2025.10.21

Hi. It's been a while.

I haven't watched much anime recently for reasons. I'll list the one I watched here:

• Finished a few seasonal shows:
  • Silent Witch. Cute! Likely won't be a season 2, which is a shame.
  • Witch Watch. Surprisingly good. Gigguk compared it with Aho Girl early on, which I thought was a disservice.
  • Hikaru ga Shinda Natsu. Very good. I'll be watching season 2.
  • Yofukashi no Uta season 2. As someone who've finished the manga a long time ago, I had no major complaints about this.
  • Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi wo Suru ("My Dress-Up Darling") season 2. Cloverworks is honestly quite insane here - this animation has very clearly set a new standard for future shows. It's refreshing to see innovation on how things are expressed.
  • Summer Pockets. Just like I've thought, Maeda Jun's works is better be done in a longer form factor.
• Finished the Suzumiya Haruhi series.
  • Yes, I've sat through the entire Endless 8. I was very close to being driven crazy.
  • The Disappearance of Suzumiya Haruhi is genuinely a great movie. Good thing the series ends on such a high note.
  • I'd argue one can skip The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan entirely unless you really want more after the movie.
• Finished Kanokon. OG ecchi show... not very good. I watched it only because it had this reputation of being widely banned in China; turns out being banned does not necessarily mean it's good. To me, ecchi shows (like this one and Highschool DxD are on a very weird position: their plot tend to be not very interesting because the main selling point is the porn, but if it's anime porn that you want, just go for R18 doujin at this point...
• Finished Tengoku Daimakyou ("Heavenly Delusion"). It's a great show, one of the more satisfactory ones. Walled garden of eden vs. post-apocalyptic world trope... The naming is truly unfortunate: the English name is very cool, the Japanese name is very lame, and both of them had little to do with the plot itself.
• Finished Tenkuu Shinpan ("High-Rise Invasion"). OK premise, OK background setting, sloppy writing (esp. the characters), dialog on the cringier side, rhythm is not very good because the length is awkward - I haven't read the original, but one'd imagine there's only one battle with the main antagonist and one face-off with the secret boss who created the system after the main show ends; this roughly gives about 5 or 6 episodes or 7 or even 8 if you're particularly lazy. This is the kind of length that you want to make a 2-and-a-half-hour long movie instead of a seasonal anime, but now we'll have to deal with the first season, and clearly Netflix is not going to make a season 2 for this.
• Rewatched Hyouka. I thought it's just me having anime fatigue, but it turns out it's just that I've been watching subpar shows.
• Finished the 4th movie of Princess Principal: Crown Handler. Finally! It's been months since I've watched the 3rd one... It's shorter than I've imagined and more of a pivot point than anything. I'm worried if we'd ever see the day of all 6 of them being published.
• Almost finished first season of Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai. Didn't realize it's the same guy who write Imouto sae ireba ii., which I'd argue is a better show.

Man, all of them (other than Hyouka are old... I'd probably rewatch Oregairu after finishing Haganai season 1. Sometimes you do notice things you miss during the first exposure.

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