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Jan 22, 2026
To be honest, I was probably watching this against my better interests and, aura/vibe-wise, I got pretty much what I expected.
But for it to clash with me IDEOLOGICALLY too? Holy shit, it's like a 2 on 1 assault on my senses.
I will say you can probably knock this up a point or two if you enjoy Cutesy Girl Shows, I don't really know what show to consider this show's North Star but there's a definite Aura to this show that I think just isn't my scene or arms race.
Kaguya is a total spoiled brat but you're supposed to find her charmingly annoying, moe, and
...
quirky.
Didn't work for me, could've sniped that little shit in the forehead 10 minutes in and gotten a better movie imo.
(Speaking of 10 minutes, you can watch the first, like, 10 minutes and get a good grasp of what Aura I'm talking about, hell, even the trailers were giving this aura)
But Kaguya being a spoiled brat, I wanna orient on that. Because it's the river from which all the misshapen, foul-tasting, ugly fruit of the poisonous tree flows from.
(before I go any further, I just want to say the songs were disposable bubblegum at best, annoying crap at worst. I'd say the nadir of this movie was actually when they played World is Mine. Fine song musically [although not great] but the lyrics were so smug and self-serving the movie actually pissed me off. It actively lessened any interest I could've ever had in Vocaloids knowing this was one of their flagship songs that even a lowly peasant like I knew the title of it, if not the content. It doesn't help the context of which it played in but you're gonna have to let me ramble a bit more down below before I can elaborate on that.)
I have not read the original tale. I have not seen the Ghibli movie. This is, broadly speaking, my first dive into the Princess Kaguyaverse.
So, Iroha is some overworked student who is more or less self-sufficient and yeah yeah blah blah blah, *insert Japanese salaryman stand-in here*
I read a summary of the original tale for this review and I'm pretty sure the OG Kaguya doesn't fall in love with anyone so why they chose, of all people, the "bamboo cutter" who raises Kaguya to fall in love with her this time, no clue.
I mean, I know why, because this is escapist bubblegum corporate garbage, but like that alone automatically killed my goodwill for this movie.
I guess Kaguya grew up to an acceptable age within a couple days so it's not truly like Iroha/Kaguya is filled with the problematic power dynamic that "Iroha raised Kaguya from babyhood" implies but on the other hand, she also mentally stunts out at (metaphorical) baby who throws a tantrum any time she needs to do something she doesn't want to and needs shiny jangly keys to not be bored to death.
Like, I guess you can just excuse her as a bratty anime girl because I'm sure there are 100 examples of "serious anime guy x bratty anime girl" you could throw at me but it's Iroha technically having raised her that just twists that knife a little more.
From there, you can pretty much extrapolate what happens here and you'd probably be correct but a lot of this movie actually takes place in Tsukuyomi, a VR world!
Let's talk about escapism.
I mentioned this when I reviewed Baan of all shows but I don't like isekai, like, on a conceptual level (CP Kaguya is not an isekai but just work with me here).
I find it to be a Not Good message that if your life sucks, you can just escape to a better world. I will say at least CPK isn't saying you've gotta die first but "you gotta put your nose to the grindstone so you can feed this empty corporate machine money so you can spend time with your friends over the digital airwaves instead of the now non-existent Third Spaces", like... idk, man, I don't think we should be encouraging working your ass off just to blow your money on video games and Second Life x Discord (I realize the irony of me saying this all while wasting my time writing a review on some shitty movie on fucking MyAnimeList but I'm also not saying that this is a good life path and that you should also watch anime and write reviews for a hobby).
More broadly speaking, they almost defiantly spit in the face of the original tale (which trust me, the quality of the movie alone was doing that, you didn't need to do it yourself) by going "uguu, we need a HAPPY ENDING, this tale's ending sucks!"
I feel like, in general, it's just encouraging people to be selfish, spoiled brats. That's the message I got from the movie tbh. Iroha WAS being too self-sacrificial, granted, but Kaguya is so ~moe~ that she gets rewarded in every single instance and Iroha ends up overcorrecting by the end.
(going back to the World is Mine scene, this is why I hated it so much. Kaguya is such a brat that World is Mine IS something she would sing but the problem is now World is Mine isn't just some disembodied voice singing it, it's through the mouth of someone I've already grown to dislike. If this were the villain song like Easy Street from Annie or Killer Instinct from Bring It On: The Musical or something, maybe then it'd be good conceptually [if not my favorite musically] but we're supposed to LIKE Kaguya. We're supposed to be HAPPY this scene is occurring.)
The direction was fine. It was a good looking movie. Certainly not in my top 10 prettiest anime mediacontent or anything (it's not even the best this season, I prefer Fate/strange Fake or even JJK S3) but like it sure looked pretty, had nice flashing colors, it could occasionally do funny gags (I liked Kaguya's first stream, that got a laugh out of me).
Like, idk man.
I have a feeling I'm just being a cynic here, my oomf was watching this at the same time (separately, we weren't watching it together, it just so happens that we both started and finished the movie around the same time) and she adored it and had completely different takeaways so I'm sure there's a positive slant here, it's just that the messages that I personally took away and understood from this movie were nasty and gross and it was delivered in the most, like, Ready Player One-ass jackoff session for the idol (and specifically Vocaloid/VTuber) industry (and League of Legends for some reason? idk if this was the director auditioning to direct a battle shounen or something [he failed, by the by] but a strange amount of time is dedicated to a League match) possible.
The movie pissed me off hard, to be honest, the only real reason it didn't get a 1 is because I'm trying to be nicer and I don't just wanna start throwing out 1s to every show that pissed me off. But, like, on top of pissing me off, I can't think of anything that I could take away from this movie and say that I enjoyed it.
It really starts and stops at:
1. I liked the Lunarians' designs. It reminded me of Land of the Lustrous. I think Lustrous did it better but, like, did I enjoy the Lunarians' designs? Yes. So good point there.
2. It did stoke the desire to consume more Princess Kaguya media just to see if this is CPK specifically or the story. I might throw on the Ghibli movie or something soon, idk.
