Holmes of Kyoto is a difficult premiere to pin down. Based on a series of mystery novels, it has the laid-back tone of an iyashikei (soothing) series, the soft-touch aesthetic of a slow-burn romance, and the content of Antiques Roadshow. Full marks for originality, I s’pose?
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a show try this hard and so blatantly to be something else—and boy howdy, does Bakabon wanna be Mr. Osomatsu.
While not completely devoid of character, this is a show clearly proudest of its schtick—meaning it’ll probably be a love it or hate it venture for many.
Lady Luck looked down and smiled upon me, surprising me with a supernatural mystery series complete with spunky female foreign-exchange students, Gatling-gun-toting waiters, and kickass great-grandmas. Oh yeah. This one has my name scribbled all over it.
Like any comedy, Asobi Asobase won’t be for everyone. But comedy that celebrates the crude side that resides within all of us, including teenage girls, is something that I’m always glad to see more of.
I never thought I’d use the descriptor “Schoolhouse Rock meets Osmosis Jones meets Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure,” but I just watched Cells at Work so here we are.
Well, there’s no slavery in it.
I’ll level with you, readers. My feelings on idol shows can basically be summed up with that one Hannibal Buress meme about pretzels. That’s not (much of a) knock—everyone has their comfort food genre, after all—but it’s just not something I find engrossing. So I’m not exactly primed to pick up nuance on the usual plot beats. All I can do is note that they exist.
Planet With is buck. Freaking. WILD, y’all. It’s an explosion of plot points and reveals and battles, a gleefully weird cocktail of absurdity, action, and sudden emotional sincerity. It’s a total mess and it has no business working and I cannot wait to watch more of it.
With harems these days, it’s go hard or go home. Everyone’s gotta have a gimmick, and sometimes that gimmick is more numbers than anything else.
This is it, folks, the comedy of the season. It somehow escaped from 2005 and is here to charm us with its complete lack of restraint and scene kid aesthetic.
The good and bad thing about short-form comedy like this is that on the one hand, what you see is a pretty good indicator all the way through; on the other hand, if you’re not hooked by the premiere, sticking around for three episodes probably isn’t going to yield different results. As far as Chio’s School Road goes, I left charmed enough to overlook the series’ small but persistent irritations.
I adore beach volleyball, so you can imagine both my initial excitement when this series was announced and my disappointment when I saw the cover art of cute girls in impractical bikinis. Harukana Receive had an uphill battle to win me over… but, well, consider me won over.
This is probably the most anticipated show of the season for most of the AniFem staff: it’s both a classic shoujo manga and renowned for being a plot-heavy, pulpy crime drama that also has a queer romance at the heart of it.
There’s a lot of world-building, table-setting, and plot packed into this first episode, yet it somehow all pretty much boils down to “What if AnoHana, but in one of them MMO animes that are all the rage with the kids these days?”
You know those beautiful multi-tiered cakes that have been carefully constructed, with each layer standing on the support of the one beneath it until it reaches the height of a small child? This is like that, except the cake is made of shit and the binding is misogyny. Let me take you on a guided tour, because this is why I get paid the Nerd Buckz.
The twenty-five-minute first episode of The Thousand Noble Musketeers felt like it was about a thousand minutes long. I like pretty boys as much as the next fujoshi, but with no bite, no edge, and no point, it all feels ultimately limp and dull.
Are you a middle-aged manager working in an office job? Then this anime might have something relatable to offer you. The rest of us are kind of out in the cold, though.
For years, every time a female-driven sports anime was announced, I’d say to myself, “Maybe this one will treat its characters like serious athletes instead of moe archetypes and vehicles for fanservice.” HANEBADO! really looked like it might be the female sports anime I was waiting for. And I was right. Sort of.
There are definitely good anime based on dating sims. We’ve even had the good fortune to review a few of them here on AniFem. So it feels cruel to knock Island simply for originally being a Visual Novel—let us say instead that this premiere comes off as a very lazily adapted, and go from there.
