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This is about as straightforward a manga adaptation as you can get, and the Liar Game manga is pretty good. Characters? Plot? Hell naw, I'm here to see Akiyama mentally destroy dudes over and over. The first few games are a bit too simple, but eventually things get more complicated once Yokoya shows up and our heroes have to outwit people with more than two brain cells. If you liked the games and strategic planning parts of Kaiji or the back-and-forth of Light and L in Death Note then you might also enjoy this.

The main issue is that there isn't really much here that would ... make me recommend it over just reading the manga. Because the essence of Liar Game is "people play games that involve a lot of negotiating and talking about strategy", it's kind of hard to even justify the existence of an anime adaptation. Like, when you read the manga, there's no part of it where you're thinking "Damn, I really wish this scene was animated because it would look so cool!" There are ways around this, though. Kaiji, for example, should have the same problem as Liar Game, except when it was adapted into an anime they did an excellent job of using the unique aspects of animation to create a feeling of tension that you can't get in a manga.

Doing such a straightforward adaptation actually feels like it makes some parts more confusing, in fact. Several of the later games involve a lot of numbers-based strategy and so in the manga there are a lot of diagrams showing, for example, changes in money between bank accounts. In a manga you can spend as much time as you want looking at these diagrams and making sure you understand what's going on, but with an anime you have to keep moving along at a set pace. I imagine most viewers will have to pause at these points to read and digest everything and at that point you have to ask yourself what is really gained from adapting a manga like this into an anime.

Ultimately I don't think this is a bad show, I just don't think it offers anything that isn't already in the manga. It doesn't butcher the source material or anything, it's just not the kind of series that you can directly translate into an anime. That's probably why it's taken so long to get an adaptation*, while One Outs, which is by the same author and is about baseball, got one like two years after it ended. There's actually shit to animate in baseball, plus the strategies aren't as spreadsheet-based so they translate more smoothly to a pleasurable viewing experience. If you don't feel like reading or you can't read then sure, go ahead, watch the anime. I'm not gonna be pissed off or anything. This isn't like a Bakemonogatari situation. That show is actually dogshit.

*Ignore the fact that there was a live-action adaptation in like 2007, the Japanese will make shitty live-action adaptations of any semi-popular manga. Ping Pong had one. Jojo had one. Or three. Uzumaki had one. To be fair, the live-action Uzumaki was probably better than the anime.

The second season of Frieren is a lot like the first in the sense that it's not very interesting and I had to constantly ask myself why I was still watching it. Thankfully it's only ten episodes long, which means only half the suffering, so I guess you could say that it might be better than season one. Anyway, the first season ended by establishing what felt like some kind of overarching narrative involving the elf voiced by Killua and all the different mages. Season two immediately discards this hint of a plot and instead is just ten episodes of random shit happening. There's a ... three episode "arc" in the second half of the season where Frieren and friends go to some random fuckass village to fight demons but it all just feels totally meaningless. Outside of this arc, every episode is split into two unconnected halves that often repeat the same tired story beats: the gang has no money so they accept a quest, they do the quest and get paid, Fern/Stark asks why they accepted the quest, Frieren has a flashback where Himmel said something and then says the exact same thing in the present. Wow! To think that we're out of ideas for plotlines only 30 episodes into the series!

We don't get any new characters this season and none of the side characters from the first season do anything (I think the woman that helps out in the demon village arc might have been in the first season but I legit don't remember), so it's all Frieren, Fern, and Stark, all the time (plus the person who gave them the quest of the week, who will never appear outside of their allotted ten-minute episode segment). You'd think that with such a small cast of characters there'd be some kind of focus on characterization and character development, but Frieren skillfully subverts viewer expectations by not doing this at all. Frieren I get since she's old and shit, but Fern and Stark are still just as boring as they were when they were introduced.

I'm not really sure what else there is to say. This just feels like ten episodes of filler. The worst part is at the end of the last fucking episode they tease a plotline that actually sounds interesting, but somehow they couldn't fit that shit into the season because the budget only allowed for ten episodes or something. Sometimes I wonder if the rating for this anime is some elaborate troll and I'm taking the bait by watching it.

Sousou no Frieren... For all my fellow gaijin out there, that means "Frieren the Slayer". What can a guy like me say about an anime - no, an institution - like Sousou no Frieren? Actually, a lot of things, but if I say them this review will probably get taken down again so we're going to skip ahead a bit. Apparently Frieren is the greatest anime of all time. You read some of the reviews for it and they're very passionate about Frieren, passionate in a way that someone like me whose heart is cold and dead could never feel. So surely there must be ... something of substance to Frieren, was essentially my thinking when I decided to watch it, it’s been nearly three years and it’s still up at the top of that list, it's still the greatest anime of all time. There must be a reason why people like this so much.

