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Winter Anime 2024: Payday

Metallic Rouge

Metallic Rouge hasn't ended yet, but I am quite certain that at this point it's unsalvageable. I can give it one thing: it's going for a specific ~vibe~, and nails it. Why anyone would want to evoke the ~vibe~ of "deservedly forgotten 2000s sci-fi seasonal" is beyond me (I won't provide an example, because if I could remember it it wasn't forgettable enough), but there you go. Truly, Bones have outdone themselves with this celebration of their 25 year legacy.

It's hard to even start, but the one thing everyone is certain about is as good as any: The plotting and structure of this show is a complete mess. Some consider this "ambitious", but I don't think an ambition of "let's throw in every half baked thing we can think of and try to glue it together with proper nouns" is worth celebrating. We've got insipid and illogical worldbuilding that ultimately goes nowhere, brave political statements on the level of "slavery sure is bad but don't be rude about it", metaphor bombshells like a character who schemes behind the scenes and styles themselves the "puppetmaster" and constant plot twists that explain things long after I've given up on even trying to make sense of anything. That's where the ~vibe~ comes from: everything that has ever vaguely annoyed you in a mid anime is somehow in this one all at once.

This wouldn't be so bad if it had characters that are entertaining on their own, but here we meet the most bizarre creative decision: the one thing it has going for it is the Diet Dirty Pair banter between Rouge and Naomi, which elevates a few episodes to "decent", but of course they spend half the show seperated. And by themselves, Rouge likes chocolate and is as dumb as a brick with charisma to match, while Naomi is sassy and mysterious and that's it. The rest of the characters (and naturally, there are far too many of them) are either irritating or at best just bland.

So if this is Bones pulling out all the stops, at least you should expect the production values to be high, but even that is a mixed bag. Metallic Rouge looks quite mediocre for the most part until it's time for a dedicated Sakuga Cut™, which might be a fight or alternatively just a random one of the dozens of boring hallway conversations (that Crunchyroll of all things is treating this as a joke really says it all). And even the fights aren't all that great, because this show somehow manages to have bad sound mixing and music beds that I'd call interesting in theory but don't work well as a score. At least it has a stellar OP, but even that seemed a lot better before the show actually came out.

I might bump up the score a point if it ends exceptionally well (which it won't), but even in that case... it's still bad. Please go back to sourcing your deep plots from Weekly Shounen Jump, Bones. ~3/10

Bucchigiri...

Bucchigiri..., on the other hand, has the exact opposite problem: While Metallic Rouge is a convoluted tangle of inconsequential plot, this show is just happy to phone it in. It almost feels like a rerun of fall 2021, where Metallic Rouge is the new Fena and Bucchigiri... is the new Takt:Op. It leaves an agreeable first impression, with a bold, colorful look, unusual setting, expressive direction and kinetic animation – but everything not entirely superficial is an excuse, and a "dog ate my homework" level of excuse at that. If all you want is bromantic burly brettyboys going through the motions, get your fanfic pen ready, but don't expect the show itself to provide significantly more than character designs. It doesn't help that the main character is particularly bad, with his gimmick being "annoying disinterested horndog". These non-characters keep going in circles slapping each other's asses and being not very funny for two thirds of the show, until a very generic "sensitive best friend is tempted by evil" drama plot appears because even yaoi shippers realize that eventually something has to happen, which boils down to Matakara going around slapping everyone's asses again, but now it's supposed to be sad. And then that doesn't work at all, because for character drama you need characters. Who knew.

Of course the funny bit is that this is pretty much what I asked for. I gave SKOO shit for only being good at the wacky parts while the heartfelt drama and more fleshed out characters fell flat. Well, now the director's followup work is just the wacky bits and feels completely hollow for it, and then the exaggerated drama lacks anything to back it up. Maybe just do better, I suppose. Oh yeah, and this also hasn't ended yet but with how completely predictable it is I feel like I've already seen the final episode. ~4/10

Undead Unluck

You can take the Shounen out of the Jump but you can't take the Jump out of the Shounen. I don't usually touch the Weekly Shounen Jump brand for good reasons, but Undead Unluck definitely had one of the strongest first impressions for one in a long time, if only because it has leads that aren't Goku and Vegeta again. But it also had a flashy, devil-may-care attitude with absurd nonsense happening left and right, a bonkers setting that is actually interesting in its own right and production value to back it up. In short, it was Fire Force with arguably better characters. When it's firing on all cylinders, Undead Unluck is a very fun time.

