Sometimes I feel a bit silly rambling into the empty threads, but I'm glad that my little reviews are being useful to someone!
P.S. If you only watched the first ep of Ranma before bouncing off, I'd suggest taking a peak at ep 2, where I think MAPPA tried a bit more to make the anime their own. I felt sort of similarly about ep 1 (like, "oh, it's just the manga but on screen"), but the ep 2 made a much better impression.
I think you're mixing up Wajutsushi / Talker with Nageki no Bourei / Grieving Soul, probably? There's a lot of adventuring party anime, lol.
I like the idea of more diversity in length, especially since short clips would be a good way to bring new people into the anime world, and I'm hopeful that this means there will be more short-form anime that have decent budgets and some real animation talent behind them. I know that shorter anime can really shine when work is put into them (I'm going to take this moment to plug Kenka Banchou Otome, a favorite of mine that does a lot with its 8 minutes) but so many short-form anime are just a couple frames of character animation in front of a static background.
Kenka Banchou Otome's elevator pitch
Separated-at-birth twins are about to enter their respective single-gender schools when they find each other and decide to switch places. Our (afab) MC learns that the boy's school is known for its fighting scene and is tasked with fighting to the top of the hierarchy, and along the way ends up making every handsome delinquent boy fall in love by punching them. It's really really easy to read both twins as trans.
I keep worrying they're going to try to redeem this guy, but it seems less and less like that's in the cards, lol. My prediction is that each and every person who appears "normal" will either become or be revealed to already be unhinged, and I am here for it.
It's almost like Azure is two different people between last episode and this one with how fast they're playing "no, really, he's actually a nice person deep down!" card, lol. It seems like he's got a lot of his own baggage, but it's still some real quick turnaround after he was so scary last time. It's also sort of funny to me that Nina had a moment of "sure, being a starving orphan isn't great, but royalty has problems too" when like, no, the level of hardship is very much not comparable - you definitely would have died on the street if you hadn't been kidnapped.
I noticed this time that the storybook in the ED appears to have a page for every episode that they're filling in with colors and details as we get through them. I think that's really neat.
Ya, if they're not motivations, it makes them feel like their purpose is only to frame him as the "good" guy in the conflict without making him really earn it.
There are moments when the story shows its age a bit, but the way they're playing with style and color really brings a lot of new life to it as well. Last week felt a little too safe, but this week felt quite a bit more bold and I think it's working out in the show's favor.
I've got a couple more premiere reviews for the garbage pile:
Haigakura
A perfectly serviceable action romp about ~~pokemon~~ god trainers running around fighting things with their captured god buddies, but done in by its horrible budget. The central premise of the story is an art that lets you bind gods to your will using song and dance, but they appeared to not have the budget to give the main character a real song or dance to do, preferring panning stills and visual sound effects - like, what's even the point of it being an anime if you're going to cut those kinds of corners. In much better hands, it would have been decent, but as-is it was a 2/5.
Tohai - Ura Rate Mahjong Tohai Roku
I will give this one some credit: they did not do the boring thing and spend most of the first episode trying to teach the audience mahjong. They instead assume that if you've shown up to watch the edgy mahjong anime you are already familiar with the game of mahjong. Now, I am not familiar with the game of mahjong, which made it feel a bit like watching an early Yu-Gi-Oh episode, where the rules are made up on the fly based on whatever would make the most dramatic twist - not a terrible experience, but not really engaging either. I'm also not typically big on edge, and the edginess here is really quite a lot (the first little arc centers a crime group who keep sex slaves and make CP). If the description of "edgy mahjong anime" perked your ears up, honestly, you'd probably have a good time with this (you'd almost certainly be able to follow it better than I did, lol). For me, though, it's a 2/5.
This seems well-made, but I'm a little confused about what it's going for beyond just "demon lord cool, cyberpunk cool, so what if both??"
Like, cyberpunk by its nature almost always has strong anti-capitalist themes, and some elements of the setting do point in that direction. On the other side, though, our hero is a demon lord, a role that carries with it (mostly just implied so far) monarchy/feudalism and racial hierarchy. It just seems very odd to me that they seem to be framing him as an underdog hero (from the proliferation of magic abilities and from the genocide of immortals), when his (current) goals are not really a good counter to the world's dominant ideology.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that a see a lot of questionable paths the story can take from here, and if it treads carefully I think it could be a good story, but I don't really have any reason to trust it yet. I have a friend who picked it up this season, so I think hearing about it secondhand will be enough to sate my curiosity, lol. I give the premiere a 3/5.
I don't get is why they can't give Kohaku the extremely obvious tsundere archetype - sort of adjacent to the Ore-sama, but would probably come a lot more naturally.
I feel like Oohara has been too passive with all this
It definitely feels like we're setting things up for Honjoji to be the brains and Oohara to be the heart, and as things drift from scheme to genuine relationship, we'll see him grow and start to be a bit more active. At least, that's my prediction. For now I'm here to see him do his character development, but if they take too long it'll definitely be frustrating to watch.
I'm liking this one so far, but it does take some willful ignoring of the age stuff. Knowing what I know about why the emperor's wife's age is important, I can see that they're trying to build it up into a mystery that we will slowly unravel, but without that knowledge it definitely seems like just a running gag that one of our main protagonists is (or at least appears to be) a literal pedophile, which is not a great look. And like, they wouldn't even have this problem if they'd picked a better age numbers all around....
When putting the age stuff out of mind, though, I'm really able to get invested in our main couple. Hadis is so affection starved and eager to please that it makes sense he'd latch himself onto someone willing to protect his happiness. Meanwhile, Jill seems to have the strength of will (and strength of strength, lol) to face down whatever the curse brings, and her characterization seems locked in on being written as her mental age, rather than falling back into treating her like a child like most of these "redo" stories do. I'm enjoying their dynamic so far and I look forward to them growing closer as they face their challenges together. (They also end up treating each other pretty much as equals, which is the most important piece of trying to ignore the age stuff)
Also, for those who don't know, "thieving cat" is the Japanese equivalent of "homewrecker" (which Sphere added "-chan" onto). The translators were in a bit of a bind because the visuals were so literal, so I don't think it came across quite the way it would to a Japanese audience.