The Anime/Manga/Related Merchandise Thread

Athrun888 wrote:

As for Okabe, liked him from the start.  Can't go into why because spoilers though, but he and Kurisu are up there among my favourite anime characters.  

Aaaaaand now I want to rewatch the series.  

I like her a lot! They're both pretty likeable protagonists despite being flawed as hell. I'm super interested to read about the game once I've finished watching the series to see how all this madness worked as a video game.

Double post, but that's me done with Steins;Gate. I really liked how Okabe and Kurisu's relationship blossomed over the series and how that all played into the final episodes of the series.

Now I'm off to watch Steins;Gate 0 which I hear is decidedly gloomier. Welp.

Haven't watched/read 0, but it's absolutely going to be heavy on the gloom due to the worldline it takes place in.  Did you also watch the OVA epilogue with the trip to america?  That was a really nice cherry on top to cap off the story, nothing essential but a very nice sendoff after the heartbreak of the previous twelve-ish episodes.  

As for the original, it was a visual novel so it wasn't really difficult for it to handle the story.  What surprised me the most when I read the vn was just well the anime adapted it, so well I honestly think the anime is the definitive version (unless you want to see the alternate endings and like the sci-fi stuff to be thoroughly explained).


Also has anyone seen the new trailer for the next Dragon Ball movie?  Because hoooooooly sheeeeeeeeet it looks incredible.  



I don't even like Broly, but that trailer coupled with the fact Toriyama himself is handling the overall story this time and completely re-imagining Broly (which immediately fixes most of my problems with Broly)?  The hype right now is IS MAXIMUM!

Like this trailer is just... It's promising all the right things.  That animation style is absolutely beautiful, fluid as hell (unlike Super), and expressive as all heck (again unlike Super).  This is the first time in a long while it feels like the Dragon Ball anime is bringing Toriyama's art to life (as opposed to painting over it with the "Toei style"), and that alone would make me mad excited for the movie.  But Toriyama whenever he steps in to handle things more directly always delivers, heck Battle of Gods is my favourite piece of dragon ball media.

Got my fingers crossed Madman gets this screening here in aus in january.

I'm only up to the first Android Saga in Dragonball Z, so I'm a ways behind GT and Super still. I'll get there though, and I might go and see the new film even if I'm not caught up just because it'd be sick to see a Dragonball film in the theatre.

Athrun888 wrote:

Haven't watched/read 0, but it's absolutely going to be heavy on the gloom due to the worldline it takes place in.  Did you also watch the OVA epilogue with the trip to america?  That was a really nice cherry on top to cap off the story, nothing essential but a very nice sendoff after the heartbreak of the previous twelve-ish episodes.  

Also has anyone seen the new trailer for the next Dragon Ball movie?  Because hoooooooly sheeeeeeeeet it looks incredible.

Yeah, they've got that as Episode 25 on Netflix so I checked out. Nice little epilogue to the series, for sure. Although I reckon I'll need to watch it again to remember the good times after watching the Adventures of Okabe Rintaro, the Sad Scientist.

The new Dragon Ball movie shares the same animation director who was responsible for the really well drawn bits of the Tournament of Power arc, Yuya Takahashi.

Drunkalilly wrote:

I'm only up to the first Android Saga in Dragonball Z, so I'm a ways behind GT and Super still. I'll get there though, and I might go and see the new film even if I'm not caught up just because it'd be sick to see a Dragonball film in the theatre.

Don't bother with GT - it's non-canon, so you're better moving to Super to get the gist of any movies they release.

That bodes well, although I hope that let Naotoshi Shida do his thing in at least one fight in the movie.  That short sequence between Goku and Black in the destroyed city still vividly sticks in my mind!  

At the risk of sounding like a GT apologist it wasn't all bad, SS4 Goku vs Baby was pretty good, as was Gogeta vs Omega Shenron.  And speaking of that the whole concept of the Shadow Dragons was awesome (if only the arc had started with the Eins/Syn Shenron stuff and skipped the lamer dragons).

Or maybe my memory's not as good as I thought it was and my nostalgia for that stuff wouldn't hold up.  Too busy to do a rewatch and see, and if I were to make time for dragon ball bingeing it'd be a rewatch of the Tenshinhan and Piccolo arcs (or the universe survival saga, but I really don't have the time to watch over sixty episodes of one series right now).

Athrun888 wrote:

Or maybe my memory's not as good as I thought it was and my nostalgia for that stuff wouldn't hold up.  Too busy to do a rewatch and see, and if I were to make time for dragon ball bingeing it'd be a rewatch of the Tenshinhan and Piccolo arcs

Tien vs Yamcha is one of my favourite fights in the series. It's just some brilliant hand-to-hand combat before the series went all laser beam focused.

In other news, I've started Steins;Gate 0 properly now and I feel so bad for Okabe.

I've countered that by also starting My Hero Academia which is brilliant stuff so far. Oh, and AoT Season Three has kicked off this week too!