The problem is that Undead Unluck is firing on all cylinders about as often as a Cadillac V8-6-4 with a flaky ignition distributor. Primarily it has a massive padding problem: The amount of recapping and flashbacks to things that just happened is patently ridiculous and I say that as someone who has watched two seasons of My Hero Academia. If you include things like OP and ED, I feel like calling roughly a third of this show's runtime literally repeated content is not a wild exaggeration. And that's only literally repeated content – since this is Weekly Shounen Jump, there is also a lot of restating of facts and tedious explanations. I can't even blame this just on Jump Editorial, because a lot of the time it seems to be in service of hitting the right cliffhangers – but if both source and adaptation have severe pacing issues, it all compounds to the worst pacing in any show I've seen a considerable amount of.

And then, even in the coinflip of time when it's actually doing anything, it's obviously not always at its best either. This is honestly acceptable from a show that goes wild – with these you have to take the bad with the good. I didn't care much for the lazily metafictional final arc for example, but it would be perfectly fine if it didn't (quite expectedly at this point) do its core statement twice in as many episodes in a row, only with more screaming the second time. It's good when it's good, sure, but it would have to be outstandingly brilliant to make the whole thing worth it – which it isn't, so it's not. 5/10

Mahou Shoujo ni Akogarete (Gushing over Magical Girls)

My standard line regarding any extra spicy fanservice anime show has always been "you know you can find real porn on the internet easily, right". Gushing over Magical Girls (which is, aint gonna lie, a genius title translation) is a pretty good example why: Even though it is pretty damn explicit, it still isn't on the level of actual porn, and then the extended moaning and wriggling sequences just take up so much of the time that it gets tedious pretty fast. And a lot of the "other" content of the show is just blatantly an excuse to make the porn happen. There's some edgy comedy too, but I think characters like Kiwi are more annoying than anything, so that didn't do much for me either. Then the middle section of the show is an excursion where our protagonist villains go sex up a couple of more villainous villains, which feels like it's missing the point even by its own standards. Also, be aware that with hentai content come hentai production values, and this one is definitely below average. None of this is particularly unusual.

However, I kept watching this one, and the reason is pretty simple: I don't actually object to spiciness in principle, and in the beginning the show did a pretty good job of portraying Utena's awakening to a bunch of fetishes. That she then started an awkward on-and-off anonymous BDSM relationship with an actual magical girl was even better. I honestly have to say that this is a brilliant concept, even if it wasn't executed to a level where I was certain it was intentional. Also, while it's arguably the "main plot", it's a fairly small part of the show and when it didn't show up much in the middle I was sure the show had lost me. I do have to admit though that against all odds, Gushing does stick the landing, with a final episode that really pays off that plotline in the best way you could reasonably (see above) expect. It's a bit of a rough ride, but this show delivers.

So I'm two minds about Gushing over Magical Girls. If you just consider it a hentai OVA that somehow escaped to television (which is not an unreasonable standpoint), it feels surprisingly ambitious and well thought out. But as a regular TV show, it just has too many weaknesses to ignore. Still, even though I can't call it good, I still think it's a more interesting curio than the score might make it sound. 5/10

Hime-sama "Goumon" no Jikan desu ('Tis Time For "Torture", Princess)

Oh no, this has "torture" in the title, what could it mean? Yeah, I think at this point everyone knows that it's a joke (one might even say... The Joke) and let's leave it at that. It feels like every season there's some fluffy and cute comedy that I quite enjoy for no profound reason. The Alleged Torture here simply doesn't do anything wrong, manages to find just about enough angles to its one joke to not get boring, and features nice designs and enough production value to deliver a smooth ride all the way to the end. It occasionally does something beyond its one joke, and that tends to turn out cute and chill as well, like Tortura's modest OL home life. Really the only thing I don't like about this is the manzai reaction antics of the sword – explaining the joke is always questionable, but it's especially so when there is exactly one punchline that never changes. In any case, this one is hardly essential and there are many others like it, but sometimes you just want something sweet and inoffensive that still puts the effort in. And this is definitely one of those. 6/10

