majestic

This is so bad I have to spoiler it: If you're in the mood for some more super brainless action you can put into the trash bin immediately: MD Geist II: Death Force What could possibly go wrong with a VHS tape cover like that?

I don't mind brainless action stuff and find it somewhat entertaining when done badly enough (or wenn done really well), but that art style is seriously putting me off, and what, guy with a TV for a head, uhm, I think I'll pass. Pretty Cure episode 1! Well that was something... They get a massive upgrade in the movie to boot! Mid Black Rose arc is the show at it's most uneventful, I think. The duels make no sense, the Mikage seminar makes no sense, everything repeats with a steady rythm and barely any comic relief or any change on the horizon. The Akio Ohtori arc also has some repetition focused around the duels - that are essentially retreaded combation duels of the Student Council and Black Rose arcs (you'll see once you get there), except with a lot of half-naked Akio to look at. Well, the duels are thematic character building of a sort. The side characaters all relate to the main characters they steal the pure heart crystal heart sword of in some way. It's not working too well. I thought that was in the first Black Rose arc episode, creepy professor wants to replace Anthy with Boy!Anthy to save his life from some wasting disease he has. There is an explanation of a sort at the end of this arc, that for me at least, retroactively saved the somewhat repetitive and boring preceeding episodes. It never really specifies what the professor thought was going to happen when Boy!Anthy becomes the rose bride, though, or if replacing Himemiya is even possible at all. However, I'm willing to accept that I'll be the only one in this thread with this opinion.

K-On!!, Epsiode 1. Yeah, so, like Sailor Moon, K-On! doesn't have season numbering. It's K-On! for the first one, and K-On!! for the second. The episode continued with the very towned down crazy from the end of K-On!. The new intro song is worse by a factor of infinity. While I actually sort of liked the first one, this one's simply horrible. Didn't like last season's outro song, don't like this one either, so that's less of an issue. Well, what do we have chapter markers for. This is the second opening: You don't need to check your settings, this is intentionaly chipmunkified. It's playing on normal speed, really. I sure checked my video player's settings. So far, so good. With twice as many episodes, I still expect four instead of only two beach episodes, so there's every chance they'll mess up again. The opening of the first season was pretty good and kind of understated (compared to the rest of the season) too. Anyway, I doubt I'll do an episode by epsiode blurb unless it suddenly turns into ecchi nonsense or turns out to be Sailor Moon Crystal awful all of a sudden.

Yes, that's pretty much what happened to me too. I liked Juri/Jury (the subs aren't sure themselves, I've noticed) well enough, but even that was tenuous. That's by design though, and the biggest problem is that the anime isn't upfront with necessary information. You'll see that with the last episode in the Black Rose arc, that's a major "ah, ok, I get it now" situation, or at least I thought it was. Especially beacuse it suddenly turned to full on visual exposition of a rather hilarous kind. Not really a spoiler, but kind of revealing, so I'll spoiler it anyway: Yeah, good luck with that*. Touga will stop sulking in his room eventually. Now, now, really, what do you think is going on between Anthy and her brother? The repetitive nature of these sequences has a point, and it's one of the things that'll never make sense until you've figured everything out. Back when @Bartimaeus and I watched Utena, I've often talked about how the pacing of the show isn't great, and how it is a bad idea to have all these elements going on and the information necessary to decode it only trickling in near the end of the arcs. The Akio Ohtori arc is sadly enough even worse in that regard. Black Rose sort of still plays relatively fair, what with the elevator rides and their implications. Was the episode with Wakaba's schoolfriend yet? That'll be a change. I've speculated that the anime must have bled a good deal of viewership at that point. I can't really corroborate that, of course, but it seems like a forgone conclusion that at least some people would tune out given the repetitive yet mindscrewing nature of all the "what the hell is going on?" moments. Poor Jury. She just can't let go of her crush. I'm not sure if that is something that worked better in the manga, or comes from padding the anime a little too much for runtime, perhaps, but none of the characters are particularily likeable. Like I said in the opening paragraph, that's by design, but it doesn't make for too interesting episodes in between the revealing ones if there's nothing you can look forward to. Except the shadowplay aliens. They're always great. *We can come back to that later. Mhm.

