Anime in the Covid Year of 2020 – Attack on Titan Returns, Muhyo and Roji, K: Seven Stories, Haikyuu, and Thoughts on Boruto

It’s been a year where anime seemed almost beside the point, and yet, by the end of it — for me at least — it felt relevant again in a new way.

Back in March, the production of Boruto went dark for a few months, as workers in Japan hunkered down in the pandemic as did those elsewhere.

When Boruto started up again with new episodes in summer, I recall feeling a little guilty almost. Like, there’s a pandemic on, and I missed anime, but not to the point where I wanted animation workers to go back into production offices and get sick drawing my entertainment.

There’s never been an experience like the pandemic of this year, and some of my reactions to things were all over the place. I’ve since settled down, remembering that people in Japan - like people here in the U.S. - actually wanted to return to work, so it’s okay.

The big news about Boruto is that Masashi Kishimoto is returning to write the manga. I’ve written here before about how Boruto has never lived up to Naruto, but the totally obvious reason for that never occurred to me before I heard this news.

One of the main reasons that made Naruto/Naruto Shippuuden so awesome was its storytelling, its amazing world-building. Konoha, the ninja village of Naruto and his friends, felt as real as anything with its large group of characters and all of their fascinating backstories. Not to mention the ninja universe itself, the five great shinobi nations and their histories.

When the Boruto manga began, I recall reading that Kishimoto was going to be less involved with it, but I didn’t really get that he wasn’t writing the story, and nor was he doing the art.

Well — no offense to the people who were, but — now I understand why Boruto’s storyline moved so slowly and had so much filler (or what felt like filler).

The fact that Kishimoto is taking over again would be cause for unmitigated celebration... save for a rumor I heard. The rumor is that the two most important characters in the Naruto/Boruto universe are getting killed off.

If this turns out to be true... let’s just say that I will genuinely freak out. Although it makes sense in story and mythic terms to have Naruto Uzumaki and Sasuke Uchiha, the two main figures in the backstory of Boruto’s universe, die so that Boruto and Sarada and others of the new generation can step up, for me personally that would leave too big of a hole in the whole universe. It would basically hollow out Boruto for me, because the series has for too long traded on our nostalgia for the old characters and their history without building its own standalone resonance with solid storytelling and character development. Without Naruto and Sasuke, Boruto would be like an aftereffect in the Naruto universe, one without a lot of meaning for me.

I can only hope that Kishimoto doesn’t do it.

On a lighter note, Muhyo and Roji’s Bureau of Supernatural Investigation had its second season on Funimation this time instead of Crunchyroll, so what I call my “emergency Funimation subscription” came in handy this summer. (I keep a paid subscription year-round to Funimation for those occasional anime series that Crunchyroll doesn’t license.)

Muhyo and Roji is one of those anime series that is enjoyable and not too cliffhangery when a season ends, meaning you can look forward to it coming back at some point without being anxious about it. It’s weird that Crunchyroll had its first season, but Funimation got its second season. Apparently, both companies will be under Sony’s umbrella soon, so I suppose it doesn’t make much difference either way in the ultimate sense.

In this covid year of 2020, a lot of us ate comfort foods while stuck at home. The same principle was followed for entertainment. People watched their favorite movies and TV shows for the enjoyment of the familiar.

I did the same with one of my favorite anime series, K, or rather K’s final iteration—K: Seven Stories, a post-series set of six episodes that beautifully finishes the K universe.

K: Seven Stories is a send-off or coda that brings closure to the entire world of K in a way that respects each character and each clan in all their quirkiness. The characters that intrigued you the most while watching the two TV seasons and the movie K: Missing Kings are explored in greater depth. Knowing how the main story ends, the opportunity to see these characters in their full humanity adds poignancy to the viewing. Even Gojo Sukuna, the young brat in the Green Clan, gets a full episode where we see how he longed for a sense of family and found it in the Greens, the most oddball clan of them all.

The final episode of K: Seven Stories is wonderful. It presents a mysterious situation where characters you know are dead are somehow alive again, and everyone is enjoying themselves in a sort of timeless Groundhog Day world where each day is fun and there are no lasting consequences for anything you do.

