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Oct 21, 2025
Makes a bad first impression with the opening monologue, and then continues in the same awkward fashion. The author wants to show all these socially adept and popular people talking to each other naturally, but this showing off gets in the way of the authenticity, and makes the dialogue very jarring to listen to.
The same self-awareness gets in the way of book girl, blonde girl, and plain girl, who are all upfront and honest about liking Chitose, which is apparently supposed to be a novelty. The author shoves too hard in this direction and makes them appear too cloying and desperate.
It’s a lot like
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Oregairu, except that Chiramune is contrasting itself with Oregairu, and saying that it’s giving the more truthful picture. Both are lying - but Oregairu admits that Hachiman has to change. Chitose, on the other hand, is given to us as someone to look up, and it’s up to you, the viewer (i.e. Kenta) to get up to his level, and if you think he’s wrong, “then I guess you’re just as close-minded, and fat, and unpopular in real life as Kenta is in the story”… This is the implication.
Which wouldn’t be so bad if the characters were actually realistic, but Kenta is a complete caricature of an otaku, and Chitose, for all his self-aware posing, is remarkably unaware he's a gigantic narcissist. None of his friends seem to notice this, which makes them all seem very stupid.
The author is either too much in love with himself to realize this stupidity, or is just content to clear the low bar, but other things do what Chiramune does, and even other light novels do it better. Bakemonogatari has more of a point, and is visually superior, and is symbolic, and has great metaphors. Haruhi is likeable, and is more imaginative, and is directed well, and is beautifully animated. Boogiepop comments on society without being so obnoxious about it – even Gamers! does the whole “lose weight and dress better” thing better, and it was insufferable there as well. It’s just too patronizing and also too awkward without being charming to balance it out, which is fitting in way, but not in a way where it’s nice or enjoyable to watch.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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Sep 28, 2025
Hard to tell if it’s pleasing to read or just numbing. It progresses slowly and there isn’t much special until you dig in. Even then it’s hard to tell if what you’re getting is substantial or just an atmosphere - the feeling of comfort, or something that’s actually comforting. The repetition contributes to this - the series has tread and retread the same ground with the same characters, invented characters very similar to other characters, and has had about sixteen million images of food that are more or less interchangeable. The manga started in 2007 and is still going, and it’s hard to tell if
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it’ll be finished, whether it’s sailing or sinking, improving or disimproving, what it’ll ultimately say, what it’s trying to say, or whether or not it had anything to say to begin with.
This is Umino Chica’s second work after Honey and Clover, and a pretty vast improvement on that. While not bad, Honey and Clover had little to offer: it shows the lives of five art students, and their lives weren’t very interesting. With this in mind maybe, Umino made the protagonist of 3gatsu an exceptional person: a shogi professional at the age of 17, who started professionally in middle school, predicted to be the next Meijin. His drive to win matches, and his general occupation, gives the series its direction and structure. The manga splits itself between this and Rei’s life away from shogi, particularly between his shogi and time he spends with a family of three sisters, whose lives become more relevant as Rei gets more involved with them.
The shogi portions are where the drama is at its most focused and it’s also where the characters are at their most complex. A lot of the early matches are kinda bad, because they just recite notation, but Umino later figures out a way of compressing them through visual metaphors. These give an insight into the mindset of the players, and while it’s sort of simplistic, and substitutes the author’s lived experience into places where actual experience is preferred, it’s engaging to read and it works on a dramatic level.
Shogi is also the starting point for the introduction of many of the characters. The constant wheel of new characters being introduced for each match is exciting at first, but later you’d wish that Umino went back and reused some of the older characters instead, because the some of the new ones like Azuki are basically interchangeable with someone like Shigeta. This kind of new toy syndrome pervades a lot of the work, and while it keeps the manga fresh it makes it sort of diffuse and leaves a lot of characters feeling unfinished. Smith, for example, is introduced early on and gets a bit of development in a match versus Gouda. He gets lectured by Gouda for not leaning into his strengths - one-hundred and fifty chapters later, and he hasn’t done anything. Gouda is hyped up as a major villain in his introduction, and is very, very quickly scaled back in favour of pursuing plotlines related to… fucking... Shimada. Shimada!! If you want to see how badly Umino favours new characters, Shimada – THE biggest jobber to ever job the job – wins not one, but TWO important matches, something which this balding BUM has never done, and will NEVER do again. He even loses his position as jobber (how do you even do that?) to some other guy Umino cooked up, who’s big into research (I can’t remember his name.)