Yuki Kajiura also makes amazing soundtracks.

The OVA is focused on them playing their first non-school live show, on New Year's Eve. Episode spends less than two minutes on them playing. For something nominally about a group of girls forming a school club band there's not much music in it. Works for me, even though the music isn't so bad, actually. It's just okay-ish rock-ish/ska-ish stuff, like, hmmm... like Love Live!'s first piece of music. Gee, I wonder where they got that idea from. Well that was great. Season one was a bit uneven overall, but ended on a really strong note. Hopefully they can keep that up. I guess Mio will be back to whacking people and Sawako will be creepy every now and then, but eh, if there's the occasional episode like the last two in between, then: Was worth it.

I should probably stop reading the spoilers, I kind of want to watch Steins;Gate, even if the plot sounds really convoluted and has time travel. K-On! Bonus episode: Feels like I'm watching an entirely different anime, for some reason. That clearly was the best episode yet. I wonder if that keeps up for season two. Well, time for the OVA I guess.

Well, where else would you start a rewatch. Going back to season one after finishing the series sure feels strange, at least it did for me, the first time around. The recent rewatch not so much, but it's been like 23 years so I guess time makes up for a lot of things. Or deletes many things from memory, because I'm back to thinking I started with R, by the way. I keep waffling around, and while it doesn't really matter, it bothers me that my memory is really hazy. It was either with the initial episodes of R and them getting their memories back or somewhere around the time Usagi was on vacation with her family. It's incredible to see how far they all have come by the end of it. You really just need to ignore SuperS and pretend it never happened. That's for the best, really. Eh, well... he's made one web series that's available online (well, where else), for free: Empires of Evil. It's interesting to see the composition and direction of the shots being so similar to his early work. Heh. Worked on a lot of things, actually, but mostly on local film productions that aren't readily available, and... hm, yeah, they also generally don't have English subtitles available. Which is a pity for Trautmann, the only cop serial (besides Columbo) I actually liked watching, but that's neither here nor there. Heh, good. Still, the things I found on that backup I downloaded with my trusty old dial up modem. Here's one thing where the good old times weren't so great, but I essentially hit the jackpot when our cable TV provider made our area the pilot testing ground for their new internet service. Still, wouldn't want to miss it for the world. Except for when your mother picks up the phone and kills the download you've been waiting for over an hour to finish, some ten seconds before it would have been done. Good idea, I'm looking forward to see if repeated exposure to that bleh intro song will mellow your opinion on it (it didn't, for me), what you think of the Sakura card arc, especially of the first handful of episodes, and the couple of killer episodes that happen in there.

You can always go back in HK and top the completion up. That's about the only reason why I actually started. I'm 20 or so minutes in and pretty far already. Actual speedrunners need like 33 minutes for the any% run, which is pretty impressive. Not bad, as far as deflections go. Pretty nice Sailor Moon gifs. Makes me want to rewatch. I wonder where the discs are, I should probably make sure nobody finds them. I did find one of our student films though, talk about embarrassing. Colleague of ours went to film school after high school. There's a scene in a bar, and it's so clearly just someone's cellar where they keep their booze. Digital effects were pretty much top tier Best of the Worst stuff! And yeah, that's... just a Video CD. I have no idea where the original "master" file is, but it's not really any better. Hm. Heh. edit: Hah, I also found 24 year old backup disc, one has a folder named "Sailor Moon", and there are like promotional pictures from ancient web sites, and some really terrible quality poster scans. Hm. Look at Minako here: edit: I put the disc away before deciding to upload Minako's picture, just before someone comes along and tells me there were no PNGs in 1997. I know that. It's a screenshot. edit: I found a copy of Legend of Lemnear as an actual Video CD. That's slightly less embarrassing than knowing where my copy of LBG is, but only slightly. That is from an official distributor, but I have no idea if it's really licensed. Original Japanese with English subtitles. Pretty much unwatchable. I mean, image quality wise. The OVA itself is, uhm... from what I recall it has well animated action scenes, well animated jiggly boobies (but nothing too explicit) and a hackneyed good vs. evil fantasy plot. No one ever claimed 80ies shonen/seinen was any better than today's, content wise, right? It sure looked a lot better though. Like, a hell lot better, even.