Eventually, of course, everyone tires of it, and begins to seek answers and a way out. The final scene brings the curtain down on K as the mysterious observer who has briefly appeared in all six episodes reveals his/her identity as the one behind the timeloop. The universe of K ends with its most emotional episode, one that has the characters affirming life even with its painful losses as something beautiful to be treasured. I love K. It’s a seriously underrated anime series, one that I wish more anime fans would watch.

That being said — a weird thing happened recently with K’s producers, the Go Hands animation studio. Some Go Hands designers were found to have plagiarized character/costume designs from other sources for its upcoming Tokyo Babylon 2021 anime series based on CLAMP’s original Tokyo Babylon series from the 1990s.

This amazes me for two reasons. First, K had awesome character and costume designs, meaning that Go Hands is perfectly capable of doing great original designs themselves. In fact, one of the distinctive things about K was that director Shingo Suzuki was also credited as K’s character designer — which I imagine has to be the only time in anime when those two very different jobs were performed by the same person.

The second thing that makes this odd is that CLAMP has always been known for fantastic character and costume designs. Couldn’t they have asked CLAMP to do these new designs?

Go Hands is hardly the first case of plagiarism in anime and manga — it happens occasionally and it’s always unfortunate. Hopefully they will get beyond this, and we’ll all get to see Tokyo Babylon 2021 sooner rather than later.

Haikyuu returned this fall. I enjoyed this season, though I’ve lost track of which level of the tournament they’re at given the huge gaps of time between each season.

Haikyuu finally got hit by the curse that hits many anime series at some time or another: the badly animated episode. A few weeks before the season ended, there was one episode where the character faces looked a little off, and the comments ensued on Crunchyroll as you might expect.

Production I.G. is known for its quality animation, but many production companies farm out some of their animation work overseas to Korea or Vietnam. Not to blame the overseas contractors, because who knows where the fault lay this time, but it seems production deadlines affect even the best of shows.

So now, Haikyuu is over once again, and who knows when it will return for another season. There was a four-year hiatus before it resumed again this year. Let’s hope it’s not another four years before the next season.

Onyx Equinox is Crunchyroll’s first original series. The story is based on Mesoamerican mythology and represents a departure from the site’s main focus on Japanese anime.

I have a lot of thoughts about Onyx Equinox, so I’ll be doing a post on it in January.

One of the delights of anime is the short-episode series, like Yamishibai (returning in winter 2021!). It’s hard to resist a series with a good premise that gives you five-minute episodes. Who doesn’t have five minutes to watch anime?

With a Dog AND a Cat, Every Day Is Fun has even shorter episodes — about a minute and a half apiece. Astonishingly, not only is it very funny, but its more serious episodes actually have me tearing up.

It’s about a young woman and her overeager, happy-all-the-time dog, and her evil but somehow adorable cat. As one Crunchyroll commenter put it, after watching an episode about the young woman’s former dog who passed away, “GREAT, NOW I’M CRYING INTO MY FOOD.” That's a tribute to the power of anime, seriously. What other form of entertainment can do that to you in 90 seconds flat?

And finally — Attack on Titan is in its last season.

Attack on Titan is unlike any other series, defying easy categorization. It’s shonen, sure, but its alternate Earth setting and those amazing, horrifying titans put it into a category of its own. Not to mention how the show’s popularity basically saved the U.S. manga localization industry in the early 2010s, and by association, anime in the U.S. as well.

The fact that Attack on Titan is ending makes me a little nostalgic. It was around the time of Attack on Titan’s initial popularity that I began to feel out of step with anime in general. My posts on this blog were spotty from 2015 to around 2018, when I came back to anime with renewed enthusiasm.

This is the 11th year I’ve been writing this anime blog. I don’t know what the future holds for this blog or the editing work I do in this industry. Like many, I suspect, this covid year has led to some soul searching for me as to how I want to spend my time going forward.

