Sirius the Jaegar opens up with a sublimation, a parallel, a contrast that foregrounds its premise perfectly: a blood red moon looms over, if not cascades, over a ongoing western modernization of Japan; the hollow orange vapors shining brightly with the rich yellows over skylines and towers, motors and power lines, the busy city streets are concerned with nothing but everything, but the immediate contrast with the posh parties of the decadent royal upper class are front and clear. The eventual unraveling of the fantastical Jaegars and the upper class being controlled and subsumed by vampires doesn’t quite surprise, as is the eventual bloodbath that follows, but only nurtures the point further: the world is volatile and ever-changing, the perfect kind of premise for the action-cum-fantasy thriller that is Sirius the Jaegar.
Sirius the Jaegar is Masahiro Ando’s 5th project, considered a return to form to his bombastic actioners like Sword of the Stranger and CANAAN, but also his bread and butter where he cut his teeth on seminal action projects like the 1993 Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure OVA, the crazed Shinbo led 90s Polymar OVA, the action orientated Mitsuru Hongo Shin-chan movies, and the vigorous realist projects of Ghost in the Shell, Cowboy Bebop, and Medarot, to name a few. He had always been notoriously known for his rigorous physicality and momentum he brought to his many action/effects cuts, a sensibility that he equally had brought onto his directorial projects and episodic work, even as he dipped his toes into slice of life dramas, sports shows, comedies, in addition to the actioners that he was accustomed to. This correspondingly gave him a flexibility and leanness to his own projects, given the time and experience he had sought on all sorts of projects and Sirius the Jaegar’s rather lean and concise premise supports this strength further, taking place in a fantastical but grounded version of the 1930s, where a pack of vampire hunters find themselves at the heads of vampires that have made their pact and home in Japan; Yuliy, the more prolific and powerful of the group has a long history with said vampires, and stops at nothing to find a truth about his connection with them, all while putting their reign to an end.
Sticking to this abbreviation is Ando’s point and métier, and along with series composition Keigo Koyanagi, wastes no time getting into any broader particulars of its world and mechanics and discrepancies, something many detractors, perhaps understandably so, were either irked by or sullenly dulled by; many common criticisms were placing the onus on its action cliches, narrative, conventions; simply put, derivative as derivative gets, coated with the sheen of a well rounded and considered production that does nothing to surprise more than it lets on. It’s easy to see where Sirius the Jaegar’s only propulsion is its action and fantasy trappings, exploring common ideas of redemption, revenge, and purpose-does little to distinguish itself from any other run of the mill action show at the time, much less an industry littered with them, from mecha war action dramas, to ultra violent fantasy and sci-fi OVAs, to the ubiquitous ‘battle shounen’ that now litter the industry more than it did then.
Yet I believe it has been a rather massive disservice to consider Ando’s concision and leanness to be shallow or derivative, as this take refused to consider the more granular detailing in Ando’s focus, but also the sensibility and vision of its overall production, as Sirius the Jaegar’s focus is more on the sheer momentum, impact, and drive of its moment to moment basis and structure that places its cast at its forefront in which physical and psychological conflicts come to bay. The fantastical action thriller premise thus becomes a canvas for Ando’s idea of action itself, one of which that doesn’t exist on its own, but a curiosity and belief that action is a volatile and momentous force that manifests itself in all aspects of life, a kinetic force where visceral choreography and dimension becomes precise and evocative within animation’s inherent philosophy of movement. With this intention, Ando makes the most of its us-vs-them premise by pinning down the psychological dimensions and geographies of its 1930s Taisho-era modernization, one of which seemed to be lost on viewers of its obvious lingering on the shadowing displacement and distortion and exploitation that comes along with the whiffs of imperialism and modernism, a world where even fantastical hunters and vampires are subsumed by the broader implications of its political and social machinations, something the action foregrounds within the focus on Yuliy, whose connections in between the two become the emotionalism and core of the show’s push and pull momentum of revenge and redemption, where Yuliy’s underlying emotions and complicated past shape the action as much as rigorous, realist orientated animation of the action drive the gravity and impact of much of its reality. If nothing else, Ando was mindful of maintaining a certain cohesion and unity, Sirius the Jaegar’s dramatic precept centers around a traumatic flashback that connects and implicates all its ensemble of characters motivations and actions, never curtailing to much background details or excursions that might deviate from this core; much of the action and shifting momentum of its structure does much to characterize the conflicts and personalities of the cast themselves, providing an immediacy that action can allow within this tension. In contrast to the bolstered and bloated spectacle of many action shows now, where spectacle is just a show of force where only grand and bombastic gestures, one of which stupendous grandiose heavy layered effects and action cuts that seem to lose any kind of specificity and lucidity within its own audio and visual overload is favored, empowering practically borderline nihilist and miserabilist stereotypical tales of power and strength within numerous excessively bloated long form ‘battle shounen’ narratives – Sirius the Jaegar then becomes quite restrained and practically humanist in comparison, where a precise focus on Yuliy’s own inner turmoil within the meticulousness and primeval depiction of violence and revenge is tinged with real sentiment and emotion.
Much of then what makes Sirius the Jaegar, and Ando’s projects in particular, so distinguished is capturing this concision of propulsion that action anime usually don’t ever capture, but action movies understand: a vigorous momentum and expressionism where action and reaction are the only judge and executioner, and it’s within this space where Ando meters out the outsized and the maximalist of its setting’s geography, where blood red foreboding skies, shimmering and bright dungeons and coliseums, displaced and rundown warehouses and alleyways shimmering with light, the darkened sky of the snowy mountains littered faintly with snowfall, the low angled distorted shot of trees, sharp and narrow, swarming in and around, the ever lingering of muted darkness that seems to pervade within its general compositing. Equally so is Ando and his talented rotation of action specialists and directors, from Ando himself to Masayuki Kojima, Tensai Okamura, and even Yasuhiro Irie, all of which seem to understand the precepts of action doesn’t only denote itself to just action sequences, but the build up of anticipation, the importance of structure and pacing, and the power of suggestion and stylization in-between the moment to moment narrative in-between all of battle sequences, which is where the thriller sensibility comes into play-the show is shadowed and littered with probing close ups, mirrors and reflections, low and high angled distortions, abrupt cuts and inserts of shifting dynamics, as if the world is ever so shifting at the whims on the precipice of something, which is thus barraged, if not enforced by its clarity and legibility in the action itself, where wide angled compositions and fixed cameras become front and center in which it propels the vigorous, shifting momentum and gravity of sheer weight and looseness of its action cuts and layouts, giving precision and catharsis to each impact, rhythm, dimension, and frame of movement, whipping up to shape within PA works animation philosophy of balanced and elegancy, where Ando and underrated action specialist Masahiro Sato makes the most of PA works regulars with a focus on the visceral and vivid instead, combining the two jarring philosophies into something greater. All within this schema thus feels like the last rites of pure action animation at its finest, one of which where perspective and choreography and geography mattered within the foundations of solid fundamentals of layouts, key animation, and even inbetweening; only makes even just the most solid set pieces of Sirius the Jaegar all the more impressive in its lucidity and physicality, balanced fixed pans and cuts, multiplane layers that denote geography between subjects, speed and timing that keep up with the momentum of its movement without melting – only serves to make Sirius the Jaegar’s worldview of the power dynamics and perspective of blood, guts, and revenge seem authentic and sincere.
All of this suggests a show with a worldview and vision that’s far more interesting and bolder than it ever suggests, where Ando understands that action anime must be propelled by something, if not an invisible and emboldened visceral force of weight, something that can take on meaning beyond just mere narrative compunctions, but aesthetic and textures that can suggest more than it merely shows, a force of movement where the world and its characters can shift on the weight of their own actions, in the words of Masahiro Ando himself, on the commentary of Sword of the Stranger, “[S]o I concentrated on key points of the action, showing a kind of animated reality that highlighted what animation can do.”
The romantic comedy is a common precept in animation – the exaggerations, embarrassments, and self-indulgences fit the registers of animation’s intensity, slapstick, and deformation quite well – as it’s within these parameters that allows animators and directors to freely display the crudest and baring emotions possible, and it’s quite easy to see why from classical realist Western animation to the highbrow experimentation of Estonian and Russian animation to the stylization and heightened realities of Japanese animation, creators have had no short notice putting the issues of love into form and premise. For this reason, the lowbrow pop culture that characterizes much of TV anime is inundated with a lot of romantic comedies; much of its popular hits had much to do with the genre itself: Touch, Kimagure Orange Road, Yawara, Kodocha, Clannad, Kaguya-sama, Oregairu, and of course the defact baron of the genre, Rumiko Takahashi comedies: Urusei Yatsura, Maison Ikkoku, and Ranma 1/2. The fact that the genre had still survived to this day points to the malleability of such premises that also allow creators more leeway and ingenuity, as most, if not all of these works are filled with sheer talent and creativity, and continues to do so, as it’s still one of the few varied genres that can still connect to a popular audience.
Gamers!, an seemingly unassuming romantic comedy that aired in 2017, joins the overcrowded gamut of romantic comedies in the face of anime’s then and current overproduction woes, and despite its ostensible popularity of its time; it had completely vanished from any real culture and critical consciousness, falling into the rest of the void of interchangeable drab genre work that had aired that year. Yet in-between all the genuinely great and notable productions that aired that year, Gamers is the one of the most pleasurable and fascinating projects, comedy or otherwise, that I’ve had revisited time and time again since it aired in 2017, as it offered more than it suggested, and its failure to hold any respect or tangibility in anyone’s eyes is at both expected and disappointing.
In the case of Gamers!, an adaptation of a light novel series by Sekina Aoi, perhaps best known for the relaxed, palavering otaku club comedy Seitokai no Ichizon, a harem comedy that places its dynamic and connections with its tether to subcultures, and how that followed and affected their mundane day to day lives. In contrast, Gamers! follows a more traditional conceit; a pair of lovestruck teenagers who constantly misunderstand and one up each other, as they crosscut through life and circumstance through their shared passion for video games, the one subculture that continually provides comedic respite and suffering. With attention to Manabu Okamoto, an up-and-coming director with a penchant for a sort of peering and heightened naturalism, and the young turks at PINE JAM, devoted loose and frenetic character animators, all come to form together a far more eccentric and offbeat take on the love triangle romantic comedy, focusing more on the pratfalls and eccentricities of its main characters as they navigate the idea of love and connections.