The last show I gave a 2 was Summer Time Rendering but at least that had a hot waifu and a song I liked.
Like, I'm sure there's an audience that'll adore this movie. To be honest, in that sense, maybe this should actually be a Recommended review because I'm sure it'll probably land with the audience it seeks to attract.
But I gotta be free. (I gotta do what?) I gotta be me. Most importantly, I gotta believe.
And I believe this movie was a waste of 2 and a half hours.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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Jan 21, 2026
It sucks because I'm trying to be as nice to this show as I can because hypothetically, it's not a total wash.
I love Hizuru Minakata, great character.
OP1 is a genuine candidate for my top 25 greatest OPs. In fact, I made my updated list yesterday and it got 18th.
Hell, the first half (the portion covered by, ironically enough, OP1) was pretty solid, my oomf was watching it at the same time and I said roughly 9 episodes in that it was an 8/10.
(Generally, I thought the mystery and intrigue before they had all the cards on the table was enough to make a gripping show.
...
In addition, the battles were more horror-centric since they either didn't know how to kill the Shadows or they at least didn't have 1700 superpowers on their side)
But fuck me, man. I don't think a show has actively upset me more (especially from the quality of the show alone, no outside factors), maybe ever but the only ones that I can think of that come close, I never liked.
It hurts even more that I liked Summer Time Rendering at one point, that I rooted for it, that I wanted it to stick the landing.
Because by the end, I stopped questioning how the (increasingly bullshit) events were occurring, I stopped caring about the fates of the characters (genuinely said "fuck them all, I hope they all die" at one point), I just kind of shrugged my shoulders at it.
I can't speak to how the manga was but the direction here is lifeless, bland, and uninspiring.
Once my friend pointed out the abuse of white impact lines, I couldn't stop seeing them.
There are so many scenes whenever it needs to be serious or intense or whatever (not to mention the "humorous scenes" that also used them) that their way of depicting this is Da Scene but with impact lines bordering it.
Instead of putting any thought or effort behind how to depict the group meetings, they'll just be like "Me and Hizuru's groups met up in the cafe. Here's what we discussed. We had a very productive conversation." with shots of the outside background.
Not a single action scene was exciting, I laughed like once, I can't think of a single scene that stood out to me directorially. It is An Adaptation that sufficiently covers the manga it is adapting and it does nothing more.
Speaking of comedy, there's a lot of, like, soft ecchi-pilled scenes?
Doesn't even go that far, honestly, there's a scene where Hizuru is in the shower and they are discussing actually plot-relevant things unrelated to the shower or her body and Ushio's just like "hey, can I grope your breasts? Wow, these G-CUP breasts must give you SHOULDER PAIN from having SUCH LARGE BREASTS, huh?"
They don't show her groping Hizuru's breasts. She does it but you don't get to see it.
I guess score 1 for Summer Time Rendering that it's an adult woman firmly in her mid to late 20s getting sexualized most of the time instead of the teenagers but, like... idk, man
Hizuru's a pretty striking figure with tons of notable features. You're telling me NOBODY can recognize this woman (notably one who previously LIVED ON THE ISLAND and doesn't really look all that dissimilar to her teenage form other than her more curvaceous body and a different pair of specs) who is like 6'7 (SSP's note: According to the Summer Time Rendering Fandom page :nerd:, she's 5 foot 6 and like 133 pounds. Whatever, man.), brawny, wields a fucking sledgehammer, and is the only main character wearing glasses... nobody can recognize her until Shinpei's like "oh yeah, she also has huge tits".
She's not even the only one with huge tits, we see Ushio's multiple times and I mean sure, they're smaller, but it's not like there's nothing there.
To say nothing of both of Shinpei's adoptive sisters wanting that Shinpussy.
Speaking of which, let's talk about the characters.
They introduce an interesting thematic idea where Mio's talking to someone and they're like "wow, Mio, it's like you're [her sister] Ushio's shadow"
Like, the Jungian concept of a Shadow, the unconscious part of the personality containing repressed, denied, or unacknowledged aspects of the self.
That's pretty cool. Hypothetically, it could be really interesting looking at sibling dynamics and how parts of yourself are reflected in them and how that affects the dynamic.
3 problems though.
1. The fact that they say it out loud. That line up there? That's unironically beat for beat what they say, basically. Way to show, not tell.
2. I don't really see it? Mio seems like the Rowdy Childhood Friend, the one that naturally gets rejected like the air that she breathes in romcoms (forget that this was supposed to be a mystery thriller). Ushio is... she seems like a rowdy fiery tomboy to me.
Honestly, it'd make more sense if Hizuru were Ushio's sister in that case. I could see that. The smart, level-headed, aloof girl and the fiery tomboy. Hizuru has dark hair, violet eyes. Ushio has blonde hair, blue eyes. I just don't see it in Mio, by comparison.
3. Even that aside, any potential that had is just thrown away for love triangle shit that doesn't matter and has an obvious conclusion.
Shinpei and the Kofune sisters at least... have a character. Sou's just... like, what even is his character? Who on God's green Earth would ever put Sou on their MAL favorite characters list (SSP's note: I checked the characters list to see how many characters wore glasses, apparently 20 people have Sou in their favorites. Should this find its way to one of the 20 Sou fans, I'm sorry)?
Tokiko has an arc deep as a puddle and then joins the main cast, mainly to be Mio's Friend.
I'm not saying Hizuru's The Greatest Character Ever Written but like, she has a defined personality and you understand why she does what she does. Like, of all the mentor characters to come out of anime, she sure is one of them and I enjoyed her presence and I missed her when she was not actively involved in the story which is more than I can say about the other characters.
They set up 2 main villains but the problem is they spend so long making Shide just this giant blob of "fuck the world, I hate you specifically, Shinpei, suffah bish suffah" that they gotta quickly stack Evil Deeds on him to build him up as any sort of worthy character.
