Rebecca Silverman
Rating:
It s back! Are you ready? Whoops, wrong boy idol show reference there. But the fact remains that I m nearly always ready for a new season of
IDOLiSH7 for the simple fact that, despite incorporating so many of the tropes of its genre, it manages to tell an interesting story each time that very rarely feels melodramatic or stretched to the point of credulity. Considering that the series involves not one, but two sets of separated siblings with one taken in by a guy who is basically a mustache-twirling villain, a guy who speaks with an atrocious accent, and roughly forty named characters, that s no small achievement.
Rebecca Silverman
I have to admit, I ve always found Satoko to be a miserable little gremlin.
Higurashi: Sotsu isn t doing
anything to change my mind. It is, however, set to make decent use of the things we already know, or at
least think we know, about the story and setting from the original series. This season is positioning
Satoko as the author of all of the many terrible versions of Hinamizawa that Keiichi had to find his way
out of back in the day, and for no other reason than to torment Rika with the possibility that she might
be able to escape the town and her fate.
Sonny Boy certainly falls into that category, with its elements of the classic manga
A School Frozen in Time. The premise here seems to be that thirty-six third year high school students, and their school, have been transported into some sort of dead zone, with nothing but fathomless black surrounding them. Some students have gained what they term “superpowers,” others have none, and a few appear to believe they have none but may actually have the most practical powers of all. Also there are a lot of cats in the school for no apparent reason, and that one with the runny nose worries me because the only time I ve seen a cat with that kind of nasal drip it turned out to be a symptom of her sinus cancer.
Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:
It s funny. I don t think I ve ever actually read the Momotaro fairy tale though I ve certainly learned the basic story through cultural osmosis. An elderly couple finds a giant peach. In the middle, instead of a seed, they find a child. They raise the boy, Momotaro, as their own and eventually he heads off to the island, Onigashima, and fight the ogres that reside there with his animal companions. Apparently,
Peach Boy Riverside is a pseudo-sequel to that story. Yet, instead of following Momotaro, it follows Sally a princess with a similar origin who shares Mototaro s penchant for ogre fighting.
Rebecca Silverman
Rating:
I feel like something went wrong in the planning department when it comes to the monsters in Scarlet
Nexus. When the first Others appeared on the screen, my initial thought was, “Are those giant, evil root
vegetables?”, which I m guessing was not the reaction they were going for. Of course, that s just one of
the several Others variants across the first two episodes, which
Funimation kindly released early, but the
other two involve lampshades stuffed with flowers on Barbie legs and some sort of lion/garden faucet
hybrid. Terror-inspiring they are not.
That s more or less how the entirety of these two episodes feel: like someone was trying really hard but