But for now, there will be no big changes. I’ll continue to blog here on anime and manga as my work schedule permits. I still feel that anime is relevant in my life, and every year there are series that surprise me. Anime can still surprise me with its variety and artistry, so there’s life here yet. And thanks for continuing to read this blog – it is much appreciated. :-)

Winter 2020 Watchlist - The Return of Haikyuu

After a few dry anime seasons - dry for me, anyway - I find myself watching more anime than ever. I wasn’t looking forward to anything this winter other than the return of Haikyuu, but suddenly my watchlists on Crunchyroll and Amazon Prime are flooded with an episode or two of something to watch nearly every day of the week.

But first... the holdovers from fall 2019.

What to say about Babylon... A series that started off as fantastic has now unraveled into a morass.

I really hate to say that about this series, because it was dark and fascinating at first. A new ward in Tokyo adopts a law that makes suicide legal, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. What prosecutor/investigator Zen Seizaki discovers is a conspiracy behind the law involving the ward’s mayor and a mysterious and ultimately terrifying woman - the true villain of the piece – Ai Magase.

There was a break between episode 8 and 9 that lasted one month. Last Monday was Episode 11. The series is listed at MAL as being 12 episodes long. We haven’t seen Ai Magase since Episode 8, the setting changed from Japan to the U.S. for some reason, and the show has gotten lost in philosophizing about good and evil in the abstract, seemingly forgetting its own plot.

I don’t honestly think they can wrap up the series in any real or satisfying way with only one episode left, but I’m invested enough to watch on Monday to see if they can do it.

And then there’s Boruto. One day, I’m going to write a whole post about how Boruto trades too much on our nostalgia for the original characters in Naruto without forcing us to care enough about the new generation of characters... but that day is not today.

Before I talk about Haiykuu... I’ve picked up two other series this season that are nice surprises.

Case Files of Jeweler Richard looks like it would be a light repast, something like the European pastries and royal milk tea the show’s lead character enjoys in his parlor. It is, however, deeper than that.

The fey and lovely Richard is a British jeweler par excellence. He speaks many languages in dealing with his international clientele. One day he’s saved from being attacked by drunken louts by a young Japanese man, Seigi Nakata, who becomes his employee.

Each episode focuses on a single kind of jewel and what its significance is, as a mystery gets solved. Pretty standard stuff, except that the stories so far have been more serious than you’d expect from the set-up. The first episode dealt with Seigi’s own grandmother, who raised him and supported him by – being a thief. The second episode featured a young woman, engaged to a nice young man, who is in severe conflict. It turns out that she is gay, and accepted the engagement in a desperate and doomed attempt to deny her sexuality and the hard road in life it often leads to in Japan.

At the beginning of the episode, Richard cautions Seigi that he is never to show discrimination or judgment toward any of their customers. This is obviously tied in to what the rest of the episode is about, but still, it seems like more than you’d expect from this kind of series.

Oda Cinnamon Nobunaga. With a title like this, you know first off that it’s a comedy. I was expecting it to be one of those satirical anime series where each episode is 8 or 10 minutes long like Skullface Bookseller Honda-san, but actually each episode is the standard 24 minutes or so in length.

Oda Nobunaga, the fierce Warring States general, the scourge of the era, has now been reincarnated in modern-day Japan as a dog named “Cinnamon” by his young female owner.

He’s not alone. The other Warring States generals are here too, and are also dogs: Date “Boo” Masamune, Takeda “Lucky” Shingen, Uesugi “Julian” Kenshin. They and Oda meet up at the local dog park to relive their old battles and reminisce about the past.

It’s light and funny, in part because each sketch or story only lasts a few minutes, followed by some quick funny bits, and then another little story. For a series that only has a single punch line (they’re dogs now!), the producers know that for it to work, they have to keep it moving, and they do.

And now, finally, after a one-season delay, Pet is streaming on Amazon Prime.

Pet was worth the wait. It’s an exploration of what could happen if people had the ability not only to reach into another person’s mind, but also to change their memories. The first episode leaves you a bit puzzled, but the second episode lays out exactly how the “crushers,” as they’re referred to, do it, and it’s a really wild ride.

I never did a review of Haikyuu when the first season came out way back in 2014, so I think I’ll do it now.

Haikyuu is the story of Shoyo Hinata, an enthusiastic, ever-striving volleyball player for Karasuno High. Despite his shrimpy height, he has outsize skills, particularly in jumping insanely high.

