nyan

Lodoss has also been done twice. The second one was less good, in my opinion.

Berserk has two anime incarnations already. It shouldn’t be touched again until the manga either ends or stops. Pick something that’s complete in the source material but not the anime instead.

The manga showed Moss growing his ear back which was missing here. OTOH the anime contains some stuff I don’t remember from the manga too.

Pretty sure that the light novel is the original and the anime and manga are separate adaptations. You’d have to compare all three to tease out whether there are any anime- or manga-original bits.

That . . . is a lot more effort and emotion than I would expend on what I vaguely remember as being a mediocre mecha show. I just dumped it in the same mental category as Valvrave, Majestic Prince, and a bunch of other shows so undistinguished I don’t even remember what they were called, and largely forgot about it.

Normally I’m all for preserving rare media, but from what I’ve heard, that dub is one of those rare things that deserves to be lost.

Well, our nutcase’s connection of the wedding with the remark that “his body was completed just recently” or something along those lines paints a picture. I hope he was just referring to the organ player steambot with that . . . but I’m not betting on it.

It’s been, I think, four years since my last rewatch, so it’s hardly surprising that my memory is fuzzy. I made a quick check of Wikipedia in an attempt to restore some details to my sieve-like brain.

question regarding From the New World

I always had the impression that it was the adults.

A note about other versions/source material: The proper source material, which is a novel, has never been officially translated as far as I know. The manga, which I think is a separate adaptation of the novel, had a reputation for leaning too heavily into the “bonobos” aspect, if you know what I mean.

I get the impression it’s still running, having resumed a couple of years ago. Monthly Shounen Magazine does seem to list it as part of their current lineup, although my Japanese isn’t good enough to decipher much else from their site. The last tankoubon published was #24.

I thought there was a lot of truth in the dragon’s “Don’t leave me behind!” right at the end. It wasn’t just the hunting expedition he was talking about—more like his whole life.

Pumpkin Scissors. Almost entirely forgotten, possibly due to it having a case of Unfinished Manga Syndrome, but it’s an entertaining, off-beat, not-exactly-a-war-story set in a world with WWI-level tech.

Not good enough to keep me from dropping it after a couple of episodes. Maybe the light novels are popular or something.

At least they didn’t attempt to claim that the reboot of Magical Girl Raising Project was in any way notable.

There’s a lot of stuff missing from the lists in the original article (compared to livechart.me, which is what I normally use), probably because whoever holds the streaming rights doesn’t consider them worth announcing in advance.

It’s been a long time, but I seem to remember that some of the characters in Mirai Nikki appear superficially sane until you get a better look at them. (The others are nuts from the get-go.) In general, any deadly-game type anime has a decent chance of containing a character who seems sane until they turn on the protagonist.

A lot of yandere types would also qualify.

It’s been at least five years since I last watched the series, so no, I don’t remember what he looked like before.

Still, the set of people who think that he and the girls and the disembodied seifuku (who are certainly characters in their own right) are all hot must be vanishingly small. And that’s ignoring the kid and the dog, whom I certainly hope people don’t find hot. (Mind you, of all the characters, the dog seemed to be the most likely to keep its clothes on, which I’m sure was conscious irony on someone’s part.)

Idk, there’s a lot you could discuss about this show beyond “all the characters are hot” but nobody ever really does

People think the middle-aged doctor whose house the MC is living at is hot? Must be a definition of the word that I haven’t come across before. 🤔

As someone’s already said, the concept of magical circles/diagrams goes way, way back. But the earliest example I can think of in anime is The Slayers (the first season, which would have aired in the mid-1990s). The interesting bit there is that only a few spells (I think Burst Rondo was one) create patterns there, and when they do show up, they’re on the ground, not in front of the caster.

The earliest example I can think of of a magic circle in a JRPG is in the SNES version of Chrono Trigger, where one appears—on the ground again—in a scene where one character is attempting to summon the Big Bad. It’s part of the background graphic. Putting something like that in the combat system would have been taxing for the consoles of the era, so if there are any older examples, they’re probably also handled as background graphics.

(This is possibly the geekiest post I’ve made in, um, at least a week?)

What was running through my head the whole episode: “Do they know just how much of a mess it would make if this thing did work?!”