AoT Uprising Arc Spoilers:

Bump! This week has been a huge anime week for me in regards to the number of series I've been watching:

Cells at Work: This is such a feel-good anime. It's about your blood cells tackling bacteria in your body, but the cells are portrayed as people with your body as a massive sprawling city. It's funny and lighthearted - an easy recommendation.

Angolmois: I've not watched any historical anime before, so this is an interesting one. It's set during a time in history I know nothing about which is the Mongol invasion of Japan. I've only watched a couple of episodes, so it's not really sank its claws into me yet.

Darling in the FRANXX: God, this anime is full of some of the worst tropes. Stupid fanservice moments and dumb character archetypes are the name of the game. Having said that, th overall premise is interesting enough and the plot's got some pretty intriguing mysteries starting to unfold, so I've stuck with it for now although I was rolling my eyes a lot in the first 10 or so episodes.

Attack on Titan S3: That fight scene from the most recent episode was gorgeously animated. Bang bang!

Steins;Gate 0:

Still not watched anything but I will jump into AoT S3 soon as I can, especially as I've got a week off soon.

You should! I'd imagine you've not read the manga, so some of the twists and turns in the series to come are going to blow your mind.

Yeah, I've not read anything, I did nearly pick up the first issue of the manga from the retro game shop but already picked up some comics that day, which I'm yet to read.

Do I have to get back into AoT? I might have to, mightn't I... Trouble is, I'm not really in the mood for grim stuff at the moment. I hope there's more potato girl.

She's still there, albeit as a supporting character with very few lines in each episode.

I've been meaning to check out Cells at Work, literally every time I see it brought up people have been raving about it and Animelab are simulcasting it (alongside Steins;Gate 0 and AoTS3).  

It'll have to wait till I've finished Pyshco-Pass though.  Up to the final three episodes of season 1, been a fun ride.  Then it'll be time to watch the dreaded splatterfest that is season 2... I hope the movie is worth it. . .

Cells at Work is just fun and a much-needed contrast from the other anime I'm watching where everyone is either dying or sad.

I finished Darling in the FRANXX and I can't decide if I'd recommend it or not. The first 15 episodes were actually really good if you can force yourself to get past some eye-rolling fan-service moments and the story could have easily wrapped up there for a first season. Instead, the show continued for a further 9 episodes. It felt like they were rushing through the second part of the series and I was totally tuned out following a certain revelation in Episode 20. Seriously, I hope somebody else watches it here so I can moan about how much I disliked the last 5 episodes of this show.

Conversely, I've started watching MEGALOBOX which is an easy recommendation. It's oozing with style in both its animation and soundtrack. It looks like Cowboy Bebop and sounds like Samurai Champaloo. It's a sports anime where dudes are boxing with robot arms and it's giving me Rocky vibes in how its story seems to be laid out thus far. Worth checking out, for sure.

I've watched the first two episodes of AoT Season 3 and can only agree with Jay about a fight scene in episode 2.

As I wasn't sure to watch next, I've gone for Darling in the FRANXX out of the 50 odd things I've got in my queue.

Finished Psycho-Pass season 2 and the movie.  I can see why people hated season 2, all of the coolness and subtlty that season 1 had was thrown out of a skyscraper strapped to the back of the decapitated corpse of an elephant.  

And yet somehow it was an entertaining ride.  There were a couple of scenes that were so awful I actually burst out laughing (episode 3.  The entire thing).  And yet at times the series managed to get me invested, excited to see where the story was going, and what the mystery was all about.  The ending was, alas, a fizzler (albeit thematically fitting with the season), but they didn't have much wriggle room with Gen Urobuchi returning for the movie and presumably having mandated things be left in certain ways.  Despite all of the season's issues I think I should definitely complement it over not messing up things such as continuity, a common issue when different writers come into someone elses creation to handle a large storyline.  Nor was everything thrown out for the movie, instead the important things were utterly self-contained and the things that continued did so seamlessly.  

And that brings us to the movie.  Ah, what a return to form that was.  If I'd gone in expecting a conclusion to the overarcing plot I'd have left completely unhappy, but as an epilogue to certain extremely important characters from season 1 it ticked all the boxes.  It also ticked a major box, in that its story ultimately tied into both seasons, and underlying everything was a distinct implication that the events were in part the fault and responsibility of Akane.  Who is, by the way, a complete badass now (take that Akane-haters that groaned at her naivety in season 1!).  

Only negative was the awful awful engrish throughout the entire movie.  The story travels outside of Japan, and so for whatever reason they decided to have everyone speak english in conversations involving foreigners.  Really REALLY BAD ENGLISH.  You think the sometimes insulting jokes about engrish is overstated?  Watch this movie and believe me, you'll reverse that decision.  

Like, I don't even know how they could mess up that badly.  It's not just that pronunciations were off because nobody in the movie was fluent, it was the intonations and inflections that were awful.  One of the main villains, whose dialogue is easily 80% "english", spoke the lines flat and utterly devoid of any inflection whatsoever.  Which, obviously, compounded the problems of his pronunciations tenfold.  

