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Julia's Reviews on Various Media

Ugh. A new page, and I start out with THIS dreck. This review was written on September 12th, 2020.

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I give this fantasy-style school idol anime...a 46/100.

Good lord. I can't believe I wasted my time on this crapfest of a show. What we have here is an anime that's part of yet another multimedia project to promote a cell phone game involving cute idol girls. Lapis Re:LiGHTs main selling point is that it takes place in a made up fantasy world with made up countries that are much more European-style in nature as opposed to something like Love Live or 22/7. Now, the only reason I watched this was because nothing else really interested me, and since the plague is still going around and putting a bunch of anime on hold, I thought it'd be a nice time killer. It was...but now I wish I had every minute I spent watching this crappy show back! Basically, a young girl goes to a fancy magic idol school where she can become a witch, which in this case is basically a magical idol. But she winds up getting stuck with the flunkies who are about to get expelled because they suck at everything. They decide to try and become an idol group and raise enough points so that they don't get expelled.

In the right hands, this premise would have been great. It could have made for an interesting character study and presented a lot of opportunities for storylines that could go just about anywhere. Unfortunately, Lapis Re:Lights has some of the worst writing, direction, and storytelling I've ever seen. And I kind of feel bad about saying that because Lapis Re:LiGHTs has some really interesting ideas and a cool setting! I'll get the positives (or what little of them it has) out of the way so I don't be a complete killjoy. I must admit, the show's setting is really intriguing. Taking place in a European style fantasy land, with magic schools, and "witches" (That's what the idols are called in this show) capable of using all sorts of magic by whistling, using hoverboards to fly around and participate in sports, those are really neat ideas! Had the show actually bothered to capitalize on the ideas it had and flesh out its world a lot more, they really could have brought this setting to life with the ideas they presented. Unfortunately, the show spends more time on cute girls just putzing around and expanding its massive cast than actually caring about things like its setting and, y'know, proper character development.

But more on that in a bit. The setting being really well made also has great animation to back it up. The colors are bright, character motion is smooth, the town the girls live in makes use of both European style architecture and more fantastical, sci-fi elements like hoverboards and castles, and the idol concerts are always a visual treat to watch. Granted, they still use bad, wonky CGI for the actual performances, but at this point it's become the standard, and the character designs...aren't great. Many of the girls don't seem all that distinguishable from one another if you swapped their hair styles, colors, and eye colors, with some exceptions, especially some of the younger, cutesier looking girls like Maryberry (Seriously?! Maryberry?! What the hell kind of dumb name is that?!). Also, I'm not gonna lie, the background music in the show is better than all of the songs the girls sing. Many of the songs feel like they were copy-pasted from other songs over the past 20 or so years, and with a few exceptions, all of them are sung by squeaky voices that just border on grating.

Unfortunately, the animation and music alone absolutely cannot save this utter trainwreck of a show. One of the show's biggest problems is the fact that it's 12 episodes long, yet has a grand total of 24 named characters, barring a select few minor ones who only appear in one or two episodes. The thing about a show with a short length is that it doesn't have the luxuries that a show that has 24-26, or even 52 episodes has, and has to set its cards on the table right at the start. It can't afford to take shortcuts with its story and its characters. Most 12-13 episode anime get around this by keeping their main cast small, and having side characters still play important roles when needed. Lapis Re:LiGHTs made the decision to have an impossibly huge cast of characters, and none of them get any sort of development or focus whatsoever, and even when they do, any development they do get is so utterly predictable and cliche, you can pretty much guess how their arcs will progress without even trying. It doesn't help that many of the episodes just consist of the girls just goofing around or doing stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with the main plot. One episode has the girls play a really degrading magical board game, and in said episode, one of the girls is made to wear a skimpy playboy bunny suit and act like a rabbit for shits and giggles. No, I'm not even kidding. Because the show has such a large cast and no interest in giving them anything beyond one basic personality trait, all of them come across as bland and unmemorable in any way, or wind up being memorable for all the wrong reasons, like Lucifer for being a complete bitch for no reason, and the worst of them, Tsubaki, for basically being a creepy siscon who gets off on stealing her younger sisters' panties for some dumbass reason. Did we really need that? Many of the characters are so insignificant that the show would seriously benefit if they had been cut out completely.

And that's not even getting to the utterly piss-poor writing! The show sets up a lot of rules for its setting, like a point system for the magic school that determines whether kids get to stay or get expelled, but often times it contradicts itself when its most convenient. The main group is constantly on the verge of getting expelled, but a good portion of them don't even give a damn and just want to putz around (Lavie is the worst offender)! Plus, one girl is confirmed to be an adult, or at the very least in her late teens, yet is still in the school under a different name and in another unit, for really stupid reasons that already contradict the show's established rules! They try to explain it as her being held back lots of times, but with how strict the school system is in-universe, you'd think the girl would have gotten expelled! Furthermore, many of the conflicts in this show, especially the one near the end, could have been resolved in five minutes if the characters just talked to each other and explained from the start why they did what they did, y'know, like mature adults! But instead of doing that, they needlessly come up with these weirdly elaborate schemes to not only keep Tiara in the dark about it, but actively sabotage her and the main groups' chances at actually succeeding in every way possible in order to guarantee nothing but failure on their end in order to get them to do what they want! I dare anyone to tell me this isn't some form of emotional abuse and manipulation in some way! The character responsible for all of this doesn't even get called out or given any real consequences for her actions! Because of all of this, and the show's utter lack of interest in fleshing out its characters and...well, everything else, any attempt at being genuine is completely overshadowed by its complete and utter stupidity and overreliance on cliches and stock archetypes. All of it comes together to make a really hokey, meely-mouth ending that's just cheesy and dumb and never felt earned in any way whatsoever.

I really wanted to be more generous with my rating for this show, but the more I watched it and thought about it, the more I realized the show itself doesn't have anything redeemable about it, other than its animation and interesting ideas that it never got to use properly. The reason why I consider shows like, say, Zombieland Saga, AKB0048, and 22/7 to be good, even with their flaws, is because they actually cared enough to flesh out their characters, even if their methods of doing so didn't always make the landing (In the latter's case especially), and put in effort to at the very least try to do something different with their premises and be somewhat enjoyable. Lapis Re:LiGHTs is just a soulless cash grab that is just ultimately hollow, shallow, and a complete waste of time.
 
Alright, time to get off the crap train and to visit an old favorite! This review was just finished yesterday.

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I give this fun, addicting box-piling game...a 72/100!

Hey Pokemaniacs, remember this game? Because I do! In fact, I bought this along with other mainline games when I had my first GameBoy Color, and I loved it! But back then, I was still very new to video games and never managed to complete all of its content, such as the secret hard modes and the extra Pokemon you can get. But Pokemon Puzzle Challenge is an old game that's still spoken of fondly. It's readily available on the 3DS Virtual Console for cheap, and I often find myself playing it whenever I need to let off steam. Seriously, this game is such a good outlet for when I'm angry. Basically, Pokemon Puzzle Challenge is a Pokemon game but with the gameplay of the famous Panel de Pon concept, where the main gameplay focuses on blocks falling into a well. You earn points by connecting three or more of the same blocks together, or getting rid of them with creative combos, like swapping them around. In this case, stacking four or more blocks causes damage to your opponent, and if the block piles manage to reach the very top, you lose. You basically go through the various towns and the Pokemon League in the Johto region, but instead of battling trainers traditionally, you fight them with blocks. Yeah.

Don't let my bad description of the gameplay fool you. Depending on the difficulty level you set for yourself, the game requires you to really use your head and strategize if you want to get anywhere in the game. But don't think the main story mode is all the game has to offer. There are also various puzzles and side-games within Puzzle Challenge, such as infinitely battling against a computer until you lose, or unlocking the various baby Pokemon in a still image by completing enough levels. If you're playing the story mode, you start off with the three Johto starters, but if you meet certain requirements, such as defeating an opponent within a certain time frame on a certain difficulty, you can unlock more Pokemon and keep them, but only if you win against said Pokemon. You can also lose said Pokemon if your entire team is defeated in battle.

Like Pokemon TCG for the GameBoy, you can pretty much complete this game's various story modes in a little over a couple of hours, and even its story is very, very light. Pretty barebones compared to other games, and even compared to other spin-offs. But that's not the point of this game. Anyway, for GameBoy Color standards, the graphics are great. The backgrounds are colorful, the Pokemon sprites are detailed and are nicely animated, with lively facial expressions showing whether they get hurt, defeated, attacking, or rejoicing in victory. Every Pokemon gets a special attacking, defeat, or victory animation, and while they're not much to write home about by today's standards, they're still nice all around. About the same quality as, say, Pokemon Crystal, which would come later.

There's also one thing you should know as well: Type advantages don't do anything in this game. The gameplay is all about stacking as many blocks against your opponent as possible, so you can easily win against an opponent even if you sent a Chikorita out against Falkner's Pidgey, or a Sentret against Chuck's Primeape. So...other than all those things, there isn't much else to say about Pokemon Puzzle Challenge. I often play it whenever I feel like it, or when I'm angry, and many people I know still like it today. It's nothing special, but if you're in the mood for stacking blocks and something different than your usual Pokemon fare, this game's a good option.
 
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Time for more mini book reviews!

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Maybe He Just Likes You by Barbara Dee
Rating
: 6.5/10
Ehh, I don't think this is one of Barbara Dee's better books. It wasn't bad or anything. Mila was a decent character all around, the message was well done, and the prose was good as well. But the side characters were all so bland and forgettable (With the exception of Zara who I outright hate), they're practically indisguinishable from one another. The adults were flat-out useless most of the time, Mila's troubles with her friends got practically no real resolution, and the ending seemed a bit too neatly wrapped up and sugary for my tastes. Eh, I don't hate it or anything. I'll re-read it on occasion.

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We Could Be Heroes by Margaret Finnegan
Rating
: 6.5/10
I wanted to like this book more than I do. The writing was good, Hank is a great character, the portrayal of autism was nice and nuanced, and it had great messages about how sometimes doing things for a good cause may end up doing more harm than good, kind of like Shiloh, presenting a lot of good moral dilemmas to think about. But Maisie is a terrible character. She continually lies, gets Hank into trouble, forces him to go along with her hair-brained schemes, never admits to her own wrongdoings nor considers how her actions could hurt Hank, gets him into trouble multiple times, never listens to other people's good advice, and during a pivotal moment, accuses him of being selfish and inconsiderate when she's been nothing but that throughout the entire book! Any consequences she winds up getting don't last long, and even at the end of the book, she still manages to get her way and escapes any form of punishment. Sorry, I'd have liked this better if Maisie wasn't such a bad influence on Hank.

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The Good Earth by Pearl Buck
Rating
: 2/10
This was just awful. My mom bought this for me for my birthday one year, because she knows I tend to like books based on Asian cultures. But as much as I appreciated the gesture, I hate this book, and I donated it to my local library. Good lord, this was a massive slog to read. The prose was too thick and overly sentimental for its own good, the pacing was extremely slow, the characters are really bland and one-note, its portrayal of women is extremely misogynistic (The main character's wife is little more than a submissive baby-making machine with no personality of her own, for crying out loud!!), it perpetuates a lot of stereotypes about the Chinese, and dear God, the main character Wang Lung is such a brainless idiot it's not even funny. The entire book hinges on him making stupid decision after stupid decision, all in the name of owning land. Every time he opened his mouth or even moved, I wanted to deck him in the face, yet the book wants us to sympathize with him! Uh, no. Not happening. Don't go near this one. So not worth it. I'd write a longer review of it, but I've forgotten so much of it that I can't even tell you much about it other than what I just described, it's that forgettable.

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The Brave by James Bird
Rating
: 7/10
Eh, this was...okay. I liked it at the start: The story centering around a young boy who is bullied at school and treated like a nuisance by his father sent to live with his Native American mother and her family, finally finding the acceptance he's craved. Most of the book was great, and I could relate to Collin's struggles, even though his circumstances are different than mine. But when the book started getting into supernatural stuff, I think that was when it started to lose its spark for me. Several twists made no sense, and I felt like Orenda was little more than a manic pixie dream girl stereotype who was just there to make Collin see the beauty of life before her eventual death. The author is reportedly Native American, and he drew on his own experiences when writing this. I'm no expert on Native American culture, so I can't comment on its accuracy, so who am I to talk? The book is still a nice, pleasant read.

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Pages and Co: The Bookwanderers by Anna James
Rating
: 8.5/10
Now this was a really enjoyable read! It has a fun premise: A girl discovering her ability to enter books and live out their stories, along with finding what happened to her missing mother. I really liked this one. It has likeable characters, engaging prose, neat worldbuilding that clearly has a lot of thought put into it, and a villain who actually has understandable motives for what he does. But there was one particular reveal that I felt was really, REALLY freaking stupid and felt really forced, and that's the reason I don't rate this book higher. The whole logic behind said reveal just felt really dumb to me. But even then, the book still manages to do interesting things with it, so it's not all bad. It also has a sequel, which you can bet I'll be reading!

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Don't Hurt Laurie! by Willo Davis Roberts
Rating
: 6/10
Eh...this was fine. Not bad, but not great, either. Mostly rather dull, and this is coming from someone who usually likes reading about this particular subject matter. The story is that a girl is frequently abused by her mother and is always debating on whether she should tell someone about it or not, and at one point her mother goes too far, prompting action. I thought it portrayed the subject of child abuse fairly well, but everything else about it was rather dull and bland. Other than Laurie, many of the characters are stagnant, with several only showing up for one or two scenes and then disappearing forever. Plus, I thought the ending seemed a bit too happy, with the mother being let off way too easily for what she did. I guess this is just one of those after school special-esque books that were popular at the time of its publication (1977). It's fine if you want something short to read, but it doesn't offer much else.
 
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This review was written on September 21st, 2020.

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I give the fifth game in this fun dungeon crawling franchise...a 73/100.