We eventually get Shide's backstory and it's the most 2010s Disney-ass villain story where he's evil because fuck you and I wasn't Shooken by any of the reveals, I was just like "oh... yeah, okay, I guess that makes sense"
Idk man, he's so cartoonishly evil that you can't really take him seriously and he doesn't have the fights to back him up, doesn't have interesting powers, doesn't have an interesting world view, hell, he's not even a good hate sink. The dude just fucking sucks.
Haine... idk, man, I can't take this seriously. I know small children have their places in horror, both in Western and J-Horror, but I mean look at her. Tiny-ass runt, made me laugh whenever she made that constipated face in OP2. And then they try to make her sympathetic and no, no, too late for that buddy, did not land at all for me. I can't really speak on this more without getting into explicit spoilers but it was too late, it's not believable how they did it, and they don't set up the new villain dynamic well enough imo.
(I don't really have all that much to say about the ending, partly because of spoilers and partly because, like, that sure is a fucking ending, huh, that sure is the ending one would write to the story that was told in these 25 episodes, I guess)
I also want to say how weird it is that Shinpei is the only male allowed to be cool.
Sou's most defining character trait is "likes Mio but because Shinpei is so Cool and Awesome and Hot, Mio likes Shinpei more" so Sou just has a damp crusty sock for a companion at this point.
Nezu is cool enough but he's also like 75 so he's clearly out of the range of Hizuru, let alone Ushio or Mio.
Totsumaru is a sleazy but good-hearted cop but he's clearly the butt-monkey (and also barely matters in general), which is a shame considering he's the only not decrepit adult male who's allowed to take ANY action.
It's like they're all being handicapped so the Awesome Teen Protagonist with the Sans eye can shine. It's battle shounen-ass pandering but it's genuinely worse than most battle shounens in that regard. It is laid on SO thick that Shinpei is Manly and Desirable.
Speaking of battle shounens...
I do not mind coming up with dumb bullshit powers if we are in a battle shounen. I love the weird, kooky, out there Stands of something like JoJo Part 6. I love Dragon's Dream (although the fight itself isn't a top-tier one). I love Heavy Weather. Fun Fun Fun is a guilty pleasure of mine.
I love those Stand memes where it's like "oh, if it's raining in London, I have a 25% additional chance of landing my sniper shots but only if you're inside of a comic book store 30 minutes before closing" like that fucking RULES... in a battle shounen.
In a mystery thriller? It's not so awesome.
I can tolerate some anime bullshit. Shinpei can time loop, okay, sure, I believe it.
But in this show, it gets to the point where they are unironically using late-stage JoJo Stands and they just... have those powers.
Unironically, they use their copy/erase power to destroy the atmosphere because they're "inside a container".
That was probably the point that this show lost me.
You cannot have this mystery thriller about this ONE time looper and his friends facing off against a mysterious shadowy force and then suddenly give this girl, that girl, that guy fucking Bankais.
It's just not the genre for that.
Hell, there's one specific thing the ANTAGONISTS did in the final fight that both me and my oomf were totally flabbergasted by. I'm still not particularly sure what the logic behind it was. I guess if your thought process began and ended at "rule of cool", it was cool, but the problem was Summer Time Rendering so thoroughly pissed on my immersion and suspension of disbelief that all I could think of was "how the fuck was that possible"
If you want to make a battle shounen... make a battle shounen. I have no inherent issue with battle shounens but it just doesn't translate from the rather good first half, not to me.
I was willing to accept Some supernatural powers but by the end, it was like every person on Shinpei's team could shoot laser beams out of their dicks because Haine sneezed on them in 2012 because it shifted the coordinates of the fourth dimension 2 degrees off the polar grid.
It got to the point where my oomf and I had an argument over if the show even had a power system at all because almost every single character who actually gets into fights gets some bullshit power that completely circumvents the issue.
To be fair, there have been shows that have made a successful leap to battle shounen from some other genre. Even Nisioisin himself has done it.
Maybe they could've salvaged it if they had good battle direction but see above.
The battles are just as flat and lifeless as the rest of the show. Outside of the couple memorably bullshit moments, it's just godawful battle choreography. Which I think is part of the problem with the transition to battle shounen.
If you transition to a genre, any genre (for example, this same logic applies to a slice of life -> horror), you still have to be competent at the genre you transition TO (and from).
Summer Time Rendering wouldn't have been a good battle shounen if that's what it always was and I think that's really the core issue.
If Summer Time Rendering stuck the landing, I likely wouldn't have said anything because I would've been enjoying what I was watching.
It's a shame because I liked the cat and mouse game between Shinpei and Haine regarding the time loop system, again, this show is not completely irredeemable but what it is is a complete waste of potential of whatever it could've been.
What started out as a thriller with ONE main gimmick you could center it around against a force with the power to copy things and move like shadows just turns into a battle manga where fucking Zato-1, Yoshikage Kira, and Shulk from Xenoblade Chronicles fight off against Mother Gaea herself and like at this point, what are we doing here?
It's a bitter disappointment and a waste of a premise that throws it away to be a fourth-string Shounen Jump manga that'd get axed in 19 chapters.
I'd rather read Shadow Eliminators, at least it knew what it wanted to be.
I've actively defended Oreimo. I've centered my online persona around a character from Noted Problematic Series Bakemonogatari. The literal next series I'm planning to start (not counting movies/bonus cours of a show I was already watching) is High School DxD. And this? This show right here? This is genuinely the most EMBARRASSED I've ever been to be an anime fan.
We can't JUST have a gripping, compelling thriller?
I can't imagine trying to defend this artform if this was playing on the television, taking an interesting premise and making it a vehicle for sexualization, teenage harem fantasies, and Summer Time Z-ass fights (hell, that's mean to Dragon Ball Z, it's not even Dragon Ball GT or Super-level).
It's a bastardized shounenization of what COULD'VE been a good, compelling anime. Hell, even if it was a 6/10 like Higurashi, that would've been miles better than what we actually got.
I promise you, you will have a better (Summer) Time just looking up Hizuru fanart.
What a waste.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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Jan 15, 2026
When I got this for my Secret Santa, I was a little apprehensive.
In part because all I got was one sentence saying it had "great dialogue that avoided all the usual cliches", in part because I am historically not a huge fan of shows with an anthropomorphic cast.