The amount of characters just makes it hard to remember who they really are, which makes it hard to care a lot about even the important ones. Even Nikaidou, who is introduced and set up as pretty major character, is just as much left by the wayside by future developments, and while these developments are good, they inevitably lead to repetition, as whenever Umino needs to reintroduce a character, she has to highlight their main trait, so that you can go “oh, it’s this guy,” - but this is just highlighting what they are, and is not actually developing them. This leads to a lot of scenes that play out the same once Umino is done introducing them. Once she does that, she doesn’t know where to go from there. She can’t have Rei face the same guy over and over (because it would get stale) so the result is this vignette, self-contained style of storytelling - which is fine… But there isn’t a sense that one story builds on the next, or is a comment on a previous one. The issue then is: a lot of these stories are too simple and too similar to one another for there to be anything substantial in them. Umino occasionally gets over this limitation visually but it’s not often.
Rei has some complexity at least but as the story goes on it removes a lot of his more interesting dynamics. After a certain point his half-sister disappears (for no reason, she just stops showing up), and afterwards there’s never really the same level of tension. Him and Gouda have the only real antagonistic relationship in the story, but that’s abandoned as well. Eventually, things just go the way of all of Rei’s problems being solved more or less automatically—not by him overcoming them, but more by him just existing. Umino trolls a bit with the romantic relationships, but besides that, compared to the previous chapters, it almost seems too easy.
The issue with this then is that is it cheapens a lot of what the manga was going for, if it was going for anything. If it’s about the struggle of someone struggling through sadness, the moral of the story is basically: Be a prodigy, work hard... and meet three woman who will cure your depression. The hard work part is conveyed well enough at least, but it’s less of a feeling of “wow, Rei’s so cool, I’m gonna work hard so I’m someone like him” and more a feeling of like “wow, losing sucks!!” or in other words, the desire to work hard that the manga gives to its readers is not inspired, but rather provoked, out of insecurity – motivation through fear, in other words, which is obviously not as effective. You can argue that, actually, Rei’s life gets harder after meeting the three sisters but there’s never really any sense of jeopardy in the family drama moments. Any financial difficulties are smoothed over, because he’s rich, and any matches lost are recovered from, because he’s happy. There’s no longer any real tension in the story as a result. The manga is already over, and the reader’s just waiting to see it happen.
It’s not that this isn’t enjoyable, or soothing, or pleasant, or warm, but at a certain point you’re going to have to wonder whether or not you’re reading Sangatsu because you enjoy it, or if you’re just reading it because it’s a habit and it numbs you. It is enjoyable to read - it’s enjoyable just to look at: the attention to detail in the backgrounds is great, the visual metaphors mentioned earlier are very good. The only real criticism I can give visually is that, whenever it does the narration – inner monologue – dialogue combination, it's very difficult to read all at once, so you have to give up reading the narration halfway through, read the inner monologue with the dialogue, and then go back up the page to fully read the narration, which interrupts the flow of reading and hurts the pace a bit. But the fact that it feels good to read is always in its favor, and while I’m left wanting more, I don’t feel frustrated with what it had to offer.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Sep 7, 2025
A guy good at pitching and a guy good at batting were on the same team once but are now on opposite sides, and this is a manga that is all about their rivalry, and they face each other an entire one time, because this is a manga by Adachi Mitsuru.
His previous baseball work, Touch, is a classic, in spite of the flaws that hold it back. The slow build-up to the main plot twist is excruciating, characters aside from Tatsuya aren’t fleshed out, and characters kind of appear, out of thin air, like the author just decided to just draw them on a
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whim, and then realized he had to put them in the next panel for the story to keep making sense. H2 in comparison is a much more professionally put together work, with a lot of thought put into how to organically grow its group of characters and have it be a part of the main story. The main character, Hiro, embodies this change in direction from Touch to H2 by being more of a team player who trusts his fielders to do their job instead of just pitching really hard and hoping he wins. He’s still more or less the main focus, but it isn’t all on him to carry the reader’s interest. Kine, Sagawa and Yanagi all have their stories and mannerisms that make you recognize them when they’re playing on the pitch. The first part of the manga is dedicated to investigating their personalities while the first few baseball matches are played, and it’s surprising how long it is able to be interesting without relying on tricks. All of it is very readable drama between people that naturally occurs when their interests don’t align, and it ties together well with the baseball matches to make them mean more than a win or a loss.