Whereas the novel focuses more on the particularities, nuances, and awkwardness of keeping up social mannerisms, standards, and facades. Okamoto takes those principles and winds them up into more of a gag and slapstick farce that pokes fun at the cast’s insecurities and blunders in the face of the romantic comedy premise’s of misunderstandings, obsession, and puppy love, one of which that Okamoto seems to actually understand as an something of a sort of comedy of manners, but instead of the crusty upper class (excepting one character), is more focused on the trivialities and circumstances of upper middle class teenage kids instead who are too much fixated with their perceived perceptions of themselves, other people, and their own ideals – all of which melt under their own vulnerabilities, showcasing not only the sheer absurdity of its love triangle farce, but their own motivations, desires, and character.
In effect, Okamoto and the PINE JAM crew, fitted out with an interesting roundabout crew of comedy expats and character acting aficionados, Ryouki Kamitsubo, Tamaki Nakatsu, Kazuomi Koga, and Katsumi Terahigashi among the episode director rotation, and a quick look at the revolving KA list reveals some greats, some of which credited and uncredited: Yu Yoshiyama, China, Kazunori Ozawa, Satoshi Furuhashi, Kazuaki Shimada, and even Kanna “Kappe” Hirayama. Yet for all the names this makes up cannot ignore the petulant reality that the production suffered greatly in PINE JAM’s growing pains and the fallout of the ambition of Just Because’s production, became a knowing gauntlet for the team that was as obvious as the show itself, a rather gaudy and messy show that looks every bit as flattened, discordant, and ill considered in its design work, layouts, storyboarding, and KA that its production could not afford to harness greatly within its constraints. It’s why within these parameters that one can see why Gamers! simply could not hold a lasting impression at the surface, as it suggested it was every bit as shoddy and undistinguished as it looked, but yet it’s this ungainliness that attracts a certain charge for its equally awkward and vain dynamics of teenage romantic love.
If Gamers! could not make up its production with pomp and circumstance, it had to make up for it with ingenuity and spontaneity, as Gamers! natural register is one that feels like it’s charged to blow up its misunderstands and show its vanities, hypocrisies, and pretentions with comedic fervor, with Keita, Karen, Chiaki, Aguri, and Tasuku reaching their limits and blowing up with outsized and outstretched expressions and antics, a far more looser and rawer deformation and character acting forming a basis of the specificity of sheer anxiety, anger, bafflement, and happiness, even as the character art and inbetweening almost seemingly starts to melt within the pressures of its production, equally surprising is the unusually inspired performances of Megumi Han, Hisako Kanemoto, Rumi Okubo, Manaka Iwami, and Toshiyuki Toyonaga, all of which play up their exasperation, clogged up stuttering and pauses, haggard and intense exultations in their inflections, all don’t suggest some kind of realism of teenagers, but perhaps the inner reality and emotions of teenagers in flux with their giddiness and pettiness. It all becomes one or the other, and it’s also within Okamoto and the rotation’s equally heightened and rather intense approach to its comedy, focusing on lingering and pauses, sharp hard cutting that places their misunderstandings with immediacy, profile shots that allow the looser take on the model sheets to flourish with expressive short hands, split screens, ornate on screen elements, reframings, and super impositions that all but show their outsized thoughts and emotions blaring out within and at each other. Gamers!’ best episode, episode 6, succinctly understands the appeal of its premise: the boiling point of their respective misunderstandings get blown up to macro and micro levels of exaggerations and split screens, and rash reactions of bafflement and anger and surprise, all come to an anti-climax of embarrassments and realizations, as it all blurs within focus on our esteemed motley crew of idiots.
Nonetheless, even as the show stumbles with its sort of cascading repetition of its own conceit, especially as the show starts to involve more characters that it could equally balance within its timeframe, and its production buffering out near the end; the show never forgets the pleasures of its general conceit, and its sheer sense of daredevil energy and ingenuity still shines greatly and cohesively within its romantic comedy premises. It’s the sort of show that feels more like an actual modern reimagining of 80s Rumiko Takahashi romantic comedies than it suggests, its sense of surprise, incongruity, and intensity matches those sensibilities better than any real reboot or throwback ever could. Okamoto’s Gamers then follows a similar understanding to its endpoint just like Takahashi’s comedies suggests, one of which where all its curious exaggerations, pratfalls, misunderstandings, deformation, all become a way for the characters to connect with each other and the wider world before them, even as they drive each other crazy all the same.
To live. To die. To love. To hate. To forget. To remember. – All precepts that follow Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End narrative, thematic, and emotional ends, as Yamada Kanehito and Abe Tsukasa’s manga frames this fantasy as a world that has been marked by the sheer passage of time, of progress and disrepair and change and stagnation, even as tales of heroics, burgeoning of fantastical magic, and realization of mythological beings come into play – all come down to the passage of time eventually. This remains the core of the titular character, Frieren, a near immortal mage elf, being shown in her perspective of what the constant march of time makes her re-evaluate her own personal ideas regarding herself and the people and world around her but broader implications of the beauty of perspective, ideals, and memories that touch upon every facet of one’s life.
It’s thus within this center that Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End’s adaptation burrows into, as in contrast to the rather stolid and stoic and roughhewn paneling and art of the manga that narrows an erratic view of time and thus the listless of a mundane ennui that is often beset by visions of wonder and beauty, the adaptation instead opts for beauty, exaggeration, and concision. And so much of it is hinged on beauty, with its art direction being so bold and lush, bolstered by its attention to nuance brushwork, traditional three point perspective that offers vantages and volume and a sense of existence and a palavering of details, of particularities of architecture, fauna, and seasons, as much as it does in symbology, customs, and societies as it dutifully tries to embellish and involve an entire world within its own background. If it’s not the ornate art direction, then what of its animation? Frieren’s default mode is one of realist orientated, that of which is concerned with a sensibility of authenticity and specificity, an evocation of life and character is seen by laborious moments of weighty, heavily volumetric character acting that underscores every gesture, mannerism, and embodiment of what makes one’s character, so that even in its visions of bombastic spectacle, a sense of scale and space is grounded with sheer attention to weight, presence, and specificity. Even its music is so heavily ordained with beauty and the ornate, as Evan Call’s boisterous composing of its symphonies, hyms, choirs, and orchestras often highlight and compels the fantastical and sentimental lurking beyond and within the frame. Perhaps much less can be said of its own attention to direction/storyboarding, opting for not only a sense of restraint, but a naturalistic bent that prioritizes long distances, preening close ups, and stillness that articulates emotion through accumulation of particularities of space, association, and character that wants to show nuance of the beauty of its own world and its effects, but the careful emotions of the people who embody it as well – a slow pan, a fixed zoom in, a master shot, a track back, and a wide angle can suggest more on their own than one thinks.
One cannot deny Frieren’s greatness in maintaining a great production, if not a sturdy structure to define itself as, as this formula and equation does infact make do with its focus on tangibility, perspective, and beauty of the world around them – yet it only remains as such sturdy, and its ever knowing insistence on beauty can rob it of its own nuances that it wants so desperately to achieve. It might affirm its own thematic and narrative ends, but it can feel like an aesthetic and emotional dead end, as so much of it hinges on this default mode, feeling rather lethargic as it methodically shows images of beauty, beauty, and more beauty, as if a walloping sense of repetition starts to proceed itself, its ornate art direction feeing frozen in ember and inert, more like a stolid post card than a living and breathing environment, its excess of details irons out any gaps of ambiguities, life, and spaces a more impressionistic take might fill on its own, only the ever present symphony of Evan Call’s music triumphantly overwhelms and underwhelms. Even the laboriousness of both its character and effects animation and careful, naturalistic direction can feel often too assiduous and strained in trying to give weight to almost every single moment, and too dry to give any other moments different dimensions and perspectives, the result is ever so elaborated, and increasingly tiresome, as much as its often-sullen sentimentality goes off into tangents of didactic truisms and received wisdom within its often pulverizing use of flashbacks as its raison d’etre (Somewhat telling of reports that the team was forced to never touch the dialogue). To say nothing of its own actual flimsy narrative structure, an episodic structure that has to distill multiple episodes worth of moments, ideas, and conflicts into single episodes – never quite allowing them the time to breathe and coalesce into something greater, nor concise enough to provide the perspective it needs to define its characters within those parameters.
Yet all of this doesn’t suggest failure, but rather a frustrating compromise between two different sensibilities with Kanehito and Tsukasa’s ascetic and stoic take with Keiichiro Saito’s expressionism and fastidiousness, and the grueling adaptation of trying to adhere to a popular manga’s faithfulness of particularities, nuances, and differences of medium. One cannot deny the visions of such intricacies in the way it details its fantastical world with genuine grounding, with actual attention to surfaces, geometries and dimensions, as well as the awe of an single intimate sway or gesture or just sheer movement that speaks within those moments of vulnerable sentimentality, awe inspiring spectacle, and deliberation. If it does not aspire to perspicacity of worldly ideas, it aspires to perspicacity of the inherent pull of animation itself, the way movement and exaggeration and concision can express ideas and emotions so clearly and more evocatively and emphatically, as it brings the pull of genuine fantasy with fierce whimsy, imagination, and delicacy within those terms of conceptual and aesthetic matters, all of which is highly pleasurable and entertaining.
It’s within these terms that I wonder if it would be rude to assume Keiichiro Saito to have a childlike view of art and the world, that although one cannot deny his hard work and talents as a leader and artist willing to push boundaries and penchant for being heavily involved in almost all areas of production, his actual worldview seems to be one of clashes and contradictions, if not ruptures of beauty itself, almost as if they’re trying to find its identity. And issues of finding one’s identity seems to run amok across all his work so far, from Bocchi the Rock’s expression of the messiness of youth and growth characterized by outbursts, subjectivity, and stylization, to his Sonny Boy episode “Laughing Dog” that shows the transformation of a man, his connections to a god that is willing to change the world on her whims in a literal kaleidoscope world and how that spirals out of control figuratively and literally, to his Boogiepop episodes, preening with close ups, flashes of warped background animation, saturation of light and darkness, and distortion of frames, all primed with ideas of transformation, intangibility, and incoherency of the human heart, to now his third directorial project, Frieren, all about the ruptures and exaltations of memories, how they are perceived subjectively, and how people want them to be perceived to make any sense of their life and identity. For this reason, Saito remains a enigmatic modern talent, as this approach can be frustrating as it is invigorating, and ultimately this is why Frieren cannot be solely disregarded – Frieren taken as a whole is frustrating to taken cohesively, but taken individually, it springs beautifully, that perhaps it suggests that it can be greater than the sum of its parts, pondering and taking in as much as living them.