As of this writing, I have played through and finished three Etrian Odyssey games: 4, Nexus, and the subject of this review, 5th game, Beyond The Myth, and just started Untold 2: The Fafnir Knight recently. A friend of mine got me into the series, and I've been playing it through quarantine. Out of the three that I've finished and played all the way through, I consider Nexus to be the best game, and Beyond The Myth to be...well, saying it's the worst isn't quite right, as the game does still have a lot to offer. But compared to the other Etrian Odyssey games I've played thus far, it's very narrow and barebones in both its scope and its story. Granted, Etrian Odyssey isn't really known for having deep, intricate, complex stories, and that in itself isn't a bad thing, but EO doesn't exactly skimp on its storylines either. The second Untold game is well known for having an interesting, deep plot, and the fourth game, Legends of the Titan, exceled in its overword exploration while saving its meatier story details for late in the game, where the stakes are raised higher than before. Just playing Beyond The Myth, it's clear that Atlus really wanted to do something new with the franchise, or at the very least return to its roots. Unfortunately, in its efforts to be as different from its predecessors as a whole, it sacrificed a lot in the process.

In the magical land of Arcania, there rests a large, mythical tree called Yggdrasil. In times past, exploring the large tree was forbidden, but in recent years, the Arcania Council decreed that adventurers and explorers would be summoned to the town of Iorys to ascend Yggdrasil to reach heights unknown. You play as a group of adventurers who also answered the call by the order of Prince Ramus. Unlike most games, Beyond The Myth introduces different races of people: regular humans referred to as Earthlains, elf-eared magicians called Celestrians, tiny dwarf people called Brouni, and the animal-eared Therians. You can choose from a total of ten classes this time around, and your main mission is to explore and chart out the various labyrinths in Yggdrasil, uncovering its mysteries and learning all that you can.

If you're looking to try out an EO game that's easy as pie to breeze through, you're sorely mistaken with this game. Even on its lowest difficulty, Beyond The Myth will absolutely annihilate you if you're not careful. No, really. EO as a franchise absolutely requires you to really take your time to prepare and strategize, to the point where random encounters can easily stomp all over a poorly structured party, and that's not even mentioning the overworld enemies that you need to avoid unless you've gotten to a certain level. But having played EO4 and Nexus beforehand, I feel EO5's greatest drawbacks are two main things: One is that the damage output is utter shit. In previous games, if you beefed up members of your party with weapons, armor, and buffs, you could dole out high levels of damage going into the high quadruple and even quintuple digits before the end of their games. But in EO5, the damage output is so neutered that unless you structure certain party members in a specific way, they can't go beyond triple digits! I understand that EO as a franchise prides itself on being difficult (Something the developer itself, Atlus, is pretty well known for in regards to a lot of their games), but if you're trying to make a game seem hard, don't completely neuter certain aspects of it just to make it be so! Legends of the Titan had that balance of being difficult, but not so much so that your party couldn't inflict huge amounts of damage to their enemies.

Which also leads me to the game's second main flaw: The extremely sharp difficulty curve that pops up at the end of the final dungeon. Barring all of the post-game material EO5 has to offer, when you get to the final dungeon, enemies are a LOT stronger, and many have said that the final boss is a pain in the ass to deal with. Having experienced it myself, they're absolutely right! Even if you buy the best equipment and beef up your characters, there's no guarantee you'll even be able to beat the stronger enemies in the game further down the line, and that's not even mentioning the level cap that keeps you from leveling up past level 70, and you can't go further than that until the post-game, where you're required to defeat certain foes. This, combined with the game's decision to neuter the amount of damage you're capable of doing, just makes this game feel poorly structured.

My other big gripe with the game...is much more a personal preference than an objective critique. A lot of the female designs for anyone who's not a Fencer, Dragoon, or a Botanist...are very ridiculously skimpy and overly sexualized. I know Atlus has this tendency to have some of their female characters in games wear the occasional skimpy outfit, which is fine in some cases, but EO5 seemed to just lump many of its female character portraits into outfits that barely have any clothing, with the female necromancers, the one female rover design, the female pugilists, and the female shamans being the biggest victims of this. The female pugilists have very short crop tops revealing their underboobs, the female necromancers aren't wearing anything that's covering their chests save for a very thin chain covering their nipples (Even one of the NPCs, Lili, who looks to be 10-12, suffers from having to deal with this), and many of the portraits, even female NPCs are given gigantic boobs with very little in the way of covering, and the female shamans are wearing very short looking dresses, along with clothing around their legs that are supposed to look like pants but aren't because they still reveal the girls' legs in a very sexualized way. I mean, EO has indulged in this every now and again, but they knew when to tone it down when needed, or restrict it to certain things. EO5 seems to be taking it too far, with many of the character portraits making the characters look underage, while still being shoved in overly skimpy, sexualized outfits. I mean, look at some of these!

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Barring how impractical they'd be in a setting like this, did the designers in EO5 really have to make the female characters show off so much skin? Even when it's not even necessary? Granted, this is mitigated by the game allowing you to pick the more generic race portraits, which are thankfully not overly fanservicey, though you are only restricted to two per gender. Plus, they also added some DLC portraits, which also helps to a degree. And again, Nexus rectified this later by allowing you to use every portrait in EO's whole existence, so you have a variety of options to choose from.

That said, that doesn't mean I think Beyond The Myth is bad. Oh no, not by a long shot. It still plays out like its predecessors, complete with its in-game cartography (They also added a lot of new icons, such as stone floors and statues) and utilizing a party of various classes and disciplines. This time around, you get to choose from ten classes from the four races, and all of them have their strengths and weaknesses, from scythe-wielding grim reaper-esque Harbingers who deal out status ailments like they're candy to the rovers and necromancers that call up their animal friends or versatile wraiths that unleash magic attacks. Every class has their own unique attacks and support skills, and utilizing them to bring out their potential is always fun. That said, I do think some of the classes could have benefited from better set-ups. For one, the fencers, which take the place of the EO's signature landsknecht class, doesn't have a lot of sword based attacks, and many of their attacks rely heavily on chaining off of other party members' attacks, and it doesn't always work that well. The harbingers can't inflict status ailments unless you manually have them use one of their abilities, Miasma Armor, up and running (Though this got rectified in Nexus). Hell, there are some classes that flat-out have no attack skills whatsoever (Merciful Healer, anyone?)!

Back to the positives, EO5 also introduces a lot of quality of life improvements that make going through the game a LOT easier. Remember how I said that EO4 made foraging TP-restoring items unnecessarily hard? Well, EO5 managed to rectify that ten fold by introducing several different methods of making it easier to find materials you need to get TP restoring items, one of those methods being cooking. EO5 introduces a mechanic where you can find campfire spots and have your characters cook various ingredients to make food, like pancakes or stew, all of which either restore HP or TP, but you can't cook them without the necessary ingredients. This not only makes it much more worthwhile to explore dungeons, as some spots let you go fishing or forage for fruit and wheat stalks, but also lets you save what little TP restoring items you have if you haven't unlocked the main method of procuring them. This is sort of off-set by not being allowed to eat food in battle, but considering how important TP is in-game, this new mechanic is a welcome addition. Oh, and it also introduced character customization, meaning you can change your character's skin, eye, and hair colors, along with giving them their own voice, even though the voice options were extremely limited at the time of its release (Again, Nexus added more options). Want a pink haired, dark skinned, badass therian warrior princess who slices her enemies with her dual swords? This is the game for you!

Beyond The Myth also introduced a solution to an issue that was pretty prevalent in EO4, said issue being gaining new party members late, but making it extremely tedious to level them up in order to have them catch up to your current party members. EO Untold 2 already started introducing new methods and DLC to help with this, but Beyond The Myth introduced two new in-game items, the Training Orb and the Memory Conch, both of which help level up your inactive party members, along with two DLC quests that not only help you level up a lot, but also give you tons of money depending on how far into the dungeons you get. Nexus carried these over as well, and they're also a welcome edition to the EO canon. Oh, and true to EO fashion, 5 has a bitchin' OST, and I feel it has the best final boss battle theme out of all the games I've played thus far, even if the final boss in question is hard as hell to defeat!

However, as happy as I am with these quality of life improvements, they don't really do much in the grand scheme of things for EO5, as again, Beyond The Myth is very lacking in its story department. All you do is climb Yggdrasil and that's it, along with seeing some exposition dumps about the game's lore that don't get utilized. Apparently, this decision was deliberate, as one of the original creators of EO wanted 5 to go back to the franchise's roots, along with trying out some new things. I do respect that, but sometimes that's not always a good thing. But does this make Beyond The Myth a bad game? No, not at all. The new features it introduced would go on to be reused in Nexus, and who knows what new EO games have in store once they start coming out on the Switch? However, if you plan on buying the game, I'd recommend buying it digitally because for SOME reason, physical copies of the game are friggin expensive now, and the game's not even that old! Even boxless copies of the game go from $60-80 at the lowest, with launch editions going for beyond $100! It's actually easier to just buy it off the 3DS eShop for $30, if you can believe it! How in the world did it get out of print so quickly?!

Anyway, while not one of the best EO games I've played, it still has a lot to like, and it's likely to influence future games to come. Plus, it's still a plain good fun time for all you EO fans out there.
 
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This review was just finished today, on a show I wish I had seen sooner.

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I give this ambitious, all CG anime about sentient rocks...a 90/100!

Let's face it, anime as a medium isn't what it used to be. That's not to say good anime don't get made anymore, but with how current anime seem to care more about following trends and promoting their original sources, anime that are ambitious and dare to be different are much fewer and rarer in numbers than they were before. Back in, say, the 70s, 80s, 90s, and even the early 2000s, people could make huge, sprawling anime that were 26-50 episodes long without worrying about money or success. Nowadays, most anime that aren't huge powerhouse franchises only get 12 episodes at most, and several of them are either barebones isekai or cellphone game commercials. Again, that's not to say all anime are like this, but many who grew up with it, myself included, loved anime for pushing the boundaries of what cartoons were capable of, never hesitating to do whatever the hell they wanted, and challenging the notion that cartoons are only for kids or adults wanting raunchy comedy. But in 2017, a new studio called Orange took on what many considered to be an impossible task: Making an all CGI anime, with slight traces of 2D here and there. Now, CGI in anime tend to be...contentious, and while some anime make good use of it, others not so much, with the latter being much more common. But Land of the Lustrous entered the autumn 2017 anime season with guns blazing and surprisingly polished CGI unlike anything the anime industry had seen up to that point. It quickly cemented itself as one of the best anime to come out that season, with many absolutely loving it and the manga it was based on. I myself didn't get into it until later, and I'm ashamed that I took so long to watch it, as everything people say about this anime is absolutely 100% justified!

So what's the story? Earth is now a barren landscape, with humanity having gone extinct because of how toxic the planet has become, and the only inhabitants of Earth are a mysterious deity, Adamant, and a race of humanoids called the Lustrous, whose bodies are all made entirely of gemstones. All they really do is go about their various chores and fight a mysterious race from the moon called the Lunarians, who often attack them with intent to shatter them and take them to the moon. One young gem, Phosphophyllite, really wants in on the action, but is forbidden from doing so because of how fragile and brittle they are physically. It doesn't help that Phos can't seem to do anything and they routinely screw up on every job they get. Adamant does tell Phos to work on an encyclopedia, which they find boring, though Phos later decides to try to find a job that Cinnabar, an isolated gem whose mercury poison kills everything they touch, can do that doesn't involve patroling the area during the night. But Phos' curiosity and penchant for getting into trouble might wind up getting them involved in something much bigger...and it won't be pretty.

In case anybody is wondering, no, this isn't Steven Universe. Both shows may have a lot of superficial similarities, namely focusing on sentient jewels, but they're two very different entities. Anyway, obviously the animation is the first thing people talk about in regards to Land of the Lustrous, especially since anime hasn't had the best track record with it in recent years. But the fact that people talk about it in a good way means the show did its job in really making it work. There's a lot to go over here: the gems' hair all have this shiny, glassy look that's fitting for their status as jewel people. The character movement is jerky when it needs to be, and amazingly fluid when the time calls for it, particularly in fight scenes, where the animators really get to show off their skills, making great use of creative camera angles, 360 no scoping, battle choreography, and the occasional bit of 2D, particularly in things like facial expressions and body parts whenever the characters' whole bodies are off-screen. Of course, the CGI isn't all the anime has to offer, as the anime also has beautiful background art and some really good character designs.

Of course, only shilling the animation and artwork would be a complete disservice to just how good Land of the Lustrous is, as it has a lot more to offer than just that. My policy on cartoons and anime in general is that as long as the story and characters are interesting and well executed, you can have as bad or good art as possible. Animation isn't necessarily the be-all end-all of a show's overall quality (example being a lot of the very early World Masterpiece Theater anime like Heidi and Dog of Flanders). There are also things like the music, which is very heavily Eastern influenced, with a lot of wind instruments and erhus, with the occasional epic orchestra here and there (And I'm kinda biased here because I love full-on orchestras), all of which are absolutely stellar. Every piece of music fits the mood and atmosphere of every scene using it, managing to elevate the story to greater heights and just being all around well done.

More than that though, I'm especially surprised at how well paced and well put together the whole show is. I mean, it has a large cast of 29 characters, including Adamant, which for a show with only 12 episodes, would be too much for a show of that length to really flesh out or develop (See my review of Lapis Re:Lights in regards to this particular issue), but because of the show's setting and lore, and how the creators managed to weave everything together, every member of the cast stands out and all have their own subtle backgrounds and characterization, even if they're not the main focus. They're sentient rocks living on a small island only interacting with others within their vicinity, or some don't interact at all, so they don't necessarily have overly detailed backstories or dramatic secrets they're hiding, save for a select few, nor are they really the most complex and three-dimensional, but the whole cast is very easy to relate to, all having their own strengths, quirks, and dynamic personalities that really shine, whether they get to let loose or during the more subdued moments of the show, and the animation definitely helps with that. Every episode brings new developments for the characters, many of them changing significantly, multiple times throughout the series, with the lead, Phos, getting the absolute best of it every time they're on screen. The show also takes great pains to make sure they're all strongly acted and that they're not just one-note stereotypes, even if they may seem that way at first. There's also the fact that the show, even with its large cast, is surprisingly well paced. Never does it ever feel like the show is trying to rush through its story beats to get where it needs to go. I said in my Madoka Magica review that if producers know how to make use of the time they have and utilize the ingredients set in front of them to make the best of what they have, that can really help a show's overall quality, with Land of the Lustrous being another result of that.

