Alrighty then time for Demian's Thoughts on His Recently Viewed Anime.
I finished
Hellsing Ultimate and it was loads more stuff than I remembered. I initially watched the first ~5 episodes a few years ago but dropped it for some reason, but I very clearly recall thinking it was
leaps and god damn bounds better than Hellsing and if the MAL reviews are to be trusted, that is indeed true. But good lord the story is stuff. Don't get me wrong, it's
cool but not much more than. The visuals are pretty, the battles are over the top, the people don't mind missing half of their body in order to continue dismembering the enemy, Alucard is ridiculously OP, and loving cool. But that's all the anime has to offer. The occasional music sucks hard. They went with the route of singing parts in English because it sounds cool to them but cringe-worthy to us. It is pretty neat that the episodes are around 50 minutes long though, they kind of felt like mini-movies.
The characters are a bit on the bland side and have really out of place comical moments, I suppose that's the style of it but I don't like it. There were times when I actually said something out loud to myself because someone did something stupid. (I mean what the flying forget was the point with the
werewolf. forget that stuff was stupid. They kinda built it up as being powerful and stuff but whoop de doo
one punch and he's dead. Because that mercenary dude can suddenly punch through his heart? He simply placed a silver tooth inside his body. I mean even if he had shot that thing at it, it would have done zero damage.
Did it die of silver poisoning?.) The series got worse in the later episodes and the last two to three episodes are supposed to be a really cool battle-royale but they are awful. Those last episodes alone knocked off one whole point from my final rating of 6/10.
Midway through Hellsing Ultimate I needed something lighter to watch amidst the oceans upon oceans of blood and gore so I picked up
Kokoro Connect and
Kokoro Connect: Michi Random. (The latter is a "sequel" which contains episodes 14 to 17 of Kokoro Connect and should be watched back-to-back.) I may have been slightly crazy to do this since I have enormous trouble connecting the names to the faces of anime characters. I can sort of manage it while I'm watching the episodes but if you were to ask me to name three supporting cast members immediately after finishing a series I probably could not do it. The premise of this series is consciousness switching. As in character #1's consciousness whooshes into the body of character #2 and the other way around. I honestly watched the entire consciousness switching arc with the (luckily short) character list open on my second screen. It took me about six episodes to learn the names.
Anyways this anime is the definition of deus ex machina. The consciousness switching (and later other supernatural shenanigans) are never properly explained. That is not the focus of the series. The phenomena are purely plot devices used to create situations for the characters to solve. And it works. I thoroughly enjoyed the antics. I felt like the story was a nice mix of serious drama and cheerful slice-of-life but the writers may have tried a little too hard to give all characters their own (larger and smaller) problems. There is an in-universe explanation for it but eh. It is almost 4th wall breaking how obvious plot devices the supernatural shenanigans are and I'm not sure how the writers could come with more arcs (and not make so obvious) than there were but I was still left wanting to see more of these characters and their relationships. I gave it a solid 8.
I'm about to start watching Yuru Yuri which one MAL reviewer described as "a show about a group of ravenous lesbians". This is what the visual style is like:
I've never tried anything like this before. This sounds like a stereotypical neckbeard basement-dweller anime. Wish me luck, I'm going in. I promise to keep shaving.
Poll