And it’s yet another good anime season! Here’s what I’m watching this summer.
Okay, you know I had to at least give this one a try. Nyaight of the Living Cat is a comedy-horror mix, about a feline virus that turns people into cats if they so much as touch a cat.
This results in scenes like you might expect:
It’s fun. The actors deliver their lines with a straight face, in other words, like it’s all dead serious - which makes it even funnier. I’m only two episodes in so far, but it’s already a keeper on my list.
Each season, I always have a few series that are kind of the B-team, to me anyway. In other words, they’re entertaining enough to watch, but I don’t make any special effort to watch the new episode on the day it comes out. Last season, it was Apocalypse Hotel and Zatsu Tabi. This season it’s See You Tomorrow at the Food Court and Welcome to the Outcast’s Restaurant.
See You Tomorrow at the Food Court looks to be slice-of-life with high school girls. I’ve seen one episode and it was sufficiently intriguing to put it on the watchlist. It’s basically two high school girls, one glamorous and the other a plain jane, who meet at the food court every day to talk about... their days. Yeah... so we’ll see about this one.
On the other side of the spectrum, genre-wise, is the guild fantasy Welcome to the Outcast’s Restaurant.
Synopsis - From Tentai Books
Backstabbed by those he considered friends, Dennis has been exiled from one of the strongest guilds around: the Silver Wings Battalion. He doesn't think much of it, though, as he was dying to use his level 99 cooking skills anyway. That's why he decides to leave the city behind and open up a diner in the countryside.
While pursuing his dream, Dennis meets Atrielle, a girl exiled from her noble household and relegated to slavery until he saves her.
The pair open the diner together, and their first client is... an exiled knight from a different guild? How peculiar. But she is not the only customer; a cocky mage and a drastically overworked yet underpaid sage become regulars as well.
The knight brings trouble to the diner at times, but Dennis's cooking skills and beloved butcher knives cut through trouble and hunger alike!
Thus begins the legend of Dennis and his diner, the talk of the town!
It sounds like isekai but it isn’t, not unless something weird and unexpected happens in the story. It just looks like a story that is set in a fantasy setting, with a focus on yummy Japanese food, or maybe European food too, we’ll see.
This one is dark, and I’m not sure I’m in the mood for dark these days. Hotel Inhumans is about a strange hotel whose only guests are hitmen and Mafioso types. And there’s a hint of the paranormal in how the two hotel employees, Ikuro Hoshi and Sara Haizaki, deal with their guests’ situations. In the first episode, a young hitman has been working under duress for years, assassinating people because his sister is being held hostage. It has a bittersweet ending, after Hoshi and Haizaki (mostly the girl Haizaki) manage to beat up his pursuers and somehow give him vital information (that they really should have no way of knowing), which leads to that bittersweet end to the story.
I’m sure even hitmen deserve happy endings sometimes, but again, not certain I’ll continue with a dark anime right now.
Finally, there is Kaiju No. 8, a returning favorite from last year.
Kaiju No. 8 is the most fun shonen anime I’ve watched in years. The second season start was a little delayed, to July 19. To make up for it, Crunchyroll aired Hoshina’s Day Off, a one-off between seasons episode, on July 5.
Hoshina is the sword master Vice-Captain to Mina Ashiro’s mega weapon-wielding Captain.
Interestingly, season 2 begins with splitting up the rookie squad that were the main characters in season 1, as they’ve now graduated and are sent to different kaiju defense units across Japan. It’s kind of a shame that we won’t see the squad together again.
By the way, the final season of My Hero Academia has been announced. It will air starting in October 2025.
And the spinoff series, My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, is coming back for a second season next February.
The final cour of Bleach: The Thousand Year Blood War will also be next year. As always with anime, there’s much more to come. ;-)