That said, the anime is still based on an ongoing manga, and the anime doesn't really have a concrete ending as a result of that. Which is par for the course these days, and an anime original ending would probably have soured the final product. The only other real complaints that I have are rather...miniscule, in that I don't like Bort as a character because I feel they come off as too much of a jackass at times, even when it's not necessary, and I've seen some CGI shows and movies that happen to be better animated than this (Kubo and the Two Strings and Dragon Quest: Your Story, with the upcoming CG Lupin III movie being practically Pixar-level quality). But that's no reason to not check this show out, as it's full of engaging characters, complex themes, beautiful imagery, and a world rich with ethereal beauty. Please, do yourself a favor and check out Land of the Lustrous, whether it's the manga or the anime. You won't regret it. I certainly don't!
 
This review was just finished today.

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I give this obscure OVA about a cute hamster and his adventures...a 70/100!

Question: does anyone here remember Hamtaro? Because I do! Alongside Pokemon, Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and many other shows, Hamtaro was one of my favorite shows to watch when I was a kid. I would always try to watch it whenever it was on. However, when new seasons started coming out, practically every day, I found myself missing a bunch of episodes because at one point in fourth grade, my parents signed me up for some after school program that required me to stay there until four. I can't remember why, but I remember being really pissed about it. Then, Hamtaro wound up getting pulled from Cartoon Network completely, and I thought I had lost my chance to watch all the episodes I had missed. Thankfully, others saved those episodes on various sites, I just haven't gotten around to actually watching it yet. I really ought to though. I later found out that Hamtaro ran for a total of 296 episodes, with only 104 getting dubbed into English and airing in America, so we never got the last half of the series. As of now, Hamtaro still hasn't gotten a complete home video release save for a few scattered DVDs containing some episodes. However, Hamtaro was one of the first anime that exposed me to the concept of anime as a whole, whether it was discovering its Japanese theme song completely by accident, or learning that the Hamtaro movies were never dubbed and released over here for whatever reason.

But what some of you may not know is that before the TV series came about, there was actually an obscure OVA that was released on VHS in 1999, titled Tottoko Hamtaro Anime Dechu!. It was advertised in a magazine, but the VHS itself wound up not being made publicly available for some reason, only being sold to members of the production team at Shogakukan, the company that created Hamtaro. Because of this, records of the OVA's overall existence was considered extremely rare, almost considered lost media. Then, on July 17th, 2017, a video tape appeared on a Japanese auction site and was bought by the admin who created the famous Hamtaro fan site, Ham-Ham Paradise. The admin, along with some other members of the site, got together to digitize it, fansub it into English, and put it up on YouTube for all to see, saving it from eternal obscurity! So what exactly is this OVA, anyway?

Well, for one, it's nothing like the TV show. Instead of being owned by a 5th grade girl named Laura, for those who have seen the Cartoon Network airings, this version of Hamtaro is taken care of by a possibly 2nd/3rd grade girl named Natsumi. The OVA mainly consists of short, five to eight minute vignettes featuring Hamtaro doing various things, like finding new places to hide or getting into adventures with the Ham-Hams. Oddly enough, Hamtaro is never shown talking, but his thoughts are fully voiced. None of the other Ham-Hams talk or have any spoken dialogue, leaving the animation to tell the story. Plus, for those who have seen the TV show, you'll notice a lot of things are different. Boss and Stan aren't present, Maxwell wears a blue suit, Penelope, whose Japanese name is Chibimaru, is a boy in this rather than a girl, Howdy's apron is blue instead of red, Snoozer actually does something beyond just sleep and give philosophical ramblings in his sleep, the Ham-Hams have a dog friend who goes unnamed (Not Brandy, who is called Wanta in this and is pure white instead of having brown and white fur), and whenever Hamtaro hangs with the Ham-Hams, he wears a red shirt, even though in the scenes where he's at home with Natsumi, he doesn't wear a shirt. Plus, Hamtaro is much more mischievous and more of a sassy gremlin than he is in the show.

In all honesty, there isn't really anything special about this OVA, other than laying the groundwork for the TV show to come later. The animation is nice by late 90s standards, if a bit simplified, though for some reason, the animators didn't want to animate Natsumi's mouth moving to match her dialogue. That felt rather jarring to me. But again, this isn't the show. There's lots of still frames, a lot of time is spent on Hamtaro messing around, the backgrounds are blurry and brightly colored, and everyone's fur and color schemes are rather muted compared to the TV show. I can probably chalk this up to the video quality coming from an old VHS tape and it never having gotten a cleaner, more modern release on DVD or Blu-Ray. In contrast, the music is surprisingly loud. Definitely not bad, but the soundtrack makes use of a lot of loud trumpets and acoustic guitars. Then again, considering most of the characters don't talk, it's just easier to notice in this case.

You won't find an overarching or compelling storyline here for sure. This OVA just consists of Hamtaro getting into mischief and hanging out with the Ham-Hams a couple of times. Mostly harmless fun you can use to have your toddler sit in front of the TV for half an hour. Another thing you'll notice that in this anime, Hamtaro is played by a different voice actress, Naomi Nagasawa, rather than the lady who would voice him in the TV show, Kurumi Mamiya. There's no English dub for this, only the Japanese audio. However...I'm not gonna lie, Nagasawa was terribly miscast as Hamtaro, mainly because she always sounds like she can't be bothered to make Hamtaro emote, like she's reading off a script than actually acting. She always keeps the exact same dull, deadpan, can't-be-bothered tone and cadence throughout the entire OVA. This is especially egregious because near the end of the OVA, there are scenes where Hamtaro gets visibly angry and emotional, but Nagasawa absolutely refuses to raise her voice or put any emotion into it whatsoever. Hamtaro always sounds bored, and it really broke the immersion for me. Sorry, but Kurumi Mamiya was clearly the better choice, and I'm glad they recast Nagasawa when the TV show got made.

So yeah, it's nothing that'll bring the house down, but if you're looking for a nice, wholesome time killer, feel free to check this out. It's a cute prelude to the TV show that would come later. Also, for the love of God, somebody PLEASE release the entirety of Hamtaro on DVD or Blu-Ray!! I want to own the series and relive my childhood!! It deserves to be seen in full so very very much! Yoohoo, Discotek, this anime has your name on it and would be perfect for you!!
 
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Let's face it, anime as a medium isn't what it used to be. That's not to say good anime don't get made anymore, but with how current anime seem to care more about following trends and promoting their original sources, anime that are ambitious and dare to be different are much fewer and rarer in numbers than they were before. Back in, say, the 70s, 80s, 90s, and even the early 2000s, people could make huge, sprawling anime that were 26-50 episodes long without worrying about money or success. Nowadays, most anime that aren't huge powerhouse franchises only get 12 episodes at most, and several of them are either barebones isekai or cellphone game commercials.

uhhhhh, anime has always been longform commercials, whether to promote their original sources (like adaptations) or to sell something. and anime has always worried about money and success - at the end of the day, it's made to make money - and companies only care about the profit they make, without caring much about how they treat their workers. that's why so many companies treat their animators badly, because they can afford to more or less get away with it. it sucks to say, but it's unfortunately the truth.

and considering how anime companies can crank out multiple shows a season, even from the 70s to the early 2000's, it all just kinda comes down to cost effectiveness. 1 cour anime is cheaper to produce and means they can have animators working on multiple projects. gacha adaptations sell, especially if the gacha is popular, and isekai is what's in right now, it's no different from the mg genre getting flooded with madoka-knockoffs after madoka hit it big.

the reason this is more obvious now is likely because you're old enough to see it for what it is! it's also because of the dearth of stuff at our disposal now too - gacha at every turn, light novels easily available for purchase, etc.

that's not to say anime is soulless - the amount of anime here that have touched you speaks to otherwise! but that doesn't change the fact it's part of a corporate machine made for profit and sales.

I've seen some CGI shows and movies that happen to be better animated than this (Kubo and the Two Strings and Dragon Quest: Your Story, with the upcoming CG Lupin III movie being practically Pixar-level quality).

oh! kubo and the two strings is stop motion, not cgi! laika, the studio that made it, is known for only doing stop motion animation.
 
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I'm well aware of all that, thanks. Doesn't mean I can't say my piece on the matter.

(Screw me for forgetting that Kubo is stop motion, but my point still stands)

Now here's something I bet none of you expected me to ever review, much less even like, and even less this much! This review was written on February 5th, 2015.

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I give the first giant robot anime I ever truly liked...a 92/100!

I don't like mecha anime. I never did like anime about giant robots beating each other up, mostly because they were either too complicated for me to understand, especially with technobabble and politics, or because they just never appealed to me. I watched Gundam 00 when it first came out, but only because of Tieria, and I've seen a few episodes of Gundam Build Fighters since it's different, but I had to put it on hold partly due to real life obligations, and partly because it didn't really hook me. I didn't think there would ever be a day where I would like a giant robot anime...but then I discovered Gundam X. Wow, I never thought I'd say this, as I'm not a fan of the Gundam franchise in general, but I really freaking love Gundam X! It has everything I want in an anime: an interesting but easy to understand storyline, great characters with their own lives and backstories, beautiful animation, a great soundtrack, great twists, my goodness, I could sing about Gundam X all day, and I will!

The story begins after a terrible war between the Space Revolutionary Army and the Earth Federation. After a space colony was driven into Earth, the planet became a shambled mess, and everyone on it had to endure years of hard times. People in space have still progressed, but Earth is still having trouble. In the midst of those hard times, a boy named Garrod and a psychic Newtype girl named Tiffa (No, NOT Tiffa Lockhart if that's what you're thinking) are brought together thanks to an old Federation mobile suit, the GX-9900, aka the Gundam X, and meet in a rogue battleship called the Frieden, led by ex-Newtype Jamil Neate and his friends. Together, they have to fight various empires and make sure the mistakes of the past will not be repeated and learn the truth about Newtypes and the world around them.

Gundam X originally had 49-50 episodes planned, but due to insane amounts of executive meddling, the episodes were cut down to 39. But oddly enough, that didn't stop the writers from wanting to resolve it in the way they felt was best and giving it a good ending. The fact that they cared enough about this show really shows in everything, the animation being one such example. It looks rather messy compared to some other shows that were airing during the time, but that messiness actually works, since the conflicts between various parties, such as Earth and space, are also very messy. But it also helps to bring out a kind of untainted beauty within everything else. Also, have I mentioned how much I absolutely ADORE the character designs? Everyone looks practical, like they could be real people you could run into! Garrod looks like a football jock, Jamil looks like a shellshocked veteran, Tiffa looks like that girl you could sit next to in school, everyone just looks great without being over the top. Plus, the character movements are very fluid and the explosions and designs of the Gundams all play off each other very well and are drawn beautifully. It's just very appealing to me.

The soundtrack is another glorious thing I must sing praises about, as it's just wonderful! The opening songs are hotblooded but still subdued and try not to be too over the top, while the ending themes are soft, soothing ballads. I especially adore Human Touch, and Warren Wiebe's voice is beautiful. His song is just so nice, uplifting, and inspiring! It's a shame he had to go before his time, from what I've read on various articles. But it does kind of suffer a problem that Kiniro no Corda: Blue Sky had, where a BGM piece would continue playing and then suddenly get cut off by something else, such as the eyecatch. Thankfully, it's not as bad here as it was in Corda, but it's still rather noticeable if you pay close attention.

The characters are obviously the best part of the series, and the thing is, at first they start off like they're going to devolve into their stereotype, but completely go against it as the series goes on. Normally I absolutely hate the idiot heroes who go against orders, cause trouble, and are hyper, but...I really like Garrod! 1. He actually matures and develops. 2. The circumstances behind his bad decisions are actually explored. 3. He's actually a lot smarter than he looks, plus the fact that his first scene is his hijacking a mobile suit with a gun and a grenade! And normally I absolutely despise the perfect little yamato nadeshiko characters as they usually don't do much, but...I really like Tiffa! Sure, she's shy, quiet, and can be a damsel in distress sometimes, but she actually does do things in the series, has her own wishes, and doesn't always rely on others, and she also develops awesomely. It's very slow and gradual, but she develops. She could have easily been written badly, but the writers executed her character very well. All the other characters are great too, with their own quirks, personalities, lives, and weaknesses that play off of each other very well. I especially find myself liking Jamil, as I thought he'd been kind of a good hearted but strict boss, but he's actually not as uptight as I expected him to be. I even find myself liking the two main villains, because their struggle and petty reasons for doing what they do is very relatable, and the fact that they go to great lengths just to get what they want really makes them good villains. They actually go out and do something and try to make their vision happen, not just sit around on a throne and watch everything. That's what makes a good villain! Make them proactive and willing to get what they want, no matter what it takes!

But speaking of the characters, I do find one flaw about most of them: their backstories haven't been fully explored, especially Tiffa's! Where are her parents?! What kind of life did she live before she came to the Frieden? None of that is explored here! At least some episodes focused on Jamil, Witz, and Roybea, and Garrod and Toniya's pasts has only been touched upon with single lines of dialogue, that's it. I love these characters dearly, but I'd care for them a whole lot more if we knew what their lives were like. The Digimon series was very good at this. Also, there are some things that don't really get explained, and when they're brought up once, they're never brought up again. For example, in episodes 2 and 3, it's established that Tiffa has the ability to feel the pain people on the battlefield feel as they die and because it's too much for her to handle, she falls unconscious...but after that, it's never seen or brought up again, even during times when it should happen, it doesn't. Consistency, people! It's not that hard!

