Hey – with all this soccer, don’t forget it’s still baseball season. In the eternal war between soccer and baseball – two spring sports that vie for the hearts of schoolboy athletes and couch potatoes both in Japan and America – the beautiful game scored a blow over the national […] Read more
Taken either as an ending or a beginning, this episode finds Captain Earth in a pretty good place. It hasn’t exactly come back from the dead like a blowed-up and drowned yakuza, but Captain Earth has certainly shown a new vigour over the last few weeks. After a span of […] Read more
Great endings truly are a beautiful thing. One of my oft-stated core beliefs is “good endings are hard”, but episodes like this one make it awfully hard to make the case. The thing about great endings is that they usually look incredibly easy – they have the effect of making […] Read more
“The Wind Rises” If there’s one word that springs to mind when contemplating Miyazaki Hayao’s final film, it would be “difficult”. And I’ve contemplated it a lot. I saw it in Japanese soon after its theatrical premiere, and seeing it a second time with subtitles has done nothing to help […] Read more
Yes, the post title is correct. A second season of Sidonia no Kishi really made too much sense not to happen. Presumably when someone leaked the news early a couple of weeks ago, all of the relevant parties denied it because there were still t’s to be crossed and i’s […] Read more
Any episode that ends with Komari disappearing is A-OK in my book… Little Busters! is a series of many moods, no question about it. Starting with the last few eps of the first season, though, they’ve mostly been pretty serious – understandably so, and those were collectively the best run […] Read more
That was a pretty good final episode – but then, that’s perfectly fitting. Rarely has an anime managed to be so perfectly balanced for so long between gaining and losing my commitment as Hitsugi no Chaika. I’ve managed to get through an entire season without making up my mind, which […] Read more
Togashi. Koujina. Madhouse. Nothing else really need be said. Author’s Note: Please be very careful to avoid divulging any information about upcoming events from the manga. When in doubt, don’t post it, even if it’s remotely possible to view it as a minor spoiler. Thanks for your cooperation. That really […] Read more
I sort of feel as if I’ve written this post before. Normally it would be a real broadside to say that an omake was the best part of the episode, but the omakes in Yowamushi Pedal are so consistently good that it’s not necessarily so in this case. This one […] Read more
Go ahead, anime-only viewers – tell me you predicted this after the first episode. No question about it, Gaworare has been as full of surprising twists and turns as any series this season. Most of the big ones have been of the tonal variety, as the series has shifted between […] Read more