Oh, absolutely… but those are American ratings, aren’t they?
When I say that they’re whacked, I don’t just mean they are lower than what I would consider normal. They’re just totally arbitrary. Some are listed as TV-MA, but have no sex or violence… some are TV-14 and have gratuitous nudity and violence. It honestly seems like they just aren’t the ratings for the right movies at all.
Anime sucks, nerds!
…
This season has been pretty weak, to be honest. Most of the series didn’t catch my attention. Fate UBW has been baaad. My motivation for finishing it it has been to be able to point and laugh at their fans, and be able to laugh with others and all their flaws. Jojo 3rd season is imo a bit ehh, too much mediocre eps in the middle and super BS final fight, and I never really connected with Jotaro, I liked the second season more. Ore Monogatari I started it because I heard good thing as a comedy romance but after a few eps is blaaand as fuck and repetitive, dropped. Arslan is the only half decent thing, a medieval adventure with what seems fantasy middle east setting, but as I say, it’s more in the “decent” range than “good”, just watchable.
I started other series like Plastic Memories but I dropped it like a hot potato.
After your comments I watched Expelled from Paradise, which I knew but the trailers and images made me think it would have too much fanservice so I has avoided it until now. And hey, it’s actually a decent story, and scifi as hell (let’s see, there are: digital societies in post-human setting, AIs, dystopia, space stations and robots and mechs, space exploration). That said it has some solid ideas but the execution isn’t so good. An example:
example
I liked the concept shown when they reveal how the digital society works, there are limited computing power so it’s society pressured into competition over them and peer-pressured in how you act, so in its own way it’s far from being an utopia. But isn’t never shown, instead it just given to the viewer in a cold dish of exposition.
So far Blood Blockade Battlefront is the only series this season I’ve bothered keeping up with. The overarching plot hasn’t really done very much, but I’m a sucker for decent urban-fantasy / action-horror mashups like this; it has a pretty unique look, IMHO, and some humorous moments to leaven the serious bits.
Nana popped up as a Netflix recommendation recently, and I decided to give it a shot. I’m about 1/4 of the way in and liking it, despite a bit of a slow start. It’s a coming-of-age type story, with a pretty weak main character, but she’s starting to get more interesting and there’s plenty of show left for that to continue. The best part is that they focus on the early 20s rather than the more common high school time period, avoiding the annoying “I’m so embarrassed by any mention of sex” anime trope…if anything they’re a little too casual on the subject. Visual style is decent, nothing spectacular but it doesn’t detract from the experience, and the Japanese voice acting is reasonable (watching with subs).
Update: Around halfway through, this series turned much more into a soap opera than a growth-and-progression story, in my humble opinion. Still interesting, but the second half felt quite a bit weaker than the first half to me. And the ending isn’t much of one…a ton of unresolved ends left, which apparently is because the source manga did the same thing after the author fell ill. Nevertheless, happy I watched it, the characters were interesting and it was rare that I felt it was dragging on.
They delayed the last episode of the season, and after TWO filler material episodes. They say the last episode is finished, but don’t fit into 30 min slot.
Hope the last episode is good. But I would watch it even only for the ending song :D
After watching a few anime where everyone was screaming and had super-powers, Moribito was a nice change of pace. Also, the kid was not annoying which was nice.
Knights of Sidonia Season two is out on Netflix.
Yes it is. And it looks really good so far.
I just watched Gate which seems very interesting.
It has mature themes; I would advise sampling it before watching it with young kids (this is based on my son telling me about the manga it is based on).
Gangsta is definitely not for kids but probably easier to tell based on it’s name.
Mentioning this because I know some of us like watching some shows with the family.
It’s so strange how Knights of Sidonia does the requisite exposition to get the plot to where they want it. They do the bare minimum. This happened, then this happened, and here we are. Watching the first episode of the second season was a bit confusing though, since there was no recap of the first season.
Maybe I should rewatch the last episode of the first season to remind myself what was happening in the series before we left it.
Really liked Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches, a comedy with a bit of romance and the super natural. Anime Japanese high schoolers actually kiss? Shocking!
As others have stated above, Time of Eve is short but excellent.
I have some 48 hour premium guest passes for Crunchyroll (it states you do not need to enter a credit card to use them.
I think I have 4 if anyone is interested.
PM your email address if you are interested.
At the very least some of you can watch Time of Eve without commercials if you plan out the two free days. :)
Time of Eve is not very long having short episodes as I recall.
It could go in any direction, really. But it hope this one and other turn into good things. Hate that all the good series have finished, but such is life.
If you want to cry, might I suggest Plastic Memories? In the near future, androids are created with a limited life span. The main character goes to work for a service that repossesses the androids once they reach their end. I especially like it for skipping the usual questions about how human can AI be or do they have souls.
I’m about halfway in and the story continues to be interesting, but I am getting seriously tired of the cliched interpersonal side of things. It was kinda cool in season 1, what with the whole love-and-loss-and-look-an-alien bent to it. Now, though, they seem intent on putting every possible harem cliche in, from oblivious-guy-jealous-girls to oh-look-suddenly-we’re-all-living-together. I still like all the other stuff Knights is doing, but it’s just sad that this could have been so much better with a little attention paid to decent relationship building instead of the standard cliches.
i love the way they drew out the launch sequence at the end of episode 3. It really served to increase the tension and made for a great cliffhanger. Plus it’s nice to see little details that add to the show a lot. Episode 4 was also great. I love that this is one of the few anime shows in which they show ships accelerating at full burn, and then having to turn around do full burn in the opposite direction for just as long so that they came to a stop again. Of course, it is still a TV show, and they do gloss over details like that in most battles, but when they form the basis for a whole episode like in Ep4, they actually stop to show things like that.
I recommend it, but not if you want to cry, but eyeroll your eyes hard.
Not quite done with it, but I agree completely. Oh how the first episode misleads so much about what the show is going to really be about.
I just reached the same point, and I think the major sins they committed were having two episodes in a row with only the relationship shenanigans, and more importantly, not having those shenanigans be interesting to the viewer. So I hope S2Ep5,6 were just anomalies in an otherwise good series.
Also, sorry to crap all over something you like, Lake, that’s not my intent.
I finished Plastic Memories last night and it was just about as I expected. It goes from cool sci-fi thing to standard Japanese teen love story in about 4 episodes, and after that it plays out exactly like you’d expect, including the overly-dramatic “we love each other sooooo much” stuff you expect from teens. The only thing that saved it a bit was the interaction with the work colleagues. I quite liked the office dynamic, although I do think it was a bit telling that at the end of the last episode she basically says: (not really a spoiler but I’ll spoiler it anyways)
not really spoilery
“I’ll miss you Kazuki. I’ll miss you so much Tsukasa. Also everyone else I guess.”