Yeah, I like a mecha anime. Never thought I'd say that. I also never thought it'd wind up being one of my all time favorite anime. What are you sitting around here for? Go and watch it!
 
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I attempted to review this on December 23rd, 2016, but I never got around to finishing said review until just today. So here it is, my long awaited review to the second season of Show By Rock.

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I give the second season to one of my favorite guilty pleasures ever...a 75/100!

Usually, when a show receives a second or more seasons, one of several things happen: Either the second season improves on the first one, does the exact same things as the first one but with different situations, or suffers a big decline in quality and winds up not grasping the magic that made the first season so good. The first season of Show By Rock was a cute and fun show, but it was held back by adhering to tired cliches and a lack of expanding on its core cast of characters, especially Cyan. But it's rare for a second season of a show to actually improve on the first season and make an effort to fix its flaws. Not all of them, mind you, but I can wholeheartedly say that Show By Rock # really improved on the first season!

Taking place right after the events of the first season, life in Sound World is back to normal, with everyone going about their lives, particularly Plasmagica trying to make it without Cyan. Unfortunately, the peace doesn't last. Dagger has recruited a new band to restart his attempt at world domination, but ironically, his return is dwarfed by the revelation that a mysterious being known as the Queen of Darkness threatens to eliminate music entirely. The people of Sound World receive word from a band coming from the future, Ninjinriot, that the Queen of Darkness successfully took over Sound World, and went back to the past to warn them about it in advance so they can find a way to stop her once and for all. With this new knowledge in mind, there's only one thing to do: Bring Cyan back and have her work her musical magic to save Sound World a second time!

So yeah, the second season still rehashes the usual "save the world from an evil entity" plotline this time around, and Cyan is still shilled as the magical chosen one without any real explanation whatsoever. Those parts of the show haven't changed a bit. But other than those two things, the creators seemed to make an effort to fix at least a good portion of the first season's flaws. For one, while Dagger as a villain is still as cliche and SatAm cartoonish as usual, he doesn't get any focus this time around, as the second season features a new main villain, and some minor ones, with actual, fleshed out backstories that explain their descent into villainy while still managing to make them somewhat sympathetic, even if said backstories don't excuse their actions. Not gonna lie, I like the second season's villain much better than Dagger.

The production values and soundtrack are still top notch as usual, even if the show still goes overboard with its sparkly moe aesthetic. Then again, it wouldn't be Show By Rock without its overdose of sparkle and moe cutesiness, now would it? But more than that, SBR's second season fixed a major flaw that I previously had with the first season: Actually bothering to give the characters focus episodes and development. In the first season, the only characters who ever really got fleshed out were Chuchu and Rom. Season two finally got around to fleshing out a good portion of the main and side characters, many of whom desperately needed it, such as Moa, Aion, Rosia, Shuzo, and a few others. Not all of them got this treatment, mind you, as several other new bands are introduced just to be cameos from the game (Looking at you, Dolly Dolci. I don't like them. They were just really annoying), but the characters that actually matter are finally given the development they deserved. Granted, I've seen other shows do it better, but considering how the first season struggled with it before, I'm willing to give season two a pass here, as it still made the effort. The show also took the time to flesh out the members of the two new bands who appear, Arcareafact and Bud Virgin Logic, all of whom have their share of focus, strengths, weaknesses, and so on.

Another thing that makes season two better than the first season is the fact that it also tried to flesh out its setting a bit more. In the first season, every person in Sound World has what's called a Melodisian Stone, which glows brightly when bands perform awesome music, but the show never bothered to really explain what they were or where they come from. Season two actually provides a solid origin story for the Melodisian Stones, something that honestly blew my mind when I first watched it when it first aired. Most shows of this nature generally don't bother with worldbuilding, or at the very least only put in a barebones effort. The fact that Show By Rock, a franchise made by a company that typically makes products for children, still cared enough about its setting to flesh it out somewhat is admirable, even though I admit I have seen other shows do it better.

However, as much as I want to love SBR season two and lavish it with praise, as you can tell by the rating, it's still not a perfect show, and still has its own problems, barring the ones carried over from season one. First off, one character has a brief backstory established in the first season, only for an episode of this season to completely retcon it and give him a new one out of whole cloth, contradicting what it had established about him earlier. Granted, I like said character's new backstory, as I feel it makes more logical sense than what season one established about him, but it'd be better to commit to just one idea rather than say a character is one thing and then going against it later. You'll know which character I'm talking about if you watch both seasons, and no, it's not Rom. His backstory was actually consistent. Secondly, while I'm happy that Uwasanopetals got less screen time this season and don't spend their time whining all the time, there's a subplot involving them that seems like it'll be the start of something bigger, but it never goes anywhere, nor does it really get any real resolution. Considering SBR has a fourth season coming out, for all I know they might address this in there, but as it stands, maybe SBR would have benefited from just saving that subplot for season four, rather than just hinting at it in this season and not doing anything with it. And in case anyone's wondering, yes, SBR still indulges in having certain characters show off a lot of cleavage and unnecessary close-ups of jiggling boobs. Though thankfully that's as far as any fanservice in this show gets. But does any of this kill my enjoyment of the show in any way? Hell no! I still love SBR and all its kooky, sparkly, musical moeness, and I'm willing to be thankful for the progress its made rather than dwell on what it could have been.

While the sequel still has its own share of issues, Show By Rock season two really tried to fix the first season's flaws admirably while still remaining a fun, entertaining show. And yes, you can bet your ass I'm looking forward to season four.
 
This review was written on August 24th, 2020.

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I give this book about a family suffering a great loss...a 52/100.

Have you ever watched a show or read a book and thought that certain ideas or conflicts don't really mix together very well? For me, that was See You At Harry's by Jo Knowles. It's trying to be a sweet, wholesome book about grief and healing after losing someone, but the things that happen right before it just feel so out of place and shoehorned in that when the big twist happens, you get a sense of whiplash. Like you're reading a romance and then boom, action and everything before that just gets shoved to the side like it never even happened. I wanted to like See You At Harry's, but I came out of this book feeling rather blah. So the story is about a family that owns a famous family restaurant. The youngest daughter, Fern, wishes her family would pay more attention to her instead of her annoying toddler aged brother Charlie. Unfortunately, tragedy strikes, and Fern feels she's wholly responsible for it.

I like stories about death, the grieving process, and healing. I find them interesting to read about when done well, and in that aspect, I think the book's handling of Fern's loss and the fallout from it was realistic, authentic, and decently well written. Yeah, I should probably let you know, a young child dies in this book. I know a lot of people don't like reading about children dying, and that's fine, but I've read/seen enough of that stuff to become desensitized to it, so I personally have no problem with it if it's written well, and I think it was portrayed decently here. The easy to read but still engaging prose helped as well. The authoress does a good job in putting you in Fern's head and making her grief and sadness feel real and raw. Unfortunately in this case, the prose and the plot about Fern's family coping with the loss of one of their own are the only good things about this book, because everything else about it really falls flat.

And it comes down to the fact that the first half of the book is just not interesting at all, and doesn't seem to mesh well with the second half of it. I mean, don't get me wrong, there needs to be some levity before bringing in serious conflict. If a story tried too hard to just have bad things happen to its characters, without doing things that would actually make us care about them first, it wouldn't be any fun to read. But the first half of See You At Harry's and its second half feel like two very different books. The first half focuses on Fern, her family, her dad's wild and crazy attempts to promote his restaurant, and her brother Holden's insecurity about coming out as gay to his family. When they lose one of their own, the book suddenly shifts to a story about grief and healing, which isn't bad, but with the way the book transitions between its two halves, it felt like a very sudden genre shift. Think of it this way: you're on an elevator that's going up fairly slowly at first, but then all of a sudden it accelerates and starts speeding upward like a race car. It doesn't help that everything that happens in the first half of the book is just pushed to the side until the very end.

But poor transition from one conflict to another isn't the book's only problem. The biggest one happens to be its cast of characters, or rather, anyone who's not Fern or Holden. Those two are okay at best, but not really the most three-dimensional. Everyone else, on the other hand, is really bland and one-note, or unintentionally unsympathetic, with the biggest offender being Sara. The book wants you to see her as this friendly but occasionally grumpy teenage girl who is totally okay with her brother being gay. That's fine. What's not fine is the fact that the book is steadfast with this portrayal, but in her very first scene, she drops a homophobic slur towards Holden multiple times and while called out on it, she never apologizes for it. Yeah, if you want to make a character likeable and supportive, don't have her drop slurs! I learned that the hard way myself! Fern's parents are also little more than one-note stereotypes, with the father often flip-flopping between being so clueless that he's willing to humiliate his entire family all for the sake of the restaurant and randomly doubling down on his son for wanting to go out with a guy (Though, to be fair, his objections aren't because of Holden being gay, but because he's dating a guy three years older than him who goes to a different school. Yeah, I actually agree with his concerns there). The mom is completely useless most of the time, preferring to go off and meditate and scold Fern for every perceived slight than actually be there for her in any way, and though she changes somewhat near the end, it's not enough to make me feel like she earned it, which she didn't, by the way. Also, Gray, Holden's so-called boyfriend, didn't seem to serve much purpose other than to be Holden's chauffeur and doesn't even do much of anything! He was just wasted as a character.

Overall, the first half of the book is mind-numbingly boring, with the second half somewhat redeeming it, but not by much. The characters other than Fern and Holden get next to no meaningful development, or in the case of Sara, try to force the readers to like them when they've done next to nothing to earn or deserve love from readers whatsoever. The way it tries to juggle two plotlines just feels off, like it just wanted to leap from one plotline to another without making any effort to stick the landing, and it just seems to drag on. The book has some potential, but it doesn't try to use it much, and as well written as the plotline about losing a loved one is, it felt like Jo Knowles just threw it in there just so she wouldn't have to write more about Holden's subplot. If you want to transition from one plotline to another, at least make the effort to make it make sense instead of having it just happen out of nowhere! There's a reason stuff like build-up and foreshadowing exist!! Also...who the hell names their kid Random?! No, seriously, there's a character whose actual name is Random! I couldn't make this up if I tried.

Not the worst book I've read, but I can name several books that tackle their subject matter and multiple plotlines better than See You at Harry's tried to do.
 
I originally started writing this on February 2nd 2017, but I didn't finish it until today. Here's a book I've been wanting to talk about for a while now.

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I give the newly made prequel to one of the most beloved books of all time...an 88/100!

Before I begin this review, I want to explain how I got into Anne of Green Gables. My journey into it is a tad different from others. I first learned about Anne Shirley and the books she starred in via an anime that came out in 2009, called Konnichiwa Anne: Before Green Gables, which is an adaptation of a book that came out the year before, Before Green Gables by Budge Wilson. I liked the anime, even if it did have its flaws, and when I found out there was a book, I went to the library, rented it, read it, liked it, and soon bought my own copy of Before Green Gables, with Anne of Green Gables coming soon after. Both books have their flaws, but I genuinely loved what they had to offer. Even their differences were interesting and appealing to me. I mean, sure, LM Montgomery didn't want to explore Anne's backstory in detail back during her time, and that was fine. But for what it's worth, I feel that the tale that Budge Wilson created, while not perfect, still has a lot of merit to it.

Unfortunately, others don't see it that way. I've honestly seen a lot of hate for Before Green Gables, a lot of which I feel is not only unfounded, but blown a bit too out of proportion. I've seen comments on Amazon, Goodreads, and even Fanfiction.net about how BGG is bad and shouldn't have been made. People were saying stuff like, "Oh, Wilson can't capture Montgomery's magic!" "Oh, Anne in BGG isn't anything like Anne in AoGG!" "Oh, there's so much that's inaccurate!" "Oh, the book is sooooo depressing, I can't bring myself to read it!" "Oh, this book was so totally unneccessary!" Other comments I've read were just ridiculous, one of which claimed that the book was condoning/excusing/romanticizing domestic abuse. I'm just reading them and I'm all like...seriously? Nothing's perfect! Adaptations always have flaws! What were you expecting?! Thus, with this review, I intend to give Before Green Gables the love I feel it deserves, because I feel it is very underrated and deserves more love, whether it's a good prequel to AoGG or not, or stands on its own merits.

The story starts off with Anne's parents, Walter and Bertha, settling into married life in Bolingbroke, and the trials and tribulations they go through before giving birth to Anne and their eventual deaths soon after. A majority of the book focuses on Anne's life with the Thomas family, a much smaller part with the Hammond family, and the final quarter in the orphanage before being sent to PEI. Anne is still the main character, and rightfully so, as the book is clearly focused on her and her life before Green Gables (Hur, get it?). She's still lively, bright, energetic, talkative, and passionate, but still has moments where she's vulnerable, gets angry, is dissatisfied with her situations, feels hopeless, and tries hard to find the good in bad situations. She still has her love of books and reading, complains about her red hair on a regular basis, giving names to locations and landmarks that make her happy, and so on, so those parts of Anne are still intact. One thing Budge Wilson did seem to cut out is Anne requesting that she be called Cordelia. I remember in Anne of Green Gables, Anne thought her parents wanted to name her Geraldine at one point, and she wants people to call her Cordelia. Not once is Cordelia ever mentioned in BGG at all. Yeah, I know it's a minor detail, but most Anne fans remember it well enough to notice its absence. I figure maybe Wilson just forgot about it when writing BGG, so I don't consider it a big deal. So as far as faithfulness to Anne's overall character goes, Budge Wilson does succeed on this front, so kudos to her!