His uncomplicated optimism keeps him moving past obstacles, including the people who don’t believe in him. And his radiant smile could power a thousand suns.

As in all shonen sports anime - he has a rival, of sorts.

Tobio Kageyama is already a star in the high school volleyball world, but he has a problem. He’s not a team player, and in fact suffered a dark moment of humiliating rejection from his teammates at his former school after they tired of his self-centered arrogance. When he comes to Karasuno, he’s pretty dismissive of the chibi Hinata, but the odd couple soon becomes the cornerstone of the team’s offense.

Haikyuu - for whatever reason - had a four-year hiatus between this season and the third season back in 2016. I’ll be honest and say that I barely remember what happened in season three, as I don’t follow the manga. It’s not the only anime production that has had a huge gap between seasons (Attack on Titan had a similar long break), but from the more casual fan, in other words, someone who likes Haikyuu but who doesn’t wait with bated breath for each episode - the producers expected an awful lot of patience here.

In any event... Haikyuu follows the basic shonen sports story template to a T. A scrappy but underperforming high school team learns to work together, with each individual player fighting to overcome his own personal obstacles, until they begin to achieve hard-won successes and ultimately advance to the final round tournament of whatever sport it is they play.

Kuroko’s Basketball is by far still my favorite anime in this genre. Plus, the character designs are way more attractive in that series. ;-)

Haikyuu is geared toward more of a younger audience, in my view. The tone is clean and wholesome in that particularly Japanese way of encouraging boys to do their best, play fair, and support others in order to win. As a shonen sports anime, it’s a model of the genre, following the template nearly flawlessly.

So why am I not as enthusiastic about Haikyuu as I am, say, Kuroko’s Basketball?

Well...

Because it’s VOLLEYBALL.

Forgive me if you’re a fan of the sport, but I don’t find volleyball that compelling. As opposed to basketball, which is inherently exciting, volleyball just doesn’t do it for me. I am completely willing to own this as a personal fault. It’s the reason that I simply like Haikyuu, rather than love it.

In addition to all the new series for winter 2020, I should mention that Crunchyroll is adding value these days in terms of extra episodes of older series, OVAs, and movies. In the past few weeks I’ve enjoyed a number of Naruto Shippuuden movies, Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet OVAs, and best of all - K: Seven Stories, a short anime series in the K universe I never thought I’d get the chance to see. I’m not sure why this explosion of bonus extras is hitting Crunchyroll right now, but it’s really a lot of fun. Keep it up, Crunchyroll. =D

Seven Years Later

Anime Expo is this weekend.

And—like last year—I’m not going.

Not making a statement or anything. I think it’s part of the process.

If you’ve followed this blog over the years, and especially in the past year, you know I’ve been going through changes as an anime fan.

I was into anime 1,000% from 2006 until last year. Last year, I felt a cooling in my interest, which continues to this day, though anime is definitely still a part of my life.

Case in point: Arslan Senki (The Heroic Legend of Arslan).

I’d stopped watching Arslan Senki in its first season because my life got busy. I enjoyed the series and always meant to get back to it.

A few weeks ago, I picked it up again, finishing the first cour of its first season. And found out there was a whole second cour I didn’t know about.

I marathoned the second cour in two evenings, all 12 episodes.

I’ve been so out of it as far as keeping up with what’s new each season, it then took me a while to discover that Arslan Senki has a second season that will begin a few days from now. When it does, I’ll be watching.

This past year has been like that. I watched the third and final cour of Durarara’s second season, and continued with new seasons of series I’d been enjoying like K, Haikyuu, The Case File of Young Kindaichi Returns and Kagewani (pictured at the top), but didn’t make the effort to search out new series.

I also marathoned the third season of Junjou Romantica on Funimation—and really liked it, a lot more than the first two seasons. So anime still holds surprises for me.

And to this day, I still totally love Kuroko's Basketball. One of my favorite ways to relax is to rewatch my favorite episodes/arcs from the series, especially the second Seirin-Touou game and the Seirin-Yosen game episodes.

I’ll continue to watch the series I enjoy. Not sure I’ll make huge efforts to find new anime series, as I’m enjoying the ones already on my list and my free time has been taken up with writing fiction and learning Japanese.