But yet, even then, if Frieren never aspires to be impressions of real poetics, nuances, and revelations, then Frieren aspires beautifully, to expressions of sheer style, emotion, and sentimentality. Perhaps then one sees that Frieren aims to please, to be so imminently broad, only ever aiming to be a good time and be so universal in its approach, its only remote displays of prestigious decency says as much, and also nothing at all. Would it ever try to be anything else? Which thus brings us to that question, will people remember Frieren as it was? Or will they just remember the good parts? Who knows. It’s hard enough to remember.
What is animation without its birthright of comedy? This medium has always amounted to provocative images of goofy gags, exaggerated slapstick, cartoonish deformation, one note caricatures, and sheer raunchy juvenilia amidst its pop and stopping violence, crude talking animals, and defiance of reality and physics. Yet it’s within these parameters that much of its greatest artists played around in; as comedy in animation had always been a place to learn more freely about construction, technique, structure, pacing, and sheer experimentation. Perhaps it’s because comedy and animation are inherently both mutable, animation being ever-changing based on structure, material, and texture, and comedy being like so with its loose focus on different kinds of manners, conventions, impressions and expressions, and improvisations. Much of the great works of art in animation have always been mindful of this, from the surrealist nature of Emile Cohl to rhythm and jazziness of Fleischer to the anarchic blunder of Tex Avery to the gentility and specificity of Sharpsteen, Disney, Jones, and the like to the scuzziness and boldness of Pritt Parn to the shifting playful forms of Norman McLaren – all of which play into some idea of comedy, as genre and tone, but also texture and form.
What of Japanese animation then? Since its growth and inception as TV animation, comedy has always been its greatest mainstays, one of which has arguably been where much of its great history and trends and innovations have come from. If one were to put down a short, if not paltry summation, comedy in Japanese animation was distinguished by variety of stylistic trends: in the 60s was born of the kind of free for all, hyper stylized gag and slapstick comedies, bold in its weaponization of limited animation of intensely exaggerated antics, acting, effects, and layouts, emphatic and loose storyboarding and direction, and a loose approach to structure that characterized the best of this era: Goku no Daibouken, Obake no Q-taro, Osomatsu-kun, and Fight da!! Pyuta, to name a few. Then in the 70s came the likes of relatively more tame, grounded, perhaps ultimately situational comedies of the likes of Lupin the III: Part II, Gutsy Frog, Hajime Ningen Gyatoruz, and Ganso Tensai Bakabon – although one can argue that a great amount of these comedies have their share of absurdist and surrealist elements to them, pushing boundaries as far as they can; their shared elements tend to be a tempered grounding to form and structure: the A-Pro and Yasuo Otsuka school meant that much distortion and exaggeration was meant to properly characterize and humanize much of the characters on the screen with a specificity of acting; the Bakabon family to the Lupin gang to Hiroshi and Pyon-kichi, all have certain quirks, antics, and mannerisms to them that are at once authentic and exhaustive, showing how much these comedies were as much a stark rejoinder and evolution of much of the earlier hyper-stylized expressionistic comedies of the 60s. Along with a specificity of acting also came a specificity in episodic structure, where a focus on the characters often mundane and routine existence became a foundation for exploration of character dynamics and situational comedy as the forefront. By the time the 80s hit, the Kanada school was running rampant with their irreverent take and evolution on character acting and effects, becoming more and more hyper exaggerated, sharper, snappier, looser, and intuitive. The usual rules of perspective, movement, and spacing were thrown in stark relief and given an intense, revivifying sensibility that tracked down the basest impulses of human emotion so exactingly, so precisely. What this meant for comedies at the time was at once a return to the gag and slapstick stylistics of earlier comedies like Goku no Daibouken and a paradoxical evolution of the more grounded, mundane comedies like Ganso Tensai Bakabon; the most major comedy of the 80s, Urusei Yatsura, shared all of its stylized absurdities and exaggerations of gag and slapstick in a chaotic romantic comedy blender with a gigantic ensemble cast, as well as characterizing and becoming a zeitgeist for much of its 80s cultural and societal and aesthetic period, its life and times, its environment and world. If it wasn’t the 80s Rumiko Takahashi comedies, then comedies like Sasuga no Sarutobi, City Hunter, Sakigake!! Otokojuku, High School! Kimengumi, all still followed suit; comedies that exaggerated and heightened much of their surrounding realities of the 80s, showing the sheer chaos and freedom and danger of its time, as much as animators, directors, and scriptwriters enlivened their productions with chutzpah, free reign, and chaos with the flybys of structure and form. Finally as the 90s rolled around with the lingering of the post-Akira realist movement’s influence mulling about, comedy anime had largely returned to a far more gag and slapstick centric mode, even reveling in more hyper stylized, “manga-eiga” esque comedy, one that has strands of Kanada school, Otsuka School, and Mushi Pro school of the past 3 decades, and then some, with its return to gag and slapstick stylistics as a whole. That meant that character acting and effects became the grounds for effective shorthand expressions and mannerisms, exaggerated to the hilt, with a greater focus on storyboarding and layouts and animation direction being a way for would-be directors to try their chops at pacing and construction, as tempo and speed and hyper exaggeration had become the binding synergy and register for a lot of comedies during the 90s. Most notably, shows like Goldfish Warning, Sailor Moon, Kodocha, Akazukin Chacha, and Crayon Shin-chan became ground zero for one of the most talented, and often eccentric directors and animators in the business such as Tsutomu Mizushima, Keiichi Hara, Ikuko Ito, Hiroaki Sakurai, Masaaki Yuasa, Shizuka Hayashi, Yuichiro Sueyoshi, Yoshiji Kigami, Kunihiko Ikuhara, Akitaro Daichi, just to name a few. Finally, once again, however much I’ve tried to denote a possible short history of comedy anime, much is lost within the ether; Doraemon, Sazae-san, Minky Momo, Chibi Maruko-chan, Mashin Wataru, Gosenzo-sama, much of the Shin Ei and Gallop slate, dozens of OVAs and independent animation, the list goes on. If that’s not it, then my equally paltry knowledge and understanding of the societal, cultural, and political nature of these eras are also lost, along with a broader understanding and exclusion of mentions of talks of Japanese Manzai, Owarai, Rakugo, and Kyogen…these exclusions are on me, as if nothing else, this short history is hopefully of interest on more formalist, artistic driven terms, as much as time, patience, and knowledge allows.
The question then remains, albeit in a different context, where has comedy in Japanese animation gone since then? Even though the answer is far too broad and fugitive to breach a clear history as it is now, if we were to firmly put ourselves in the 2000s, the slow ease and shift into the late night had expanded its repertoire and material, as comedies had started shifting their focus and priorities into playing around with ideas of variety, energy, incongruity, and sheer experimentation in and around structure and form. One possible strand that may be linked is the rise of the Galaxy Angel franchise, an offshoot gag spinoff of a series of romantic, dramatic eroge space operas. The knowing history of its inception was due to a large gap between the realization and commitment of a scale of adapting a dramatic space opera, especially due to its short length episodes, so in which the adaptation initially became a way for the anime to be a supplement; to instead have a bunch of one off stories for each of its main characters, albeit in a fairly lighter tone, which thus transformed unknowingly to a far more bizarre, absurdist, and anarchic gag comedy. One of its greater admirers, Yuichiro Oguro of Anime Style fame, had claimed it to be one of the more daring and fresher of the new gag styled comedies that had come from the crop. In his own words, in a 2004 Anime Style blog post, “There’s never been a gag anime like this one before […] it has a charmingly irresponsible attitude about itself.” Irresponsible is a key word here, as Galaxy Angel’s structure was slowly but surely then given the laissez faire system where anything and everything goes. In this manner, Goku no Daibouken’s satirical and loose streaks and Urusei Yatsura’s ease of madness and gags comes to mind, but as Oguro put it, no matter how surreal and absurdist those shows came to be; it is at once developed and contained and concluded within its format, a return to normalcy is all but awaits at the end of each episode so it may continue its façade the next week. Galaxy Angel’s mischievous irresponsibility then becomes its sole drive, as although it has certain rules regarding its focus on devices like “Lost Technology” and a reoccurring bedrock cast of sweethearts, egotists, stoics, and maniacs, its structure remains that no episode remains the same, and that no episode is expected to lead up to anything else. No matter how much they get maimed, have their lives changed, or set up some insane plan, or knowingly plunge the world into darkness, the only thing that remains is what remains at those ends. At these ends, its structure allowed the best and brightest of the then Madhouse based rotation free reign to delve into all sorts of ideas, as much as it allowed, giving rise to an unpredictably in structure and form, even as its certain default mode is outsized cartoony hijinks and acting, its pleasantly all over the place, with a certain incongruence in its heightened approach to character acting and direction still means that each staff handling an episode gives off a certain unique texture and mode; Araki’s sense of radical construction and tempo is different from Hara’s mode over maximalism from Asaka’s pleasant comedy of manners.
If then Galaxy Angel showed the possibilities and pleasures of certain varieties and experimentation of structure within the comedy format, then one would be remiss not to talk about the hectoring, primal yells, and disobedience of what both FLCL and Sayonara, Zetsubou Sensei stand for in the 2000s for comedies. Although one is a broad surrealist dramedy and the other a dismal, dark gag comedy, both share a proclivity to not only stand against the grain, but to enact that sort of free and loose experimentation for certain thematic and plastic results within those registers. FLCL has to register its comedic beats within Tsurumaki’s own worldview and making, one of an uneasy coming of age adolescence that can never pinned down or condescended to, so the outsized and often expressionistic stylistic register confer to those ideas, so that even filmed manga panels, realist expressionism, distorted and ugly close ups, incongruent and loose CG, flaked out and bombastic cartoony acting, and a lingering sense of stillness and punctuation become frameworks for something more as Naota tries to find something of worth within himself. But if FLCL was all but a boorish Rorschach test, then it wouldn’t be worth its merit, as it’s the differing and chaotic modes and textures of comedy is what makes it rewarding and pleasurable and unpredictable. It’s by pushing the heights and ceilings of certain A-Pro, Daichi, and Kanada-esque stylistics that it can both register profound and dumb and beautiful, sometimes all at once, a bit, and nothing at all; so that tonal balance, something that often doesn’t matter at all, is on the fritz, as each character, moment, and set piece are never going to be quite who or what they seem to be, allowing comedy to flourish whenever possible to complicate that perspective. Perhaps this is said best by Kazuya Tsurumaki himself, “I’d like you to think of FLCL as imagination being made physical and tangible, just as it is for me when I take whatever is in my head and draw it.”
