Only 9 anime, this season, sadly. But, for what it's worth, there were some really nice gems among them.

Spring is usually a very fun season, since it's seen as the season of romance, of rebirth and the season of new beginnings.

Because of this, I was hoping for some nice romance TV shows to sink my teeth in, but that didn't really happen (well, one of them technically qualifies as a romance, but it's not really one).

With all that all of the way, I want to say, I had so much fun this season. There were a lot of good things to watch, and I'm all here for it.

1. Witch Hat Atelier

I loved this show, almost to a fault.

The best way I can describe this is that it's a coming of age story, but done in a world in which magic exists.

And no, even though magic exists in this world, it doesn't take place in the traditional, swords and goblins fantasy style world that anime seems to love, so much.

The story follows a young girl named Coco. She lives in a small village with her mother, helping her make clothes as part of their family's business.

Coco has been passionate about magic ever since she was little and had been gifted a picture book by a strange magician.

They live modest lives until one day, a new peculiar customer arrives, named Qiffrey and wishes for them to make some clothes for him.

However, a magical flying carriage that was parked near the village gets damaged by one of the villagers by accident, and nobody knows how to fix it, since magic is something only witches know how to fix.

Qifrey then reveals to everyone that he, in fact, was a witch all along, revealing his witch cap and offering to fix the carriage.

But, because ordinary people cannot know how magic works, he wishes to fix the damaged carriage in secret, in Coco's room, all alone.

Coco sneaks around her house, and despite clear orders from Qifrey insisting on secrecy, she takes a peek at him while he's fixing a part of the carriage. It turns out that magic is triggered by someone drawing with a regular pen.

Only Coco discovers this.

Later on, after Qifrey leaves, Coco looks back at the picture book she had received from her childhood and discovers a pen that had come with it.

Using that pen, she begins drawing the symbols from the picture book, realizing that they were all spells.

But, in doing so, she draws a symbol that creates a spell so powerful that it explodes out of control, and begins engulfing the entire house in a giant block of ice.

Qifrey manages to barge into the house and save Coco just before she becomes engulfed, but is too late to also save Coco's mother.

As the house becomes fully engulfed, Coco laments on her mistake, knowing that she never should have delved with magic, since she was never a witch to begin with.

Feeling bad for her, Qifrey decides to take Coco in as his apprentice, deciding to help her undo her mistake and save her mom.

Thus ends episode 1.

Ok, so, all in all, the first episode doesn't sound that particularly amazing.

The story sounds quite generic, but it's there to get the ball rolling.

What I like most about this story is that nothing is particularly out of the ordinary with it. It's just a simple story about a complete novice trying to become a witch to save her mother from her own mistakes.

That's all there is to it.

And yet, this is an example of how even a simple story like this one can reach greatness just because of its execution.

Because, after episode 1, the story becomes very enchanting.

I loved learning about Qifrey, his other students that Coco has to learn to befriend, the magical system that this world uses, how the circles work and how they influence the spell and, moreover, I just love the entire witch society, with all their rules and layers, the many professions that need to exist in such a world to aid witches in performing their duties, and so on.

This is a case of where world building is done exceptionally well.

My main gripes with generic fantasy stories is that they keep recycling the same elements over and over again, just because most viewers are familiar with them: you have goblins, orcs, dragons, paladins, knights, mages, kingdoms and so on.

All of these things are fine for a story or two, but once every anime incorporates them into its runtime, it becomes so repetitive.

I am so thankful this anime doesn't do that, but instead decides to be a bit more original and tries to invent new species of plants, new animals, new settings and new mechanics for its world.

For example, there's this whole idea of a trial that an apprentice needs to pass in order to order to move on from apprenticeship and become full fledged witches (there's actually multiple trials).

Coco, naturally, tries to do the first trial, which involves finding a specific plant in a different part of the world, a part with floating pieces of land.

Naturally, since she can't fly, she has to become creative and figure out how to get to the floating island, to get the plant to pass.

I loved it.

Such a simple idea: collect one flower. And yet, so very few fantasy anime even tried to do that as a quest, it's mind-blowing.

And the simple idea of figuring out how to get to a floating island, while not particularly inspiring, felt so refreshing in this show.

Why? It's hard to tell but my only guess is that so many other anime take magic for granted. They always just show the stuff magic can do as mere miracles that are easy to pull off, a means to an end.

Here, the story actually delves into how the magic works, how spells need to be drawn, how their very existence needs to be kept a secret from ordinary humans. And how, even when spells are too difficult to activate, for one reason or another, a witch can find ways around their limitations by just being creative enough.

That's so very clever to me.

The main thing that this show tries to present is that, for every problem, there's many possible solutions, each tailored to the personality of a specific person. Every witch can figure a solution to a problem in their own ways, without having to conform to a specific template.

For example: there was another trial in which flying was not possible, due to a spell. You had to walk forward on a concrete walkway. But then, the walkway would have a gap in it, a gap that was too large to jump over.

So, naturally, a witch undergoing that trial had to figure out how to get across that gap without flying.

There are many possible solutions, and each character devised their own ones: one of them was to combine spells to create new matter and get across that way, a different time a mage that was too shy to draw spells when having others look at him, figured to just use a spell to become invisible so he can cast freely, and so on.

The thing is, magic is a fun avenue that's practically limitless. You can pretty much invent anything out of nowhere, since, well, it's magic!

That's what I love about this show. It gets creative with its rules since it knows that magic can be anything you want it to be. The rules are practically so short that you can make anything work. And it takes full advantage of those liberties.

Oh and, lemme just say, this show got some very nice and clear animation.

Every spell in this show is animated beautifully, in clean and fluid motions that always made me giddy, whenever I knew a spell was about to be cast.

I loved the animation for this. Granted, it won't blow your mind away, it's not that revolutionary, but it's just a nice touch that adds to the wonder and excitement that I got whenever I saw a witch cast a spell.

And, I won't say too much, but I loved the fact that there was a supporting cast member that turned out to be evil. I won't say who it is, but the plot twist genuinely caught me off guard.

I cannot do justice in describing this show. This is what I've been waiting to see, for a very long time.

It's the best example of an anime that's very creative, very fun and very imaginative in everything that it's doing.

The only thing I disliked about it is its ending, since it left on a pretty unpleasant cliffhanger that I felt was beneath it.

But, other than that minor thing, I am so onboard with a season 2 for this. I really hope it will get a second season, since it was such a marvelous experience.

This needs a sequel, as soon as possible.

2. Mistress Kanan is Devilishly Easy

Another great show, for sure.

This one, I wasn't sure how I was gonna react towards, initially.

The plot is about the teenage daughter of the demon king from hell, who asks her dad to allow her to visit the human realm, in order to conquer a school and consume the souls of the humans there. Her name is Kanan.

Her father agrees to her request and, as such, she enrolls in a typical Japanese high school, under the guise of a regular girl, trying to fool all the humans there so that she can control them.

One day, after finishing all the preparations, she uses her powers to mind control a student at that school, Kyōgi, as she directs him to visit her after the school in a secluded classroom where she plans to subdue and consume him.

However, just as he arrives, Kyōgi becomes smitten by Kanan's human appearance, and immediately devotes himself to her, in an attempt to become her boyfriend.

After he confesses to her on the spot, she accidentally agrees to become his girlfriend. From that point on, Kyōgi and Kanan become a couple, with him acting completely obsessed over her and her trying to tame his affection towards her. His forthcoming nature and incredible energy is always enough to thwart Kanan's initial plans of consuming him.

There's a bit more to episode 1 than this, but that's the general gist of it.

The jokes in this show can be sexual some of the time, such as with Kanan telling Kyōgi that she plans on devouring him and him misunderstanding that as a sexual fetish.

Or, at one point, Kyōgi offering Kanan to hold hands with him and her believing that such a thing would cause a pregnancy.

It's ridiculous over-the-top humor, but it's the exact type of humor that I dig, a lot.

I like it when this is the focus of the show.

The idea of this being of incredible power being overwhelmed by the mere love from a teen boy is humorous.

I was worried that the jokes might become too creepy, with the protagonist going overboard and turning into a rapist, but thankfully this never happened.

Kyōgi is likeable and gentlemanly enough that it never becomes gross, his affection for Kanan always stopping short before it becomes too one-sided.

Kanan, for her part, initially looks like she is appalled at the idea of dating a human but, as time moves on, you do start to feel that she's putting up a tsundere facade, and she is in fact in love with Kyōgi. This happens, mainly, because she won't allow Kyōgi to hurt her dignity by showing off that she can date him, if she wanted to.

This, in turn, eventually becomes a romance between the two of them.

And yes, there are later episodes in which this show feels like it's trying to become a harem, but thankfully it never devolves that much, with the focus of the series always being on Kyōgi and Kanan's relationship, trying to make it wholesome.

And, for that, I'll give the show credit.

I was hoping this would go even farther and make it about a forbidden love story between a devil and a human, but it never went that far. And, honestly, I don't think this show was capable of pulling off such a serious matter, especially with its comedic edge.

Overall, I'm very glad I watched this show. The comedy, the innuendos, the colorful cast, the energy of the jokes and just the sheer absurdity of the setup and how fun and clueless Kyōgi usually is, makes this one of my favorite TV shows of this season.

Definitely worth a watch.

3. Agents of the Four Seasons

This is one of those shows I was initially planning on skipping over, during the selection of my anime list.

When I read the synopsis for this show, I was not very certain that it was gonna turn out well, and I was planning on not watching it, in favor of a different anime TV series.

I'm glad to say that I changed my mind at the last second, and decided to give this show a try.

And, in my opinion, it was well worth it.

The show takes place in a world where Gods give ordinary people in each country the powers of bringing about seasonal changes by doing a simple dance in every region of the country.

The story happens in Japan, where two girls are traveling through a mountainous region, during winter.

The two girls, Hinagiku Kayo and her guard, Sakura Himedaka, are on a mission to reach a shrine on that mountain.

While traveling, they encounter an even younger girl who's shoveling snow.

Sakura asks the girl why she had ignored the evacuation order that was in effect on that mountain, but she doesn't answer.

Seeing her stubbornly refuse to leave, Hinagiku and Sakura follow the girl on the trail.

They eventually reach a cemetery where, it's revealed, that the girl was shoveling snow every year because of her, now dead, mother.

Her mother had died because, 10 years prior, Japan's agent of spring had stopped doing her job of bringing spring to the country, which caused prolonged winters every year. This, in turn, ruined Japan's tourism sector, of which the girl's family was operating in, which plummeted the family into poverty, ultimately leading to the girl's mother dying.

Feeling saddened by her plight and her anger at the agent of spring, Hinagiku then reveals that she is, in fact, the agent that had been skipping work all those years and, in order to sooth the girl's pain, she performs the dance that brings spring there, ending for the first time, in 10 years, the unwelcome overstaying winter that had taken the place of spring.

And so, Japan's agent of spring makes her official return, 10 years after going missing.

That's episode 1.

Now, to get this straight, this show was way better than I originally thought it would be.

The very idea that there are people, in this world, that can bring about the changing of seasons by doing a dance sounded silly to me.

And, worst of all, this show isn't a comedy. It's meant to be taken 100% seriously with its plot.

So, I was initially skeptical that I was going to like it.

But, as the episodes rolled in, and I learned more about Hinagiku, her past, the reason she went missing for 10 years, as well as all the other characters, I started to feel attached to them.

This is a pure drama, at its core. There's a lot of suffering and tragedies being discussed here.

I won't go into spoilers, but I will also say that there's a bit of romance here, as well. This is a trend I've noticed in Japanese anime, in that TV series that focus on drama, tend to also have a bit of romance on the side as well.

Here, the romance felt fine, albeit rushed, since they only had one or two episodes to develop it.

But aside from the rushed romance, I liked the show just fine enough.

It's a simple story about trauma and how one needs to have the courage and willpower to move on from it, even if it means becoming a different person if that's what it takes.

I don't see anime tackle this type of story enough, so I felt that this one is welcome.

The show also does the whole trope of characters that are fated to be together but circumstances force them apart for the longest time, until they meet again at the end. Another anime called 86 also did this, albeit without the romance undertones that this has. This is a trope I like, and it was executed well enough here.

And also, the colors of the show, the animation and just the spectable of bringing spring into the scene was very magical.

I loved watching Hinagiku use her powers for summoning that season, since it was always majestically done.

In fact, all the seasons get their dances done very well and animated spectacularly. It's just that spring feels particularly beautiful and refreshing.

Overall, I liked this show a lot. The animation, the colors, the opening and ending being very catchy songs, it was all done very well. I'm looking forward to another season of this if one will ever get greenlit.

4. Liar Game (First half)

This is a thriller. And not just any thriller, it's the kind of thriller that involves a bit of thinking to follow the plot, which I definitely enjoy.

The story of the first episode revolves around a young woman named Nao Kanzaki, who's living alone in an apartment and is trying to be supportive of her ill father who's bedridden in the hospital.

One day, Nao receives a package in the mail and, when she opens the letter attached to it, she finds that she was invited to participate in an illicit contest in which she can earn money.

In the suitcase that she received, she will find 100 million yen in bills. That money is entrusted to her, even though it still belongs to the organization that set up the contest.

Nao is tasked with keeping the money in a safe place for a whole month from the another contestant of the game, after which they will come to retrieve it back.

Any money Nao will get to swindle out of the other contestant, who themselves will also receive their own 100 million yen, will be hers to keep. Since the player in the game who loses money cannot give it back to the company that it belongs to, at the end of the month, that player will end up indebted to the company for that sum.

And, as it turns out, the other contestant is Nao's teacher from middle school.

Nao meets up with him and tries to discuss what they should do next and the teacher advises her that the tournament is actually a scam and that they shouldn't participate in the game.

Nao inherently trusts him and, after discussing matters further, they both agree to keep the money in his bank account, for safe storage.

Nao hands off to him her entire stash of 100 million yen, without much worries.

Later on, she decides to visit his house again, just to thank him for his help, only to inadvertently end up sneaking around and overhearing her teacher talk on the phone about how he had tricked her out of her money.

Realizing she had been duped, Nao runs back and tries to contact a famous con artist that just got out of jail, a young man named Akiyama Shinichi.

Shinichi was on the news for stealing money from a bunch of companies, which landed him in prison for a certain amount of time.

Once he got out, Nao gets in touch with him and pleads with him to help her get her money back.

After witnessing how helplessly honest and gullible she is and realizing she had been taken advantage of, Akiyama eventually agrees to see if he can help her out.

That's about it for episode 1.

Now, the idea of a game show that revolves around lying and tricking people is a simple thing.

In real life, I don't like those types of shows since it always ends up being scripted and just a work of fiction.

Anime, in comparison, is ironically way more believable since you know, from the very beginning, that all the characters are fiction to begin with and there's never the expectation that any of these people are real.

The idea of a genius con artist like Akiyama participating in a game in which the whole point is to lie to others, is as straightforward as it gets.

But I like seeing what schemes he comes up with, how he always seems very intelligent and two steps ahead of other contestants.

It's very impressive seeing him manipulate others to his liking. The fact that he also is willing to help Nao out, because he finds her gullible nature to be something that needs to be protected, adds to his character and gives it a dimension that makes him more human and more than just a simple con artist.

I was hoping that there might be a romance angle to this story as well, between Nao and Akiyama, but the show never goes there.

It keeps things simple and the characters are there mainly to outwit other contestants to get out of the game, as soon as possible.

The show was strongest in the first couple of episodes, when it was clear that Nao was pretty much just very unlucky, and that was the reason she was chosen to participate. I could feel for her, and I genuinely wished for her to get out of that shady game as quickly as she could.

But once everything settles around the halfway point, and she gets to exit the game without any debts attached to her name, she still keeps being pulled back in for one reason or another, always ending up relying on Akiyama to save her.

After a point, I began to lose sympathy for her, once I realized how she keeps participating in the game, even after she realizes how shady everything is.

Being forced into it was one thing, but choosing to keep on playing afterwards just because she wants to help out is entirely another, and the show lost me a bit on that.

But, because the show keeps things fresh and it changes the rules of the game every so often, it kept my interests piqued enough, always trying to figure out what Akiyama is scheming and what the other contestants are also planning.

It's always interesting seeing how the players keep trying to exploit both the rules, and each other's trust.

Overall, this was a good show. I really enjoyed watching it and I'm glad that it has another half coming up. I'll be sure to follow it.

5. Daemons of the Shadow Realm (first half)

If you wish to know more about this one, it's probably enough that I mention that this is based off a manga whose author is the same guy that made Full Metal Alchemist.

The plot of episode 1 is very simple, for the most part.

In a remote Japanese village somewhere in the mountains, a pair of twins is born during a day when the day and night have the same length. The twins are a boy named Yuru and a girl named Asa.

Many years later, after his parents had fled the village for unknown reasons, Yuru has become a skilled hunter that kills animals for the village. His primary weapon is a bow.

One day, the village's mystical barrier that keeps outsiders from coming in is broken by an unknown entity and soldiers and helicopters invade it from the outside.

Not knowing how to deal with the modern technology that the soldiers are using, most villagers get slaughtered quite easily.

Yuru tries to make his way to where Asa is within the village to protect his sister and, once he arrives there, he discovers that she had been killed by a woman. The woman claims to be the “real Asa”, and the girl that she had killed was an imposter and that she is Yuru's real sister.

Another villager named Dera manages to take Yuru away from the attacking forces and sneaks past them, towards the village entrance where the statues of Left and Right, spiritual deities with great power called Daemons, are.

Dera uses Yuru's blood to animate the two statues, who then swear loyalty to Yuru, as his personal Daemons and then they attack the helicopters that were invading.

Thus ends episode 1.

So, right off the bat, this is a fish out of water story.

Long story short, Dera will take Yuru to escape the village as it's being attacked, and allow Yuru to blend in with modern Japanese society to hide from the attackers.

In doing so, Yuru will be forced to adapt to modern technology, such as a cars, trains, the TV, smartphones, and many other items that did not exist in his remote village.

This is used as a source of comedy for the show, although I never really got much out of it.

Fish out of water jokes aren't my cup of tea, personally, and the jokes fell flat for me.

However, thankfully this show isn't a comedy, and most of the plot is taken seriously.

I won't spoil what goes on but there will be a lot of various political talks between two clans that came from that village: the Kagemori clan and the Danno household, both of which have their own goals and backgrounds.

Yuru will have to pick sides, decide who he trusts the most and who his allies are, as well as decide if he wishes to trust the woman that calls herself “the real Asa” and her story.

This is mostly an action TV series. Yuru will have to learn how to use the powers of Left and Right to his advantage, as well as also rely on his own hunting skills for survival.

I like how the show takes advantage of Yuru's hunting background to give him an edge in battles. His way of analyzing the situation, being analytical and thinking critically, as well as his abilities in using the bow and arrow, do come in handy on various occasions, which I liked.

The mystery side was also quite interesting, since I was curious about the situation with Asa and the real Asa.

The story got me intrigued enough to make me watch the show religiously.

I do have a complaint though, and that is that this show gets very political at times, with a lot of talking and discussing and not enough action.

This is a complaint I have with shows that like to take their time building the story, especially shows that span for more than 12 episodes.

Generally it's a good thing that there's a lot of dialogue, since that means that the story has a lot to offer, but at times it slows down the progression to a crawl.

But I got used to it.

And, thankfully, the more I watched the show, the more intrigued I was getting and the more questions I was starting to have, since the more the show answers previous questions, the more it introduces new ones as well.

Overall, this was a great time I had with this show, and I'm very glad I get to watch another half of it.

6. Re:Zero − Starting Life in Another World (Season 4) – First half

Re:Zero is back, and this time Subaru and his party go on a journey to the Pleiades Watchtower, where a great sage named Shaula is said to live.

They do this to seek his advice in reversing the effects of Gluttony, after Julius also suffers from his curse.

Even getting to the watchtower is a problem, because of the surrounding environment that's filled with hazards.

Once they get there, they have to undergo a series of trials to unlock the knowledge that they seek, including confronting a very powerful man who calls himself the Stick Swinger and who's a very powerful martial artist.

Yeah, there's nothing more to add here. It's Re:Zero, we all know it's gonna be good.

My only gripe with the show is that the plot became so thick that it's hard to follow at certain points, since there's a lot of knowledge and background for so many characters, after 4 seasons, that it's difficult to remember all the lore details about everyone that gets to play some role now.

There's a lot going on, but I still love the show for being as awesome as it is.

I can't add anything more without spoiling it, so I'll just end this review here.

I can't wait for the next half.

7. Killed again, Mister Detective?

Now it's time for a detective TV series.

A talented young man named Sakuya Outsuki is working as a detective to solve various cases, along with his assistant, a girl named Lilithea.

Sakuya lives under the shadow of his father, another even more brilliant detective named Tatsuya, who has made a name for himself for cracking very hard cases.

Sakuya has a hidden ace up his sleeve: he's immortal. Every time he dies, he comes back to life after a short period of time. Only a couple of people know about this, one of them being Lilithea.

One day, Sakuya takes a job in which he has to investigate the director of a movie who's interviewing actors on a cruise ship.

As the two arrive on the cruise ship, they meet a strange girl named Yuriu Haigamine, who is one of the actresses that the aforementioned director is interviewing.

She's looking for the director's missing cat and asks Sakuya to help her find it.

Sakuya agrees and, while searching for the cat alone in an isolated area of the ship, he finds a man that had recently just died, via hanging.

As he was searching the dead man's phone to determine what had happened to him, Sakuya gets stabbed to death by an assailant wearing a clown mask, and collapses to the floor.

He later awakens on Lilithea's lap, after reviving.

Thus ends episode 1.

Yeah, it's a thriller.

I'm a sucker for detective stories, and this show has them.

The idea of having a detective that can come back to life is quite novel, since this introduces new ways of gathering clues to solve a mystery.

That and, to be clear, the mysteries that this show highlights are pretty novel, to say the least, albeit a bit too outlandish.

There's a point in which all the passengers on a Ferris wheel all get killed at the same time before the wheel can make a complete turn.

Then there's a point in which a plane crashes onto a cruise ship, without somehow sinking the ship.

Then, there's a story about a mermaid and a plan of some scientists working on a miraculous serum that can turn someone immortal, a giant computer ball that uses AI to develop its own consciousness and can hack into anything, a talking dog detective that's absolutely brilliant but needs a specific human to translate for him and so so much more.

Honestly, it's so difficult to suspend my disbelief at everything that's going on, it's incredible.

But, surprisingly, everything works, and the wackiness of it all is almost stylistic for this show. This isn't a comedy per se, it takes itself seriously. But, at the same time, it's got a cartoonish sense of reality that's hard to ignore, exaggerating things almost to their breaking point, while still pretending that it's normal.