Going in I was expecting something introspective or moralistic like a Mushishi or Kino’s Journey, but that’s not the case at all. There are a lot of episodes where nothing of importance happens, but the mundanity never feels like it’s serving any sort of purpose, it’s just random bullshit for random bullshit’s sake. When Frieren does get a chance to try to go for a more thoughtful angle it totally fucks it up, the most obvious example of this being the whole demon arc around episode 10. In an earlier episode something actually interesting happens when a demon comes back to life and learns that the super powerful death ray spell he was using decades ago has become regular old magic that everyone knows how to use and defend against. So, it feels like there's a sense of progress to the world. Later, Frieren encounters a group of demons trying to negotiate a peace treaty with humans, and she immediately goes on a racist tirade about how all demons are evil and need to be killed. When most people see this, they're probably expecting this to develop into an interesting plot point, that the demons have progressed past their violent ways and now Frieren needs to reconcile her old views regarding the demons with the way they are now. This actually is not what happens. Instead, immediately after Frieren goes on her total demon death tirade, we get a scene showing the demons hanging out together and talking about how evil they are and how stupid the humans are for believing them. Great stuff, very thought-provoking. By the way, after this arc we don't see a single demon for the rest of the season, so the whole thing just feels like a throwaway.

The characters, likewise, are fine but not particularly interesting. Frieren is an autist, Fern is a teenage girl, and Stark is just the yellow hair dude from Demon Slayer. A bunch of characters get introduced toward the end of the season, complete with uninteresting backstories, but the only one I found myself giving a shit about was Ubel and that's probably just because she's hot. They're all just missing the kind of hook you’d need to actually give a shit about any of them.

There's a lot of other minor stuff that sticks out, too. Magic is initially presented as like Harry Potter shit where you learn a bunch of different spells and then cast them to do different things. Then we get to the exam arc and magic basically just turns into Nen where everyone has only one type of spell they can cast and some of the shit doesn't even feel like it should be categorized as magic. There’s your typical cute but emotionless loli (cuz she’s a stone cold killer…) character and for some reason her “magic” is to fight with her hair. Also, Zetsu gets introduced fairly early. The animation is normally fine but sometimes it suddenly swaps to rotoscoping or CGI and it’s pretty jarring, and anytime there’s a big fight scene the surrounding area seems to expand infinitely. The writing is tolerable for the most part but it constantly does this thing where someone says something and then you get a flashback to someone in the past saying the exact same thing, which is nice the first time but they legit do this like every other episode, and then the end of the season does the same thing too and it just gets really annoying. Everyone is dressed in pretty reasonable medieval garb for most of the season until this Uma Musume-looking bitch shows up in an outfit with an exposed tummy and like shoulder windows or whatever the hell you call them. People in taverns are just eating random-ass modern Japanese food. And so on, you get the idea.

Overall, it just doesn't feel like a lot of thought was put into creating a setting that is either unique or interesting. It’s your typical fantasy world, it’s got your typical fantasy things like monsters and dungeons, it’s got magic, it’s got elves, it’s got dwarves, even Lord of the Rings which fucking popularized all this shit still tried to make it a bit more interesting than that. Compare Frieren to something like Shinsekai Yori, where even though the characters are total shit a very obvious amount of effort was put into making the setting both interesting and cohesive. There's an actual history to the world and the main antagonistic race, the mole rat dudes, aren’t just like “Muahaha, we’re so evil!” You also don't have characters that show up in fucking jorts halfway through the series.

So, why is Frieren so popular, what is that elusive reason that I very cleverly teased up at the beginning of this wall of text? Well, when the modern anime landscape is dominated by factory-produced isekai slop, it makes sense that a series that takes place in a familiar (read: generic) fantasy setting but is actually fairly competent in most aspects must look like the greatest shit ever. It doesn't do anything weird that might alienate the audience, even the opening themes are just generic J-pop instead of something that actually fits the intended vibe of the series. It's all just very safe, very boring, no big aspirations, no attempts to explore any deeper themes, and ultimately nothing special.

