2022 Winter Premiere Digest
The new year brought us a quiet season with some hidden gems and stellar rom-coms.
The new year brought us a quiet season with some hidden gems and stellar rom-coms.
This has been a disappointing season thus far – at least for me. I was holding out hope for this series since the trailer looked good, but damn what a way to be disappointed.
How did this veritable shitpost of an anime get so much love and attention? I mean, the art looks good, the OP and ED are solid, and the comedic direction is on point.
Fantasia Sango somehow makes The Three Kingdoms boring by being the most tepid video game adaptation to ever air.
If you’ve ever asked the question, “How do I make baseball more dangerous, more exciting, and also, a contact sport?” then Tribe Nine might just be the over-the-top, absolutely goofy series for you.
Do you want to watch a show about an insufferable young man born into money, scheming to make more money, stumbling into success and being lauded as a tactical genius?
I wish the first episode did more to lean into the premise.
Okay, post-apocalyptic dystopian action series featuring giant mushrooms and rust plague. You have my attention.
If you’re not a sports anime fan, it probably doesn’t have enough pizzazz to win you over. If you’re already a sports anime fan, you can probably already recommend six other shows that you’d rather be watching.
It’s an incredible thing for a show to still disappoint me despite the extremely low bar I set in order to get through it.
In a thus-far pretty dire winter season, I’m thrilled to say that Sasaki and Miyano’s premiere is a sweetly sincere young adult rom-com with likable characters and basically zero caveats. Isn’t it nice to have an easy add to the watchlist sometimes?
Ah yes, the queer gothic series I’m obsessed with and have a very hard time recommending.
Over-the-top sentai flourish aside, the charm for KUROITSU comes from the mundane existential dread of working in an office with demanding bosses and a limited budget.
Akebi’s Sailor Uniform is a beautifully-put-together show with a voyeuristic undercurrent, that doesn’t necessarily affect the overall experience but leaves it (at least, leaves me) feeling… off.
I can tell you right off the bat that this show isn’t interested in reinventing the wheel.
This has the makings of an exceptional rom-com, with a couple of caveats.
I was honestly expecting to be laughing my way throughout this premiere, because who read the synopsis and didn’t laugh? But then I had to sit through the whole thing.
Cue is a perfectly fine anime that offers up a solid enough premiere that’s well-executed, mildly memorable, and promises more in the coming weeks as the plot finds its legs.
There’s nothing wrong with Slow Loop (except some potential yellow flags in the dynamic between these soon-to-be stepsisters, which I’ll get to in a second) but it just doesn’t earn the kind of gold star I know this genre can.
Personifying war machines (or just putting cute girls in them) is a trope by this point, and I want to say it’s not inherently harmful in and of itself. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that the very premise of this show relies on detaching killing machines from their historical (or current!) context. Yes, these girls represent assault rifles and are shooting assault rifles, but don’t worry about it, they’re only using them to shoot evil robots. And don’t they look cool?