It's almost as ridiculous as Ron Kamonohashi: Deranged Detective was, which is itself another anime TV series that borders on the insane, but this was somehow even more outrageous than Ron was.

And the mysteries that Sakuya has to solve, much like the case in Ron, are pretty much impossible to solve by the audience of this show. Yes, the show reveals the clues to us, but the deductions that we'd have to make to connect the dots and figure out what went on, are so ridiculous to envision that it's next to impossible to figure things out.

Sakuya has some truly amazing intelligence to be able to make the deductions that he's making in this show, with the clues that he's given.

But again, solving the puzzles isn't the point of this show. You're not supposed to make deductions along with Sakuya. The fun of the show is in being amazed at how ridiculous some of the hoops you have to make are, in order to figure out what's actually going on, behind the scenes.

This is a case in which you won't be able to figure out what's going on by yourself. You need to let the show spell it out for you and, even then, it will be difficult to believe the explanation.

But I digress.

The show was fun, I'll give it that. It was difficult to suspend my disbelief for a lot of the bizzare stuff going on in it, but it was fun nonetheless.

Would I watch another season of it? Absolutely.

8. Even a Replica can Fall in Love

Did I ever tell you that I'm a big fan of romance anime?

And not just romance anime, but romantic dramas, specifically.

So how come, you may ask, did this show get such a low ranking for me, since it's in the second lowest spot?

The reason for that is because this show is pretty generic with its story.

The first episode details the life of Nao, a cheerful and energetic high school girl that is part of the literature club.

Nao has a secret and that is that she is actually a replica, specifically the replica of Sunao Aikawa.

A replica is an entity that looks exactly like another human and which is subordinate to them.

Sunao can will Nao into existence, as well as decide when to make Nao disappear. For Nao, the period of time when she doesn't exist feels like the blink of a second.

Sunao uses Nao to do anything which she doesn't want to do herself, like going to school.

Since nobody knows their secret, Nao pretends to be the real Sunao at school, always taking her place without anyone noticing.

Nao has all the memories of Sunao, but not the other way around.

One day, a boy named Shuya Sanada joins the literature club at their school, after he's forced to quit the basketball club due to a leg injury.

Shuya bonds with Nao during their time together, unaware that she's Sunao's replica.

The next day, Shuya approaches Nao again at school, but she's acting coldly to him and doesn't seem to remember their previous discussions. This is because, unbeknownst to him, he's actually talking to Sunao, not her replica that he had been talking to up until then.

Thus ends episode 1.

Yeah, I'm not going to lie, I didn't like the first episode of this show.

The idea of a replica sounds very cool and it can add a lot of interesting spins and ideas to a TV show, but this feels like the most boring implementation of this.

There's also the fact that, surprise surprise, this is a high school drama, and most of the show takes place in high school. This might sound like a nitpick (and maybe it genuinely is), but I'm sick of high school romance shows.

Not that they can't be done right (I've seen a couple that are done right), but this has all the hallmarks of a high school romance: they just talk, do various activities together, go on a date maybe once or twice and they're in love. That's it.

I don't mind that too much if there's something natural going on in the relationship, like maybe some friction, some arguing or at least some chemistry between the main characters.

But the issue is, the main characters are extremely boring. Shuya is just some polite guy that likes basketball and reading, Nao is just some girl that is usually happy and sociable, and that's it. Yes, there's also the fact that Nao is a replica, sure, but her personality is pretty much “the happy girl”.

If there was a spin to it, give Nao a bit more of an edge, make her a tsundere, make Shuya a bully or a geek, or a hopeless romantic, something to stand out.

When I talked about Mistress Kanan was Devilishly Easy in this ranking, the characters were oozing with personality. Kanan was a demon from hell that wanted to control an entire school, while also being a tsundere and Kyōgi was a hopeless pervert that wanted to dedicate his entire life to Kanan.

Sure, the two shows are entirely different genres, one being a comedy and this being a drama, but, at the end of the day, I'll remember Kanan way more than I'll ever remember this boring show.

The characters are just too mild in their personalities. I get bored every time they are onscreen together. And that's a problem for a romance show when you should root for them to be together.

Then, there's the inconsistencies in the plot. If Nao was genuinely the only replica in this story, I might have overlooked this issue but she's not. There are other replicas that will appear, later on, of other characters. In fact, it actually looks like replicas aren't that rare in this world, which makes me wonder how they are still a somewhat secret phenomenon, given that nobody is supposed to know about them or how they work.

There's literally a part in which a replica will actually disappear in front of a group of people, one day, and everyone is astonished. Why? Is this supposed to be something novel and new to them? In a world filled with replicas, is this truly the first time that one of them disappears off the face of the Earth in a split second?

Well, OK, maybe it really is that uncommon. But then, how come there aren't news stations talking about how this person suddenly disappeared in thin air? Surely, given how many witnesses there were, this would have to be addressed?

But no, nobody takes this seriously. That's just overlooked like just an ordinary death. Nothing to see here.

There was this one time when a specific character was supposed to die at one point because they were pushed into an oncoming train, but they do a sudden plot twist and, somehow, through some insane physics trick, they get grabbed by someone else and they swap places in midair, with that other character dying in their stead. That was the most bizarre 180 degree midair flip that I've ever seen? Physics, I guess!

And I would have forgiven most of this stuff if the romance had a bit of an edge to it, but it doesn't either. it's not like the chemistry isn't there, but this is the most vanilla by-the-numbers romance I've seen in a while. They don't push any boundaries with anything and this is the type of romance you would see in a children's show, in which the most they do is hold hands.

Now, with all of that said, do I hate this show?

Well, no, not really. There are some good things about it.

Given the generic plot, I was expecting a very predictable ending, something that I could see a mile away; especially when, as the last episode was approaching, they were setting up an ending that I was almost sure they would do, given the nature of the show.

But, surprisingly, the show took a different turn at the last second, not going with the predictable route this time. Granted, a good chuck of the ending still went the way I predicted it would go but a significant part of it was unexpected. And I'll give credit to that.

That and, to give credit where it's due, the show did have some teeth and actually killed off some characters, which was more than I expected from it.

I'm not going to say who died, but I will just say that it's not necessarily a forgettable character.

So there's at least that.

But, in the end, I didn't like this show very much.

Some of the rules about replicas felt like they were being written as the show went along, the plot just took whichever direction felt the most “dramatic” at every point, and most of the stuff is predictable.

The romance was nothing to write home about, the characters were too vanilla for my tastes and the overly cliched setting of a high school didn't do it any favors either. Seriously, just make them adults in college or something! I don't care about high school.

Oh and there was also this weird stylistic decision of adding a white border around every frame of this show, almost like suggesting that everything was a dream sequence and that nothing was real. I was wondering what they were doing with that but that never got explained. Why was that there?

Yeah, I don't think I'll be watching a second season of this, even in the unlikely event that one will come out.

9. Ghost Contert: missing songs

And we finally arrive at the end.

Before I talk about this show, I want to say that I picked this show because of its synopsis on Crunchyroll, when I first heard of it. I was convinced that it was going to be a hit and so I was looking forward to watching it.

I was also unsure if to also pick up a different anime, what is Agents of the 4 seasons, which I already talked about on this ranking, since its synopsis sounded so cheesy and forced.

In the end, I decided to watch both and boy, after seeing them fully I am amazed how wrong I was about both of them. Agents of the 4 seasons turned out to be such a good show that I am impressed while this one turned out to be so....bad.

Granted, I want to say, unlike other rankings that I have made in the past, this last item isn't so bad, by comparison. I have seen much worse shows in the past years, and this one doesn't come even close to being as bad as those.

But, even with that said, this didn't leave much of a mark on me.

The first episode is about a young teen named Seria Aiba who can see and interact with ghosts.

The plot takes place in Japan in the future, (I think it was 2045?) when the world is dominated by advanced tech, cars drive themselves, computers and AI is everywhere and music is banned.

Yeah, apparently the only songs people are allowed to listen to, even in their private homes, are songs that are AI generated. It's illegal to even hum a song.

And if you're caught humming a song or outright singing, you become targeted by a bunch of drones that are constantly patrolling.

And everyone is tracked by some device that they have implanted on them.

Anyways, long story short, Seria gets involved with a ghost that tries to possess her and take over her body but she manages to overpower the ghost by singing her heart out at it, which convinces the ghost to join her side as a spiritual companion.

Once Seria returns home and tells this to her friends, that ghosts are real and they have powers, her friends immediately label her as insane and abandon her, leaving her alone. Then, a group of monks working for an organization called Tera convince Seria to join them, in a mission to destroy MiucS, the AI that's controlling everything and that's responsible for the music ban.

Thus ends episode 1.

OK so, I did not like this show very much.

My main complaint of the show is the very fact that music is banned.

That, to me at least, is an insane premise to base an entire TV series around.

I could accept this premise if it was a comedy or something nonsensical, but this show tries to take itself seriously.

And that's a problem since I cannot conceive of a future world in which AI takes over humanity and outlaws even the mere practice of singing, to the point in which you'd get shot and killed just because you were singing.

That's the type of dystopia that sounds so ridiculously evil that you'd have a hard time believing it to be real in a semi-serious setting, much less a TV action series that wants to be dramatic.

How did technology take over and how did humans not revolt at this development?

There is the last episode of the show that tries to explain how we got here but, even then, it just brushes everything off with a half assed explanation of “the bad guys just did shady stuff that is legal but very morally wrong” and that's pretty much it. OK, sure, but what about the part where people can be gunned down if they sing? How is that legal? How did everyone agree to this, so that it gets to this point? Can you explain that?

I just cannot fathom such a future as being possible. And if the main premise of a show is not something I can buy, suffice it to say that the show itself won't entertain me that much.

I could not suspend my disbelief enough to believe any of this.

But even leaving this aside, you'd think that a show with some type of plot about challenging the control of AI and trying to legalize singing again would be at least somewhat interesting, right?

Well, yeah, about that, there isn't much of a political angle to this story. Instead, it becomes this story about going to a different dimension called the Phantom Realm to fight spirits and concur various parts of it, which somehow will give Tera more ground to attack MiucS in, in our world, somehow?

I don't know. They explained how it works but it made no sense to me.

Basically, the monks will travel to that new realm every episode, fight a spirit there, Seria will sing a powerful song that makes the spirit join her side as a companion and then they will claim that territory for themselves.

That's how it works.

Honestly, this didn't mesh well with me at all.

I didn't understand why this was even possible in the first place, I didn't get how they were mixing sci fi tech with the paranormal spirits and Phantom Realm in the same story, why they wouldn't simply move to another country where singing was legal (or maybe there was no country left in which it was legal? maybe? And if so how exactly is that possible???), how conquering parts of the shadow realm results in the AI losing power, why society wouldn't just build another AI if the first one was destroyed by them and so on.

In fact, none of the plot made sense. I couldn't digest any of it, I just didn't understand what was going on.

Then there was a side-plot involving a forced marriage, a side plot involving Caesar and his desire to be able to sing, and then the finale in which the head monk gets to be reunited with an old acquaintance.

I don't know, just nothing clicked with me on this one.

Why should I care? Why is singing banned in the first place? Supposedly it was because singing was enticing violence, somehow? I guess? Maybe they should have expanded on that.

Here's the thing: if you take a plot like this and treat it seriously, you have to make things believable. I couldn't follow the plot of this show regardless of how hard I tried, and as for the stuff I could follow, I couldn't suspend my disbelief enough to accept it.

Things were just happening, various famous personality figures like Nicola Tesla and Cleopatra were introduced, they would give Seria some power or valuable insight and the plot would just move along.

I couldn't care. I tried to care but I just couldn't bring myself to.

The songs weren't my cup of tea, either. They were fine, I'll give it that, but so much of this could have been better if this entire anime didn't exist at all and they just made a bunch of music videos.

As is, this show had little substance in it.

And the worst part about it is that, as I was watching it, I could tell that there was some amount of passion behind it. Whoever was making this show clearly had some love for both music and history, and was probably struggling to combine the two together into a unique art form. But this is all they came up with and, sadly, it just didn't do it for me.

I just couldn't care. I was a bit interested in Seria after episode 1, seeing how she lost her friends and everything, but after that, she almost fell into the background as a character. After that episode, I just didn't learn much about her anymore, other than the fact that she has a great singing voice apparently.

Characters fall in love with her singing, they want her to teach them to sing, they get moved by her voice. Ok, cool, but who is Seria? What does she like? What does she love? What's her life been like?

There was only one more episode of this show that talked about her, the very last episode, which was the one episode I did like, since I got to learn more about her and her parents. But other than that episode, everything felt like a fever dream. It wasn't about Seria anymore, it was about her ability to sing. That's it.

And this isn't just about Seria, either. Almost no character gets any development in this show. The plot just moves along, trying to sound interesting and important but, in the meantime, sacrificing valuable screen time that could have been better used to learn about these people.

There's a bit about a romance sideplot between Seria and a classmate of hers, that tries to confess to her but always fails. That goes nowhere.

The head monk was apparently one of the scientists that worked on the AI. I would have loved to hear more about his philosophies and why he did what he did.

There was a romance at one point between a historical figure in the form of a spirit and one of the girls at the shrine; that didn't go anywhere either.

There's just glimpses of good ideas strewn about, everywhere, but nothing gets developed.

Everything is just thrown out, since there's not enough time to develop the plot and so everything feels rushed. But the plot just isn't making any sense to me either, so nothing works for me.

Why? Why have an episode dedicated to a forced marriage side plot, rather than have the characters sit down at a table and just talk? Reveal more about them, their backgrounds, their wishes, their hobbies!

Or hell, even if you don't care about the human characters, talk about the spirits! I would have loved to learn more about Cleopatra, about Caesar, about all of these great historical figures. You could have done so many great things with their personalities, be creative and expand on them, similar to how Fate does with its Universe.

But not even the spirits get any screentime. I learned almost nothing about them.

I'm so tired. Suffice it to say, I disliked this show.

Nothing worked, nothing made any sense. It was all just one paint-by-numbers battle in some Phantom Realm after another, no rhyme or reason for any of it, to defeat this AI overlord and give people the freedom to sing again.

Ok, sure. If that sounds good to you, watch this! It might be up your alley.

It just wasn't for me.

I'm done with this show.

It's time for another ranking and boy, is there a lot to talk about.

As always, all of these shows can be found on Crunchyroll. Let's begin!

1. Hell's Paradise: Jigokuraku (Season 2)

These are my thoughts for season 2 of this show. If you want to read my thoughts on season 1, you can find them here.

A short recap, in case you didn't watch that season, is that this criminal that was sentenced to death named Gabimaru, along with many other people that have committed very severe crimes and have been captured, are sent on a distant island that's rumored to host an elixir of immortality to retrieve said elixir and bring it back to Japan. Whoever manages to achieve this will be granted a pardon for all their crimes.

Gabimaru wishes to receive this pardon so that he can return home to his loving wife.

Once on the island, though, things don't go very well and Gabimaru is forced to use his ninja skills to defend himself from very powerful and dangerous monsters that inhabit it, while also struggling to get along with other criminals that are fighting for the same objective as him.

In this new season, we continue to watch the adventures of our heroes, as they make alliances with each other, to survive on that island.

We'll get to discover more about the odd creatures that inhabit it, the masterminds behind them and all the strange phenomena there, as well as discover a plot that said masterminds have devised to eliminate all of humanity.

The best way I would describe this show is something akin to Naruto, seeing how it's all about ninja and ninjutsu and how they fight, but if Naruto had zero comedy to it.

This show is played 100% straight. It's pure unadulterated action on steroids and strategizing, in the best ways possible.

I don't want to spoil too much but I will say that every episode was a treat and I do love it how even Gabimaru, despite being as overpowered as he had been presented in season 1, gets to have his ass kicked during this season, to the point in which he is almost killed.

The fact that he was brought so close to death, given that the first episode of the first season established that Gabimaru was almost unkillable, even by the most skilled of executioners, should give you a hint about how strong his opponents will be, this season.

And yeah, what more can I say? It's just pure action, at its finest, with some good plot twists that I haven't seen coming, cool fights, good ideas and a lot of world building.

Definitely waiting for a season 3, as well, since the plot was left on a cliff hanger.

2. The Invisible Man and His Soon-to-Be Wife

This is one of those anime that is an adaptation for a romance manga.

Generally, I'm very much against workplace romance manga, since they are usually painfully slow at developing the relationships, but this one is an exception to that rule, thankfully.

The plot of the show is about Shizuka Yakou, a woman that works as an assistant at a detective agency in a big city.

Shizuka was born blind and had never known to recognize light or colors. She walks around with a cane and does her best to be a productive member of society.

She works alongside Kikira, the company's only IT guy, Jarashi, a large and muscular cat lady that does most of the physical work at the agency and her employer and their boss, Tounome, an invisible gentleman that likes wearing classy suits.

Yes, in this world, we have beast people, elf people, invisible people and many other eccentric types of intelligent races, all cohabiting in the same country, trying to get along with each other.

All four of them work in a small office, taking on odd jobs like finding missing people, finding out details about stalkers, looking into odd behaviors that people bring up to them and so on.

Generally, this sounds quite boring for a lot of reasons, and I get why one would think that. Hell, I thought it would be like that, but I was very pleased to find out that the addition of different races made a lot of these mysteries or cases that needed to be solved, quite unique.

The world that they inhabit is very colorful and interesting, filled with wacky characters like a couple made up of a dark elf that causes curses around him and his girlfriend who's a white elf, who own a tea shop.

There's a hot spring resort that is seemingly haunted and is losing customers (apparently, ghosts don't exist in this world so there has to be logical explanations for the paranormal phenomena).

There's also a village of invisible people as well, in which literally everyone that inhabits it is invisible.

And so many more.

I loved how creative the show got with its world, and I was very much looking forward to each new episode, only to discover more things about it.

And as for the romance between Shizuka and Tounome, it was fine.

It was nothing to write home about, but I did appreciate how much I got to learn about them throughout this season.

I never realized how novel of a concept this was: the idea of a man that's invisible falling in love with a woman who can't see to begin with. The idea is that Shizuka, unlike everyone else, isn't bothered by Tounome's invisibility, since her other senses are so well sharpened that she can notice his presence anyways.

I did appreciate that their relationship evolved over time, with the first episode being Tounome even asking Shizuka to be his girlfriend. Generally, that's almost unheard of, for a romance manga adaptation to be so quick with its confession, but here it got going fast.

It reminded me of another romance manga adaptation that I genuinely love, called Tonikawa: Over the Moon for You, which is also on Crunchyroll and is also an amazing experience. Granted, I'm not saying that this is as good as Tonikawa, but it's got that same energy to it.

And yeah, the show is about how Tounome and Shizuka date each other and eventually decide to get closer and closer together, up to the point in which they decide to cohabit.

Granted, I was hoping they would go even further, this season, to the point in which they marry, but they didn't get that far.

But still, that's incredibly remarkable, as far as I'm concerned, for a romance manga to go this far in just 12 episodes.

It left me wanting for more, much more. If this will ever get another season, I'd be there to pick it up.

3. Fate/strange Fake

This is a very strange one.

Normally, I'm quite receptive to Fate anime adaptations, since they are some of the greatest pieces of animated media to come out of Japan.

Fate, as is, is a humongous franchise in that country, recognized by many people.

Naturally, I was very much interested in another Fate adaptation, once I heard that this was coming out.

However, there is a problem with this series: and that is its first two episodes.

But before I get to that, I'll start by describing the first episode, which on Wikipedia is marked as episode 0.

In the fictional town of Snowfield, in Nevada, the United States, a new holy grail war is being invoked by rogue mages.

Lord El-Melloi is reading about this new war from a different country, far away, trying to observe it from a distance. One of his students, a young man named Flat Escardos, travels to said town, without the school's permission, to witness said war, where he ends up summoning a Berserker class servant for himself.

Elsewhere, Assassin is also summoned but quickly tries to kill her own master, not wanting to assist him in his endeavor, before he can use his command spells on her.

Gilgamesh is also summoned as the Archer class heroic spirit, where he is paired with a native American woman named Tiné Chelc, who wishes to use his powers to win the Holy Grail, so that she can reclaim the country for her people.

As other servants slowly become summoned by various other people, including by a girl in a coma in a hospital, Gilgamesh meets Enkidu, who also just so happened to be summoned, and the two commence battle with each other, over the Nevada desert.

There's a bit more to it but that's the general gist of it.

Please forgive me if the above summary is inaccurate since it's been a while since I've watched that episode and I had to read about it from Wikipedia, to jog my memory. Why that is, I will explain now.

My problem with this series is, like I've said before, its first two episodes (technically it's episode 0 and episode 1).

On Crunchyroll, episode 0 aired on July 2nd 2023, episode 1 aired on November 23rd 2024 and episode 3 aired on January 10th 2026.

Episode 4 aired a week after episode 3, so from that point on, new episodes came out on a normal, weekly, basis.

But episodes 0 and 1 aired at least a year apart.

That, to me, is scandalous.

For a story that's meant to be told in a TV series format, the fact that this show treated its first episodes like movies and aired them so spread out over time, is a really bad idea.

By the time the series started airing normally on a weekly basis, my memory of the previous episodes was so hazy I could barely follow the plot.

That's not a good thing. The fact that the studio in charge of this thought that this was a good idea, really shows how out of touch they are.

In fact, just because of this issue, I was half debating on not watching this series at all, just because of how pissed off I was at it.

I feel like there's something to be said about the need to have a proper viewer-friendly airing schedule. That's one of the most basic things that a TV series can do, and this show had the audacity to ignore it.

But alas, I'll try to be neutral and pretend that this didn't happen.

So, how was the series overall?

It was fine.

It's just Fate, all over again. It has servants that are powerful people from history that wield powerful noble phantasms to do battle against each other, in a battle royale to see who wins the Holy Grail.

It's endlessly entertaining and I genuinely wanted to see how the fact that this is the first series to take place in the US would affect the story (it didn't do much but it's at least a novel concept).

As always, certain masters will make alliances with others, based on their philosophical affinities, while going against others.

I would say that I didn't care much for the second to last two Fate anime that I watched, those being Fate/Apocrypha and Fate/Extra. Fate/Grand Order was mostly alright, although nothing groundbreaking either.

This one, I'm happy to say, took me by surprise. I was invested in the alliances, most of the characters, the backstories for them, and a bit about the masters as well.

In fact, I think this is one of the better Fate anime that I've seen in recent years, on par with Fate/Grand Order even.

A significant drawback to this series was its number of characters though: this is one of those Fate anime that have way too many servants and masters.

It's very easy to get lost, after awhile, when you have to keep track of the number of characters in the story, how each of them relate to each other, what allegiances a specific character has, what are their goals, who are their master, what are their master's goals and so on.