Of course it isn’t new to add a extra layer of stakes to a sporting event, people do it all the time with betting, but Adachi is very good at making these wagers and making them seem like they’re not rigged. There are various twists in the matches that are sometimes aggravating to read because they’re not what you want, but they’re what the story needs in order to keep all the matches engaging. Even if you know that Hiro’s team has to win for the story to progress, there’s still the sense that maybe they won’t, because you don’t know for sure, and Adachi exploits this sense very well. Sometimes though it's like he rolls dice across his table to make up some of the scores, because Hiro’s team should be able to steamroll some opposition, and then they don’t, and then it seems like they should lose, and then they steamroll. At a certain point, like in real sport, the reader should be able to get a feel for how good a particular team is after they’ve seen them play enough times, and roughly know what the outcome is before a match starts. You can’t do this in H2, and it’s due to the Adachi’s development of the baseball members: he wants you to like them, so he makes them all competent, but then they’re all too competent, and should realistically beat every team they’re up against. This cheapens some of the tension later on when they run into some artificial difficulties.
So Hiro’s team are going along and they’re beating everybody pretty easily. They draw a match against a baseball team who have a hysterically evil pitcher, and they later beat this team in a tournament and are set to progress pretty far in it, possibly to the finals to face Hideo’s team, who have Hideo and a bunch of other strong players. The issue though is that Adachi wants to save this showdown for later, preferably for the end of the manga, because if he makes them face now, he loses the ability to make their match seem mysterious and suspenseful. But that still leaves the issue – who will beat Hiro?
Adachi’s answer is to clone the two main characters and put them on the same team against him., and then he has the audacity make it seem like he’s going to reuse these characters and that They’ll Meet Again Someday. The story doesn’t go downhill or anything after this but it’s a sour moment. You put all this trust in Adachi to not stretch reality too far and then he goes and rips a hole in space and time just to make Hiro lose a baseball match. The fourth wall breaks are less intrusive than this (they’re just a form of padding). What also seems like padding are the multiple fanservice shots, which seem to be done to fulfil some sort of quota. Or maybe seeing woman’s underwear has a kind of key-jangling effect on the Japanese public and helps them keep reading. Maybe this is the real key to the Adachi Mitsuru formula all along, but you have to wonder whether or not its worth alienating the female part of your audience just to do it.
He takes the fourth wall thing pretty far though. Hiro and Hikari, and Hideo and Haruka all go visit an Adachi Mitsuru museum, and his work is displayed in glass casings, and then afterwards they talk about how much it sucked just like how you would after a real trip to the museum. There’s not many of these instances where the main group are hanging out as you’d expect, it’s usually either Hiro with Hikari, or Hiro with Hideo, or Hideo with Hikari, or Hiro with Haruka. Haruka is the odd one out here – she doesn’t have as much interaction with the rest of three as the rest of the three have with themselves, and this lack of attention hurts her development as the story goes futher on. Hiro, Hikari and Hideo all have goals in their life that extend beyond just highschool, but all Haruka wants to do is to start a highschool baseball team. This is the starting point of the manga, sure, but besides starting it and cute and endearing, Haruka stalls and doesn’t grow. Hiro and her form a connection that eventually goes beyond friendship, but nothing much changes even when they hold hands. Eventually she gets pulled into the ongoing action between Hideo, Hiro and Hikari, but again, there’s no real result from this. This is probably where Adachi’s desire to be subtle and realistic gets the better of him. Haruka has the patience, not of a girl, but of an 80-year-old grandmother. Hiro puts her through enough mental turmoil to justify her throwing a fit on at least one occasion, but instead she just smiles and accepts it and everyone moves on. Hikari too, also seems to have developed a similar level of telepathy and neatly sidesteps any potential confrontation that could happen between her, Hiro, or Hideo. Adachi’s subtlety and avoidance of common anime/manga exaggerations has been praised and deserved to be praised but at times it runs counter to what it’s trying to achieve. Realistically, there should be at least one scene where any two of the four have an argument, but Adachi is too protective of them - he wants you to like them, and so he wants to avoid negativity, and so implications and wordless acknowledgements are all you get, and while they usually work, they’re overused and sometimes feel like a pose.