I’ve spent more time this past year on my writing career, and also on my Japanese studies—particularly learning kanji. In my work, if I can learn the kanji, it’s a huge boost in income for me. So there’s great incentive there. ;-)

Another interest that has captivated me is Star Wars.

I’ve been a Star Wars fan my whole life. I saw the original trilogy when it came out in the theaters, and the new movie Star Wars: The Force Awakens has brought all the old feelings back.

I’m especially intrigued by the fandom that has arisen around “Reylo,” the Rey/Kylo Ren pairing. There’s not only fan fiction, but a significant number of meta essays and posts on the topic.

So, I have no grand pronouncements or conclusions in this post, which marks the seventh anniversary of this blog. I’m still an anime fan. I still want to write about anime, though not as much as before. So this blog will continue.

A housekeeping note: I closed this blog to comments last year, as I was checking here less frequently and didn’t want to leave comments hanging without my moderation. Blogger unfortunately hides all past comments when you do this—it doesn’t let you close to comments going forward and also leave the past comments visible. If I get more active on this blog again, I will open to comments as before and the past comments will be visible again.

That's all for now. I'll post again when the mood strikes and I have something anime-related to say.

Until then, best wishes to all, and if you're going to Anime Expo - have a fantastic time. =D

Seiyuu Appreciation Day - The Other Guys

In the current endless run of flashback fillers in Naruto Shippuuden, we're seeing more of Neji now than ever before.

I miss Neji. :-(

Look at Neji's picture above. Now imagine you hear his voice.

...

Were you able to hear him? Neji's seiyuu, Kouichi Toochika, has a very distinctive voice - soft-spoken with a certain husky timbre.

Neji is only one supporting character in the Naruto universe and he even got killed off - but I can still hear Neji's voice if I call up the character in my mind.

Most of the time in these seiyuu posts I talk about the big-name seiyuus, the stars, because they're the ones I see most in anime. But sometimes you'll hear a voice in a supporting role that really catches your attention.

One such supporting character was Kensuke Fukui, the point guard for Yosen in Kuroko's Basketball.

Fukui only has a few lines in several episodes when Yosen battles the main team Seirin in the semi-finals. I didn't even know the character's name until I looked him up for this post - I only thought of him as "the point guard from Yosen with dishwater blond hair and a nice voice." Since that's a mouthful, it's good that I know the character's name now. ;-)

The seiyuu voicing Fukui just had a really nice voice and I noticed it. Warm, masculine, sexy. I looked up the seiyuu and found to my surprise that Kaito Ishikawa has played two main roles in series that I watched, and I didn't recognize him.

First, he was Tobio Kageyama, the second main character in the volleyball anime Haikyuu.

Kageyama is one of the best male tsunderes I've seen in a while. ;-) I mean, look at that expression. XD I couldn't believe Ishikawa played Kageyama and I didn't recognize him as Fukui, but the next surprised me even more:

Ishikawa was Ledo in Gargantia! I didn't recognize him from that role either! And Ledo was a difficult role. You'll recall that the character comes from a different universe and has to learn the language, speaking it hesitantly and with an odd cadence at first.

Ishikawa also played Nine in Zankyou no Terror and has done main roles in other series. So even though I didn't remember his voice from the two big roles I'd heard him in, I heard Ishikawa's voice in this small role as Fukui in Kuroko's Basketball and enjoyed it enough to notice and look up who the seiyuu was.

Often you'll see big-name seiyuu playing special characters in an anime, like in the last Shirobako episode when the director finally comes face to face with the elusive mangaka whose manga MusaAni is adapting. I didn't have to look it up to know it was Takahiro Sakurai playing the mangaka, since I can recognize his voice. =D

But seiyuu who play big roles will also play smaller roles without any fuss or fanfare, like Kaito Ishikawa playing Fukui. Actors love to ply their trade, after all, and every role is another chance to do what they love best.

Thinking of warm and distinctive masculine voices makes me think of Kenji Hamada, who plays Teppei Kiyoshi in Kuroko's Basketball.

Hamada's voice is so distinctive, I've recognized him in two small roles in other series since I first heard him in Kuroko's Basketball.

