krofire

Mappa’s 2020 surreal fantasy promises far more than it delivers. It is like some bizarre mash-up combination of “FLCL” and “Takt Op Destiny” (also Mappa in 2021) with Gundam-style mechas thrown in for good measure. And, no, that isn’t meant to be a compliment. There is no point explaining the plot as I never understood what-on-earth was going on most of the time. It is set in some kind of post-apocalyptic future fantasy world where human civilisation has been torn apart by the sudden appearance of shadowy monsters – the “Earless”. The only defence (as... See full review

Doga Kobo’s 2023 fantasy drama made quite  big splash when the first episode premiered at cinemas in Japan as a feature-length movie. HiDive milked it for all it was worth and it generated quite a lot of chatter across the web. Is it any good though? Certainly, that first episode packs in more story telling than is normal even within an entire season of episodes. So much happens that you wonder what on earth there is left to tell. It ends up just being a set-up for the main story which is easily as good as the kick-off movie even if the pace shifts down a gear a little. Its main theme is one of... See full review

Some eight years after season one of “Last Exile” landed such a smash hit for Gonzo they revisited the same universe in this, its 2011/12 follow-up. It is very visibly the same space opera universe with its vanships and vast aerial battle fleets and it even boasts several key characters from season one. Yet fans will note that the storyline is disjointed in seemingly being completely unrelated to anything that happened in season one. What is missing here is the manga “Last Exile: Travelers from the Hourglass” that tells the story of what happened in-between the two seasons. The key... See full review

Gonzo’s 2003 classic “steampunk” sci fi saga is ripe for a remake as its sweeping visuals are hard to discern in streaming. Twenty years later in 2023 it sits on the Crunchyroll back catalogue in standard definition in a highly compression file leaving the original’s majesty all blurred. Even so, the beauty of this fantastical vision is still there in a tale set on some far away planet that mankind has colonised in the distant future. The only problem is that the planet is split in two by a permanent storm band known as the “Grand Stream” that is nearly lethal to anyone... See full review

Liden Films’ 2023 High School romance is pretty adorable featuring two main characters each struggling with a sleep disorder. Ganta Nakami is a boy with few friends and he can’t sleep at night. Seeking a quiet place at school to get his head down he stumbles upon the abandoned school observatory. However, that is already occupied by fellow insomniac Isaki Magari. Isaki is very much his opposite – popular, friendly, outgoing, good at everything and with a wide circle of friends. They swap stories before finding it remarkably easy to get some much-needed kip in each other’s company... See full review

Studio Signposts’ 2023 school-slice-of-life comedy was one of the little gems from the year. Its title may not have promised much but we absolutely loved it. It contains a pretty unique school boy called Taiyou Takada whose utterly bizarre interpretation of life has a profound effect upon his fellow students. One such is the gloomy girl Akane Nishimura whose dark demeanour led to the other kids nicknaming her the “Grim Reaper”. They meant it cruelly but that isn’t how Takada sees it (or how he sees her). For him, Nishimura is the coolest kid in his class and despite her... See full review

Asahi Production’s 2023 sci-fi-tinged adult romance is set in the world of manga artists. Struggling artist Ichiro Kuga is bringing-up his siblings alone after their father’s death. To help him in his work he recruits the mysterious Shiori Goshiki who describes herself as a fan. Despite the fact that she only read her first manga a year before she is a natural illustrator and the two become fast friends. She is apparently a “princess” from a small obscure Japanese island with a strange legend about a falling star. As we can quickly guess she is not entirely human and when she... See full review

Typhoon Graphics’ 2023 romantic-fantasy/historical-drama is an isekai that hails from South Korea. The title used for the anime comes from the English translation of the novel with the original having the slightly shorter title “Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke's Mansion”. It is not unlike Silverlink’s 2021 show “My Next Life as a Villainess” where the heroine wakes up in the next life to find she has become a character in a novel she is familiar with. However, she knows that character (Raeliana McMillan) is murdered by her gold-digging husband so she devises a plot to... See full review

