Quick reviews of what I watched before the season starts to close. Not that I have much to say about any of them. A few were great, most were forgettable.

Great:

• This Monster Wants to Eat Me - Easily my favorite this season. The show is very well made, especially how the characters are portrayed. It did have a slow start but that’s just the kind of show it is. Very character and situation driven. Each episode enhances the situation, characters, inherent conflict, etc.
• Alma-chan Wants to Be a Family! - Second favorite of the season. The characters have good chemistry, the concept is fun. I enjoyed every episode.

Good:

• Lvl 9999 gatcha… - I did not expect much from this, but it has been surprisingly enjoyable. It has its issues, but the characters are fun and varied, the pacing is not too bad, and there seems to be real world building… alright, I actually picked up the LN for this, and it does have good world building and the plot progression has remained consistent so far.
• A Gatherer’s Adventure in Isekai - I thought this would be a boring, slice of life, travel anime, but something about it works for me. The characters and sub plots are nothing spectacular, but interesting enough and work well together.
• Isekai Quartet3 - Carries on from the others. Always fun to see these different characters interact.

Just Ok: -My Status as an Assassin Obviously Exceeds the Hero’s - I’m not sure why I am still watching this. The current arc is dragging on way to long, the previous elf arc was terrible, there has been little story progression, just hints of a bigger plot.

• May I Ask For One Final Thing? - This just never clicked for me. The concept is fun, and I generally enjoy the whole dumped otome heroine/villaness sub genera, but nothing about the story or the characters works for me.
• The Banished Court Magician Aims to Become the Strongest - Another over played concept, but it avoids some of the worse tropes. The former party leader does grow up and recognize his mistakes. The MC actually knows he is strong. It’s above average for this sort of anime.
• Dad is a hero, Mom is a spirit, I’m a reincarnator - Dropped, then picked back up and binged through quickly one afternoon when bored… probably should have left it dropped.
• Mechanical Marie - The concept is fun, its just a bit too plain. The romance is barely more than a crush. The humor does not hit often enough.
• The Dark History of the Reincarnated Villainess - There are a lot of these reincarnated in an otome game with a twist sort of shows. The twist is different enough in this one that it carries the show. I’d have dropped it early on if I did not enjoy seeing the main character constantly flustered trying to deal with the consequences of becoming the villainess in the world of her own childhood dark fantasies.

Just wanted to say it’s mildly infuriating how people still can’t pronounce Reze (Chainsaw Man) correctly even AFTER seeing the movie. The characters literally say her name a couple of times throughout the film.

Finished My Hero Academia over the weekend. We may rewatch it in English after a couple years, just to say we did, and because we’ll miss this series and these characters. We watched the Japanese dub because it came out first, and because we’re manga readers. My wife read all the manga chapters when they were new. I think I jumped on the manga after the first or second season.

Currently watching The Summer Hikaru Died. This is a Netflix series, and I think it was a simuldub? So we’re watching that in English.

Current: The only thing current that I watched last week was May I Ask for One Final Thing, which is still satisfying. The plot twists played out well, and we’re neatly set up for the finale next week. I’ve enjoyed everything about this series.

I had also been watching Gnosia, and I’ll undoubtedly finish it up sometime, but I just didn’t feel any particular urge to watch this latest episode. I’m tired of the complete lack of any sort of overarching plot - the ever-growing pile of mysteries and complications and the increasingly awkward lack of answers. Empty stylishness and an episodic cycle with no meaningful stakes can only carry a series so far by itself (it’d be better if there was at least some comedy or some ecchi or something to break the tedium). As it is, it’s almost as tedious as the Endless Eight arc of Haruhi.

Past:

So first up from the past last week was the rest of Ping Pong the Animation, which I started the previous week. It was… pretty good. I get the concept of sacrificing artistic precision for dynamism, but there were points in that that were too much even for me - points at which the figures looked too much like they were drawn in crayon by a kindergartner. And I found Smile’s character progression a bit unexpectedly shallow - not so much as if he grew from a person with no competitive drive into a person who was willing and able to compete at all costs as he just sort of flipped an internal switch and just went from the former to the latter. That said, I did like it all in all, though I’d rate it at the lower end of Yuasa’s work.

Then I went back to the Gridman universe for SSSS Dynazenon, which was sort of unsettling and frustrating, and in an entirely different way than SSSS.Gridman was. Gridman tended to be mean-spirited and cruel, while Dynazenon tended to be capricious and aloof. I kept wondering (and still wonder) where the urgency was. Kaiju are rampaging through the city, throwing buildings around and destroying entire precincts, so certainly killing hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, and when Yomogi is asked why he fights, he can’t even manage to come up with an answer. And when they meet the kaiju users, they don’t react to them as if they’re the people responsible for all the death and destruction, but as if they’re just someone they’re sort of inexplicably fated to oppose for some vague reason. In fact, outside of a few scattered scenes, they don’t even really seem to acknowledge, much less be concerned about, all of the death and destruction. Instead, against that mostly unacknowledged backdrop, they play out a fairly standard, though admittedly satisfyingly well written, school/slice of life/awkward romance ensemble dramedy, complete with all the tropes - beach episode (well - swim park, but still), festival complete with fireworks (and Yume beautiful in a yukata), school festival… When I gave in and adopted their lack of urgency and mostly ignored the kaiju, it was a pretty decent story really, with relatively interesting characters who develop well. When it was over though, my first thought was that the movie had damned well better tie together a whole lot of loose ends, because between the two series, there’s a whole boatload of them.

And… the movie, Gridman Universe opened up with the Gridman characters, and immediately went mean-spirited and cruel and crushed Yuta’s heart, and I turned it off. I’m not in the mood for that sort of shit.

So I switched to the second season of Love, Chuunibyou and Other Delusions, and only then realized that both series not only each have a Rikka, but each Rikka is involved with a Yu(u)ta. That can’t be a coincidence.

But anyway - I had been sort of tempted to just leave Chuunibyou alone after the first season, because I was quite satisfied with the way it ended. And in retrospect, I probably should have. The second season was… not good. I didn’t actively dislike it, but I really didn’t like it much either, and the season-ending special was rage-inducing (the pictures weren’t the point - Yuuta made a promise to Rikka, then broke it, and NOTHING excuses that. Asshole.)

I had planned on watching the movie, but after that maddening 13th episode, I lost interest.

So entirely burnt out on tedious sort of vaguely romance-ish entanglements and emotional manipulation, I switched to one that I had actually been sort of saving for just such a situation - when I needed a palette cleanser that was smart, low key and funny - Joshiraku. And when the first episode opened with one character declaring that we should just go read the manga because this is a dialogue-heavy series and it’s a dumb idea to adapt something like that, which led to a warning on-screen that says, “This anime is full of ordinary dialogue so that viewers can fully enjoy how cute the girls are,” I was sure it was a good choice. And it so very much was. The characters are great, the dialogue was witty and amusing and it never lost that meta edge. The only thing that was sort of disappointing about it was that it was one of those series that I’m sure I would’ve enjoyed that much more if I understood Japanese, so I could’ve caught all of the puns and wordplay and dialect shifts. I liked it so much I think it holds a solid third place on my list of favorite CGDCTs, behind only YuruYuri and Gabriel Dropout.

Then, refreshed, I went back to Gridman Universe. It did provide some answers, but not “Ah - I get it now” sort of answers, but more like “Sure - okay - whatever” sort of answers. It was pretty much just the rule of cool expanded to movie length and big screen size, which I guess is sort of appropriate for super robots vs. kaiju. And at least it finally stopped toying with Yuta’s heart, though the pay-off felt more like an addendum than an actual part of the story. It was okay all in all, but could’ve easily been better.

And… I’m not sure what’s next. I’m burnt out on romance, burnt out on action and burnt out on emotional manipulation. I’m sort of craving something that’ll let me just switch off my brain and coast…

Finished my Gundam 00 rewatch. Overall it holds up well. I might be the only person who likes season 2 more than season 1 though! I also watched the Gundam 00 movie for the first time. I’d say I liked it about as much as the TV series. I would go into details on why but that’s spoilers and spoilers are a massive pain on this platform so I won’t bother.

Since I was in a Gundam mood I also watched the SEED Freedom movie. I thought it was kinda bad. Not as bad as SEED Destiny because that would take some real effort, but still worse than SEED itself. Gotta admire the director’s dedication to horniness. Never gotten such a view of a woman’s ass while she was sitting in a chair before. How does that even work? Anyways, decent action but horrible plot. Also, I could’ve sworn the guns that shoot green lasers were also making Imperial Tie Fighter laser noises. I need to do a side-by-side comparison.

I felt like doing more anime things, so inspired by the Quest for the Best podcast I watched my first Uma Musume thing: the Beginning of a New Era movie. It was really well-made. The characters were fun. The story was well-written. Absolutely no complaints about the animation. I think I just fundamentally don’t care even one iota about horse racing or idols, so the movie fell a little flat for me. I still enjoyed it, just not nearly as much as some others seem to have.

Edit: Forgot to mention I also got caught up on Mechanical Marie. Forgettable really is the word for this show. It was definitely better than the SEED Freedom movie but it can’t stand up to anything else on this list. The story and characters are fine, but if I’m being honest it’s barely animated.

I’ve slowly started to try to catch up with this season, but so far, I’ve not liked any of them except Gachiakuta and May I Ask.

• Dark History Villainess: pacing is all fucked up. It’s as if I’m watchibg a summary. Dropped after 3 eps
• Mangaka’s Workplace: couldn’t stand the MC. I don’t typically mind characters like her, but she seemed super over the top anxious for no reason and over the same thing the entire time. Well for the time I watched it anyway. Dropped after 1 ep.
• Pass The Monster Meat: started out fine, but after a couple of eps it became messy. Dropped it after 5 eps.

If anyone has fall 2025 suggestions, I’m open for it (as long as it’s on CR and Netflix. Can’t be bothered to pirate atm).

Just a quick meta head-up that next week’s thread will be the Winter Preview Thread! So, @[email protected] will be monitoring that thread to enable show discussion threads for the upcoming season. I do just want to mention one show that is starting ~2 weeks early, Ao no Miburo: Serizawa Ansatsu-hen. So, let me know thlis week if you want discussion threads for that show. You can also just request threads by private message if you want.