Jeoffrey

This is definitely the best season of this anime series so far. Again it features some great scenes, featuring two epic fights - "All for One" vs. "One for All" (it makes you wonder what else someone could accomplish using the basic story of Dumas' The Three Musketeers...) and Midoriya vs. Bakugo. This time it is extremely emotionally charged and suspenseful - it is really more interesting than the first two seasons. There are a few answers and a lot of new questions, and it even manages to act as a promotion for the upcoming movie (OK this is not that cool...). Another reviewer Toren wrote that this show is "the best that modern shonen has to offer" and I agree - both the narrative and the atmosphere are definitely very good. In addition, as the fight scenes pack a punch, the characters are still quite relatable (the main protagonist especially gets more bearable from one season to the next), I have to pull the highest rating out of my hat this time. It was extremely entertaining, so 8.8/10. P.S. I would recommend that "Nyanta" look to cleanse her soul by watching the anime series Black Clover because it would help her to realize that Deku is definitely not the worst main male protagonist out there. o.0

If, after watching the first few episodes of this anime series, someone had told me that it would end up for me being the most successful romantic comedy anime series of the anime season Summer 2018, and probably even of the last few years, I would have laughed in their face. This is because at first, this anime series seems like nothing more than a very obvious advertisement for some old and maybe even new computer games. Please believe me, it is true... For anyone who was born in the eighties and therefore actually lived through the computer game boom that came in the nineties, this is going to take you back, and you are going to be riding that wave of nostalgia and start reminiscing about your first experiences with both arcade machines and game consoles. So if it was just about the video games and the gaming rivalry, I would not have awarded less than three stars, because this show is incredibly close to my heart, and it brought back a lot of great memories. This is because the producers really know how to portray the passion of playing video games, to show the enthusiasm not only for the games themselves but also for the gameplay. It also helps the audience find the character Yaguchi more believable! However, it is that strong romantic undercurrent that makes Hi Score Girl something much more interesting, powerful, and unforgettable. I have not seen such a good, effortless and heartwarming romantic comedy in a long time, and there are at least two episodes (the one with Oono's departure, and the one where Oono is running away from home) that are worth a solid five stars in my book and could easily warm up my otherwise very cynical and cold heart. In general, I personally find Oono an incredibly charming girl. This is probably the first time that I actually feel that the description of the character as "silent and mysterious with a strangely sublime aura" really fits how I perceive the character. Oono is not a character that needs to talk, she expresses her feelings very clearly just by the way she looks, gestures, or by the way she acts... The problem is that there is the other girl in the show Hidaka, who is not too bad either, in fact, she is very nice and supportive... So now you have to choose, dear audience! I managed it, and I believe Yaguchi could do it too, even though we are only going to find out the answer to the riddle of this love triangle in the follow-up in 2019. I simply cannot wait for the next season now after watching the last episode of this one, which has the most anticipated and also the worst cliffhanger ever. I thought that Hi Score Girl was the biggest surprise out of all of the anime season Simmer 2018 releases and shows how an anime series can be on the right side of heart-warming, romantic, and nostalgic. It also shows how it can promote old computer games, new video games, and the eventual second season without being extremely irritating. In addition, this show features peculiar and atypical animation that really grows on you. 7.8/10.  ----------- EDIT 17.05.2019 -  I thought, unsurprisingly, that the three-part OVA continues the high standard set by the original anime series. Once again, it is really heart-warming, and, in my opinion, the perfect romantic comedy - oh, and there is more gameplay too... The characters are still the same, Oono is amazing even when she is not speaking, and she has those big sad eyes and a tragic backstory that makes you feel for her and take her to your heart even if you are not fully aware of it (just like the main male protagonist). Hidaka’s character is a close second for me, a remarkably personable fighter, and I was rooting for her too. Oh, and Haruo is still just as entertainingly tragic and knows nothing except gaming - probably like Jon Snow. In my opinion, this is still one of the best, funniest, and most heartwarming romantic comedies, hidden away where you perhaps would not necessarily expect to find it. It succeeded in making me quite emotional and it made me smile. Admittedly, I could easily criticize how much everyone here is now pushing Haruo to understand, because he is very dumb, what is really going on. I could also be dissatisfied with the fact that after the massive climax at the end of the first season, everything was dug up again to be intensely dealt with in the OVA (although I was actually satisfied). This is despite the fact that in the end, nothing was really resolved (although I can actually understand that), and so I feel like we are back to where we were before the big admission. We are therefore just now waiting to see what is going to happen in season two. Yes, there will be a second season this fall, and I am looking forward to it. After the three-part OVA, I am going for 8.2/10, because perhaps like a good RPG game (which at least maintains the plot to a certain extent throughout), the more you play (watch) it, the more you enjoy it and the visible flaws and mistakes fade away - at least that is what Todd Howard supposedly said... EDIT 23.12.2019 - The second season started off a little less dramatic and interesting than I expected. I did not find Haruo and his rebellious period or the fights between the video game gangs all that entertaining. However, there is the conclusion, when the love triangle is finally dealt with. Everything builds up dramatically in a very suspenseful way towards the ending which I had expected, and I guess the only thing that I found a bit irritating was that they used the same storyline again, meaning the journey to the airport… However, what the hell, since everything is beautifully evocative, just like the first time, and I thoroughly enjoyed the last few episodes as intensely as my mother enjoys watching the conclusion of a storyline in her favorite soap opera. I mean, it managed to move me, shake me and it also warmed my heart - the ending was a truly five-star experience and I enjoyed everything and fully understood why I love this anime series and its characters so much. So, riding on the wave of these emotions and satisfied with what I saw and how it was presented, I am raising my rating for the last time and going to look for that damn ninja who was slicing onions in my room somewhere during the last episode... The second season gets 9/10 - overall the entire anime series gets 8.6/10.