I was willing to trust the vision but it had a bit of a climb to make.
...okay, yeah, you know what, fair enough, this was a damn good show.
I had a few minor gripes (one of the characters speaks in rhymes/rap and that was really annoying, I'm not the biggest fan of the last scene, the mystery of
...
what was behind Odokawa's door... I get what they were going for but I didn't care for how that was resolved) but generally speaking, great show.
Is the dialogue great and does it avoid all the usual cliches? I'd say, generally speaking, it does avoid the "usual cliches" although idk if I'd consider that all that big a hurdle given the genre it was in. A lot of the things anime dialogue would usually get made fun of, OddTaxi tends to avoid. Idk if I'd call the dialogue an all-timer, nor would I make it the one selling point, but it (outside of the rapping character) does its job well.
To me, I think the biggest selling point is the intersecting storylines. Pretty much every character introduced (so not, like, the landlord lady or the bartender but every character who actually gets focus) is set in motion so they somehow interact with Odokawa and the underlying plot that ends up becoming Operation Oddtaxi and I just think that's so cool.
Even something like the radio comedy duo that plays in Odokawa's taxi technically has some connection to Operation Oddtaxi somehow, it genuinely is pretty much EVERY character.
While I expressed my dissatisfaction with a certain mystery up above, I feel like the other mysteries are handled pretty well, at least to the level where I was satisfied by the reveal and my immersion wasn't broken.
The visuals also look pretty nice. Kind of showing my hand here but the show this had to endure the most comparisons to (for me) beforehand was Beastars and among other things, it succeeds at not making the animals look like total freaks. They look nice and cute and like something you'd want to buy a plushie of. In general, the whole show has this nice, cozy artstyle (although the cars are 3D which... sure, fine, whatever).
In a way, it kind of reminds me of a Boogiepop or Durarara where it's a criss-crossing, intersection of urbanites affected by city living and how their paths connecting changes their lives and OddTaxi carries this out very well. It succeeds at being a thriller, a mystery, it's a success in my eyes.
I didn't end up giving it a 10 for reasons above but the fact that I even considered it is higher than I ever thought I'd give it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Dec 31, 2025
I technically gave this a higher score than 100M's mangaka's other project, Orb, but it's mostly due to the direction because this movie just kind of... existed for me, story-wise.
Part of it is that it follows a similar chronological structure to Orb. The only thing is... Orb wasn't about one guy, it was about the continuation and the historical struggle for the acknowledgement of heliocentrism. While you could've easily told that with one protagonist, it made sense to have multiple "chapters" in the story of heliocentrism since it obviously wasn't just one person involved.
100 Meters has one, at best two, protagonists but they're existing in
...
the same era chasing the same goal.
It starts out with our protagonist, Togashi, running and eventually meeting our deuteragonist, Komiya (which, honestly, kind of forgettable, I had to actively think about what the fuck this dude's name was for a second during the latter part of the movie because I was remembering him as "Moriya") which okay, gave off heavy Look Back vibes, but I'm here for it.
And then it skips to junior high championships for, like, 5 minutes, skims over it and into high school. Which, okay, we've got a cast of characters now, got a way to develop our protagonists, we're eating good, right?
They finally race each other and it timeskips ANOTHER 10 years and at this point, my investment totally died.
It's too skittish to sit down and cook but honestly? It was kind of boring as a result.
It throws too many characters at you to care about the majority of them because it follows a similar structure to Orb... which had 25 episodes. This movie? Like, 1 hour and 45 minutes.
The Childhood chapter has bullies who kind of mistreat Komiya (who I genuinely almost called Moriya writing this sentence). Never seen again.
The High School chapter gives both Togashi and Komiya casts to work with.
They don't matter.
Naturally, by the time they reach Adulthood, they don't even have the time to bother.
One would think they put all their time into developing Togashi and Komiya then but... I don't know, not really?
The captain of Komiya's track team is like "please stop running, Komiya! Your running form is fucked up and you'll cripple yourself if you keep going" and Komiya's like "lol, okay, worth it if I get a gold medal" and you'd think that'd come back but no, that's literally never a plot point again. The next time we see Komiya, he's totally fine and has a completely different issue.
He gets a pep talk and immediately trashes the problem he had before that.
The junior high championships mini-section is just an excuse so that Togashi isn't dominating Roman Reigns-style over the entire track world because it fixes itself in the most cliche way possible.
The other boy on his high school team has his own problem but he just... kinda vanishes.
I genuinely don't think there's a single character in this movie that has a consistent, well-written arc.
I said this up above but this worked for Orb (my problems with the latter half of the story aside) because they had enough time to tell their stories and it was tragic if they couldn't because that's how the church treated heliocentrists back in the day.
100 Meters has no reason to be jumping around this much without a damn good reason and it never comes up with one.
However, give all my love to the production team and director. I'm a huge fan of the Flowers of Evil anime so I popped the fuck off when I realized a lot of this movie was going to be rotoscoped. It doesn't look as ugly in this movie artstyle-wise but to be fair, 100 Meters also wasn't trying to be unsettling.
I will say, it's pretty damn noticeable and it kind of took me out a little because I was giggling and going "it's just like Flowers of Evil!" so maybe that's why they haven't been using rotoscoping for anime (at least not to this degree), lol.
That aside, they've got quite a few cool scenes that are animated well beyond just rotoscoping. The final high school race in the rain in particular is a total standout. I also love the music that plays during the races, the way it starts with the starting pistol, the way it enhances the mood of each race.
To be honest, the production alone gave this 2 or 3 points, this movie was lowkey super fucking boring.
I think the underlying story is something that can be told, even with the segmented chapter style, I just don't think it works the way it does.
I'm being vague to avoid spoilers (although tbh, I've probably said too much already) but the way they tell the story kind of kills my interest in seeing the two face off. In terms of pacing and, like, storyboarding/plotting the movie out, it's a very messy story.
It's worth seeing on a technical level but I thought it kind of sucked outside of that. Mileage may vary.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Dec 31, 2025
Going into this, I didn't really expect much.