The other characters are also an eclectic bunch, such as the various members of the Thomas family, Anne's classmates at the first school she attends, various townsfolk, and so on. We get to know the Thomases, and the ones that get the most focus are Joanna and Bert, Anne's first adoptive family. The two of them are surprisingly well developed, even if they're not exactly the nicest people. Joanna is trapped in a loveless marriage, stuck with several children and a drunk husband who frequently beats her, and often takes her frustration out on Anne even when the latter hasn't done anything wrong. Back in those days, women stuck in abusive relationships had no support, resources, or any agency, and were expected to just suck it up and stay with them for the children, even if doing so only makes things worse for them. But while the book does show her not necessarily being the best parent towards Anne, what with constantly calling her wicked over everything she does and making her do chores way earlier in life than she should, Wilson still takes the time to remind us that Joanna, with all her flaws, is just a woman doing what she can, preventing her from being either a stereotypically abusive parent or just a little victim. I found out that the anime version left out some subtle nuances to Joanna's character that she had in the book, so its depiction of her isn't the best. Her husband, Bert, is oddly enough the most well developed character in the book. There's no denying that when he hits rock bottom, he gets drunk, causes wanton destruction, and often times hits his wife during his drunken spells, and the book doesn't portray his abuse as anything other than what it is: Cruel and devastating for not just himself, but for everyone around him. But in my honest opinion, Wilson did an amazing job at really bringing him in particular to life, giving him the right amount of background and depth to make him as fully fleshed out as possible. Sometimes he's even far more interesting than Anne herself. Whenever Bert and his family are given focus, the book shines in creating genuine and heartwrenching drama around them, and she never forgets that Bert is also a human being who can be capable of kindness, maturity, and compassion when he isn't trying to drink away his woes, something the anime further capitalizes on. The other side characters aren't nearly as fleshed out, with one of Anne's earliest mother figures, Eliza, outright disappearing after a few chapters and never appearing again, and because of Anne's impoverished home life, she isn't given the chance to really interact with her classmates, something the anime version rectified. Plus, all of Anne's foster brothers are just portrayed as wild, noisy brats who run around screaming a lot and aren't given much personality beyond that.

One thing that does make BGG stand out from the original Anne of Green Gables continuity is the fact that it features a lot more interpersonal conflicts and drama than the original did. Most of it involves Bert having outbursts while drunk and some people dying off page, along with Anne's feelings about being passed around and used as literal slave labor by everyone who adopts her. Anne of Green Gables mostly focused on more realistic drama and nothing truly bad ever really happened, which some people may find boring, while others may praise it for being more restrained when it comes to its drama and never feeling like a soap opera. People who aren't fans of slice of life may not like the original Anne of Green Gables series. Before Green Gables isn't afraid to get dark when it wants to, showing how peoples' actions directly affect their own lives or others' for the worst, and showing people being truly cruel. There's even a scene near the end when Anne makes a friend at the orphanage, only to realize that said friend turned her back on her and betrayed her trust, something the original Anne Shirley never experienced (as far as I know. I only read the first three original Anne books). Some may find BGG to be depressing, but I found it more bittersweet and realistic than anything. It helps that the darker moments are used very sparingly, with a majority of the book being fairly wholesome and focused on Anne's shenanigans, and it never feels like they're just thrown in there purely for shock value, but to really force the characters to grow and have them overcome obstacles that won't simply be wished away.

Budge Wilson mentioned once that rather than try to imitate LM Montgomery's style of writing, which can't really be done anyway since an imitation will always be seen as just that, she opted to write BGG in her own personal writing style. I think this was a good move on her part, as Wilson's own writing and prose have a lot to offer on their own. I feel she's at her best when she's describing the setting and the environment, as she paints vivid pictures of Nova Scotia with her words, from the trees in the autumn months, to the various homes Anne moves into. But she's also really good at getting into the characters' heads and showing their thoughts and how their actions affect them and others, even if her style comes off as being more like favoring telling over showing. It does tend to favor a more contemporary style of writing rather than something from the 1900s, but it can be pretty hard to try and replicate writing styles from the early 20th century anyway, and I think trying to do that would just make it come off as stilted and stiff. Again, I think Wilson dodged a bullet there by sticking to her own style.

That said, this isn't a perfect book by any means, and while I disagree with many peoples' criticisms of the book, there are some that I do find to be valid. One of them is that a good chunk of the book focuses on Anne when she's five or six, and...well, she's made to talk like an adult at five/six years old, and any person who's been around children for any length of time can tell you that no child that age talks like six-year-old Anne does. I know I didn't, and I didn't start talking until I was six myself because of being autistic! I mean, I'm not an expert in child development, but what six-year-old knows words like brocade? And two year olds don't normally talk in full sentences. The anime rectifies this somewhat by starting off with Anne being six years old and actually having her talk at her age level (somewhat), so the problem with her talking too advanced at a young age is avoided, for all intents and purposes. Also, the book has characters mention or think of certain things, like menstrual cycles or breastfeeding, which during the time period BGG would take place in were considered inappropriate topics to even mention, let alone think about. Plus, as much as I appreciate Budge Wilson trying to give lots of characters backstories to explain why they act the way they do, sometimes it seems like she's a little too eager to do so, even when it's not necessary. She spins these elaborate backstories for minor characters like the orphanage matron and one of the teachers that works there, and they don't really add anything to them as characters, and just feel tacked on. Since some characters are so minor, they're only there for one or two chapters at least, there isn't much of a reason to develop them, and Wilson could have just had them be normal people who just happen to work there or just have their reasons that they're not obligated to disclose. Backstories are fine for important characters, but sometimes they're not always necessary. Sorry Wilson, I know you had good intentions, but this was a misfire for sure.

Does this kill my enjoyment of BGG in any way? Hell no! Sure, BGG has its problems, but as a prequel to Anne of Green Gables, I think it does a serviceable job. It's not perfect, but nothing ever is. Granted, others may not like the liberties and decisions that it makes, and that's fine. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and if BGG isn't their cup of tea, who am I to convince them otherwise? But does BGG condone domestic violence like people say? As far as I've read, no, it doesn't. Can it be sad and depressing at times? Yes, it can, but Montgomery herself made no secret of the fact that Anne's background before meeting the Cuthberts wasn't a walk in the park, and Wilson didn't try to hide that or sanitize it in any way. I hate this idea that kids shouldn't be allowed to read about depressing subjects like domestic abuse, death, alcoholism, and so on, because reading about things outside their life experiences can enrich their minds and hearts, and people who do actually live through situations similar to Anne's here can not only find characters they can relate to, but also learn potential coping methods for how to deal with things like that in real life. Like Anne in the story, lots of people found solace in books, reading, and tapping into their imagination, so for every person who doesn't like BGG or even Anne of Green Gables itself, there'll always be someone out there who will say this and the Anne series itself is their favorite book.

Not a perfect prequel to the Anne canon by any means, but it does a serviceable job at filling in the blanks and it's definitely one of my favorite reads.
 
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I started this review on September 27th, 2018, but I didn't finish writing it until today.

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I give this recent novel tie-in to the Disney movie...a 88/100!

It's a no brainer that whenever a book or game is adapted into something like a movie or a series, the original source material is always going to be better, mainly due to having more time and resources to tell its story. Movie and TV show adaptations do have their merits as well, but come with their own set of problems, such as making changes to better suit the medium, for better or worse, leaving things out, or not having enough time or freedom to really do the material justice. Just ask anyone who watched the Percy Jackson movies, the Persona 5 anime, or that crappy Netflix Death Note movie. But there are a few exceptions to the rule, where the adaptation can actually wind up being better than the original source, such as the anime for Angelic Layer--which expanded on the manga and made changes to it that made more sense, pretty much every World Masterpiece Theater anime ever, and Spielberg's movie, Jaws, which made the main characters much nicer and more likeable than their more jerkish, hypocritical counterparts in the original book. If given the right amount of time and creative freedom, an adaptation can really make the source material shine like no other. Such is the case for this novelization of Disney's movie, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms.

Being a tie-in for the movie, it has the same premise: A young girl named Clara Stahlbaum and her family are dealing with the loss of her mother, Marie. One Christmas Eve, her family try to make the best of things and attend her godfather Drosselmeyer's Christmas ball. She receives a present that once belonged to her mother, an egg-shaped music box, but there's no key. But through a series of events, Clara finds herself in an unexplored corridor of Drosselmeyer's house, which leads her into a magical parallel world unlike any fairy tale she has ever known, inhabited by living toys that her mother created. But the Realm is in danger, and it may be up to Clara and her new allies to save it from peril.

Now, for anyone who's interested, I did watch the movie, and to put it simply: It wasn't anything special. Just a cute, cliche fluff movie that's all style and no substance, trying too hard to be Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland and not making a whole lot of sense. It also made no effort to break away from all of the typical kid movie cliches that Disney has been swimming in over the past decade and not trying anything truly new with the premise. But for anyone who was disappointed by the movie, I highly, HIGHLY encourage you to read the novelization, because not only does it expand on and explain a lot of things that didn't make sense in the movie, but it gives a lot of much needed characterization and development for several key characters, giving them much more depth than the movie could ever hope to give them. Granted, the book is still pretty cliche on its own, even with the added backstory, as it follows a lot of familiar plot beats that every Disney movie has done: Lonely girl who feels misunderstood, a dead mom whose absence causes crap tons of angst for everyone, an ally who turns out to be bad, a villain who turns out to be good, so on and so forth. But there's a lot of things that the book achieves that helps it stand above the movie in terms of overall quality.

One of those things is the prose and overall writing. Sure, the material the book has to work with isn't anything special, and since this is a book aimed at children, it has to take care to be understandable and not purple prosey. But it also can't afford to be boring or dull, either. Thankfully, the novelization actually manages to strike this delicate balance very well. Every sentence is descriptive enough to make you feel like you're in the book's world, enough to make you picture exactly what's going on, with evocative imagery using all of the five senses, like taste, smell, and touch. At the same time, Rusu knows when to hold back on the description and let the story tell itself when needed, and he doesn't try to overexplain things that are better left to the imagination.

Another improvement is the fact that the book doesn't only show things from Clara's perspective, but also goes into the story of Clara's mother, Marie, and her companion, Sugar Plum. The extra time dedicated to Marie and Sugar Plum, and their segments in general give them much more backstory and development than the movie could give them, and Rusu choosing to flesh them out further gives them far more presence and personality than just the dead mother and the overly cutesy fairy friend. Furthermore, certain twists near the end are actually given proper foreshadowing because of this, rather than coming out of nowhere, something that the movie suffered from. This added characterization for everyone, along with Rusu actually getting into their heads and exploring their personalities make them far more dynamic than they were in the movie, even if they still admittedly adhere to typical archetypes that are prominent in stories like this. Also, I love that the novel decided to have Clara's dad just be generally nice and sympathetic, if a little clueless, rather than overly stern and more concerned about appearances than Clara's concerns and feelings like he was in the movie.

That said, the book isn't perfect, and while it does rectify a lot of issues that the movie had, it also has a few issues that the movie has as well. Mother Ginger is considered the main antagonist throughout a good bulk of both the movie and the book, but the direction they take her in doesn't really seem all that seamless. It was like the creators wanted to go through with a certain direction they had with her but didn't know how to make the transition in doing so, and as a result, her whole character just seemed cobbled together like a Christmas gift that got poorly wrapped and delivered at the last second. She didn't have much backstory or development compared to the other characters, and we don't learn much about her. Granted, I did like what little the book did try to give her, but as it stands, as far as character development goes, Mother Ginger kind of got the shaft. Furthermore, for those familiar with the original Nutcracker story, this novel isn't really about a Nutcracker. There is a nutcracker character, who in this is basically a toy soldier come to life, but that's really it, and he's a side character. People who liked the original Nutcracker and expected him to have a big role here will definitely be disappointed, as much of the story focuses on Clara and the magical world than a Nutcracker. I personally didn't mind, as I didn't read the original story (I do own it, though. I just never got around to reading it), but since the book and movie have the Nutcracker title in them, with the Nutcracker itself just being a side character, I wouldn't blame you for thinking this was false advertising on Disney's part.

While the book may not be perfect, I consider it to be the superior work over its source, Disney's movie, simply because it had more time and freedom to expand on the story, the characters, and everything else that the movie couldn't. Some things don't always work in different formats. Books and movies are two very different beasts, with different ways of telling a story. It's really all about how you use the time, resources, and ingredients you have, and I think this novelization of The Nutcracker and the Four Realms succeeded where the movie that inspired it didn't. It takes talent to make something that actually winds up better than the source material. It's not the original Nutcracker story, obviously, but I think it's better off going in its own direction than trying to be something it's not. The Nutcracker the Four Realms' movie isn't anything special, but the novel has become a favorite of mine, and hey, maybe you'll like it too if you decide to give it a read.
 
Here's a review I literally completed just now.

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I give this short game about a boy and his pet pelican...a 55/100.

Some time ago, I found this game on Steam, which seemed interesting, especially since it's based on a book written by an obscure Australian author. I bought it on Steam but it didn't run too well on there, so I refunded it. Then I found it was on the Nintendo Switch and decided to buy it. I knew it'd be somewhat of a short game, seeing as it was at a very low price, but short games can be good in their own way, right? Well...after playing Storm Boy, I must admit I came out rather disappointed. The story is about an unnamed boy who lives with his reclusive father by a beach. One day, he comes across three baby pelicans without their mother. He and his father raise them until they grow up and learn to fend for themselves. One of the pelicans, whom he names Mr. Percival, returns and becomes the boy's best friend. That's really all there is to it.

This is especially apparent because the gameplay is...non-existent. All the game really requires you to do is move in one direction and play some inconsequential mini games. Even if you opt out of the mini games, you aren't penalized for doing so. The mini games aren't much except for collecting shells, feeding pelicans, riding the ocean on a wooden sailboat, directing Mr. Percival to a boat, and so on, and you don't really get anything out of them. No rewards nor penalties. Plus, the game has literally nothing in terms of its content. It just tells of the boy and his adventures with Mr. Percival, and rather than showing it, the game just uses text from the book that pops up as you make the boy run in one direction. I mean, you can literally finish the game in 15 minutes flat if you don't spend too much time on the mini games. It has very little, if any real content to really utilize.