"Some people are broken. You and I both know it, and that is about all there is to it..." sings the Czech rock band Kabát, and I have reached the conclusion that there are a lot of broken people in this anime series. The human psyche is a rather fragile thing and it is not that difficult to damage it, just like the glass depicted here so many times (which is a rather perfect metaphor). I have met some broken people in my life, people who have been affected by their environment or even just one important experience, and a lot of them still carry that inside them and constantly struggle through life. However, what are we really fighting for? For ourselves? For those we love? Each one of us is trying to find something that will fulfill them, looking to fill their empty glasses (I find this metaphor is also perfect), and can find comfort and fulfillment in different things, people, and narratives... People are different, they have different personalities, different experiences, different desires - so it is very difficult to generalize and evaluate them without full insight into their minds, souls, and backgrounds. Certainly, we can say that the collection of characters in this narrative are quite repulsive, twisted, and disgusting, although I should also perhaps add that I thought that the exposition regarding the way the characters ended up the way they are is realistic, warts and all. We have the chance to get to know the characters, their motivations, their origins, and their experiences. These are all inevitably horrifying, of course, and logically nothing much good could come of it. At least it is horrifying for a person like myself, who has had a stable background, a decent upbringing, fairly normal values, and who is currently filling his own empty void living vicariously through watching other people's narratives. I think the world out there is dull and grey even though at the same time it is also full of interesting and strange people and their narratives... This was interesting too, a narrative with a sophisticated psychological aspect, and so I could get my head around most of it, and sometimes had to try and figure out how it all worked... The anime’s creators gave me food for thought and I appreciate that they offered me situations, problems, and solutions that I thought were both shocking and repulsive, even though they still made sense to me. In addition, there is the ending, which is the logical conclusion of all those rather extreme ideas about love and a happy sugar life. At the same time, there is also another subject for further reflection - what is going to actually come of Shio after all this... So even though I did not really enjoy it, still, it gave me the chills, and sometimes I felt disgusted, but there was a point to this because I was not thinking about it in terms of being a bad anime series, just that "some people are broken..." and especially why... 5/10.

Open the Depress Gate and the fun will really be 0 most of the time. The story of how everything had to return to the way it was and exactly how that happened is full of sad crying, resignation to fate, and negativity that I just would never recognize from the original Steins;Gate. This is why I cannot say I like this version whatsoever. Okabe's biggest problem is Okabe himself, and it takes an incredibly long time for that to change. Oh, and when Hououin Kyouma finally shows up in what’s probably the strongest and best scene of the entire anime series, it is already too little, too late, and a shadow of what I had gotten used to. Until then, it goes from depressing part to depressing part, finding more reasons to explain why it cannot be done, figuring out things that the attentive audience has long expected, and filling the spaces in between with extraneous nonsense and occasionally even fan service. The original concept behind Steins;Gate is still intact, and the ending was pretty good, too (in other words, the last three to four episodes or so were even quite entertaining). In the end, I am not going to say how disappointed and depressed I am with what I have seen and push the rating down, because even if it was somewhere else in spirit (or perhaps even without spirit) compared to the original show, I still cannot bring myself to say that it is a bad anime series. It could well be a bad experience in certain parts considered to be poor perhaps, although as a whole it still holds up thanks to a few engaging scenes, and I am even going to award it 5.5/10, and this is because of the original concept behind this show.