Madhouse’s 2023 romcom drama gets off to a slow start but soon kicks into its entertaining gear. Akito Yamada is a bright 18-year-old High School student yet a bit of a late bloomer. He doesn’t really get on with people and displays a social dysfunction you would associate with autism. His saving grace is his goods looks. The girls all love him and completely disregard his lack of charm. He has gained no small fame as a pro-gamer. Then there is Akane Kinoshita who meets the boy on the online game “Forest of Savior”. She only used to hang out there because her boyfriend liked the... See full review

The Tezuka Production 2023 ecchi café comedy is workmanlike yet it really grows on you after a slow start. The setup is an inevitable excuse for another harem show although that element is quite late to develop. Young Hayato Kasukabe is a University student who has just inherited his Grandmother’s Seaside Café. He had been cared for by his Grandmother after the death of his parents yet in his teenage years he had not got on well with her. He had left for High School some three years before and not looked back. He wants nothing to do with his inheritance other than to turn it into a car... See full review

Seven Arcs’ 2023 romcom picks right up from where 2020’s season one finishes. Nasa Yuzaki is somewhat of a genius and has also married very young to the mysterious Tsukasa Yuzaki, a girl he met one night when she saved his life. Smitten with her he confesses but she will only agree to date him if they are married. So, they get married. The story is mostly just focussed upon their relationship which is often awkward and naïve. Both behave in characteristically cute ways and most of the story really just teases apart the elements of their relationship. Season two kicks off with them... See full review

Studio C2C’s 2023 fantasy slice-of-life has its main gag written into the show’s title. Elda is the name of a real-life Elf who has lived for hundreds of years at the Takamimi Shrine. Her needs are taken care of by 16-year-old Koito Koganei. Elda is painfully shy and avoids most human contact preferring to play with modern technologies to amuse herself. She plays computer games, watches anime, reads manga, eats a lot of junk food, you know - the usual stuff. In one fun scene she is seen wielding an airbrush to paint a robot-model kit for which Koito chides her for as the smell of the paint... See full review

Synergy SP’s 2023 sci-fi comedy features a reasonably-cool central idea that could be right out of the mind of comic genius Douglas Adams. You can just imagine Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect coming across a race of homicidal aliens hell bent on destroying the human race just because ET have no cute fluffy pets in their universe. Coming to Earth and experiencing a Cat Café would be pretty mind-blowing for these aliens. So mind-blowing in fact that they would fear that cute fluffy animals are mankind’s secret defensive weapon. Enter said alien Liza Luna representing the empire of the Azatos... See full review

P.A.Works’ 2023 High School romcom was a standout show for the summer season displaying great writing and well-crafted characters. Mitsumi Iwakura starts High School in Tokyo a long way from her native home in Hashikko. She is bright and ambitious but her first day at school doesn’t start well when she gets lost of the Tokyo train network. Good fortune shines on her when fellow first year Sousuke Shima takes her under his wing and gets her to school on time. The two become fast friends but in many ways they are polar opposites. She is the stern and sincere student prone to occasional bouts of... See full review

Doga Kobo’s 2018 teen-rom-com strangely got re-launched by HIDive in Summer 2023 as if it was a new show. We guess it had been on hiatus for a while. We caught up with it upon its latter reappearance. The “Tada” of the story is a High School boy who loves photography and is a member of his schools Photography Club. The club boasts a colourful and eccentric bunch of characters but is lacking girls. One day he bumps into a pretty blond girl from Europe, Teresa Wagner. She is hopelessly lost and somewhat ditsy. Taking pity upon her he takes her to his grandfather’s café after she... See full review

