Glad you liked the movie! Season 3 is fine imo. At this point you kinda know what to expect from Konosuba and it delivers roughly that. Alternatively, there is the spinoff series about Megumin and Yunyun that focuses on the Crimson Demons almost exclusively. I liked the spinoff, but it doesn’t quite feel the same without the chemistry of the main group. With just Megumin and Yunyun (and supporting Crimson Demons), everything is a bit more dramatic (lots of capes) with fewer opportunities to relieve that tension with silly antics.
Comment on Winter 2025 Anime Season Kickoff and General Discussion Thread [2025, Week 01]
Rottcodd@ani.social 5 days ago
Nothing in this coming season catches my attention.
So, first up last week was the KonoSuba movie, Legend of Crimson. And it was every bit as awesome as wjs18 led me to expect it to be.
Lots of great moments, but my favorite had to be Komekko completely stealing Kazuma’s spotlight, then unveiling her own Crimson Demon chuuni-style intro. I’m even laughing right now, remembering it.
Next up was an oddity: [VTuber Nandaga Haishin Kiri Wasuretara Densetsu ni Natteta]( (aka VTuber Legend: How I Went Viral after Forgetting to Turn Off My Stream). My little brother’s a bit of a weeb too, so we spend much of holidays sharing interesting things we’ve seen/played since the last time we talked, and that was one of the ones he mentioned. It was better than it seems like it should have any reason to be - not high art by any means, but not a cynical cash grab either, which is what I would’ve expected. I know nothing at all about vtuber culture, so that was all lost on me, but it was enjoyable enough anyway.
Followed that up with another he mentioned Nozomanu Fushi no Boukensha (The Unwanted Undead Adventurer). It was really quite good all in all, and then completely fell apart in the end when it was revealed that it wasn’t really an anime season in any meaningful sense, but was pretty much just a 12 episode prologue. Nothing at all was resolved - it spent all of that time, and all it managed to do was establish the setting and what presumably is meant to be the main cast and some of the background, and it was cynically obviously done just to serve as a foundation for a hoped-for franchise. There’s apparently a season 2 coming, but I’m not sure if I’ll watch it. I liked it well enough, but to be honest, the cynicism of so blatantly trying to create a franchise with the only possible payoff relegated to the future rather than telling a story with its own payoff pisses me off.
And at the moment, I’m finally watching the second season of Non Non Biyori - Non Non Biyori Repeat.
I have a complex history with NNB. At the time the first series came out, the manga was my absolute favorite, no competition, and it still ranks as one of my all-time favorites. And the anime was certainly gorgeous, and it has a couple of stellar episodes (the New Years episode with Candy Store and Renge is on the short list for my all-time favorite anime episodes period), but I was still disappointed all in all - it just never quite caught the magic of the manga. So when the second season came out, I was interested, but I just couldn’t quite get myself to watch it - I didn’t want to be disappointed again. But it is NNB, and its reputation is even better than the first season’s so… I was going to end up watching it sooner or later. And now’s the time.
And so far, so good. It’s sort of odd that it’s essentially a reboot, but I’m hoping that that’ll be to its advantage, since a lot of what disappointed me with the first season was seeing inferior versions of great gags from the manga, and this one has only touched on a couple of those moments in passing and is mostly telling other parts of the story. We’ll see.
wjs018@ani.social 5 days ago
nyan@lemmy.cafe 4 days ago
It’s partly an issue of the structure of the source material (I was entertained enough to seek it out, despite the lackluster ending), which the anime follows fairly closely. The novels don’t partition out well into cours- or volume-length chunks—the author was obviously writing a continuous webnovel-type narrative without taking stopping points into consideration. The first real climax in the story corresponds to the end of volume 8, which, given a typical LN-to-episode conversion ratio, would land around episode 32. Given that they were only doing a single cours, I the animators they picked the best stopping point they could, even if it wasn’t great. If they’d adapted the last chapter of the 3rd novel instead of stopping with the next-to-last, the result would have been worse, because it ends in a somewhat random place.
Rottcodd@ani.social 4 days ago
Ah.
Well, at least it wasn’t the cynical attempt to establish a franchise that I took it to be. It really felt to me like the entire point of that season in the long run was simply to create a demand for season 2.
I might have to look into the LN, because I liked the story well enough until I figured out that we weren’t getting any sort of resolution of anything, and the petty contrarian in me kicked in.
nyan@lemmy.cafe 4 days ago
For what it’s worth, J-Novel Club has the license for the LNs. They’ve published 13 volumes in ebook and (unusually, for them) 12 in paperback. The translation is decent overall, but they don’t keep careful enough track of the setting’s lore from volume to volume and end up translating some terms inconsistently, and there are occasional outright grammar bodges (something I am regrettably sensitive to). They need a better editor.