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The Fall 2017 Anime Preview Guide


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PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2017 4:26 pm Reply with quote
On Just Because!: "like undiluted mono no aware given life in the most boring way possible." - this is Extremely Good, Actually.

I liked the first episode and thought the re-establishment of the relationship between the two presumable male leads was pretty smartly written. The narration describing the fracture of the relationship plays as constant subtext during the baseball game to contextualize it as the reformation of a previously lost close friendship without that being outwardly obvious from the game or the character interactions alone.

The narration establishes the ambiguity of the value of the relationship that emerges when the relationship collapses without much explanation, and then the game shows how both parties felt that ambiguity and their slow realization that the other one was concerned with it, ultimately proving to them both that it was unambiguously valuable, otherwise neither party would be particularly concerned about it or its re-establishment. This is all conveyed basically with just the song playing in the background and the increasing seriousness with which the Shinji Matou lookalike takes the game.
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Ambulator



Joined: 08 Oct 2016
Posts: 30
Location: California
PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2017 4:30 pm Reply with quote
I enjoyed the disparate scores on Just Because, although I'm much more in the Jacob Chapman camp. It's good to know someone liked it. Provisional results,

Great: Nothing

Good: Gintama, UQ Holder!, Food Wars!, Konohana Kitan

Dropped: Everything else. There sure seem to be a lot of 'kill everyone' shows so far.
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BodaciousSpacePirate
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Joined: 17 Apr 2015
Posts: 3017
PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2017 4:39 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
The far edge of high school is an inherently fraught time in anyone's life. While there's anticipation for the adventures to come, there's also great melancholy at the thought your whole world is ending. Yes, high school was a burden, but it was also a kind of home, and the friendships and identities you've kindled across those years now all might disappear in the wind. The end of high school is a brisk winter breeze, both invigorating and stifling, a cold wind telling us to keep those we've come to love close at hand.


Ugh, now I'm never going to be able to think of this show without this running through my brain. Thanks a lot, Nick. Very Happy
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Tuor_of_Gondolin



Joined: 20 Apr 2009
Posts: 3524
Location: Bellevue, WA
PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2017 4:43 pm Reply with quote
BodaciousSpacePirate wrote:
Quote:
The far edge of high school is an inherently fraught time in anyone's life. While there's anticipation for the adventures to come, there's also great melancholy at the thought your whole world is ending. Yes, high school was a burden, but it was also a kind of home, and the friendships and identities you've kindled across those years now all might disappear in the wind. The end of high school is a brisk winter breeze, both invigorating and stifling, a cold wind telling us to keep those we've come to love close at hand.

Ugh, now I'm never going to be able to think of this show without this running through my brain. Thanks a lot, Nick. Very Happy

Yeah, if I ever need to induce nausea in myself, say because I over-indulged in chocolate, now I just need to reread that, and I'll be all set. Bleh.
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GainaxFanboy



Joined: 05 Jul 2017
Posts: 60
PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2017 4:56 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
Overall, the vibe of this episode is very much in line with titles like Sound! Euphonium! or last year's Tsuki ga Kirei, and I feel confident that viewers who liked those titles will be amenable to this one.



Tsuki Ga Kirei was this year
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harminia



Joined: 24 Aug 2015
Posts: 1987
Location: australia
PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2017 4:57 pm Reply with quote
I read some chapters of the King's Game manga but it sounds like it changed the plot a bit from the novel (assuming the anime is following the novel correctly). The fact they killed off 10 students in one episode makes me wonder if it's being rushed or something.
I liked King's Game Origin a lot but the King's Game manga felt somehow... too trashy? Maybe it's because the art of Origin looked better.

Quote:
a fitting hard rock closing song by American indie band Pile,

It's the opening song, by coldrain. Pile isn't an American indie band, she's the singer/voice actress known for playing Maki in Love Live. (She voices one of the characters in King's Game)
I haven't watched the episode yet but looking at the end credits of ep 1 they just put the opening song for the credits.
Also, looking coldrain up, they're from Nagoya.

Kougeru wrote:
spoiler[ The next episode will trigger people. One of the next orders is for Hondo to "hook up" with another dude, right after she confessed and kissed Main Character. She'll either do that, and be disloyal to him, or she'll remain loyal and die. Either way will trigger people.]


That bit in the manga cracked me up. spoiler[Have sex with my girlfriend! Do it! Do it now! have sex with her! F*** my girlfriend, god dammit!]
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zrnzle500



Joined: 04 Oct 2014
Posts: 3767
PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2017 5:02 pm Reply with quote
@Kougeru While I enjoyed Tsuki ga Kirei and Just Because much more than Jacob, I don’t think it is okay to put down his taste because of it. Those shows did not speak to his experiences in the way that something like Scum’s Wish did, and given the sort of romance Tsuki ga Kirei and Just Because display is fairly common in media, it is easy to see why he might find those shows uninteresting and tiresome, even if he perhaps underestimates the demand for such shows (IIRC Tsuki ga Kirei did respectably in sales, to say the least). While I don’t know how much more of his opinion on both shows I care to hear, I don’t think that justifies insulting his taste.

Last edited by zrnzle500 on Thu Oct 05, 2017 5:22 pm; edited 1 time in total
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ChibiKangaroo



Joined: 01 Feb 2010
Posts: 2941
PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2017 5:20 pm Reply with quote
Blood- wrote:
@ ChibiKangeroo - correct me if I'm wrong, but I suspect the only reason you found the Summer season "surprisingly strong" was because of the undeniably awesome Made in Abyss, right? Did anything else strike your fancy? I don't expect to encounter a show as good as Made in Abyss this season either, but that doesn't mean I also think it will be "meh" as usual. Besides the Ancient Magus' Bride, there's the second season of March Comes in Like a Lion, the second season of Blood Blockade Battlefront, the second season of Himouto!, the second season of Yuki Yuna is a Hero, Recovery of an MMO Addict, the reboot of Kino's Journey and a number of others which, based on their summaries, may be in my wheelhouse but I won't know until I see the execution. In other words, it's a promising season for somebody who doesn't have a perpetually sour outlook on 99.9% of what anime offers these days.