I wasn't going to watch it because "lol, generic harem show, amirite" but a friend wrote a positive review so I put it at the tail end of my 2025 seasonal catchup.
Even when I was watching it, around 4 minutes in the first episode, I finally got an establishing shot of the 3 waifus and... I was kind of underwhelmed (which... to be fair, that's still kind of the case, I like them as characters but I'm not really attracted to any of them per se, I'll touch on that more in a little bit).
I almost turned it
...
off and put on a different show because at least I found that girl attractive.
However, once I locked in (after 15 real life minutes of deliberation)... holy shit, this show actually kind of rocks?
It kind of plays with the "average MC-kun bumps into a menagerie of bombshell waifus" by centering the anime around that theme.
The MC-kun, Yu Ayase, is less than average at everything. He sucks at athletics, isn't particularly smart, and despite being the son of a famous actress, he sucks at acting. The only things he has going for him are his looks (which is one thing, he's not exactly the kind of character they'd put alongside, say, Taiki Inomata or Wakana Gojou [NOT THAT I'M SHITTING ON THEM AS CHARACTERS, merely commenting on more notable romcom MCs with designs I've seen called "bland" and "samey"] in those slander pictures), he's a good househusband, and he's nice.
The Mikadono sisters, on the other hand, are natural-born prodigies. Niko is a karate champ who can beat even professional males, Kazuki is the star performer of her theatre troupe, and Miwa is the youngest shogi champ ever. Since Yu is so cute and femboypilled, the Mikadono sisters (Niko and Kazuki in particular) play the role of the "prince" which leads perfectly into the crux of the problem with them: Being a prodigy kind of sucks?
They hardly take breaks, have to carefully ration out what they eat, and are constantly locked in. When you first meet them, they want nothing to do with this absolute goober in Yu, the representation of what they could've been and could be if they are caught lacking.
In addition, their dad is basically only interested in how they are as prodigies, it's Yu who has to take this fractured family dynamic and try and glue it back together (since he himself knows what it's like to have a fractured family, desperately trying to live vicariously through the Mikadono sisters to create a second family for himself). They so desperately want to be more than they are, more than "Good at karate/acting/shogi", full-fledged women who can laugh and have fun and LIVE but it's not until the exact person they feared becoming comes in that changes their lives.
And it's not their natural talent that allows them to succeed in their endeavors in this show, it's them embracing their humanity. Niko can take the stick out of her ass when fighting, Kazuki isn't just Observing what it's like to be feminine, these are things that being with Yu has allowed them to embrace despite their previous life experiences.
They even add a fifth character who gives us a perspective from a complete outsider, one who isn't a prodigy like the sisters nor a "failed prodigy" like the MC. She comes from (relatively speaking) nothing and had to make it all on her own on hard work.
In general, I think Miwa's arc is probably the strongest since she has a strong character to bounce off of and I liked her, like, "lesson" the most. It was kind of sad knowing she didn't even get to do what she WANTED to do per se.
I'm not going to necessarily say this applies to every show universally but generally, for romcoms, I tend to find the more... disposable ones tend to live and die by their waifus. By that, I mean it's genuinely the only thing I think of when I think about the show. This is something like Rent-a-Girlfriend or even Blue Box (not that it's nearly as bad as RaG).
I feel like the more high-quality romcoms are the ones where I can reflect more on the PLOT, the moments, what actually happens in the story (or at the very least, it's really fucking funny like Urusei Yatsura or 100 Girlfriends). This is something like Kaguya-sama or KareKano.
As I said earlier, I don't think any of the sisters will be winning a waifu contest in my eyes any time soon, but I DO want to see more of them as CHARACTERS, learning and developing and growing as people. To be honest, "which one is MC going to pick" isn't really a question that came to mind too often.
I don't want to excessively glaze this show and hype it up like it's THE greatest romcom (or even harem) of all time. The production, while solid, isn't anything to write home about. Due to being 1 cour, it's only got so much time to develop each waifu so you only get like 2 or 3 episodes each that focus on them (although I did like that they kind of segmented each sister into her own part so they each get a big spotlight, even though the others are still in the background) and should this not get a second season, it's not like you'll know how their love lives end up. It's still a harem anime at the end of the day, if you don't like harems, I doubt this'll change your mind.
But if you can fuck with it, it's well worth your time.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Dec 28, 2025
I was a bit shocked to see a new Key anime in the big 2025, it seems like the Key era has come and gone at this point, so to see an adaptation of a 7 year old VN of theirs was a surprise.
Speaking of surprises, I still think the Key formula holds up pretty well.
The only Key anime I've seen as of writing (other than Summer Pockets because duh) are the 2006 adaptation of Kanon and Angel Beats but even so (especially with Kanon) you can see what you're in for if you've seen a Key anime before.
As you'd expect given one was adapted
...
from a VN and one was not, this follows a lot closer to the Kanon side where you've got "routes" exploring a few characters I presume the MC could end up with in the VN before it wraps up with the "true" "golden ending" with the main girl, all the while they keep punching at your heart hoping for some tears which I can say happened a few times.
Maybe it was the VA (no offense to him, he had a perfectly cromulent performance but it's not a very "standout" voice) but the MC felt pretty bland to me. He had a few (kind of cringe) lines about being a broken bird and needing to Find Himself but honestly, I don't think it was fleshed out enough to really warrant the dramatics. Like, they DO expand upon why exactly he's "broken" but idk, it didn't do much for me. Otherwise, he sure was a character that existed.
The girls were pretty decent. I liked Kamome but the problem is her and Tsumugi (the protagonist of the second "route") kind of blip from the story after their arcs are done so they don't really stick out, unfortunately. Kamome's arc was probably the high point of the show since it didn't really have anything to have to follow up to and it was a nice look at the Key formula in action.
Tsumugi, however, I did not like at all. I say "uguu" in my day-to-day life more than I should so I'm not totally foreign to Key girls and their strange utterances but the amount of times Tsumugi said "Mugyu" kind of ticked me off, especially since unlike Ayu in Kanon, Tsumugi's not the main girl so they gotta hammer that shit in in the short amount of time Tsumugi has the spotlight. Tsumugi also has a friend who I'm just calling Tits because that's her character. She's got a giant chest and is not afraid to use it.
