional unnecessary and watered down fan service that felt out of place, it just didn't do it for me.

Maybe if I played the games myself, I would have liked it a bit better, but as anime is a non-interactive medium that's very linear, I just couldn't muster the will to care. The story always felt like it was Fay's, not mine, which made me not care.

If a new season of this gets announced, I don't know if I would watch it. I'm not saying I wouldn't, but it would highly depend on my mood when picking the shows. I kind of want to give this show another chance with a new season, but I don't know if I'm willing to spend that much time just to risk wasting it on a boring plot like this.

Maybe I will, maybe I won't. Right now, I cannot say.

8. A Condition Called Love

And we finally arrive at the end of this ranking.

It's safe to say that, since it landed on this spot, this is the show which I dislike the most from this particular lineup.

This show is one for which, if a season 2 will ever get confirmed, I won't watch it, nor do I care much for the source material that this was based off of.

But before I can go into why I dislike the show, I should first start off describing its first episode.

The show is about a 16 year old first year high school student named Hotaru Hinase who, one cold winter day while at a local cafe with her friend, they both witness a messy breakup scene between a girl and her boyfriend named Saki Hananoi, a handsome young man who Hotaru's best friend recognizes as a student from a different class at the same school as them.

Left heartbroken, Hananoi leaves the cafe in silence.

Later on, after Hotaru and her friend also leave and separate, Hotaru just so happens to meet up with Hananoi again, who's still dejected from his breakup and is standing alone, on a bench while having snow constantly fall on him because he had no umbrella.

Feeling sorry for him, Hotaru approaches him and positions her umbrella so that both of them can be under it. In those moments, while looking up at her face, Hananoi falls in love with her.

The next day, Hananoi visits Hotaru in her class, at school, and confesses to her in front of everyone, only for Hotaru to reject him.

After school, Hananoi waits for Hotaru at the school's exit and decides to still follow her when she comes out and, when she asks him why he's still after her seeing how she had rejected him, Hananoi says that he should still give her the chance to get to know him before allowing her to make a proper decision.

Hotaru has a good life with her family and her friends, she's happy with the way things are going, but she has never understood feelings of romance or crushes.

When Hananoi asks her about what types of hair styles she prefers, Hotaru casually says that shorter hair is probably better, just because it's easier to wash.

The next day, Hananoi shows up with his long hair cut short, this being obviously because of Hotaru's previous suggestion, which makes her feel uneasy a bit.

Later on, while having another conversation with Hananoi, Hotaru admits that she has never felt romantic attraction towards anyone and, as such, she wouldn't be able to be in a relationship or reciprocate Hananoi's love for her, thus she wants to avoid hurting him by rejecting him.

Hananoi suggests that, her not understanding love isn't an issue and that she should, at least, give a relationship with him a trial just to see how it feels like. He suggests she should try being in a make-believe relationship with him until Christmas, which was already approaching.

Hotaru is unsure about his proposal and doesn't agree to it immediately but allows herself to consider it.

Later on, Hananoi is seen also removing his earrings because he feels like Hotaru might find them too flashy but, when Hotaru suggests that he shouldn't change his looks just because of her and insists that him put them back in, Hananoi reveals that he had lost one of them.

Later that day, Hotaru lends one of her hair pins to a friend while they run around the track field but said friend ends up losing one of the hair pieces there.

Just before they can go on the field to look for the missing piece, it begins to snow outside so the entire field becomes covered in snow.

Realizing that it would be impossible to search for her lost hair pin now, Hotaru decides to leave it and return home.

Later that evening, Hananoi calls Hotaru asking her what the pin looks like, causing her to worry and making her realize that Hananoi was on the track field of their school that night, rummaging through the snow trying to find Hotaru's missing hair pin.

When Hotaru also arrives there and confronts him on this, she reprimands him for not thinking enough about his own well being, as his hands were already frozen from rummaging the snow and she takes him to the nurse's office to take care of him.

Finally, the next day, Hananoi returns Hotaru her lost hair pin, him saying that this time he had waited for the snow to melt before he went again to search for it. In response, Hotaru also gives him his missing earring back, and she says she had found it by the school's vending machine.

Seeing how much he had put himself through just for her sake, Hotaru eventually says that she wants to give dating him until Christmas a shot.

And so ends episode 1 of the show.

OK so, yeah, this show is a slice of life high school romance story.

It's about this girl, Hotaru, who never understood romance and is otherwise very casual and sheepish when it comes to love, and has her discover what being in a relationship actually entails.

Hananoi will be her very first boyfriend and they will have to navigate the realities of being in a relationship with each other, for the first time, despite Hotaru's inexperience.

Honestly, I liked the premise of this show, and I genuinely saw a lot of potential behind it.

The first episode seemed pretty promising and nice, although Hananoi left me with a pretty bad taste in my mouth due to how much of a stick figure he was.

I hoped that as episodes went by, this would improve over time and become less of an issue but, really, it didn't.

This is where I get into my first and main problem with this show: I really dislike Hananoi, a lot.

Historically, I've been very vocal about my stance on main characters not defining the TV shows that they are a part of. I've said in shows like Bucchigiri that even if the main character is a shallow dunce that's extremely and wholly unlikable, that the show can still survive and prove to be a good show, in spite of that, if it knows how to play around it in a clever enough way.

However, Bucchigiri was a comedy at its core, and such a thing was possible for them to get away with because his incompetence and shallowness were used as recurring gags. Even more, the protagonist in that show, despite being a simple minded buffoon, eventually grew to be likeable and overcame his cowardice to become a true hero towards the end, which helped that show immensely.

This show, on the other hand, doesn't have those benefits. For one, this is a pure romance, not even a romantic comedy, so I really have to like the main leads in the show because of that. Why? Because in romance, the audience is supposed to want for the main couple to succeed in getting together, that's the point of it.

Here, Hananoi was actively hampering my enjoyment of the show, simply because he felt like a very troubled and, to a degree, disturbed young man that had a lot of issues that made me genuinely worried for Hotaru's well being when she was around him.

Why?

Well, even from the first episode, Hananoi was triggering red flags towards me all around.

Granted, I will admit that I am a straight man approaching middle age, not a high school girl, so I understand that I am not the target audience for this show, but Hananoi's pretty boy aesthetic was really rubbing me the wrong way even from the very first episode.

Like, the fact that he was very much depressed because of breaking up with his girlfriend, feeling very dejected and standing all alone on a bench while snow was falling, was very natural and I was empathizing with him at that moment.

But as soon as Hotaru enters the picture and tries to be nice to him, he immediately switches gears and falls in love with her; no cool down period from the previous relationship, no remorse for his ex girlfriend or anything like that, he just sees Hotaru lend him a helping hand and then, the very next day, he's in her class asking her to be his girlfriend.

That's very unsettling. And scary.

Honestly, if I was the ex, I'd feel insulted how this man felt so little for me that the moment I took issue with him and decided to break up, he simply decides to go for another girl the very next day.

And it wasn't because Hotaru defended him, or tried to be there for him, it was entirely because she simply held an umbrella over his head while it was snowing. That's all there was to his attraction.

Well, OK, that was weird, sure, but maybe he is simply that flexible and quick to get back up on his feet. You never know.

Then, it's the fact that Hotaru had rejected him, clear as day, but he still chose to wait for her, at the end of the school day, for her to exit the building so that he can accompany her home, even though she had already rejected him by that point, nor were they even friends.

The show glosses over that, trying to make it seem like not a big deal but, really, he's just acting like a stalker at that point; but instead of actually stalking, he's being upfront about it and tries to follow her home. The only reason this worked was because Hotaru did not get creeped out enough to tell him to leave her alone, right then and there.

Then, when Hotaru says what hair style she likes, in response to his own question, and she answers that she likes short hairs, simply because they are easier to wash, the next day this man came to school with short hair, after cutting his long hair, just to appeal to her.

This man has no self respect, no personal identity, no fashion style or wants or desires. He pretty much just wants to appeal to this girl, as desperately as possible.

The anime tries to play it off as him being earnest and diligent but, really, it came across as very creepy and unhealthy.

Like, in proper context, Hotaru didn't even agree to dating him by that point, at all, so she's pretty much a stranger to him, but her saying that she prefers shorter hairstyles because they are easier to wash was enough to cause him to change his entire body image just to appeal to her; and she didn't even agree to be his girlfriend by this point, mind you.

Worse, after Hotaru's friend had lost her hairpin that day, Hananoi was planning on spending the entire night, on that track field, rummaging through the snow, in an attempt to find the lost pin hidden in it for her.

Like....bro, what?!

It wasn't until Hotaru herself showed up and had to knock some sense into him that that stuff that he was doing was crazy that he changed his mind; and not crazy in a charming kind of way, as the anime was trying to play it off as, but crazy in a “this man is mentally unwell” kind of way.

And this was just the first episode, mind you.

There's way more than that where that come from.

Like, there's another episode where Hananoi arrives early for his date with Hotaru. And by “early”, I don't just mean “early”, I mean at least “two hours early”, where all he does is stand there, waiting for her.

That is not how real men work.

And, worse, this sets a very bad precedent because young inexperienced girls who may be single and who are, coincidentally, the target audience for this show (I assume that's the target audience for this), this show will set these unrealistic expectations for a boyfriend to them, so they will then expect for their future boyfriends to arrive two hours earlier before the set time for their date, they will expect for their boyfriends to be willing to change their appearances and looks based on their whims and they will expect for their boyfriends to rummage through snow, at night, looking for something that they had lost because that's what “romantic” means to them.

Make no mistake, I feel like having high expectations for a partner is a good thing that most people should do, but those expectations have to at least be realistic. This show is setting expectations that no normal human being would ever meet, expectations that only the most desperate of stalkers would ever be willing to fulfill.

But, to some extent, I know what the fans of this show will argue. They would say that I'm a hypocrite, that as a straight man, of course I wouldn't understand why Hananoi is so obsessed over Hotaru; it's not supposed to be logical, it's because he's the impersonation of what the ideal boyfriend should be like. He's more of an ideal, rather than a real human being.

And, everyone will argue, and I can see this argument being made, that men also have anime TV series that set unrealistic expectations for women as well: shows like The Helpful Fox Senko-san, where Senko is overly cheerful and helpful towards the protagonist in that show, how she goes above and beyond to make sure that he is happy and comfortable, and that it sets very toxic examples with how selfless and obsessed she is with him in that show.

I get that argument, and I can see a valid point in it.

Because of this, had this been my only criticism of Hananoi, I would have backed down and conceded that this was simply a case of a TV show simply not being for me and moving on.

However, this was not the only unnerving thing about him. As the show went on, he continued to trigger red flags from me, everywhere he went.

Even if you set aside how obsessed and selfless Hananoi is, the fact of the matter is, he has no true character to himself. Outside of being Hotaru's boyfriend, the man has no qualities.

He has no likes, no dislikes, no passions, no dreams, no motivation outside of wanting to please Hotaru. If you take Hotaru out of the picture in this story, Hananoi has no identity to himself.

Hell, the way he is portrayed, I genuinely believe that, if Hotaru were to be caught cheating on him, I am convinced Hananoi is mentally unstable enough to be capable of committing suicide from that. I wouldn't put that above him; that's how much he relies on Hotaru being a nice girl to him.

Some women might find that romantic and a good trait for a boyfriend to have, but I find it highly unhealthy.

But, again, Senko-san is the same in that regard, so we can chalk this all up to it being what an idealized boyfriend in fiction would be like.

Then, there's the fact that Hananoi makes some dubious decisions while he is in a relationship with Hotaru.

For example, there is a small part of one episode where Hananoi, for no reason whatsoever, selfishly decides to put some distance between himself and Hotaru, so that they can keep their spaces (she agrees to this arrangement at his request, but only because she is inexperienced in the romance department).

Usually setting a distance between yourself and your partner is done for a good reason that warrants such measures, but the show never explained why he did that. It was Hotaru that needed to push the boundary between herself and him to end that ridiculous arrangement. Granted, that decision did allow for their love to grow stronger, but that doesn't change the fact that it was a nonsensical and borderline psychotic requirement that had no reason to be there, to begin with.

Or, in another episode, Hotaru and Hananoi are talking, but it's clear that something is bothering Hotaru a lot. When pressed about it, Hotaru keeps it to herself and doesn't reveal what that is to Hananoi.

As they are about to leave the rooftop, Hananoi reveals to Hotaru that the door to the rooftop where they were on was locked, and that they were stuck on top of the school.

During this time, while rummaging through their thoughts, Hotaru eventually reveals what's been on her mind all along to Hananoi.

Then, their friends come up to the rooftop to unlock the door for them, only for them to reveal that said door had never been locked all along. It is then revealed that Hananoi had lied all along, just to buy himself extra time alone with Hotaru, just so she can reveal what was actually on her mind.

Granted, I'm all for talking about your issues with your partner so that you can discuss your differences as much as it's needed, but if my partner told me that they don't want to discuss something, then that would be the end of it.

I wouldn't then decide that I need to buy myself time alone with them, until they change their mind to talk about it.

That's not only scummy, it's downright manipulative in the worst ways possible.

If Hananoi is willing to lie this easily about something, like that door being locked just so he can keep Hotaru there on the rooftop with him, for a matter this trivial, imagine what else he's willing to lie about.

But the main thing which I hate about his character, besides being manipulative and underhanded, is the simple fact that he is extremely unlikable.

He's not just avoiding conversations with other people, he outright is unfriendly towards them.

Pretty much, Hananoi is merely tolerant towards Hotaru's female friends because he has to, since Hotaru does need to have friends, but he's also extremely cold, to an unnecessary degree, towards her male friends.

Again, the anime tries to play this off as quirky, but it's deeply unsettling.

This type of controlling behavior was triggering red flags to me, non stop.

I'd understand it if they were also courting Hotaru, or being unreasonably cold towards her or him, but that's not the case. Literally, one of them even outright says that he cares about Hotaru and he's looking out for her as her friend, and Hananoi treats that as a bad thing.

Like, what the hell is his problem?! He is literally the newcomer into Hotaru's life and yet, after she decides to allow him into her life as her boyfriend, he wants all of her male friends out just because he doesn't like them.

Normally that would be acceptable if there were reasons why he didn't like them, like if they mistreated her, or something, but they were simply looking out for her.

Hananoi is unusually cold towards everyone, tries to act cool and mighty whenever he feels like it, wants Hotaru to not be around her friends, is over imposing on her male friends whenever he feels like it, and is also willing to cheat at games whenever he's making a bet against them (like he did, once, while playing ping pong with one of her male friends).

The more episodes I was watching, the less I liked his character; and that's a problem when he's the main lead in this romance story.

By the time the anime ended, I was genuinely wishing for Hotaru to break up with him. I liked her enough that I was feeling bad for her, for being with this asshole in a relationship. And, mind you, that's not what a romance is supposed to make you feel like.

I will admit, at the end of the day, I was spoiled by other, much better romance anime, like Tonikawa: Over the Moon for You, A Sign of Affection or hell, even this lineup's Grandpa and Grandma Turn Young Again; shows that are far more genuine in their romances, who have characters that love each other without being underhanded, obsessed or manipulative, and who feel clean cut and honest.

Granted, even in A Sign of Affection, Itsuomi was being a bit of an asshole towards Yuki's childhood friend, but that was because the childhood friend was being overprotective and unreasonable; and even then, Itsuomi was still trying to be curt and nice towards him, not like the asshole that is Hananoi here.

I digress.

Honestly, this show didn't do it for me. This feels like one of those romance animes that had good intentions, but got lost along the way because of the male lead.

However, would this show have been better if Hananoi was written differently? Honestly, I think so.

To give credit where credit is due, the show does evolve the romance over time, to a significant degree. I'll still say it's far better than Shikimori's Not Just a Cutie, by a long mile, and it has redeeming qualities.

And, objectively speaking, I feel like the show ain't that bad. It's on the last spot on this ranking because, subjectively, I didn't like it at all, but objectively, it wasn't half bad.

Objectively, I feel like the show is still better than the likes of The Ice Guy and His Cool Female Colleague, simply because the romance does go somewhere, and I feel like the show does talk about important stuff that are relevant; stuff like knowing how to establish rules about your relationship from the very beginning, knowing how to set boundaries in a relationship and how to take things slowly, how to become comfortable with one another, how physical contact is necessary for a relationship.

All of these are important things to talk about and, I will admit, I was surprised that this show took these topics and treated them as seriously as it did. Honestly, it's got good ideas behind it.

It's a shame that the execution was ruined for me, due to Hananoi being the male lead. That, honestly, ruined it entirely for me and, as the show went on, it got worse and worse.

I hoped he would undergo some character growth towards the end and, the show claims that he did, but I really don't see much of an improvement. He did become tolerant towards Hotaru wanting to spend time with her friends over him sometimes (yes, imagine that was a plot point in this show), but that's as far as it went. He was still extremely intolerant and insecure about her male friends being around them.

Honestly, I just don't like the guy. It's as simple as that.

Had I been a teenage girl with lower standards, maybe my opinions of Hananoi would have been different but, as it stands, I just couldn't stand him. And if this show was done with a comedic edge to it, in which they went all out and treated Hananoi like an irredeemable bastard, like in KonoSuba, then I would have liked it way more; or maybe if the show didn't try to put him in the spotlight and pretended like he's a good guy and made him over the top unlikable, like in School Days, then I would have liked that much more.

I'm fine with a main character being an asshole if he either grows out of it, or if the show plays along with it and makes him get his comeupins or, at least, it's being honest about him and showing him for the asshole that he is. This, however, doesn't do any of those, but tries to play it all off as quirkiness.

As it stands, it just feels manipulative, in trying to make me sympathize with, what it looks to me to be, a pretty annoying insecure unstable teenager that has an unhealthy obsession over his girlfriend.

The show tried to make Hananoi appear relatable by showing his tragic past but, really, while I can see that past making him become the unlikable character that he is now, that still doesn't change the fact that he is unlikable, nor does it excuse it to me.

Like I said, if a new season of this gets greenlit, I will not be watching it.

We got 8 new entries to talk about. Let's get to it!

OK so, we're at the end of a new season of animes, and it's time to wrap things up again with a, as is tradition on this blog, with a new post ranking the shows that just ended.

This season has been quite a nice one, and it had a lot of shows that I particularly like. Even the worst ranked show on this list, I can say, wasn't very bad, objectively speaking; I just didn't like personally, on a subjective level.

Overall, I felt very happy with this lineup. This season had a lot of very good stuff and I'm just itching to write about them.

As always: all the shows in this ranking are available on Crunchyroll from Romania. Some of them may be unavailable to other regions of the world, due to licensing differences. Please keep that in mind.

So let's get started with the ranking!

1. Grandpa and Grandma Turn Young Again

This is a very innocuous title.

Generally, most people wouldn't think much of a TV show with a title like that. I certainly didn't, when I first saw the description, on Crunchyroll, for the show.

It looked like a very boring and uninteresting idea, the idea that an old married couple turns young again, and shenanigans ensue. That's a very cliched and overused plotline in fictional media, and I didn't care much for it.

I was absolutely not expecting much from such an entry, especially since Crunchyroll didn't even have a video preview for what the show would be like.

I generally like to use video previews for upcoming TV shows, to gauge what the style and humor of the show would be like, and I tend to avoid watching shows that don't even have that preview on Crunchyroll.

But, even so, even with the lack of such a video preview, and even with the overly cliched premise of the show, I listened to my gut feeling and decided to go ahead and watch it, nonetheless.

Honestly, I am so glad that I listened to my gut.

This show was very much worth watching. Is the premise cliched? Yeah, it is a bit. However, this show proves that, even with an overly cliched premise, at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is execution. And this show executed this premise flawlessly.

What's the first episode like?

An old couple are tending to an apple tree orchard that they own when, one day, they find a golden apple on the tree that they had been growing since they were young.

Tempted by the delicious looking golden apple, the couple decide to eat it.

The next day, they wake up young and healthy once again, almost like they are in their 20s (although they still retain the gray hair from their old age).

They are amazed by this development but, still, they decide to go about their next days as if nothing had happened.

The episode then covers the people around them acting absolutely astonished at the fact that they had become young again, especially their adult children who are incredulous at the fact that their geezer parents had become younger than themselves.

Running gags include how the granddaughter becomes overly attached to grandpa, which causes uneasiness in everyone around them, how the now-young-looking-couple absolutely obliterate the competition in a sports festival where there victory seemed already won by the opposing side since they had young people participating for them and other such gags.

That's kind of the gist of episode 1.

This might seem like a sparse summary of episode 1, but that's because this is simply how the episode is structured. Not only that, but all episodes are structured such that they are just a series of running gags, sequenced one after the other.

The reason I'm praising this show as much as I am is because of how wholesome the show is.

The humor is very innocent and simple, where the main idea is that the couple can now do things that they couldn't do before, now that they are young again.

The show explores topics like them playing video games again, celebrating Halloween with their grandchildren, participating in overly exerting sports or physical activities, or even just going on a honeymoon and visiting a new city.

This might seem like it would date the show quite a lot, as it's introducing stuff that feel very specific to this time, but it's honestly surprisingly timeless.

The couple is open to trying new ideas, they never shy away or try to preach how the old times were better or how the youth has lost their ways, as I'm sure less inspired writers would immediately attempt with this premise.

Instead, the show simply jokes about it, but also makes them particularly capable and adaptable to the new times and allows them to be good at things they wouldn't otherwise be capable of doing.

I liked that.

But, more importantly, disregarding the constant gags that run all the time, the show is timeless in a different way, in which it talks about old and new romantic relationships all the time.

The couple, despite turning young again, seem just as attached and happy with each other as they had been while being old, which makes it very nice. There was an idea that was played with, in one episode, where grandma suffered a concussion and temporary amnesia, where she had lost memories of being married to her husband and now grandpa needed to make her fall in love with him again.

It was an interesting idea, that I really liked, and I also liked that the show didn't shy away from claiming that love would happen again, even if they had to start over again.

There are good ideas in this show.

Also, there's another background romance between their granddaughter, Shiori, and another boy from her class that she just happens to be interacting all the time with, Shota.

The show is mostly about human relationships, more than anything else. It talks a lot about achieving your dreams, having regrets over things you never got to accomplish, how timeless romance can be but, at the same time, the fragility of life and coming to terms with one's own death.

Given the theme of family that this show hovers around with, I want to say that the closest anime that I can think of that I can compare to this would be Clannad: After Story, as the two shows seem to draw a lot of parallels.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that this show is anywhere close to being as good as Clannad was. However, the way it talks about life and family feels, if not similar, at the very least inspired to how Clannad talked about these things, in a generally timeless manner.

I respect this show a lot for that.

One last thing I want to say, but this show also had a very nice and profound ending.

The ending was left ambiguous over what it implied, leaving the audience to imagine if it was a sad or happy ending, but I will say that it was done almost perfectly. It left me wondering and even a bit scared, but I am glad that they ended on the note that they did.

I would have liked for them to go the 'sad ending' route, just because I'm a fan of those, but they left it ambiguous to not be overly depressing, and I get that.

Overall, this was a perfect anime that talked about life, romance, family and, most importantly, age. I love everything that this show did and I couldn't get enough of it.

Absolutely worth your time to watch it.

2. Spice and Wolf: Merchant Meets the Wise Wolf

Honestly, I didn't know what to think of this, when I learned that they would be doing a remake of this anime.

For those that don't know, Spice and Wolf is a still ongoing light novel series, being written by Isuna Hasekura, that originally began being published since February of 2006. The light novel series is quite old but it was chosen to be adapted by ASCII Media Works into a manga from September 2007, and later on it was also chosen to be adapted into an anime by multiple studios, which got to air from 2008 to 2009, was directed by Takeo Takahashi (the guy that also went on after this project and also directed Yosuga no Sora, So I Can't Play H!, Rokka: Braves of the Six Flowers, Citrus and some other anime as well) and got a total of 24 episodes and two OVAs animated for it.

So, to put it mildly, this intellectual property is well established. Not only this but that aforementioned anime also became a cult classic and is seen as one of the most influential staples of the romance genre from the anime community, to this day.

And, personally, I did like the anime, although I will admit that I did not finish watching it. I remember watching that anime many years ago, and stopping after finishing the first season (after the first 12 episodes). I planned on continuing to finish it and watch the second half as well, but I never got around to it.

From what I heard online, the original anime never finished adapting the story and left a lot of viewers hanging although, since I never finished watching it myself, I could never confirm this, so take it with a grain of salt.

Still, I was very much surprised when I saw this entry pop up a couple of months ago, animated by Studio Passione and claiming to be a remake.

Takeo Takahashi was returning as the director for this remake as well, although this time having a co-director named Hijiri Sanpei also co-directing along with him.

This was a big thing, and I didn't know whether I was liking the idea of a remake of the original or not. On the one hand, the original anime felt adequate enough and I believed that it was entertaining enough and had enough heart to it that I didn't feel that a remake was necessary in the least.

On the other hand, though, I did eventually drop the original midway through, so maybe it wasn't as enticing and entertaining as I remember it being.

Maybe the remake could fix that?

Either way, here we are, midway through the remake as well, and now I'm going to convey my thoughts on this show and tell you what is it about it that makes it worth watching.

The show starts with a traveling merchant named Kraft Lawrence who's visiting a pagan village to buy some of their wheat and who plans to sell it for a higher price to other merchants.

The village he's visiting is known to have a bountiful harvest of wheat and he also has good relations with them, as he had been a customer of their wheat since many years before and, as such, he stands to negotiate good prices for it.

He enters the village in the midst of a festival that they are having, in which they are celebrating their new harvest while also mentioning Holo, the name of their pagan wolf god who is said to be the reason why their harvests have historically been so bountiful.

After buying some of their wheat, Lawrence leaves the village, planning to travel in the night on his carriage as he is in a hurry to deliver his goods to other towns and cities nearby.

After leaving the village and settling down in the middle of nowhere, for the night, Lawrence discovers a strange girl with wolf ears and a large tail sleeping and hiding in his carriage. Once she awakens, she reveals herself to be the wise wolf Holo, the god that that pagan village worships.

Holo claims she decided to abandon her village, and so she took the liberty of hiding in his carriage while he was passing through.

In disbelief, Lawrence asks for proof that she is the real god Holo, otherwise he would turn her in to the church who would burn her for claiming to be a god.

Seeing no other way of convincing him, Holo eats some of the wheat that Lawrence had in his carriage to transform into a giant wolf beast, who scares him.

This incident convinces Lawrence to return to the pagan village and seek to stay the night there, where he and Holo talk.

Holo claims that the villagers of the pagan village have grown skeptical of her existence and have been losing faith in her over the years, mainly due to the occasional poor wheat harvests that she produces every once in a while, to protect the village's soil. In recent years especially, with the advent of new farming techniques that seem to have bolstered their wheat output, most villagers have started to abandon their faith in her and turn towards the more mainstream faith in the one true god that the church is promoting everywhere.

Seeing how the village she has been protecting over so many generations have become disbelieving towards her, Holo had decided to abandon this village and currently plangs to go towards the north, to a different village where she had been born in, where it's much colder and the winters are longer.

After hearing her story, Lawrence agrees to allow her to travel with him in his carriage for a time, provided she can end up paying for her own expenses.

Holo agrees, claiming that as the wise wolf god, she is more than capable of making profits through her business-savvy knowledge, moreso than most other people, so she can earn her stay by his side.

And so, the traveling merchant Lawrence and the wise wolf Holo become traveling partners, as they travel across the country to make a living for themselves. During this time, they need to avoid attracting attention onto themselves, as the very influential church in that world would surely want Holo burned if they were to ever discover her existence.

Thus ends episode 1.

So, right off the bat, I could very much sense the similarities between this remake and the original anime as well.

Granted, I haven't watched the original in many years, so my memories of it are a bit fuzzy, but I remember it enough that, in broad strokes, I feel like the first episodes match somewhat well with each other.

This show also seems to have a very technical focus towards economics and the life of a merchant, talking about negotiating prices all the time, buying products when they are lower value and selling them at higher prices to make a profit, exchange rates between different currencies, the seasonal values of certain goods and so many other stuff in this area.

I liked that, both in the original and in this remake.

It feels like it makes the world that they inhabit have a realistic feel to it, filling it with a sense of genuine lore that makes it believable.

Moreover, despite this being set in a land that is made to replicate medieval Europe, from the looks of it, it didn't fall for the common temptations of adding magic or quests, dragons or other supernatural entities into the plot in any ways.

After the deluge of isekai anime from recent years, seeing an anime be set in, what looks to be medieval Europe, and yet still resisting the temptations of adding unnecessary superfluous fluff to that universe felt like a breath of fresh air.

In this world, gods are prayed to and believed in by the general folk, but, with the sole exception of Holo, they do not make appearences or fly down onto the Earth, there is no magic or potions in this world, prayers are not miracles in any way but mere chants that have little practical effects and the people feel like they are part of a genuine medieval society. These are all good things that make everything feel down to Earth, almost historically accurate even.

Granted, I know that this is the style that the light novels were most likely going for, as the time when they started being written and set the style for themselves was way before this isekai anime craze and before any of these tropes even became popular to begin with but, still, it's refreshing seeing this type of world building.

And, for what it's worth, I also liked seeing all the humans in this world. They all felt realistic in their portrayals, all of them having genuine emotions, wants and needs and also affiliations and loyalties.

Honestly, this is what I liked the most about this anime: it's its sense of grounding in a medieval setting. There's no magic, no quests, no treasures, no kingdom wars or demons or demon lord fights, no enchantments of buffs or skills or levels or any of that; just life as a merchant trying to make money for yourself.

And, the economics being talked are genuine and they are dumbed down in a way that I feel like most laymen without degrees in economics can follow without much issues. I liked how accessible the story was.

But, aside from that, this anime is mostly a romance between Lawrence and Holo. And, to put it bluntly, I liked the chemistry that these two had.

Granted, there are some cliches that pop up every now and then, like betraying your loved one when you're desperate, which I don't particularly like.

Still, I like how they played Holo's wise wolf personality in this anime, as they make her very cunning and clever, somewhat manipulative even when she needs to be, while also staying loyal to Lawrence for helping her out.

Lawrence himself isn't a stick figure either, as he learns over the travels to be somewhat more selfish when the time comes and also learns how to better negotiate with people that he interacts with, as well as adapting to hard and difficult situations.

Really, there is character growth in this show, and I liked both of them a lot.

Granted, my one complaint about this show is that the romance is quite slow, and I feel like there are times when I feel that it's unnecessarily stagnant even, but I'll be waiting for the second half of the show before I can make a proper call of how this will end.

Overall though, this was a very fun and, for the most part, entertaining anime.

Do I regret seeing it over the original? Honestly, I don't. I never planned on dropping the original in any ways, it just so happened back then, but now, I definitely won't be planning on dropping this one, and I still plan on finishing through all of its currently airing episodes.

I don't know how this remake is planning on adapting the entire plot, seeing how the light novels are still ongoing, and probably won't stop being published any time soon, but I do hope to see a proper conclusion to our characters' struggles and a final happy ending to their love story.

Here's hoping for a nice ending, for the next half of this story.

3. KonoSuba: God's Blessing on This Wonderful World! (Season 3)

How could I make such a ranking without Konosuba making it in the top 3 spots?

Truthfully, I wasn't sure how to rank this show and Spice and Wolf, as they were pretty much tied in my head this season.

I enjoyed these two shows almost equally, so it was very difficult for me to pick one over the other.

In the end, I had to make a choice, and I chose Spice and Wolf over this show but it was very close, I'll say that.

When's all said and done, it came down to which genres I like more: romance or comedy, and that's how I made my choice. Spice and Wolf was not a very good romance, but it was a romance, nonetheless, that had a lot of other good qualities to it, whereas this was a very funny comedy.

However, if I were to reverse the ordering of these two shows in this ranking, I wouldn't necessarily find it wrong, nor would I cry about it.

Honestly, I could talk about Konosuba right now, since I've never addressed the show in my rankings before outside of Megumin's own spinoff but, really, who doesn't know about Konosuba already? It's among the most popular isekai of all time, and for very good reason.

I'll just very briefly try to describe episode 1 of season 1, just to give you a hint of what the show feels like.

So, in episode 1, this teenage guy named Satou Kazuma ends up in the afterlife talking to Goddess Aqua, who tells him that his previous life as a boring NEET had ended abruptly when a large truck almost ran him over, the scare of which gave him a heart attack in the moment and caused him to die on the spot.

Aqua laughs at Kazuma's misfortune, and acts disparaging towards him knowing that he was a shut-in with no social life in his previous life but offers to reincarnate him in a parallel medieval world filled with magic and monsters, where he has to defeat the Demon King as an adventurer.

After deciding on the specifics of this arrangement, Aqua tells Kazuma that he can take with him anything of his choice to the new world, that might aid him in his quests.

Seeing how disrespectful and mean Aqua was to him, Kazuma makes the 200 IQ decision to choose her to bring with him, which prompts Aqua to be replaced from her role of overseeing the afterlife with another goddess who promptly teleports them to the new world.

As such, Kazuma now has to defeat the Demon King of that world to bring peace to it and also to attain a great deal of money and fame for himself.

However, he soon realizes that despite forcing her to come with him because of his decision, Aqua seems to be pretty useless in this world, as she seems to have only very limited healing magic abilities and knows some party tricks to entertain mortals with.

Seeing how useless Aqua is to him, Kazuma decides to take matters into his own hands and register as an official adventurer in that world, forming a team with Aqua, in the hopes of at least earning enough money to be able to buy food for themselves, much less defeat the Demon King.

There's more than happens in the first episode but that's pretty much the main gist of it.

In short, Kazuma has zero knowledge of how to be a good adventurer, is very poor because he started out in that world with no money on him and has only a bunch of low level skills like “Steal”, that allows him to steal items from a different person, as well as having very high luck.

Aqua, his companion, has very limited intelligence but a lot of fortitude and specializes at healing but is overall quite selfish, reckless, and dumb (and also an alcoholic). Moreover, she had lost her status as a god when Kazuma had chosen her as the item to bring with him, which means that they have to defeat the Demon King now for her to return to being a god again, which is obviously what she wants now.

And so begins their journey together, at defeating the Demon King of that world.

That's the summary of it.

Honestly, there's a lot of stuff that happen after that, especially once Megumin and Darkness also enter the stage as new companions, but I won't go much into details. Suffice it to say, this isn't as much an isekai anime, as it is an isekai parody, more than anything else.

Yes, sometimes this show takes itself seriously and yes, it has good action sequences from time to time, but almost everything in this show is played for laughs.

Kazuma is selfish and a scumbag, at the end of the day. He isn't the ideal hero by any traditional meaning of the word, except that he is very adaptable and reliable most of the time.

His party is even more useless than him, which makes a lot of the adventures that they go on end up in very humorous situations.

The show makes fun of a lot of isekai and fantasy tropes almost every episode, with its selfish but still endearing characters and its tongue in cheek humor.

This season, the show will cover various arcs of the story, most important of which is Kazuma finding an infinite money making magical item, himself getting kidnapped by the princess of the kingdom and becoming her “big brother”, and a new arc concerning Darkness and her noble origins.

There's a lot of stuff to discuss but, I am glad to say, the colorful cast and the charming wholesome humor make a great and very welcome comeback once again.

I already mentioned how, in my previous review of KonoSuba: An Explosion on This Wonderful World!, Megumin's spinoff TV series, I found the humor to be a bit lacking and repetitive, and how I longed for the return of the main cast into the story.

Well, here the main cast did return and, boy did I miss seeing them.

The humor made a nice return to form, almost every joke landed quite a lot, with new improvements this time, with them making fun of arranged marriages in the nobility, the innocence of a child princess that gets to be body-swapped with Kazuma and, last but not least, Kazuma unlocking the ability to change voices at will.

Needless to say, a lot of chaos ensues.

There's not much more I can say about this show that will do it justice.

I will say that I feel like this season was more plot focused than the previous ones, which lent itself to fewer jokes, sadly, but the jokes that they do do are very funny and worth staying for.

I also would have wished for more romance moments between Kazuma and his love interest but those got sidelined in favor of the plot. Oh well.

Still, if you liked the first two seasons of Konosuba, there's little reason why you wouldn't like this one as well. All the charming moments are still there, the wholesome humor and the quirky characters make a full return, and it was such a treat.

It's worth seeing.

4. Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation (Season 2, Part 2)

And today we'll be covering the second half of season 2 of this TV show, in this entry.

You can read about my thoughts of the first half here.

This is simply a continuation of that, as nothing much changed about the pacing or the story of the show since then.

I'm not going to talk much more about Mushoku Tensei, as I personally feel like it's among the most renowned isekai anime in existence, and most people already know about it.

This second half of season 2 continues with Rudy's journey after finally deciding to marry the love of his life.

Before the marriage can happen, though, he needs to secure himself a house for their family. Then, he has to think about children with his new wife.

But as most things go, trouble eventually rears its ugly head even during these happy moments of his life, when Rudy will receive an ominous letter informing him that his mother was finally found, many years after she had disappeared during the mass teleportation incident, but she needs to be saved.

During her rescue, another character from the past will reappear, and Rudy will have to make many difficult decisions along the way.

So yeah, that's the general gist of this second half.

Season 3 was already announced as well, so I'm also looking forward to that too.

Honestly, this season was pretty satisfactory, all things considered.

I disliked the slow pacing and the fact that not much was happening, in the beginning, because I thought that things were starting to look up for Rudy and were becoming quite boring overall, seeing how now he needed to settle down with his wife and look forward to a new life as the head of a family, but that quickly changed when the letter informing him of his mother was received.

So yeah, there's more story to be told.

To some extent, I did dislike that there was even a continuation after the first half of this season, as I felt that they ended on a very good note, with him deciding to marry who he decides to marry, he already fixed his health issues that he was concerned about and he had gained a place at a prestigious university.

All things considered, I thought that was a good place to end on.

Especially given the small side quests that seemed to become prevalent in this second half, in the beginning, I felt that most of this was just an after story, and I was getting bored, since I felt like the meat and potatoes of Rudy's life had already been covered and detailed.

But, apparently I was wrong. There's way more than needs to happen, and I'm happy to say the story took me by surprise at how dark and gloomy it became, towards the end.

Granted, the plot became a bit cliched at some points, here and there, like how Rudy got the news about his mother at the worst moment possible, how he's the only one that can save her, how he arrived just in time to save a particular recurring character, at the very last moment and how said character falls in love immediately with him.

There's a lot of that that I found to be cheesy.

Then, there's the fact that the show suddenly decided to go in a different direction than what I wanted, and went with a harem route.

Don't get me wrong! I don't dislike harem animes, nor do I have any issues with them, but this felt like it was ruining, what could have been, a very sweet and nice love story. Rudy was already married and happy, he already had a child on the way, the fact that the story needed to shoehorn in another love interest in the middle soured my mood quite a bit.

And the reasoning for it taking that direction also felt very weak and unjustified for me.

I don't know, I kind of dislike the direction that the plot is heading in. Had the show ended at the first half of this season, I would have been more than satisfied with the story and would have considered it perfectly serviceable.

As it is, it feels like it's adding unnecessary fluff just to appeal to a particular demographic.

But I digress.

The ending didn't fully rectify any of these flaws, mind you, but it did leave me impressed that it, at least, left things on a down-to-Earth note.

Usually stories like these want to end on a happy, overly sugary note, trying to be as saccharin as possible to leave the audience overly satisfied. I appreciated that the show pulled back a bit and said “No, that's not how real life works”, and left us on a sober ending, instead, where there is a component of a happy ending, sure, but a lot of things were left uncertain and heavy losses had been incurred already.

What I like the most in this story is the fact that all the characters feel human, relatable, flawed and even selfish, at times, but never to a degree that's unrealistic. I like the heavy conversations that they have, how difficult certain moments are and how sober and honest certain life lessons can be.

Overall, I feel like the show did what it needed to do. I do regret seeing the story go in the direction that it did, as I hoped it would end at the place where I felt was most fitting for it to end at, but I do understand the need to continue the story to tie up the loose ends that remain hanging.

Overall, outside of Konosuba, this still remains my favorite isekai anime of all time, and I will contend that it's among the best implementations of the genre, that I've ever seen. It's absolutely worth a watch.

5. Viral Hit

It's time we look at a show about fighting.

Generally, I'm not much into anime TV shows that cover fighting as their main selling point, but I'm personally glad that I still gave this show a look.

This is an animated adaptation for a manhwa that's being released as a web comic.

The author for this manhwa, Taejun Pak, is also known for a different manhwa titled Lookism, which I heard was semi-popular in South Korea.

I don't read manga in general, much less manhwa, so I don't know much about Lookism personally, but, with that said, this show is pretty cool and I like the direction that it took.

So, let's talk about episode 1.

Yu Hobin is a high school student that always gets bullied in his class by a guy named Pakgo and his cameraman, nicknamed Snapper.

You might think “Why does a high school student need a cameraman?”. Well, the reason is because Pakgo is a famous Newtuber (Newtube being this world's version of our YouTube) and he's trying to make a living for himself, and uses Hobin in his videos to attract an audience. Secretly, Hobin is being bullied to appear in his videos as a willing participant but, behind the scenes, he's effectively treated as a slave and he makes no money out of it.

We later find out that Hobin's mother spends her entire time in the hospital, being treated for cancer.

She's fighting for her life against the cancer but the treatments that she's undergoing are incurring hefty medical bills that Hobin has to cover.

As an only child with no father (or, at least, his father is never mentioned in the anime), Hobin is forced to make money working as a part time employee for a fast food restaurant.

The low wage that he receives barely covers for his mother's medical expenses, and he's constantly struggling to survive and is in desperate need for more money.

One day, after hearing how much money Pakgo is making from his Newtube career, both Hobin and Snapper decide that they should make their own channels to start making money.

Pakgo tells Snapper that he is incapable of doing this, though, as he's still technically a minor and, as such, he cannot legally have a bank account to have his videos' revenue sent to.

Knowing that his parents would not allow him to use their accounts, Snapper decides to, instead, rely on Hobin and use Hobin's mother's bank account, instead.

Not wanting to suffer more bullying from Pakgo, Hobin agrees, and sets up a new Newtube channel for Snapper and also connects his mother's bank account to it, without her knowledge.

At some point, later on, while Hobin is working on his shift at the fast food restaurant, he makes casual conversation with a coworker around his age named Choi Bomi.

Hobin has a crush on Bomi, but he keeps that to himself.

Pakgo comes into the restaurant with his smartphone live streaming everything to his Newtube channel and then, to gain popularity and also to ask Bomi out, he comes to the counter of the restaurant where Bomi asks for his order and he then claims that his audience is asking him to challenge her.

He gives her a picture of a large burger that she'll have to make for him in half a minute and, if she cannot fulfill this challenge, she'd have to give him her phone number as a penalty.

Not wanting to be rude to him, since he's a customer, but also troubled by the prospective of having to give him her phone number, Bomi is visibly distraught, which Hobin picks up on.

Not wanting to make her go through this ridiculous setup, Hobin takes it upon himself and does his best to fulfill the challenge in her stead, successfully making the burger that Pakgo had requested in 30 seconds.

Thus, Bomi did not have to give Pakgo her phone number.

Bomi is happy about this and she does appreciate Hobin's assistance.

Later on, at Hobin's house, Hobin has Snapper come over and use his desktop PC to live stream a video game Let's Play for the Newtube channel that he had set up previously.

While Snapper is making the content at the desktop, Hobin is in the kitchen making him food, at his request.

Hobin laments the state of his life and how miserable he is for being used by everyone around him, especially since Snapper isn't paying him any money for everything that he is doing for him and his new channel.

As he walks with the ramen that he had made for Snapper to the living room, Hobin trips on the power cord for the PC, while Snapper was playing, and also accidentally pours the hot ramen on Snapper, which enrages him.

Hobin apologizes for everything, but Snapper starts beating him up, yelling at him for tripping on the power cord and causing the PC to shut down, which abruptly ended his live stream and caused him to lose significant revenue.

At one point, Snapper says that Hobin's clumsiness is why his mother has cancer, which finally pushes Hobin over the edge and angers him enough that he finally decides to fight back and start hitting Snapper, turning their squabble into a full on brawl in his house.

The next day, Hobin wakes up to a phone call from Snapper in the early morning, with Snapper yelling at him to delete the video of their fight from his Newtube account.

Hobin is confused at first, since he had not recorded, much less uploaded, their fight to the internet.

Snapper claims that the live stream had recorded their fight through his desktop's webcam but Hobin doesn't understand how that could be since he had accidentally tripped on the power cord and disconnected it, last night.

That is until he realizes that the power cord that he had tripped on wasn't the desktop's power cord but the monitor's power cord, which was the reason for the screen going black and fooling both Hobin and Snapper into thinking that it had turned off and the stream ending when, in fact, the desktop continued to be on all the time and the live stream continuing to go on in the background while they fought.

Realizing this, and knowing that only he had the password for that Newtube account (as he had been the one to set it up for Snapper), Hobin listens to Snapper's request and attempts to delete the video, until he realizes from the comments on the video that he made a very large sum of money, just from that one video, because of the high number of views that he had gotten.

When Snapper returns to school, he realizes that everyone around him is making fun of him, as the video of his fight with Hobin had already become viral and everyone is now aware of it.

Tragically, Snapper now discovers that the pecking order in their class has changed, and he is now the runt of the class, since no one can respect him anymore after taking a beating from the lowest loser like Hobin. Not even Pakgo is willing to defend him anymore.

Enraged by this state of affairs, Snapper later confronts Hobin and asks for half the revenue of that video, but Hobin refuses, since he is in full control of the money, due to the fact that the money is in his mother's bank account.

After another fight between the two of them, Snapper eventually tries to reconcile with Hobin, and makes him an offer: rather than fight for that one video like they were already doing, he proposes a collaboration between the two of them: Hobin would become the star of their Newtube channel and be featured in all the videos and Snapper would simply be the cameraman and the producer for their videos (since he already has experience in those fields and the recording equipment, for having worked already as a cameraman for Pakgo).

Snapper initially proposes a 9:1 revenue share between him and Hobin, respectively, hoping that Hobin would agree to it, as he had always done up until then, and also hoping that this would restore the pecking order in his favor.

Hobin, however, finally grows a spine and refuses.

When realizing that his proposals don't work, Snapper keeps changing the split until it reverses to 1:9 instead, to which Hobin finally agrees to.

The pitch of their new joint channel will be Hobin calling out bullies and fighting them, since that has already proved successful when Hobin had fought Snapper and becoming a viral hit.

And so starts Hobin's attempt as a fighter against bullies.

So ends episode 1.

So yeah, that's the pitch.

To tell the truth, I found this to be an interesting start to what seemed to be a fresh idea.

Generally, I haven't seen many animes talk about school fights that much, so I've found this to be quite a nice and original idea.

Of course, I did watch Bucchigiri a while back, which I already talked about here, but while that show is about fights and is also very action packed, Bucchigiri focused more on gang fights while this show is more one-to-one fights, instead.

I'm not the biggest fan of the underdog trope in animes, but I will commend it when it's done well, and here I feel like it's been done well enough.

I will praise this show for keeping things simple and making the character not become an overpowered god like I was initially afraid it would do.

Hobin is initially a very weak character, who is extremely malleable and has trouble even against the lowest thugs. And, even as the show progressed and he became stronger, he still encountered enemies that were constantly more difficult to deal with and were causing him issues, making him feel uncomfortable and even wonder if he would win.

I like it when the opponents keep becoming more and more difficult to deal with, and this show did it in a realistic manner.