In all honesty, the only things the game has going for it are the graphics and the soundtrack, both of which are very good. The game never skimps on the details in the environment, like the wild grass, the sand dunes, and the harsh oceans during a storm. Everything is rendered in loving detail, giving it an almost summer-like quality, which is fitting since the game takes place at a beach. The only thing is that the humans are given dot eyes and more simplistic designs, which makes the backgrounds stand out more. It doesn't hurt the game in any way, though. The soundtrack is fairly nice too, if nothing to really write home about, with plenty of soft, mellow piano and flute tunes, always at a low volume and never trying to be louder than it needs to be. It helps the soundtrack is used really well, knowing when to be subtle and when it just doesn't need to be used, accentuating the nuances of a scene.

But as much as it pains me to say this, that's really all the good things I can say about the game. It's not bad in any way, but it just feels so barebones. I guess this is what comes of me expecting it to have more content than it has, being spoiled by other games that had much more content. I kind of hate being critical of this game though, as whoever worked on it clearly put effort into it, and hey, it does make for a nice time killer for if you want to waste 15-20 minutes. But as it stands, the game doesn't really have much to offer on its own. The characters aren't given much personality or development, the storyline is terribly predictable to the point where you can see certain twists coming from a mile away, and the gameplay is just non-existent. I wouldn't recommend this for hardcore gamers, but more for people wanting to kick back and relax a bit. All in all, Storm Boy isn't anything special.
 
Hoo boy. This one's been a long time coming. This review was just finished today.

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I give this anime about cute girls forming a band...a 52/100.

Oh, K-On. This anime is both famous and infamous for a lot of things. I watched it when it was first coming out, and at first I thought it was okay...but then watching it more and more began to frustrate me with every episode, though I did finish it and the second season, which will be its own separate review. K-On is said to be the anime that popularized the moe anime genre, particularly the "cute girls doing cute things" type of it, which some may say was to the anime industry's detriment. After seeing both seasons, I think I can see why. In all honesty, K-On as a show really frustrates me, because it does have potential to be a good show, but rather than utilize that potential, it just wastes all of its time waffling around and focusing on cutesy moe antics rather than the more important stuff. After I finished K-On, I didn't go near it again until this year when it randomly came out on Netflix, so I thought maybe I'd rewatch it again and see if maybe I have a better opinion on it.

The result? No, my initial feelings on it haven't changed. It's still as frustrating as it was back when I first watched it.

So the base premise is that four--later five--high school girls start a light music club after it gets disbanded. Yui Hirasawa, the guitarist, is a cheerful, spacey girl who has never played a guitar in her life and just wants to spend her days having fun and being a ditz. Ritsu Tainaka, the guitarist, and her friend Mio Akiyama, the bassist, are the ones who initially reform the light music club, with rich girl Tsumugi Kotobuki, who plays synth, and level-headed freshman Azusa Nakano, also a guitarist, joining soon after. Though everyone tries to learn more about music and playing their instruments, most of the members prefer wasting their time eating sweets, drinking tea, goofing off, and getting all mushy-gushy with one another, to the frequent irritation of the members who are more dedicated to music.

No, really. I'm not kidding you with that last sentence. That's really all the show is: Just a bunch of girls waffling around and doing everything except playing music and getting their act together. Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with slice-of-life anime. I don't want to give the impression that I outright hate slice-of-life anime. Many of my favorites happen to be in that genre. However, if you make a slice-of-life anime where nothing happens, your audience isn't going to care. Characters in a story, even in a slice-of-life story, need to face challenges in a way that'll make the audience care about them, if done well. And that's one of my biggest beefs with K-On: Any challenges the girls face always wind up having some sort of convenient solution that neatly wraps everything up in a neat bow and doesn't present any actual conflict. Yui doesn't have enough money to buy a guitar? Let's have the rich girl's father own the music store she gets it from and have her buy it at a discount! Mio accidentally flashes her underwear at a crowd? Let's soften the blow by having some people form a fan club around it, which is totally not utterly degrading and humiliating whatsoever! One of the club members calls everyone out on their lack of drive? Let's have her warm up to them by having the girls cuddle her and have her stick cat ears on her head! No one ever faces any consequences for their actions, or lack of action, with Ritsu being the biggest offender on this one, as she continually bullies Mio and acts like a brat towards her, but any repercussions she gets are always played for laughs, and she never faces serious karma.

Speaking of the characters, everyone's a moe blob. Yui's the clumsy, clueless ditz, Mio's the exasperated level-headed one, Ritsu's the obnoxious tomboy, Mugi's the rich girl, and Azusa is basically a younger Mio. Other than Mio, Azusa, and Ui, I really didn't like any of the characters, namely because the show is trying so hard to make them seem as cutesy and super pwecious as possible rather than making them feel like people. Yui in particular annoys me with the fact that she acts less like a high schooler and more like a 5-year-old shoved in a Barney skit, and the show infantilizes her like crazy. Who the hell legitimately DOESN'T know that you have to pay to get your guitar strings replaced?! Most people would know before high school age that if something is broken, you either buy a new one or pay somebody to fix something for you, like changing a light bulb or having a vet prescribe medicine for your sick pet! The teacher is just there to complain about her lost youth and shove the girls in stupid outfits, and Nodoka, as good as she is, is woefully underutilized. I can totally understand why people wouldn't like a show like K-On based on how the characters act in this alone. I mean, you don't necessarily watch certain anime for realistic acting or three-dimensional characterization, which is fine. But when you lean too heavily on trying to make your characters as diabetes-inducingly saccharine as possible, without putting in the effort to develop them, flesh them out, or make the audience care about them, you screwed up hard. Also, Mio and Azusa deserve better. They really do.

Seeing as this is a music anime, one would think the soundtrack would be good, right? Uhh...no. I mean, the background music in and of itself is fine, if rather sappy at certain points. But the actual songs the girls write and sing are, like them, ridiculously childish. Granted, nobody expects teenagers to automatically be as good as Celine Dion in a nanosecond, which is fine. But again, the show is favoring cuteness over substance, and the girls' songs, along with their lyrics, are nauseating and painful to listen to a lot of the time. One song is about friggin ballpoint pens, for Pete's sake! Who the hell writes a song about pens?! All their songs are little more than generic bubblegum pop that's all just so grating on the ears. In all honesty, the only good thing the anime has going for it is the animation. KyoAni prides itself on fluid animation that really brings the characters to life rather than having them be just static images with moving mouths and blinking eyes, and this continued even after K-On's runaway success. But good animation isn't enough to hide K-On's blatant flaws.

That being said, do I think K-On is a bad show? Not necessarily, I've seen plenty of stuff that's even worse (*coughcoughLapisReLightscoughcough*), but it's completely held back by cliches and the desire to be as moe as possible. I do plan on seeing the second season and reviewing it, but I doubt I'll like it any more than this one, especially since the second season is longer than this one. But hey, if you like K-On, cool! More power to you! It may not be for me, but sometimes people like their cotton candy anime, and that's okay.
 
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This review was just finished today.

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I give this cute game where you play as a princess...a 66/100.

If this game, called Pretty Princess Party, had come out when I was a kid, I wouldn't have gone anywhere near it. As a kid, I despised overly girly things even though I'm a girl myself. Anything that wasn't Pokemon, Digimon, Kirby, or resembled something like My Little Pony or Bratz, I stayed the hell away from them. Now, as an adult, my tastes are a bit more refined and less...overly judgmental. Plus, quarantine happened and I wanted something to pass the time. This happened to come out, and I figured it looked easy enough, so I bought it and finished it. It's...nothing special. Just a royalty sim where you decorate your castle with tons of furniture and play minigames like riding horses and decorating cakes. Typical girly stuff. You play as a girl who gets magicked to another world filled with talking rabbits and princess ghosts, and you're tasked with restoring the castle's magic by decorating it based on the requirements each room gives you.

This isn't the type of game where you fight monsters, get to know an eclectic band of characters, or kick back and live the farm life. This game wears its girly princessyness all over, and the gameplay exemplifies this. First off, the core gameplay consists of two things: Minigames and interior decorating. The minigames consist of lessons that your character has to partake in in order to increase your character's ratings in three themes: cuteness, coolness, and elegance. At first, you only have access to three minigames, but as you progress in decorating the castle and unlocking the various rooms, you gain access to three more. Completing these minigames will also net you in-game currency called Lumina, which you use to create/unlock furniture, hair styles, dresses, eye colors, accessories, and so on. You can also get it by greeting people, though you can only get Lumina from greeting people once a day.

However, the best part of the gameplay is the interior decorating. While you start off with a small selection and have to meet every room's requirements (Each room has a theme, like a kitchen, a garden room, a library, an office, and so on), the game allows you to decorate every room however you please. You can even go back to previously unlocked rooms and decorate them with new items that you unlock later in the game. Your imagination can rule the roost in this castle, and as you restore parts of the castle, residents will move into town and they ask you to design their homes for them, though that's pretty easy, since not only do they give you new pieces of furniture, they straight up give you the things they need for their own house. So while the interior decoration is the best part of the game, there's literally no challenge here, since everything is given to you when you accept the task to fulfill the villagers' requests. But the gameplay from both the decoration and minigames have their own sets of problems. For one, there are only six minigames in the entire game, and you're expected to play them to acquire points over and over again with little in the way of variety, and even on the hardest difficulty, the rewards you get are painfully miniscule. Furthermore, while it's easy to acquire Lumina and unlock recipes when you get to a certain point, the game only lets you unlock recipes one at a time, making the game feel sluggishly paced and really slow. As a result, the gameplay begins to feel very tedious and repetitive.

Not helping matters is that the characters in the game are as bland as wheat toast, with everyone's main character trait being generically nice and pleasant. Your character, while you can customize their appearance, is a silent protagonist without much in the way of a personality, and all the other characters are just archetypes with little depth to them. On the technical side of things, while the background art is beautifully rendered and the rabbit characters and dress designs are great, the human characters just look...odd in-game. While the cover art for the game is pretty nice, the in-game sprites for the human characters have strangely large heads, big eyes that cover almost 80% of their faces, their body movements feel herky-jerky, and as a result of the odd character design, the MC's facial expressions can be really creepy at times, falling straight into the uncanny valley. Seriously, I've seen indie games with better 3D designed characters than this. Finally, the soundtrack is nice to listen to, but there are only about 5 or 6 pieces of background music in the entire game, and not very memorable on their own.

So is Pretty Princess Party a bad game? Well, not necessarily, but it's not something I'd recommend for hardcore gamers. It's a cute game you can use to kill time, but there's very little in the way of depth and variety. If it had more minigames to choose from, along with more fleshed out characters and didn't feel overly saccharine, I'd probably recommend it. While decorating rooms around the castle and village are fun, the gameplay is rather lackluster. But hey, sometimes a short, sweet time killer might be just what we need, and that's okay. If you have a little sister, daughter, niece, or young relative who loves princesses and dress up, this is the game for them.
 
This'll be my last review for the year, so let's end this one off on a good note!...and on something I never expected to enjoy!

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I give this anime about a group of girls becoming school idols...an 82/100?!

(This is my 400th completed anime!!!)

Whoa. I...I was honestly not expecting this anime to be this good. Hell, I never expected to even watch it, let alone complete it! Now, originally, I hadn't planned to go anywhere near this, as I mentioned previously that I never liked the Love Live franchise. It just felt too cheesy and overly saccharine for my tastes, and the first two seasons, Love Live: School Idol Project and Love Live Sunshine, have a certain thing that I have a very visceral hatred for, which is characters grabbing other peoples' boobs without their consent and playing the sexual harassment for comedy. Yeah...no. I can't stand that in any way, shape, or form, and yes, I know the Love Live franchise has much more to offer than that, but those elements are a HUGE turn off for me, and I stay the hell away from any anime that has that trope in it. That's the reason why I'll never go near shows such as Haruhi Suzumiya, Nagi no Asukara, Seven Deadly Sins, Adachi and Shimamura, Strike Witches, and many others. But hey, if you like the other Love Live seasons, cool! More power to you! They may not be for me, but the Love Live franchise has become massively popular since the first anime aired in 2013, and there's no fighting big successes. That being said, two more Love Live seasons were announced, this one included, and assuming that this one was going to have those creepy elements as well, I wasn't going to go anywhere near it, and I had planned to watch other shows.

So how did I wind up watching Love Live: Nijigasaki High School Idol Club in its entirety? Well, two things: One, boredom, and two, I dropped several shows I had intended to watch, one of which had a really annoying main character who did nothing but whine, screech, and act like a brat and just got on my nerves every time she appeared on screen (The Day I Became a God), and the other one started going in really questionable directions and apparently never recovered (Wandering Witch). Then I started hearing that the Love Live Nijigasaki anime was turning out to be really good, so I was bored, and I thought "What the hell? I might as well try it out and give it a fair shot." So I watched the first episode. Then another. Then another. And before I knew it, I saw the entire show, and to my MASSIVE relief, this show doesn't have a SINGLE instance of boob groping or sexual harassment played for comedy. THANK GOD!! This is what I've been waiting for!! I still have no intention of watching the original SIP or Sunshine, but I did feel somewhat guilty about not getting into the franchise, as several friends and people I know really love the franchise, flaws and all. Now, any guilt I once had is now assuaged, as not only have I finally completed a Love Live anime series in its entirety, I found one I actually love!