The equation became so complicated that, halfway through this TV series, I lost track of the plot, it was that bad. I just began turning my brain off and just watching this show for its epic action moments (which there are many of).

I haven't seen this many characters in a Fate TV series since Fate/Apocrypha and that was a big turn off for me.

And the fact that the first two episodes had aired so far in the past that I forgot certain plot points, that did not help matters.

And before I get anywhere, let me just say: the story ended on a cliff hanger. The war is far from over when the last episode finished, there's some plot threads that remain open, only a few characters had died, and there's a lot that still needs to happen.

And I don't like it when TV series are obviously leaving a lot on the table, to be handled in a future season.

But, here, I kind of get it as well, since there's so much plot that has to be gone over that it's unreasonable to expect for a single 13 episode anime to cover it all.

So, even though I don't like it, I get it.

And despite all the issues that this show had, I mostly enjoyed my time with it.

Am I willing to forgive it for airing the first two episodes so far apart? No, not really.

And if the next season will do that again, assuming it gets produced, I will definitely be dropping it entirely.

I have very little patience with anime that do that. Either you follow a proper weekly airing schedule, or don't even bother! Just because you're somewhat decent, doesn't mean you're special.

4. GNOSIA (Part 2)

This is my review of the second half of GNOSIA. If you want to read my thoughts on the first half, they can be found here.

The general summary that I can present, in case you didn't read that and don't know anything about GNOSIA at all, is that it's an anime adaptation of a video game of the same name, a game in which the player is tasked with identifying the liars that are infected with a dangerous disease among the crew of a space ship, using logic and deduction to single them out, so that they get voted by the majority of said crew members to be put into cryo sleep (or, if the player is themselves infected, they have to lie to deceive the others until the number of Gnosia infectees among the crew is at least the same as the number of non-infected crew members, at which point, they win).

The anime adaptation stars Yuri, that takes the role that the player of the game would have had, in which they are awakened from stasis one day and find themselves on the ship, where infected Gnosia are hiding among the crew members and are out to kill the non-infected ones.

Yuri has a silver key on him, that had been given to him by another character on the ship named Setsu, the key allowing him to travel back in time whenever he dies, usually at the point in time in which he's awakened from stasis.

Every time he loops back this way, who the Gnosia infects ends up being someone else and Yuri has to figure out all over again who they are (and sometimes they themselves are infected too).

I'm not going to lie, I like these ideas. The game sounds very fun, although I probably won't go through the process of buying it myself, but it looks like a good experience.

The anime goes above and beyond in trying to be an entertaining adaptation. I can't say how faithful it is to the source material since, like I said, I never played the game that this is based off of and, thus, I will be judging the anime solely on its own merits.

And, after saying that, I will add: I loved it.

The show clearly had a high budget behind it, with gorgeous visuals, highly detailed character designs and very nice visual effects to boot. It also didn't cheapen out on the music, since it had some great artists working on the intro and outro.

This is one of those shows that you can tell, even from a glance, that it's someone's passion project. Someone, out there, played the game, loved the story and ultimately said that they wanted to see this on the TV screen.

And they did not spare any expenses to make that a reality. And for that, I will say, I very much appreciate the efforts since he produced something that is, by no means, a masterpiece, but is still an awfully entertaining piece of media.

Compared to the first half, this part will cover new plot points, including what happens when Yuri's silver key gets filled up with knowledge, which allows the end of his looping, uncovering more mysteries of various crew members and, of course, a possible almost-romance between him and another character.

I won't spoil how the show ends but I will say that it had a surprise for its viewers near the end where it had a fake ending episode. That, coupled with the fact that the next week when a new episode was supposed to air just so happened to have the Winter Olympics on the same day which caused the next episode to get delayed by another week, led some people to think that the fake ending was real and stopped watching the show.

To an extent, this is partly Crunchyroll's fault, since they have no way of telling their users when a show is officially done airing or not. Users typically just have to wait another week after the last episode to see if any new episodes of that show continue the story. If there's no such new episode, it's usually assumed that the show ended.

It's because of this that caused me a lot of headaches when I assumed a show ended when it actually didn't (i.e. Tasūketsu: Fate of the Majority) or I assumed that a show had not ended when in fact, it did (i.e. Kaiju No. 8 (Season 2)). Both cases are extremely annoying to me since it messes with my schedules.

But I digress.

In case you're watching the show yourself, don't be fooled by the fake ending! There's another ending waiting for you, which is much better.

My only complaint for the show is the lack of consistency in some areas but, at least compared to the first half, this half was a bit better at explaining things and finally filling some plot holes that were never thoroughly addressed in the first 12 episodes.

Overall, this was a very fun series to watch. As far as adaptations go, this is probably up there among the best or, at the very least, deserves an honorable mention. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if some people discovered the game because of this highly successful anime.

I won't expect another season out of this, since it ended on such a good note, wrapping up almost everything nicely, but, if it ever does get renewed somehow, then I'm sure to continue watching it.

5. Journal with Witch

If you've been reading my blog for a significant amount of time, you'd know that I'm a sucker for TV shows like this one.

Granted, I do get the argument that shows like these shouldn't even be animated to begin with, since the drama can well be expressed by real life actors as well, but I don't consider this to be that much of a loss.

The good thing about animation is that you can make your characters have more expressive faces during heavy scenes, although you need to be careful not to overdo it, since it can detract from the experience if they start to look goofy.

But I digress.

What's this show about?

Well, in a nutshell, it's about a 15 year old girl named Asa, whose parents end up dying, one day, suddenly in a car crash.

Left with no means of providing for herself, her extended family debate over who should take her in, now that there's no one to care for her.

Seeing as how everyone is treating this like a sudden burden, Asa's aunt, a 35 year old woman named Makio, decides in the spur of the moment to be the one that takes her in, at least until she becomes 18.

Makio is a novelist that writes fiction, is generally antisocial and lives a reclusive life in her small apartment, which clashes with Asa's generally extroverted personality.

Still, the two learn to live with each other, despite their seemingly incompatible personalities, as Makio struggles to become a surrogate mother to Asa and Asa has to learn to cope with the sudden loss of her parents.

That's episode 1.

Now, at first glance, this is giving me shockingly similar vibes to a different anime with a somewhat similar premise called Bunny Drop. Much like this show, it's also an anime adapted from a manga about an adult having to take in an orphaned girl when their relatives aren't very keen on doing it themselves. And it's also about the growing bond between that adult and the girl, as they have to learn how to live with each other.

This show, however, is a bit different in that the adult protagonist is a woman, not a man, is a bit quirky (in that she is antisocial and awkward a bit) and, most importantly, the child here is 15 years old (in Bunny Drop she was much younger).

Outside of this, I respect both of these shows for how mature and timeless they end up being.

Very interestingly, this show has a lot of valuable lessons that work for both age groups: those that are around Asa's age as well as some lessons for those that are around Makio's age. I just so happen to fall in the latter category, and I'm happy to say that this show had an educational side for me, since it treats the idea of parenting with a lot of realism.

Makio learns how to deal with a child that needs to grow into her own person, to be supportive of her but not controlling, to maintain a fine balance by being by Asa's side but also allowing for her independence and also maintain the life that she has always lived up until this point.

Asa, as well, has to learn to deal with what it means to go through the death of your parents, learning how to mourn, to not allow depression and loneliness to take over and also learn about other people's boundaries.

These are very good lessons to teach.

What I like most about this show is the dialogue. The conversations flow naturally: they speak in ways that people of their age would actually talk, with Makio being wise and thoughtful with everything that she says which goes well with her being a fiction writer, Asa being more abrasive and blunt, how they interact with each other and have small disagreements when trying to live together, how verbal conflicts can erupt and how mean and nasty they can be, even from a teenager, how one says something but then forgets about it later on, how misunderstandings can happen and so on.

All of this feels purposeful and natural. Nothing being said feels out of place or character. Everything is just so consistent and realistic, which makes this a very solid watch.

The lives of the characters, their experiences, the life lessons they learn, how they deal with their problems and how they approach them, all of these are presented slowly and simply to us, as we, the audience, dive into this world filled with characters that feel so real that you can genuinely have a deep conversation with them.

These are not paper thin characters, they feel like real human beings, presented in a natural way.

My only gripe with this show is how slow it is, but that's a given seeing how well it portrays human interactions. This is not meant to be watched by young kids. I can see someone around Asa's age watching this and learning from it, but not much younger.

Other than that, this was a blast. I loved this show, I loved the characters and the artistic visual metaphors that the show uses to express their feelings and emotional state.

A season 2 would be more than welcome, in my opinion.

6. Sentenced to be a Hero

Oh boy, where do I even start with this one?

Well, I'll start by saying that this show got off on a wrong footing with me.

The first episode that aired of this, it came out on a Saturday, and it was a full hour episode, introducing the main characters.

Normally I like that since it means shows like this anime are taking themselves seriously and want to set things up properly, which I am always a big fan of.

However, Crunchyroll, in all of its wisdom, doesn't tell you about the airing schedule of any particular TV series that is currently airing.

If you wanna watch something on Crunchyroll that's currently being aired, for the very first time, the only thing the website tells you is the airing date of its first episode, that's it.

That's usually good enough, since that tells you the day of the week that new episodes of that TV series will air in, since all of them air on a weekly basis usually.

This time, however, the first episode came out on a Saturday, but all subsequent episodes came out on Thursdays.

Which, for someone like me that tries to plan ahead what they are going to watch, in which days of the week, ended up messing my schedule a lot.

I had other shows I needed to watch on Thursdays, among of which was a different TV series called Roll Over and Die that I was hoping to follow, but because I had to reschedule everything so that I could now fit this show in my Thursday schedule, I had to drop that entirely.

So yeah, just because of this show, you won't get to read my thoughts on Roll Over and Die since I never finished watching it.

But alas, let's move onto episode 1 of this show:

In a medieval world that heavily employs magical seals to create powerful weapons, powerful demonic creatures called Faeries are quickly spreading throughout a kingdom, in an event called a Blight, destroying human settlements and generally corrupting the land, as they gain territory.

One day, as he is being chased by said creatures, a thief called Dotta Luzulas is running away with a casket on his back.

Just as he is about to be killed, he is saved by a fellow young man that throws explosive daggers, named Xylo Forbartz.

The two, evidently, seem to know each other.

It is revealed later that both Xylo and Dotta are both heroes: criminals that are enslaved using magical seals painted on their bodies, who are under the servitude of the country, as disposable soldiers.

People, generally, have an aversion and strong dislike towards heroes, since only those criminals that commit the most heinous of acts end up being forced to become heroes.

After being questioned by Xylo, Dotta finally admits that the casket that he was carrying was, in fact, stolen by him from a bunch of soldiers that were transporting it.

The two open up the casket only to find the dormant body of a little girl in it, which Xylo determines is most likely a goddess.

Goddesses are divine beings with great power, that help humans fight back against the Blight and who have the bodies of small girls.

They are generally immortal since they don't grow up, but can die if bodily harm is inflicted onto them.

As the two ponder what to do with her, they notice that various Faeries are running rampant nearby, about to invade a village.

As Xylo prepares to aide in defending the village, the goddess in that casket reveals herself to have awoken and declares that Xylo is her knight, and that she will assist him.

Xylo refuses her help, though, and ventures onto the battlefield alone, only for the goddess, now known as Teoritta, to follow.

As Xylo fights against the incoming wave of Faeries, Teoritta joins the battle and tries to assist him, but Xylo is stubborn and tries to fight on his own, without her help.

Xylo then meets up with a bunch of Holy Knights, a military group that was defending said village, under the command of a woman named Patausche Kivia, who quickly recognizes that Xylo is a hero because of the seal on his body.

Under the threat of another wave of Faeries that's approaching, Xylo tries to help Kivia fight them off, only to be overwhelmed.

As the battle ensues, realizing that they are losing and that there's no other way out, Xylo decides to allow Teoritta to help him, forming a pact with her and activating her powers.

This causes Teoritta to summon a rain of swords that obliterate the Faeries and clears the battlefied.

With Teoritta's help, Xylo defeats that wave of Faeries and brings victory to humanity.

It is then revealed, through a flashback, that the reason Xylo was sentenced to be a hero to begin with was that he had killed another goddess in his past, because he had been framed and sent to a battlefield that was bound to be overrun by Faeries. Knowing that leaving a goddess be captured by Faeries would corrupt her and bring about the end of the world, Xylo murdered her with his own hands, to prevent that from happening.

The higher ups, not believing his story and declaring him a vile human, sentenced him to become a hero.

That's the story of episode 1.

Ok, so there's a lot to unpack here.

The first and most significant thing that I want to talk about is the animation.

This show has gorgeous action scenes in it.

Every time there's a battle against Faeries, there's some very nice looking animation that accompanies the battle, making the action sequence come alive on the screen.

It's fluid, it's well animated and it's simply gorgeous to look at.

I also like the idea of the story: a penal hero that uses throwing daggers as grenades and a goddess that has the power of summoning swords at infinitum like Gilgamesh are very cool ideas.

In fact, this entire premise is chock-full of great ideas.

There's a hero that thinks himself as the king of the empire and is very talented at making magical weapons using the seals he draws on them that give them powerful properties.

You have magical bombs, magical machine guns, magical cannons, all of these really cool technology that exists in this world, demonic creatures that corrupt the land and, as it later turns out, also have intelligent commanders controlling them.

All of this stuff is great.

After Clevatess from the previous season, I was very much looking forward to a dark fantasy to keep me entertained.

And I was hoping this would be it. Spoilers: it wasn't it.

There's many reasons why I don't like this show: the main one being the plot.

I dislike plots in which the main character gets framed for doing something horrible, and this is the reason why everyone around him treats him horribly, not listening to him, marginalizing him, and so on.

This isn't the first anime that does this, nor will it be the last.

Granted, the fact that he gets framed by someone else would be fine and all, if the story actually focused on it and tried to show who the person that did the framing was, what his connection to Xylo was, what his motivation was and so on.

Here, that doesn't happen.

Outside of the very first hour long episode, Xylo's backstory and the fact that he was framed, doesn't get mentioned at all this entire season.

Since the entire point of Xylo's personality is the fact that he declares revenge on the person that framed him, you'd think that this would be a huge plot point for the story. But it's not.

The story of this season is just: Faeries are invading this part of the kingdom, Xylo and his comrades have to go rescue the people there. Now, Faeries are invading this other part of the kingdom, now Xylo and his comrades have to go there too.

And every time they visit a new place, it's the same story: the people there don't trust Xylo since he's a hero, they ignore his advice, they treat the heroes badly, but when the Faeries attack, Xylo saves everyone anyways, they get their recognition and then they move on.

Rinse and repeat.

I'm just done with this.

I really wanted to like this show. But I hate generic cookie-cutter plots like this one.

Granted, the animation for the fight sequences is nice every time, like I said, but is that really enough to carry an entire series of 12 episodes?

Some people, particularly younger ones, might argue that it is. Hell, if I was 10 years younger, I feel like I would have been more forgiving of this show as well. But as it stands, I want something more.

I want an interesting plot or maybe some character development or at least some world building, I don't know, something! Just give me something more than just good animation! I'm not asking for much here.

The plot is just the recycled “protagonist is an underdog that everyone mistreats, then proves to be powerful and reliable”. That's it. On repeat.

Nothing more.

I wanted to know more about Xylo, to know his backstory, who the previous goddess that he was with was, what his previous life was like. Or hell, any of the other heroes, for that matter.

I had so many questions about all the heroes, not just Xylo, since they all seemed very interesting. But the show just treats them as pawns on a chess board, it doesn't go into details about any of them, they just exist there for Xylo to command.

Xylo himself is a mess of a character, since it feels like he is just a Guts-wannabe (from Berserk). It's just the hard boiled egg archetype of the guy that's always grumpy, has had a rough life and doesn't like anyone but is deep down actually a good guy, who just wants to help others out but without saying it out loud.

Granted, I've seen this archetype before, and I didn't mind it much, but here it's particularly grating given how illogical his character usually is. Xylo constantly refuses to employ Teoritta's help, even after forming a pact with her, because of....I don't know....ego, maybe?

This goes so far that, at some points, he risks other people's lives just because of that. Time and time again he jumps into battle by himself, trying to defeat Faeries, only for himself to almost die before Teoritta shows up and saves him.

Had this been a kid doing this I would have been more forgiving but he's portrayed as a full fledged adult, for crying out loud; and not just any adult, but a strategist, no less.

Surely he can figure out that not using the powers of a literal goddess and putting himself and others in peril because of that is not a good idea, right?!

I just, I don't get his character.

Teoritta, herself, is just a goddess that, for some reason, wants to receive head pats from Xylo whenever she does a good job at helping him.

Yeah, that's pretty much it. She's a goddess with great power that, for some reason, wants praise from her knight. Not much more to her character than that.

The world building is also very shallow: there's a bit of talk about the politics of that world, how there are people that preach coexistence with the Faeries, and who constantly betray humanity whenever they can, but that's also shown very marginally.

The world just feels very paper thin.

You feel like, given the existence of Faeries, there would be interesting religions, cultures, social constructs and things in this world, but it's explored so very little.

This is where, for all of its faults, Clevatess did a better job than this show, in that it showed a bit more of the world, it explored it a bit, it explored magic and the various magical deities in it, it explored the strengths of various kingdoms and so on.

Here, outside of the very last episode, in which something particularly interesting happened with Kivia, nothing interesting happens to any of the main characters.

The world is mostly unexplored, the characters, both the main and side ones, are also unexplored, the Faeries are just monsters that keep attacking, no rhyme or reason why, there's an assassination plot that felt like it might go somewhere but it doesn't get explained why it's even a thing in the first place.

Everything, from top to bottom, is just shallow. There's no depth to anything, whatsoever.

Unless you want to watch a show with pretty fight scenes that are fluidly animated and that's it, there's not much reason to give this one a shot.

I cannot, for the life of me, recommend this TV series. Nothing about it is worth talking about.

As dark fantasies go, I was hoping it might do something unique, something a bit dark, morbid, or at least interesting, but it just didn't.

The show had one strength: the fact that it has good animation in it, and that's the only thing it did right.

Everything else was just boring, under-cooked, shallow and just unremarkable in every single way.

For a premise so interesting and with so many good ideas behind it, the fact that it doesn't utilize them at all feels like such wasted potential.

If this were to ever get a new season, I'm unsure if I'll ever continue it. I really hope that it will become better, if and when a new season will ever get greenlit, but I'm not sure if it ever will; or hell, if I'll even bother watching it.

We'll see.

7. The Holy Grail of Eris

An anime about the ghost of a woman that was executed?

You'd think that with a premise like that, this show would be a banger even from episode 1.

And yet, here we are, with this show being almost at the bottom of this ranking.

To be fair to this show, at least it has a plot that's intriguing, in comparison to Sentenced to be a Hero which, for the life of me, I would have to struggle to recall the latter's plot.

What makes this show be ranked even worse than that is the fact that, for better or for worse, Sentenced to be a Hero has good animation for its fight scenes, which are very pretty to look at.

This show doesn't have that.

But before I get to that, a small recap for episode 1:

A small girl is running through a crowd on a rainy day, at one point getting lost in it.

As she tries to find her way out, she witnesses, first hand, the public execution of a strange woman, who's yelling curses at those that are there to watch her get killed for her crimes.

As it turns out, this woman being executed is named Scarlet Castiel, the daughter of a high ranking noble of that country who was executed for, supposedly, trying to assassinate the king by poisoning him.

Fast forward a full decade and that small girl, whose name is Constance Grail, participates at a large party where she is invited for being the daughter of the Grail family, a family of lesser nobles.

At said party, Constance encounters the ghost of Scarlet who, for some reason, only she can see and hear.

While being at the party and enjoying herself, a girl gives Constance her hairpin, asking for her to hold onto it, before disappearing suspiciously afterwards.

Constance doesn't think much of it but, as it later turns out, this was a set-up by a different noble girl to frame her for “stealing” said hairpin, in front of everyone there.

Constance, being very timid and introverted, is bad at defending herself and is under a lot of pressure because of this but, just before she's about to collapse under the load of the accusation, Scarlet, who had witnessed the entire thing, possesses her and begins speaking through Constance's mouth, pretending to be her.

She sways the public in her favor, revealing the set-up against her and convincing everyone that the girl who was the mastermind of all of this, was the one to blame, surprising everyone at how sharp tongued and cunning she turned out to be, not knowing that it was Scarlet that did the talking.

Later, as Constance wakes up after that, she thanks Scarlet for her help in defending herself in front of everyone. However, Scarlet then reveals that, in return for her help, she wants Constance to assist her in finding out who was the one that is responsible for her past execution as, as she claims, she had been framed as well and she had never intended to poison the king, to begin with.

And thus begins the story of Scarlet and Constance, who have to find out the events that led up to Scarlet's execution and who masterminded all of this.

That's episode 1.

Now, I'll simply say that the premise for this story is simply genius.

The plot is there, there's a lot of characters that get introduced and have their own strengths, weaknesses and goals and, most importantly, there's always an element of mystery around Scarlet that kept me asking questions.

All in all, the first episode was an absolute win, as far as this show is concerned.

However, my main issue with this show is a simple one: this show is for adults only. And not because there's anything risque about it, there's no sexual content in it that's particularly on the nose, no heavy violence or gore of any kind. It's just very boring.

The show has a lot of talks about politics, the state of affairs of that country, the various clans and hierarchies of nobles that exist there, what their relationships to each other are, discussions about various businesses and how they operate, a lot of that stuff.

This stuff might be digestible for adults, since they can tolerate this for better or for worse, but kids would get bored very quickly if they had to watch through this.

Hell, I am a fully grown adult and I was barely managing to keep myself watching this, not because the plot was overly complex, mind you, but because I was getting bored.

There's a plot about a woman that was Scarlet's friend that committed suicide but left behind a strange key. Then there's a plot about this secretive organization that sells a potent drug on the streets, then there's a plot about the king's consort that is actually a girl that lived in an orphanage, then there's a plot about a war brewing between this country and one of its neighbors, there's just a lot.

Mind you, it's all very interesting and cool, I'm not gonna lie, but the show focuses a lot on dialogue and figuring things out, one step at a time, which can be a problem.

This is very clearly a light novel adaptation since there is just so much dialogue in this and so very little action. The few action sequences there are, they aren't animated very well and they are mostly forgettable.

This is just a story about a mystery, about a villainess that turns out isn't even a villain, but just someone that was framed.

Why was she framed? And by whom? Well, I can't spoil it but I will say that I liked the reveal.

One thing that this show did well is that it kept me guessing throughout, making me constantly wonder how they are gonna explain anything.

And, for what it's worth, the ending was surprisingly satisfying, tying everything up with a neat bow and closing all the threads that it starts with.