Oh, that. I've misplaced that thing somewhere when I found myself not hating Love Live!, I guess. I'd need to check how much speed is compatible with my brain accepting something as watched. If I miss half the subtitles then that probably won't count. Speaking of that...

To use a Bushism, don't misunderestimate me here. I know I come across as more critical of K-On! than I ever did of Love Live, but that's not because I'm enjoying it less, it's exactly the opposite. K-On! is, for the most part, really enjoyable, if a bit silly. The "sort of" chibi look of the girls isn't so bad after a while - it's not fully chibi but the body proportions are way out of whack for girls that go from being 16 to 18 in two seasons. The overacting is mostly fine, it only really starts to grate once Sawako comes into play, and somehow has to up the ante on the crazy. There are these occasional moments where it kind of appears that the writers were paying their "respects" to the manga this was adapted from, which just like with Love Live!, is seinen. There's very little overt fanservice (the half a second long "huh look at Mio!" bikini scene, mostly), and most fanservice isn't even really there, it's more implied. Like ascene from their first live show, at the end, Mio trips over a cable and falls over, and people in the audience are starting to take pictures with their phones and cameras because Mio lands a bit like Ami in the narrow alley. Except the shot is seen from the group's point of view. Mio is embarrassed by it, and the others are pretty much too, or laughing at it. So far so fine, but Sawako has a video of that and shows it to Azusa later (there's no actual footage to see, it's just them staring at a screen). Without knowing the manga, of course, but these scenes are kind of jarringly out of place compared to the normal flow of the show. Like the one where Sawako is seen having pulled off Mio's pants, I mean, who does that, other than some seinen manga teacher character. What's stopping you from trying? The worst that can happen is you turn it off immediately or perhaps after Sawako goes fully nuts. *shrug* It sure won't be the worst thing you've tried - second worst perhaps if you try the English dub. edit: The music in the anime is what it is, but they perform something like four songs, and they're fairly short. It's a lot less about music than you'd think. I'm imagining watching Devilman Crybaby at 2x the speed, that's kind of hilarious. Maybe I'll try that on Netflix for a quick rewatch.

Probably. Most likely. Good idea. The episodes since were pretty good. Yui proves that she has no idea what she's doing when Azusa talks to her about guitar playing. Yui tunes her guitar "by ear" and doesn't know what "palm muting" is, and Azusa doesn't know whether she should be impressed or annoyed. Things become really funny when Yui's guitar starts having problems and she mentions she had no idea that you should clean and maintain it. Yui's younger sister Ui (yeah, naming... *shrug*) pretends to be Yui for a bit. It's ridiculous, they only notice it because Ui doesn't call Azusa by her stupid nickname. Sure. It was worth a laugh or two though. First season is almost over, last episode now. There's a bonus episode and an OVA before the second one.

Try? Ask Tuvix about "trying" to kill the crew off.

Doesn't seem to affect international distribution anyway, or Netflix hasn't put up any info yet. So we get to "enjoy" VOY on Neftlix longer, "yay!"

There's still a lingering disappointment over it being a scene in the first place. Eh, fine. Probably my fault for expecting something better. I should go into these things with no expectations at all, that should make things easier. Granted, there was no actual grabbing, because Mio was the first attempted target and it was over afterwards, but some things are best left without even an implication. Pfff. At least it's far and in between, so far. Yeah, watch me call it, it's probably just going to get worse, right?

Oh boy. Second beach episode in the first season, and this time Psycho!Teacher is tagging along and they're all bathing, and Sawako is around too and says she can't tell the girls apart without her glasses, so she'll just do it by... I guess that finally establishes that there are zero original ideas in Love Live! (not that THIS in particular was a GREAT original idea, but it's not even that), but I don't know if this one's worse because it's coming from the teacher or handled much better because Mio isn't having any of that and just knocks her out with a well placed whack to the head, while Nozomi gets away with it every time. It's always something with these episodes, it was going really well until that point.