Pine Jam’s 2023 school romcom features and unusual male protagonist (Junta Shiraishi) who possesses the near-supernatural ability to be invisible to other people. This social invisibility is meant to be more metaphorical than real yet this show depicts it to humorous effect as being a genuine affliction the poor boy suffers. He sits in the back of the class at school and nobody – not even the teacher – seem to realise he is there. Everybody except super-cute yet mischievous classmate Nagisa Kubo. She seems fascinated by the boy and gently teases him to get his attention. Initially she... See full review

Shin-Ei Animation’s 2023 school life romance features an (initially) quite dark Chunibyo-style character Ichikawa Kyotaro, who dreams of slicing up his fellow students with a knife. He doesn’t quite fit in at school and has come to despise the behaviour of the popular kids. He thinks he is different and messed up so he hides inside his homicidal fantasies. In truth he is just a lonely boy awaiting someone to trigger his true-self to show through. That trigger is popular and pretty class-mate Anna Yamada. Ichikawa wiles away his lunch hour hiding in the library but there again so does Anna. She... See full review

The Studio Lings/Passione 2023 café-work-life drama is also billed as a comedy yet there is not much to laugh at. The show is not all that easy to watch. Despite it featuring cute girls dressed in ye olde style school uniforms the plot-making is awkward to follow. It is set in a themed café where a loyal clientele get to dine in the surroundings of a mock pre-war German Girl’s Finishing School. In these fantasy surroundings the waitresses play to the audience with intimate girl-on-girl quasi-romantic relationships. Into this slightly weird setup wanders new girl and principal protagonist... See full review

Studio Nut’s 2020 post-apocalyptic sci fi extravaganza is certainly far better than its packaging suggests. Those of you who only bothered to stick it out through episode one or just gave a cursory glance at the blurb may well be missing out. Sure, it has the superficial feel of so many similar looking anime such as “Darling in the Franxx” or “Cagaster of an Insect Cage” but this one is worth sticking with. In episode two the story foregoes any opportunity to slowly build up the mystery of the world of Deca-Dence by going for the full reveal. It may be a bit of a spoiler but... See full review

Seven Arcs’ 2016 slice-of-life comedy has such a generic plot that you would think it would be terribly samey. Yet it mostly defies the odds in becoming a finely executed little show noteworthy for being high enjoyable. Each of the twelve episodes is only two minutes long yet it manages to pack in quite a lot of story. We love the fact that the English translation of this title is "The Landlord is in Puberty". Quite why middle-schooler Chie Satonaka is the landlady of this apartment block is never explained. We join her story at the point a new tenant Maeda moves in. He is mystified and... See full review

Seven Arcs’ 2020 historical drama looks like it was written about contemporary Japan and then dropped into 16th Century Italy. It is ill-fitting and lacks any kind of serious authenticity. It is possible to create truly classic anime as period drama as Kyoto Animation proved in 2018 with sublime “Violet Evergarden”. How does “Arte” fall so short? It is adapted from the manga series by Kei Ohkubo that ran from 2014. Arte Spalletti is a teenager from a noble family that has fallen on hard times. In a deeply patriarchal society, the only choice given to her is to marry a wealthy... See full review

Studio NAZ/Magia Doraglier’s 2018/2019 harem romcom is set in that peculiar world where idiotic teenagers write bestselling light novels. The one saving grace for this nonsense is that it is built around a surprisingly good core idea – it depicts siblings where the boy Yuu Nagami wants to be an author but is unsuccessful. His sister (Suzuka Nagami), on the other hand, is a genius and writes a bestselling novel much to her brother’s shock and envy. She is concerned that their father wouldn’t like her writing so they agree that Yuu will pretend that he wrote the book. So far so good... See full review

Studio NAZ/Magia Doraglier’s 2018 harem romcom is set in that peculiar world where idiotic teenagers write bestselling light novels. The one saving grace for this nonsense is that it is built around a surprisingly good core idea – it depicts siblings where the boy Yuu Nagami wants to be an author but is unsuccessful. His sister (Suzuka Nagami), on the other hand, is a genius and writes a bestselling novel much to her brother’s shock and envy. She is concerned that their father wouldn’t like her writing so they agree that Yuu will pretend that he wrote the book. So far so good... See full review