Tsumugi and Tits both felt like one-dimensional characters to me so the arc fell flat.
Ao kind of has her own Character Traits which could be kind of annoying but she was overall much better (not to mention the shaved ice shot was the funniest gag in the show).
Speaking of Ayu though, I thought Shiroha was a much weaker "main girl". She's more like Kanade Tachibana in personality but Angel Beats was a much different show (not to mention half the length). It's... like, she's a kuudere which okay. But then she's also gotta push MC away for ~reasons~. And then you gotta throw in some Key moe, naturally. She's not bad or anything but even for the genre of Key kuuderes, I'd rather have Mai from Kanon or Kanade Tachibana. Just kinda bland and flavorless.
I thought her "arc" was perfectly fine, if worse than Kamome or Ao, but the problem is they then spend the rest of the show on her/Umi (very cute little sister-type, 10/10 would protect) and... idk, man, the last arc kinda stunk.
They introduce a new character and I just never got invested in her and Shiroha's relationship and the ending kind of ruins the dynamic MC had with the people on the island.
The show is a bit uneven and it doesn't match up to the very best Key has to offer but it's still got the Key touch if you like that sort of thing. It could be funny, it could be sad, it had cute characters, if you're nostalgic for Key works, this might be up your alley.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Dec 25, 2025
I feel like you can summarize the vast majority of what I'm about to say with one sentence: It's just a worse The Summer Hikaru Died.
That's just what it is.
Using my Reading Glasses, my read of what this show is trying to say is she's depressed and her emotional vulnerability is leaving her open to predators who want to prey on her whether that be carnally, emotionally, etc. and the yokai are allegories for these predators?
Ignoring what I'm about to say, if this is the reading we're supposed to be having, not a fan of this being the plotline to a yuri show where there
...
are a grand total of 0 men who are still alive in this show.
Compare this to The Summer Hikaru Died (which I swear the rest of the review isn't just "Hikaru good, This Monster bad" :sob:) and Hikaru is more or less explicitly about the pressures of living in a suffocating rural town where everyone knows everyone and looks down on ~deviant~ people. I'm not saying This Monster has to use its GL to forward its themes like Hikaru used its BL to, I'd like to think we're at a point where a show can just BE BL/GL without having to "justify" it, but it didn't have to lowkey portray them as predators either.
Anyway, sure... but the problem is Hinako is such a wet blanket dude, oh my God.
The one real """stylish trick""" it has to its name is to submerge Hinako's POV in a bunch of water because she's depressed, get it guys? Because being depressed weighs you down.
Naturally, that gets grating (really grating, actually, it actively pissed me off every time I saw it by the end) and old, especially when it feels to me like that's all this show is. Hinako is depressed, she wants to kill herself, but Da Monster wants her to Give Life a Try so she can eat her.
Except she doesn't want to eat her because she's not tasty enough yet. She's also powerful enough to stop any yokai who would try to eat her. Causing her emotional damage is also out of the question.
Which leads to a giant problem this show has: There's no horror to be had outside of very, very brief moments as a result.
There's no tension in the plot because it's like if we saw a suicidal person in Saw just sit down and let the bear trap open, except at least then, we'd see some gore.
What kind of story is it where the monster wants the victim to live and the victim wants to die?
And before you come at me with examples, how many of those monsters THEN want to still kill the victim later?
Shiori promises to Hinako multiple times that she's Really Going to Eat Her but I don't believe her. It's a fucked up story when I'm just rooting for the MC to kill herself. After all, that's what she wants and at least presumably, if she DOES get all happy and cheery, Shiori is going to eat her anyway.
I presume the point is that Shiori is never actually going to eat her (or at the very least, wait until Hinako's about to die from natural causes or something) and Hinako Actually Really Doesn't Want to Kill Herself but they fail so spectacularly at giving Hinako any character or life that it'd almost be a mercy killing to take her out back.
The direction, like the rest of the show, is bland and lifeless.
It carries itself like a slop-tier yuri (which, I feel like I'm going in hard on yuri, I don't hate yuri. I wouldn't say I'm a hime by any means but I will watch a yuri, I've got a few on my PTW, trust me when I say that this is bad even among the admittedly limited amount of yuri I've seen, this isn't "yuri bad", it's "This Monster bad" because This Monster is poorly written and directed) halfheartedly pumped out and that's genuinely what it feels like outside of the times it decides it wants to try being horror.
It feels like the world's most lethargic, bland, dry love triangle with the average Cute Girl energy of something like Watanare or Do it Yourself (which... not that I was a HUGE fan of either of those shows but at least they had something engaging there).
Like, idk if that makes sense, but it's directed most of the time like one of those comedies where people just go "ha ha, cute girl did slightly amusing thing!" and they take a screenshot/imgur GIF of it.
Since Hinako just wallows around in piss, filth, and misery for 90% of her screentime, I don't want to watch her get with Shiori OR Friend-chan.
It's not good at horror. It barely tries and it can't actually DO anything due to the motivation Shiori has, not to mention Hinako's such a wet blanket, I don't give a fuck if she dies anyway.
It's not engaging GL. Hinako is a party pooper to the highest degree and Shiori is just kind of "raaar, I'm a scawy monster and I want to eat you but not yet, uwu".
It feels like watching a show through Hinako's Depression Goggles. It's so boring, bland, and lifeless that you'd rather just turn off the TV, turn in, and go back to sleep.
Honestly? It's like what the public perception of Twilight is but if a hime wrote it. A boring, uncharismatic plank of wood is stuck between two creeps with only slightly more charisma and the only purpose is to make its audience squee at the thought of their ship rubbing up against each other.
Fuck, man, I said this is a worse The Summer Hikaru Died but honestly? This show's so bad, you'd probably be better off watching actual Twilight. At least that had Paramore going off with the hardest song of their discography.
How did we get here indeed?
