First Impressions: Winter 2015

Absolute Duo, didn't give me high hopes for the season but watching The Testament of Sister New Devil (weird English translation not done by me), I was starting to feel like I should be embarrassed about my hobby. They're both trashy light novels that are getting adaptations because of their blatant fanservice with main characters about as deep and interesting as the directions on my cup noodle. Maybe I'm just judgmental and jaded, but I can't stand these animated excuses of male sexual angst.

Not a good start, but there are some redeeming shows already; "Magical Boys" (Binan Koukou Chikyuu Bouei-bu Love!) appears to be a self aware, magical girl parody and is so far pretty funny but I can see it burning out its running gags. I don't know if it will be able to maintain its funny content for 11+ more episodes but it was a relief after the softcore porn I was suffering through earlier. 

I'm not really a big fan of shows that are adapted from games since there have been so few that were actually good and they mostly exist to bring in more cash while expending as little as possible, resulting in poor animation and writing. Kantai Collection is about par for the course right now. The backgrounds are either CG or uninteresting. There is lots of animation haphazardly spliced with CG but, to its credit, its at least pretty OK CG (personal preference; I just don't like aggressive use of CG). I was hoping that, given its popularity, it would turn out an above average adaptation. I am so far not disappointed, but not impressed either. It does at least introduce me to the characters that are popular on image boards and in fan art all over the internet without having to bumble around in a Japanese only mobile game. 

Yuri Kuma Arashi is my favorite so far mostly because I have no idea what happened or where it's going. There is yuri (lily or fictional lesbian relationships), there are kuma (bears), there is this mysterious thing translated as an "Invisible Storm" (arashi=storm) and weird heavy symbolism. You'd think with all the title drops some of it would make sense, but nope, I'm left off with a girl being eaten by a bear after a strangely suggestive "consuming nectar" scene. It looks and sometimes feels like it should be a comedy, but it maintains a very serious tone regardless of the cute bears and amusing situations. I'm looking forward to getting into this one since I still don't know how to react. 

There is more to come!

-DysNeko