Tuong Lu Kim from South Park was right - damn Mongolians, every time an Asian builds a big wall, the Mongolians show up to destroy it! This time, the Japanese knew it... They had such a nice wall around their native settlement on Tsushima Island, so the Mongols just had to come and break it down... However, it was an interesting spectacle, full of strategies and battles, where the mission to keep the Mongols on the island eventually became a mission of survival. I enjoyed it, and even the bittersweet conclusion was quite satisfying in the end... 7/10.

Mr. Holmes, they are the most Holmesian of all Holmeses! If I had a shot of Captain Morgan’s Rum for every Holmes-san, I would be really fucking hammered every Monday... Otherwise, this is kind of an average whodunit crime drama with some slightly naive incidents, where Mr. Kiyotaka, the antique dealer (known as Sherlock Holmes), in addition to simply estimating the price of certain items, searches for the ubiquitous forgeries he knows are around, and is fighting a terrifying counterfeiting genius. He gets to solve more than one serious crime in the process. At times it is quite interesting, at others it seems to be quite amusing, because of the cases Holmes is trying to solve... Besides, there is a bit of a romantic subplot, and surprisingly, that is more interesting than trying to uncover forgeries, using deduction, and solve crimes all the time. I am almost happy I am not Mr. Holmes from Kyoto because then I would have perhaps found some counterfeit items in the fridge or even inside the toilet, and my life would never know peace and quiet, and I could never be truly happy. This way I can just smile, tell myself it probably was not as crappy as I had expected, although at the same time it was not as interesting, intense, or romantic as it could have been. So, with that being said, I am just going to walk away now and leave it to other antiquarians to judge whether it was a great or terrible imitation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's writings... 5/10.

“MEOW, well at least I saw something very original."- says Sensei. "MEOW, although in a way it has a certain charm too." - says Sensei. "MEOW, the narrative is also quite strange." - says Sensei. "MEOW, a kind of anti-war propaganda." - says Sensei. "MEOW, MEOW, above all, everyone should forgive, leave anger behind, and above all stop eating meat!" - recommends Sensei. "MEOW, even the animated 3D model of the mecha was interesting." - says Sensei. "WOOF, I quite liked it all." - says Generalissimo. "MEOW, except for the dragon, that was weird" - says Sensei ------- 6 MEOWS out of 10 WOOFS.

The next time I refer to someone as the most incompetent loser, tragic, and total beta male protagonist ever, please remind me of the existence of this anime series and that there is this tragic parody of anything remotely male called Aki. This is not a beta male, this is an omega male! Aki is a boy who has perhaps not an ounce of testosterone in him, so the other female characters in this show do whatever they want with him, abusing him with all sorts of obscene bullshit. In the end, the embarrassment I initially felt for the main male protagonist in time turned into despair, and the only embarrassment I feel now is that he is the same sex and species as yours truly. In the beginning, I even found myself stupidly entertained, mainly because I thought that if the creators of this anime series had any balls, it could have been high-end hentai, even if it would be for me a completely inappropriate shota (very young boy) hentai show. The ecchi scenes are so well devised that a person who has actually watched any hentai could easily see exactly where this show should be heading. However, this show never really goes anywhere, because this is just an ecchi anime series, and Aki is a character who specializes in being tragic... He could have an entire harem around him, girls literally offering themselves up in every conceivable way, and still, nothing would ever happen, Aki would just allow himself to be abused, and once again for the umpteenth time become the biggest fuckwit I have ever had the misfortune to watch. My patience was slowly running out, however, the moment his own sister appeared and the main male protagonist became an even sadder and more tragic figure, the proverbial cup ran over. So I quit this show less than halfway through the eleventh episode (I know I did get quite a way through it), and I am probably never going to know if cross-dressing Aki finds his "peanut balls" and becomes at least man enough to brush off his sister with all this ladies’ dresses to hell so that he can be a real fuckwit to other much older and more well-developed women without them needing to make him model the women's clothes they make for him, and while he is at it, he can even dream that one day when he finally grows some hair, he might even also grow a pair and even dare to give a little kiss to one of them... This was the stupidest ecchi anime series I have seen in years... 1/10.