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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Dec 20, 2025
I feel like this show, more than any I've ever seen outside of maybe a few comedies, is the most "Saturday Morning Cartoon"-esque series I've ever seen.
The vast majority of these episodes, you could just kind of "flip on" and not really need to think that hard about the plot and, in that respect?
I think by isolated episode, it's a good, enjoyable show.
I think it's funny, the main 3 Scouts (we'll get to the other 2 in a second) and Luna have good chemistry, it has cool moments at times, including a genuinely sad moment with one of the villains.
The problem is if you try
...
to watch it at a pace quicker than, like, 2 episodes a week.
This is not the show to try and watch at any sort of accelerated pace because is it miserable to sit through the exact same scenario like 45 times.
>Sailor Moon meets person
>We get to know person for a few minutes
>Jabroni of the arc turns person into monster
>Sailor Moon and friends fight with their one signature attack each
>Short denouement
If you're watching this like a Japanese schoolgirl in the early 90s where you're only watching one episode a week?
Perfectly fine formula.
However, it got on my nerves towards the end.
I don't think it helps that a lot of the characters are kind of bland.
We meet Sailors Moon, Mercury, and Mars pretty early on and they're good. Great. That is a strong trio you can build off of. You've got your clumsy crybaby jackass MC, her hot-headed rival in Mars, and the cool-headed mediator in Mercury (my personal favorite).
We get a few episodes of just those 3 and then in the later half, we meet Jupiter and Venus. Jupiter, like, has her own personality but I'm not really sure why she needs to be here. She just kind of seems like a less aggressive Mars to me? She's kind of tough and tomboyish but also is super boy-crazy and... I don't know, is that not just Sailor Mars? I mean, I like Jupiter but she never really sold me on her existence.
I think Venus is the worst one though, not because I dislike her but I'm not even really sure what she's supposed to be? She appears with a second cat and her role is basically "oh, we've gotta wrap this shit up, Artemis, drop some lore about the Dark Kingdom". She only really got one episode ABOUT her and even then, idk, the only impression I hypothetically got was Moon going "wow, Venus is so much more mature than us"... and is that not just Mercury? She even throws some proverbs for Mercury to just go "oh, actually, this is what the proverb is and how you use it."
She's, at best, really bland and at worst kind of aggravating since her cat Artemis is really heavy-handed at railroading the plot back onto the rails after filler hell. She doesn't even have the plus of having a striking design like Jupiter, she's a blondie with blue eyes like Moon, only her hair's just a straight curtain of blonde unlike Moon's famous hairstyle.
Tuxedo Mask kind of sucks for the most part too.
His role is:
1. As a civilian (mind you, he's a college student and Moon is a middle schooler), to shit on Moon
2. As Tuxedo Mask, to throw a rose at the Monster of the Week and encourage Sailor Moon to fight and win
He does get something to do in the later stages of the story but even then, a lot of it is still just a more anti-hero version of being Tuxedo Mask.
The villains kind of suck.
I like the minions of Queen Beryl, even if they're just:
Zoisite and Kunzite: "I'm gay!"
Nephrite: "I'm straight!"
Jadeite: "I'm a jackass!"
But Queen Beryl herself just kind of sucks too.
She sits there, ominously moving her hands around a crystal ball while her minions do her actual dirty work until the literal last episode. Her 3 moods outside of the last episode are:
1. Ominous crystal ball
2. Talking to Queen Metalia (who is just Evil Energy/an evil that needs to be awakened, even less interesting than Beryl)
3. "you have failed me, minion, but I will give you yet another chance/you have failed me, minion, DIE!!!!"
It's hard to tell with how fatty this series is with filler (22/46 episodes are canon according to MAL, which means more episodes are filler than are canon) but the Dark Kingdom arc just seems kind of plain?
Like, this is the plot of Sailor Moon if you take out all the filler:
We meet Sailor Moon
*fast-forward*
We meet Sailor Mercury
*fast-forward*
We meet Sailor Mars
*fast-forward*
Jadeite says "fuck it" and fights them
Nephrite appears, does a couple Monster of the Week tricks, and seduces a middle school girl
We meet Sailor Jupiter
*fast-forward (side note: what do you MEAN Ryo Urawa is filler, bro was so good for Mercury)*
We meet Sailor Venus
Sailor Venus and Artemis drop a whole bunch of lore about who the Dark Kingdom is, what the Silver Crystal is, who the Moon Princess is, etc.
The Dark Kingdom actually bothers to strike
Sailor Moon vs. Dark Kingdom
If you try to watch this show without the filler, it seems like it's really skinny and lacking any substance which is kind of weird because it's still 2 cours long without the filler.
The ending sucks too. I'm sure you can guess why just by looking at the last two episodes' titles (which are spoilers, as much of spoilers as looking at the episode titles beforehand can be), it actually pissed me off so bad I dropped it down a point or two.
Idk, man, it's entertaining enough if you're just watching it episode-by-episode, but it's not really that good as a whole. It's super repetitive and when it's actually on track and about the Dark Kingdom, it's some of the worst episodes in the show (outside of the like one or two episodes Nephrite gets towards the end of his arc but given how much fucking filler we get, kinda wish we got more with him).
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Dec 19, 2025
I was a little skeptical going into this show because I strongly dislike Beastars. To be honest, I was kind of only there out of morbid curiosity since I heard this was Paru Itagaki making yet another show just for one of her fetishes and I personally don't have a burly old man/Santa Claus fetish, so I didn't expect much going in.
And you know what?
Fair play, Paru Itagaki. I enjoyed this show quite a lot.
I think part of my issue with Beastars (other than it being about anthro characters which were, quite frankly, disgusting to look at, which Sanda avoids by having human characters) is
...
that I'm not really sure what it was going for other than "predator/prey", I felt Sanda was more clear in what it was trying to SAY and in that respect, I felt more of a connection to the themes of Sanda what with the declining birth rates all across the world and the obsession with youth and beauty.