And then there's Hasumi Itou, whom I've mentioned before, who played Kaoru in Hakuouki, Chizuru's cross-dressing long-lost brother who we see in makeup and a kimono for many episodes until he finally reveals his evil little male self. ;-) Itou is the seiyuu who did that weird, unforgettable scene where her voice slid from fake-female to low-male without a hitch, just a pure slide from one to the other.

Aside from Hakuouki, Itou only has one other credit, as Aoi Toosaka in Fate/Zero. She is definitely a seiyuu to keep one's eye on.

Of course, one of my favorite seiyuu who never gets a main role but is always one of the other guys in a series, is Nobuo Tobita.

Tobita was the star of Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam decades ago, and since then has only done supporting roles. But his beautiful gentle voice remains one of my favorites and hearing him is always a treat.

Finally, talking about supporting seiyuu and being one of the other guys wouldn't be complete without mentioning Shizuka, who finally got a voice acting job in last week's Shirobako episode. Shizuka, you'll remember, was the only one among her college friends who hadn't succeeded in the anime industry yet.

In honor of Shizuka getting her first role, here's a photo of Shizuka's seiyuu, Haruka Chigusa.

In the episode, Aoi Miyamori is in the recording studio when Shizuka walks in to record her role. Miyamori is shocked to see her friend, then nervous for her as she reads her lines, and then finally cries in relief and happiness when Shizuka finishes the acting job without a hitch and to the director's approval.

It was all done without words and was beautiful to watch. Ah well, might as well show you Miyamori's seiyuu's picture as well. Here's Juri Kimura. :-)

Again, if you're not watching Shirobako, you're missing a gem. =D

Summer Season 2014 - Reviews

This summer’s season of anime was better than I'd expected at the outset. Of the four series I enjoyed the most, three were complete surprises.

First, as to the series that are continuing. I’m on episode 5 and finally enjoying Sailor Moon Crystal. Since it’s the original magical girls anime, now I see where certain conventions of that genre came from, like the moment when the girls “power up,” announcing their special names and striking a pose. ;-)

I’m most intrigued by Tuxedo Mask (I keep wanting to call him Tuxedo Moon), and apparently his story gets told next in episode 6, so I’ll look forward to that.

I’m still watching Yamishibai S2, those little five-minute paranormal creepfest episodes. I’m currently behind on Naruto Shippuuden by about nine episodes, so I’ll have to block off time for a marathon. And Crunchyroll is such a one-stop-shopping experience these days with all their licenses that I’m behind on Space Dandy S2, which I have to keep remembering to watch on Funimation.

I watched the first episodes of Shonen Hollywood and Zankhou no Terror and then got swamped by my writing schedule and never continued with either, though both looked decent. They’ll go onto my on-hold list rather than the dropped list, because I may pick them up again in future.

Bakumatsu Rock ended on the same wild note it played through the whole series, with the bad guys setting up gigantic speakers all over Japan to hypnotize the populace with their dastardly “Heaven’s Song.” Of course Ryoma-kun and his merry band of rockers save the day at the end...

Haikyuu deserves its own post and I’ll write one at some point. I’ll just say here that it’s an example of how a sports anime can be good even if you focus solely on story and character growth at the expense of fan service (there is none) and the fan pandering that you see in most other sports animes.

I continued to enjoy The File of Young Kindaichi Returns this season in its second cour. Some of the crimes Kindaichi solved this season were quite dark and brutal, which slightly dampened my enthusiasm for the show, but it was still good.

Finally, the four that rocked me this season.

The one of the four that didn’t surprise me was Love Stage, which of course I loved. :-)

Love Stage was a sweet BL series. I hesitate to call it yaoi: it’s a soft and fluffy love story with only light touches of angst here and there. Compared to heavier stories like Sekai-ichi Hatsukoi or Junjou Romantica, Love Stage was like a spring breeze.

And it was so funny. It was more of an outright comedy with a BL romance pairing than it was a BL story with some comedy. Love Stage made me laugh out loud many times, which puts it right up there with Monthly Girls Nozaki-kun this season.

If you want to dip your toes into yaoi/BL waters, Love Stage is a perfect introduction to the genre.