That’s not to say that H2 is lacking in confrontation or genuine emotion, but it’s not completely consistent in portraying its characters as people. There’s a lot of development given to a lot of a characters, and while it’s spread evenly, it’s also spread thin. A lot of them are still two-dimensional and act on obvious lines. The hysterically evil pitcher mentioned earlier is such a caricature that it’s hard to take him seriously - but at least he stands out. Everybody on Hiro’s team is just some variant of nice and polite. Part of what made Touch great was the fact that Tatsuya always had a certain skepticism that helped balance out the tone. Everyone in H2 however is just relentlessly nice, which contributes to a sort of toothlessness in casual conversation. Even Hiro and Hideo’s rivalry never really goes beyond harmless jabs like “I’ll beat you!” “No, I’ll beat you!” and so on.
There’s always potential for drama though thanks to the baseball matches, which help supply the missing tension. Contributing to the enjoyment is the consistently clean and readable artstyle, which manages to convey a lot thanks to how the eyes are drawn and where they look. Adachi’s very good at compressing information like this and it helps keep the story’s momentum. The volumes go by very quickly – even Adachi, looking back in one chapter, is surprised at how easily he’s been able to fill up so many volumes. He probably shouldn’t have looked back.
When you have a story as wide as H2 and apparently as plotless as it goes on it becomes a lot harder to wrap things up. You have all these characters that you have to provide solid endings for, and you have to find the time for this while wrapping up the main story. In Touch you only had Tatsuya and the people Tatusya cared about, but in H2 you have Hiro, and Hiro’s baseball team and later Hideo’s baseball team, and also the love triangle, and that’s not including Haruka, who – does she even like Hiro? Will she end up with Hideo? Who does Hikari like? And you also have the baseball matches as well - something has to give, and it’s baseball. The final tournaments matches lack the tension of the previous ones and are shot through pretty quickly. The two clones mentioned earlier aren’t brought back for a rematch, and the evil pitcher guy is injured – there’s nothing left to look forward to besides Hiro versus Hideo. There are, of course, certain moments for certain members, but the matches are otherwise breezed past without much detail, like Adachi was just sick of working on the manga, and wanted to move on to something else.
The final, climatic showdown between Hiro and Hideo arrives and the build-up and the eventual ending are equally unsatisfying. The stakes are muddled and it’s not clear who gets what or who gets hurt if either Hideo or Hiro lose. You’re rooting for Hiro obviously since you’ve been with him since the start but it’s not like Touch where Tatsuya absolutely has to win or the world falls apart. Either can win or lose and it’s not like it matters. It’s just a game of baseball. You can argue that maybe the dissatisfaction is intentional; regardless, the ending sucks to read.
Getting there is fun though, and it’s still fun to re-read the first few chapters, and see Kine being an idiot, and then comparing him then to how he is at the end. It’s satisfying to see the progression, both from the people in the manga, and from Adachi Mitsuru himself, in H2. To see its people change over time, and work towards something, and express themselves through baseball, is fulfilling in a way that can only be described by experiencing it yourself. You should read it, it's really good.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Jun 24, 2025
I don’t like Gundam and I liked this show. I think it takes all the parts that’s good about it (Newtypes, Char, the setting) focuses on those parts well enough, and patches up what’s usually weak about it (the fights) into something serviceable. This is not a career defining work by any means but it’s still well made. Each episode’s entertaining enough – along the way the thread is lost a bit but it’s still easy viewing to watch each episode individually. Nothing of much substance is said but there’s an occasional few lines that stand out. The explanation of the Mav system is interesting,
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for example, and the final episode has a few good observations, like the need to suffer for freedom, which you can take or leave. Animation’s good as well, nothing standout but there’s a consistent quality. Characters designs are a bit unsuitable, especially in scenes where they’re holding guns, but they're clean and readable.
The mech designs are a bit messy. I heard the word “busy” being used to describe them and that’s pretty accurate. It’s hard to tell what you’re looking at whenever they’re moving. The 3D’s unspectacular but it’s not as bad as like, Gridman/Dynazenon. Their movements are not so sluggish and have a good degree of weight, but it is still noticeable as 3D (if that makes sense).