On the other side of the line, Sayonara, Zetsubou Sensei combines the best of Shinbo and SHAFT school to congregate and collaborate over a Koji Kumeta satirical dark gag comedy about a pessimistic teacher and his equally eccentric students as they talk about life and culture negatively and despondently as they try to navigate the treacherous world around them. Such a premise then thus demanded an equally treacherous and anarchic structure and form to it, and Akiyuki Shinbo, Naoyuki Tatsuwa, and Yukihiro Miyamoto took up to that task, divulging a collaboration that went about as loose and free form as it got. By masking and dressing up Sayonara, Zetsubou Sensei as a loose free-for-all structure of differing capitulations on certain ideas of life and culture and pomp and circumstance, the team adequately understood that a roundabout and madcap form was best suited to its ruminations, the sort that routinely finds itself with ill fitting and frivolous gags, sometimes of differing modes of register and mixed media and sometimes of different genres all in itself, as it could be claymation, cut outs, glitch art, cubism, Picasso expressionism, magical girl parodies, thick block shading western comic books, chalkboard gags, flip books, filtered live action photography, kaiju films, to really just name a few. These all serve some purpose of alluding and making mockery of the kind of overstuffed and exhausted lives we had all lived, never pinpointing, and never settling on the kinds of issues that actually do plague our everyday lives, cause it was either here, there, or somewhere else out on the street deserving of ridicule and shame; this best describes not only its structure and form, but also its equally gigantic ensemble cast filled with eccentric freaks and geeks and self professed straight men who all chip in with their own takes, and have a certain dynamic that plays in and around with the loose structure as they play different roles and focuses. Along with a blink and you’ll miss it mode of speed and its equally parched, sharp and angular look it all that compliments its blanked out madness and puts the detritus and wonder of both popular culture and art history and perhaps just life itself into a real semi coherent worldview. With Tatsuwa’s love of all things art, Miyamoto’s fastidiousness, and Shinbo’s guiding hand, Sayonara, Zetsubou Sensei perhaps captures the indomitable and unobtainable SHAFT school at its best, as Akiyuki Shinbo once put it, “[T]o make a work incorporating all the staff’s feelings.”
The fact that these works could be anything and everything was what made them peerless and alive, but experimentation in form and structure was not just the only modes of thought that made a splash around this time, as it manifested itself in different ways, sometimes of just tones and worldviews and variety. Beyond the reach was the rise of equally anarchic, but fairly understated and classical, Tsutomu Mizushima, whose comedies predicated the idea of comedy not just as an overall tone, but a worldview that best fits the sheer inherent and normalized absurdity of life, where everyone is on the laugh, and everything being played up as a farce makes life what it is. Renjuro Kindaichi’s Hare+Guu puts the onus about a young boy, Hare, who lives in an unspecified, somewhat Nomadic community, finds himself at odds with a trenchant and mysterious girl named Guu, who laterally and literally sends his life into shambles, Mizushima finds a center within this odd couple, so as much as Guu may terrorize Hare’s life, his naturally bizarre and welcoming environment and community is just as equally confounding, Guu just being another building block to the absurdity of his life. The fact that Mizushima’s Shin-Ei lineage gives it a rare humanist edge to it, as though he is often characterized as immaturely gleeful and irresponsible, and of course Hare+Guu is definitely characterized as such, its his focus on certain authencities and manners and specificities for his characters that give Mizushima far more nuance than one thinks, and it’s ultimately what makes his comedies work within those factors. Hare’s own specific neurotic mannerisms is what properly characterizes and humanizes him even as Hare+Guu may divulge into a carnival of gags and non sequiturs, as it never strays from the moment that Hare is the focus. Thus, much of Hare+Guu’s humor is placed within contradictions, perhaps just blown-up contradictions that make up the absurdity of they navigate within their plastic and treacherous world, Mizushima’s hand becomes a way to settle an accumulation of absurdities, reactions, and farces until the lit fuse blows. Moreover, the fast and loose tempos and hyper exaggerations of the Daichi/Gallop school was alive and well in comedies like School Rumble, Animation Runner Kuromi-chan, Di Gi Charat, Juubei-chan, and Onegai my Melody; they themselves using their hyper stylizations and sheer locomotive tempo to bridge greater and stylistic deviations in gags, slapstick, and character acting that could arguably rival the best of Kodocha and Akazukin Chacha in their steady speedy formulation and sheer variety of pure slapstick and gags in the Daichi and Sakurai mode. To say nothing of the breadth of the other kid’s/shounen/kodomo/shoujo comedies of the time, of the likes of Keroro Gunsou’s lengthy extremities of gags, the radical 2000s run of Crayon Shin-chan, the scale and ambition of Ojamajo Doremi’s structure and looser approach to cartoony character acting, the madcap multiplicities of the Jewelpets starting with Sunshine, and of course Gintama’s blend of fire sale gags, skits, and ensembles of ensembles that also played beautifully with drama and action in buck, all equally played around with a sheer variety of tones, gags, form, and incongruities. The fact that this is merely, as always, a paltry examination of the sheer range of so many works within the comedy genre during this time just speaks to the ambitious, scattershot nature of much of these great works in the genre that gave rise to whatever formal and structural experiments that they could best muster; leaving out such greats like Futakoi Alternative, Welcome to the NHK, Cromartie, Minami-ke, Masaaki Yuasa works like Kemonozume and his Shin-chan specials, and Kyoto Animation comedies like Lucky Star and Full Metal Panic! Fumoffu hopefully show that such exclusions show as much as they tell during the time, an embarrassing buffet of treasures.
It shows, and it sure shows, how the comedy genre had radically transformed into something special and one of a kind, especially within the TV space, that perhaps it could never truly slow down. If the early and mid-00s had brought on fairly radical formations, then the late 00s to early 10s brought on the last flames that still lit on before it started going away around the mid-10s and later. The chief titles in my mind, that exposed any kind of innovation, bold or otherwise, would have to be the quadruple decker of Tantei Opera Milky Holmes, Nichijou, Ai Mai Mii, and the anthology comedy Space Dandy. These titles further explored the idea of variety and momentum and experimentation with certain thematic and formal groundings, ones that shake with a worldview or idea or feeling more than they possibly did with past titles. With attention to Tantei Opera Milky Holmes firstly, Milky Holmes toyed around with the irresponsible and loose structure of Galaxy Angel to a far more maximalist degree, albeit with an interestingly burrowed down and specious narrative attached to its ongoings. Set in an absurdist “near future” that is hilariously called the “Great Era of Detectives”, where people born with super natural abilities known as Toys are positioned as well-doers and superheroes to stop all sorts of evil and crime all at once, Milky Holmes puts the focus on a bunch of supposed detective prodigies, Sherlock Shellingford, Nero Yuzurizaki, Hercule Barton, and Cordelia Glauca, as they find themselves lost without their ridiculous superpowered abilities and thus must prove themselves in the face of expulsion. This sort of absurdist premise is more or less the foundation of the multi-media franchise this actually spawned from, much like Galaxy Angel, where its surrounding original material was far more serious and dour than what was expected, as the TV anime decidedly took matters into their own hands to instead make a scattershot, blockhead and maximalist absurdist comedy. It’s thus within Makoto Moriwaki and Kazuyuki Fudeyasu’s and Seiya Numata’s hands that gave it the radical edge it needed to stand out from the pack, with Moriwaki’s past as a comedy maestro who had been known for the irrationally silly, surreal, and absurd, had cut her teeth on iconic comedies like High School! Kimengumi, Urusei Yasura, Yawara, Gintama, Doraemon, and leading projects such as Onegai my Melody, Jewelpet Kira Deco, and of course the notably batshit PriPara. Within Moriwaki’s hands, she gives a layer of both absurdism and humanism to Tantei Opera Milky Holmes that gave it a grounding that Galaxy Angel didn’t have, that although the comedy of the Milky Holmes treacherously failing over and over is put forward, it’s the foregrounding of Henriette’s ominous and vile but strangely caring and proceeding love for them is what makes the foul absurdity of Milky Holmes failures humanizing and genuinely hilarious. It’s also within this foregrounding that Moriwaki shows her worldview, a sort of empathizing and affection for all her characters, whether they be egotists, blockheads, and maniacs; as said by her in a Natalie.mu interview, “[I]t’s hard for me not to eventually get so attached to all of my characters…I have nothing but love and affection for them, it’s been the same for PriPara and yet even the same for Milky Holmes.” So that even the Thieves, G4, Milky Holmes, and even Kamaboko too, all share with each other the pain and joy and wonder of simply trying to get by, as whacked out as all they all seem, getting into bizarre shenanigans of lard, prison islands, flashers, and terrorist attacks, they all but try to remain true to themselves, and it’s within this groove that finds itself the running worldview of a sort of acceptance of failure within driving odds, even as episodic structure, Kanada-esque effects and acting madness, and the world itself spirals out of control.
