Aquarion EVOL continues on its brash way, although it seems to be trying to grow up a little. Sometimes. (Part 1 review here.)
Reviews & Reflections
Reverse Step: Watching Love Live! Season 1
A brief summary of my history with the Love Live! franchise: some months back, very soon after I started writing for the Crunchyroll Newsletter, I got tapped to do a little review of Love Live! 2. Now, at this time I had barely heard of the franchise, but I wanted to get writing, so I wrote the piece. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Skip to the present and I’ve watched all of season 2 and spent countless hours with Love Live! School Idol Festival (the franchise’s mobile rhythm game), but I still hadn’t seen season one. Until now.
Aquarion EVOL Part 1 DVD Review
Welcome to the world of Aquarion EVOL, where love must yet be sin, nakedness rivets you to the pulse of life, and punches go on for infinity.
January Physical Media Reviews
I got a little tied up in January with everything that was going on, so this was a lighter month for reviews—a lot of time went to the start of the new season and getting up first impressions here and over on Otaku Review. But, I still got to review two really fun pieces and I’m set to tackle a few more in February!
“Bro before holes?”
Is it Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? Light Novel, Volume 1 Review
A transparent attempt to cash in on the popular tropes and trends of the day, but Is it Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? is not without its charms.
Animator Expo Impressions (Part 2)
For those of you who don’t know, Evangelion director Hideaki Anno’s Studio Khara, in conjunction with media company Dwango have been running a cool little project called Animator Expo (there is an English language version of the site) for the past couple weeks. 30 short anime productions are planned for the Expo, with a new one coming out every week starting on November 7, 2014. So far, 10 of the 30 shorts have aired, so here are my thoughts on the last five of them. Rather than giving them a standard rating, I’m just going to go with a [bad/decent/good/great] scale.
Previous Posts: Part 1
On these five shorts as a whole: Overall, I was a bigger fan of this set of shorts than the last. We basically got three music videos in this bunch, a format I think lends itself really naturally to the kind of creative experimentation that the Expo seems to want to encourage. Having “Tomorrow from there”—easily by favorite short thus far—in this group definitely bumps it up a notch, but (unlike the first batch) I genuinely enjoyed every short on this list and would recommend checking out each of them.
December Physical Media Reviews
Hey, guys! So, a bit of an announcement today—I recently started writing for a news/review site called the Otaku Review. I’ve been doing a lot of writing for them in the last month, including both news articles and my very first reviews of physical media.
You’ve probably already read most of the news stories already, but if you’re interested in the reviews, I’m compiled links to all the stuff I covered in December. Hope you enjoy!
Level E Review
World Trigger, Volume 1 Review
Animator Expo Impressions (Part 1)
For those of you who don’t know, Evangelion director Hideaki Anno’s Studio Khara, in conjunction with media company Dwango have been running a cool little project called Animator Expo (there is an English language version of the site) for the past couple weeks. 30 short anime productions are planned for the Expo, with a new one coming out every week starting on November 7, 2014. So far, 5 of the 30 shorts have aired, so here are my thoughts on them. Rather than giving them a standard rating, I’m just going to go with a [bad/decent/good/great] scale.
On Animator Expo as a whole: It’s definitely a cool project—feels a bit like the Anime Mirai project that produced Death Billiards and Little Witch Academia—geared specifically for promoting anime as a medium. I started this post before watching the first five, so at the beginning I was pretty curious about the quality of animation and the quality of content that would come out of the project. As with anime in general, it’s been a mixed bag.
Mage in a Barrel 