Kusuriya no Hitorigoto (Apothecary Diaries)

I feel like I should like this show a lot more than I actually do. This is because it is made of great ingredients: Very nice looks, a setting with tons of potential, mostly interesting characters and in particular an amazing main character. Maomao is just great, she has tons of personality and a funny oddball charm that is tempered by a smart and stoic attitude. The beginning of the show, where Maomao plays the streetwise intruder into the stilted world of court intrigue and manages to cut through the bullshit like nobody else could, is pretty excellent.

However, as the show went on, it became clear that I just don't agree with the direction the plot takes. Of course it turns out that Maomao is actually deeply involved into the court drama in half a dozen ways (without ever telling the audience about it, which smells of retcon). Of course the focus shifts to other characters like Jinshi or later on Lakan, who are far less interesting. Of course there is a romance with Jinshi on the horizon. I don't want to be that guy that is mad that a show doesn't turn out to be what they had wished it to be, but it's still a letdown.

And that's not mentioning that the daily business of the show, various levels of detective work, is hardly solid gold either. It's just bad at mystery writing – most "cases" turn out to be massively contrived and then Maomao walks in and just guesses the solution out of nowhere. The large-scale mystery (who is Jinshi, really?) is not much of a mystery at all but Maomao can't figure it out because apparently she has to solve these complicated and tiny problems before she can realize the simple and obvious large one. And then there's the drama, which is effective enough in the moment but seems to be mostly built on a foundation of allegedly smart people acting much more stupid than they should.

So overall, I think this is still a good show simply because Maomao is fun to watch no matter what, but I just don't think the writing can quite hold up its part of the bargain, and that is kind of a bummer. 7/10

Yuuki Bakuhatsu Bang Bravern

Bang Bravern arrived with a simple, but quite amusing thesis statement: What if you had a tacticool, Armored Core-like mecha setting but then everything changed when a super robot show invaded. That's pretty funny. It also just so happens that Masami Oobari knows that the likes of Top Gun tend to have a certain undertone, and also made Bang Bravern explicitly homoerotic. That's even funnier. Add to this the fact that the epic super robot action genre is inherently hilariously over the top, and you have the makings of a very amusing show. Now, I could just leave it at that, because that's what Bravern is. An over the top and self-aware love letter to the super robot shows of old, with a couple of additional comedic angles.

In other words, it's like all super robot shows that have been made in the last two decades. Yeah, Bravern is undeniably quite entertaining, but I also don't think it's anywhere as unique as people seem to think it is. The "super in a world of reals" joke in particular doesn't really come into play that often, apart from when that side of the show keeps introducing dozens of characters that then proceed to not do anything apart from standing on the sidelines. The gay love affair does matter more often, but seems to run into diminishing returns because once you've done "come inside me" (which it does in like episode 3), you really have nowhere to go. And besides those two, well... it's charmingly exuberant and features all the goofy tropes, but it lacks the absurd hugeness of a TTGL or the meaningful subtext of a Gridman – and that's only shows that I have actually seen as a non-fan of the genre. I suppose fans will gladly take it anyway, because the genre is somewhat rare nowadays, but Bravern doesn't exactly blow me away. Still, you can't deny the fun. 7/10

Sousou no Frieren (Frieren: Beyond Journey's End)

So here we come to the big dog. The show that's pulling Doraemon numbers on Japanese TV, has been riding a comfortable #1 spot on MAL for months, and has inspired an unfathomable amount of porn. And the real surprising thing is that it's the first show in a very long time that I think comes even close to deserving that level of hype, especially early in its run when it absolutely isn't the kind of show you'd expect to do this – apart from the production values being about as good as TV anime gets, naturally.