Main characters were, fortunately, able to avoid this problem.  Kogami, while still speaking fairly stilted english, at least had good inflections (just as well given all his english lines were in action sequences), and Akane had about ten english lines total.  But dear lord the villain was painful until he switched to Japanese near the end of the film.  Like, genuinely immersion breaking painful.  

Aside from that rather large issue (because there is a LOT of english dialogue in the movie) it was top notch stuff.  A fantastic conclusion to several characters stories and an interesting exploration of the setting of the world and the Sybil System.  If they ever make another season (or movie) I'm absolutely onboard, and if not the movie left me satisfied.  

Overall ratings of Psycho-Pass:

Season 1 - 9/10
Season 2 - 6/10
The Movie - 9/10

Absolute must-watch series.

Now, what to watch next... Cells at Work perhaps?

Psycho-Pass might be next watch as I watched all of Darling in the Franxx which I do recommend but does have issues which Jay brought up.


Be it fanservice especially in the first episodes and the end being rushed along with being cringey. I liked to have seen it end at episode 15 and then season 2 (which I doubt will be a thing) focusing on the end but done over 15 episodes not 4.

Athrun888 wrote:

Now, what to watch next... Cells at Work perhaps?

It's still ongoing, but if you've got a Crunchyroll Premium subscription then you can watch new episodes as they release.

As for your point about Engrish in anime, I think the problem is that a lot of anime production companies seem to avoid hiring native speakers for characters that are meant to be American or whatever. As a result, the acting is wooden and robotic.

For Mas...

Darling in the Franxx Spoilers:

From what I read the creator did similar with another anime.

JayMoyles wrote:

As for your point about Engrish in anime, I think the problem is that a lot of anime production companies seem to avoid hiring native speakers for characters that are meant to be American or whatever. As a result, the acting is wooden and robotic.

Anime's one thing, but the Psycho-Pass movie elevates engrish to an artform!  Take this introduction of a pack of mercenaries being hired to take out the protagonists for instance.  Took me a good few minutes after that scene to get my head back in the movie.  

I really need to get a certain thing I've heard eradicates the problem, and then probably rewatch the entire movie.  There were entire scenes I wasn't paying attention to because I was giggling at the engrish.  Really good scenes.  

Cells at Work, Animelab's simulcasting it alongside the big shows of the season too.  Been eons since I simulcasted anything!  

masofdas wrote:

Psycho-Pass might be next watch as I watched all of Darling in the Franxx which I do recommend but does have issues which Jay brought up.


Be it fanservice especially in the first episodes and the end being rushed along with being cringey. I liked to have seen it end at episode 15 and then season 2 (which I doubt will be a thing) focusing on the end but done over 15 episodes not 4.

Be aware that it can be a bit of a slow burn, it spends a good ten episodes slowly building up the cast and world with some (really good) crime of the week stuff, slowly building up to the "big" storyline.

Athrun888 wrote:

JayMoyles wrote:

As for your point about Engrish in anime, I think the problem is that a lot of anime production companies seem to avoid hiring native speakers for characters that are meant to be American or whatever. As a result, the acting is wooden and robotic.

Anime's one thing, but the Psycho-Pass movie elevates engrish to an artform!  Take this introduction of a pack of mercenaries being hired to take out the protagonists for instance.  Took me a good few minutes after that scene to get my head back in the movie.  

Oh dear.

I don't know why they had the word "guerrilla" pop up so often - that's torturous for Japanese natives to pronounce, surely?

I've finished off MEGALOBOX now - watch this show! It's only 12 episodes but it's a brilliantly written and gorgeously animated cyberpunk boxing story with one of the best OSTs I've heard an anime to date. Brilliant stuff.

Back to MHA now for me!

Man, I'm sad I missed the MHA bandwagon when it was trundling along! This show is brilliant - the characters are fun and I'm surprised by how much dread the final episodes of the first series instilled in me. I was concerned about the fate of the characters - they're all likeable in their own way. S2 seems to have eased back on the world-building to focus more on the characters themselves which is good as I knew next to nothing about most of Class 1-A out of Midoriya, Uraraka, Bakugo and Iida.

Todoroki and Tokoyami are both becoming favourites of mine.

Ooh, is that out for free on Crunchyroll Jay?

Seems to be! You'll miss out on the most recent episode as Season Three is still airing, but that shouldn't be a massive problem.

After now watching all the currently released episodes to date, I think it's my favourite shounen anime to date. In addition to my enjoyment of the cast of characters and the overall premise of the show, I admire the lack of any noticeable filler. There's slower paced episodes for sure, but they serve a purpose in building the world or developing the characters and it works brilliantly for when the pace ramps back up again. There's some real emotion in the show as well which I've not seen in a shounen anime before - Episode 49, looking at you.

Highly, highly recommended. I feel lost now that I'm caught up!