Don’t worry, Mile. Your series achieved what you could not: it averages out its charming elements with some of anime’s laziest fallback jokes to reach a grand total of “basically okay.”
This might be the best premiere of the season: a tense, slow-burn legal drama that viciously punctuates its own simmering tension in the final moments.
If you’re into male idol series, this is not offensively bad.
A shounen series seemingly aimed toward the same middle-grade sort of audience as Little Witch Academia, Iruma-kun feels perfect as a bit of fall sweetness.
It’s been a while since a premiere has so systematically robbed me of every gesture of optimism I tried to offer it.
The bait Azur Lane was putting out to attract a certain kind of viewer tuned me out of any meager charms it might’ve had to offer, long before it doubled down with carefully rendered shots of an eight-year-old’s wet shirt clinging to her skin.
This episode has one joke.
There will always be a place for episodic supernatural action series in anime, and BEM (mostly) has a solid aesthetic going for its main trio of monster-hunting monsters. Unfortunately, this episode spends most of its time with the least interesting of them.
Demon Girl is definitely cloyingly cute, but if you’re in the market for low-key slapstick with buckets of shipping fodder between the two leads, this isn’t half bad.
The show is rough around the edges visually, complete with big hair and wonky eye-to-face ratios straight out of 2004, but the isekai story is fresh air after season after seasons of noxious incel pandering and slavery apologism.
You know how Netflix put out that movie Bright back
in 2017, and it was really well-received and everybody liked it? Oh, that’s not what happened at all? Cop Craft might have a problem then.
I’m not sure that the series will be able to fully deliver on its promising premise while still being bound to both its origins as a mobile game and the aesthetic conventions already established in this first episode. I’d love to be surprised, though.
“Magical girls in giant robots” is a fantastic concept, and GRANBELM just might have the chops to pull it off.
This is going to be one of those reviews. You know the ones, where I hem and haw for a few minutes about how humor is ultimately subjective before admitting that this premiere just didn’t do much for me.
It’s been a while since I watched a premiere as tight and concise as this one.
The show takes less than five minutes to rocket past “frustrating fat-shaming” and straight into “likely to be triggering for anyone who’s ever struggled with disordered eating.”
Y’know, once I stopped laughing, this wasn’t really a terrible premiere. It is possible I’ve sustained some serious neck damage from all the whiplash, though.
The last few years have seen a boom in the English-language yuri market, with more and more manga about queer romance between women making it to shelves. But with all these choices, where does a curious reader start?
I’m sorry in advance, because getting a levelheaded review of an Ikuhara anime from me is basically impossible
Some people might not be bothered by the creepy dogwhistles and can still enjoy the nice stuff here, and that’s fine. But I’ve got better things to do with my Wednesdays.