Plot’s a bit stupid. The transition between the Clan battle section and the civil war section could’ve been done better – they could’ve carried over some of the characters from the first part over to the second to make it less jarring. Once the second part starts it’s kind of hard to care about what’s happening because there’s pretty big leaps in time inbetween each episode and they feel also a bit episodic rather than building on the previous one. This isn’t what’s really stupid, it’s the fact that these girls are committing war crimes over some guy who thinks his Gundam is talking to him, and instead of committing this guy to a mental institution, they both want to go to the beach with him. And in the end Machu contracts his schizophrenia and says that her Gundam is talking to her too nooo Machu noooo take your meds Machu take your meds!!!!!
You might be looking at the staff credits and thinking this is the next Utena/FLCL/Eva - and it’s not, but it’s a good show, and it’s entertaining, and it has a bit of depth to it as well. I enjoyed my time with it and - unless you try really hard to not enjoy yourself - you’ll enjoy it too.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Jun 17, 2025
The first fifty, fifty-five minutes of the film are the best I’ve seen from the four films I’ve seen of Shinkai’s (out of Suzume, Your name, Garden of Words and this) and this is owing to the fun kind of energy brought by the main trio of a runaway kid, his kind of irresponsible but generous employer, and his high-energy crazy niece. This runaway meets a confident girl with the ability to dispel rain and her playboy nine-year-old brother, and together they try to make as much money as they can before the film passes the fifty-five minute mark.
Because after that point, the film has
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to get dark and serious, and this is according to the Japanese successful animated film formula, invented by someone, obviously, but I’m not sure who. It might be that FURRY Mamoru Hosada, who employs a similar sort of structure with The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. If you’ve seen that film, a lot of what goes on is going to seem very familiar – main character has a rough start, then gets (in this case meets a girl with) a fantasy power, where the power is used and then is used too much, which has Consequences. Shinkai’s innovation to this formula is to add a gun.
All the scenes with the gun are completely dumb. You know he’s not going to kill anyone with it, so why even bother pretending. It’s a dumb part of the film, and this is a film with a lot of stupidity. The shoehorned-in musical montage at the start is so incredibly badly integrated into the film that I can’t believe that it made the final cut. The long, drawn-out running scene on the traintracks isn’t much better. The Mcdonalds sponsorship scene is so on-the-nose that it makes the melodrama of the gun scenes seem subtle.
Once the story starts to careen head-first into this melodrama it’s not as likeable. It’s not as true in the same way as the first half is. The visuals are still there though, and they are impressive, though the character designs sort of let everything else down. None of them look bad exactly, they get across who they are well, but they look like they could be in any other anime. They don’t really have a distinct style, unlike the background and lighting effects which are definitely Shinkai’s. Some of the digital effects are tacky (like the lens focus one when Suga and Natsumi are talking at the bar) but their general effect creates an original kind of photo-realism that is impressive and always nice to look at.
Pretty, fun to look at, fun for the first half, melodramatic for the rest of it – could be copypasted into a review for Your name. Tenki no Ko is better for longer but it falls apart worse. They both kind of have this world-beating, melodramatic energy that is appealing up to a certain point. Tenki no Ko doesn’t really have an excuse to be like this though, which is what makes it a bit of a weird film. This is not a typical Shinkai film but it’s been made to fit into the same kind of formula, so as a result there’s this complete disconnect between the energy and the events, especially in the film’s back half. There’s nothing really here to evoke much feeling despite a lot of feeling being shown, and that disconnect distances you from caring.
Regardless of how good or bad they are though, Shinkai’s films always give the feeling that a lot has happened in them. A lot happens in this film, and a lot of it is bad, and some of it is good, and I think it’s worth seeing.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Apr 19, 2025
Any action show more or less follows a blueprint, or anyway, there’ll be an action set-piece to set up that takes time away from meaningful dialogue. Despite this, some anime make it work, and they make it work better than SSSS.Gridman. The easy example is Eva: it manages to link together the action with the rest of the show. Shinji gets punched by his classmate. who has issues with Shinji, and these issues are resolved when the Angel shows up. With Gridman though the show splits itself between slice-of-life and action. Any issues brought up are resolved in each section, resulting in less time given
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to develop character. The action scenes are more at fault, but they have bigger faults to worry over.
The action scenes are animated in 3D. The 3D models move in imitation of people in costume like in tokusatsu entertainment, which you would know if you were sixty years old and Japanese and watched Ultraman. I know because I googled it. Once you know, you accept it, but if you don’t, it looks bad. Every frame or so of 2D animation intercut between 3D made me wish it went all 2D. If this were true though the fights still wouldn’t be good.