Moreover, I also appreciated how down to Earth this show was with its fights. It never went cartoon-ish with it and it still kept things simple and easy to follow. The show will also explain what techniques Hobin used to become better in fights, how he strategizes how to deal with specific opponents and fighting styles, and how he deals with each situation on a case-by-case basis. The analytical focus of the fights and how he plans on handling them was quite intriguing.

It's from this show where I learned a bit about Taekwondo and about sumo wrestling, how to fight a regular thug or how to fight multiple people at the same time. It's got good lessons and, while I cannot vouch for how realistic any of these lessons are or how practical they are to follow since I'm not a fighter myself, they did appear to have a genuine feel of authenticity to them, to the extent where I feel like regular people can use the stuff they see here and put it to good use in real life (although I'm definitely not suggesting you should take fighting lessons from a fictional TV series, by any means).

There were issues that I did have with the show, though, such as how lawless the world that they were in appeared to be, or how very cliched and one dimensional all the villains in this show were.

Don't get me wrong, I don't expect for minor characters to care about what the protagonist is doing at any point, especially if they are strangers to him, but in this world it looks like every random stranger on the street wants to take your money at any moment's glance. Or how the school was fine with a lot of stuff where the students could pretty much beat each other up with no consequences whatsoever.

Like, doesn't law enforcement exist in this world? Or any kind of authority for that matter?

I know that the story calls for Hobin to have to defend himself, but it feels kind of ridiculous how everywhere he goes, there's someone around the corner that wants to steal his money or ruin his life forever and he has to fight them.

And then there's the issue with how the internet is portrayed. I know that, to some extent, there is a certain feel of novelty when thinking that being a content creator on YouTube can give you a lot of money, and that is indeed true for a minority of people on the platform but, realistically, I find it genuinely hard to believe that anyone could make a career out of fighting bullies on YouTube. There's a very good reason why, when you go there, you don't find that many videos of that type of content, and that reason is because YouTube uses demonetization on videos that contain violent content, especially fights which are from real life and wouldn't be staged.

Had Hobin's channel been real, YouTube would have immediately demonetized all of their videos, if not outright deleting his channel altogether for the kind of content that he's making.

Given how even swear words aren't allowed on YouTube videos without the algorithm significantly punishing the video makers for it by removing it from the recommended section, I find it unrealistic how actual real fights would become popular on it, at all, especially to the extent where someone would make a lot of money out of it. That just doesn't happen in real life.

Then, there's the issue of how certain content creators in this story do some horrible things, on stream, live, and seem to get away with it, such as beating people up on stream and, at one point, even putting a girl's life in danger from a prank that almost caused her to be hit by a car. That type of stuff would be enough to get people arrested in real life, had there been any semblance of consequences in that world. And even if the police wouldn't get involved, with the current online climate of cancel culture being a thing, real audiences are extremely unforgiving for any type of content that's actually morally reprehensible in this way. If a video maker would be shown to bully someone in real life, and their audience became aware of it, his subscriber count would go down the very next day and no amounts of apologies or pretend crying is gonna be enough to save his channel. His persona would forever be doomed on the internet, from that day onward and his social media will be filled with negative comments that will stick with them permanently.

Basically, this world is too lawless and forgiving, is what I'm saying. The internet isn't the wild wild west nowadays, like it used to be. This type of stuff wouldn't fly in modern times.

But aside from these inconsistencies, I liked the story.

I liked the friendships and relationships that Hobin managed to build over the course of this story and, to some extent, there were some opponents which got to be humanized a little bit, and the story tried to show their side of the story as well (although I still think that most of the bullies in this show are very shallow).

Overall, I think this was a good watch. There were times when I was on the edge of my seat, wondering how Hobin will recover from that, or how he was gonna win when all the cards were stacked against him.

I think the show is good, and worth a watch. As far as slice of life action shows about fights with an underdog trope go, this one is definitely a good one, and I would recommend for people to watch.

I'm definitely up for a season 2, if one were to ever get announced. 🤞

This is only part 1 of this ranking. For part 2, click here.

This is kind of a follow-up to my previous blog post about the history of DRM, which I wrote here.

What I want to talk about in this blog post is which video-on-demand providers decided to not use these mechanisms for their content.

The basic gist of what I wrote there was that copyright holders of popular media wanted a means to protect their content when distributed to consumers digitally, video on demand providers wanted technical solutions to provide such means of protection and make a feasible business model out of it and tech companies wanted to solve these issues in various ways.

Long story short, they all had their dreams come true via the development of three concurrent technologies for protecting digital media: Apple's FairPlay, Microsoft's PlayReady and, last but not least, Google's Widevine.

These three pieces of technology is nowadays used to protect, behind the scenes, all video media that's copyright protected but which also reaches your screen.

They are the foundational building blocks that enforce copyright in a mostly transparent way.

Now, let's talk about enforcement, as not all video on demand providers use these technologies in equal capacity.

Technically, to enable the usage of these technologies in an agnostic way, the W3C introduced a new web standard called the Encrypted Media Extensions (which introduced the requirement for web browsers to include some form of proprietary decryption components, even browsers that had been traditionally open source).

By the standardization of this technology, all web platforms had a common and stable API to call from their client-side Javascript to interact with the underlying FairPlay/PlayReady/Widevine protection facilities in order to initiate and maintain a secure channel to transfer copyrighted video content through the internet.

Since this particular standardization back in September 2017, it was pretty clear that video on demand services had a stable future ahead of them.

Netflix, which had already been proven to have a successful business model by that point and was already an extremely popular platform even back then, was reaching revenues that were quite impressive.

Many other video on demand platforms were already quite well established, by this point, which was already a good indicator that this EME tech being standardized was pretty much inevitable.

However, there were those people that had issue with this: the free software crowd.

Free software, as a social movement, was always about promoting open source and the ability to contribute and share your changes with the world at large, as much as possible.

The free software crowd never liked the idea of forcing proprietary components into web browsers in order to keep them compliant, as that would go against the very principle of what they argue the open web should be.

But, as I said in my previous blog post, the open source dilemma was a huge one and, realistically, there is no way to write a web browser that's fully open source but which also is supposed to allow for hiding of digital data that's copyright protected and very valuable.

To do so entails that anyone that has some experience with the programming language that this web browser is implemented in can very well take the source code as it is, change it to bypass the security measures that are implemented in the vanilla browser, re-write the pipelines that the protected data are supposed to go through and change them so that you reconstruct a video file from the stream instead, dump said file on your desktop and then, “voila!”, just like that, you have an unofficial fork of that browser that can steal the video contents from Netflix and dump them in mp4 files on your desktop and then share that file with the world at large.

Nobody wants that.

And so, even though this decision displeased the free software crowd by a lot (so much so that, the same day the EME tech was officially standardized, the Electronic Frontier Foundation published an open letter of resignation from the W3C), the W3C made the difficult decision to standardize this technology anyways in order to prevent third party media plugins (e.g. Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight) from re-emerging into the scene as necessities to use Netflix or other video-on-demand providers.

Web browsers that were historically open source but still wishing to remain fully web standards complying (such as Mozilla's Firefox) ended up with having to devise clever workarounds to provide the needed functionality to their userbase. Mozilla, for example, figured out a way to do this by simply piggybacking on Google Chrome's existent proprietary Widevine CDM solution and simply utilizing this as a plug-in to their, otherwise open source, web browser. And, to still keep their free software promoting user base happy and not have them cry foul and yelling that Mozilla is “polluting” a free software browser with proprietary nastiness, they added a checkbox in their browser's settings that allows the end user to decide whether to enable the Widevine plug-in or disable it completely. Disabling it would mean, obviously, that video on demand providers would have no way to create a secure communication channel with the Content Decryption Module on the end user's device (since there is no CDM to talk about at all) and, thus, there would be no way to secure the video content, which means that sites like Netflix would simply refuse to let you stream from them, even if you were a paying customer.

Obviously, this meant that most people that still use Firefox kept that checkbox enabled, so that Widevine would remain as an installed plug-in and be constantly enabled. After all, who doesn't want to watch Disney+ TV shows on their computer?

Well, maybe this won't surprise very many people, but I am a hard-boiled free software advocate myself and I've always been very adamant about the web needing to be as open and devoid of proprietary technologies, as possible.

Given my very puritan stance on this matter, it should come as no surprise, dear reader, that I was among the very few Firefox users that kept said checkbox unchecked, and so I had no Widevine CDM to speak of installed on my Linux system.

This meant, effectively, that video on demand providers like Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video and so on would detect the lack of a proper CDM in my browser and, obviously, they would refuse to stream any content to me, because there was a very real risk that I would then copy said video and allow others to pirate it from me.

Needless to say, I was a bit unhappy with the current state of affairs. Still, I wasn't willing to compromise, and I genuinely believed, deep down, that video-on-demand as a business model was doomed to fail and that it was the root of all evil, as it was causing the advent of more proprietary solutions that were parasitizing a pure and virgin web.

In my quest to find video on demand on the web to consume but which did not require me to enable the proprietary CDM in my browser, I ended up with three video on demand platforms that I had to choose from: Crunchyroll, HIDIVE and Wakanim.

Before you say anything, no, I wasn't specifically choosing anime services to watch; it just so happened that these were the only services that did not require me to have Widevine enabled.

All the others (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, HBO Max etc) automatically detected my lack of a CDM and would give me errors when trying to play any stream on their platforms whatsoever.

Those three were the only services that I could use (although, with Wakanim, even this might not have been the case, as I couldn't even reach the point where I could play media on it).

Wakanim

Wakanim is the outlier because I simply couldn't use it at all. For whatever reason, whenever I tried to use their website, the website presented itself in Russian to me.

I've encountered situations like these when a website tries to auto-detect my location based on my IP and then decides to auto-translate their entire page to whatever language it thinks I speak as a means of convenience.

The only issue is, I'm not Russian, nor do I know or speak Russian whatsoever. I've been born, raised, and am currently living in Romania. So the website auto-translating itself to Russian was quite a hindrance to me.

Normally, a rationally designed web platform would still offer the end-user the possibility of correcting these types of errors by giving them a language selection menu to select a different language from the current one. But no, of course it wouldn't be that easy. Apparently the programmers that worked for Wakanim decided that their platform was too perfect to need such a fallback and that such bugs could never happen on their polished little website (spoiler alert: it happened, to me at least).

So, with Wakanim, at least, I really can't say whether it would or not allow for playing protected media without a CDM installed. From what I read online, supposedly, you can actually download the video series that you purchase from their platform, in an unencrypted format, so you can then play that media on any player of your choice, offline.

If that were true, I would have been mighty impressed and a big fan of. It would mean that there's really no point in employing a CDM and encrypting the data stream if you're just gonna gift-wrap the protected content to your customers anyway.

I guess we'll never know now, since they've been discontinued since November 2023.

HIDIVE

Oh, good ol' HIDIVE. It's very funny to think that the entire reason why I initially chose to become one of their customers is because I could use their platform without needing to install proprietary components in my browser to watch their videos.

My relationship with them was a short lived one, as any of those that follow my anime blog already know (specifically, the blog which can be found here).

If you don't know, long story short, I made a subscription to them back in early 2022, watched a couple of their shows that were pretty fun (like Tokyo Mew Mew New, The Executioner and Her Way of Life, Endo and Kobayashi Live! The Latest on Tsundere Villainess Lieselotte and many, many more) but eventually, at some point during April or May 2023 I think, they suddenly and abrutly stopped servicing Romanian customers on their platform. You can read more about that over here.

Eventually I decided to mask my location using a VPN to appear as if I was from a different country so that I could still stream from them but, when the time eventually came to renew my yearly subscription towards them, I decided to cancel and never look back.

In the end, I liked the fact that they don't force a proprietary CDM down your throat in order to stream videos from them. And if you're also anti-proprietary DRM and want to support video-on-demand platforms that don't require them too, then you might like them.

Personally I cannot, in good conscience and with my self respect intact, continue to financially support a service that discriminates against me simply for being from Romania, so I choose not to continue giving them money (I know that it's not a personal matter and that they just made a financial decision to stop supporting Romania, I get that, but I still find it insulting nonetheless).

Crunchyroll

Finally we came to the last one in our list. Please be aware, though, that what I'm about to write is a, mostly, historical piece about how things were back at the time.

For a long time (I don't even know since when but it's been the case at least since I joined them), Crunchyroll has somehow allowed you to stream their content without actually necessitating to activate the Widevine CDM in your web browser.

I don't know if they've ever officially supported that, since as far as I can tell, their website always warned that you should enable it to have it work, but unofficially, if you kept it disabled, either intentionally or unintentionally, the page you'd load would warn you that you need to turn it on but, eventually, the video would still load without any issues.

Yes, that's right. You used to be able to watch Crunchyroll videos entirely unprotected, no CDM required, at your leisure.

That. was. AWESOME.

Key words being “used to”.

At some point in the past (I think late 2023?) they've patched their Javascript implementation and now their website correctly detects whether you have the CDM disabled or not. If you do have it disabled it doesn't allow you to stream anymore.

So this obscure workaround doesn't actually work anymore, as of the posting of this blog post.

I am tremendously sad by this outcome, I'm not gonna lie.

Crunchyroll, the last bastion of hope that I had for a free web has betrayed me, and now I am forced to enable my Widevine CDM again, just to watch Crunchyroll videos again.

Conclusion

I know what many people are going to tell me: it's selfish of me to want for streaming services to disable the only means that they have for protecting their content just because of my personal puritan ideology of hating proprietary software.

I get it, I really do.

That's why, in the end, I decided to still keep my Crunchyroll subscription.

Because, even though I'm unhappy with how things turned out to be, I realize that what I want is pretty much impossible to implement: I want full complete control over my own hardware and everything that runs on it (i.e. the free software philosophy, in a nutshell) but I also want to be able to stream copyright protected videos through that hardware as well (which requires at least some proprietary closed-source components to implement the necessary protections).

This is a contradiction that has no solution. In fact, this isn't even a technical dilemma, the way I always thought of it, but merely a philosophical one.

The only way to reconcile on this is to make some compromise: either I give up on streaming media on my PC entirely and embrace a fully open and free software ecosystem, or I decide to allow media streaming on my PC, in which case, I have to install at least some proprietary software to allow for its protection and copyright enforcement.

Ultimately, I made the decision that any weak willed individual would make and I eventually caved in and enabled the Widevine CDM. It was a choice, a painful choice, but a choice I needed to make.

Some might argue that it was the wrong choice and, to be honest, I wouldn't necessarily even disagree with them. Compromising on one's own ideals because of convenience is never an easy pill to swallow, but I did.

Still, it is because of this decision that I still get to watch Crunchyroll streams to this day, and maintain my anime blog as well.

So I guess at least some things worked out, for better or for worse.

Still, I can't help but wish for a better world: a world that maybe copyright holders decide to be more trusting of their consumer base and would allow them to watch their media without having to devolve to such barbaric and convoluted processes just to prevent piracy.

Because, as many people have shown in the past, DRM is nothing more than additional hoops that are added to discourage piracy. It does not guarantee that piracy will never happen.

And time and time again it's been shown that pirates, for better or for worse, will get their hands on said protected media one way or another, through various means, and the end result is always the same: DRM just acts as a minor impediment in the grand process of breaking the protection schemes.

The people that always end up suffering the most when DRM is added to products are the lawful consumers.

Time to talk about DRM again.

Naturally, most people don't care much about this topic, and I'm sorry if another blog post talking about DRM might seem very boring and too technical for you, but I really need to get this off my chest.

With that said, I'll try to keep this as simple and easy to understand for non-technical people as I can.

So, let's get started!

A bit of background on DRM

So, what is DRM anyways? DRM stands for Digital Rights Management and is an umbrella term used to refer to any technological means of enforcing copyright over digital information of any kind. Examples of digital information that are usually DRM protected are music, books, video games and, of course, video files.

Since copy-pasting a file in a computer is as simple as doing a Control + C, Control + V on it and, just like that, you have an exact copy of it without having had to pay any amount of money for a second copy of it, DRM was invented to stop the user from being able to do just that, for the sake of enforcing copyright restrictions.

There are many schemes that have been invented (and reinvented) over the years to do just that, one of the most popular known ones being Apple's FairPlay technology, that is implemented on macOS and iOS. This tech was used historically for protecting music that was distributed over the iTunes store (and still is), but was also extended for protecting ebooks too, as well as video and other media.

Microsoft also tried their hand at this and came up with the PlayReady technology, a similar proprietary tech that is used primarily for encrypting copyrighted video that gets streamed to devices running the Windows family of operating systems (especially on Microsoft's own brand of web browsers, particularly Microsoft Edge).

These pieces of technology are needed in the modern day world simply because, if they did not exist, it would be trivial for anyone to steal digital information passing through their computer. Simple tools like Wireshark (which are free, by the way), would allow anyone with a Netflix subscription to capture the network packets coming from Netflix servers and reconstruct the video file that would represent any TV show or movie that you wanted to get a hold of.

Once this reconstruction process would be complete, you, as a simple Netflix customer, would have in your possession a digital copy of the episode or movie in question and would then be able to share it illegally with anyone of your choice.

It is for this reason that Netflix and other video-on-demand platforms have been employing the aforementioned technologies to protect their digital content and bar computer users from misusing their privileges to enable software piracy.

Why is this a problem?

Now, on paper, DRM sounds quite fine and dandy and, for all intents and purposes, it can be seen even as a necessity in a modern digital age.

After all, how could you, as a movie studio or a musician, ever feel comfortable to distribute your own work digitally to your customers if there was no protection in place to prevent them from illegally copying your work and then distributing it freely to others against your will?

After all, piracy means loss of money to you, doesn't it?

Well, here's where we get into murky territory.

While it's easy to think in black and white terms like that when you're the owner of your own work, it gets complicated when you have to really think about how to prevent people from copying over information when that information has to go through untrusted computers.

Because, at the end of the day, anything that can be shown on a computer, whether it's a book, music or video, has to come down to being a long series of bits. Because, deep down, that's the only thing that computers can work with: digital data.

And, also, that data, in order to be useful to a customer that pays you money, has to go through his own hardware: his CPU, his GPU and, eventually, reach his display or his speakers. A song can only be useful to someone if it plays on his speakers, a video can only be useful if it gets played on his monitor etc.

So, regardless of how you spin it, this protected data, somehow, has to travel through the medium of the internet and eventually reach hardware that is a customer's, a customer that may or may not have malicious intentions of illegally copying it for his own needs.

The inherent problem that I'm trying to highlight here is that, in the end, the data has to reach untrusted territory, and be processed by untrusted hardware.

How can this be resolved when any piece of hardware can be tampered with, physically? How can one guarantee the safety of a piece of data if it has to pass through a CPU that can be made to run an untrustworthy operating system on it?

Well, there is no easy answer to that question. Theoretically, the answer is it's impossible but, then, that would be quite problematic.

That answer would cause a lot of issues, least of which is the fact that video on demand, as a business model, would be effectively impossible to implement if that were the colloquial answer to this dilemma.

Oh, you want to make a business out of streaming copyrighted content to computers all over the world that have an internet connection? Well, TOO BAD. It's technically impossible to protect said data from being illegally copied by malicious technically savvy actors and so, well, you can't make a business out of that. Sorry.

Imagine if that was the case! Netflix, as a business, wouldn't exist. And TV shows and movies would remain only in the world of TV and Blu-ray/DVD releases. That would be a very sad thing indeed.

But wait a second! I just mentioned Blu-ray and DVD, didn't I? Home media, as a concept, has been a very lucrative industry for many years and, even that, in theory, relies on giving customers access to copyrighted digital data and letting them view that at their leisure.

Blu-ray, by definition, allows a customer that had purchased the Blu-ray disc of a particular movie or TV show, to watch said movie or TV show on their own TV, which is technically untrusted (since any piece of hardware can be tampered with).

So, if Blu-ray could do it, why can't video-on-demand platforms?

The breakthrough (sort of)

Multiple things had to happen at the same time to make Blu-ray, as a piece of technology, become possible.

For one, digital transmission of video streams had to be locked down entirely.

Ever used an HDMI cable? Or a DisplayPort? That's digital video transmission and everything going through those cables has to be encrypted.

The exact name for this encryption technique is known as HDCP, which stands for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection and it was invented back in 2000 by none other than the Intel Corporation (initially for DVI and later expanded to include other kinds of physical links as well).

Nowadays HDCP is used behind the scenes by pretty much every piece of hardware in existence.

Any type of graphics card will, at the very end of the processing pipeline, encrypt the video stream before it sends it out on the physical cable so that, no matter what that cable is connected to, it will only receive encrypted data (and when I say graphics card, I also mean integrated graphics as well).

But how can a TV or computer monitor read a video stream that's encrypted?

Well, before the encryption even begins, there's a special kind of key exchange that happens, and that kind of exchange is only possible if the TV or monitor in question has its own kind of key burned into its own hardware that is, inherently, trusted. The exact type of exchange is complicated and is designed in such a way as to not leak trusted key material to untrusted parties. I won't go into detail of how this is done but, if you're up to the task, you can read up on the details here.

In addition to this, the trusted keys that have to be burned into monitors or TVs had to be buried into microchips that are difficult to extract data from.

Physically this is not impossible but it requires specialized equipment and knowledge to reverse engineer these keys.

This is to say, to circumvent the problem of How can you protect copyrighted information that has to go through untrustworthy hardware, the solution engineers came up with was Simple! Just design all hardware in existence that has to handle such information to be trustworthy.

This is to say, make an authentication scheme that cannot be spoofed very easily to ensure that sensitive information doesn't get sent out to tampered hardware, bury sensitive cryptographic materials that such schemes rely on in microchips that are very difficult to tamper with and, finally, whenever data has to exit such trusted hardware and has to travel through physical links whose integrity cannot be guaranteed, encrypt that information before it has to travel through said links so that only trusted hardware can decrypt it back to a readable form.

So, how did Microsoft and Apple implement a solution for video-on-demand providers? They designed their FairPlay and PlayReady protection schemes to make use of these hardware technologies by enhancing their respective operating systems with the capability of creating secure write-only pipes that have special anti-tamper protections built into the very kernels. Such pipes would have sensitive copyright protected information travel through them, which, in practice, just means that this information gets encrypted as it gets passed around from one memory area to another (much like how a VPN encrypts your network traffic as it travels from one point to the next) and only the hardware parts that need raw access to that information has the means of decrypting it. Everything else would just see encrypted gibberish.

To make this possible, TPMs had to become widespread (as they are designed to be trusted by default and also handle sensitive information), drivers for graphics cards had to be enhanced by video card manufacturers to support these protection schemes, and much more.

Ultimately, the end result of all of this was a very complex system with many many moving parts, where many giant tech companies had to agree to multiple standards and had to come together in their engineering efforts (among of which were Microsoft, Apple, Intel, nVidia, AMD, Google; pretty much all the big names that you can think of) and, in the end, it resulted in a highly advanced protection scheme whose sole purpose was to enforce copyright over digital data.

And, after all these efforts, we had a technological means of guaranteeing to video-on-demand providers that their data could be safely handed over to secure machines running secure operating systems, that would run secure hardware handled by secure signed proprietary drivers.

But wait! What about Linux?

Oh right, of course things couldn't be that easy! Open source just had to make things complicated again!

You see, dear reader, in this world of security through proprietary secret technologies and encryption schemes implemented through locked-down TPMs or proprietary drivers that nobody can inspect the source code for, there exist those people that want to run only free software, open source software; there exist operating systems whose very kernel can be modified by whoever has the technical knowledge to do so and can be changed to do whatever they so desire. And doing that requires no reverse engineering or hardware tampering whatsoever.

In such a world, you may wonder, how can such data be protected, if the operating system can be modified by anyone in any way?

It would be one thing if the web browser ran directly on the video card and web developers could interface against a secret API from Javascript to access the proprietary underlying drivers to encrypt media, but that's not how anything works.

The web browser runs from the context of an operating system. The operating system runs on a CPU. In order for data coming from a Netflix server to be protected against illegal copying, it has to be passed over from the web browser process to the video drivers (since we're talking specifically about video content now) through system calls, and then the video drivers have to take it and encrypt it and then pass it on to the monitor link.

It is at this point where the data has to be passed over from the web browser process to the video card drivers where it is vulnerable to being copied.

If the kernel is truly open source and a hacker can manipulate its source code to make a modified malicious version that can steal any data that gets passed over during this time and extract the unencrypted bits, then it's all over.

What's even worse is the fact that there are versions of graphics drivers that are also open source, made by third parties unrelated to nVidia or AMD or Intel, who cannot be controlled by them and who publish the source code for their work as well. These drivers can very well be rewritten by anyone skilled enough to copy the data when it is still unencrypted and dump it into a file.

These issues are very pressing and, honestly, this is where we get into the grey area that nobody likes to talk about.

In a world where nobody cares, the solution that most engineering companies would come up with would be “just ignore Linux users” and that would be it. “Since we cannot ensure a secure pipeline for copyrighted data from the web browser to the physical wire that goes to the monitor, we cannot trust the operating system at all. As such, let's not support it” and that would be the end of the discussion.

What this would mean would be that Linux users would be left in the dust, and Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, HBO max and all these other platforms would simply refuse to service them, as none of them would be willing to hand over their copyrighted video data to such untrustworthy platforms.

Thankfully, this is not the case.

Widevine to the rescue

And here we come to the end of our story. The hero that saved Linux and made video-on-demand streaming possible to it was none other than a company that wanted to provide a means of securing data from the context of a web browser.

Widevine Technologies have been making a name for themselves in the area of protecting digital content from 1999 onwards, being among the most famous companies that enforce content protection on various platforms.

In 2010, the company was acquired by Google, who was very well aware of the necessity of acquiring their tech.

The problem with the aforementioned PlayReady and FairPlay technologies is that they were proprietary and relied on special support from the underlying operating system to work.

PlayReady would only work on Windows and FairPlay would only be accessible from the context of Apple's own ecosystem of operating systems.

This posed a problem to Google, since they wanted to make a cross-platform web browser that would the same across all operating systems (namely Google Chrome).

To make Chrome work correctly, it would, in theory, be possible to maintain different code bases for each separate operating system, but that would be an unnecessary amount of extra effort to invest into a means of protecting digital data.

Instead, Google sought to obtain a universal solution, a one-size-that-fits-all glove that would be agnostic to the operating system that it ran on and, would additionally work well on Google's own operating systems, namely the Linux-based Android and ChromeOS environments which lacked the aforementioned protection schemes.

As such, Google realized that it only made sense to acquire Widevine Technologies as a response to this necessity, and integrate their solutions into Google Chrome and Android ecosystems, which lacked them.

“But how can an open source web browser like Chromium ever be able to encrypt data in such a way that's impossible to be bypassed by hackers who can just change the source code? And how can they protect such data from a potentially hostile tampered operating system?” you may ask.

Well, the answer is a fair bit complicated, but, to put it simply, Google had to do a lot of patchwork to get there. But, it's Google. At the end of the day, they had more than enough money and engineers to throw at the problem.

The way they did it for the Chromium project was to simply not make their solution available there, at all.

If you use a pure version of the Chromium web browser to watch Netflix, you'll quickly find out that it simply doesn't work. That's because Google could not reliably implement such a solution into an open source project, lest it invite the open source dilemma that we already talked about.

Instead, they implemented it only for Google Chrome as a proprietary plugin-in dynamic library who does all the heavy work duty of both encrypting and decrypting the media streams in a closed proprietary environment that's very difficult to reverse engineer.

This is known as the Widevine CDM, and is only a small part of the whole Widevine infrastructure that's behind the content protection that's needed.

As this CDM is just a dynamic library file on the local file system, in theory, it is possible for a malicious party to simply disassemble it and extract its inner functioning, analyze it, and figure out how it does things (and this has happened before; I've even read up on a now archived Github page how one user attempted to do just that).

At one point in the past, the way this CDM did things was by using RSA encryption to decrypt video content that was being sent over the wire to it.

Basically, the CDM had its own public-private RSA keypair burned into the library, with the private key very cleverly hidden in some .data section in the library file. Whenever a protected content stream was to be initiated, the Chrome browser would load the proprietary plug-in, the plug-in would send an exact copy of its public key in clear text to the Widevine server that was on the other end of the internet connection, the server would check against its database of trusted RSA keys to see if it was trusted and, if it still was trusted at that point in time, would start encrypting the protected data stream using that public key and send the encrypted data to the browser over the internet. The CDM would then use its associated private key to decrypt the stream back to its original form and then display everything from the context of the web browser as a video feed.

Simple, easy and very elegant.

That was how it was done at one point. Since then, especially after this information got released from the guy that reverse engineered it, I imagine Google engineers updated the method to something else now.

The point is, there exist many different ways to do it, and, as hackers reverse engineer the Widevine library to keep finding out how it works, Google has the resources to find new ways of protecting the content, in a constant cat-and-mouse game of trying to evolve a solution to protect digital video feeds.

“But wouldn't a tampered host operating system defeat this? One could just inspect the RAM memory of the Widevine CDM and access the raw decrypted data directly, if they were skilled enough”.

Yes, yes they could. For this reason Widevine has such a thing as protection levels. Because, unlike Windows or macOS, the Linux operating system that runs in the background cannot have its integrity guaranteed in any way, if Google Chrome detects that it's running on such an environment, it considers this to be in an L3 (i.e. protection level 3) context. This is the least secure context and it is, for this reason, considered the highest risk one.

Within an L3 context, all operations are done in an unprotected memory area by the Widevine CDM, and this is considered low security. For this reason, most video-on-demand platforms only hand over low quality streams to such an environment, content that, even if it were illegally copied and then distributed via piracy, would only lead to marginal financial damages. I forgot exactly what type of restrictions this has, but for Netflix, if I recall correctly, I think they send out only a maximum of 540p quality streams to such environments (either that or 480p or 720p, I can't remember which). Such low quality streams are considered low-risk enough that even if they were sent over to insecure channels, the amount of damage they would do would be limited.

The next level up would be L2 protection, in which video decoding and encoding is done in an unprotected environment but cryptographic operations are done securely. This is where Google Chrome running from the context of ChromeOS would be (sometimes, ChromeOS might even support L1 protection even). Technically ChromeOS is also Linux, but it's treated in a special way, because the operating system is heavily modified by Google to be locked down intensely against tampering, and its own source code is not published online (there is the open source ChromiumOS project that ChromeOS is based off of, but it's only an approximation of the real thing, as ChromeOS modifies it using proprietary means very heavily, much in the same way that the Chromium project is only an open source approximation of Google Chrome).

Inside the L2 context, most video-on-demand platforms would allow for content streaming up to 1080p, as it's very unlikely for memory inspection tools to be available in such environments for hackers to tamper around with.

Finally, there is the L1 context, that's only available on modern hardware that use TPMs and hardware-protected video decoding to ensure the availability of a secure pipeline to send copyright protected information through. This is a 1:1 equivalent to the aforementioned PlayReady and FairPlay solutions, where data protection is guaranteed on every step of the way through the pipeline, from the browser until the data gets displayed on the monitor/TV.

This level of protection can only be guaranteed only on the latest versions of Intel and AMD CPUs (that have TPMs incorporated in them), you have up to date device drivers that ensure that the hardware can handle protected data and the host operating system is guaranteed to not have been tampered with in any way (usually by integrity checks and ensuring that the boot loader of the device is locked, if possible).

From the context of Widevine, this is usually only possible on the latest Chromebooks and on Android devices (smartphones, tablets or smart TVs) that have never had their bootloaders unlocked (and always on iOS and iPadOS devices as well).

In such environments, the security guaranteed is so high that there are no more limits with regards to the quality of the content being shown. This is considered the maximum level of security that Widevine can afford, equivalent to the PlayReady and FairPlay schemes.

And so, thanks to Widevine, Linux as a whole now supports protected video playback (albeit L3 level but still).

A blog post talking about the history of the privacy-focused Tox protocol.

Background

After the 2013 Snowden US government leaks, it's no secret that many people, including those from the general public, have become quite uncomfortable about the topic of government surveillance.

Up until then, there was always an air of acceptance among everyone that the government was spying on them and that, most likely, all digital communications were being harvested by it somehow, but nobody gave the thought too much thinking.

Well, Snowden changed this and, in the wake of publications of classified materials that showed just how much the US government was eavesdropping on everyone, including domestically on US citizens, it became clear that the idea of being spied upon suddenly lost all its humor in the public's eyes.

Programs such as PRISM became part of the public consciousness and technologies that many had taken for granted, such as Skype, became the target of much distrust all of a sudden.

People were suddenly concerned about their online privacy, and felt betrayed by the revelations.

And so, as a consequence, in June 2013, the first commit was published on github by a user named irungentoo, a commit for a repository named toxcore.

And so was the Tox protocol born.

Design goals

The protocol, in its infancy, strived to achieve some very straight forward goals:

1. It was supposed to be entirely a peer-to-peer protocol, meaning that unlike many other instant messaging protocols devised up until that point (such as Whatsapp, Signal, Telegram etc.), the tox protocol will not rely on any central service at all, outside of the barebones bootstrap nodes which would be used to get the ball rolling

2. It would be an end-to-end encrypted messaging system, meaning that the only players involved in the conversation would be the ones that would have the means of decrypting it

3. Once a contact's friend request is accepted, the two clients would immediately connect directly to each other, without relying on any relays or intermediaries whatsoever (except if any of the contacts decides to use Tor to mask their IPs for additional privacy)

The Snowden leaks revealed that the main reason digital communication was prone to being eavesdropped on was that the most famous and common instant messaging communication programs relied on servers to relay the messages between the participants. This means that the NSA only needed to go to the server operators to convince them to handle these messages to them, either voluntarily or via use of legal coercion.

So the Tox protocol solved this dilemma by simply getting rid of servers altogether. You can't easily spy on everyone if people are directly connecting to each other to talk, without central intermediaries.

A good analogy is the advent of telephone companies. It's easy for the government to spy on phone conversations because, ultimately, there are only a handful of phone companies in any country, so they just need to compromise all of them and then they can access the phone conversations of millions of people. This is possible because all these millions of people rely on just a handful of companies for all their communication.

The less companies there are to compromise, the easier it is for the government to breach the service.

Drawbacks

The idea, was a good one. There were some caveats though.

Who came first? The chicken or the egg?

The main issue that hampered Tox's growth was the fact that Tox, by design, was very privacy focused.

Yes, in theory, you could use your real name as your tox profile account's name, you could post your email and phone number in your tox details as well for all your contacts to see.

But, in practice, most people used an anonymous username that was very difficult for others to guess. Moreover, the protocol didn't even mandate for the registration of an email address or a phone number. Basically, the protocol allowed for full anonymity at all times.

This was by design like this.

The issue with this was that there was no easy way to find your friends even if they also used tox.

There was no directory where you could search people by name, email address, phone number or even tox username at all.

Instead, if you wanted to talk with someone over tox, you first had to share your Tox ID with them, which is this long 76 character long hexadecimal string, that they would then use to find you over the internet and send you a friend invite.

Once you accepted the invite, your tox client would connect directly with theirs over the internet, negotiate a secret encryption key with them and then use this to encrypt all your communications with each other.

The key would only exist on your device and theirs, never leaked to any third party at all.

Needless to say, this was a cumbersome process, and it made finding new people a complete and utter hassle. Not only this, but it opened the door for a chicken and an egg dilemma, because if you needed to securely talk with someone, you first had to give them your tox ID (or they had to give you theirs) over a secure private channel before you even started talking over tox.

But in order to do that, you needed to have a private trusted communication channel between the two of you already to send the tox ID through, so what even was the point of tox if you already had that?

Offline messages? What's that?

Another, glaring shortcoming that the tox protocol suffered from, due to its server-less architecture, was the lack of offline messaging functionality.