Frieren starts out as an uniquely focused narrative that explores as many angles as it can out of a complicated mess of legacy, memory and regret through the lens of a pretty simple and generic RPG trope. It achieves this almost entirely through one of the best casts I've seen in a long time – Frieren may not be quite as charming a protagonist as Maomao, but she has much more depth and more importantly, every character that matters in her show is almost as good, and their relationships are even better. In its first-cours adventure mode, when we're just wandering around having more or less episodic encounters and plot points that drift in and out of focus with a wistful tone but splashes of goofy comedy, Frieren is quite excellent and would have been my show of last year if I had considered it eligible.

But then it slams in a new gear with the elegance of a tractor driver who thinks clutches are for pussies. Suddenly we're doing a proper Shounen Exam Arc and we're getting a lot less of this and a lot more of this. Now to be fair, this is a long running manga and it probably could not have kept doing flashbacks to Frieren being too dense to realize that Himmel was hitting on her 80 years ago forever. But still, the mage examination arc just really isn't Frieren at its best. It's not even that the content is particularly bad (maybe apart from the really quite rough beginning), and I do understand the long-term benefits of introducing a bigger cast of characters for future use, especially when they turn out to be quite good eventually... but it all just takes way too long. There's still great moments here, but that's usually a small segment of the established good stuff or, failing that, Frieren dropping a sick ass spell. Yeah, I won't even blame this on the action, because said action is incredibly well done and still quite brief, but you really didn't need a full season of theorycrafting and skill discussions to get those explosions. In short. Frieren temporarily turns into Full Metal Alchemist with better leads, and while this would be high praise for almost any shounen manga, it isn't for the one that has demonstrated it can do far better.

There is one real upside to this distraction arc though: Unlike, say, the plot problems of Apothecary Diaries that are here to stay, none of this irreversible, which Frieren immediately makes clear by snapping back to its best behaviour the second they leave the designated raid zones. The ending is as good as any part of the show, with the skillful writing and great tone we have come to wish for. Frieren may not be as consistently excellent as it first appeared, but it is still pretty damn good – and not on a purely superficial level either, because it obviously can have outstanding writing when it wants to and the fundamentals are rock solid too. 8/10

Yubisaki to Renren (A Sign of Affection)

And the top spot of the season goes to... a show that may not be the most ambitious, but does absolutely nothing wrong. Yubisaki to Renren is a fluffy romance where a very cute girl meets a very nice boy, and then no drama happens because not everyone in the world is a fucking idiot. I think my delight with this says more about the absolute state of romance anime than it does about the show itself, but I also have to say that while the plot of this show might be simplistic, it takes great care to set everything up in such a way to get away with said simplistic plot.

Obviously the core of the setup is that Yuki is deaf. But, quite smartly, the author doesn't make the story about Yuki's problems with not being able to hear, but rather about how her world is just... limited. And Itsuomi is a dude with an uncommonly wide worldview and experience. Opposites attract, and there you go. The show basically gets all the grounding it needs from that simple setup for free, then throws in a bit of complicated history among the larger cast. Then just make Yuki incredbly cute and Itsuomi an uncommonly levelheaded adult who will take measures to prevent any pointless drama before it gets out of hand, and you have a show that's just 100% a good time all the way through. So the leads (i.e., the thing that matters way above all else in a romance) are great, and the rest of the cast is more than fine too, even those who would instigate such drama – it can't get annoying, because they never succeed.

Really if I had to say something negative about this show it would be that it's still superficial compared to a show at its skill level that does go hard. I mean, it's about two nice people falling in love and nothing goes wrong, which isn't exactly a lot. There is maybe also the idea that Itsuomi may be a bit too perfect, but I'm just more than happy to see a male lead in a shoujo romance that is neither an abusive jerk nor a bland cardboard cutout. In a perfect world, something like Yubisaki to Renren should feel a bit bland and generic, but in the real one, there just isn't much like it. 9/10

#anime #review #winter2024 #metallic rouge #bucchigiri?!#gushing over magical girls #undead unluck #hime sama goumon no jikan desu #kusuriya no hitorigoto #yuuki bakuhatsu bang bravern #sousou no frieren #yubisaki to renren

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