Yeah, I had my fill of CLAMP anime adaptations that aren't Cardcaptor Sakura for the time being. I liked X well enough, of course, but enough is enough for a while. The CCS anime is really, really good (unless one doesn't like almost perfectly written Shojo anime, well... in that case keep your unsophisticated opinion to yourself!). The unmutilated version, that is, and certainly not the newer Clear Card. That's just awful. I wonder how many people will miss out on CCS just because Clear Card was pretty bleh. Just like everyone who watches Sailor Moon Eternal on Netflix. Ah, the pain. It burrrrrrrnsssssssssssssssssss my precious. Nasty. Nasty.

He did cause the whole incident with the egg, or at least that was the implication, was it not? Plus, in the film (spoiler again, KP!) I watched episode nine of K-On! (out of roughly 40 episodes in total). Azusa understandably has a crisis and can't really believe how a bunch of absolutely unmotivated slackers could possibly play as well as they did in their club presentation for new pupils, and she's right in wondering that. There's no real reason they could, looking at this realistically. It's explained away by the power of friendship (and stage presence) being a factor, rather than only pure skill or determination. Was a sweet moment because she was asking Mio - more or less - what a gifted bassist like her is doing in a group of clueless, if funny, people. Adding Azusa to the group made them more determined to practice and improve. Psycho-overdrive mode or no, it almost looks like someone planned out the character progression here.

I might misremember from sort of binging from this point to keep up but didn’t the shadow girls do something important in this one?

I don't mind the hammy theatrics in Japanese (but it's not winning me over, either), but that English dub sounds really bad for me. The only thing that made Madoka worse for me (as non-native, anyway) was Madoka's piercing, shrill voice. Which wasn't much better in the original either, so that's appropriate casting, just with... worse direction, I guess. I'd like K-On! more if they would just talk normally and only Shatner it up every now and then. Or keep it limited to one character that's not on screen all the time. Kind of like Nanami. You're just saying that because he starts trolling Nanami. Well, in that case you'll need to gauge if the funny outweighs the gouging or not. At least you didn't immediately swoon and start watching, because that would have made me like: Heh. edit: The girls are now in second grade, and Mio gets transferred to a different class. Well, that's not going to go well for her. Poor Mio. edit 2: One of the first years joins the Keion club. She comes to the club meeting in the music room, expecting them to practice and all that jazz, and the girls are doing the usual, sitting around, goofing off, drinking tea and eating cake that Tsumugi always brings with her. The new girl is completely flustered and thinks they'll get chewed out when Sawako comes in. She just sits down and orders tea with milk. It's funny how quickly they managed to establish funny running jokes in the series. Still not really into the character art, but it beats Girls' Last Tour in looks, at least. edit 3: There we go with the insanity again. Poor new girl thinks it's a test to see if she's interested in playing, starts practicing on her own and Sawako flies off her handle, yelling at her that she's making noise while she's drinking tea. New girl starts to cry over that, and Ritsu just calls her a moron. Good job. Well new girl is called Azusa, but everyone calls er Azu-nyan (i.e. Azu-Meow) because Sawako forced her to wear cat ears. Yeah. Really. Tone this down a notch and it would be really great. So it's just mostly funny and good when its good. Ah well, can't have everything. Still beats Magic User's Club.

