Anime Fall Season 2013 Review, Part 1

Well folks, it’s time again for a wrap-up. I’ll be going through my impression of every anime I watched this past fall season, what I liked, what I didn’t like, and naming my winner and loser.

I noted in the preview for this season how traditionally the fall season is considered slow. There are several reasons for this. First, the season tends to be a little disjointed towards the end as the broadcast schedule gets ruffled by specials for Christmas and New Year’s. As a result, as is the case with multiple titles this year, the end of the fall season and the start of the winter season sort of wash together. Second, there are a lot of personal matters that tend to stir things up. For instance in the U.S the start of the Fall anime season coincides with the start of the new year for schools, so the beginning of the season can get a little complicated with settling in to a new school routine after the summer break. In Japan their new school year of course starts in spring/end of winter, but they do come off a long summer holiday at about the same time too.

In other words, we get so busy with other things at this time of year that anime takes a sort of back seat. Even if the season isn’t really that bad, our attention is so focused elsewhere that it all just washes out and nothing sticks particularly well to our memory. Conversely, during the summer season and the spring season, both seasons with the longest holidays spent at home doing nothing but watching TV and videos (summer break and spring break/Golden Week) we can pour our attention on anime a little more forcefully and thereby more stuff sticks, leaving a stronger impression.

For those who watched this fall season, however, there was a little more grab than usual. A good number more shows seemed to hit above par, with a few more highly anticipated shows coming around this season too. So without further ado, let’s see how things shook out.

First things first. I originally said I would drop Diabolik Lovers after the third episode, and I did. No idea how things went with that show after that. I heard some murmurs that it improved relatively later into the series, so I might go back and check it out in the future, but it’s fairly low on the totem pole right now. I also stopped Monogatari Second Season at episode 18. That was partially unintentional. I ended up with tough Friday-Sunday schedules a few weeks in a row, and had to push back a number of weekly premieres. The season was boring and annoying the hell outta me so it checked in rather low on the catch-up list. Eventually I just gave up on catching up. But, as I said in the season preview after my initial mistake about the length of its run, my view on the series didn’t move and likely wouldn’t move even if I did see the last episodes right this minute.

Second, there are a lot of shows that are carrying over into the winter. From summer to fall the only direct carryover was Monogatari Second Season. From fall to winter there looks to be about seven right now; Gundam Build Fighters, Tokyo Ravens, Kill la Kill, Golden Time, Nagi no Asakura, Strike the Blood, and Log Horizon. That’s a lot. It’s been a while since so many shows have been two cour all at once. I’ll get into what that means for the winter season when I do its preview, but for now that means those shows will hold off their reviews until April when the winter season ends.

Now this season… Walkure Romanze was a show that lacked any real major plot. It’s set in a fictional modern day country, at a school (high school apparently) that still celebrates, teaches, and practices jousting as a sport. The story definitely deserves points for originality there. They could have gone with literally anything else, for all that it really matters, but they went with the one thing that you’d have to wrack your brains to recall ever being in a show at all, let alone a main focus. But once you look past the fact that they actually did a show about jousting, you see it’s just another harem anime. Well, not really. It’s more like just a fan-service show under the guise of a harem anime, under the guise of an anime about jousting. Like any harem there is only one male of any significance in the entire cast. Even so, he only has a limited focus in the story. He’s there, but the cavalcade of beautiful, buxom, women around him are not wholly obsessed with winning his affection as is normally done. They’re more concerned with jousting. Which would make you think this was a show all about jousting that just happened to have a mostly female cast of beautiful women, if not for the constant double-entendres, jiggling body parts, and suggestive camera angles. Of course it ends without the male lead ending up with anyone. Honestly, the show is pretty common affair. But for the novelty of saying you actually saw an anime about jousting, you could easily do worse… assuming you can find another show about jousting.

Non Non Biyori is one of the best comedies and takes the cake for most adorable character with Renge. It is as slice of life as the genre gets, yet at the same time is unbelievably unusual. The setting is a town as small as it can possibly be, having a single group of kids – 1 boy and four girls – and still huge physically, covering so much area. There is a joke in the last episode that one of the families owns one of the mountains, and the girls thought that normal, that everyone’s family own a mountain. It really is a “cute girls being cute” type series. The charm and comedy is in their contrasting their country boondocks lifestyle to the new girl’s big city lifestyle, or rather the image of the two lifestyles and when they interact. But Renge steals the show. As the youngest she is so precocious and has such an unbelievable imagination you can’t help but laugh when she says or does something ridiculous. It’s not a knock your socks off comedy, but it’s still pretty good.

Unbreakable Machine Doll falls into a strange routine. It seems like your average shounen first, harem second, series. It is all about magic users battling it out with puppets/dolls controlled by their magic. Our M.C isn’t very skilled, not a prodigy or that usual trope. Instead he is at the bottom rung and is trying to work his way up, driven by revenge against his brother who apparently killed their younger sister, and may have since used her body to create one of his dolls. This is standard affair. His doll is in the form of a girl who at every single turn is asking him to either marry her or sleep with her, always to his vocal rebuke and her forceful attempt to make his answer “yes”. What’s more if he is remotely friendly to another female she assumes he’s having an affair with that female, of which there are three added to the harem.

The gem of harem anime is often the comedic routine of the male lead and the female cast. There’s usually a ton of “accidents” or misunderstandings. This show seems to want to shine a light on this by the extremes to which they go for their jokes. Case in point, in one episode he asks one such girl if he can borrow one of her dogs as he goes off to try to save one of the other girls. She responds with a comment literally stating that she thinks he’s into bestiality because of that request. It’s hard to not laugh at such an outlandish leap in cognitive function. The series could likely do so much more if it kept going. I’ve no idea how much farther the manga has gone relative to the anime, but it would be nice to get a second season at some point. It’s a middle of the pack show honestly, but I could see the series as a whole getting better if they could flesh out the story more.

That is partly the issue with BlazBlue: Alter Memory. BB was disappointing. For as much groundwork as was laid out by the games, it’s brutally easy to see what went wrong. The producers/writers/director for the anime wanted too much to make the anime stand apart from the game, so they did their utmost to tell the story while avoiding the exact story. Sounds confusing? That’s the point. They in part needed more than 13 episodes. They left out almost any discussion or development of the characters and the entire story seemed too hobbled together. They really should have focused on telling the story of the first game, and even that would have possibly been hard to do in only 13 episodes. To make matters worse the animation looked to be of fairly base quality. Anyone who played the game and saw the beautiful animation done for those scenes was likely appalled by the anime’s animation. They really let the fans down with this one. It’s very disappointing, because I had high hopes that this would be THE top show of the season. At this point all you can really hope for is a reboot in a couple years at the earliest, or that if it manages to do well enough for a continue that they dedicate the time, effort, and money to make it what it should have been.

Copellion was the other big pre-season show to watch. I won’t rehash the whole thing of its backstory how the show itself came to broadcast. It wasn’t disappointing. It wasn’t superb, but it did very well. I do have to admit that it didn’t go quite the way I was expecting. From the way it started I thought the pacing would be more subdued with more of a steady revelation of the cause of the disaster, as well as a look at what was going on in the outside world. The outside look was very, very small; only of an inept and feckless Prime Minister. It was emotional, tackling issues of guilt among those involved in the disaster, and a somewhat unexpected tact of questioning the meaning of humanity. The superpowers turn was also a bit unexpected. There was a lot left to build a new season on, so with any luck there will be another season of Copellion in the not too distant future.

That’s it for review number one. There are three more this week. Look forward to them, and in case you didn’t visit on the 1^st, Happy New Year!