Fights follow a strict formula: Kaiju appears; Gridman gets beat up; Gridman gets a power-up; Gridman kills the kaiju; day is saved. The different kaiju distinguish themselves with different looks and different moves, and Yuta defeats them with Gridman with different moves each time, by himself and sometimes with others – usually in one hit, which gives too little satisfaction. Fights are cut too short; couple this with the sluggish way the 3D models move and they become unexciting to watch.
But the fights do prop up the scenes of everyday life. These parts are great. When characters speak they speak very naturally and convey who they are in a lowkey way. In the same lowkey way their faces are drawn to reflect this. Scenes keep a good walking pace and shots don’t overstay their welcome. Sometimes there are very long pauses
and then we’re back into the action.
The big reveal midway through reveals a big revelation that makes you think wow this is big. It changes little apart from marking more plot. The slice-of-life parts take a back seat to a story that doesn’t engage. Points of interest still appear but the character drama does not try hard enough to be convincing. Looking at the last episode as an example: Utsumi criticises himself about not caring about the damage kaiju do – damage that was being reset, so who cares. Anti’s problems aren’t real, so who cares. Akane is escaping from reality, but you don’t know why, so who cares.
But you will care about how Gridman pictures everyday life. The way it does it should be seen. The atmosphere these scenes create is perfect. If Trigger managed to distil this atmosphere across the whole runtime this would be the best anime ever made. As it stands, this is a good show that carries a lot of baggage, but this baggage is tolerable and should be tolerated to see what’s really good about it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Apr 19, 2025
Sekina Aoi writes better than he’s given credit for but that doesn’t amount to much good. He knows what makes a story work and knows how to avoid pitfalls, and knows some people and the way they speak but he uses bad patterns and bad tropes way too much to be forgiven for it. Student Council’s Discretion is smart and Gamers is smart too but it’s too often too dumb for anyone to care about what’s good.
Gamers is trying to be a comedy and the comedy is sometimes funny. It starts with gaming addict Amano about to join the gaming club with the school idol
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gamer girl Tendou. He refuses last second and I guess this is funny. It’s funny again when it’s Tendou, not Amano, who develops a one-sided crush, and it’s funny seeing her gush over Amano for one scene. It stops being funny once it’s every scene. In various similar ways and moments, the comedy starts and stops being funny. The animators try way too hard to make up for it. There are some funny things that click with the animation and they happen just enough to keep you watching but it’s otherwise tiring and this is tiring on top of the tiring misunderstandings.
Gamers takes misunderstandings as far as they’ve ever been taken. Someone’s boyfriend puts a hand on one girl’s shoulder, and the girlfriend concludes that he’s cheating, and then this is multiplied by twenty for twelve episodes across five different people. It starts well but at the seventh episode I dropped the show, I was so tired of it. The show stretches the misunderstandings so long past the point of belief that there’s no choice but to get sick of it, but I stuck through due to the animation.
The characters drawn are drawn a bit strange but are still drawn well. The lines used and the colours used remind me of Trigger if Trigger were about to go bankrupt. I don’t like how the OP has a random fight in it for no reason, but that’s the only negative thing that’s animated. It has no right to be so good considering that what it’s animating is a story that doesn’t have a plot.
There is no plot but there are some very good moments that happen where someone character realizes their feelings about someone else, or how that someone else feels about them, which are very well realized in animation, but there’s also the thick wad of smelly bullshit you have to sit through, where Amano throws out a innocuous compliment and there’s a big close-up of the girl’s eyes and her eyes go wide and her blush extends so far out her face that it disproves the Flat Earth theory.
