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.