By some perverse act of God, after more than a decade of trying, I’ve finally* managed to finish watching Bakemonogatari, so I am now qualified to say with full confidence that it is total dogshit. I fucking hate Tarantino movies and this reminds me of them a lot. Just words, words, words, the characters keep fucking talking and talking but never say anything of substance. Two cardboard cutouts of what I assume are supposed to be people talking and talking and talking. I guess that’s being a little mean to Tarantino, though, because he does occasionally manage to be funny or have something interesting happen, ... but Bakemonogatari never manages to be either funny or interesting. People often describe it as “clever” or “witty”, which is code for “not actually funny”.

There is no plot, it’s a harem anime with the most boring fucking lead in the universe. I watched 15 episodes of this shit and I still have no clue what kind of person Araragi is supposed to be, it’s impressive that someone who talks so much winds up having no personality whatsoever outside of “Uoh cunny!!! Titties!!! Pussy!!! Hair go boing boing!!!” Seeing people talk about this show online might make you think this is actually a really exemplary piece of art, a shining achievement in the world of anime, but the truth, behind all of the meaningless words and wacky camera angles that you can find in any bargain bin art film, is that this is a coomer anime. It’s a coomer anime masquerading as something else, and that’s the absolute worst sin of all. Cool, there's a 20-second panty shot at the start, awesome, the female lead spends half the second episode in her underwear. Wait, this is supposed to be artistic? Should I take my hand out of my pants?

Did I enjoy seeing the big titties on the catgirl in the last arc? Yes. I want it to be clear that I’m giving my honest opinion here. I did enjoy it. However, that is all this show has to offer, it’s like one of those 3-hour Japanese porn videos where everyone who watches it skips all the exposition scenes so they can get to the good stuff, only when you read the reviews for this one in particular everyone is saying “Bro, you HAVE to watch the whole thing, the dialogue and character development is AMAZING.” So you bite the bullet and watch it start to finish and all you’re left wondering is “What the hell am I doing with my life?”

*I actually finished watching this like a year ago but I have to repost this review because the original version was too mean :(

The second season of JJK was kind of poop but I figured I'd keep watching anyway, call it sunk cost fallacy if you want. This season was also mostly poop although for slightly different reasons. The premise is basically that everyone is playing Fortnite and there's this system where you get points when you kill people, and if you get enough points you can add new rules to the game. Yuji and friends enter the game so they can add a rule that allows people to escape the game, and also to search for someone who can free Gojo from the cube. Sounds pretty simple, ... right? Well, JJK doesn't seem to think so. Episode 3 of this season is maybe one of the worst things I've ever seen in a shonen series. The entire episode is basically a fucking PowerPoint presentation where the narrator explains how the game works, only they do it in the most confusing way possible. I don't think they even explain that it's essentially a battle royale, they basically go straight into rules minutiae, plus they feel the need to explain the motivation of every single character and what their plans are going to be for the rest of the season. It's the type of thing I'd expect to see in, like, Ex-Arm, not a big budget series from a fairly competent studio.

Outside of Episode 3, which is pure ass, the season still suffers from several common issues. There are a lot of fights, but most of them suck because it's usually not clear at all what's going on. If you think of something like Jojo, the best Stands are the ones that have clear limits (ex: Mandom rewinds time 6 seconds, that's it, that's the whole ability), this is part of the reason Part 6 is so bad, you've got Stands like Diver Down where you think you understand what they do but then they do something completely new that makes no sense, and then you've got ones like Dragon's Dream where the ability is so convoluted that you stop trying to understand what's going on. JJK is full of shit like this, the fight with the woman that has the star ability legit gave me Dragon's Dream flashbacks with how much time the narrator spends trying to explain how the ability works. Any time domains show up it's the same thing, the narrator starts infodumping you almost as an acknowledgement that none of the shit on screen makes any sense.

I think there are also a few different characters in this season but at this point it just feels kind of hard to give a shit about any of them. Yuji is there, I guess. The JJK version of Sasuke is there, too. I can never remember what his name is. Panda shows up. Maki spends one episode going on a Man of Steel-esque rampage that just feels like a bunch of meaningless shit happening. That might be it. There's also the dude from the movie. Just like Shibuya Incident, this is another "serious arc" so we can't have any of the fun character interactions that made the first season entertaining (most of the fun characters got killed off, anyway). Plus, it's another Avengers-level fight for the fate of the world so everything needs to be as bombastic as possible. If entire buildings aren't exploding, something's gone wrong.