Studio Gainax’s 2011 gothic-mystery/supernatural horror show is a bundle of highly imaginative stories somewhat spoilt by poor animation. Set in pre-war Britain the historical depiction is all over the timeline oscillating wildly between the 1820s to the 1920s. This may work stylistically in the original manga from a Japanese perspective but anyone in Europe (with more than a passing familiarity with history) will find it a curiously inaccurate mish-mash of periods. Into this fluid history the main character Anthony Disward steps fresh from his role as a pilot in World War One. He has inherited his... See full review

Studio Doga Kobo’s 2016 slice of life is playing in a very crowded field in its comic depiction of the lives of three crazy High School girls. The bar has now been set pretty high for “eccentric high school girls” by Lerche’s “Asobi Asobase” in 2018 and by Lay-duce’s 2019 “O Maidens in Your Savage Season” but these came later so it is an unfair comparison. Poor little rich girl Youko Nishikawa comes from a family that recently lost its fortune. Now she is slumming it in a public school and surviving on bread crusts. At lunchtime she hides in the bushes... See full review

To be honest we were not expecting too much from Studio Sunrise’s 2012 fantasy comedy yet it turns out to be a cut-above the average. It is a good demonstration of just how good this irreverent genre can be if just a little more attention is paid to the actual writing when converting manga to anime. Sixteen-year-old High School girl Ichiko Sakura is selfish, arrogant and unfriendly – a shoddy personality she gets from being parentless yet extraordinarily lucky. In fact, she has an unnatural amount of good fortune, is good looking and very popular with the boys in her class. The problem is that... See full review

Studio Xebec’s 2017 interpretation of the clockpunk light novel series, written by Yuu Kamiya and Tsubaki Himana is big, loud and brash like a kid’s cartoon. Unfortunately, it is borderline unwatchable despite offering some pretty neat looking graphics. The plot is incomprehensible and we would struggle to summarise it. It involves a couple of ultra-moe clockwork automatons mixed up with a character called Naoto Miura who has a special hearing ability allowing him to sense where the problem is in any machine and fix it. He becomes allied to a genius clock technician girl called Marie Bell... See full review

J.C. Staff’s unimaginative 2017 fantasy comedy really doesn’t press any buttons and as soon as it is gone you will forget it. If you watch a lot of anime there is a lot of uncompetitive material out there to wade through. There is a danger of getting jaded as it can all start to look the same. The role of really great anime is to pick you up, wake you up, slap you around a bit and alert you that something really special and worthwhile is about to be experienced. “Urara Meirochou” does none of those things. It has a plot lifted from the pages of Harry Potter and features a bevy of... See full review

Production IMS's 2018 food’n’drink show represents twelve 15-minute endorsements of well-known Japanese alcoholic products. Disarmingly the charms of these intoxicating products is being sold by four good looking young ladies from a house share in Tokyo. They represent the age range 20 thru 27 and consist of Michiru Amatsuki (the naïve country girl), Makoto Kiriyama (University Student), Nao Kiriyama (her older sister) and Kae Midorikawa (wedding planner). There are quite a lot of animes out there that are focussed on the Japanese cultural obsession with food and drink. A lot of them are... See full review

Silverlink’s 2018 charming slice-of-life comedy is focussed on three elementary school girls and their adventures around the Ueno district of Tokyo’s Taitō Ward. The area is known for its park & cultural attractions and you will get to see a lot of these during the show. Mitsuboshi means “three stars” and those stars are little Yui Akamatsu, Saki Kise & Kotoha Aoyama. They have formed a gang they have dubbed “Colors” and their mission is to safeguard the peace of the town. Of course, there really isn’t anything to challenge this peace and most of their... See full review