This is much more than just an ordinary anime series - this is art! Granted, I always got like a C in art class, however, if this is not Expressionism being used in anime, they never taught me anything of any worth. The expressions of the female protagonists are as dramatic and powerful as Edvard Munch's famous painting The Scream. Sure, some will find it ugly, perhaps they will think the animation is rubbish and everything is unnecessarily dramatic, extremely shocking, and insane, etc. However, that is the purpose of such works! That is just how it is supposed to be! The whole of this anime series is something completely out there and original, and it is often quite intense and really absurd. As for the jokes, the humor is sometimes even more insane and extreme than the jokes in Gintama, for example, and nothing is sacred in Gintama... In addition to this, the ending of each episode is perfect, with one hell of a kick-ass song and, in the last episode, there is the addition of another small in-joke for the attentive viewer, which is a reference to the preceding narrative. Does it work? I guess it depends on who is watching it. Some people are going to be disturbed by it's visuals and give up on watching it, other people are going to be disgusted by the teacher tasting that mysterious liquid under the door in the very first episode and give up on watching it, and then there will be people like me who will be thoroughly entertained, who will gush over the originality, rawness, and the absurdity of it all... So if you want another classic slice of life anime series about cute girls doing cute things in their own club, then this show is definitely not for you. However, if you are looking for something hardcore, unexpected and brutal - welcome to the Freakshow. 8.2/10.

To begin with, this anime series is an adaptation of a Japanese light novel series that, like the anime series, does not start until two years after the main male protagonist appears in another world. It was probably an attempt at a marketing ploy (after all, Star Wars also starts with Episode IV) to draw attention to itself, and maybe the author and creator just did not want to start in the usual way, with perhaps the most boring passage of the whole narrative (because let us be honest, the beginnings and making up a supposedly original way for someone to get from the present to another world is pretty tired, and mostly involves the main male protagonist just kicking the bucket or it must be "magic" anyway). Likewise, it probably would not be anywhere as much fun to follow the beginnings of our perfectly ordinary main male protagonist, when all he can do is look up solutions to his problems on his solar-powered smartphone. I mean, there is going to be plenty of that in future episodes... So in the light novel series, they solved that particular problem by keeping that for the second novel and skipping it altogether in the anime series. For the attentive viewer, all you need is everything to be shown quickly in the opening plus a few flashbacks at the appropriate time... Is that a good thing? I do not know, however, I certainly did not mind it! So now we can go straight to the action and it is just another sub-par isekai, which I would subtitle "Cockblocked in another world with my SOLAR-powered Smartphone". I have highlighted the word solar on purpose because they repeat that word so often in this show to explain how a smartphone works for so long without worrying about charging it (apparently we simply need to leave it in the sun for an hour or so and then the smartphone is ready to use again - although do not let the reviewer DaweForeman know - he is ignorant of this...). ​​The smartphone plays a really important role in this show, the main male protagonist himself admits that his actually just a big cheater and self-critically admits that without searching for wisdom on his smartphone he would be just an ordinary nobody (I commend him for this self-criticism, the main male protagonist is OP, even though he is not actually OP). This is diametrically opposed to another with my smartphone-based anime series (my attempt at a modified title is a parody of that show’s title). In that other show, Touya is OP even without a smartphone, and he has superpowers which are embarrassingly straight from God himself, and the smartphone is only there just as a cool accessory to attract the youngsters - which is obviously garbage and the height of lameness. Here, the smartphone is a crutch, albeit a stupid one, even though it is still better than, say, "divine magic". Now, let us take a look at the girls. I hear Yuuto is useless at picking up women?!? I do not think so. Yuuto is in love with his childhood friend, the narrative hints at this more than once, and he even admits that because he is in love with his friend he does not want to be in a relationship with someone else. Is that weird? For someone who has been in love and knows how a person in love is usually oblivious to other partners (or even just oblivious to anyone who is not their dream partner) very much, this, on the other hand, is quite real. This is a pretty sweet way to (at least partially) refuse or ignore all the sexual advances from other people in a graceful way, and not in that typical way like the aforementioned Touya, who does nothing but suffer nose-bleeds. I think Touya is quite a useless main male protagonist when it comes to women! Yuuto is just loyal, monogamous, and perhaps boring... It is also worth noting that the "harem" in this show is designed to be more like a family, they call each other brother, sister, and father, and, in all honesty, if there was anything which smacked of incest even if the characters were not blood relatives - sorry, however, I really do not want to watch that... Personally speaking, I thought that there was some other nonsense and for example, at the moment when the battle was won by a camel that came out of nowhere, I thought about lowering the rating. However, I am not going to do that. I have seen the horror show In Another World with My Smartphone, mentioned several times before, and this is at least a level above that. 3/10.