Alright, enough of my personal history with it. Let's talk about what this iteration is about, shall we? Two best friends, Yu Takasaki and Ayumu Uehara, have recently become fans of school idols after seeing one, Setsuna Yuki, perform live. They see if they can find the school idol club in their school...only to find that it's been shut down. Undeterred, the duo decide to start their own school idol club themselves, and through trial and error, even recruit the previous members of the old school idol club, who had broken up due to a falling out. But rather than form one big group and enter competitions, the girls pursue their own individual paths as school idols, learning the ins and outs of the entertainment industry such as making promotional videos, holding concerts, putting themselves out there, practicing singing and dancing, and so on. Every day brings something new as the girls become school idols to have fun and see what it's all about. Unlike the previous Love Live series, there's no dramatic plot to save the school from being closed nor are the girls participating in any competitions, so the stakes are much lower and more grounded this time around.

Now, if you're a hardcore Love Live fan, you'll notice that the animation and art style is different from previous Love Live anime. You're not seeing things, and there's a reason for that. Unlike SIP and Sunshine, Love Live Nijigasaki (I'm calling it that rather than its much longer original title for the sake of convenience) is directed, written, scripted, and animated by a completely different group of people. Yes, Sunrise still does the animation, but a different set of animators were brought on to animate this particular season. You'll notice that the character designs are simpler, slightly less refined, and with less emphasis on things like the color in their cheeks or the detail in their eyes. But the simpler character designs also allow for more fluidity and making the character movement feel much more dynamic. It also helps that the animators always slip in little easter eggs that reference the cell phone game, the backgrounds are still bright and colorful, though slightly more muted compared to its parent series, and it makes good use of dynamic camera angles and lighting during particularly important scenes. One thing that Love Live fans in general feel that this series vastly improved on compared to the original two seasons is the CGI. These days, most anime companies prefer to render characters in computer generated images whenever they're dancing rather than actually animating them themselves due to cutting costs and wanting to make things easier. But early idol shows had really bad CGI that had really wonky movements and made the characters look more like plastic knockoff barbie dolls, complete with weird faces. None of this is present here. Not only are the CGI models of the girls much more dynamic, they actually actually blend surprisingly well with the 2D scenery for once and the models actually resemble the characters.

Of course, with this being a music anime, the soundtrack has to carry the show, because of it doesn't, it'll bring the show down. The background music is pretty versatile, with plenty of sweeping orchestras and heavy usage of instruments like oboes, flutes, pianos, electric guitars, and so on. I admit I'm kind of a sucker for orchestras. That being said, I liked many of the songs okay, as they're mostly well sung and fit the characters well, but taste is subjective, and while I like them just fine, others will likely dismiss them as just generic bubblegum girl pop numbers. Though if you ask me, I'd much rather listen to the Love Live Nijigasaki songs over, say, anything Miley Cyrus or Katy Perry sings these days.

While I admit to not having seen SIP or Sunshine beyond their first episodes, one thing I've noticed upon researching these seasons is that they often had problems with focusing too much on certain characters while not focusing enough on others that really needed proper character development. With large ensemble casts, it can be hard to find that balance where you need to develop every character and show what they're like in order to make your audience care about them. Thankfully, while not without its own issues, the Nijigasaki cast is free of this. Every character gets their own focus episode, along with an insert song as the cherry on top, and all of them get nicely fleshed out, receiving healthy amounts of development that make them feel like they're more than just a single archetype. Ironically, the mobile game that this series is based on is notorious for not really bothering to flesh out the Nijigasaki cast in any meaningful way. The staff on the anime seemed to realize that this was a problem and rectified it ten fold. I admit to not having played the game, but after being impressed by the levels of characterization the girls received here, I can only imagine what the mobile game's handling of them must have been like. Nevertheless, the show has a great cast of characters, and while many may still consider them generic moeblobs compared to other shows, considering that most moe shows these days are actually trying to put more effort into giving their characters more depth than just one personality trait, I have to give kudos to the staff here for at least bothering to care about what they do. Also, IMHO, Rina is my best girl, with Kanata coming a VERY close second.

Another thing I really respect about the Nijigasaki anime is its writing. Previous seasons often wanted drama a little too badly, bordering on melodramatic at times. I know the original SIP had characters singing rain storms away, shouting their feelings whenever they experience hardship, a huge deal being made of main characters wanting to quit after getting sick once, school idols being considered more important than studying abroad, characters being needlessly mean and wanting to stop school idol clubs from being formed for asinine reasons, and so on. Since the Nijigasaki anime doesn't really have a central conflict like saving their school from being shut down, the stakes are much lower this time around, and I think this was for the better. The Nijigasaki anime shows a lot more restraint when it comes to its drama. For one, whenever the characters have a problem, they actually talk to each other about it and work to resolve it like mature people rather than dragging it out needlessly or throwing hissyfits like toddlers. Nothing is ever blown out of proportion or made into a bigger deal than it is, and the characters behave and act realistically, which is something I really wish more anime would do these days. One reason this anime has a much more subdued atmosphere is that one of the scriptwriters, Jin Tanaka, also worked on shows like Laid-Back Camp and various Pretty Cure series. Tomoyuki Kawamura, who directed the show, previously directed Mitsuboshi Colors and Kamigami no Asobi, and did storyboards for shows like Anne-Happy and the last Gintama movie. Sometimes change can be for the better, and in this case, it was absolutely needed and it worked out perfectly!

That said, as much as I want to lavish with show with all the praise, it's not a perfect show, as it's often held back by its own formula. Every episode goes like this: Character goes about their day, character has a problem, the others help out in some way, character has an epiphany, random song number, end. Granted, execution is everything, and there's really no original spin on anything anymore. Plus, the show does expect you to really stretch your willing suspension of disbelief at certain points. Early on, the characters go into random choreographed, PV-esque musical numbers, complete with colorful visuals and new outfits, even though these music video setpieces make no effort to really tie into what's actually happening, so it makes the transition from regular stuff to music feel very jarring. Later episodes rectify this with having characters actually perform in concerts where they can actually make use of special effects and show them in costume, but I can totally understand feeling very thrown off by it initially. Plus, a later plot point has the girls attempt to hold this super huge festival, managing to put together everything from venues to equipment and costumes perfectly even though the show never explains how they even manage to put together the possibly huge amounts of money to do so.

However, Love Live Nijigasaki's positives more than outweigh its negatives. I'm glad I got to watch this, as now, I finally have a Love Live season that I both actually watched in its entirety, but can proudly say I actually love! If you want to watch any Love Live season at all, but feel put off by some of the decisions the first two seasons made, don't hesitate to check out Love Live: Nijigasaki High School Idol Club if you can. It's a sweet show about girls having fun, and considering how crappy 2020 has been, we could use a bit of subdued sweetness right now.
 
Alright! Let's start 2021 with...an old review of an old favorite. This review was written on December 20th, 2015.

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I give Aikatsu's second season...a 72/100.

When a show, book, or any form of visual media is confirmed to get a sequel, that idea can go in a variety of directions. The creators can expand on the original source material and recitfy any flaws the first installment might have had. Or the creators can create new stories that don't add anything to the plotline so as to give the fans more chances to see their favorite characters on screen. Or the creators can use them to take more risks, try new things, and see if they can spread their wings with new ideas. Or they can keep the same formula and not change anything. Sequels are usually hit or miss, and when done right, they can really add to a show, book, comic, etc. But if done wrong, things can go awry. Aikatsu's second season is sort of a mix between good and bad. It's not a bad second season, as it introduces a lot of new and neat concepts that add to the show's setting. However, it does have many flaws that really hold it back.

Continuing from where the first season left off, Ichigo has come back from America, and while she was gone, a lot has happened in the Aikatsu scene. First off, there's a new school called Dream Academy that's more lax than Starlight is in regards to accepting new students, but is far more progressive in that it offers not just singing courses, but designing and producing courses, so kids can aspire to become producers or designers, and have more advanced technology helping the students train and study. The Starlight girls meet new friends along the way, such as Seira Otoshiro, the rock music loving girl who wants to put a new spin on Aikatsu, Kii Saegusa, her peppy but nerdy producer, Sora Kazesawa, a beautiful, up-and-coming idol/designer, Maria Himesato, a spacey but polite farm girl from a rich family, and Starlight newcomer Akari Ozora. With new friends and new adventures, Aikatsu is bound to get more exciting.

Before we get to the negatives, let's start off on a positive note on something that the series has finally managed to perfect: The CGI. From the fourth episode onward, the CGI has become absolutely masterful. The character models are much more faithful to the anime's designs and don't look stiff, nor do the characters look like plastic dolls that fall straight into the uncanny valley. The dance sequences are much smoother and much more fluid, and when the characters move, they actually move, and their bodies actually look realistic this time around instead of looking like Barbie dolls with noodle arms. I can probably attribute this to Aikatsu being so popular that the producers managed to rake in a lot of cash, and they really put their budget to good use. The same praises for the CGI can be said for the animation. For the most part, it remains fairly consistent. The colors are bright, the character designs are sharp, though why some characters such as Sora and another one in season four have weird gradient hair is beyond me, and the Aikatsu sequences are still beautiful. I do think some of the dress designs have become VERY over-the-top.

Since it's a show about singing and music, there's no way Aikatsu is gonna go even one episode without some singing and music. Like the first season before it, the soundtrack is reasonably good, albeit rather simplistic and repetitive, with re-using songs from the first season and making BGM versions of certain songs. Some Aikatsu songs are great, such as "Best Friend," "Egao no Suncatcher," "Aurora Princess," and covers of old songs such as Idol Activities are here too. However, other songs sound great, but unfortunately their impact is dulled by strange lyrical choices. Sora's song, "Kira Pata Shining," is a wonderful homage to the Middle East and Arabia, but I can't bring myself to like it wholly because of Sora's "kurukuru kyawawa" catchphrase being shoehorned in, and it really takes me out of the song, not only because it doesn't add anything to the song, but completely takes away from the Arabian feel its trying to give off. This isn't the first time its happened either. It's a shame, because season two's songs are great most of the time, but they get bogged down by strange lyrics and the occasional bad singing voice here and there.

While old characters return, new characters show up, and while I applaud the show for trying something different, unfortunately...the characters are where the show really suffers. For one, the old characters have returned, yes, and that's great, but now instead of getting much focus episodes, they're basically reduced to their annoying character tics and catchphrases. Otome gets especially annoying with her "Love You!" and...becoming Starlight Queen, when other, more respectable idols like Yurika or Aoi are more deserving of the position. Sakura's "Kitaouji Theater" got old really fast, and Ran was pretty much cast aside. The new characters, on the other hand...don't really develop. Now, if there's one thing I applaud the show for doing, it's introducing a rival school and rival characters WITHOUT making the rivals into jerks or evil people who just want to defeat the protagonists just because they want to. You can be a rival without being a straight up jerk, and being rivals isn't everything. I'm glad Aikatsu made thei Starlight/Dream Academy rivalry relatively friendly all the way through, as its very refreshing. However, the new characters are woefully underdeveloped. Seira is interesting as she's a rocker who wants to become a rock idol and challenge the status quo, which is great, but she never seems to really overcome anything. Kii is her producer, who is then made into an idol who...automatically wins a competition and pulls off a Special Appeal without any effort despite it being her VERY FIRST time performing. Sora is pretty much a blank slate. She makes her own brand and is well known, but there's nothing else to her. Maria is especially guilty of being a Mary Sue because she gets recruited into being an idol all because she gave a refreshment to Dream Academy's principal. That's it. No, I'm not kidding. The DreAca girls seem to get everything handed to them on a silver platter, and none of them really have any flaws. Granted, they're not NEARLY as bad as Kaede, but I wish the creators would have put more effort into making them into more well rounded characters instead of being perfect idol archetypes who get everything handed to them and don't have to deal with the harshness of life.

This is especially jarring considering halfway through the season, we're introduced to a new character who not only isn't perfect and doesn't get everything right as soon as she steps on stage, but she actually has to work really hard just so she can keep up with other idols, and an entire arc is devoted to her growth as a character, an idol, and a person. Who is that character? Akari Ozora. I'm saying it right now: Akari is the single BEST character in the entire show. Yes, I said that, and I'm NOT taking it back. One of my biggest complaints about Aikatsu, which still persists even now as the show nears its end, is that everything seems to go WAY too smoothly/perfectly for the characters. Many characters just happen to win serious competitions with little effort, and even if they mess up, they don't suffer any realistic consequences that come from messing up something so important. Some characters even manage to do everything perfectly on their first try, and that just doesn't happen in real life, and no the "its a kids show" excuse doesn't hold any water because even kids shows usually don't try to lie to viewers and say that you can do everything right on your first try. Thankfully, ALL OF THIS is thrown out the window the minute Akari is introduced. When Akari messes up, there are serious consequences. When she barely improves even though she tries hard, she doesn't get what she wants. Even when she does get what she wants, she has to work really hard just to keep it up, and nothing comes easily to her. Seriously, why can't Aikatsu make characters like her more often?! She has the most depth out of all the idols, even Ichigo! Making someone good at everything doesn't give them depth or make them relatable, it just makes them unrealistically perfect.

As flawed as season 2 is, there are a lot of neat ideas that it has that would later lay groundwork down for seasons three and four, one of them being the concept of other schools that have more options for students rather than just training them for singing and dancing. DreAca has producer and fashion designer courses for students and has more training methods. Introducing other idol schools shows that Starlight Academy isn't the only idol school, giving more opportunities for other idols in other places or even parts of Japan to try making it big. The fact that the other schools aren't depicted as being bloodthirsty rivals at war with one another is also very refreshing. The concert scenes are still well done, the original characters still get spotlight episodes, and even the top idol, Mizuki, gets more to do throughout the series, so season two isn't BAD. It's not as good as season one, yes, but it still has a lot to offer. It just suffers from underdeveloped characters and pacing issues.

Flawed, but this is still a respectable sequel to a good series about idols and singing, and if you can get past the bright colors and underdeveloped characters, it's a decent show at best.
 
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I originally tried to review this on August 10th, 2019, but I didn't finish writing the review until today. Whoops.

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I give another one of Salten's books about animals...an 89/100!