There's the episode in season one with the fake Sailor Moon when Venus finally shows up, but otherwise... seems like a missed opportunity all right. While that CGI travesty doesn't deserve anything else, I guess you're right, there's still the old one. Skoop it is then. Or maybe Skoopie. Yes, they are. Kind of. I mean, that's fine. Mostly. I actually like K-On!, I just meant it's not easy to recommend based on just how the characters are... presented? It's a combination of being nuts, voice acting and the animation (that includes the art style). There's the situation when Ritsu finds out that their teacher was in the Keion club herself, and was the guitarist and vocalist of the group, with neon pink hair and half a death growl, and they're all sort of surprised the otherwise reserved and polite teacher has a past like that. Ritsu then proceeds to immediately blackmail her with it and starts calling her Sawa-chan (well, what a Japanese diss for a teacher). That's "normal" for Ritsu, and Yui isn't much better, as such when you want to show that the teacher's a bit unhinged, they needed her to get full scale psychotic for it. Ah, but why talk about it, here, have a look: Well, spoilers, obviously. Well, if you find the clips funny and not "gouge your eyes and ears out" cringe, then you might actually kinda like it, at least from only having seen half the first season. Yeah, and THIS is what happens when you turn on the English audio track: Darker brown haired girl (Yui) is Stephanie Sheh, just in case that's not entirely discernable from the absolutely wonky way she delivery her lines. Imagine Usagi sounding like that all the time. Getting Madoka flashbacks here? Because I do. I mean, I watched the Madoka movies with the English dub, after all.

Poor Juri's fate, always forgotten. Ah, well... That's a mouthful. How about Dumbo? I know, we talked about Bond before, exactly when talking about the little things that aren't problematic until they are. Mostly because Jay liked Skyfall. Well, nobody's perfect. Had a good laugh now. K-On!... now that I'm halfway through the first season, here are some random observations: I'm laughing a lot, which is a good sign for a slice of life comedy, but it's more than that, you have these random 4 girls that meet each other (except Mio and Ritsu who have been friends for longer) through a highschool extracurricular activity club and slowly become friends. They're actually effecting each other in a nice way. Like Mio becoming more confident and even agreeing to sing, Yui becoming less of a person who is quick to be interested in something and then just giving up on it before even trying, while Tsumugi (yeah, no wonder everyone calls her Mugi), the obligaroty rich girl of the group notices for the first time how it is to have to save up and work for something. When Yui wants to buy a guitar, she's taking a ten month advance on her allowance from her mother, and still can't afford it. They all take a part time job to earn money for Yui, even Tsumugi. Yui then decides to buy a cheaper guitar, not the Gibson Les Paul she wants. She does get the Gibson in the end because, in typical comedy "happenstance" Tsumugi's father just happens to be the music store's owner, and the manager gives her an 80% discount on the guitar after Mugi learns what haggling is and just walks up to the poor manager saying she wants a discount on a guitar. Ritsu even does something next to absolutely nothing with her life for the first time, and her Minakoish tendencies (she's reall liberally hamming it up even more than Yui, forgets things, doesn't care about important things, doesn't apply any effort but is shown to be pretty good at school life when she does, etc.) are curbed a little. Insofar it's pretty good. If season two really becomes a little more serious, it could be legitimately great. Assuming they drop the teacher out of it at some point, or tone her down by like two Minako's and half a Rei. Really. Still, in terms of striking a balance between funny and serious and characters that really go well together, the gold standard is still Sailor Moon. Well, and CCS, but yeah, that's mostly cute and funny, not funny and serious in almost perfect balance. Pity about the borderline psychotic character presentation. And the waste of the English voice talent.

Yes, she is. I mean, she really is that, in terms of the narrative, at this point. An object to be won in duels, but you could already see that she's not just that by the way she sat at the table with DIO after he won her. Or is that in episode 12 and you haven't seen that yet? I'm spoilering the rest because I really don't know what was in 11 and 12:

Ah, okay, got the wrong impression then, never mind. edit: Because of the character complaints and the character art style, I mean.

I dunno man, perhaps you should drop it. It's not like anyone's forcing you to watch it. Unlike @Bartimaeus who was forced by his watching partner and me simply because I tried it. I get the feeling you don't see anything redeeming in it. Up until the beginning of the Akio Ohtori arc I was enjoying it well enough. Kinda lost me there. Might really be better on a rewatch, with the benefit of improved understanding. Hm. edit: K-On! just had a Christmas themed episode where it really went off the rails. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy watching it, and it was just the one episode so far and it was quite funny for the most part, until it suddenly became really, really strange. It's like having a few loose marbles is a job requirement for anime directors. edit 2: Spoiler, as an explanation: