The Good: May be the most clever anime I’ve ever seen. The Bad: “Artistic” ugly. Annoying side characters. Entangling plot and metaphor. Coming too soon after Endless Eight. The main character talks too fast. Michael won’t shut up about it. Final Grade: +

I’ve seen way too many comedies try to get by on premise alone. This kind of crap is all over Adult Swim. There’s no creativity to keep you interested once the novelty of the premise wears off. The shows either keep trying to milk the premise long after it’s been beaten to death or resort [...]

Another year, another END DAY. I initially dropped Kenshin back in the 20s. It was loaded with filler adventures I couldn’t bring myself to care about. Kenshin goes to the circus. Kenshin rides a train. It seemed that Kenshin quit his role as Battousai the Manslayer to become the Japanese Spot. Somehow my brother convinced [...]

No wonder Galatea slashed her eyes and got to a nunnery Me in 2001: Why are they having nosebleeds? Me in 2006: Why are they bleeding out of anything but their eyes after seeing that ugly swimsuit? Me in 2011: It’s funny because otaku have stupid fetishes. It’d be easy enough to bash the fetishization [...]

Some say Rose of Versailles is as good as it gets. I say it has been better gotten. There’s one huge objective flaw that should keep anyone from giving RoV a perfect score. Most of the RoV characters are actual historical figures. Oscar is not. She’s not going to shoot the Duke of Orléans. She’s [...]

Some call me a homophobe because I prefer watching anime without gay sex. I tell them I can’t be homophobic because I like lesbians. They tell me that gays and lesbians are completely different, because lesbians are demeaning and trashy, whereas gays are artistic and enlightening. I tell them I like gay characters too, particularly [...]

I once put off watching Spice and Wolf because I assumed it was targeted at zoophiles. Then I put off watching the second season because I hadn’t watched the first season. Then I watched K-ON, the worst anime ever, and learned two things: 1. I don’t understand otaku fetishes at all. (Apparently it’s the ears [...]

Everyone else knows something about microbes. Everyone else knows about Sawaki’s secret power. Oikawa knows nothing about anything. She’s out of place in every single scene that has anything to do with microbes, not to mention all the other scenes she screws up because she’s an annoying bitch. Stupid cow Her only reasons for existence [...]

Final Grade: ++ Now lets talk about everything that sucked. Spoilers abound. The vampires are sparkly and have feelings. Nice cleavage Natsuno looks too much like a girl, even for anime. His personality is too inconsistent, even for anime. He has too much implicit gay sex with his best friend, even for anime. Megumi’s attack [...]

That’s what I looked like when I watched it I heard all the hype. P&Sw/G was so hip and radical and antiestablishment and subverts tropes and doesn’t take itself seriously and is made by GAINAX. This had to be the best thing since Astro Boy. But before I could watch it, I had to figure [...]

VS. Round 1: Japanese Title Jellyfish Princess: Kuragehime (5 syllables, all one word) Squid Girl: Shinryaku! Ika Musume (8-9 syllables, three words, questionable punctuation) Advantage: Jellyfish Princess Round 2: Not Improperly Called Slice-of-Life Jellyfish Princess: Animesuki 2010 Choice Awards Squid Girl: Anime News Network Advantage: Draw Round 3: Tentacle Rape Jellyfish Princess: Only date rape [...]

Quick, name a GAR character. Did you say Kamina? Why not Guts, Kenshiro, or Golgo 13? Why is it Kamina’s name that’s synonymous with GAR? I asked the OH! Team to enlighten me. Baka-Raptor: I don’t get it. Why does everyone keep saying Kamina is GAR? Lbrevis: Kamina’s dramatic speeches, fearlessness and hotheaded battles with [...]

The manliest song without an AMV? Anything worth doing is worth doing alone. Can’t exercise by yourself? See if I care when you get a heart attack. Don’t want to eat alone? Go ahead and starve. People who need others to hold their hands to get them to do things they already want to do [...]

Why 2009? I’m always a few seasons behind. See what I did there? Could my post order be any more strategic? If you’re not satisfied with that explanation, consider this: if this post only contained series from 2009 that I finished in 2009, it would include Queen’s Blade. This list only includes series. Movies, OVAs, [...]

You do not live in Japan. A new season of anime means new anime airs on TV in Japan, which is a country you do not live in, unless you’re a disillusioned expatriate who has yet to learn that watching anime all day makes you a loser no matter where you are in the world. [...]

I recently took a six-hour Defensive Driving class to get a car insurance discount. The instructor spent the whole class telling me that driving would get me killed, falsely accused of statutory rape, and escheat my life savings to the nanny state. Those being my three greatest fears, I spent the next few days driving [...]

I do all I can to keep my website family friendly. For example, I ‘m not watching this season’s offerings of incest, more incest, lingerie, and masochism. You won’t find nudity anywhere on this site (if you do, please tell me, because any nudity I handpicked must be fap-worthy). My site is 1000% sparking clean, [...]

When I first heard of High School of the Dead, I figured it’d be little more than a mildly entertaining anime-style remix of the same old zombie movies I’d seen so many times before. I was completely wrong. Something unexpected and very disturbing happened at the end of the first episode: I realized I’d never [...]

VS. Round 1: Episode 14 Kibure: Watched it five times, never saw her Flower Girl: Appeared thrice Advantage: Flower Girl Round 2: Macross 7 Dynamite OVA Flower Girl: Didn’t appear in it Kibure: Didn’t appear in it Advantage: Draw Round 3: Commercial Bump Flower Girl: Got one in the Fleet of the Strongest Women OVA, [...]

Today is October 1, a date of great significance in human history. No, I’m not talking about the Battle of Gaugamela, the beginning of Shinkansen service from Tokyo to Osaka, or even the Thrilla in Manila. I’m talking about the fateful day when savage war engulfed the world and civilization was destroyed: 1997, October 1, [...]

Warning: this post is 100% spoilers. If you haven’t seen both FMA series, pay very close attention to the next two lines before deciding whether to read any further. Full Metal Alchemist (plus Movie): +++ Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood: +++ FMA:B has too much to cover, so instead of reviewing the whole series, I’ll just [...]

You know that gay show about emo ninjas I stopped watching approximately two years ago? Well I recently decided to give Nabari no Ou another chance. Every so often I fumble a show, that is to say, I drop it unintentionally. Such was the fate of Nabari no Ou upon its licensing. I cared so [...]

Slam Dunk Originally aired: 1993-96 Began watching: 2004 Ran out of subs: 2004 Number of Episodes: 101 Episodes missed: 89-101 (training for the national tournament) Thoughts: Too many crappy jokes. At times it’s worse than Lucky Star, no exaggeration. Picking up the series during a filler stretch was painful. The game is portrayed fairly realistically. [...]

1. The final boss is the Qwaser of Gold The philosophers among you might appreciate the symbolism of gold being the ultimate evil and iron overcoming it. Productive people realize that gold is one of the most industrially useless elements on the periodic table. The Qwaser of Oxygen suffocated people. The Qwaser of Sodium caused [...]

The Ichigo 100% ending sequence might seem ok if you don’t have any rhythm. Otherwise it’s painfully off-beat. The strawberries are off, the marching is off, and the marching doesn’t even sync up with the strawberries. Did they think we wouldn’t notice? Did they think we wouldn’t care? I don’t know anything about hand-drawn graphics, [...]

Behavioral and psychological studies have repeatedly shown that people value first impressions and final impressions a lot more than anything in between. Not me. I’m a middle man. Some of favorite shows have beginnings or endings that flat-out suck, but none of my favorite shows are anything short of brilliant in the middle. To account [...]

With my eyes currently out of commission, I’ve had to ignore a lot of anime I’d otherwise carefully and diligently research before ignoring. Spice and Wolf II: She still has a tail – get over it. Basquash: Stupid title Revolutionary Girl Utena Movie: Why bother watching anything that’s open to interpretation? Evangelion Movies: All I’ve heard [...]

I started watching Mouryou no Hako back in 2008. The show was great. My eyes were great. Unfortunately, neither was meant to last. Subbing for the show quickly slowed to a halt. At the time I couldn’t believe that fansubbers were running from a lesbian murder mystery. Now I can’t blame them. I wouldn’t be [...]

You’d think a guy who spent his whole life training in the mountains couldn’t possibly be useless. Indeed, he appeared to be quite the badass when we first saw him. Score Too bad he’s totally irrelevant for the rest of the show. He sucks up to Aoba. Aoba is oblivious. Rinse and repeat. Nothing ever [...]

90% of all betesticled anime characters look like girls. Many have six-pack abs yet act like complete pussies. Only one part of the body never lies: sideburns. In this dark age of androgyny and pedophilia, sideburns are the only reliable indicator of manliness. Thick, thin, long, short, neat, sloppy, straight, tapered—as long as you have [...]

These days, picking anime with teenage female casts is like walking through a minefield. For every show that’s good on its merits, another show is called good because “it is what it is.” When nobody differentiates between the good and the bad, how am I supposed to avoid the crap? Whatever happened to standards? There’s [...]

Remember how Kure-nai couldn’t stop fucking around? Shockingly, in the greatest redemption story mankind has ever witnessed, the author of Kure-nai bounced back and wrote Denpa teki na Kanojo. This time he didn’t fuck around one bit. Just look at the cover. There’s rain…a girl with an umbrella…doesn’t look like anything special…and then— OH SHIT, [...]

I recently saw some cranky hag on TV whining about how TV violence against women has increased 120%. It was only a short commercial, so I wasn’t entirely sure what her point was. Was the original level ok? Should they have spread it out more? Maybe she was angry that the 120% increase wasn’t enough, [...]

32 people love action. 33 people have taste. 42 perverts beat them out. Let’s get it on. Candy Boy VS. Golden Boy Round 1: Number of Episodes Golden Boy: 6 Candy Boy: 7 Advantage: Candy Boy Round 2: Lesbian to Non-Lesbian Ratio Golden Boy: 0 Candy Boy: Infinity Advantage: Candy Boy Round 3: Non-pedophilia Golden [...]

Naraku is too damn brave. He needs to wuss out of more fights and try manipulating third parties from afar, thereby subjecting Inu Yasha’s gang to a profound test of character: will they kill the innocent or be killed themselves? Too many power-ups are the well-deserved fruits of arduous training. Once in a while, it [...]

All it took for Queen’s Blade to win my endorsement was a single episode. Twenty-three episodes later, I’m doubling down. I wouldn’t watch Queen’s Blade if it had a shitty story. Forget for a moment the stereotype that hentai/ecchi/fanservice anime have flimsy plots. A plot that’s “not bad for an ecchi anime” still wouldn’t cut [...]

Seitokai no Ichizon chronicles the hijinks of a five-girl student council. Each girl represents a different fetish: one is a loli, one is a sadist, one is a tomboy, one is a pussy, and one is a male. Every day in the student council room, these five girls continuously screw around and drop references until [...]

Cromartie High School? Slice-of-life? Holy shit, that would kick ass! I would do anything to live in a world where it’s plausible, let alone ordinary, to go to school with a sentient robot, a sushi-making gorilla, and Freddie Mercury. Unfortunately, Cromartie High School is the least realistic anime I have ever seen. That’s not to [...]

A lot of bloggers have recently posted their Top N Anime of the Decade lists. I’ve never cared to write these kinds of trendy posts (though I’m more than happy to criticize them). Even if I did get in on the posts, the vast majority of my readers wouldn’t care that it was part of [...]

I highly recommend that your first opinion be Snark’s, but if you want to be a bitch, you could read pretty much any other Shin Mazinger Z review on the internet, as they’re basically all the same. Whichever review you choose, make sure you read it exactly once—no more, no less. Now you’ll get an [...]