Friday, October 2, 2015

Fall 2015 Anime Season Preview, Part 1


Hey, I'm back.  If for somewhat briefly.  Who knows?  My presence here is as transient as the glimmer of sun off of a loli's shiny shoulders, or the faint glimpse you get of the fanservice shot before the camera pans away.  

What I'm saying is, I'm busy.  I may or may not really write much on here anymore, unless I'm suddenly hit by a strong bolt of inspiration.  However, I will try to get out a few thoughts on the coming season, if only because I want to look at and be amused by my tragically incorrect predictions.  Just call me Nostradanimus.

This season seems to be going for a lot more in terms of gender equality.  Apparently the higher-ups finally realized perverted girls exist after Free exploded.  The standard of quality in these girly fanservice shows is still pretty low, but, to be fair, it's not too high for the guys either.
I’m just going to skip over the sequels that I have nothing to say about.  Sound good?  Yeah, I thought so.


Brave Beats


This poor anime is coming out the door with a massive double-whammy penalty: it’s a kids’ anime, and whenever I search its title the first thing that comes up is Angel Beats.  Honestly, I have no interest in watching this, but I do feel kind of bad for it.  I mean, it does have dancing robots in it. 

Comet Lucifer


The song in the trailer is unfairly catchy and there are some cool colors in the promo art, but I’m guessing that we’re getting a magical girlfriend show out of this.  First of all, the only character who features in the PV at all is the cute alien (well, I’m assuming she’s an alien, but I guess she could be some sort of magical earthchild or something) girl, and we see the male main character not at all.  That usually means that he will be bland and boring, and the anime will probably try to make me self-insert into him instead of actually caring about him.  At least the setting is a mining town instead of a high school. 

The studio is 8bit, a relative lightweight that has shown itself to not be particularly light on the fanservice.  Aquarion EVOL, Infinite Stratos, Grisaia…  Shows of varying quality, with tendencies towards heavy fanservice, melodrama, and harem (at least in the latter two’s case).  This does not give me hope that this will rise high above its magical girlfriend premise, regardless of how likeable/amusing EVOL could get.  And, considering how the magical girlfriend looks like a child, I don’t feel particularly hopeful.  At least the main male character is in the promo art.  And robots are involved somehow.

Concrete Revolutio


Adapted from a manga, not a light novel?  Check.

Studio Bones?  Check.

Colorful, varied character designs?  Check.

Trailer that shows off energetic, colorful animation?  Check.

A plot about superhumans guarding and fighting instead of going to high school?  Check.

While I’m not going to run my mouth about how every Bones show is a mind-blowing masterpiece, they are pretty good at running shows that have at least some sort of merit to them.  Since this doesn’t have a forgettable little nothing-premise (it’s instead something about superhumans of wackily varying backgrounds existing and the conflicts they cause) and apparently has giant robots punching each other, this should hopefully be good fun.  As long as this doesn’t go the way of many mech anime and Proper Noun me into insanity, I’ll check it out.  The only thing that rubs me the wrong way is the lack of detail to some of the backgrounds (especially all of those dots).  I understand the bold colors and wacky designs are somewhat of a stylistic choice, but it does make me wonder if the studio feels a little stretched, with having to cover both this and the second season of Noragami this fall.  

Also, autocorrect hates this anime's title.

Dance with Devils


I don’t understand these shows.  I guess I kind of get the appeal some teenagers get out of dating the sexy bad boy (“I can change him!”), but, once it becomes a harem, it seems like she’s putting a bit too much weight on her shoulders.  Then again, I don’t really get harems at all, so yeah.  I’d much rather have a lot of focus put into one relationship to make it interesting and individual than get a bunch of random snippets of cliché dialogue and cliché characters. 

Plus, all of the sexy bad boys here are shockingly similar.   If you wanted to make your harem characters each feel individual instead of part of some amorphous sexy horde, you could at least try to differentiate them.  Instead, we get five white, skinny bishounen.  How about someone overweight?  Someone black?  Someone bald?  Someone awkward?  Even the shounen ecchi shows know to at least have a busty chick and a flat-chested loli. 

Hell, we don’t even get a glasses guy.  Why is there no glasses guy?  That’s such an easy fetish to appeal to, and the character designers couldn’t even figure that one out.  They need a glasses guy. 


Problem solved, anime revenue boosted 50%.  You can put my check in the mail, Brains Base.

Diabolik Lovers More,Blood


Stahhhp it with the dumb punctuation, Diabolik Lovers.  It’s a real turn-off.

Yeah, so if the above anime wasn’t enough for you, there’s another dark-sexy-bad-boy-harem this season.  This one also has a frighteningly-similar clone army.  Perhaps the bishounen are planning a world domination scheme, and they’re just hoping we don’t notice how they all look suspiciously similar by stripping and threatening to suck out our delicious, sweet life fluids.

Apparently this one's plot focuses on having Female Character randomly meeting a new clan of vampires, who all look the same as the previous group apparently.  

To be honest, I have no idea how this got a second season.  It seems like the ladies want to meet as many different identical bishounen as possible, it seems to make more sense to allocate the money into making a functionally identical show where all of the characters' names start with a different letter and they're werewolves instead.

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