However
I think this actually leads to my 2 biggest gripes about the show, to be honest. First... just Niko Kazao in general. Not only do I not like her as a character and find her annoying but one of the show's aspects is that they have arranged marriages. Which sure, okay, no problem with arranged marriages, we love arranged marriages, but it feels weird to me that the one arranged marriage/set-up couple we see... it just so happens to work out.
Why exactly is Sanda cool with being hooked up with Niko? I get he's a 14-year-old boy but he liked Shiori and we're just... not going to question being hooked up to some random girl? Of all the fucked up things the adult world does to its children in this series, arranged marriages are okay and they work out fine?
Even if you want to say "oh, Shiori's a lesbian, Sanda may like her but she doesn't have to like him" which I totally accept and I personally think Shiori's lesbian until further notice... I honestly think he had more chemistry with both Amaya and even Fumi?
My second issue is that it spares no expense at making all of Sanda's relationships with his fellow kids seem weird because he can transform into a big strong old man. I get what they were TRYING to do here but it didn't work for me. Sanda in Santa mode is still a child, just in a man's body. Was his brain also supposed to magically turn into an [xx]-year-old's brain?
Sanda also got Science Saru on the team and as per usual, Science Saru showed up and showed out. I think Orange was kind of handicapped with the anthro shit that makes up Beastars' characters because they can do good work (see: Trigun Stampede) but Saru never disappoints. It looks good and adapts Itagaki's style very well.
I have my gripes with how the show covers its themes but I think it's got a lot of style, it does have Things to Say and decent commentary on Society when it wants to say something, and it's got (mostly, see Niko) likeable characters.
If we aren't considering the Chainsaw Man movie as part of Fall, I would say this is my AOTS.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Dec 18, 2025
I really wanted to give this show a good score but the last few episodes brought it down on a drastic scale.
I think it really had something the first ~3/4ths. It managed to take something that sounds really dry and bland (a show set in fifteenth century Poland about fucking heliocentrism?) and they make it gripping and exciting. The heliocentrism is even tied into revelations and a cultural uprising against the church, a sign that living on Earth isn't just a dumping ground that humans need to be saved from, it's a place worth living on in its own right.
And I thought that was a
...
beautiful message and watching multiple generations fight and struggle to keep the theory of heliocentrism alive was fucking incredible. It was at a 9/10 territory for a significant amount of the story.
You get to see multiple people's journey into discovering and believing in heliocentrism, these broken scholars pushed down by the thumb of the church, and it's a really cool way to tell the story.
However, I don't think it ever recovers from Chapter 3 and towards the end of Chapter 3, it TANKS HARD.
You see, Orb follows 4 different protagonists (technically more, but there are 4 "Chapters") and I really liked Chapters 1 and 2. However, I think Chapter 3's protagonist(s) aren't really all that compelling?
I mentioned how beautiful heliocentrism's thematic relevance in the plot was but our third protagonist, Draka, is mostly in it for 1. the money and later 2. her belief and fondness for the leader of the Heretic Liberation Front.
Speaking of the HLF, heliocentrism seemed more like a tool to overthrow the church's grip on society rather than something they personally believed in.
This all kind of disillusioned me to this set of protagonists which made their story less compelling.
However, towards the end of Chapter 3, it all falls apart.
The church (and in particular, Nowak) are treated as this brutal, unforgiving group of tyrants who'd do anything up to and including torturing and murdering children to stop the spread of heliocentrism. And it really works at making them seem like total assclowns who really need to be stopped, I think Nowak is one of the strongest written villains I've seen in anime.
However, they kind of paint Nowak out to be, like, The Villain instead of part of the broken church?
They try to recontextualize the anime so that Nowak and a small group of people were anti-heliocentrism but in general, the church doesn't really have a problem with it. And that just doesn't work for the story they are telling.
If heliocentrism suddenly isn't this blasphemous theory (which isn't true, in the Copernican era, people were arrested and charged with blasphemy for heliocentrism), like who cares about the struggles of Rafal and friends? They weren't struggling against The Church, they were struggling against A Few Bad Apples.
It's like Jesus Christ himself went to Orb's mangaka and made them change the story so the church looked good because a heliocentric scholar was the bad guy who made Albert (the Chapter 4 protagonist) not want to go to university, it's the CHURCH that made him decide to go after all.
I'm not saying that The Church always has to be the bad guy, by all means, tell a story that shows religion in a positive light (which was kind of what Orb was ALREADY DOING, I didn't think it was trying to say that ALL OF RELIGION was bad, just the church as it was at the time) but if you're going to tell a story for like 80% of the time that Church Bad, you should probably stick to Church Bad.
What's even worse is it's kind of pointless to even try and recontextualize the church? It's so deep in the story that they don't even do much with this new reading of the church so why the fuck did they even bother?
Speaking of the fourth chapter, it kind of sucks, to be honest. In just 2 episodes, it quickly assassinates the character of someone who was already established in the story and it kind of makes the rest of the story prior kind of pointless?
I get what they were saying, it's honestly admirable that they try to weave the fictional story of Orb into the real-life events of how heliocentrism actually came to be without either writing Orb to strictly follow real-life or just rewriting how heliocentrism actually came into prominence but on the other hand... it just kind of sucks seeing how (or even if) they resolve the problem of spreading heliocentrism to the masses.
I genuinely think the story would've been better off cutting out the last chapter and leaving it on an ambiguous note (well... as ambiguous as it can be given the vast majority of people today believe in heliocentrism) on if heliocentrism ever comes to light.
It's a frustrating story because I really do like a vast majority of this anime. Even Chapter 3, which I thought was a step down from the stellar first 2 Chapters, was pretty good until near the end. But the last 20% or so really, really flubbed the story.
I would go so far as to say that to my recollection, there is no good anime with a worse ending in my eyes. Even something like Promised Neverland, it feels like a direction that they could've gone in. A bad direction but it was a possible direction they could've gone in. This one went in an immersion-breakingly bad direction, almost in a sort of retrograde, like it was apologizing for previous events it wrote in the story.
It's hard to recommend, in that case. Sure, a lot of it is great but it's trapped so snugly in its terrible ending that I don't know if I can recommend it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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