Everything gets explained quite well. There's even a question that I had about why Scarlet never remembered the day of her execution, that gets answered in the last episode which I really liked and, well, it all just wrapped up very nicely in the end.

If you're willing to put up with all the dialogue of this show just to get an interesting mystery, this might be a good watch for you.

For me, even Sentenced to be a Hero was a better watch, personally, because I liked the action in it since, like I said, it was well animated, but this show had the superior plot overall.

I am shallow, in that I value good animation over a good story, like that, but Sentenced to be a Hero won over this one just barely.

I can easily see a world in which, had I been just a bit more invested in the political stuff of this story, I might have considered this to be the better show.

Oh and, I really hate it when shows, in the last episode, after tying everything up, decide to sequel bait for no reason, outside of just “we want to tell more stories”.

The reason I chose to watch this show over Roll Over and Die was simply because I had hope that, given that the light novels for this ended, that this might have a proper and satisfying ending to it; which it did, but for some reason, the show still decided to sequel bait at the very end, going all “but it's not really the end just yet” in the most comically shoehorned in non-ending that I have ever seen.

That really left a bad taste in my mouth.

That's not to say that I wouldn't watch another season of this, if it came out, it's just that why would you tarnish a perfectly good ending with a “but is it really over...?” question that has no place here. Everything got solved, all the characters had a happy ending, all the questions got answered, all the character arcs had ended. Why ruin a good thing?

I don't know. I just didn't like that. It felt cheap and beneath this. A show like this didn't need that. If it will ever get renewed for a new season (which is a big IF), then I might consider watching it.

But I just don't see the point of a new season honestly, nor any direction where it could head in after the events of season 1.

8. Dead Account

And now we arrive at the final entry in this ranking.

This is, without a doubt, the show that I enjoyed the least.

Before I begin talking about it, let's discuss the first episode:

Soji Enishiro, a teen that has a very active online presence, posts rage-bait videos on this world's version of Youtube, to make revenue from it.

It works quite well for a short while, although he keeps getting hate from his followers for always click-baiting them and treating them with low quality entertainment.

However, despite his bad reputation, Enishiro is doing this for a good cause: he has a bed ridden sister that's very sick and he needs money to send her to the US to pay for a treatment surgery, that will save her life.

Still, one day, as he walks around, he gets attacked by a man with a giant hammer, who's trying to destroy his smartphone, for some reason.

There's a bit more to episode 1 than that, as it explains why he's being attacked, but I won't spoil it since it's a bit of a twist.

So, long story short, why is this the worst one out of all of them? Simply put, this is the most cliched story out of the bunch.

Outside of the twist in episode 1 over why he's being attacked at all, there's nothing in this show that was particularly hard to predict.

I could guess, without much effort, everything that was going on, as it was being set up.

This is the stereotypical underdog story, in which everyone will treat Enishiro as an inept man, for one reason or another, considering him either incapable or simply evil for very shallow reasons, Enishiro has to grow to become strong to prove them wrong, he proves them wrong in battle and that's it.

Oh, the battles in this show revolve around smartphones. Yes, this show is about exorcising smartphones that become portals of the dead to corrupt the living.

Sounds like a cool idea, right? Enishiro becomes an exorcist, goes to an exorcist high school where he has to learn to deal with apparitions of the dead.

Well, it's not cool. This becomes an anime about high school drama.

Yes, it talks about a competition between two classes, and how they have to fight each other so that they can go on more important missions, later on.

That's it.

I just hate high school drama anime. I just do.

If you're gonna do something creative about exorcisms, like bring them into the modern world and have it tied to digital devices, that's fine, that's cool. Talk about it! Do something creative with it! Talk about how glitches affect the exorcism, how you might need to repair your phone as it breaks down, what happens if you lose cell coverage and how that impacts the exorcist's powers. Get creative with it!

But no, the only thing that this story does is that, if your phone's battery dies, the exorcist loses his powers. Ok, cool concept, I like that but that's not enough to justify 12 episodes of this. Do a bit more with that!

There are good ideas with this, but it all boils down to the fact that, at its core, this is just high school drama about friendships, proving your worth to your peers and not losing sight of what's important.

That's all well and good, don't get me wrong, but it's all stuff that many other anime, shounen or not, have done so many times in the past that it just doesn't do it for me anymore.

Nothing about this stands out. The characters are boring and predictable, the plot twists aren't anything to write home about, it's just the classic underdog trope, all over again.

If you're fine with watching that, good! That's cool.

I'd say there's more to this show than just that (and there technically is, since there's a very faint amount of fan service in the very last episode in a hot spring scene but even that was half baked) but that's pretty much it.

I feel like the comedy was supposed to save this show but even that doesn't work, since there are barely any jokes here, either.

The only thing that I feel like this show did well, which other cliched series failed at, like last season's Tougen Anki, was the fact that it established an identity for itself.

This show, for better or for worse, has a unique style and mechanic, that being exorcists that use smartphones, at its core. And it's a cool image, honestly.

Tougen Anki technically also had the whole concept of Oni using their blood powers for survival, which is also a cool idea, but it didn't establish a proper identity with it, I feel. Like, I could watch a fight scene from Tougen Anki 10 years from now, and I feel like I'll barely remember about the show from it, whereas here it's a bit more well defined.

But that aside, there's not much more to say here.

It's just an underdog story, with the protagonist becoming more powerful as the story progresses.

Nothing about it is amazing. If you don't mind the cliche, give it a watch!

As for me, I'm done with it. Even if a season 2 gets greenlit, I won't watch it. I'm dropping this one.

Only 5 shows, this season.

Yeah, sad to say, I didn't have much time to watch anime this season, so I kept my list short. That and one of them is the continuation of a TV series that started last batch.

Hopefully, this will be enough to interest at least some of you since, even though this list is short, it has some good TV series in it.

As always, these are all viewable on Crunchyroll. This list is in the order of my most favorite shows to my least favorite of this lineup.

The List:

1. This Monster Wants to Eat Me

Let's look at a manga adaptation.

This was a very nice surprise to me. It didn't look like much, from its first episode, so I was very impressed by how much this story has evolved throughout this season.

The plot is about a young woman named Hinako, who's just a regular high school student that meets a strange girl named Shiori, that looks to be around the same age as her, who immediately befriends her for no obvious reasons.

Hinako has been suffering from depression ever since the rest of her family has died in a car accident where she was the sole survivor. Ever since then, she's been struggling with wishing for death, because of how painful it is to live without her loved ones around anymore, but, because of her having heard her family's last wish of them wanting her to stay alive, she cannot bring herself to commit suicide.

One day, after school, while waiting for her best friend, Miko, Hinako is lured into the ocean by a strange girl, which turns out to be a horrific monster that tries to eat her, only for her to be saved, at the last second, by Shiori.

Shiori has very long claws and a semi-mermaid form, very Jekyll-esque. She then reveals herself to the saved Hinako to be a Japanese mermaid, a specific type of yōkai (Japanese monster) that is incredibly powerful.

She then also reveals to Hinako that the reason she had approached her, earlier that day, was that yōkai like herself can smell from afar the blood of humans and apparently Hinako's blood smells very savory to them.

It is, for this reason, that that sea creature had just attacked her.

When Hinako tells Shiori that she actually wishes to die, Shiori responds with the fact that she intends to eat her herself, but only after she grows a bit more, so that she becomes even more delicious. In the meantime, Shiori pledges to protect Hinako from other yōkai.

That's the synopsis of episode 1.

Now, there's a lot to unpack here, but I'll start by saying that I think this is a horror manga, but just very toned down.

For example, Shiori's true monster form isn't revealed until much later (in episode 1, she was still more than half in her human form). Apparently, Shiori has the ability to change shape at will, her being able to appear however she desires.

Her true monster form, when it finally gets revealed, was refreshingly horrifying to look at.

I haven't seen such a monstrous design in a long time in anime, which left me very stunned and in awe at how much they could get away with, in her design.

Make no mistake: Shiori has an agenda of her own and is, for the most part, a horrible inhuman creature that lacks any semblance of human morals.

The contrast that this has with her normally beautiful human form is quite shocking, but adds to the delight of the show.

Oh and, before I go any further, I should mention that this is a yuri story (or, for those that don't recognize this Japanese term, it means it's a story involving the romantic relationship between female characters).

I usually hate to use the term lesbian in the context of anime, since that is such a politically charged word that almost has new connotations for the English crowd, but, in a sense, that's what this is: it's the lesbian relationship between Shiori and Hinako.

Granted, it took me a while to piece together the fact that this was even a romance at all, since the show tried so much to make it seem like their friendship was innocuous and innocent.

And, to an extent, it still is, but it gets a bit more physical than I expected towards the end.

But leaving this aside, it should come as no surprise that I'm a huge fan of this plot. I've always been enamored with love stories between humans and monsters, and this is one of those types of plots, thankfully.

Shiori is a surprisingly cunning little woman, that always manages to manipulate Hinako into agreeing with her. Usually this would be a major red flag for a romance, but I'm happy to say that this show is self-aware, and doesn't shy away from showing how damaging their relationship is to each other.

Moreover, while I'm not going to go into spoilers, I will say that the basis of their agreement has a lie somewhere in it. I'm not going to say what that lie is but it will play an important role, later on, one which almost completely fractures their relationship.

But leaving all of these things aside, I just liked the psychological angle that this show adopts: how it talks about depression, trauma, feelings of craving suicide and mental illness.

These are very mature subjects that I would normally very much fear to see in lesser shows, just because of how much damage they can cause if not done right, but here, they are handled quite tastefully.

It shows how much someone can suffer just because of a simple accident, how one's life can go upside down from a single event and how trauma can rear its ugly head even in the most innocuous of moments.

Honestly, big props to the creator of this manga! This story is very original and very well done, as far as I'm concerned. Then again, I'm by no means a mental health expert, so I can't speak with regards to inconsistencies or accuracy.

And the addition of the horror elements to this story was superbly done. When Shiori's past is revealed and her true form is shown, I was genuinely impressed at how incredibly vile looking the show portrayed her to be, and yet the story kept her personality the same and I genuinely liked how well these two elements meshed together.

Usually, I'm not a fan of horror anime, since I feel that they are usually just annoying and cheesy, but this one was done right. Shiori's mere presence on screen, when in her true form, was sending me shivers down my spine.

And the ending, while I can't say did everything I wanted, left me wanting to see more. I liked seeing the moments between Hinako and Shiori, I liked how deception between them almost broke their bond with each other but they found a way to still make it work, and I like how otherworldly Shiori's personality turns out to be, her being incapable of understanding humans and human emotions but eventually having to learn them, when forced to by circumstances.

This was simply a masterpiece, in all shapes and sizes.

This might genuinely be the first horror manga I've seen that I genuinely find to be well done. It's truly scary, psychological, intelligent, symbolic and mature, has deep and introspective characters that learn to grow together and is very much an amazing experience, all around.

I doubt that this will ever get a second season, but I will definitely be watching it if one does get approved.

2. Li'l Miss Vampire Can't Suck Right

I'm not gonna lie, I didn't expect much out of this series.

This is a manga adaptation that's about the high school life of a vampire which, in essence, sounded like a very terrible idea to me.

Generally, I'm a big fan of anime about vampires, since I feel like they are the most imaginative and fun to watch (i.e. anime like Mayonaka Punch, Call of the Night, Hellsing, Rosario+Vampire and others). The only one that broke that rule was Seraph of the End, which was just recycled shounen tropes packed into two seasons, but even that had some amount of suspense to it.

Now comes this one about high school, and I was very skeptical I would like it. I thought from its synopsis on Crunchyroll that it might become a romance TV series at some point (spoilers: it didn't), but I didn't have high hopes for it.

Well, it turned out that it was just as good as I had hoped minus the romance part.

The story is about the high school life of a little vampire girl named Luna Ishikawa.

In this world, all sorts of mythical creatures and monsters can attend school (although the show only focuses on Luna as the only monster from her school).

She's popular in her school because of how mysterious and noble she appears to be, with everyone always admiring her from a distance. However, she doesn't have any close friends.

One day, she gets assigned cleaning duty with her classmate, an ordinary guy called Otori, and they remain behind to do the job.

While doing so, Otori notices that Ishikawa is constantly snaking away, which leads him to believe that she is hungry. When confronted about this, it's revealed that Ishikawa, being a vampire, needs to drink human blood to satiate her hunger but is actually bad at sucking it, since she doesn't have anyone to practice on and she's been trying to keep this a secret, since it might ruin her image of a cool vampire that her peers have of her.

Realizing the conundrum she is in, Otori, being the nice and helpful guy that he is, offers her to practice sucking blood on his arm, which Ishikawa gladly takes him up on.

However, since she is unskilled at doing this, she eventually sucks so much blood from him that he faints.

Thankfully, he recovers and a happy Luna asks him whether they can continue practicing in secret because his blood tastes so good, to which Otori agrees.

Later on, during a lunch break when the two are on the school building, Otori advises Ishikawa to take big bites from his arm, instead of nibbling, so that she can suck more efficiently. Afterwards, it's also revealed that when she drinks blood, Ishikawa can fly with her retractable wings.

That's the gist of episode 1.

OK, so right off the bat, I know I already said this but, just to drive the point home, this was not a romance anime, as I expected it would be. Or, maybe the show thinks that it is, but, to me at least, the relationship between Ishikawa and Otori can, for the most part, be described as a parental one, in which Otori acts as a caring mother and Ishikawa acts like his child, always sucking blood from him the same way that a child would suck milk from her mother.

That's not an analogy I came up with, the show constantly makes this joke: treating Otori like a mother figure for Ishikawa.

In a sense, this is pretty fitting since Ishikawa, in the show, has two forms: her usual “cool vampire” form in which she's drawn with full details on her body and of a regular height for someone of her age and her chibi form which is just a very tiny cartoony vampire girl that is the size of a human baby.

The show likes to infantilize Ishikawa this way when she's in her chibi form, treating her as being needy, emotional and very vulnerable, as well as someone that gets lost a lot.

It's the same technique that's used in other anime to make a particular character appear cute and dependent of others, which is supposed to incite feelings of attachment from the audience.

And I'll be damned, it works.

Every episode, whenever I'd catch of glimpse of chibi Ishikawa, I'd go “Awww” like a mindless animal that just saw something incredibly cute in the wild, making me want to affectionately hug her.

It's a very insidious form of manipulation, one that the Japanese are known of employing in their anime, but it simply works and is highly effective.

But, if you're reading this and thinking to yourself that this is just a simple moe-blob anime that relies on the cute factor of the protagonist to stay afloat, I'm happy to announce that this isn't the case. There's more to it than that.

The show is also very creative, which I was hoping would be the case.

For example, it's revealed that Ishikawa, being a vampire and all, doesn't show up in photographs (she doesn't even cast a shadow in real life, either). Because of this, there aren't many ways that you can capture her presence easily, but due to Otori's creativity, he finds a way to do it. I won't spoil how he did it, I'll just say that he has found an ingenious way of doing so.

Also, the blood sucking moments in the show were surprisingly wholesome for me. I thought it could very well become lewd or sexual in some way, but the show had the restraint of not going there, instead making the moments very clean and fulfilling to the soul. I don't know what it is about, but they really did capture the sense of a baby sucking milk from their mother when Ishikawa was sucking blood. Maybe it's because of the fact that they usually portray her in her chibi form when she's sucking.

It's so difficult to pin down, but it just worked.

At other times, during a festival organized by the school, it all looked like it was simply going to repeat the whole festivities thing which, I'll be honest, I've seen done to death in high school anime before but, because this show is creative, it ended in a way that only a show about vampires, could. I won't spoil it, but it was magnificently done, and it made me so glad that this worked in the way that it did.

This made me realize: why did I like the show so much? What's it about that is so well executed that it worked, when so many other high school anime fail for me?

The answer is twofold: one, the moe aspect of this show. It's just cute, endearing even. I cannot look at chibi Ishikawa for a second and tell you “I hate this show” without feeling like I'm a very bad person. Yeah, it's emotional manipulation, at the end of the day, but I just like watching the cuteness simply for cuteness' sake.

The second, and more important aspect is: all the characters are likeable. This isn't to say that they are well written or complex in any way (they just aren't), but they are likeable. I was thinking that Otori will end up becoming just a shallow protagonist, given that his only role was to help Ishikawa with his practicing with her, but nope, it's later shown that he is just that kind of guy: the kind that doesn't just want to help Ishikawa, but help anyone in need. He likes to dedicate time for others and try to sort other people's problems for them, even to a fault. The show recognizes this as an issue and doesn't try to sidestep it.

Ishikawa's friends are also friendly and notable, them always trying to do right by her and trying to take care of her when she needs it, which I also found enjoyable.

And the ending: it was so fun. I will say Otori got a nice present from Ishikawa, one that only her could give to him. It wasn't romantic, but it was still a very nice sign of their friendship having blossomed, and grown.

Overall, I loved all of these characters. I loved Otori, Ishikawa, Sakuma, Kusunogi, Ishikawa's parents, the school principal, all of them. It was just a fun world to inhabit and, by the end, I genuinely felt like I had been part of their lives.

It was a fun world, a colorful world, an imaginative world and one that had me saying “I want more of this” but also, if a new season won't get greenlit, then I can still say “I'm satisfied with just this much”. It never left me being disappointed, all the episodes left me happy and the characters were simply fun to be around.

This world, as fuzzy and cartoony as it was, was a fun one to be a part of. I'm very much glad that this show didn't break the trend of vampire anime being good because, honestly, I would have hated to be disappointed by this one. Thankfully, this wasn't the case.

3. GNOSIA (First half)

I'll start this off by saying that this anime is based off of a video game with the same name, that originally came out in 2019 on the PS Vita.

It later got ported to other, more contemporary consoles as well, and for Windows too.

I'm usually a fan of visual novel adaptations, because sometimes they are geared towards adults and so the stories usually have more mature undertones to them, which I definitely like.

This, however, doesn't feel like one of those adults-only kind of games.

But before I go any further, let's talk about the first episode.

The episode starts out with a young man named Yuri, being woken from a capsule by a woman named Setsu.

Yuri has been unconscious for some time, since the cruise ship that they are currently on has departed from the planet. He is also amnesiac.

Setsu now begins to explain to Yuri the details of what has happened while he was unconscious.

Apparently, their ship, called the DQO, has departed from the planet Liu-An, who was being ravaged by the Gnosia. Gnosia is a disease that makes people want to kill non-infected individuals, and compels them to lie to appear innocent at all times.

The ship's AI computer, LeVi, detected that one of the passengers, on board, is also a Gnosia infected, and is lying to appear as non-infected. Because of technological limitations, the computer cannot determine exactly which one of the passengers is infected, at least not until the infected one is put into cryogenic sleep.

Due to the current state of affairs, and since the ship is programmed to self-destruct if they don't put the Gnosia infected passenger into cold sleep soon, Setsu explains that all the passengers on board will have to hold meetings to determine who the infected person is.

As they finally arrive in the meeting room, Yuri gets to meet these other passengers: a very outgoing and seductive young woman named SQ, a highly intelligent organism named Racio, and a silent introvert named Jina.

When they start the meeting, Racio reveals that she immediately suspects Yuri for being the infected, since it's very “convenient” for him to have amnesia in the midst of all of this.

However, after Yuri defends his position, this ends up going against her when the passengers of the ship decide to vote who to put to cold sleep. The majority vote is that Racio will be put into cold sleep.

After doing so, the ship AI confirms that it was not Racio who was the one infected, so they have to continue having more meetings to decide to choose a different passenger, next.

However, before they could have their next meeting, the ship is programmed to do a warp jump, so they have to each return to their rooms. During this jump, the Gnosia infected will have free reign over the ship while everyone else will be unconscious, and will be able to kill one other passenger.

Yuri struggles to think about this, wondering who he should vote for, next.

But before the warp jump can take place, SQ enters Yuri's room, where it's revealed that she wants to talk with him.

After having a bit of small talk amongst themselves, the warp jump takes place and Yuri wakes up after it in his room.

During the jump, it appears that Jina was the one that was killed by the Gnosia.

Now, it's just Yuri, SQ and Setsu who are left. Yuri is warned that, if there will become a point when there will be the same number of Gnosia infected people as uninfected people on the ship (after leaving out the ones put to cold sleep) the Gnosia will immediately take over.

Knowing this, Yuri knows this is his last chance at saving the ship: if he chooses wrong between Setsu and SQ, he will die, murdered by whoever is the Gnosia.

Feeling the pressure, and also feeling that there's something that Setsu is hiding, Yuri decides to vote for Setsu to be put into cold sleep.

Knowing that these are the rules they have agreed on, Setsu laments that she was not able to sway Yuri on her side.

Just as she is about to enter her cryo-pod, Setsu gives Yuri a strange silver key that seemingly immediately enters his body.

After that, once she is put to sleep, SQ reveals herself to be the real Gnosia, and now she is alone with Yuri. It's at this point that Yuri realizes that he was mistaken for voting Setsu but, it's too late, and gets murdered by SQ.

However, immediately after that, Yuri finds himself back at the beginning, waking up in the same capsule as from the start of the episode, him meeting Setsu a second time.

Thus ends episode 1.

Now, there's a lot of things I like about this show.

The first, and most important thing, is that I like that Yuri makes mistakes in the beginning but, as the show progresses, he learns from them.

Much like the video game, the more you play it, the better you get at it.

Yuri is not a genius, by any means. He is just another random guy who wakes up one day, is put in front of an insane scenario in which he's forced to partake in, knowing that if he makes just one wrong move along the way, he risks either being put into cryo-sleep himself by the other ship mates, or he ends up getting killed by the Gnosia (or something else entirely, as will become apparent later on).

And yes, Yuri will make mistakes along the way. And sometimes, those mistakes will cost him, dearly.

But I just like how well the plot is handled.

I'll just put out a disclaimer now: I did not play the game that this is based off of.

However, it definitely felt to me that this was inspired by a werewolf video game (and I realized this before I looked it up).

The ideas and mechanics behind the plot are very rigid, reminding me of games like Among Us.

But, of course, this is an anime, not a video game; and while it is inspired by a video game, the plot can only be linear. A huge part of the enjoyment of this experience, which is the ability to vote for who you think might be the Gnosia, is removed from here, since this is a linear non-interactive experience.

As such, I was worried that this show might become boring, once all the rules of the game are revealed and the audience can then just use logical thinking to sus out who the Gnosia actually is, each episode.

But, surprisingly, this did not happen. Instead, each new episode would introduce new characters, new rules, more stuff that Yuri has to cope with, all while learning to be better at spotting lies.

And, most importantly, I liked that each character in this show gets fleshed out with important backstory as the story moves on.

Had the show only focused on the rules of the game and trying to sus out who's the Gnosia and who isn't, I'm scared that it would have flopped, big time.

But, thankfully, this never happened. Instead, the show knew when to talk about the game, when to talk about Yuri, and when to talk about other characters as well.

There are some really interesting characters, like an alien looking guy named Shigemichi, a cowboy dressed captain named Jonas, a mute young woman named Kukrushka, a human-cat hybrid called Chipie and so much more.

Oh and I didn't even talk about the talking dolphin in this show. Yes, there's a talking dolphin that will be part of the passengers.

There's a lot of good stuff in this, and I really love the colorful cast of characters and the rich sci fi setting in which, so many bizarre things can end up happening.

The plot twists that we get are very hard to predict, which always keeps you on edge. And sometimes, catastrophes happen that aren't even related to the Gnosia at all.

In the current age when most anime are fantasy, I really miss the sci-fi ones. This isn't to say that sci-fi is more interesting than fantasy, but I feel like the current anime landscape is oversaturated with fantasy (and the current isekai craze didn't help matters, either).

Granted, there are some things that I dislike about the show too: like how the rigid rules behind the game keep reminding me that this was originally meant to be played by a human player.

And by that I mean, there's really no reason why certain restrictions have to be in place, other than because the game just needs them to be there. Stuff like, why can the Gnosia only kill exactly one non-infected person during the warp jumps, why can't the Gnosia vote each other out to confuse the others, why can't passengers who were placed into cold sleep be taken back out once it's confirmed that they weren't the Gnosia (at one point, this even happens for entirely different reasons, so this is possible), why can't there be loops where the starting number of Gnosia is already equal to the number of non-infected passengers and so they can take over immediately? Or, for that matter, why can't there be loops when there just so happens to not be any Gnosia on board at all?

But yeah, I get it, there's some things that just can't be helped.

That's inevitable.

Overall, there's clearly a lot of passion put into this anime though. The art style is very polished, the music is definitely well done, the plot twists are unpredictable, the character development is prominent and there's even romance sideplots that keep things fresh. Hell, I read online that even players of the game were surprised by certain plot twists from the anime.

Clearly a lot of time and effort went into making this piece of art, and I'm all for it. I cannot say that their efforts went unappreciated.

If you really like this type of stories, then I highly suggest you check this out. It is so worth your time.

4. My Friend's Little Sister Has It In for Me!

It's probably best if I keep my review of this show short.

There's not a lot of reasons for why this is, mainly just that this did not interest me a lot.

The story is about a high school boy named Akiteru Ooboshi (or just Aki), who is a young man obsessed with being efficient in life.

He tries his best to follow the shortest possible routes to success in his life, and is also very flexible when it comes to following others' rules, sometimes even skirting the rules entirely if doing so fits with his own goals.

He is friends with a classmate of his called Ozuma Kohinata, who is a very talented programmer and whom he respects greatly.

Akiteru is actually the leader of a video game development group called the 5th Floor Alliance because, as it turns out, all the people working on this indie game just so happen to live in the same country, in the same city, in the same building and on the same floor (the 5th floor). It's on that specific floor where Akiteru and Ozuma also live, as neighbors.

There are also other members on that floor that are also involved in Akiteru's development group but, for now, I'll omit talking about them.

The game they have developed has garnered quite a following in Japan and they are praised as being highly talented despite still being in high school.

Akiteru also has his own nemesis: Ozuma's younger sister, a girl named Iroha who has a very disciplined and orderly personality at school but is, in fact, a childish troublemaker that loves to tease Akiteru while at home.

A running gag between Akiteru and Iroha is that Iroha likes to make fun of Aki's inexperience in love, and how she may have feelings for him, only to do a U turn at the last second, and reveal that she's just playing a prank on him, at his own expense. This always infuriates him.

One day, while the two are bickering amongst each other, Aki receives a phone call from his uncle, who's the CEO of a well established video game company in Japan and who is aware of Aki's success as the director of his team's indie game, and he invites Aki to dinner at a restaurant, but only after Aki confirms that he is not in any romantic relationship with anyone yet, to him.

When the day of their meeting comes, his uncle makes Aki an offer: he will put in a good word for him at his company, to make it likelier that Aki will be hired there after he'll finish high school, if Aki agrees to act as his daughter's girlfriend until they'll graduate. His daughter, Mashiro Tsukinomori, who is Aki's cousin and someone he was very good friends with back when they were kids, has recently moved schools and will now be Aki's classmate in the future, and her dad wants to make sure that other boys will not try to court her, so he wants Aki to act as her boyfriend to keep them away from her.

Aki, always being obsessed with efficiency, takes his uncle up on the offer and agrees to pretend to be Mashiro's boyfriend.

However, things might not go so well when, due to a misunderstanding in which he walked in on Mashiro while she was in the bathroom, Mashiro thinks that Aki is a pervert and has a severe dislike towards him.

Thus ends episode 1.

Yes, this is a love triangle anime, in which Aki will have to pretend to be his cousin's boyfriend, while also trying to handle the childish antics of Iroha on the side.

Or at least, that's what the show will have you think.

In reality, this is barely a rom-com at all. It's just a regular high school slice of life where the romance is set aside and, instead, it's just about the drama that the characters partake in.

Honestly, I liked the beginning and I was hoping that the show would cover the life of a high school video game development group, because anime has seldom focused on these kinds of things.

And, it makes you think that's the direction it's going to be but, in reality, it's just about Aki's high school life, not his professional life.

Like, how difficult it is for Aki to make friends with Mashiro, after she thinks of him as being a pervert, how he wants her to make friends with everyone, how he wants to focus on his tasks as group leader but other issues make things difficult, like how a drama club at his school are about to be disbanded and he has to help them because something something, one of his group's members is part of it.

Basically, if you're still following, it's not about the video game development process, it's just high school drama.

And, frankly, I just couldn't bring myself to care.

There's nothing particularly wrong about high school drama, per se, but I feel like the plot should really be about something a bit more than this, since it promised that Aki was also the leader of an indie game group.

I felt like the story just kept focusing on things that have very little merit, instead of the things that could actually be interesting.

And as for the romance aspect of the show....it's also very underwhelming.

For starters, I generally am forgiving of incestuous relationships in anime because I feel like they have potential for very good drama, when done right, but this show doesn't even acknowledge that Mashiro and Aki are related at all.

I mean sure, it mentions that Mashiro is Aki's cousin in passing, but they never say “Hey, we're actually related. Maybe we shouldn't be doing this, after all?”. Some might say that since they are only pretending to be a couple, that's going to be fine, but then, later on, the show decides to throw that out the window and then try to take their relationship seriously.

This is like the show trying to have its cake and eat it too. Are you actually treating this whole incestuous thing seriously or aren't you? Because, if you are going to take it seriously, you should probably address the elephant in the room and actually talk about it.

Anime that want to have incest in them but just conveniently never address this issue are really bothering me, since that's actually a good premise for an interesting story that can have thought provoking questions behind it, but the show is too scared to even touch this idea with a ten foot pole and suddenly forgets that these two characters are related at all.

But then, there's Mashiro herself: she's just a stereotypical tsundere. She starts off by disliking Aki because of a complete misunderstanding, but then slowly, throughout the show's run, warms up to him and becomes more and more interested in him.

Tsundere have existed in anime for like decades, at this point. I just want something more interesting done with this stereotype. Vanilla tsundere is overdone.

Akiteru, for his part, is the stereotypical efficiency nut that doesn't have any qualms about breaking rules, as long as it suits him. At some points, he ends up actually lying to others' faces, just so he can manipulate them into doing what he wants. Sure, he has a good heart and has no ill intentions, but it's still underhanded when he does it.

The only character I liked was Iroha. She turns out to be a bit more interesting in the show than I expected, but she doesn't get enough screen time, in my opinion.

Again, the show focuses a lot on Aki's relationships with Iroha and Mashiro but, after seeing a lot of love triangles in other anime done much better, it just pales in comparison.

A show, similar to this that I've watched on Crunchyroll a year ago was a show called Love Is Indivisible by Twins, another anime light novel adaptation that's a slice of life high school TV series, but done much better. You can read about my thoughts on it here.

That show, for all its faults, was at least more entertaining and actually compelling with its love story, had a slow romance development but actually got somewhere.

Like, if you're actually going to do a love triangle story, at least commit to the bit and do something with it, reach a conclusion! If not for the audience reading your story, at least for the sake of the characters in your story.

I don't want to read about how Akiteru solves his school's drama club disbandment problems, I want to read about his love life with the two girls! But the show doesn't commit to either, it tries to focus on both at the same time, only doing half as good a job for each, ultimately doing a disservice to both.

This is my problem with romance high school anime in general: they focus too much on the high school aspect and too little on the romance.

And then, at the end, when at least some kind of conclusion has to be drawn in the sand, the show then does a 180 degree turn and goes literally back to the status quo being like Just kidding, there's no actual romance here. You'll have to wait for season 2 for that.

Blow me!

Granted, Love Is Indivisible by Twins also had a very unsatisfying ending as well, but at least that had more focus towards the romance aspect throughout the middle of the runtime. That and, at least Jun, in that show, ended up being slapped in the face (which was greatly satisfying for me). The protagonist here didn't get slapped, so there was nothing satisfying about this one.

My only hope is that the light novels for this were actually much better than how the anime adaptation was. Maybe they are, I don't know. I never read them. This review is strictly for the anime, but the anime itself sucked.

Did this show have more plot than Li'l Miss Vampire Can't Suck Right? Yes, it definitely did. But the reason I liked that show more than this one is that, ultimately, that show was actually fun to watch. It clearly had passion, creativity behind it. I genuinely liked how they integrated the supernatural elements into its high school setting. And even if it didn't have all of that, the show was still hundreds of times more entertaining just because of the vampire lead who was so cute to watch.

This show didn't have any of those, so it was relying on a good story to fall back on. But it didn't have that either.

I'm done. On to the next one.

5. Tougen Anki: Legend of the Cursed Blood (second half)

This will be my review of the second half of this TV series (of its first season). If you wish to read about my thoughts on the first half, you can check them out here.

This show...really went sideways with this second half.

There were some things I liked about it, don't get me wrong. This isn't like the worst TV series I've seen in a while, but it was below average when it comes to delivery.

If you read what I thought about this show during its first half, you'd know that, even back then, I didn't like it very much.

It had good ideas, an interesting execution, and a semi-fleshed out plot but, all things considered, it was still a mediocre action TV series with subpar character development, half baked characters and with a very predictable sequence of events that led me to dislike it quite a bit.

Here, in this second half, not much has changed except that there's even less character development.

After the events of the first half, our team of Oni trainees, along with their teacher, decide to travel to Kyoto, for some reason, wearing undercover clothes to disguise themselves, since the oni-hating Momotaro agency now know how they look like.

In the process of visiting the new city, one of them ends up being forced to use his Oni powers in the daylight to save a little girl from being run over, exposing that they are there.

This doesn't go unnoticed by the local Momotaro agency in Kyoto, who decides to look into these things, further.

That's pretty much the gist of the first episode of this second half.

There's a bit more to talk about, but that is the most important information you need to be aware of.

There's also another Momotaro character named Shinya Momoiwa and Mikado Momodera that get introduced here, that will play a bigger roles as the antagonists of this second half, but I won't go into details about what their involvement will entail.

Long story short, there's gonna be a bit of deception going on behind the scenes in which the Oni, unsurprisingly, will get framed for a lot of devastating incidents in which a significant number of civilians will die.

First, I'll talk about what I liked about this second half.

The main thing that I liked in this part of the story is the introduction of this Mikado guy. He is, for all intents and purposes, a very strong and gifted Momotaro that has a lot of power and is extremely skilled in combat but, more importantly, he is a rational and kind person who wishes to make justice into the world, and doesn't simply hate all Oni just because he's a Momotaro.

That, to me, was a nice addition to this world.

I liked to see that not all Momotaro characters are just some combat driven lunatics that are controlled for their blood lust against the Oni and have at least a little bit of depth to them.

As such, this was the one and only thing about this second half, apart from the combat and action sequences, that I genuinely liked.

During this second half, a fledgling friendship will blossom between a Momotaro and an Oni. That's the crux of it.

And....well, it did play a big role, but not in the way I hoped it would.

But before I get to that, I'll talk a bit about the combat in this series.

Much like in the first half, the combat and techniques that the characters use to defend and attack are awesome. I love seeing the blood techniques being used, how they are countered by the Momotaro agency. I liked the creativity behind the powers of both the Oni and the Momotaro, and I liked that they now added reconnaissance abilities for this as well.

Pretty much everything involving the strength and abilities of the characters and anything pertaining to the action sequences, I liked.

The fight scenes were cool, significantly long and well done and well animated, which made me sufficiently happy.

Now, let's talk about the things I didn't like about this show.

And boy, there's a LOT to talk about.

I'll start with the plot: it's cliched as fuck.

I won't go into spoilers but, I'll just say, this turns into the whole cliche of two friends who believe in each other but who have their relationship put to the test, because an evil third party decides to deceive one of them and make them turn against each other.

I'm not going to say much more than this but, again, this is the whole plot point of 'Who are the real monsters, here?', in which the Momotaro Agency (or, in this case, just one person from this agency) becomes unscrupulous and ends up targeting and killing civilians in order to further their plans against the Oni.

This whole spiel about humans being more evil than the literal Oni has already been done in the first half of this season, so seeing it be done again in the second half as well felt both surprising and unwelcome.

I mean, can't you get a bit more creative than this?

Mikado being introduced kind of offset this a bit, since the plot added some dimension to the agency, thanks to him alone.

But outside of this, it's the same recycled crap all over again: the Oni are framed for doing something truly despicable, the Momotaro confront them and try to exterminate them, fighting ensues between them and the Oni win and then the whole truth gets exposed.

It's the same formula from the first half (except this time there's also a framing element to it), simply repeated. Same candy, with the same taste, just a different color.

And I figure that the whole plot involving the true friendship between our main characters being put to the test was surprisingly badly done this time around.

Had this plot involved characters that were romantically involved with each other, I feel like it would have been highly more effective and entertaining.

Or, at the very least, their friendship should have been even more pronounced and significantly more fleshed out. The fact is that a Momotaro and an Oni have only known each other for a single night, literally, and now they trust each other so much that one cannot even fathom the thought that the other could be evil?

How much trust can you put in someone you've only met during a single night?

I know this seems like a nitpick, but the whole show tries to make this look like a big deal, like the two are genuinely meant to be friends for the rest of eternity, just because they have this weird chemistry between them that's very difficult to fake. And when the Oni is framed as having done these horrible things to civilians, the break-up moment between them is supposed to be stomach churning.

This is, for all intents and purposes, complete bullshit.

There were times in which I was literally siding with the bad guy, mentally asking that specific Momotaro how gullible he can be. I mean, sure, the Oni was being framed for having done all these terrible things but, if the plot had actual depth to it, how much more interesting could it have been if the Oni really was the evil culprit behind those murders?

Or, better yet, what if this second half was more about morally ambiguous decisions, like the righteous Momotaro trying to come to terms with the fact that he's a Momotaro and has a duty to perform to his agency, in which he has to kill Oni, even though they might not be inherently evil per se. Basically, he'd have to make a decision about fulfilling his duty as a Momotaro or following his own personal moral principles.

How much cooler of a plot would that have been?

But no, it's the cliched recycled boring plot of “Oni are actually good and there are some rotten apples within the Momotaro agency that are spoiling the whole bunch”, kind of thing.

It feels like the show is only interested in having straw-man arguments about racism and nothing else, at the expense of so much potential.

But leaving aside the plot, let's talk about some logical inconsistencies in this show.

The show really tries to portray that there's this inherent difference between Oni characters and the Momotaro, even though I still don't understand the argument. Like, both of them have incredible powers at their disposal. What's even the point of trying to differentiate between the two?

The only thing that sets them apart is the fact that the Oni characters have horns on their heads (which they can easily hide, so that barely even counts) and the fact that all their abilities are blood-based.

Other than this, the simple fact that there's even a conflict between these two parties feels like just forced conflicts for the sake of forced conflicts.

I really find it hard to believe that the Momotaro would have trouble accepting a ceasefire with such powerful beings, especially given how much potential for combat Oni seem to have.

Then, there's the less obvious stuff.

Some abilities that Oni have seem to make literally no sense. At one point, a particular character creates a giant wave of blood to engulf a Momotaro enemy in it, to defeat him, so much bood that they cannot possibly have contained all of it in their body. The human body can only house around 5 litres of blood, not nearly enough to create a giant wave of it.

Then, there are points in which characters should very easily have died from the amount of trauma they took during battle; I maybe can tolerate at least a little bit of this happening to the Oni (since, you know, Oni are purely fictional creatures and you can make up any rule regarding their bodies), but then you have Momotaro, who are supposed to be regular humans, that take so much damage that they should have easily died from it, but still don't. The Momotaro sometimes are damage sponges in this show, surviving insane amounts of blunt force trauma that would have normally caused multiple fractures in normal humans in reality, if not immediate death.

Then, there's a case in which a specific Momotaro character just gets a single bleeding wound on his neck and that's it, he's dead. Him, simply for not being a combat person, just died from a single wound in the neck, just like that.

It's very inconsistent.

Another time, an Oni character literally gets his foot blown off one of his legs and he does not bleed out immediately, but is still able to function normally (but don't worry, his leg will be just fine later on, for some reason).

Then, another time, a regular human character ends up in a car crash, just because his vision gets altered by someone's powers that replaces what he should see with what they're seeing, effectively blinding them while they're driving the car. That made me chuckle, I'm not gonna lie.

Here's the thing: the fact that you would somehow get blinded in your eyes while driving doesn't necessarily mean you'll crash the car. Most drivers have an instinctual sense on how they should move their foot to hit the brakes of the car and stop it before they crash. The fact that he died like that made no sense to me.

Or how about when a character walks right into an explosive trap and survives it without even a scratch, just because they were “careful” and “saw it coming”. How does that work? I don't know.

Then, there's the action sequences themselves: don't get me wrong, they are cool, but they don't make sense at all. Like, a character can just stay on the side of a building just by running, somehow defying gravity, or how they can dodge a continuous rain of bullets aimed directly at them just by running sideways.

Yeah, apparently, running in this show makes you invincible.

This is why I hate guns in fiction. They are usually portrayed as being so much more finicky than how they really are. I'm not going to pretend that I know how it is to shoot another person, but I don't feel like it would be that hard to do that while they are running.

This is literally just Stormtrooper aiming, in anime form.

You get the idea.

I don't wanna harp on these inconsistencies for too much, since, like I said, the show is cool and it has flashy fights and cool abilities but damn, the moment you apply even the slightest bit of logic to it, it falls apart so quickly, it's incredible.

Or, and this is my last complaint, I promise, how that particular Momotaro has so much blind trust in the Oni despite having known him for just a single night, but then, the moment he sees the Oni at the scene of a tragedy, he loses all hope and simply refuses to trust literally anything the Oni has to say, not even refusing to hear him out.

That was so contrived and amateurish, that it was pulling me out of the experience. The simple fact that you had incredible blind faith in someone you barely know but, after all of that, you slingshot into the opposite direction and don't even wanna hear them out to see how they defend themselves is unbelievably contrived, on all grounds. There's literally no middle ground when it comes to that Momotaro, it's either he's in full trust mode of the Oni or in complete distrust mode. There is no in-between.

I just can't anymore.

This show was just too ridiculous. I watched it for the cool powers that the characters had but even I couldn't take it anymore, after a certain point.

After watching intelligent shows from this batch like This Monster Wants to Eat Me and GNOSIA, that had so much more logic and forethought put into them, this show just looked like it was written by a high schooler.

Or, at most, someone that's studying writing in college.

This isn't to say that I think that the person who wrote this plot is necessarily from those age groups, but it's at least clear to me that he's targeting the high schooler demographic with this.

In fact, I think even teenagers would find some of the plot points in this show to be extremely dumb, but they are more likely to forgive it, just because the action is cool.

For me, as an adult, it felt jarring. I just couldn't get into the plot. It felt contrived, boring, simplistic and very much predictable.

The only good thing I can say about this show is that, after last season when I watched Kaiju No. 8, I will at least say that this show is better than that. Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying it's more intelligent than Kaiju No. 8. All I'm saying is that it's more entertaining than Kaiju No. 8.

Kaiju No. 8 was worse, to a fault, because, unlike this show, it targeted adults as its main demographic (at least, I think it did). Due to this, it had to be more intelligent and add extremely boring side arcs to the story, involving military command structure, power struggles and disagreements between the humans, cadets that are trying to reach new heights and are constantly challeging the status quo, all things that sound really cool on paper and can make for a good story, but in reality just slowed everything down to a crawl and took away time from the fight sequences.

This show, even though it's way more dumb than Kaiju No. 8 on pretty much any level, is at least fun to watch (at least for the fight scenes). When the fight scenes happen, which isn't very often sadly, but when they happen they are very much fun to watch seeing how they play out, what abilities a specific Oni or Momotaro have and how creatively they get to use it.

Granted, none of the fights are surprising, you can see the outcome of the fight from a mile away, but at least they are entertaining to watch. Kaiju No. 8 also had predictable fights too, but they were boring to look at, which made that even worse of a bargain.

So yeah, this show had cooler fights than Kaiju No. 8. That's all I'll say.

The fact that I got more enjoyment out of this show than I did for Kaiju, even though Kaiju was supposed to be more up my alley since it was meant for adults, isn't a complement towards this show, as much as it is an insult for Kaiju No. 8. It's just that bad.

But aside from this? I'm officially dropping this show. I cannot fathom why they chose to adapt 24 episodes for this show, when there are many, so much better written stories out there, that deserve these many resources instead.

If this will ever get a second season, I'm not watching. I'm done. It's just too dumb for me. I can easily see someone that's younger that can get into it, but for me, personally, it just insults my intelligence on a level that is unforgivable (and no, this isn't me saying that younger people are dumber than older ones, I'm just saying that they are usually more tolerant of dumb things than older people).

Kaiju No. 8, Clevatess or Call of the Night (Season 2). Which one would you pick as your favorite?

We have 9 anime entries for this season, and I'm excited to talk about most of them (and also, a bonus one at the end for those that have a Hidive subscription).

This has been a busy season, since I've had to watch new episodes pretty much every single day of the week, except for Monday. Fridays and Sundays were especially difficult since I had 3 shows to watch in each of them, so I was very much busy throughout my weeks.

Do I regret it? For the most part, no. I had a lot on my plate but I am glad to say that things worked out well, and I had a lot of content to enjoy.

And with some special exceptions, it was a very nice roundup. I very much enjoyed watching most of the shows that I'll be discussing today.

So grab a cup of coffee (or tea, whichever you prefer) and let's get cranking.

As always, all of these anime will be available on Crunchyroll from Romania, since that's how I've watched almost all of these (with the exception of the bonus entry at the end).

Let's begin.

1. Night of the Living Cat

This was such a wild ride.

Imagine, if you will, a zombie apocalypse that turns modern day Japan into a desolate place with only a handful of human survivors, but instead of actual zombies, it's regular domestic cats.

Yes, this show is about a virus that turns people into cats when they get touched by them without protection gear.

Humans turn into adorable, small and playful cats that want to cuddle and play around.

You'd think this would be easy to solve. Just employ the army and get rid of the cats, right?

Well, the story starts when most of humanity (or at least in Japan) has already been turned to cats.

The plot follows a group of three survivors: Kunagi, Kaoru and Arata, as they maneuver around the abandoned lifeless city, trying to scavenge for food, fuel and gear to survive in this maddening world.

Kunagi is an especially interesting case since he is a young man that suffers from amnesia, since he doesn't remember who he is or where he came from, but who just so happened to wake up on his own. It just so happened that he entered a cat cafe that was owned by Kaoru's brother, where he was offered to stay until he can remember his past.

Then, the cat apocalypse suddenly happened and all cats began to turn humans into them, and now Kunagi, Kaoru, Arata and Kaoru's brother have to escape. Kaoru's brother sacrifices himself so that the other three can get away from the cats, and now they are left to fend for themselves.

They manage to secure a car and, using it, they now have to find ways around the city without attracting the attention of their feline foes.

That's a good description of the first episode.

What's interesting about this show is that, for the most part, despite cats causing this chaos and civilization extinction event, nobody really seems to hate them at all.

If you can't tell already, this show is a satire of American zombie TV series. It's all played for laughs more than anything else.

Of course, the action is real and the cats will behave like predators going out of their ways to turn Kunagi and his allies into more cats, and our heroes will have to find ways to defend themselves, such as using cat toys to lure them away from the main group, or using improvised water tools to spray cats with water to deter them from approaching.

And if you're wondering: no, there's no real animal violence in this show, thankfully. This is all played for laughs and is very lighthearted.

It's very funny seeing the main characters almost lose control of themselves when they want to stop and cuddle with a cute cat, only to suddenly remember that they shouldn't and cry in pain because they can't pet the cute cat. The cats aren't mind controlling anyone, mind you, it's just that all the human characters in the show just really love cats. And really, who doesn't love cats?

There are some serious moments from time to time, though, as human characters will get turned into cats on occasion, and the show does treat it as a serious loss, like a tragic event. In fact, the survival aspect of the show, while it's played for laughs, is not underplayed. There are times when cats will pose a serious threat to their survival, and our heroes will have to get creative to escape.

While the story is absurd in every way possible, it takes itself seriously and the action sequences, while intentionally over-the-top, are well done, like Kunagi riding a motorcycle to escape a giant cat monster, or a cowboy trying to shoot with water guns at cats that are approaching him.

Oh and, this is a minor spoiler, but there will be cats that will control other, bigger animals in the show, later on. Like how cool is that?!

Imagine a cat on top of a brown bear, as the cat controls the bear. That's so creative I can't even begin to describe it.

Or there's also another cat that's actually very intelligent that will appear, later on, and become an ally to our heroes. And that cat will receive a small device that will translate everything it says into English, but only in famous movie quotes.

I love the ideas behind this show. It was so creative and funny.

It has everything I liked about an anime: it's absurd, surreal, nonsensical, funny, dramatic, creative and, most importantly, it had cats; lots and lots of cats.

As a cat lover, I couldn't ask for more.

And, the cherry on top was that, at the end of each episode, you'd get a short educational post-credit segment with our main characters trying to teach you on how to be a responsible and informed cat owner, which was a nice touch.

If there's any show that is as surreal as this one, it was another one I wrote about back in spring of 2023, called Too Cute Crisis, about a bunch of aliens who arrive on Earth and try to study humanity, only to have their invasion plans halted because of a cat being too cute.

I love shows like these that are both wholesome and family friendly, but still very entertaining even to adults.

This needs a season two, since the whole virus plot doesn't get answered just yet and I really want for there to be a continuation to this story. As is, it was very good and I do not regret watching it, but I feel like it's incomplete and there's a lot more that needs to be addressed, such as who created the virus and who is the mastermind behind all of this.

Please, Japan, give me a season 2 of this!

2. Detectives These Days Are Crazy!

It's time for a comedy.

I'm not gonna lie, I loved the preview for this show when it first came out.

It looked wacky, full of energy and was just unhinged in the best ways possible.

And yeah, I made a judgment call to watch it because of that since, usually when something is wacky and unhinged, that's a green flag that the whole show will be like that.

And what would you know? I was right.

The first episode is split into two parts.

In the first part, we are presented with 35 year old Keiichiro Nagumo, a private detective that had a successful career in his high school days but is now struggling to pay his rent and food. He thankfully manages to get a case that involves getting evidence that the client's wife is cheating on him. But before he can start the investigation, a high school girl named Mashiro Nakanishi arrives at his office and suddenly requests to become his assistant.

When inquiring why such a young girl as herself wants to become the assistant of a private detective whose agency is barely getting any new cases, Mashiro gives out a petty shallow excuse that does not impress Keiichiro, so he declines her offer.

Instead, he decides to take on the case on his own. He follows the suspected wife around the city until she and a strange man that she's with enter a young cafe.

Keiichiro, knowing that a single old man like him would stand out like a sore thumb if he followed them in, decides to wait for them outside so that he can continue stalking them but Mashiro then arrives and offers to pretend to be his girlfriend so that they can enter together.

Begrudgingly, Keiichiro accepts and they do so. As they stand at the same table, Mashiro realizes that Keiichiro is very bad with technology and anything that's new, since his ways of collecting evidence are very outdated and conspicuous. Seeing no other ways, Mashiro manages to help him solve the case by making it seem like they were taking a couple's picture on her phone when, in fact, they were taking a picture of the cheating wife and her boyfriend in the background, which they then sent to the husband as evidence.

Seeing how Mashiro had helped him solve his case, Keiichiro concedes and hires her as an unpaid assistant as a reward for her help.

He later regrets his decision when he realizes that Mashiro had gone around the city posting fliers of his agency everywhere, claiming that they are willing to accept whatever odd jobs there are, in an attempt to boost his business.

The second part of this episode involves a miscommunication gag in which a new client asks Keiichiro's agency to help him deal with a bees' nest.

To save time, Mashiro agrees to handle the situation on her own, and leaves the office to arrive at the client's house while the client himself remains at the office with Keiichiro.

Keiichiro gives out instructions to Mashiro over the phone to guide her to the house but, because of a miscommunication, Mashiro arrives at the wrong building that houses a bunch of yakuza.

Thinking that she's talking about the bees, Keiichiro instructs Mashiro to kill all of them, and so she proceeds to invade the building and starts attacking all the yakuza in it. She overpowers all the yakuza in just a couple of minutes, clears the building on her own and has one lone young member beg for his life to her, and she decides to spare him in the process.

After “clearing the bees' nest”, she returns to the office thinking that she had accomplished her job, none the wiser.

The yakuza man that she had spared, named Nezu, decides to also join Keiichiro's agency as an unpaid assistant as a show of gratitude.

So ends the first episode.

So yeah, this is a lighthearted comedy, if you couldn't tell.

The jokes are basically non-sequiturs, always making fun of the characters, like how old and outdated Keiichiro is, how muscle headed and selfish Mashiro sometimes is, or just how odd the situation can get sometimes.

The show likes to poke fun at the characters and even break the fourth wall multiple times, while also introducing other strange people like the Nipple-Tasting Man, whose only purpose is to serve as a gag for a bunch of episodes (and yes, he is a recurring character).

I loved this show.

It's the type of comedy that I certainly like. The comedy and jokes reminded me a bit of Mayonaka Punch but it was even less grounded than that, if that's even possible.

This show likes to defy the laws of physics, common sense and even tropes, innovating at everything that it does and also providing an instant punchline that sometimes works, other times it doesn't, but at the rate of jokes that it keeps telling, you're bound to laugh at least a couple of times each episode.

If you're a fan of nonsensical comedies that loves to make fun of its characters, I highly encourage you to check this out.

There is no overarching plot in this one, since it doesn't take itself seriously enough to have one, but honestly, it doesn't need one. It's all about the jokes and, hey, if the jokes are funny, that's good enough for me. If that's also good enough for you then I suggest you watch this.

3. Hotel Inhumans

Time for a manga adaptation.

I really liked this show. It had a very distinct style, with many interesting twists and turns each episode that kept me guessing all the time.

The plot revolves around two concierges that work at Hotel Inhumans, a secretive inconspicuous hotel that is actually an establishment founded to serve underground assassins from all across Japan.

The two are a young man named Ikuro and a young woman named Sara.

The premise of the show is simple: Ikuro and Sara, as full time employees for the hotel, must ensure to cater to every need that the hotel's guests may have, regardless of difficulty. And given that their guests are assassins, you can imagine that the requests can very quickly become wild.

Episode 1 follows a young man named Siao who works for the Okajima gang. He is an assassin that works for this gang to protect his sister, Mao, who is being held by them in a secret location.

Each year, to prove that she is still alive, the gang give Siao a recording of his sister singing a lullaby.

During one of his missions, after killing his target, Siao is betrayed by the head of the gang and almost killed by them but manages to escape.

Having nowhere to turn to, Siao arrives at Hotel Inhumans, per the instructions of the previous gang leader, and requests Ikuro and Sara to help him save his sister from the gang's hands.

After looking into the matter, Ikuro brings Siao to a chapel where he confronts the leader of the gang along with his henchmen. by themselves.

As they are about to be killed, Sara swoops in and very easily kills all the henchmen and incapacitates the gang leader, all by herself.

Now, seeing as he is cornered, the leader tries to talk himself out of being killed by the three. Once Ikuro realises that he's lying and that Siao's sister is actually dead by hints left behind from her last lullaby recording, Siao kills the leader.

At his sister's grave, Siao meets up with a small girl that also was there to deliver flowers. It is at that point that Siao realizes that this girl must be his niece and that his sister was a mother.

Back at the hotel, Ikuro reveals that he had known for some time of that little girl's existence and had set Siao up to meet with her. This wasn't what Siao had wished from them, initially, but it was the closest he could get to fulfilling his customer's needs.

That was episode 1.

As you can tell, there are many plot twists in this show.

It kept me guessing all the time, which I've found to be very refreshing.

Some episodes end with a bitter sweet ending, since, as you can imagine, the assassin world is filled with tragedy, and this show doesn't shy away from that.

Every couple of episodes introduces new arcs, with new assassins, each with their own stories, backgrounds, motivations, personalities and needs. And then it's all about Ikuro and Sara trying to find ways to accommodate them in whatever ways they can.

Some of the stories are insane, such as one involving a young girl that's deathly ill trying to recreate a miso soup that tastes the same as her mentor had made for her before her own untimely demise, but without her knowing the exact recipe or ingredients. And Ikuro and Sara have to figure out this recipe from a small clue (that being the girl's nickname) while a group of other assassins are out to kill her.

Others involve a dementia afflicted old assassin that visits them and is very much mentally unwell, as Ikuro and Sara have to make sure that he doesn't reveal the true purpose of their hotel to others.

And many other such stories.

Some of the stories are tragic and don't end on a happy note, as you might expect. Others are heart warming.

It's all around just a fun experience.

I've really enjoyed my time with the show, and I honestly love how professional and capable both Ikuro and Sara prove to be, as well as how likeable they both are.

Moreso than anything else, the show is about professionalism and service excellency from two young concierges that cater to the most atypical of crowds.

That's what this is, in a nutshell.

And it was a very entertaining ride.

I will be returning to this one, no doubt about it. I really hope for a season two. 🤞

4. Tougen Anki: Legend of the Cursed Blood (first half)

I'm not particularly thrilled about this one.

This is the one anime that I didn't initially know what to expect but, as time went on and I kept watching it, I very much realized that it wasn't really for me.

Before I get into my thoughts on it, let's talk about the first episode.

Shiki Ichinose is a high school dropout that is trying to live a peaceful life with his dad at their family shop. Shiki is rebellious and loves guns.

One day, while living his life as usual, Shiki gets attacked by a strange old man who seems to possess incredible powers.

He gets saved by his dad just in time, and they immediately try to run away from the man in question.

His dad explains to him that Shiki is actually an Oni, the descendant of a group of very strong creatures that can control their blood and use it as weapons in combat. Oni have caused a lot of turmoil and suffering historically and, because of this, a clan of humans named the Momotarou have made it their mission to exterminate all Oni and their descendants.

The man in question that had attacked them and is still pursuing them is, actually from the Momotarou clan, and have tracked down Shiki.

But before they can make their escape, Shiki gets captured.

I won't spoil the ending of the episode but, needless to say, you can probably figure out where this is going.

Shiki will eventually awaken his Oni powers, have to fight for his life, learn how to work with other Oni and prove to the Momotarou that he isn't the monster that they think that he is.

That's this plot, in a nutshell.

This is based on a shonen manga, and this really shows. The childish humor, the focus on fight sequences, the moments where it feels like it's gonna be gruesome but always shies away from becoming too graphic, all of them are tropes in shonen stories like this one.

And the anime adopts the style of the manga and goes full force with it. It feels custom made to cater to a young, teenage demographic. From the rebel protagonist, to life lessons about team work and trusting your friends, even to the ending song that's literally called “What Is Justice?”, everything screams teen energy at the max.

And that's where my issue with this show lies. I'm just too old for this kind of stuff. Had I been 15 years younger, sure, I can really see myself loving a show like this. But as I am, today, it all just feels like a shallow corporate creation specifically made to engage teens and gain their attention.

This feels like it wants to be a culture bomb and I'm not sure if it will succeed at it. It might become, if teens will really get into it and become popular enough, but that remains to be seen. I'm so disconnected with the newer generations that I cannot predict, for the life of me, whether this will become big enough of a phenomenon with them to ingrain itself into the modern ethos of shonen anime.

For now, I just felt very bored at it.

But I did find the gimmick of transforming your own blood into weapons for combat to be surprisingly innovative. Frankly, I'm surprised that this is the first time I've seen an anime do that. Surely it isn't the first one to employ such a gimmick, but it's the first one that I, personally, saw to use this.

And while I do find the concept of using blood for combat to be extremely gross and life threatening even, the show abstracts away from that and intentionally doesn't let you dwell on the details of this setup. You'd think that using such weapons too much would cause sufficient blood loss to kill the Oni, but that doesn't happen.

But I really liked some of the designs and powers of the main characters. The fact that the protagonist loves guns, you can probably predict that his powers will involve making guns out of his own blood. And yeah, while that sounds gross, it is actually surprisingly cool the way it gets executed.

But then, the show gets bogged down by the classic cliches of the genre: the uptight teacher that just doesn't get it, the discrimination that the Momotarou have against oni, the whole “who are the real monsters?” dilemma, the chosen one trope, the having to learn to master your emotions, the unlocking of new powers whenever a significant impediment happens; it's all so recycled that I just didn't care anymore.

Again, if this had come out 15 years earlier, I would have been impressed. But I've seen these tropes done to death already. This felt like a paint-by-numbers kind of show almost.

But, still, that doesn't change the fact that certain ideas are still cool and I do find the blood techniques to be a nice new idea that I'm glad gets executed. I'm just sad that the story has to go through all of these points again, when so many anime have done them in the past.

And let me just say, the humor and shallowness of the characters are really turning me off. There are multiple times in which the characters feel so shallow and one-dimension that they feel like caricatures of what real people would be like, them always possessing only one trait and nothing else.

The fact that these characters are also sometimes cracking jokes at the worst possible moments and acting like buffoons when the scene demands that they be serious is killing my mood. I know that that's a classic thing in some shonen anime but it feels particularly egregious here.

But maybe this just is my age showing and me not understanding what the youth want out of their shows, these days. I don't know.

Either way, am I done with watching this show? Well, I thought that I was but apparently I'm only halfway through the season. While I do sometimes drop a show by this point if it's very bad I'm looking at you, Tasuketsu, I'm not at that point with this show. I dislike the show, and I do feel like it's not for me but, at the end of the day, I've seen worse shows than this one, and I feel like I can stomach another 12 episodes of this.

So yeah, you'll see me writing about the second half of this show in the upcoming batch as well.

5. To Be Hero X (Part 2)

This blog post will cover the second half of this TV series. If you wish to read about my thoughts on the first half, feel free to do so here.

Long story short, I really liked the show. It had some things about it that I found boring but, for the most part, I really liked the action sequences and the story.

This second half will cover the backstories of more heroes that have remained unexplored, as well as a plot point about a mysterious substance that can turn people into monsters called “fear”.

Much like the first half, the action sequences are very nice in this. The music is also very memorable and the art style is experimental, with each hero arc having a different one that's unique to it.

We also get to learn more about Hero X, which is a focal character that keeps getting talked about constantly by other characters in-universe, as well as his personality.

And yes, this is also the half in which we get to see the dog arc in which, yes, there will be a literal talking dog hero. I won't spoil too much about it, and honestly it was more underwhelming than I expected it would be, but it was pretty original, at least.

There were also more connections being made with what happened in arcs from the first half, such as the reason why the original hero Nice had committed suicide.

This show really loves making references to other arcs, all the time. It's kind of its thing.

All in all, I liked the show. But, as time went on, the momentum that this show had started to wane on me, a little bit.

While I like the formula of constantly switching up the main character of each arc and sometimes showing the same events from different points of view, it became tiresome after a certain point. I've found this way of doing things refreshing initially, since so few other anime do it, but now I understand why this technique is so rare.

I will say that, after 24 long episodes, the gimmick was losing its charm. I'm very thankful that this was the only show that did this, this season.

Other than that, I liked this. I do feel like this second half was a bit less impressive than the first one, mainly because the aforementioned technique was becoming tiresome for me but, overall, I still see them as a good experience.

If you like this sort of storytelling that involves multiple points of views, switching main characters and art styles, and a fleshed out world with multiple characters all partaking in the weaving of the story, then this is very much for you. Just be aware that this might get a bit too much as you approach the ending.

6. Clevatess

Are you in the mood for a dark fantasy story? If so, then I have good news for you.

This one is as straightforward a concept as it gets. Let's start with a synopsis of the first episode.

A group of heroes employed by the Kingdom of Haiden, travel to the far south of the human empire to confront one of the lord of the dark beasts that lives at the corner of said empire.

The heroes, armed with mystical weapons of great power called Regalia, include a young woman named Alicia Glenfall.

Alicia had become a hero, as a promise to her late father, so that she will open up the world so that humans can advance into new territories that were previously unreachable to them because of said dark beasts that block their paths.

Armed and ready to confront the beast, the heroes attack Clevatess, the dark beast of shadows, in an attempt to slay him.

Clevatess, being an immortal creature that can manipulate shadows, easily overpowers the heroes and begins to kill them one by one.

In the process of doing so, Clevatess also learns that it was the king of Haiden that had sent them to his territory.

Angered by this, Clevatess leaves his mountain in anger and attacks the capital of Haiden, pretty much decimating everything in his path and murdering both soldiers and human civilians alike.

Eventually Clevatess makes it to the castle and destroys it entirely, before confronting the king himself.

He asks the king for why he had ordered the heroes to attack him, but the king answers that he wouldn't understand the reason even if he told him.

Dissatisfied by this answer, Clevatess decapitates the king and starts to leave. Among the rubble of the castle, Clevatess is called out by a dying woman, who begs him to spare a crying baby that she holds and save him from death.

Clevatess, very disinterested, inquires why he should save this baby, as he doesn't see humanity as more than an insect that needs exterminating, now that they had provoked him. The woman responds that this baby will bring peace to the world and show him why humanity is worth saving, but only if Clevatess will save him.

Intrigued by this answer, Clevatess agrees to take the baby boy with him, effectively adopting him, and then leaves the capital and flies back to his mountain.

There, Clevatess quickly realizes that he is unfit to take care of such a young boy and that the baby will most likely need a nursing mother to give him milk when he's hungry.

He resurrects the female hero Alicia, whom he had previously killed, using his powers, and, to her surprise, he orders her to feed the baby milk. Alicia is obviously surprised but, since Clevatess is in full control of her body, he forces her to do so, only to then discover that Alicia is incapable of producing milk, since she is not pregnant.

Alicia informs Clevatess that, because he needs to feed the baby, they will need the help of a nursing mother, a woman who still lactates, to provide them with the milk.

And so, Clevatess decides to take the baby, who he now calls Luna, and his new slave, which is Alicia, with him so that they can find a nursing mother for the baby.

Thus ends the first episode.

Initially, I will admit that this first episode did not leave a very good impression on me.

I can't really explain it, maybe it's the avalanche of isekai fantasy stories that I've seen the past couple of years, but seeing something so dark and broody all of a sudden left a bitter taste in my mouth, especially when you look at the kill count from the first episode alone.

Clevatess pretty much wrecks the capital of Haiden and while no official count of casualties is said, the implied toll of deaths in just this episode alone is staggering. Not that this is in any way a bad thing but, to me at least, it felt so unexpected to have a first episode so unapologetic and dark.

Thankfully, this taste didn't last long and, as more and more episodes came in, I began to warm up to this show.

Needless to say, fantasy has been ruined for me because it's the stereotypical genre of choice for isekai anime, and this is why seeing something so dark put me off initially, since I wasn't used to stories being so cold and dark.

The show will continue to have a lot of implied suffering, including references to slavery, rape, still births, hanging and much much more.

This is not a fun world to live in, and there are consequences for a lot of stuff.

And Clevatess practically decimating the capital of Haiden and killing off what seemed to be the whole royal family will have side effects, as well, since for the rest of this season, another neighboring kingdom will take this opportunity to invade them.

So yeah, there's a bit of politics in this too.

When I began to digest what the show was doing and take in the story, I quickly realized that this was, for all intents and purposes, what I've been waiting for from a fantasy setting anime for such a long time.

I don't mind dark and mature TV series in a fantasy setting. In fact, I prefer them. It's just that, after so much isekai slop recently, I've just become surprised that such high quality shows even exist anymore. I thought they were extinct.

This show has proper world building, power scaling, character development, and a unique style and presentation that follows it from beginning to end. And my only fear of it was that Clevatess would turn out to be too strong. But thankfully the show realizes that this could be a problem and thankfully underutilizes his powers and tries to make excuses on why he cannot use them at certain points, so that his allies, like Alicia, will have to think on her feet and survive on her own.

That was surprisingly refreshing.

So many new ideas were used that also set this apart as a unique fantasy series, like Clevatess not necessarily being the bad guy of the show, but making him just be another character that simply follows his own interests and has his own goals. There are also other dark lords that will partake in the story as well, to keep things balanced.

And Alicia will also have her backstory revealed in this one as well.

Honestly, all things considered, I really liked everything.

From beginning to the end, this was a surprisingly well done and beautifully detailed world, interesting plot twists, and some very heart wrenching battles that were also very nicely animated.

For anyone that will ever say “This guy just hates fantasy”, I will always point you to this specific anime and say “No, I don't hate fantasy. I just hate fantasy isekai”. This show could have so easily been done as a recycled isekai anime in which Clevatess was a reincarnated white office worker that somehow had the powers of a god, and this really could have turned into another slop.

But it didn't. It knew how to build an interesting story and not use recycled cliches and shallow trends to make itself stand out.

And I, very much, appreciate that. If a new season gets greenlit for this, I will be sure to watch it.

7. Kaiju No. 8 (Season 2)

It was inevitable that we would also talk about this one, seeing how I already covered season one in my previous blog post here.

I strongly suggest you read my thoughts on season 1 to get an idea of why I'm going to say what I'm about to say here.

Basically, I didn't like this show's season 1, nor do I like this season, either.

There's many reasons for why that is but it all boils down to the fact that this is simply a very generic style shounen jump story about a protagonist that ends up ultra powerful (basically, out of pure luck), enrolls in some para-military organization to protect his country against giant monster threats, and uses his powers to covertly do just that while trying to maintain his kaiju powers a secret from his peers.

Major spoilers for season 1 ahead.

If you watched season 1, you'll know that, by the end of it, his secret gets discovered by everyone and they all become aware that the protagonist is, in fact, Kaiju No. 8.

Now, that's all well and good.

My issue with the show, even from season 1, were all related to the plot. I hated the whole generic “the protagonist is actually a hero but he has to maintain his powers a secret” subplot, since it was such a generic overused trope in fiction. I'm glad that they threw that out the window by the end of that season, and that was giving me hope that the show will finally improve into something better.

And, to some extent, this second season started out in a promising direction.

Major Kaiju attacks take place in the city and Kafka has to protect all his peers only to discover that, for some reason, most likely due to the enemy's interference, he is unable to transform into Kaiju No. 8, and so now he has to fight in his human form until he figures out a solution.

Ok, so the author decided to nerf the protagonist for some reason now.

I didn't like that but I was looking forward to seeing how Kafka will survive everything.

Well, the conclusion to that arc wasn't what I was hoping it would be. He figures out how to transform again, but the reason he was unable to in the first place was another generic excuse that I've seen other shows do before this one.

But ok, sometimes stories like these will naturally reuse plot devices from other shows. Maybe it's not very original but as long as the fights are entertaining, who cares about the story, right?

Well, there's the second issue with this show: the fights just don't grab me.

I hate the action sequences in this anime. During season 1, I could never figure out why that was but now, during this season, I think I've figured it out. The problem is that nothing has any impact.

When the hero fights and throws a punch, the enemy survives mostly unscathed. Sure, he gets thrown back a great distance (and maybe goes through a whole bunch of buildings in the process), but that doesn't change the fact that he survives the big punch and rises back up to fight.

Same thing when the hero gets punched. The show pretends that it hurts and that there are consequences, but nothing has long term impacts.

All the punches, all the kicks, all the hits, they are all superfluous. They are just done to make the fights look cool, but they don't actually do anything.

When a punch doesn't hurt the one getting punched, then I stop caring when I see punches.

It's as simple as that. I'm sick of the heroes and enemies being punch sponges, constantly throwing big punches around like it's supposed to mean anything when the story clearly doesn't think that they are a big deal.

During certain fights, with the whole explosions and complete destruction that the environment undergoes during these fight sequences, there were so many times when I said to myself “This character cannot possible have survived that”, especially when that character is just a regular human without any special powers, only to be proven wrong time and time again.

Frankly, it lost all its credibility, at that point.

The show tries to pretend like it can get serious, like during the point when a major character dies during this season (and yes, everyone in the plot makes it look like it's a big deal), but given that the subject matter is that Kaiju keep invading Japan and doing extreme amounts of damage, I'm really surprised that the casualty count is as sparse as it still is.

There's only been 1 good guy that died this whole season. 1. After like half the city has been decimated. Are you kidding me?!

Then, as if that wasn't enough, the show then decides to take detours and grow other minor characters, rather than focusing on the big plot, trying to make them grow stronger too.

I'm generally all for character growth, especially for minor characters in a TV show, but I never cared for these ones. They are all shallow, generic, the kind of people that are simply “good guys that want to protect and are willing to give their lives for that goal” kind of characters. Literally, just the most generic soldier personality you can think of.

In fact, this entire show just feels like military propaganda, since this season, at least, was less about Kaiju No. 8 and more about the good guys that protect civilians. It just tries to show the soldiers growing, working together, assisting each other, pulling each other back up.

That's all this show is. It's military propaganda, but for a paramilitary organization that doesn't even exist.

I never cared one bit for any of the characters. Nor did I care about Kafka, for that matter, since they are so paper-thin characters that you could literally sum up each of their personalities in just one sentence.

Couple this with the fact that a lot of higher up characters that are very strong are always just quirky and make irrational decisions just because they feel like it, like always treating Kafka like an underdog even though he clearly is one of the strongest assets that they have, just because that's the way this boring trope works, and I'm at my limit.

This isn't a proper story anymore. It's just regurgitated recycled shounen jump tropes into a single TV series. None of these cliches have any rhyme or reason for being added here, specifically, they just are added because this story is a paint by numbers kind of story that wants to reuse as many popular ideas from other stories, as it can.

Hell, even Tougen Anki, which is a different anime from this batch that I'm reviewing, even that was more enjoyable for me to watch, despite having extremely amateurish dialogue between its characters and also being full of cliches. Because in that show, at least, the fight scenes actually felt like they had impact and depth to them, and the blood techniques used in that show were actually kind of cool to look at.

And that show is clearly meant for teenagers, just trying to be flashy and cool but while also being as shallow as you can get. And me, as an older adult, I still got more of a kick from watching that show than this one, that's full of mature characters and would arguably be more up my alley.

And last but not least, the ending of this season was just abysmal.

Given how bad this season was, it was already bad enough and I doubt the ending could have saved it from being a car wreck, in my eyes. But, to add the cherry on top, the ending was a spit in the face, as if it wasn't enough.

I don't wanna spoil what the ending is but I will say, it's a cliffhanger. And not the kind of cliffhanger that's at least tasteful and leaves some kind of resolution behind, but the kind of cheap cliffhanger that you get in anime at the end of an episode in the middle of the season, not a season finale.

This cliffhanger was so undercooked and so out of nowhere, I genuinely was fooled into believing that the last episode of this season wasn't even the last episode, and that another episode would surely come next week. But nope, no new episode came, which left me confused. I then went to reddit to see what was going on and yes, apparently I wasn't the only one that had been fooled. There were other people who couldn't believe that that was the season finale, and had to use other websites that confirmed it to finally come to terms with it.

Imagine watching a show that was so poorly written that the literal season finale didn't even register to you, the audience, as a season finale. There were no hints, no signs, no resolution. Just one big “fuck you” type of cliffhanger, in the middle of the story, just stuck in there like “Yeah, we did that. Whatcha gonna do about it?”.

I'm done with this show.

There are no redeeming qualities for this anime. None whatsoever.

The only thing it did kind of well was the plot point at the end of season 1, in which Kafka revealed to everyone else that he had been Kaiju No. 8 all along.

That was a bit unique and kind of cool. That was literally the only thing that this show had going for it, and it was good enough that it gave me sufficient hope to want to keep on watching, even though I knew that it was a bad TV series.

Now, I don't need any more reasons. I'm done with this.

Even in the off chance that this gets renewed for a new season, and I suspect that it will, I'm fully dropping this. It's not only bad because of its story, but it now is actively insulting me and my time, for watching it. And frankly, I don't need that from my TV shows.

8. Akrnights: Rise from Ember

I ain't going to lie, after the mess that was season 2 of this show, my hopes for this new season were quite low. Which, in a sense, ended up playing in this show's favor, as I feel like the plot finally started to move forward in a way that made sense.

If you want to read about my thoughts on the previous two seasons of this show, you can read about them here and here.

My main complaint about season 2 was that it had very few important things happening in its story and everything felt like it was progressing at a exceedingly slow pace.

Generally, I like it when TV shows do that, since it allows for proper world building and it gives the audience time to build an attachment towards the characters. However, Arknights took this to a whole new extreme and really tested my patience, always making me question why I was watching the show in the first place, since everything felt like it was of such little importance in the grand scheme of things.

There were no side quests or anything of the like. Every event had a place in paving the way towards progressing the story, it was just happening at a very slow rate.

In the context of a video game, this might not be that much of a bad thing since, the whole point of a game is to have fun. If the gameplay is engaging enough and there are enough addictive mechanics to keep you playing, then story just becomes a commodity that rarely plays a good role in the overall enjoyment.

In anime, however, this doesn't work anymore. You need an engaging story to keep the focus of the audience, since there is no gameplay loop to keep them interested anymore.

This is where the drawbacks of this adaptation start to rear their ugly heads. The show, for better or for worse, takes its time in developing the plot of the game, very slowly unraveling the intricacies of the story and the background of the characters by drip feeding you with minute details every once in a long while.

After the horrible slow paced crash that was season 2, my expectations for season 3 were at a new low, but I chose to keep watching it simply because I felt like there might still be something worth salvaging here.

And, while new details did pop up that almost went into the backstory of the doctor character, which I am very curious about, it was still not enough for me to justify the 27 long episodes that you'd have to watch to get up to speed.

Like I had said previously, this show isn't for people who aren't fans of the game. If you come into this hoping to discover an incredible story with amazing characters and gut wrenching plot twists, I'm sad to say that this simply isn't it.

There are plot twists in this, don't get me wrong, they just aren't anything to write home about. The characters aren't particularly interesting and the few ones that have an intriguing background are kept in the shadows and seldom talked about, which really left a bad taste in my mouth.

But I digress.

I will continue to follow this show, simply because I am curious to see how the plot will evolve but, as I have said before, this show is not worth watching unless you're a fan of the game. If you aren't, there's very little to be enjoyed on this one.

9. The Water Magician

And we finally arrive at the very end of this ranking, which implies that, yes, this was the anime of this batch which I enjoyed the absolute least.

Make no mistake, I hate this TV series. The only reason I picked it up initially was because of the video preview that Crunchyroll had of it, that showed a single young man suriving in nature all by himself, which made me think that this was going to be something like a survival series, or maybe some sort of nature exploration story.

What we get, instead, is a recycled isekai plot about a 20 year old guy that, after an untimely death, gets reincarnated in a fantasy world by some god, is given a home in the middle of the wilderness as well as powers to create and manipulate water, in both its liquid and solid states.

This man is called Ryo, and he is the protagonist of this show.

Nobody from that world knows of his existence even, since he is so far away from civilization.

After multiple months of self training, Ryo gets a better grasp of using his water powers, as he lives a quiet and peaceful life in his home all by himself.

He kills some creatures with his powers but still lacks in strength.

One night, he encounters a glowing headless knight on top of a lake that is incapable of speech, but is clearly intelligent and very powerful. After a brief fight with it, Ryo realises that this knight is actually trying to coerce him into training with it, so that he can better master his water powers.

After many nights of fightning with that knight, Ryo eventually becomes very strong.

At the end, the god that had recincarnated Ryo, realizes that he also has Eternal Youth as an ability, which was not initially planned.

There's also an Assassin Hawk that Ryo manages to kill after becoming stronger, which he couldn't do before, but that's about it for the first episode.

In essence, this looks like a very interesting take on the isekai genre. At first glance, you're probably thinking that this is a new approach of storytelling, in which the protagonist discovers the creatures of the forest, goes on quests by himself and explores dungeons to become stronger. And, while I was hoping it would be that, it turns out that I was wrong; very, very wrong.

The first episode is deliberately crafted into misleading you that way.

If this were all about journeys of self discovery and nature exploration, I'd have very little issues with it.

But as soon as episode 2 rolls in, that gets quickly thrown out the window, as a new male character gets introduced called Abel, who will become Ryo's friend and will be used to propel the story in a new direction. Specifically, Ryo will decide to guide Abel back to civilization, and then he will move in with him there.

And, as soon as they reach the first city, all that mystique and sense of wonder that this show had, evaporates.

It then becomes the cliched fantasy isekai experience of: Ryo decides he wants to go on quests, he starts out as a rookie, but is actually very overpowered for his rank.

Powerful magicians are in awe when they hear what he can do and don't believe it initially.

Then, there's a plot about the underground layers that spawn monsters which become overactive and, to prevent the monsters from overflooding the city above, adventurers have to cull them.

Then, a bunch of men get teleported into very low depths, along with Abel, and they are about to die because of very powerful monsters, only for Ryo to have to save them.

It's all just incredibly boring stuff.

This is another prime example of a show in which the protagonist is just so overpowered that he stops caring about his enemies and just wants to have fun, just for the sake of having fun.

When the protagonist doesn't feel like he's in danger, I stop caring. And Ryo is a prime example of this.

He never takes anything seriously, he never feels like he's about to die. He just always pulls out an incredibly strong spell out of his ass whenever a monster is about to attack and then just nukes them out of existence without batting an eye. No surprise, no suspense, no drama, and barely even any action.

I guess the point is to be amazed at how creative all the water spells he has are, which I guess that's a good idea, but is really not a good enough reason to sit through all these episodes of recycled cliches.

There were only two times in which I felt like Ryo ever got serious when fighting someone, at least in this first season. I won't spoil them, but one is fairly early on during a strange magical eclipse of some kind, that didn't last very long, not even a full episode, and another is at the end of the season.

Both were quite nice fights, and it felt like things were getting interesting, but they were, in my opinion, too short and not very creative or interesting. They were, at least, the only fights when I thought that Ryo was being serious.

And then there's the lack of world building. I'm sick of fantasy anime having the standard goblin, demon, dragon-esque creatures always in their settings. Nothing is particularly new about them, they just have to be in the plot somewhere. No new creatures or anything particularly interesting.

I mean, it's a medieval fantasy setting, for crying out loud. Do something with it! Introduce religions, art, history, geopolitics, something new to it that makes the world interesting. But the show never does. Instead, it's all just about this one character that treats everything like a video game.

I just cannot take this show seriously, for the life of me.

When Konosuba came out, it wasn't about Kazuma's life of becoming strong, it was about making fun of him and his team. The show was incredibly shallow too but it was self-aware and took advantage of itself to make funny jokes, laughing at its own expense. It took all these fantasy tropes and made a satire of the genre. That worked.

Here, there is no comedy. The show treats itself 100% seriously, which just means that it needs to have an interesting story and character growth. But, strangely, it has none of those either, so all that's left is just....I don't know. I don't even know what this was. It felt like it was another self-fellating power fantasy of the author's self insert in which he wanted to be the center of the world.

I just can't anymore. I'm so done. This isn't the worst isekai I have seen in my life. I Shall Survive Using Potions is miles below this one, at least. Compared to that, this is the equivalent of Lord of the Rings.

But it's still not good. I'm so done with the lack of an interesting story, the episodes that are filled with boring dialogue between paper thin characters, the lack of tension in fights, the lack of world building, the lack of chemistry and passion.

The only thing this show is good at is being used as an example of everything that's wrong with the isekai genre. I'm done with this.

I don't believe this will ever get a season 2 but, in the off chance that I am wrong, I will avoid it like the plague.

Bonus entry: Call of the Night (Season 2)

This is a bit of a special one. Normally I would not include a Hidive anime anymore in these rankings, since I am a big fan of Crunchyroll and I watch most of my anime on it.

But, with that said, I liked season 1 of this anime so much that I just could not stop myself from going out of my way to watch the second season as well.

The fact that a second season was greenlit was very nice and I watched it without a moment's hesitation.

Just to be clear, this bonus entry is by no means worse than any of the above. I just added it here as the very last entry since it's a special case, as it is not available on Crunchyroll and I did not watch it there. But in terms of how much I enjoyed watching this show, this would be ranked sandwiched between this blog post's entries for Detectives These Days Are Crazy! and Hotel Inhumans. That's right, I would rather have watched a new episode of this series than a new episode of Hotel Inhumans, that's how much I love this show.

Honestly, I did not expect to write about a continuation of this TV series after such a long time.

I knew that a season 2 was coming, and that I would absolutely love to watch it, but I have since canceled my HiDive subscription since they began refusing to service Romanian customers.

And Call of the Night is really a HiDive exclusive, not available on Crunchyroll so, after my cancellation, I was pretty sure I wouldn't be able to continue watching the show.

But alas, I've found a way and, even though the show is still not available on Crunchyroll, nor do I think it ever will be, I believe it's definitely worth a watch if you can.

If you want to read my thoughts on season 1, you can read them here.

In a nutshell, I really liked the show, even going so far as saying that it is among, what I consider to be, the best romance anime in recent years. In fact, I genuinely think that it surpassed any romance anime on Crunchyroll that I have seen, to date.

The moment I saw that a Bluray for season 1 got released in my region, I immediately rushed to snatch it.

Even if you leave aside all the romance aspects of the show, the beautiful shots of the night, the unique hybrid style of horror and thriller that it adopts and the depth of the human interactions that the show presents, really left a good taste in my mouth.

It was such a strange and unique experience, unlike anything I have seen in a long time.

Couple that with the band Creepy Nuts performing for both the opening and the ending of that season, and you got a real classic on your hands.

This new season, well, it pretty much continues everything that season 1 left behind.

In this new season, we get a glimpse into Nazuna's origin and understand how she became a vampire, as well as discover more lore about the main antagonist of the show and what her relationship with Nazuna is like.

This confrontation was already hinted to be a big thing, back in season 1, and I will say, it did not disappoint.

I'll do my best not to spoil you with anything since, if you like season 1, I do believe you will also like season 2 as well, since they pretty much maintain the same style of comedy, thriller and romance, throughout.

My main issue is that the romantic undertones do take a step down in this season, since a lot of plot progression and character development has to happen to all of our main characters, and that's a lot to undergo, but there were some sweet moments between our main couple that I could enjoy.

They weren't many, but they did exist and were satisfying enough in my opinion.

This new season also introduced some new mysteries that it has yet to resolve, which brings me hope that they might be hoping for another renewal into a season 3. Whether we will get one, remains to be seen.

The action sequences, while even less prominent than the romance ones, were well executed, but they were never the focus of the show.

The human interactions and life lessons were, and still are, the meat and potatoes of the show. Characters will grow and, for this season at least, Nazuna will see the most development out of all of them.

My only gripe is, ironically, the protagonist Yamori, never seeming to change at all, or learn anything. He has kind of become just an avenue of plot progression, since he seems to be the only one to figure out what the antagonist is going to do, before she does it, revealing her plans and even predicting her feelings and emotions.

In season 1, Yamori's intelligence was hinted at to be above average for someone of his age but it was still believable. Here, he has become almost like the oracle character, in which the author uses him to progress the plot since all the other characters aren't smart enough to realize these things by themselves.

The fact that he, a middle school kid, seems smarter than these women who are vampires and who, if you can believe it, have lived for a significant amount of time and have way more life experience than him, was enough to break my immersion of the plot, although not enough to ruin the season for me.

But that's a nitpick.

There were also some uncomfortable moments for me when the show helped me realize that the main couple has a bit of an overly creepy age gap going on here. Yamori is, if you can recall, still in middle school; I believe he is 14 in the story. Whereas, Nazuna is between 30 and 40 years old. Yes, she is a vampire and that's why she looks so young, so they look like a good match. But that left a strange taste in my mouth when that sunk in.

Granted, I won't harp on this too much since, at the end of the day, it's just fiction, and I can put these things aside, especially for a show as well fleshed out and entertaining as this. For me, personally, this isn't that big of a deal, although it really makes me wonder how Yamori always acts as the more mature one in the relationship.

But, if this age gap is a bit too troubling for you, just be aware that it is a thing.

And yeah, the gorgeous night shots make a nice return in this new season as well.

Seeing this on an OLED TV enhanced my experience even more. The contrast was just stunning. I know that they're all just drawings, not even real photos of the night, but they look so damn good.

Creepy Nuts also make a return doing the opening and ending of this season as well, which is a nice touch.

Overall, I did enjoy this. If you felt like season 1 was a good watch, definitely give this new season a shot as well.

It's very much worth it.

We have some new entries to talk about. Let's go!

New season, new stuff.

This time around, I'll be keeping this specific blog post short, mainly because I only have 6 TV series I've watched for this particular anime batch (one of which is The Apothecary Diares, which should be well known to you if you read my past blog entries already).

Crunchyroll had some interesting candidates this time, and I'm glad to say that some were better than I expected (while others being just mild). However, there wasn't anything this season that I can say I particularly hated with a passion.

The last entry on this ranking is gonna be a bad show, yes, but it's not a “so bad it's good” kind of show. It's just boringly bad.

But let's not go into too many details. Let's start with the rankings!

PS: I ditched the first episode screenshots to avoid copyright strikes

1. A Ninja and an Assassin Under One Roof

We're starting off strong with, what is arguably, the most surprising entry on this list.

Frankly, when I watched the Crunchyroll preview for this show, I had no idea what to expect.

Sure, I knew it would be a comedy, and I suspected that it would be dark comedy given the subject matter, but I didn't expect for it to be as good as it turned out to be.

Make no mistake: I loved this show, to the brim.

This is a nonsensical type of comedy that is absolutely chock-full with many original ideas that were very much welcome.

But before I get ahead of myself, let me summarize the first episode of this TV series.

Deep inside a forest inside a ninja village, a young girl named Satoko Kusagakure flees the village, along with other villagers that decided to desert their hometown and find new lives for themselves in the outside world.

As soon as they manage to escape, they all go their different paths, hoping to integrate into modern day Japan as regular civilians.

Satoko, however, is not very good at doing that and, eventually, she ends up alone in a dark alleyway, on the verge of starvation, due to not being able to make money to buy food.

There, she meets up with another girl around her age, a girl named Konoha Koga.

As the two make acquaintance with one another, they are attacked by another ninja from Satoko's village, who had been tasked with killing her as punishment for her fleeing. Konoha gets roped in with Satoko but she very quickly and easily disposes of the attacker, killing her in cold blood.

It is then revealed that Konoha is actually a very skilled assassin who's very much used to killing other people and doesn't mind getting her hands dirty. She's part of an association that takes jobs to assassinate others and whom she's trying trying to climb the ranks of.

After witnessing Satoko dispose of the dead attacker's body by using a secret ninja technique that only she knows which turns dead bodies into leaves, Konoha gets the idea of partnering up with Satoko, since her ability to dispose of bodies is exactly what Konoha needs to improve her assassin work, since that is the main thing holding her back in climbing the ranks.