Huffff...

How dare you sir! My sour outlook only applies to 95.5%! I challenge you to a duel for the rose bride.
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leafy sea dragon



Joined: 27 Oct 2009
Posts: 7163
Location: Another Kingdom
PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2017 5:31 pm Reply with quote
From one of the King's Game reviews:

Quote:
Tragedy obviously isn't an automatic negative, but showing an audience a puppy and then shooting the puppy isn't effective drama—it's cheap, ineffective, and frankly cruel to the audience.


Hirohiko Araki does this all the time in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and he gets away just fine with it. It's practically a recurring joke by now as it happens once every part.

I understood what was meant though. It happens in JoJo to highlight how cruel and heartless the villain is that they'd kill a dog for seemingly no reason except to tick the heroes off. I'm guessing the analogy here is that it's bad writing to bring in someone likable and kill them off without advancing the plot or providing characterization.
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter



Joined: 07 Mar 2009
Posts: 23665
PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2017 5:46 pm Reply with quote
@ ChibiKangeroo - I gallantly accept your duel challenge! I don't know about you, but when settling matters of supreme honour, I prefer to engage in a life-or-death pie eating contest. Cruel? Perhaps. But that's just how I roll.

King's Game is pretty bad and what's more, it would have been so easy to make it actually fairly compelling. First, ditch the idea that the MC has been involved in a KG before and therefore knows what's coming. Second, spend some time introducing characters and make them likable so that there's actually some stakes. And don't wipe out a third of the class by the end of the first episode. Introduce the game and everybody takes it as a joke. However, one of the punishments actually happens (in a non-supernatural way). So the class wonders, is it a coincidence or something else? Structured like that, this could have been kind of interesting instead of this pointless mess.
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kinghumanity



Joined: 03 Nov 2014
Posts: 365
PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2017 8:25 pm Reply with quote
King's Game is trash. Complete trash. It's trying hard to be edgier than Big Order so to make people unable to look away. Save yourself the time, don't watch it. spoiler[The MC pressures his buddy to rape his girlfriend]
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Gina Szanboti



Joined: 03 Aug 2008
Posts: 11306
PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2017 10:28 pm Reply with quote
Rebecca re Just Because! wrote:
He spends most of the episode texting back and forth with a friend from his previous high school, which is a bit of an irony since he tells us that he and Haruto fell out of contact fairly soon after he moved the first time, despite the fact that he still has Haruto's number in his phone too

Having a number and using it are different. My father died years ago but I still have him on speed dial. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I assume if Eita got a new phone he would just port over his whole address book.

Rebecca wrote:
The show is purported to have five main characters, whom I assume to be Haruto, Eita, Mio, Natsume, and Komiya. There are, however, about ten named characters introduced, all of whom interact with each other enough to make it a little confusing which ones we're supposed to care about.

I thought the MCs were pretty easy to pick out. I knew Natsume (who btw is Mio) would be Eita's love interest the moment she first looked wistfully out the window. Komiya though...yeah, I'd be shoving her damn camera up her nose. Freakin' little paparazzi in the making...

People keep comparing this to Tsukigakirei and I see why, but the latter was iffy from the start and I dropped it after 3 episodes because I couldn't stand the characters not talking to each other. This left me with an entirely different feeling. I think it may relax me the way Konohana Kitan seems to be doing for other folks.

Theron re King's Game wrote:
Though it's probably irrelevant to the story, I would definitely be interested to know how the authorities respond to this. Nine classmates hanging themselves and a tenth exsanguinating would look hugely suspicious, after all.

That was pretty much all I could think about during all that, along with its potential to have wiped out nearly the entire class in one night.

I agree with Blood-'s take on how it could have been done a lot better. There's a distinct lack of suspense in this so far. I was expecting one order a day or something, not over half a dozen. At best, this is on the short list for the axe.
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Hiroki not Takuya



Joined: 17 Apr 2012
Posts: 2501
PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2017 10:49 pm Reply with quote
BodaciousSpacePirate wrote:
Ugh, now I'm never going to be able to think of this show without this running through my brain...
Well thank you for the link, I never heard this before and I love it! (Pachelbel really is everywhere...) Also love how reviewers can have such divergent reviews, must not use the same critical criteria...
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leafy sea dragon



Joined: 27 Oct 2009
Posts: 7163
Location: Another Kingdom
PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2017 10:59 pm Reply with quote
Hiroki not Takuya wrote:
Well thank you for the link, I never heard this before and I love it! (Pachelbel really is everywhere...) Also love how reviewers can have such divergent reviews, must not use the same critical criteria...


Simply put, when you make something, it'll appeal to some people and not to others. Different tastes. My father loved the Filet-O-Fish, for instance, and would get one ever time he would go to McDonald's. Plenty of other people hate the Filet-O-Fish, however.
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meiam



Joined: 23 Jun 2013
Posts: 3442
PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2017 11:05 pm Reply with quote
Hell yeah! Just because was some damn good directorial muscle flexing right there. It flow really well despite constantly jumping around all the time and tell a nice coherent story. I though it was really obvious who the MC were, each with there own little clic that are all interconnected and you get a good sense of who they are. I am very impress.

Personally my high school was unimpressive, I think I made the most out of my time there and don't regret anything but I'm glad it's done (having disposable income is just too damn awesome). So I neither revere that time nor do I fear it, which gel well with the atmosphere of the show.
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