Well, there was a theory going around at the time the original TV series ended that it was his chilldhood trauma that was being reflected and dealt with (or something like that—this was a long time ago and I wasn’t all that interested back then.)

In an anime? I won’t say it never happens, but it’s pretty rare even for minor side characters.

Is this the first time they’ve so extensively reused footage from the same episode, or was I just not paying attention?

I’d say there’s a fair chance. It’s the animated version of Leiji Matsumoto’s style, and every adaptation of his work that I’ve ever seen has used it.

Many, many years ago, when I was first getting into anime, the fourth Vampire Princess Miyu OAV managed to give me the cold creeping weirds while I was watching it at around 2AM. I don’t think any other anime has managed that since.

The portrayal of medieval Islam seemed pretty even-handed to me: the main character is as devout as her circumstances allow, but not fanatical, and at the same time some side characters complain about the too-rigid religious thinking of others. Mostly the characters take it for granted, as the characters in Orb take Christianity for granted. At that time, the Islamic world really was the center of science and learning in the West, and they seem to have handled that bit decently. I expect it isn’t perfect, and I’m not knowledgeable enough to point out the issues, but it looks to me like they at least tried to be respectful.

About Mongolian history, I know even less than I know about medieval Islam . . . but I expect that 99.999% of the people watching the anime don’t know anything about it either. According to Wikipedia, Mongolia has a total population less than that of Los Angeles, and I don’t think they have a very large diaspora abroad, either. Any controversy regarding the portrayal of medieval Mongolia here is probably being manufactured by people with no personal stakes or relevant knowledge, if said controversy exists at all. (I will withdraw this if anyone can point out a complaint or comment by an actual Mongolian.)

I’m happy to see people acknowledging it instead of finding him off-putting enough to consider dropping the show.

He would have been if they hadn’t been so quick about filling in his motivations, I think. Now we can at least feel a bit of sympathy for him while he’s chewing on the scenery.

Hmm. If they’re going to keep adapting shoujo of that era, I’d like to see someone do Seimaden. Or maybe take a second crack at Basara (there was a single-cours anime covering the first six tankoubon made in the 1990s, but I’d like to see the other ~20). Or just about any of Kaori Yuki’s extensive body of work.

Kingdoms of Ruin is so dark that it comes close to flipping over into parody (I mean, even before you hit the sex-bot episode). Nastiest thing I’ve seen since Magical Girl Raising Project. Don’t get attached to any of the side characters, because their survival rate is extremely low. Also, if I recall correctly, the female lead is pretty much a cardboard cutout of a saint. And the anime ends without completing the story, and I doubt that there’s going to be another season.

So I’d maybe put that one down at the end of your priority list. If you want something darkish and violent, maybe seek out Dorehedoro instead (second season just ended, third will probably be along in a year or two).

Counterfeit character goods? They might manage to get rid of that issue, since those can’t be created without an entire factory supply chain.

Online piracy? Get real. At most, they might be able to trace the ad payouts for sites whose owners are trying to make a quick buck. Stuff that’s being uploaded by actual fans without any hope of payback? That isn’t going away any time soon.

the worst part? the first 5 minutes of every episode is recap and intro. the last 5 minutes is credits and teaser. the middle has a 1-3 minute commercial break recap. so that leaves roughly 15 minutes of mediocre content.

This is how you extend what I suspect is only 18-20 episodes worth of story to fill 26. 🙄

It’s kind of hard to tell what the guild’s priorities in this are. I mean, most of the newbs taking the exam weren’t even ready for the expected low-level-zombie-killing fest. Maybe the guild feels the most efficient way to get rid of overconfident idiots is getting them killed (with appropriate “indemnify and hold harmless” clauses on the exam sign-up sheet). While that wouldn’t be very nice of them, it isn’t unusual for life in those types of fantasy worlds to be nasty, brutish, and short.

Any readers of the source material have any insight?

I’m pretty sure they’ve gotten worse over time. Or at least, I don’t remember K and Coppelion as being quite this bad (and I did make it to the end of both). Anyway, a fair chunk of their output has been for K, Mardock Scramble, or Seitokai Yakuindomo, so if you avoided those three, it isn’t too surprising you’ve never come across them before.