In the same vein, Nichijou offers an alternate glimpse of the kind of evolution of the madcap variety and mix and experimentation that Sayonara, Zetsubou Sensei set forward, except that instead of the juvenilia and stylized specifics of SHAFT, it’s placed within the wheelbarrow of the Kyoto/Shin-Ei stylings of the far more broader, warmer, and sensitive crew of Kyoto Animation. Nichijou follows, more or less, the everyday and mundane lives of all sorts of people, young and old, spry and stoic, sometimes robotic and strange, in the landlocked prefecture of Gunma, as the strange and outlandish frequently circumvent their lives in the process. Centered around the idea of “random everyday miracles”, Nichijou finds much of its humor and structure within the vignettes of everyday life, having an explicit skit structure that divides each episode into a variety of gags, moments, and places. Within this mode, it’s hard not to see not only traces of SZS, but also Crayon Shin-chan, and maybe a bit of Ganso Tensai Bakabon in the way it not only characterizes its structure and form in its more outlandish and cartoonish acting and mannerisms with certain specifities, but even in its structure of building upon a steady variety set of gags with its gigantic ensemble cast throughout the show. But what sets it apart is the way it uses this variety to experiment with different moods, registers, and place focus on different kinds of characters that all but slowly develop and show all kinds of perspectives to them as the show goes on; it’s never one or the other, and Kyoto Animation’s delicacy and fastidiousness gives it each character and segment a sort of unmatched texture and layer and nuance that surprises everytime with how sharply constructed and attentive in its approach, whereas SZS’s cynicism and free for all attitude puts everything into a blender until it all mixes and mushes into something direct. Whereas other comedies do have the mundanity of everyday life as the background, Nichijou places the importance of everyday life as the foreground for much of its comedy, even if it goes into wild directions of drama, horror, and action, the comedic exaggeration and intimacy of everyday is the forefront and foundation of its ideas, and it’s within Kyoto Animation’s broad approach that actually innovates on these grounds.
Although not quite like the other, but also perhaps closer to each other in spirit, Ai Mai Mii and Space Dandy both share a sort of irreverence and ambition, a desire to push against the boundaries of both TV anime but also their respective genres. Space Dandy, perhaps best described by Ben Ettinger, as “space opera via the cartoon”, is an anthology comedy series conceived by the multicultural and boundary pushing Shinichiro Watanabe, its “space opera via the cartoon” description being apt as it focused on a round robin rotation of Japanese animation’s brightest and greatest, each pulling in their respective view of Space Dandy’s loose and free continuity to best suit their general expressions of any kind of theme or idea. Yet for all that is extremely experimental and ambitious in the way its anthology structure allowed many of its talented directors, animators, and scriptwriters to do their own thing, much can be said about how comedy was the sole core of many of its episodes, its general tone, and even surprisingly poignant can-do slacker worldview. It’s space opera via the cartoon because it allowed much of its individuals to play around with the abstractions, exaggerations, and comedic bent of many speculative and intellectual ideas of sci-fi into the plastic pleasures via the cartoon, where precision and hyperbole go hand in hand. Much in the same vein, Ai Mai Mii, also pushes the boundaries by exploring the matters of good taste, aesthetic or otherwise, within the worldview of a sole madman that is Itsuki Imazaki, using Choborau Nyopomi’s juvenile and crude gag comedy manga as the basis for compressing and poking fun at the rise of slice of life club comedies to their barest absurdities, where everyday life is pushed into barriers of stupidity. Imazaki pushes its scraggly, drawn out and pointedly ugly aesthetic of sharp curves, linework instability, and geometrical shapes on the fritz to create a gross out look to it, a sort of post-modern take on the Kanada School, except with far more exaggerations and screwed timing and spacing, becomes one of the few anime to properly cultivate an actual heta-uma aesthetic, where ugliness is beauty, and ugliness is king. Much like how Space Dandy achieves its drive and worldview through the individualities of artists placing their takes on the space opera, Ai Mai Mii achieves the same with Imazaki as the sole practitioner and master of his domain, as he places his own take on the slice of life comedy also, via the cartoon.
It’s within these shows, Milky Holmes, Ai Mai Mi, Nichijou, and Space Dandy, that certainly gave me a charge, a sense of something greater, or at least a sense of what comedy was capable of, showing how mutable and everchanging it could be in its sense of variety and life, that simply no other genre could I would be remiss to say that it certainly had me believed that perhaps this would be the future of the genre, and I was more than happily awaiting to see if there would be successors to the throne, that comedy would be on top of the world, crowned as some of the highest achievements in the medium. But alas, with an unknowing acquiescence of how much the industry would start to change and become a shadow of itself, becoming not only victims of overproduction, labor issues, fragmentation, and erasure and distortion of techniques and sensibilities; comedy too, would also take under an entirely different mask, one that is plagued with the aforementioned, but also one that is plagued by itself.
By around the mid to late 2010s, and perhaps even earlier if we were to be more truthful, the industry had changed rapidly and spontaneously, something that casual onlookers would be shocked to hear about, but as things usually are in the anime industry, some things move too fast, and some things just move too slow. On the account of where comedy was coming and going within the parameters of TV animation, it might be too difficult to name any perpetrators or causes, but if there might be some causal link with all the changing priorities and circumstances surrounding productions, especially of scale, feasibility, and technique. In short, the rise of wide-screen, HD 16:9 productions, more digital tools taking over, increase of complexity in designs, layouts, and KA, and of course strained planning and scheduling had put a chokehold on many productions, their knowing feasibility, and what they can afford to focus on and prioritize. Of course, not all of these advancements and changes are inherently bad – but advancements always mean to adapt or die, and adapt many of its overworked and underpaid artists in the industry shall do. What this meant for certain genres can never really just be pinpointed down, but for one’s sake, it perhaps can provide some grounds for where they might go; in the case of comedy, at least in my view, there is a sense that the reigning view of dichotomies, restraint, repetition, and spectacle as a form of comedy itself caused itself to naturally evolve within the genre of comedy due to these aforementioned historical production factors, as well as the changing of the guard and trends.
Even as specious as this claim might be, it might help us give a solid enough theory where this genre had gone and shifted, and while we can run the gamut and take a look at the whole scene as it is now, it’s best to scale it down and focus on a few key titles that may major into factors. That’s why within these parameters comes to mind a blockbuster megahit, Shingo Natsume’s One Punch Man. ONE’s ‘One Punch Man’ was a simple story, following the life of a superhero, Saitama, who was far too strong for his own good, leading to misunderstandings, complications, and ennui on the musings of what it meant to be a hero, and what it meant to truly be strong. While ONE found a certain layers within his disheveled and sketchy aesthetic that placed everyone and everything on the same dimension and plane, revealing their inner absurdities and humanity, Shingo Natsume’s adaptation instead found the irony and repetition of Saitama’s own strength, placing the onus of the humor of his indomitable strength that chiefly defines him and his life. However, that distinction is not unique to Natsume’s own interpretation, as one can argue that the adaptation more or less adapts Murata’s more flashier and bombastic manga adaptation straight – but even one layer removed is another layer placed in-between, and where they separate is on the matter of form and structure, like all comedy has to rely on. Shingo Natsume’s ‘One Punch Man’ has to thus play things straight and narrow, its inherent comedic core is how it exaggerates the superhero/battle manga conceit, its construction, setup, and revolving cast of characters all have to rely on a simple joke; nobody knows Saitama is strong, but they sure will soon. Comedies relying on a single joke, if not a simple and narrow structure that can produce gags and slapstick freely, is not anything new – Lupin III’s criminal hijinks is inherently formulaic, the situation revolving the Nohara family are always dysfunctional, the Yorozuya will always be broke, Nozomu will no doubt decry despair at some point – but great comedies tend to use simple jokes as a way to explore other constants and variables, bridging off onto other observations and exaggerations around them. Natsume’s OPM decidedly does not, as the joke revolving around Saitama is not a bridge to other ideas, but a reiteration of the same joke over and over and over and over again. If it’s not the monotonous and restrained structure, then the equally inert, bland and interchangeable setting that has no traces of any specific reality, amusingly called City Z, does it no favors giving it any nuance, as is its admittedly funny but strangely sincere than actual parodies on Toriyama’s art via Chikashi Kubota’s designs, Makoto Miyazaki’s wailing and thrashing soundtrack certainly gives a pulse with JAM Project leading the charge, yet for all that does it seem incapable of playing any other register but its own horn, but also showing how strained its production that so little was given to attention to any other surrounding elements, its rather drab storyboarding aside. So then, where does Natsume’s ‘One Punch Man’ appeal even lies? It’s in its spectacle. The spectacle becomes the basis for Natsume’s overall vision for One Punch Man’s stylistics, and while spectacle is common enough in comedies, it’s the decision to narrowly focus on this front is where the contention lies, as it becomes its sole worldview and comedic bent, where might makes right is defined by Saitama’s willingness and also unwillingness to hold back, illustrated through the then more looser and chaotic web-gen movement, where thin lines, stylized and flat effects, smears and multiples of loose character art, and an throwaway of model sheets for something rawer and individualistic – if it can’t accumulate a sense of detail or construction in its spotty production, it can certainly brute force it. Its comedy has to then be contained within those key moments of sheer spectacle and bombast, handled by some of the wildest and boldest webgen animators and directors, which shows its action scenes are taken as seriously and exaggeratedly as they could be, its comedy defined by its theatrics in physicality and destruction in contrast with Saitama’s strength overpowering all, and amazing them in the process. Yet it’s the only kind of pulse it has, as its inattention to anything else blunts the impact severely, its bombast claims a spurious charge in the moment at best, its attention to its construction or characters or setup isn’t really there at all – it’s still a farce played up quickly as it begins, which perhaps spawns a different kind of texture of immediacy.
