If you stepped up to a roulette table and the dealer was a 17 year-old kid, wouldn’t that set up a few alarm bells that something wasn’t right?? I was going to question the logic of a casino that (naturally) doesn’t allow minors as customers but does allow them to […] Read more
No question about it – when it comes to sports anime, give me the freaks every time. Ah, the fine art of the setup episode – it’s a staple of every sports series, and how well they portray the buildup to a big game can be as important as how […] Read more
Hell hath no fury like a (shota dressed as a) woman scorned. Soredemo Sekai wa Utsukushii makes its return after a soccer-related hiatus last week, and it picks up with an episode that displays elements of both the charms and challenges of the series. Not for the first time the […] Read more
You gotta love sports! In the midst of the most sports-heavy schedule in recent anime history (certainly at the top of the quality spectrum at least) Chihayafuru weighs in with what I’d call a “straight sports” chapter, a reminder that it can tackle this material with the best of them […] Read more
Every bit as good as you’d expect, that one. Sidonia no Kishi is nothing if not predictable. I think you could read a one-paragraph synopsis of any episode in the series so far and predict with almost total accuracy how successful that episode was going to be. This is a […] Read more
If there was such a thing as an archetypal Mushishi episode, that might just have been it. A week away from Mushishi seems like forever, even after having waited eight years for its return. Its return this week is a classic episode in every sense of the word, one that […] Read more
An awful lot of puzzle pieces were slotted into place this week. Among the many things I admire about Ping Pong, foremost is that it’s simply a marvel of good writing. This is an extremely busy story – it pinballs (or ping pongs, if you prefer) from character to character […] Read more
There’s great comfort in knowing some things don’t change. I wasn’t totally sure how I’d feel about returning to AnoHana, some three years after the completion of the TV series. I certainly loved it (I ranked it #2 on my list for 2011), but three years is a long time […] Read more
Nothing like a little magic fog to speed up your emotional exposition… It’s surely a coincidence, but the first episode of Hitsugi no Chaika following the announcement of a second season was one that very much behaved as if it wasn’t in any particular hurry to get anywhere. Indeed, this […] Read more
I just had to let that one sink in for a bit. Normally the longer the buildup, the more likely the payoff is to be a letdown. It’s an inevitable part of fiction of every stripe, anime not least. But when you’re talking about Hunter X Hunter the normal rules […] Read more