The writer should be sent to jail for indulging so much in stuff like this, he has to know it’s bad but I guess he thinks it’s okay since he’s doing it on purpose. CTE levels of thinking if true, and frustrating too. He writes better than most light novel authors and shows an awareness of the real world that they don’t have, and this awareness could lead to something good. It doesn’t, but it could, which is more than I can say for Oregairu or even the stuff by Nisioisin. But Nisioisin has worked out a truth for himself that he knows; even if it doesn’t show in his work you still feel his work is based on that truth. Sekina Aoi, if he has a belief, doesn’t base his work on it, so what you’re left with is this kind of mist which hangs around and blows away if you think about it too long. There are a couple moments that precipitate and crystalize into stuff you can take with you, and some characters act in a way that is true and they say things that seem true and it’s stuff you can sometimes relate to, but Aoi contrives a lot and fakes a lot too which kills a lot of the believability. Still, Gamers doesn’t do badly as a romcom, something which is usually done very badly, so if you like the genre and know what it’s like and you like games too, you will like the first few episodes and then see if the rest is worth sitting through.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Mar 14, 2025
So the film comes from Oshii’s idea of wanting to be a priest, and his rejection to do that. Camera shots are framed in a way to suggest something peering down. It gives the film tension when it’s quiet, and also creates a detachment. You are put as an observer and not a participant.
The film is still good in these limits, but I don’t understand why Oshii didn’t try to move on. He’s continued to make emotionally detached films like this one throughout his career. You can argue in Sky Crawlers he tries to make you care, but even there it’s more like he’s rationalizing
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why he can’t. The people in that film are literally replaceable - the end starts towards optimism, but there’s none displayed in the film itself. In trying to be a priest, maybe Oshii was looking for a way to find compassion, and thought instead that making films was the way to go. Whether or not he succeeded is hard to say with the films themselves.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Jan 29, 2025
The later entries of Monogatari are full of rapid cuts and zoom-ins, characters drawn in different art styles that reference something, characters in the background moving around – tricks done for the purpose of breaking up the long conversations to be easily digestible. As this method is repeated you see the issue being that there is no relation between what’s happening and what’s being described. So your mind filters it out, and focuses on what’s being described. Rather than working together, the writing and visuals are now put at odds and this is bad because it’s wasteful. Bakemonogatari is better than the rest of the series
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because it’s not like this.
An example: Hitagi speaking to Araragi in Mayoi Snail: one of the best sequences in the show, with seamless transitions between each scene, and with each scene – and each action in the scene – corresponding to what is being described. Even on mute, you can tell what’s happening by seeing Hitagi and Araragi cycle around. Something similar is in the first conversation between Araragi and Kanbaru, or in the cram school with Araragi and Oshino. This makes you understand what’s happening better, which makes for more fun, because you’re better able to understand the characters, their situations, and sympathize with them more, and give more attention and respect, and this is enjoyment you get regardless.
Bakemonogatari jeopardizes this enjoyment is in its writing. The second story after Hitagi’s, Mayoi Snail, has a lot of aimless dialogue that wastes time. This aimlessness raises its head again in the final volume with a protracted gag involving anonymous names chiming into a radio show to tell jokes relating to their names. Some conversations don’t get to the point or last too long. The dialogue is otherwise great. The stories work well until the climax, where they then crumble, because Nisioisin has to contrive a feeling to suit the scene, rather than doing it other way around. When it gets real though, it’s good.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Oct 15, 2024
The first sixty or so chapters are a monument to boredom. One slice of white bread and another slice of white bread compete to see which one of them is the more perfectly flawless gift to humanity. Kazuya has a twin, but he doesn’t do anything. Characters like Harada seem to pop into existence whenever the plot demands it. Who knows if a plot exists. The love triangle progresses with excruciating slowness. There’s a load of two-dimensional, one-off thuggish villains thrown in for the sake of having something happen. There isn’t a whole lot of baseball. And then Kazuya dies.
And then the story really starts
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after all that set-up, with most of it being in excess to the rest of it. A new rival shows up to reinstate the love triangle, and Minami and Tatsuya’s relationship resets. They have no chemistry together. Minami is dull.
Tatsuya’s been forced to play the role of his dead twin brother. His honesty in expressing his unwillingness to conform, and him sacrificing who he is for the sake of others is selfless and even heroic. The situation lends a lot of depth and richness to the straightforward story.
Watching Tatsuya’s transformation is the main reason to keep reading. Characters still pop into existence without any foreshadowing. None of the matches are particularly memorable. Akio and his sister are stereotypes. The conflict they make is artificial. There’s also a villain, and his development is trite and predictable. Other developments happen, and have a similar quality, where they’re ham-fisted, and contrived. But the manga manages to make it work.
It works because Tatsuya is someone worth rooting for: for who he is, who he wants to be, and what he wants to achieve. The ending closes this out perfectly. Tatsuya defies the expectations of everyone, even the reader. It’s something you have to see.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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