With then attention to the idea of spectacle as a basis of comedy, KonoSuba plays around with this idea fruitfully, albeit on a more micro manner, as it focuses on a shut-in, Kazuma Sato, who becomes reincarnated into a different world and becomes entangled with trying to merely survive and live in his new and hostile fantasy world along with a gaggle of equally dumb as bricks morons, respectively named Darkness, Megumin, and Aqua. Takaomi Kanasaki is the lead QB here, and his credentials in comedy is nothing to be trifled with, as his rather slacker worldview permeates the rowdiest season of School Rumble, the multi genre parody of Kore wa Zombie desu Ka?, and a stint in Onegai My Melody, all show in some forms, a dry and slacker sense of humor that values going against the grain and living for one’s self, albeit under a view of a frequently chaotic world. Given that, Kanasaki indubitably fits KonoSuba to those ends in a sense, as its cast of its gaggle of fools fit best this sensibility of its flippantly selfish don’t-wanna-grow-up slacker tone. Certainly then, KonoSuba’s own appeal becomes the focus of the cast itself, but not so much the cast of earnest and exaggerated individual personalities, but the cast’s appeal as a bunch of mean spirited, asshole tricksters – Kazuma and Darkness and Megumin and Aqua all inconvenience each other to no ends, upping the ante of their more impish assholish desires, usually of pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth – until there’s nothing left. So then, the point of contention here lies, as although comedy is the birthright of certain selfish desires, and certain acts would simply not be the same without extrapolating the follies of human desires and instabilities, yet KonoSuba’s main mode of register feels just as the same as a One Punch Man – it has to be predicated on the premise of them being flippant assholes and nothing else. This feeling is only more blatant when looked at KonoSuba’s main cast of fools; each and every one of them play upon some, if not the same idea of selfishness, one can argue for certain felicities regarding each character, Megumin certainly isn’t as much abrasive as the others – but if it’s the rooted feeling that KonoSuba’s structure and tone can only position them as selfish and nothing more, so even characters like Megumin have to get swept up within the same register eventually, and its lack of strong bit players and a gamified, also interchangeable drab fantasy setting only accentuate this point of them overpowering any other tone or register or feeling to serve this rote end, they aren’t so unpredictable that they can give some sense of incongruity or surprise in their approach, and one wonders if Kanasaki’s singlemindedness to his approach in handling most of the storyboarding duties gives further rise to this feeling, without a great rotation leads to great repetition. Likewise, although Koichi Kikuta’s designs and approach to comedic character acting recalls even some of the best of A-Pro and Kanada school of sheer energy and capturing specific mannerisms, the one tone default mode that dresses over KonoSuba also dresses over the general form of its cast – frequently loose and blobby and reactionary in its use of probing and exaggerated close ups and poses, yet it’s the same kind of acting for all of them, and risks, yes, once again, repetition and spectacle. It’s a different kind of spectacle from the action bombast of One Punch Man, sure, but it’s a spectacle in the way it deforms and distorts mannerisms and gestures into formless blobs of erratic timing and spacing, neither defining any aspect of any characteristic or specificity within those moments. But even so, it’s perhaps within this single-mindedness, its commitment and refusal to grow up or show any growth of its leads, might be its own appeal entirely, as it’s rambunctious enough to know what it is and what it isn’t – the energy is there, and maybe too much is better than too little.
Furthering these ideas of comedy shifting into these forms of pure spectacle, of restraint and repetition within their dichotomies, one has a sense of the genre turning into something else entirely, but not all of it must be share of ambivalence. Even within these parameters, there have been a slew of projects that admirably push against the grain even amongst their boundaries, limitations, and feasibilities – and it’s here that perhaps comedy can thrive in different, emergent forms. The best of these to my knowledge, even it might be too early to assume, are the one two punch of both maximalist and vigorous comedies, Kaguya-sama: Love is War and Bocchi the Rock. Kaguya-sama places two particular geniuses of their prestigious academies pitted against each other, with the kicker being that one loves the other and vice versa, and within the pressures of teenage insecurities, they frequently misunderstand each other in their pursuit of pride as they try to make each other confess. A ridiculous premise deserves an equally ridiculous adaptation, and it’s here where Mamoru Hatakeyama, a former SHAFT expat, finds much to wring out of its outlandish premise by exploring that particular strand of unrequited love to its dopiest and embarrassing effects blown in and out of their lives at the academy. It’s within Hatakeyama’s own brand of SHAFT and Shinbo school influence that takes a far more looser and experimental approach to structure and episode direction, where little pieces of key moments and emotions are shifted and exaggerated to sheer expressionistic impulses, playing around with not just different registers, but also using referential comedy to express allusions and iterations of visual gags, bonehead slapstick, grandiose skits, and a round robin of bombastic acting and effects, which is doubly impressive for a production that has to constantly go against not just the grain, but the strains and feasibilities of its production, putting resourcefulness and ingenuity over all. In a like manner, Kaguya-sama is thus a triumph of continuing the beleaguered SHAFT school, and also the closest successor to the chaotic Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei, a comparison I’m most likely to agree with, but yet one that has me with the most reservations. Although the consistent inspired bursts of creativity cannot be contest in Kaguya-sama’s favor, its overall effectiveness feels at once blunt and exhausting, because as much as it’s willing to play around with form within the structure of its romantic comedy pretentions, it has to play around within these rules and limitations dutifully. Compared to the rote ends of both One Punch Man and KonoSuba, Kaguya-sama is far more willing to be adventurous than either in its pursuit to explore youth and romantic love at differing ends and comedic registers, that is to be sure, but yet it represents a sort of different problem, or at least a different focus – Kaguya-sama has to abide to its narrative ambitions as much as its comedic ones, and the appeal lies in much of Kaguya and Miyuki’s will they or won’t they romantic development as much as its goofy comedy where it expresses their youthful diatribes as expressionistic absurdities. This then represents a strict dichotomy, as it predicates on the cast abruptly breaking with character and reality, each time their facades and personalities are challenged on any level (usually of pettiness or of romance), and on this end the element of paradox can feel a bit stifling and redundant. We’re not so much peeling back the layers of the cast in their exaggerations, but rather seeing the comedic bent of them trying to keep up their facades – it’s unpredictable in its approach to the way it expresses them but predictable in the result that they remain the same as they are, especially when it essentially plays around with one, maybe two types of gags. In the preening exaggerations of Kaguya-sama’s comedy, this isn’t bad at all, and it’s to the show’s credit that it can muster up energy and ideas out of thin air to different thematic, narrative, and ultimately comedic results, but it leaves one a bit wanting with such a cast’s dynamics and individualities – which, compared to the anarchic and sardonic Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei, where its cast of admittedly one note eccentrics become more broader with its scattershot variety of gags and focuses, but also remain blaringly sincere in their characterization every time, never quite breaking character, adding to their unpredictability and nuance to the world they inhabit.
To say nothing of the peerless and gigantic success and popularity of Bocchi the Rock’s success would be putting it lightly, especially in the vein of its equally astounding and radical approach to experimenting with gags, structure, form through its appropriation of variety of mixed media, animation history, and genres – one of which that seems to have spoken to a far more broader audience than one had even expected, especially for a slice of life comedy, which is a whole another topic entirely reserved as its own essay. There was much commotion over its sense of experimentation, emboldened by not just Saito and Umehara’s open-mindedness of collaboration, but also of Kerorira’s approach to go for a far more starkly, looser, rawer, and malleable sensibility to key animation and animation direction and layouts where everyone was allowed to go all in or not at all, which extended beautifully to storyboarding and direction, even beyond the confines and limitations of traditional animation – showing it was willing to play with different forms of textures and ideas and materials, quite literally, as live action film, claymation, pixel art, cel anime throw backs, cut outs, realist character acting balanced out by stylized shorthands, individual approaches to the model sheets, obviously the list goes on, and one starts to get the idea as the show goes on that its visual repertoire is never repeated, but in fact multiplied each time, which rivals and perhaps even the best of Kaguya-sama itself, showing how its approach to the slice of life comedy is at once radical and familiar – one of life and growth and the unpredictability and messiness and joy of youth. However, Bocchi the Rock’s own rather radical experimentation being one of a kind is a bit of a spurious charge, as many commenters and critics were quick to hop on the train of thought that there was nothing like Bocchi the Rock’s comedic formal experimentation, this community’s troubling presentism started to reveal itself – as if comedies such as FLCL, Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei, Goku no Daibouken, Galaxy Angel, Crayon Shin-chan, Kare Kano, Excel Saga, Hidekazu Ohara shorts, Manga Nihon Mukashi Banashi, Minna no Uta music videos, Nichijou, Urusei Yatsura, Milky Holmes had somehow all disappeared into an ether, their efforts and own experimentations somehow didn’t matter at all in the face of Bocchi the Rock. Even so, if one were to take that claim at face value, the way Bocchi the Rock is more playful and loose with the way it explores different animation registers other than purely traditional and conventional ways is right to be lauded, there’s nothing quite like the way Bocchi the Rock uses raw formal experimentation to string together so many discordant stylistic elements – but that’s where it starts and ends. Unlike many great animated comedies where it used its structural and formal pretentions to explore a multitude of comedic ideas, sometimes of personal and intimate, sometimes of the broader ensemble concerns, sometimes of thematic and aesthetic ends, Bocchi the Rock only places a function, and the basis, as well as aesthetic and narrative concerns, around Bocchi. It then serves a similar purpose to Kaguya-sama, much of its experimentation is served, sometimes messily, to a fairly single-minded end, to explore Bocchi’s own issues of isolation, social anxiety, and cynicism – much of its sense of expression plays to mostly blunt emotional outbursts of Bocchi’s own timidness, insecurities, and growth. This became a point of contention at some point, which the audience wasn’t sure if it was to pointedly laugh at, or laugh with Bocchi to these ends, and I’d say the overall effect is never quite one of inconsistency or incoherence, because its strictly POV aspect means that it could never be one of surprise, incongruity, or multiplicity. Its comedic register is one of to be expected, never to quite expect a queasiness and challenge of real laughter or unpredictability, as even if it goes to town with claymation, exaggerated faces, live action, or what have you, its basic binary is never really disturbed, its nuance in the details can never really be found. Thus, Bocchi the Rock instead finds something a bit more pointedly, one of selection and specificity in animation, a similar kind of multiplicity – especially considering that its production could never reach the highs of greater realist, nuanced intimacy – but instead perhaps finding laughs and astonishment in the way her subjective and selective view of the world around her finds an empathetic way for directors and animators to express her worldview in all its navel gazing and vulnerability, where the brisk experimentation in stylizations come from within to internalize every thought or emotion comedically but empathetically, to explore broader expressions of pain, worries, and anxieties from all sides – not exactly emotionally intelligent nor a bit sincere, but empathetic because it wants to express where those feelings are coming from, the good and the bad.
