Posts with the “magical girl” tag

Two dorks, too twee

A Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai! Ren review

The majority of Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai! Ren (lit. Even With Eighth Grader Syndrome I Want To Be In Love, alt. Love, Chuunibyou and Other Delusions -Heart Throb-) is forgettable fluff. The core relationship between recovering chuunibyou Yuuta and incurably afflicted Rikka that came to a head in the first series is the focus this time around and instead of the clear split between light humour and super heavy drama, this second series is almost one hundred percent affable comedy. There are diversions such as a competitive napping contest and a school trip but otherwise this is a by the numbers campus love comedy.

would a second offering be more light-hearted after the first’s rather conclusive ending?

In an attempt to inject some drama into an otherwise undramatic and glacially moving relationship, a friend from Yuuta’s past makes an appearance: the similarly ex-chuunibyou Satone who sports a mane of pink hair and shrill, borderline hysterical laugh that becomes somewhat of a warning siren throughout. She is the only notable addition to a series that was already heavily weighted towards females and the story is content to shed Yuuta’s only other male friend, Makoto, who becomes a lot like YuruYuri’s Akari in being invisible most of the time. When he isn’t wearing the anime equivalent of blackface and being preyed upon by a predatory male classmate of course.

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Prismatic

A review of the Vividred Operation anime

Your enjoyment of Vividred Operation can be accurately measured by whether you prefix "bums" with "little girl" in the phrase "it's full of bums". Thankfully you don't need to wait long for an answer as it's a scant twenty seconds into the first episode before a sunrise from the top of the Tokyo Sky Tree is framed between the legs and crotch of the series' antagonist. You can switch off right there (advisable if your screen is in any way publicly visible) and be safe in the knowledge that the series doesn't get much better.

the smaller the girl, the bigger the hammer
As an entry into the "magical girl" genre it feels a lot like painting by numbers. Spunky and earnest protagonist that acts as the lynchpin of the group? Check. Antagonist who must be won over by the all-encompassing power of friendship? Check. Colour coded sentai team? Check. And yes, red is the leader. Everyone knows that.

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Mooning

Hello my name is John and I'm a Moonie. I've been clean for eleven years now, but I can see that ending soon.

I had found I could tune into a German dub of the show - uncut from the original Japanese version and already well past what was available in English

It all started when I was a young strip of a lad, barely thirteen years old, and still reeling from the discovery of series like Guyver and Devilman on the satellite-only TV station, Bravo. Certainly they both had a schlocky thrill for a newly pubescent boy but the then nascent internet provided a much richer idea of what was on offer from Japan.

An anime image site at that time was a rare and precious thing, not least because web space was measured in single digit megabytes and hosting archives of freely accessible images seemed unfathomably generous. The one I first spotted Sailor Moon on has long since succumbed to time and its name lost to memory, but it was the only title on there with a triple digit number of images.

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