There are a few spots where the animation looks nice and you can actually tell what's happening, also the opening theme's pretty good. The last episode of the season is the only one that I would say was legitimately entertaining and it barely even feels connected to the rest of the season since it features Movie Guy. You could literally skip the entire rest of the season and watch that episode and not miss out on anything. The stupid narration is kept to a minimum, the powers of all the characters are pretty simple, minimal domain shit, not a lot of CGI outside of the one awful-looking bridge scene. It's not a good episode because of anything set up before it, it's a good episode because it's a dude fighting multiple other dudes and it looks cool.

So you know what, that's my recommendation. Skip the entire season and just watch the last episode.

After seeing how the second part of this manga crashed and burned, then crashed again, then burned some more, then crashed a third time into like a group of children or something, it's probably safe to say that the first part being unironically awesome was a total accident. If you've read Fire Punch you're probably well aware that Fujimoto kind of just hops between plot arcs seemingly at random, like an arc will kind of wrap up in one chapter and then in the next we're in a completely new setting and all the characters that showed up before are totally gone. This ADHD style ... actually worked with the first part of Chainsaw Man because the things that were happening were cool enough and the characters were memorable enough that you could excuse the fact that a lot of shit just kind of happened randomly.

Not so for part two. The truth is that it simply isn't compelling. Fujimoto used all his good ideas in part one, so for part two it legitimately just feels like he's making shit up as he goes along (moreso than in part one, and also in a bad way). There's no direction, characters will show up and then vanish for 30 chapters and when they show up again you can't remember who the fuck they are. It all just becomes a mush of shit that lacks a single interesting idea to grab on to. And as terrible and nonsensical as the ending is, it's probably better to just let it die. Wrap it up by any means necessary, move on to something new, anybody who was actually unironically invested in the story at this point probably needs to be kicked in the head anyway.

Read part one because it's great, like legit some of the coolest shit ever, but as soon as you see Bucky the headless chicken just close the tab and go do something better with your time.

The first season of the Chainsaw Man anime had some pretty huge issues and I'm not gonna act like I was expecting the movie to fix those issues but I'm also not gonna act like I was blown away by this (haha get it). Mappa's direction on the series as a whole makes no sense - the manga is drawn in an almost amateur style and the pace is so fast that it ends up having this very chaotic feel to it. By contrast, the anime adaptation looks way too clean and washed out and the pacing is totally fucked. Those things plus the overdramatic ... soundtrack end up totally removing the chaos from a series where the chaos is the main appeal. Take, for example, the part where Reze sings a song on the roof of the school. In the manga, this part takes up about two pages and you'll probably flip through it in less than ten seconds. In the movie they felt the need to include the entire song, so you have to sit there for a minute or so listening to Reze sing. The end result is a totally different vibe between the two versions and given that I like the series because of the manga, I'm inclined to prefer the fast-paced version that isn't trying to be melodramatic or linger on anything for longer than necessary.

The first half of the movie generally suffers more due to this Mappafication or, as some would say, fitting a square peg into a round hole. The second half feels better but still has problems. The anime series relied on CGI way too much and often ended up looking like shit in the most important parts, the action scenes. The CGI crutch isn't used as much here but in its place I did notice a lot of rotoscoping that, again, I just don't think fits the vibe of Chainsaw Man. A series that's playing everything fast and loose shouldn't really care that much about using realistic movements and proportions everywhere.

So overall, I don't think this is a bad movie or anything because the source material is good and the animation looks fine, but it's just kind of disappointing because I feel like an adaptation of the manga could have been so much more if it was more stylized and the pacing was faster.

Nukitashi’s premise is basically Kill La Kill except with sex instead of clothes. There are a bunch of different characters, there are things that happen, blah blah blah. None of that matters because this is a comedy, so the main question is whether or not the show’s funny. Sometimes it is, but most of the time it isn’t. There are two main issues here. The first is that the extent of the show’s comedy is usually just “Ha ha I said cum” or swapping out some normal thing with something sex-related, so instead of a school athletic competition there’s a school sex-having competition. That’s an ... okay basis, but you need to go farther or else you’ll end up with a lot of wasted potential. There ARE moments where the show actually goes farther, like when the protag gets reverse raped after the sex-having competition and then his wiener gets so big it launches the reverse-rapist in front of a moving bus, and those moments are funny, but they aren’t as plentiful as I would have hoped.