It's no surprise by now that I'm a huge fan of Felix Salten's body of work. Thus far, I've read the following books by him: Bambi A Life In The Woods, the sequel to that, Bambi's Children, Fifteen Rabbits, a tiny bit of The Hound of Florence, and the subject of today's review, A Forest World. Published in 1942, the story focuses on various animals living in very different worlds. The barn animals that live on a farm don't go anywhere near the forest beyond their gates, and the animals of the forest consider the farm to be just as scary. Two worlds are literally right next to each other, but couldn't be further apart. Gradually, creatures from both sides begin to interact, bringing the once distant worlds a little bit closer. It's a story about expanding one's horizons and learning what makes life in the barn and the forest so different from one another.

Unlike Bambi, which has a central main character, A Forest World focuses much more on a scattered ensemble cast and doesn't necessarily have a true main character. One could argue that Manni, the donkey who lives at the barn, is the main protagonist, as he has the most page time in the entire novel, but just as many other characters get their turn in the spotlight, like Perri the squirrel (Who would later get her own book), Tambo the stag, Genina the mother doe and her two fawns, and so on. Also unlike Bambi, which depicts humans as being mysterious and dangerous, A Forest World does feature humans who are shown on screen, namely a forest ranger, Peter, his wife Babette, and Martin, their sort-of adopted son, who care about the animals in both the barn and the forest, with Martin in particular being the biggest link between the two settings. Not only do Martin and Peter genuinely care for the barn animals, they also make sure the forest animals don't go hungry during the winter, protect them from poachers, and in Peter's case, only kill elderly or genuinely dangerous animals. So if you wanted to see a Salten book where humans are portrayed much more sympathetically, this is the book for you...as far as I know. I haven't read the entirety of Salten's work, so take my statement with a grain of salt.

I've gushed about Salten's prose in the past, and here it's the same as ever. Lush with detailed descriptions and evocative prose that really make you feel like you're a part of the forest, bringing every piece of nature to life. I honestly don't have much else to say about it on that front, as it's just good all around! Of course, the talking trees and leaves make their return, and having read some of his other books, which also contain similar scenes, I think it's safe to say that Salten likes shoving in scenes where trees and leaves talk to each other. I'm still kind of meh on it, but the chapters in question can be skipped if you're not into that. Now, the translation for Forest World is very similar to the one used for Bambi. I don't know if they were translated by the same person or not, and any information I tried to find didn't confirm anything. I did find that Forest World was translated by one Paul Milton, and the person who did the original English translation for Bambi was done by Whitaker Chambers, a friend of Max Schuster (Co-founder of Simon & Schuster), but the copy of Bambi I have, which is a more modern release, doesn't list a translator, so I have nothing to confirm whether his translation was used again or not. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong!

Also unlike Bambi, A Forest World doesn't necessarily have an overarching plot. It does explore the idea of freedom as a running theme, along with how different life in the forest is to life in the barn, but many of the chapters are fairly episodic in nature. One chapter deals with the cow Lisa's anxieties about her baby and her fear of humans taking it away from her, another set of chapters deal with poachers threatening the forest animals, some chapters detail Tambo's life and his relationship with a doe, Debina, and so on. But like most of Salten's work, A Forest World isn't afraid to go dark or drastically change the status quo. It doesn't shy away from the dangers the forest animals face, like predators and poachers, but it also shows that farm life for the barn animals comes with its own set of problems. One thing I definitely appreciate about this book is that it's not afraid to give its characters huge flaws and have them make bad decisions that have serious, long-lasting consequences. I won't spoil anything, but the book basically kills off a very important character and in a way that you'd never see coming. Everyone's actions are realistic and true to life, and true to their overall character, but Salten is also careful to at least give his characters sympathetic and likeable traits when need be...with some exceptions. That said, there are a lot of characters to keep track of, with some of them only appearing for two chapters and never again, but it's easy to tell who's who from their actions and the point of view switches between chapters, so I never felt lost when reading it.

Now, there is a reason why I don't rate this book higher. While I do like a majority of the characters in this book, there are plenty of others who just don't do it for me, or could have benefitted from being better written. To put it bluntly, the only characters I didn't like in this book were, ironically, the deer characters, which is weird for me to say because deer are my favorite animals! Particularly, the characters of Tambo, Genina, and Arilla were the weakest members of the ensemble, with the latter two being because they are solely defined by their desires and motivations...and said desires are not only extremely shallow, they also read as downright misogynistic if you stop to think about it. Get this: Arilla's first mate was violent and abusive, and was shot by Peter because of how dangerous he was. Arilla refuses to mate with any other stags unless they have the same kind of personality as her first mate. Chapter 20 reveals that Arilla actually wants to be tyrannized, dominated, and abused by violent stags, because she believes that it's an act they put up to hide the fact that they actually want to be loved. That's...extremely unhealthy, especially from a human perspective. I don't know if this is intentional on Salten's part, or if it's the way it's translated, but this reads to me like it's trying to romanticize domestic abuse, and I don't think I need to go into how bad that is, because everybody and their dog knows that domestic/spousal abuse is not okay in any fashion, and it should never be portrayed as such. However, Genina's character and motivations aren't much better. She doesn't feel complete without children to raise, and when her first set of fawns grow up and leave her, with her son outright spurning her because he can't stand her treating him like a child, Genina is beside herself and has two more fawns to fill the void. Now, there's nothing wrong with wanting to raise kids and become parents. However, Genina doesn't have much personality beyond loving her kids too much and not wanting to let go of being a mother. Her naivete and the fact that the narrative explicitly refers to her second set of fawns as substitutes for her first ones cement the fact that she has a very rose tinted view of motherhood and hasn't learned anything from how she reacted to her first fawns growning up. When I said their motivations read as misogynistic, I wasn't kidding, as the book does seem to imply that girls absolutely need men in their lives--particularly need them to domineer over them and treat them like punching bags--and to have children or else they have nothing going for them, which is a very stupid, narrow-minded view to have. Imagine how these scenarios would go if they were human beings. More than that, the book doesn't actually show them learning from their mistakes and bettering themselves in the long run, so I can't bring myself to sympathize with Genina and Arilla in any way.

Adding onto this, it often seems like Salten can't seem to figure out what he wants to do with Tambo. First he's depicted as shy and skittish, but next he's brutal, dominant, and entitled, and later is so wishy-washy you just want to smack him across the head and tell him to stop acting so entitled. His mate, Debina, is at first devoted to him, but then completely spurns him because he wants to keep a harem of does when mating season comes along. So yeah. I love deer as animals, and Bambi is my favorite book of all time, but Salten really dropped the ball for his deer characters in A Forest World. I liked every character in this book except for the deer characters, which really says a lot!

That's really all I have to say on this one. I really wish I could like this book more than I do, and had it done away with some of the more questionable elements described above, it might have gone higher up my favorite books list. But for what it is, it's still a pretty nice read for anyone looking for a relaxing but still riveting time killer.
 
This review was just finished today.

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I give this anime based on the popular cellphone game...a 67/100.

I wasn't originally planning on reviewing this right off. I watched the show as it aired, and a second season was announced right after it ended, so I thought about waiting until the second season aired to review it. But since the second season won't air until about 2021, and due to recent events regarding the cellphone game this is based on, I decided to review the first season after all. Magia Record if a spin-off of Madoka Magica, the popular magical girl anime that aired in 2011, and MR itself began life as a mobile game in 2017. The mobile game wound up becoming super popular, and in Japan, it's still going to this day. I had no way of playing the game until I got a new phone, but the anime provided a nice alternative, and seeing as I love Madoka Magica, I decided to check this out. Unfortunately, as you can tell, while the anime does have some things going for it, it can't seem to escape from Madoka's shadow.

The story follows a young magical girl, Iroha Tamaki, who has been having strange dreams involving a girl she doesn't know. Some clues lead her to Kamihama City, and she runs into a plethora of magical girls who offer to help her with her search however they can. Later, Iroha finds a pint-sized Kyubey, nothing like the Kyubey she knows of, and through physical contact with it, she learns that the mysterious girl in her dreams is actually her younger sister, Ui, who seems to have disappeared completely. In fact, evidence of Ui's whole existence are completely gone, even from people's memories. Now that her memories are back, Iroha decides to stay in Kamihama, thinking that helping fight against powerful witches and rumors becoming reality will lead her to find out what really happened to Ui. But she may wind up getting more than she bargained for.

Like the original Madoka Magica anime, Magia Record is animated by the studio SHAFT, which is both famous and infamous for its usage of colorful, crazy visuals depending on the kind of show they're making. For the most part, the animation is true to Madoka Magica's original style, keeping the crazy, colorful, out there visuals to the witch lairs and keeping the scenes that take place in the real world relatively normal, complete with Madoka's trademark overly elaborate buildings and architecture. It helps that the character movement is still relatively smooth and with very little still frames. One thing I do commend Magia Record for is rectifying one particular issue I had with Madoka's animation. Remember how the anime would have characters' faces be drawn in really weird angles and with an extra thick line that outlines their cheeks and chins? Magia Record still has this as well, but with the characters' cheeks and chins being much rounder, save for certain scenes, this particular quirk is not only toned down to make it seem much more polished, but it's integrated into the animation in a way that doesn't feel intrusive, nor does it look like the result of an animator not knowing how to draw someone's face.

Unlike Madoka Magica, Yuki Kajiura is not in charge of the music for Magia Record. Granted, the anime does use some famous pieces of background music on occasion, but the majority of this soundtrack was done by one Takumi Ozawa, whose portfolio is more limited than hers. He mostly worked on stuff like Divine Gate, Okamikakushi, and Aria The Scarlet Ammo. I don't know if he does the music for the game or not, but that said, his music for the anime is surprisingly good. Parts of it feel like they were directly inspired by Kajiura's work, but it's easy to tell that other parts of the music are distinctly his, and it would have been more contentious had he tried to solely emulate Kajiura's style. But that's only really noticeable for those with a particularly trained ear for music, and considering Yuki Kajiura is one of the more well known composers in anime, that's saying a lot. The opening and ending songs are well sung too, but they're not exactly going to set the world on fire.

Unfortunately, this is where my praises for Magia Record start to dwindle. It's no surprise that Magia Record is based on a cell phone game, and mobile games are known for having a LOT of characters, often with new ones being put in whenever a game has a new event or something. With many of those properties being made into 12-13 episode anime, you have to really be careful with what you adapt, because if you try to bite off more than you can chew, your adaptation will suffer in the process. Two of the things people like myself loved about Madoka Magica was that it kept its cast of characters small and made optimal use of the short run time that it had, making sure to make use of all the ingredients it had while restraining itself from doing more than its run time would allow. Every character and plotline had a purpose, and the creators used them nicely. Sadly, this is where Magia Record suffers. Instead of having one singular plotline to focus on, Magia Record instead tries to juggle Iroha's search for Ui along with learning about the Witches based on rumors, or Uwasa, with the latter taking up the majority of the focus in the anime. Plus, rather than focusing on a smaller cast of characters, Magia Record pulls in a whole bunch of them, and other than a select few, they never really develop or receive fleshed out character arcs, making them all feel rather hollow and one-dimensional. Iroha herself is also a victim of this, and she's the main character. I admit I never got very far in the mobile game (And didn't get the chance to due to the game shutting down. No thanks, Aniplex!!), but even in the earliest parts of the game, Iroha was much more proactive and capable at fighting than the anime makes her out to be. She never really gets stronger in any way, and she always has to have someone to save her.

Speaking of characterization, it doesn't seem like the anime really knows what to do with Yachiyo. Her characterization is all over the place at times. In one scene, she's understandably mistrustful of one magical girl because of her childish, reckless nature, and later on, she completely changes her tune and allows said girl to live with her with little rhyme or reason! The game has her characterization be more consistent, as there, she does start out mistrustful of Iroha to the point of trying to drive her out of Kamihama, but Iroha manages to win her over and Yachiyo stops trying to antagonize her, so there, the changes in her personality make sense, but she's still a hardened magical girl veteran, so you never feel like the change happened too suddenly. In the anime, Yachiyo seems to keep flip-flopping between being terse or being uncharacteristically nice. Make up your mind, writers!!

It doesn't help that the two main plots don't necessarily have much of a connection to one another until the final two episodes. Many episodes just show the characters wandering around searching for the plot, which makes the pacing feel sluggish, and in turn, makes the show feel like it's meandering...and for a story like this, it really shouldn't do that. Madoka Magica knew what to focus on and never tried to pull in any superfluous subplots to make it feel bloated, whereas Magia Record brings in too many plotlines, many of which aren't woven into the narrative very well and wind up having nothing happening. In an anime with a short number of episodes, you can't afford to waste any time and resources, and Magia Record, in its desire to show a bunch of the game characters and cover as many of its early subplots as possible without trying to find ways to organically make them work in a short time frame, wound up doing just that. Sure, a second season has been announced, but that can only go so far in fixing the show's mistakes, and the show leaves a lot of things unresolved in the end anyway, making it feel even more disappointing. In all honesty, the only episodes of this show that I found good were the ones that focused on Sana, as those had the best execution and visual direction in the entire show. I kind of feel bad for being so critical of Magia Record, as you can tell it really wants to do more than its limited number of episodes will allow. Had this been made in, say, the late 90s or early 2000s, it might have been able to get 39 or even 52 episodes to cover the games' entire story and actually afford to meander a bit. But these days, every anime that's not a long running franchise has to be 11-13 episodes, and I think that's what made Magia Record fail: Rather than try to cut the chafe from the source material and adapt it in a way that'd work for the animation medium, it wound up biting off way more than it could chew, resulting in it not having any sort of balance whatsoever.

If you're a fan of Madoka Magica and want to watch something tangentially related to it, feel free to give this a shot, but it's unbalanced nature and bloated narrative make it into just another mediocre gacha game anime. And no, I'm STILL not over Aniplex shutting down the American version of Magia Record!! Why'd you have to get rid of the only mobage I actually cared about?!
 
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