Skype, Teams, Signal and all these other instant messaging platforms have servers that are, inherently, trusted by all the clients by design.

Servers might not seem like that much of a huge deal, but it allows for useful features like offline messaging to happen without having to overly engineer a very complicated solution.

Basically, if Bob wants to send Alice a message over Skype, for example, but Alice is offline at the time, Bob can send the message, the message gets recorded and timestamped by Skype servers which are, by design, always online, and then Bob can do other things in the meantime, even go offline as well, knowing that the message has been sent.

Now, even if Bob may have gone offline in the meantime, Alice may come online, connect to a Skype server and, as soon as the server sees her coming online, it remembers that Bob had tried to send her a message when she was offline, and sends the message to her now.

Bob doesn't need to be online for any of this. The Skype server did the job for him behind the scenes. This is what's known as offline messaging.

Tox doesn't have servers, though, so none of this is possible.

I'm sure, technically, this can be done in a peer-to-peer application too, if you put enough thought into designing a clever solution.

As long as there are other peers for you to connect to, you can engineer a solution in which they store the message themselves, instead of relying on a server, and relay it somehow to Alice when she gets online, but then you have to design a propagation protocol so that the message is kept alive while peers come online and go offline randomly, make sure that a malicious peer doesn't just flood the network with bogus offline messages meant to DoS all other peers and other such nonsense.

The point is, designing a solution that doesn't rely on servers is not easy and tox just decided to take the easiest approach out: just avoid supporting offline messages entirely.

What this means is that in Tox, if you wish to send any of your contacts a message, both you and the contact in question have to be online!

Sure, tox can hide this fact by queuing the message locally on your computer, waiting for your contact to come online to send it to him but, if you decide to shut down your computer during this time while they're still offline, they won't be getting your message while your computer is shut down, even if they will come online in the meantime.

Basically, all your offline messages to your contact will ever be sent to them only during the brief period when both you and them are online at the same time.

This makes people who live on opposite sides of the planet, and who have huge time zone differences between them, very difficult to communicate with each other over tox, as one is usually offline sleeping while the other is online, and vice versa.

Worse, if you have an urgent message you really need someone over tox to read, your only recourse is to keep your computer online and not sleeping at all times, until they get online, for the message to be delivered.

This is not only a huge waste of power but, many times, it's impractical. Basically, in order to mitigate the lack of servers, communicating parties have to turn their clients into servers themselves.

And, not only this, but because Tox is a trustless protocol by design and peers are designed not to trust each other, even if they are directly communicating with one another, a message that is being received by Alice at a later time than it was when being sent by Bob (i.e. an offline message), gets timestamped by Alice's tox client as the time of it being received by Alice, not the time it had been sent by Bob to Alice.

Or, in simpler words, if Bob sent Alice a message, but Alice was offline on Tox for an entire week afterwards so she couldn't receive it, when Alice does finally come online on Tox and receives Bob's message, the message is recorded in Alice's client as having been sent at the time Alice came online, not a week prior when it had actually been sent by Bob.

This is because, Bob could have hacked his own Tox client to lie to Alice about when he had sent the message, in which case his client could claim that the message had been sent a month prior, or even a year prior. Without a trusted third party server to corroborate the sending event, Alice's client has no way of knowing if what Bob's client says is true, nor can Bob's client even prove that he had sent the offline message at the time he claims he has and not earlier or later.

As such, in Tox, the offline messages you receive from a contact are timestamped on your end as the time you actually receive them, not at the time your contact claims to have sent them to you.

This is the issue with software that's inherently distrustful by design. You always end up lacking features that software with trusted servers have.

Have more than one computer? Sucks to be you!

Oh, this one's a doozy.

You know how, on Skype or Microsoft Teams, you just have to login to your account and then you can send messages from literally any internet-connected computer at your disposal?

Like, let's say you send a message to your boss on at work, close your computer to go on lunch break, and then, while you're gone and eating, you decide to see if your boss answered by just logging into Teams via your phone and check.

You can do this because your Teams account is stored somewhere in a database and, regardless of where you connect to Teams servers from, whether it's your work Desktop machine, your Android phone or your grandma's laptop, the servers are always the same and the database that they use to store information about you is also always the same. Only the Teams clients are different.

Well, Tox only has clients. It has no servers, no databases, no anything.

Basically, if you want to share your Tox conversations across machines, you're pretty much out of luck.

OK, in theory, there's nothing in the Tox protocol that prevents a Tox client from somehow implementing a solution to synchronize conversations across multiple computers using peer-to-peer technology. Maybe someone, someday, will actually implement this and I'll take my words back.

But, in practice, I've personally never seen this done.

Only once did I move my qTox profile from a Linux laptop to my Windows desktop by copying the profile folder on a thumb drive and, thankfully, everything went smoothly and without any bugs whatsoever. That way, I've effectively moved my encrypted Tox conversations across machines.

However, it's worth noting that, at least back at the time, this wasn't officially supported by qTox, meaning that it could have very well not worked. Or, even if it did work, a future update could make it not work anymore.

Basically, if you want to use Tox on multiple computers, the official fully supported way of doing it, is to just generate a new Tox profile on each and every one of them. And that means you'll have to re-add all your contacts across all of them, every one of your contacts will have to accept a separate friend request for each computer you use tox on, your friends will have you listed multiple times in their contacts list, once for each of your computers and, even with all of this, none of your chats will be synchronized across your devices, meaning that different computers will have entirely separate conversation histories.

This.IS.A.NIGHTMARE.

If you ever wonder why the Tox protocol was never successful, it's not because it was buggy or it lacked advanced features; it's because, by design, it couldn't implement some of the most basic features that most people expect by default from any instant messaging app.

Its greatest strength, the fact that it had no servers or central database, was also its downfall: no servers means no simple way of inter-device data syncing, offline messaging or central user directories to add friends from.

This is why Tox failed

Lack of support for niche Linux distros for certain Tox clients

This is more of a niche thing, as most software doesn't support Linux anyways, but the user base that most Tox clients pandered to, was the privacy oriented, corporation hating, free software loving Linux community.

Sure, there were Tox clients that were geared only towards Windows too, but those were very rare.

So you'd think, given their primary user base, that many client developers would go out of their way to ensure good support for most distros. Well, you'd be wrong in thinking that.

Or at least, I was wrong about this with a tox client named qTox.

qTox was one of the more popular clients out there, and it was my client of choice because it had the widest operating system support of all clients.

So, naturally, that was my first choice for a client.

I also have to point out that I'm a Fedora linux user. I use Fedora Workstation as my daily driver on my personal laptop, and I love this OS, with all its flaws and shortcomings.

One day, I upgraded to Fedora 36, as that was the latest release at the time and then, as usual, I went ahead and enabled RPM fusion repositories on my system.

Then, from RPM fusion, I installed qTox on my system.

Well, wouldn't you know it, I was getting an error upon trying to start the program.

The error? A library called libvpx.so.6 was missing on my system. Of course, I didn't get this error message while trying to start qTox normally from my launcher, I had to try to start qTox from the terminal, just so that I would get a printout on why it was failing to start in the first place on the console.

Well, wouldn't you know it, apparently Fedora 36 upgraded its system libraries and instead of coming preinstalled with libvpx.so.6, as qTox seemed to be expecting, it came with libvpx.so.7 instead, which was entirely different.

I mean, I know RPM Fusion was a third party repository and that people shouldn't expect much quality control from stuff in it but, isn't the entire point of a package manager that it was supposed to solve dependency issues like this?

And yes, I tried creating a symbolic link named libvpx.so.6 to libvpx.so.7, expecting it to work out of the box, but it wouldn't. The program would still crash immediately upon start-up with an even uglier error message.

The point is, while Fedora is indeed a bit niche, it's still one of the most popular Linux distros on the planet. You'd think the development team for qTox would try to pre-emptively fix issues like these before people would make the upgrade.

And, for the record, I didn't do the upgrade the exact day Fedora 36 came out. I usually wait a couple of weeks before I upgrade, so they had more than enough time to sort this out. The fact is, they didn't care.

Granted, qTox is just one Tox client. Their development team doesn't develop c-toxcore or any of the many other Tox clients on the planet, so they are just one party at fault here.

And, despite this issue, qTox also offered an AppImage that worked out of the box so I could continue to use qTox even after this.

But still, it's disheartening when you realize that this is the type of bugs you encounter quite often when trying to use Tox.

The titan has fallen

With all of these shortcomings, and without obvious technical solutions in sight, the Tox protocol has seen an excruciatingly slow but painful death.

It bled users year after year, as more and more privacy focused individuals sought to use other software suites that promised privacy but which also offered the benefits of centralized services, like Signal.

Don't get me wrong, I despise Signal as much as the next person, and the fact that I still have to have a phone number in order to use the service is extremely infuriating. But, at the end of the day, Signal is easier to use than Tox. And that fact is simply indisputable.

Couple that with the fact that Signal also is open source, much like most tox clients are, and you really have no reason to prefer Tox over Signal.

As time went on, developers, for one reason or another, started abandoning their tox projects, one after the other.

People simply didn't seem to care about peer-to-peer protocols anymore and, as the Snowden leaks were slowly fading out of the general population's consciousness, so too did the volunteers working on the myriad of tox clients all around the world.

And, after many years, the most popular tox client out there, qTox, had its official repository on github frozen, with the developers leaving behind a message that they're planning on abandoning the project.

Keep in mind, there are still many tox clients out there, and the main project, c-toxcore, the one that actually implements most of the functionality offered by Tox, is still maintained to this day.

But c-toxcore is just a platform-agnostic library that implements the Tox protocol itself. A library is worthless if you don't have front-end clients to expose its functionality.

That's what all the tox clients are supposed to do. Now, qTox is abandoned, so that's out of the question.

If you go to the Tox protocol's wikipedia page, you'll see a table with the most popular tox clients out there, as well as a column in that table mentioning whether they're still supported or not.

And, at least as of right now, most clients reported on that page are said to have been abandoned.

The most popular Tox client still being maintained right now is one named Toxic, a C client implementation relying on the Ncurses library. Issue with this one is that it's reliant on Unix functionality, meaning that it doesn't work out of the box on Windows.

Sure, technically savvy people can go out of their ways to make it work on Windows, either by compiling the source code using Cygwin or maybe using the Linux subsystem for Windows that's available under Windows 11 but, at the end of the day, most normal people won't go through this stuff when there's Skype, Microsoft Teams, Slack and many other alternatives available at their fingertips.

qTox was the last Tox client that still supported Windows out of the box and now that it's also abandoned, a large portion of desktop users will don't have the option anymore to use Tox, sadly.

Sure, this is a huge loss for Windows users, but it's an even larger loss for Tox, as now, a lot of people won't even consider using the protocol anymore, since they won't be able to use it to communicate with friends and family that do use Windows.

The protocol itself is maintained by the previously mentioned c-toxcore github project, which only maintains the library that does all the heavy work behind the scenes and which is used by Tox clients.

The library's latest stable version, 0.2.17, as of the posting of this blog post, was published more than a year ago at this point (13 months, to be exact).

The developers never said that it was being abandoned too, but, personally, if a piece of software doesn't get any updates for more than a year, I really start to wonder if it's still being maintained.

Technically there's also another Tox client that supports Windows called yat, but as of the writing of this blog post, I tried installing it myself and all installation links lead me to a website called www.lovecry.pt that seems to be down.

I also tried to reach that website a week ago and I didn't have any success back then either.

So yeah, I'm not getting my hopes up anymore.

At this point, I'm convinced the Tox protocol is either destined to die sooner or later, as nobody cares about mass surveillance anymore to go through the hoops that is using Tox, or, best case scenario, it becomes a protocol mainly used by third party clients that work only on Unix operating systems and used by a very niche community of privacy focused nerds.

For the past decade that I've been using it, I've never heard anyone mention Tox in day to day conversations, as an alternative to Skype or Discord, and now I'm more than sure I never will.

And with the advent and promotion of the federated communication protocol Matrix, there's even less of an incentive for people to seek out Tox nowadays.

In the end, one really has to wonder: how long does it take for a project to die?

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