The second issue is that the tone of the anime feels too generic, like if you took out the sex stuff and swapped back in whatever it’s replacing this would just be Generic Seasonal Anime #32 where the protag has a harem of girls with different titty sizes and they go on wacky adventures*. When you have a premise as stupid as Nukitashi’s, you need to play it 100% serious or it just ends up feeling lame. Prison School is a show with a stupid premise where everything that happens is treated as a life-or-death situation, and as a result it is ten times funnier than Nukitashi manages to be. When the show actually does take its retarded situations seriously (like in the reverse rape scene mentioned above), it’s funny. When all the titty girls are standing around and talking about stupid anime bullshit, it’s not funny.

Is Nukitashi actually worth watching? The answer to that is based on how much trash you’re willing to sit through for a few solid moments of gold, mostly around the midpoint of the series. This is one that’s probably best watched with the boys to help power through the boring shit. If you don’t have friends I guess you’re out of luck. Maybe go outside instead of reading anime reviews.


*It’s hard to believe, but there are actually many different anime series that come out every month and people actually watch them even though they’re total dogshit (I don’t watch them but I know this is true through pure intuition)

Takopi is a dark comedy that basically has the premise of “What if Doraemon visited kids with shitty parents?” It’s an entertaining enough watch and the animation is very good, but thematically there isn’t much there so don't expect to be facing any kind of existential crisis after you watch it. I guess part of the problem is that it’s only 6 episodes long so there isn’t much time to develop the themes or the characters or whatever else, and while you could say that’s the fault of the source material there isn’t any law saying you can’t just add new shit for the anime ... adaptation. If this was longer maybe I’d be able to give a shit about any of the characters and not just view them as punching bags for the story.

And boy, what great punching bags they are! Maybe it’s partially because there’s so little time for build-up, but the things that happen to the characters are often so extreme that it’s hard to take them seriously. Like, the moment the character that’s getting tortured by bullies says she loves her dog, you know what’s gonna happen to that fucking dog, that’s the kind of show this is. In the last episode, one of the characters explains to our Doraemon/Jesus stand-in, Takopi, that people can be both good and bad and that Takopi’s a fucking retard for not realizing that. Okay, thanks for telling me that, but I didn’t really appreciate the insult. Except, every single parent that appears in the show is an irredeemable asshole to a comical degree. Shizuka’s parents both abandon her, Marina’s mom needs kombucha or she gets a little kooky, her dad’s in love with a ho and is never home, and Azuma’s mom won’t let him eat pancakes if he gets a 95 on his test. The primary theme the show seems to be pushing is that you shouldn’t be a shitty parent or your kids will have shitty lives, which is fine but the show doesn’t really develop it past that. It gets too caught up in the surface-level events that are happening and beating the shit out of its punching bags.

The ending is also pretty bad, it’s very Madokaesque in terms of just saying “Fuck it” and ignoring the show’s themes to give something cheap and easy instead. I don’t think it’s as much of a betrayal as Madoka’s ending, but it certainly doesn’t give the show any points.

Overall, Takopi is decent enough as a popcorn show but after I press submit on this review I’m probably never going to think about it again, at least until a 3-hour analysis video shows up in my YouTube recommendations (“Takopi’s Original Sin: A Bleak Masterpiece”) and I get pissed off.

Narutaru is messy, but also very good. The way it was sold to me (and I'm sure many others) was as a deconstruction of the Pokemonesque monster tamer genre. These days that's literally just Pokemon but, you know, back in the late 90s everyone was trying to get a piece of the Pokepie. While Narutaru does have elements of genre deconstruction to it, that really isn't the drawing point of the series, so you shouldn't go into it expecting it to be "Pokemon, but people ACTUALLY DIE!"

What you should expect instead is a sense of total, overwhelming nihilism, like what you'd get in Bokurano ... or even something like Punpun. Horrible things happen one after another but it never feels like it's all just for shock value, there's a very clear sense of direction behind everything. When things are vague or confusing it feels the same way, that rather than being a mistake of the author it's being done on purpose with the expectation that the reader is intelligent enough to connect the dots. Like Bokurano, Narutaru has very strong themes that only really become clear once you've finished the whole thing and thought about it a bit, which honestly to me is a sign that the author knew what he was doing and had a specific goal in mind.

The execution in some parts isn't as good as it could be, especially towards the end when things start to feel a bit rushed, but like I said above, because I know the author is competent and not just throwing shit in for no reason it makes it easier to see what he was trying to go for. In a way, even through the messiness, I think I liked this more than Bokurano (which was also very good). You can almost feel the overwhelming hatred of the author towards Japanese society in parts, and while Bokurano also carries that hatred, it feels a bit less raw there. Maybe Kitoh mellowed out a little or maybe he wanted to make the story tighter, who knows.