We then find ourselves at the crossroads, and it’s at these crossroads that I find myself realizing that comedy might not really be dead, or even dying, but these few titles give me a sense that it is transformed into something else entirely…which is a feeling of ambivalence as well as curiosity, that along these parameters, it’s not really quite like what I had expected it to be its future all those years ago, where I had believed comedies would start to really push boundaries of structure and form, but also of tone and sensibility, and even among the modern greats they simply don’t have the sense of sheer energy, variety of tones and moods, and surprise and experimentation form and structure that past titles dutifully did all at once. If nothing else, playing compare and contrast with the past and future is a losing game in art terms, especially when these new titles are pitted against some of the greatest in the medium, and by no means do I wish for them to conform solely to them, and only them. But for my two cents, the fact that they deserve a bit of quibbling is at least a measure of what they are capable of and their inherent potential and achievements, especially as the genre itself is besieged by an onslaught of boorish, interchangeable, milquetoast gamut of either fantasy/isekai/action comedies or the equally confounding trend of romantic comedy being subsumed by a genre of “girl teasing boy”, which all suffer from the same kind of sloppiness, inattention to form, indifference, and lack of any real construction or character within any of their material. Perhaps worse off, comedy as a genre, while mutable and broad enough as it is, keeps being subsumed into other genres, to the point where comedy as genre, tone, or sensibility is dutifully played down and restrained; it’s nothing but dressing to play up to other focuses, never realizing its inherent potential in breaching broader ideas and emotions. Still, then, even so, this whole diatribe at least gives me a frame of reference for what I dutifully valued in this genre – and Bocchi the Rock and Kaguya-sama definitely do come onto those terms and then some, and some comedies I haven’t had a chance to dig into like Dungeon Meshi’s current tripwire act of balancing wonder and slapstick, Pop Team Epic’s defiance and mockery of TV anime’s structure and history, Kei Oikawa’s wonderful shows of exaggerations of comedy of manners, the sheer self indulgence and ugliness of appropriating Urusei Yatsura’s loose comedy in Mamoru Oshii’s Vlad Love, and Heybot being the last vestiges of whacked out, absurdist kids comedy, as it least shows me what made this genre so arrestingly pleasurable, surprising, and innovative within its form as animation – gaiety, laughter, life, and to ha-cha-cha.
Lupin III’s appeal as the roundabout franchise of stylistic criminal hijinks, of robbery and thievery, roguishness, deviancy, and habitual free spiritedness – all of which coming from Monkey Punch’s own pet themes and influences of 50s and 60s pulp and pop culture blending into its own mix, seem to anticipate the loose and flexible foundation for many of its interpretations, of the kind where artists could be set loose their cultural, societal, aesthetic and artistic influences and predilections all within Lupin III’s multicultural irreverence, sleaze, and devil-may-care worldview. None show this better than the revolving door of its own animated TV adaptations, aptly numbered after parts, of Part I’s Masaaki Osumi’s short lived hard boiled and entrenched crime drama to Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata’s gentile and broad comedy with a focus on authenticity and specificity to Part II’s free for all extravaganza of loose, over the top, and unrestrained stylistics that characterizes much of its jazzy and adventurous tone, to say nothing of its back catalog of movies and OVAs, all seemingly teemed with their own primed aesthetics and views, all contributing to that vast, global enterprise of Lupin III’s worldview.
And yet it’s Part 3, the one that awkwardly stands among the mix of being the last of the TV iterations, is the fascinating intermittent mix of its own evolving realist and looser sensibilities of its day and its back-to-basics approach that seems to re-examine, if not provided a grounding, to many of Lupin III’s own delirious hijinks into something more tangible and hard boiled. This sort of unevenness to its own production and approach has left it to be rather underappreciated and considered lesser in its day (much less said about its fate seemingly dictated by swarms of baseball broadcast delays), which may have lessened as time goes by, but yet things remain the same; still considered the roaming black sheep of the franchise, never fitting in one way or another for what people want out of the franchise, for the ill and good.
The one leading this spurious charge for Part III is Yuzo Aoki, one of the unsung and idiosyncratic animators and directors of their time that had been with Lupin III since the very beginning, typified by his rubbery, antic heavy, and heavily caricatured character acting, stylized and geometrically thick effects animation, and elaborate and fairly dense mechanical animator to boot. Namely, his “Broadway” series in Lupin III: Part II are some of his most well-known episodes, if not the most rambunctious and over the top episodes of Part II itself, abstracting Lupin’s antics into a chaotic funk, erratic shifts in stylization and shifting space and weight that often defies reality, but yet remains grounded enough to make its real impact; a sensibility that could be seen as a sign of things to come for Part III’s own stylized realism mix.
Henceforth, although Part III shares Part II’s insistence on not having a general vision under an actual director, a common sentiment that even gets bogged down to Part I’s own directing fiasco with Osumi, although one can also argue Yasuo Otsuka is Part II’s real director as well – Yuzo Aoki’s own credit as a “supervisor” on Part III gets the closest as one gets to TV Lupin finally having some kind of guiding principle, a totalizing force, and yes, a vision. With then attention to Yuzo Aoki in particular, one has the idea that his guiding hand is similar to, but also different from Yasuo Otsuka, as contrary to some noted views of Part III being inconsistent and all over the place, Aoki’s own loose and idiosyncratic but ultimately grounded predilections serves as the arch that forms Part III’s overall sensibility, tone, and worldview that jived between a yearn to return to the hard boiled heydays of Lupin III’s past, but also a rejuvenation of aesthetic sensibilities that demanded something between the real and stylized, raw and immediate, a take that served as the overall basis of Part III’s own conceptual basis, firmly alleged by Junichi Iioka in his book, title roughly translated by me, “My Struggle with Lupin the 3rd: Tales from the Anime Script”, apparently coming to a conclusion that Part III should be a re-contextualization and harmonization of not only Part I’s hardboiled elements, but Part II’s wackier comedic elements as well. Although this rather big claim comes from just the scriptwriter, much less Yuzo Aoki himself, there seems to be some truth into it that was born into the aesthetics of Part III itself – an aesthetic that dutifully formed into a blend of loopy cartoony hijinks interspersed with a recognition of tangible weight and space in its acting and effects, an aesthetic that is once supported by Lupin III: Part III’s structural throughline of more of a relatively grounded focus on Lupin and gang’s petty crimes, mondo big heists, and thwarting of mercenaries, accelerationists, terrorists as much as thieves, gangs, and of course, cops.
This in part, shows how much Part III’s specific sensibility spoke to and gelled with many of the rotating crews on Part III, each providing their own equally idiosyncratic take, but also as arches that build onto one another in its overall stylized realism tone that hunched back onto Part III’s own restraint in its tone and structure of its hard-boiled episodic stories. This stands out in particular of Part III’s far more eclectic rotation of crews in comparison to previous entries in the series, studios of the 80s that all had heavily ordained styles when that sort of rather mattered, from AIC’s more blunt and grounded work, Iruka’s own mix of flash in the pan cartooniness, and even the chaotic Kanada school adjuncts of Studio No.1 and Studio Z5, but the huge brunt of the work is carried by Kusama Art and Oh Production, with Kusama Art’s greatest episodes having Tatsuo Ryuno at front and center, whose often rubbery and erratic take on Lupin’s own chaotic and loose tone, characterization by extreme immediate cartoony exaggeration and loose, curvaceous deformation that plays to the intensity of his characters emotions all so caught up in the moment. This is best described by maestro Ben Ettinger as “controlled chaos”, and Ryuno’s own predilections best form this sensibility, but also his own worldview to match. In contrast, Oh Pro’s episodes are the somewhat more heavily realist orientated take, at least in sense of sheer volume, balance, and weight in its direction to how it brings its character and effects animation characterized by their episodes in bringing the theatrics and grandiosity of Lupin III’s death defying madness to a relative tether and grounding to reality, even as exaggerated as it gets.
As a result, it all shows how Part III’s highly distinctive crews bought into, and brought the blend of stylized realism and exaggerated portraiture to its fullest extent of Part III’s production and worldview of its free-spirited hijinks, one of which that precisely defined sheer displays of physicality, momentum, and pomp and circumstance of Lupin’s monomaniacal obsession of stealing and dealing, this to me being a reverberation of what Yuzo Aoki was always trying to deal with Lupin III since its inception, which then feels fully formed in Part III, played out and expressed in differing perspectives that matter. If there is much rumbling and rambling of Lupin’s own played out formula strung out in Part III’s episodic structure, then Part III shows that it doesn’t matter much at all, as Lupin’s own bedrock structure can be a way for talented animators and directors to make their episodes each their own, Lupin’s own criminal hi-jinks being a way to express animation’s greatest pleasures of bending weight and volume, pin point precision, raw draftsmanship, and mimicry and exaggeration of reality – of Lupin and gang grimacing into caricatures, zany and loopy effects animation that springs around the frame, Zenigata running across in and out of the layers and frame that display momentum and swagger, and deformation that lays into the basest of human emotions so clearly and exaggeratedly, all of which that forms itself to pure expression of the love of the form.
Nowadays, Lupin III as a franchise seems all for naught a bit depleted, that even though it’s had its inspired run of movies, specials, and OVAs since the end of Part III, it has steadily and knowingly run its course. Part IV and V respectively tries to throw it all back and bring back key players of Lupin’s own historical production, Kazuhide Tomonaga among them, into trying to rejuvenate the spirit of Lupin III in the modern day along with like minded modern talent, but even present day Telecom cannot imbue an imprint of spirit of ingenuity and creativity that it selectively does not have in an increasingly fragmented and strained industry closed to being crushed on its own weight, locked down and restrained as Part IV and V are, telling of its insistence to keep to the same overall aesthetic and design work, as well as its meager focus on keeping everything tidy and polished, a consequence formed by the modern industry as it is on this production itself, showing that it is never quite matching the beat of its own production it desperately tries to do so, its only r eal calling card is that it’s definitely the Lupin III “brand”. Consequently, and depressingly so, Part VI only digs its feet in further, even as it tries to reinvigorate itself once more with a brand new crew and even noir, fairly hard boiled sensibility, the best it can muster among its barebones crew and rotation is the selection of, admittedly impressive, screenwriters – Mamoru Oshii, Masaki Tsuji, Taku Ashibe, and Kanae Minato being among the headliners, but if writers were all it took to somehow revive interest in this beleaguered franchise, then maybe it was better off not doing much at all, considering once again, that its production could never be suited to actually properly depict such ideas with aplomb, a weary side glance at its own credits reveal a roundabout desperate measure of worn down veterans and old flames, put upon the swarm of ADs, assistant ADs, 2nd keys, and 4 episode directors for each episode each. Perhaps much less said about its latest iteration, Lupin Zero, which chiefly feels inspired in by its focus on replicating the 80s as it was, heavy compositing that tries to replicate the brash distortion and lo-fi look of bygone VHS and LD transfers, along with its more looser take on its own model/expression sheets that recall the best of old Lupin: Aoki, Otsuka, Tomonaga, Miyazaki and Ryuno and all; but yet, all of this once again shows an embittered and rather alarming idea that this franchise is forever beholden by past glories, trapping itself in some void of nostalgia, as if we all click our feet together and clap our hands together then perhaps, if faintly, we can go back to the 80s, when this franchise actually meant something.