There’s still one more episode left of Nobunaga Concerto, but this show rapidly grew on me this summer and I can already say – along with many commenters on Crunchyroll – that this was the most underrated series of the season.

A time-travel historical story done as a straight-up drama, Nobunaga Concerto has a beautiful look even though – or perhaps because – it’s entirely CGI. The main character, modern schoolboy Saburo who finds himself subbing in for the real Nobunaga in the Warring States era, looked at first like he was going to be obnoxious, but he settled down and became a complex and engaging character in a solidly-told story.

Like Nobunaga Concerto, I threw Dramatical Murder onto my watchlist at the last minute, not expecting too much of it. It became one of the series that I always made sure to watch each week despite having a busy schedule this summer.

Dramatical Murder is based on a video game. Set on the island of Midorijima sometime in the future, the main character is Aoba, a young man who can’t remember too much of his past.

Aoba works in a junk shop and has one good friend, Koujaku. Midorijima is run by gangs who play a virtual fighting game called “Rhyme.” The real controller of the island is a dictator named Toue, who rules from his futuristic tower in the center of the island.

Each person has his own “All Mate,” an AI computer built into what look like pets. Aoba’s All Mate is Ren, a small blue dog whose pink tongue perpetually hangs out.

The episodes seem unrelated at first as the show follows one character’s path from the video game and then another’s. But eventually the greater story unfolds, and then you’re hooked.

Actually, I got hooked early on by the great character designs, fantastic costumes, cute AI pets and generally hip and cool presentation of this universe. Dramatical Murder initially comes off as a Durarara or K type of anime, too-cool-for-school and style over substance. But like those other two series, it builds to a mystery that has you impatiently looking forward to each new episode. There were some deep and poignant moments too. It’s a much better show than you’d think just from its description and I recommend it.

And finally, the series I enjoyed the most this season.

I always watch anime series about mangakas because I find the manga industry fascinating. With Monthly Girls Nozaki-kun I also got a great comedy series, which I wasn’t expecting.

Petite red-haired Chiyo Sakura has a crush on the stone-faced Umetarou Nozaki. Her crush turns out to be a professional manga artist despite still being in high school, and Chiyo begins assisting him with his art work.

She meets his other part-time assistants like Hori, the talented but short actor in the school’s drama club, and Wakamatsu, who plays on the basketball team.

There’s plenty of comedy just between Nozaki and Chiyo with his manga work and her crush on him, but what really made the show funny were the gender reversal pairings of Hori and Kashima, and Wakamatsu and Seo.

Hori is the drama club’s director, and he’s constantly frustrated in dealing with Kashima, a tall glamorous girl the other girls call “Prince.” Their relationship involved so much gag violence, confusion and misunderstanding that I couldn't tell if it was supposed to be a romantic pairing or not. They either liked or hated each other – I couldn't tell which – but they couldn't let go of each other.

The funniest couple was Wakamatsu and Seo.

Seo is one of my new favorite female anime characters. Totally lacking in grace or the decorum that young women are supposed to possess, she’s loud, insulting, physically violent and clueless about others. She also has a beautiful singing voice, giving her the nickname “Lorelei.”

Wakamatsu, on the other hand, is Mr. Nice Guy to the point of insipidness, and Seo’s victim. She targets balls at his head during basketball practice and harasses him until he can’t take it anymore and asks Nozaki for advice.

He finally decides to challenge Seo to a duel on the school roof, only to say things and take actions that make it seem he’s in love with her instead. At one point, his voice rising hysterically, Wakamatsu accuses Seo of throwing balls at him, and making him carry her stuff home from school, and then taking him to a family restaurant and treating him and giving him gifts and...

... At which point Nozaki, hiding and listening to this, thinks, “Actually, I think she likes you.” Seo is like the boy who picks on and teases a girl because he doesn’t know any other way to show his crush. It’s a truly funny role reversal and even better in that neither seems to get that they do, in fact, like each other.

Compared to the two supporting couples, Chiyo and Nozaki were almost dull, but still funny. I did appreciate how Chiyo is still in love with Nozaki at the end, despite experiencing his weirdness and weaknesses close up. ;-)

Monthly Girls Nozaki-kun is now on my anime DVD to-buy list.