After some persuasion from her part, Satoko agrees to partner up with her and, in exchange, Konoha will allow her to live in her apartment for the time being, as well as promising to protect her from future ninja that may be pursuing her.

And such begins the relationship between the very feminine and innocent Satoko and the poker faced and cold blooded Konoha.

That's the premise of this show.

So yeah, where to start?

I was never much into dark comedy TV series, mainly because I find them always relying on recurrent gags that get old very quickly, but this show broke that trend for me.

I love how every single time a new ninja appears to threaten Satoko's life, she always ends up being murdered very swiftly and without much effort. Most of the ninja barely get any screen time at all.

The show doesn't portray the exact means in which they are killed, that happens very quickly off screen, but it's still nice to see how quickly the body count increments with each passing episode.

Also, all of the characters in this are very unique and have nice designs. The simple fact that a lot of the enemies barely get any screen time at all is a bit of a shame, although it did caught me off guard.

I was expecting for this gag to wear off on me eventually but no, every time Konoha kills someone, I ended up laughing.

As sinister as that sounds, the show just knows how to deliver that punchline each and every time, without it getting old.

And the duality of Satoko and Konoha's personalities always clashing with each other is such a joy to watch.

Seeing how innocent and gullible Satoko usually is, always ends up clashing with the harsh reality in one way or another, and then her and Konoha have to figure out how to fix things.

Their partnership felt a bit strained at first but I very quickly bought the idea that they were becoming friends.

That and all the characters are so fun to watch interacting.

The show is basically a nonsensical comedy. There's a mad scientist type of character that appears later on as a rival to Konoha, and she mixes things up and the trio become embroiled in a lot of wacky shenanigans.

I love their relationships and how they interact off each other.

And yeah, there's also a sort of pseudo-romance that forms later on, between certain characters.

I won't go into details but I will say, I very rarely end up shipping a lesbian couple, mainly because I never find their relationships believable. This time, however, I genuinely found myself saying “Yeah, I want to see these two together”.

The show never crosses that border, always holding onto itself and never making things more than just a close friendship, but I genuinely liked seeing those two interact.

And combined with the comedic non-sequiturs from the show, and I genuinely respected this one.

The show just likes bringing the cold hard reality to ruin any moment that tends to become too cheesy, in a simple way of shattering expectations in a way that's both blunt but also stylistically unique.

That and there's a robot Satoko that makes an appearance later on that can shoot lasers out of her eyes. I mean, what more is there to say?

Do yourself a favor and give this show a watch! It is very much worth the experience!

2. The Apothecary Diaries (Season 2 second half)

As promised, I am returning to talking about this show.

I've talked about this show on length, many times before. I've praised it for its originality, focus to details, unique world and atmosphere and its superb musical compositions.

And yeah, Maomao just keeps kicking ass everywhere she goes.

This is a continuation of the first half that began the previous winter batch, of which I already wrote.

I want to keep praising this show again but, really, I don't think there's anything left to say that wasn't already said.

Maomao ends up biting more than she can chew, this time around, when her meddling ends up almost revealing the masterminds behind the attempted assassinations against imperial officials that were shown the previous season, the new character Shisui ends up playing a very major role, political turmoil in the country ends up rearing its ugly head and one of the concubines of the emperor ends up going missing.

That and so many questions that were left unanswered previously end up being explained now.

Honestly, I think this is the most intelligent TV series I have watched in recent years. The mysteries, the drama, the class and style that it displays, they are just wonderfully done.

This is a masterclass in how anime needs to be done and I am so thankful that I have decided to pick up this story, for it is the one ongoing plot that keeps on giving with each passing episode.

And for those that want to learn more about Jinshi's character, this second half will finish the introduction of his full backstory, so there's more to digest about him.

I simply cannot do this show justice just by writing all of this about it.

If you don't mind complex stories that deal with real drama and has very intricate plot twists, please give this show a watch. It is amazingly fruitful.

3. To Be Hero X

And yet another superhero anime TV series set in modern day Japan has appeared.

This one, I'll be honest, I have mixed feelings about.

Let's get into the first episode, shall we?

Lin Ling, who works for an advertising company and who is obsessed with superheroes, is giving his boss his new pitch that he hopes will inspire other people.

Lin Ling is very enthusiastic about heroes and is passionate about learning more about their lives and backstories, especially about two named Nice and, his girlfriend, Moon.

In that world, heroes exist and save lives, and their powers (as well as their weaknesses and sometimes even curses) are intimately tied to the amount of faith that the majority of people have in them. When people start to believe that a particular person should be able to fly, then they will gain the ability to fly. Conversely, if people start to lose faith in a particular hero, they will eventually lose their powers.

After the pitch that he had made to his boss goes very poorly, Lin Ling gets fired and is now without a job.

As he considers committing suicide by jumping off a building, Lin Ling discovers his personal hero, Nice, flying and landing onto the same rooftop as him.

But before they could interact, Nice jumps off the building and crashes down below, dying from the impact.

Lin Ling is horrified, realizing that he had just witnessed his own personal hero having committed suicide and is then found by Nice's personal manager and her bodyguards who take him into custody being he was a witness.

After Lin Ling explains to them what he had seen, the manager realizes that, by some strange coincidence, Lin Ling's face almost looks like Nice's face.

Using this to her advantage, and not wanting to give up her job because Nice had died, the manager decides to release a public statement in which she hides the fact that Nice had died and, instead, she swaps their identities, her claiming to the public that it was actually Lin Ling that had killed himself by jumping off a building and then disguising Lin Ling as Nice, asking him to continue being the hero he had always looked up to.

Lin Ling is obviously very reluctant about taking up this role but, since people believe that he is Nice, he slowly ends up acquiring Nice's powers and slowly but surely starts turning more and more into Nice.

That's the premise of episode 1.

Now, before I go into more details, I will say, this isn't just about Lin Ling.

Yes, he is the main character of the first arc of the show however, this isn't the only arc.

This show is divided into multiple arcs, all with their own main characters. They all share the same universe, with some characters that have already appeared in a previous arc making a very short comeback in new arcs to further the plot.

The show follows all of their personal stories, their tragedies, how they each end up becoming heroes and how they all will eventually end up competing against each other in a public tournament that takes place every 2 years, that's there to update the rankings among all the heroes of the world and with the number 1 spot earning the title of Hero X.

Now, as I learned, this story is part of a larger plot that encompasses two other anime that aired in 2016 and 2018, respectively.

This series is, in fact, the de facto third season of those shows (which are actually just two seasons of the same show).

I didn't know this going in. And I never watched any of those previous seasons, so I was going into this blind. In my defense, Crunchyroll didn't make it very clear that this was a continuation of that saga.

Either way, for someone that went into this completely blind, I had no trouble whatsoever following the plot.

The ideas are very simple to grasp, the plot was very easy to follow and the show came into its own very nicely at the end.

The multiple arcs thing was actually very welcome, since it felt like it was constantly keeping things fresh, always introducing new characters, new enemies, new dilemmas, it was actually very fun.

My only gripe with the show was the fact that most characters felt shallow, especially the bad guys.

The motivation of the villains in this show is not particularly interesting, with a lot of somewhat intelligent and competent characters always devolving into mere shadows of their former selves.

I didn't like that very much.

That and also, I didn't really like the world building in this one. I genuinely feel that a society in which faith in others can literally confer other people supernatural powers would be wildly different than our current ways of living. Religion, philosophy, technology and social norms would be very different if we had the rules that that world has, and yet this show treats that world as just another iteration of modern day Japan, which is so very boring to me.

But, outside of those pet peeves of mine, yeah, I liked the show. The stories were engaging, the main characters were somewhat fleshed out, there is some character development happening and certain arcs had some nice and heartwarming endings (although not all).

And yeah, it had some unexpected plot twists at times.

Overall, it was a good experience. I very much enjoyed watching it. And also, I did become a Lucky Cyan fan. Her arc was very emotional.

4. Once Upon a Witch's Death

This one was interesting, to say the least.

I feel like I needed to have a show with magic in it, for this season (there's also Teogonia in this batch but I'll get to that in a minute).

My overall thoughts on this show are that this was an interesting idea that suffered from a pretty lackluster execution.

The story follows Meg Raspberry, a young girl who's the apprentice of Ms. Faust, an old lady who's renowned across the whole world as one of the Seven Mages.

On her 17th birthday, Meg is informed by Faust that she has only 1 year left to live, before a curse that had been placed upon her since birth will rob her of her life.

There is, however, a solution: Meg has to collect in a special magical glass bottle, 1000 tears of joy from other people. This will allow her to create a Seed of Life, which will make Meg immortal, effectively nullifying her curse.

Meg is unsure how to take this news but, as she walks around the town of Lapis, she encounters a young girl whose mother had passed away recently.

Being friendly, Meg offers to help the girl find the pink flowers that her mother had always loved, so that they can bring them to her grave.

After following the girl to her house and meeting with her father, Meg realizes that the flowers that the mother loved so much were Yoshino Cherry Blossoms, from a foreign country in the far east.

Being Faust's apprentice, Meg is knowledgeable enough in magic to cast a spell that creates the illusion of those particular flowers to fall from the sky around them, which reminds the family of the dead woman and gives closure to them.

The father and daughter cry together and their tears of joy automatically become captured inside Meg's glass.

Thus begins Meg's journey into stopping the curse that threatens her life.

That's episode 1.

This series is based off a light novel and that clearly shows.

For one, this is a dialogue heavy show. There's a lot of talking and world building constantly going on, and this will become eerily obvious as the show progresses.

On the one hand, that's one of the show's greatest strengths. I really like the world building being done here.

There's a lot of imagination being used to create this colorful and vibrant world. There are many quirky and nice characters inhabiting it as well. And the rules of this world are fairly standard and simple: magic is almost like this sort of essence of nature that flows through all things and objects and is one with the world. Sometimes magic can also disrupt the natural flow of things, bringing about natural disasters of sorts.

Then there's spirits, intelligent beings that appear as floating orbs of energy that only some people can communicate with. And then there's demons which are malevolent and who make deals with mortals in order to bring evil to the world.

As cliched as all of these concepts feel, I'm very impressed by their integration into the plot. Nothing ever feels out of place, everything is woven into the story organically and in a believable manner, and all the elements are always done in a manner that is consistent and easy to understand.

And I also really like Meg as a main character. She's quirky and a bit of a brat but also has a good heart and knows her way around the world.

I found her to be a very nice and refreshing take on the role of a female lead in a magical world.

The fact that this girl is capable of not only taking the news of her upcoming death very well, but is willing to fight her destiny without even batting an eye is very unique and, I feel, actually believable when taking in her personality.

However, when all is said and done, there is one thing that ruins this show: it's the lack of action in it.

This story takes itself way too seriously. There's almost no comedy in it at all, outside of Meg's quirkiness from time to time.

This might be fine in certain cases, but I feel like the show is too slow paced in what it does, and the constant talking and lack of interesting events ends up hurting it more than it helps.

I'm fine with exposition dumps and character introductions but I generally dislike shows that take a very long time to get into the main plot. And yeah, that's the other thing I really don't like about it: almost everything feels like a side-quest.

Technically it all ends up helping, since Meg is collecting tears of joy throughout all of the show's length, this is true, but it almost turns into a formulaic adventure-of-the-week type of story, in which every new week something new happens in the town of Lapis that Meg will have to help others with.

That's really unfortunate, since this is an interesting world that does have a lot of promise. I just wish it had a bit more meat and bones that I could chew on.

But alas, the world building makes up for its drawbacks.

Overall, I enjoyed watching this. Could it have been done better in certain areas? Almost certainly.

But I'm not gonna fault the show for being too slow paced, since I'd rather have that than be too fast paced, instead.

Either way, I'll be looking forward towards a new season of this.

5. Please Put Them On, Takamine-san

Ok, there's also this show that has magic in it, although, at this point, I almost can't take this show seriously at all.

This is what I like to call “a good idea, with good execution but whose very nature is bringing it down” kind of show. Why?

Because this is an ecchi show. And it knows it's an ecchi show. And it takes full advantage of the fact that it is an ecchi show.

What's it about?

Shirota Koushi is a regular high school student that's pretty much the very definition of a loser. He lives an average life, mostly invisible by those around him, as he tries to go through his school classes uneventfully.

One day, while hiding in a gym storage room, the class representative of his class, Takamine Takane, also sneaks into the same storage room as him and, unbeknownst to her of his presence there, she begins undressing there to change her clothes.

Shirota remains quiet to not give away his presence until she's done and leaves.

Later during that day, as the teacher is handing out their test results and Takamine receives an almost perfect score, she suddenly decides to pull down her panties in front of the class, much to Shirota's complete dismay.

A couple of seconds later, Shirota suddenly realizes that time has turned back for him and that the teacher is starting to hand out their test results all over again, only this time Takamine receives a complete perfect score somehow.

Apparently nobody else noticed this discrepancy, and nobody remembers Takamine having taken off her panties at all.

When asking Takamine directly about what had transpired, Takakine realizes that Shirota was somehow now immune to her powers.

Seeing that he is the first person to be able to have recollection of those erased events, Takamine decides to reveal to him that she has special powers: the power to turn back time to undo past events whenever she takes off her underwear or bra.

Since Shirota had previously seen Takamine's breasts while she was changing in the storage room earlier that day, this somehow made him immune to her powers of turning back time, meaning that his mind travels back in time unscathed along with hers whenever she removes her undergarments.

Seeing that this is the current state of events, Takamine offers to Shirota to become her “closet”, meaning that she wants him to partner up with her and carry around a bag full of spare underwear all day long. Since taking off her underwear to use her powers completely causes said underwear to vanish into thin air, Takamine wants for Shirota to put new underwear on her body, so that she can keep using her powers continuously if she needs to.

Shirota, realizing that there's nothing in it for him and that she's trying to use him as a man servant, considers refusing her. Seeing his reluctance, Takamine decides to “persuade” him by shouting that he had assaulted her, causing the entire school to immediately come to her rescue and restrain him and call the cops on him.

Realizing that he has no way out of this predicament and that his life is officially over, Shirota shouts to Takamine that he agrees to become her closet, causing her to use her powers to undo all those past events and save his life from being ruined.

Thus, now Shirota has become Takamine's personal closet and one of his first duties is: he has to put her underwear on her in the middle of class after she uses her powers during it.

Thus ends episode 1.

That was a long summary that I had to write, but that's really necessary for a story like this.

Honestly, how else would you explain a plot such as this to a complete newcomer?

This show is pretty much a textbook example of nonsensical absurdity that exists only to be perverse and show Takamine in many unusual and questionable situations where she's scantily clad or, sometimes even, completely nude.

Leaving aside the fact that this show had one of the most unstable release schedules on Crunchyroll when it came out (I never could figure out on which day of the week new episodes were supposed to come out since it kept flip-flopping between releasing the censored episodes and the uncensored ones), the show just isn't that good.

It tries to be a comedy by putting the protagonist in very weird situations in which he is forced to put underwear on Takamine without anyone else noticing him, and that is the source of tension with regards to the episodes.

To be fair to the show, it was quite creative and novel in coming up with these unique situations, sure, but the problem is, most of them are simply not realistic.

I could not believe that this man was able to put on underwear on that girl in the middle of a class, without anyone noticing at all. I don't care how stealthy you are, that's simply not possible.

The amount of suspension of disbelief that you have to pull off to buy into some of these premises is absolutely mind boggling. And trust me: I tried.

I feel like this premise would have worked better in the context of a harem, because it would at least add some variety to the ecchi scenes and make it a bit more interesting, but it didn't do that. This is one of those “one true love” kind of stories and it sticks to just Takamine.

There's some differences between the censored and the uncensored versions, obvious ones, but nothing to really write home about. Honestly, I'd pick to watch the uncensored episodes any day of the week, but mostly because I find the censorship so annoying in this show that it's actively distracting. The nudity is really not that impressive either though.

Nothing is particularly original here. If you want to watch nudity with a bit of comedic edge and don't mind the absurdity, I guess it's fine just for that.

But I got tired of how much I was supposed to suspend my own disbelief. Like one time, while Shirota was at Takamine's house so that she can help him do his homework, she used a cat costume to distract him so that he ended up staying later than intended (her excuse was that it would help him study somehow).

Oh yeah, Takamine is just not honest with her own feelings. She's clearly attracted to Shirota but keeps making excuses whenever he catches her in the act of being kind towards him.

And Shirota, for his part, is just the dumb ecchi protagonist that simply can't catch a hint and never realizes that she has feelings towards him.

The one good thing that the show did was the ending of season 1, where it took a step forward and decided to be brazen about the direction it was going.

I'm not gonna spoil what it did, but I will say that it did some things that other, more respectable shows, were too afraid to do. And that left me with a good taste in my mouth.

Was the ending so good that it justifies watching the whole show though? Maybe, but it really depends on the person. For me, it wasn't worth it, but I can easily see other people who may be able to enjoy it.

As for me, I'm not planning on watching another season of this one.

6. Teogonia

And we finally arrive at the very end.

This one, I had high hopes of.

The premise is fairly simple. In a remote small village called Lag Village, a young warrior named Kai is involved in fightning in an invasion of their village by anthropomorphic macaques. During this skirmish, Kai is saved by a man named Olha Vezin, the son of the chief of the village and a Guardian Bearer.

In that world, Guardian Bearers are powerful individuals that were chosen by a god of a particular piece of land to protect said land against aggressors.

Olha uses his enhanced strength and stamina as a Guardian Bearer to fend off the invading forces of the macaques. The bodies of the dead monkeys are then dissected to extract their God-stones. In that world, each living creature has a God-stone in their body. Having that God-stone removed will immediately end that creature's life.

Once extracted, liquid from another creature's God-stone can be drank in order to rejuvenate the body and fuel it with a surge of spiritual energy.

After the defeat of the macaques, all of their God-stones are collected by the villagers and shared among everyone that has fought in defending the village.

Kai is disgruntled since low ranking warriors like himself only receive small amounts of God-stone juice and food after their victory, while the chief's family receives much more.

He wishes he could become stronger, so that he could advance in rank among their army and receive better rewards.

Kai is also plagued by visions of a past life and glimpses of knowledge that are not his. He is troubled by these and is uncertain of what to make of them.

He had a vision of creating flames from his own hands, which makes him wonder if he is capable of such an act.

Later on, during another invasion by demi-humans against their village, Kai is severely injured, making him unable to run. When the other villagers are forced to retreat, they have to leave him behind.

When another enemy is about to take his life, Kai uses the knowledge of that vision of summoning flames from his hands to actually create magic and gain the upper hand against the demi-human that he's fighting, only for him and his enemy to fall into a river below.

Thus ends episode 1.

If it wasn't obvious already, this is another isekai story.

The protagonist is actually reincarnated from our world, and the visions that he sees is from a past life from living in, what I assume to be modern day Japan.

Using glimpses of scientific knowledge from our society, Kai is able to construct unique spells that will come in handy in solving various problems in that world.

I admit: I'm very fond of that idea. The idea of someone using modern day knowledge to gain an upper hand in a fantasy world is an intriguing one.

Of course, this concept had already been done to death in other anime, so this is nothing special by itself.

But the foundational idea is a good one, and I feel like this world and these characters are unique enough that, given enough imagination and time at the drawing board, I'm sure a very interesting story can arise from all of this.

Sadly, that's where all the good things I have to say about this show end.

This story was just severely overwhelming.

You may wonder how a lowbrow ecchi show like Please Put Them On, Takamine-san ended up having a higher spot in this ranking than a serious plot like this one. I'll tell you how: that show took some risks.

Like sure, Takamine-san was absolutely nonsensical and completely unhinged but, at the very least, it had the fanservice to make it stand out, somewhat.

And I'm not that big of a fanservice fan. In fact, I consider it one of the cheapest ways of setting yourself apart. But, at the end of the day, it's something.

Teogonia doesn't even have that much going for it.

The problem with this show is it's story. It is incredibly cliched, to an extent I never thought possible: the cliche of the chosen one, the cliche of the underdog, the cliche of reincarnation and knowledge from a modern day Japan in a fantasy setting, the cliche of the woman that wants to be recognized as a warrior but isn't because she's a woman, the cliche of the damsel in distress, the cliche of the corrupt nobleman that's a bastard and needs to get his comeupins, the cliche of the arrogant warrior that is too prideful to listen to reason until the protagonist has to intervene, the cliche of the love interest that ends up pulled out of the story.

It is incredible the amount of cliches that could be crammed into one single show. This anime is absolutely fascinating in how uninspired it is.

I have never seen a show be so devoid of originality before. The more episodes I was watching, the more dread I was feeling in my soul.

The show isn't bad, per se, and if you watch these cliches for the very first time here, I'm sure you will enjoy it. But after watching these cliches and common writing tropes so many times before, done in so many other shows before this one, sometimes done even better, this felt very disappointing.

I will say: this world is interesting. I feel like, in the hands of a competent writer, this could have become a very good series.

But it just lacks originality. These characters are so shallow, but even with their shallowness they still deserve a better written story about them.

This lackluster story is pretty much responsible for single handedly killing this show off for me.

A good comparison of a similar show would be Sengoku Youko, which I already reviewed on this blog, in the past.

Both Sengoku Youko and this show are fantasy-esque anime TV series that start out a bit underwhelming and have seemingly boring protagonists and cliched story elements in them. However, what set Sengoku Youko apart and what made it one of my most cherished anime TV series in recent years was the fact that, even though it had cliched plot points in it, it still knew how to tell interesting and unique stories.

The characters were fun and complex in it. The dialogue was timeless and memorable. The quotes were deep and introspective. The character growth and motivations were deeply explored and showcased over many episodes.

And guess what? Sengoku Youko also suffered from common tropes like the Chosen One, the damsel in distress, the protagonist underdog that wanted to become stronger. But the difference was that it knew that if it wanted to set itself apart, it needed to explore the characters and the themes of the show more deeply than just surface level.

Teogonia doesn't do that. Everything is surface level here. There's no deeper layers to the characters, no hidden meaning behind the plot, no introspective conversations or character growth.

Everything just feels so shallow in this one.

I feel bad for harping on this show so hard, but it really is that simple. This story lacks depth at a fundamental level.

I just wish there was more to it than what meets the eye. Towards the end it started picking up steam by putting the protagonist in the role of an arbiter among different species, which I like the idea of but it didn't do much with it.

Maybe a season 2 would flesh this one out a bit more, much in the same way that it did for Sengoku Youko but, as it stands, this one's very underwhelming.

I couldn't bring myself to like it. I've definitely seen far worse anime TV series in recent years than this one, but nothing as unoriginal as this, at least.

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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