At worst, this shows how much this industry has knowingly changed, and as much as I don’t feel particularly enlightened to say if it has changed for the worse, perhaps there’s an argument to be made among the mountains of laborious, strained, simply put: boring, waves of blockbuster spectacle driven megahit productions that swarm the industry as it is now in search of overflowing content that aim to please a broad audience while also simultaneously trying to kill its creatives; that Lupin III being treated this way is depressing as it is distressing.
The last episode of Lupin III: Part III unusually ends as if it was any other day, another episodic chapter in the books, its parting words being, roughly translated, “This season ends today. We will meet again. Goodbye!”. Surveying the way things are nowadays, one hopes that one day that comes true.
Congruently with the studio’s rise and willingness to come back from tragedy and misfortune with unforeseen changes, Tsurune S2 represents a sheer production priorities and ideas as well, dialing down on their sheer focus on precise, moody compositing and specificity and weight in character acting in AD and KA work, but shifting that with a more intimate focus on editing and sound direction as well. The result becoming far more spirited, far more audacious, and far more rigorous and thorough in its attention to chronicle the winding coming of age story and spirit of austere, mind over matter kyudo that Tsurune best represents, as much as Kyoani has resurfaced with gumption and willingness to move forward.
None show this better than episode 12, an episode wholly dedicated on the eve and forthcoming day of their respective prefectural kyudo tournaments. Yamamura’s own growth as director comes through the handling of the time and space of how it all plays out in its entirety, taking no shortcuts or chances to rigorously portray their tournament with all the unease, spirit, the erratic twitches, the jolts, the lingering and joy all caught up in the moment; as well as their renewed vigor of their commitment to the sport: contrasting with their gazes of their focus in taking their linking shots with a veil of their own memories, emotions, and ideals that all come together as one. The result is thus Kyoani at its very best, but also shows their shift in priorities, their current focus on sheer weight and volume goes hand in hand with their ostensible focus on intimacy and sensitivity with how they want to portray a sense of authenticity with their characters with utmost sincerity, a way of portraying these emotions that feel palpably lived.
Bang Dream! It’s MyGO!!!: Episode 3 – CRYCHIC
Among the cornucopia of idol shows, Bang Dream found its niche in its focus on rock and pop bands, differing from its offspring of flashy dance numbers and ensemble vocal performances; that is to say, Bang Dream seemed a bit more lowkey and a smidge goofier and relaxed than many of its cohorts, the focus on playing live shows, learning instruments, and hanging out becoming a core of its identity – rather than the dressing. At the same time, a franchise going as long as it does is bound to have its outliers, and It’s MyGO!!!’s focus on melodramatic theatrics and sullen, dour sensibility along with its equally rather off-putting and eccentric cast sticks out.
Episode 3, appropriately named CRYCHIC, is one of MyGO!!!’s very best episodes, but one that stands out as the thesis of the work as well as proving succinctly the power of CG through its deliberate storyboarding with its focus on 3D camerawork and layouts, that provide a spontaneity that traditional could not do, as it can swing into perspectives more organically as well as portray a time and space that feels more immediate and fluid, especially in terms of lighting, 3D environments, and camerawork. By placing it entirely in Tomori’s POV, one is shown through her dour monologues and selective memories is one of sheer loneliness, ever so disconnected from the world around her. Ever so dolent with the hushed whispers of her own monologues, her austere lingering and avoidance of her gazes, and sharp cut ins of her other lingering feelings sketched out sharply in her note books – all of this come together to form a thorough and intimate look at her character, all of this shown through her own subjective eyes, as it never stops even for a moment, before it all crashes down.
Onii-chan wa Oshimai: Episode 8 – Mahiro’s First Girls Sleepover!
Nostalgia and influence go hand in hand, both becoming convenient short hands for sensibilities, worldviews, and ideas. If the 2020s so far feel like a lot of 2000s and 2010s throwbacks and sensibilities, that’s because for the most part, it is; as a lot of many of its would be young and older animators and directors who had grown up throughout those times have taken higher positions since then, instilling without fear and shame broadly showing their influences, allegiances, and passions. Notably, Shingo Fujii and Ryo Imamura’s adaptation of Onimai, a sweetly cute TFS slice of life manga about a guy turned into a girl unwillingly, which in turns allows him to experience life and perspectives beyond his own. Even if one were to wax philosophical about the underlying idea of adapting a TFS story that might just be about gender identity and dysphoria in the year 2023 – this is largely a boys club, a way for Fujii’s crew’s fervor, sleaze, and influences to come through unabashedly through its hyperactive cartooniness acting and spectacle, lowbrow 2000s otaku comedy, piercing soft pastel colors that evoke 2010s Dogakobo, and shameless, intensely sensual and cutesy designs. It’s as erotically provocative as it is introspectively evocative, to say the least.
Episode 8 is evocative of all its ideas, a blender of everything and nothing, as it depicts feverishly and intensely Mahiro’s first girls sleepover, all replete with misunderstandings, cutesy asides and antics, and animator showboating that superstar animators Hironori Tanaka and Toshiyuki Sato have a blast in a bender that allows them to go all out with nothing holding them back. Its sheer commitment to this energy, especially as it’s so loose and kinetic in the way it handles goofy cartoony short hands and way too ambitious layouts, recalls when anime didn’t need to be so self-serious and strained of itself in aesthetics and ideas. The fact that it doesn’t need to be so strained for some kind of perfection is what makes it shine! Perhaps then, this captures something essential, as its own sense of immaturity aligns best with Mahiro and friends hanging out, finding beauty in its own irreverence and seemingly shallowness.
Hirogaru Precure: Episode 17 – The Great Baton Pass! Mashiro’s Intense Relay
As franchises go on, especially kids ones in the modern day, the limitations of its own making really start to show – the limitations of its own structure, narrative and stylistic ambitions, and production woes all start to show; all at the mercy of Toei’s own tentpole megahits like One Piece and Dragon Ball and the like, proving time and time again that Toei’s producers could care less about its lesser, more important properties if there’s bigger fish to fry.
Hirogaru Precure’s episode 17, proves in a small gesture, how Precure used to be so inspired within its own limited framework, giving old maestro Morio Hatano a space to breathe his own sensibility and style within the Precure foundation. Hatano had always been around for Precure’s heydays, his episodes always been standouts among the mix; a flair for Igarashi’s warmth and sincerity with his token theatrical ambience and style taken to a more austere and grounded take, that is to say, a take that conveys emotions with immediacy and clarity. It all takes in account of Mashiro’s anxieties and worries with delicacy and warmth, taking the time to properly express her own predicament within small gestures, changes in distancing perspective, and a more intimate, natural sense of lighting that reveals and omits. Significantly, it shows Hatano’s penchant for expressing pain and frustration with life’s ambiguities, ever so clearly, Mashiro’s own clammed up gestures and ensuing blow up on her frustrations coincide with the natural warmth of the lighting that seems to shine around her; ever so lightly.
Overtake: Episode 9 – The Day of the Disaster
Overtake’s episode 9 is the climactic focal point of Overtake’s character drama and themes, placing squarely in Kouya and Haruka’s reunion among the place of the source of his own trauma, a small local community that was at the center of the 2011 Tohoku Earthquakes. The preamble of their union is suffused with a sense of normalcy and happiness, that becomes more and more suffocating with an inherent sadness and distance that permeates throughout; Kouya and Haruka feel as distant with each other as much as they do with the world, as warm and beautiful as it can be, and it painstakingly shows that through the grit and sharpness it shows its characters vulnerabilities, knotty, dried up and tired hands, and a burrowed frown, the sharp elasticity of a grip, to the pared down, realistic bodies and faces in distress in face of indescribable tragedy.
All of this is imbued with a pinpoint immediacy of the understanding of storyboarding, what to select and what to omit, sharp close ups, spacious layouts and master shots, wide angled spaces that dwarf the characters with immediacy, still shots that ever so slowly revolve around, fixed cameras with zoom ins, reverse shots that distill emotions and relationships, all the while infused with its careful animation direction, exaggerating and shaping character art when it needs to be when captured in particular moments. It is in any sense the beauty inherent to Japanese animation’s limitations, a concision that allows for it to be so exacting in expression and emotion; or perhaps as better said by Osamu Dezaki himself, “Animation storyboards need to depict what people feel when they when they encounter something, or are blown away by something […]”
Heavenly Delusion: Episode 8 – Their Choices
Among the cadre of prestigious shows that pull out all stops in hoping for the next big “megahit”, those that seem slightly out of lock and step with the ongoing trends and sensibilities of the current industry seem all the more curious and valuable. Heavenly Delusion’s unusual talented line up and painstakingly realist and thorough sensibility seems to buck against common trends of enlarged, visceral action and fantasy spectacle – Heavenly Delusion’s post-apocalyptic and action dressing might’ve played in part of its own clearance to get greenlit, but the feverish psychodrama and eccentric dark comedy puts it far in between, at arms length, a skip and step away. By putting it in the hands of an Hirotaka Mori, an Production I.G. born follower and believer in pure unfettered realism, Ishiguro’s manga finds an narrowing center and core.
Haruka Fujita’s episode 8 burrows into this core, which needles into the predicament of an assumed cult’s transgressions, and the militant group that aims to exploit them, all leading into a destructive end where nobody comes out unscathed. Fujita, being an ex-Kyoani member, shows how much the Kyoto school permeates throughout the episode in its lingering delicacy and ostensible focus on minutiae detail and gestures; the surrounding apocalypse might seem hopeless and desolate, but Fujita still tries to show that people still try to live regardless, even in their day to day and moment by moment. The ensuing result feels unusually raw and a little messy, as this thorough approach demands so much outside of the confines of Kyoani, but it only makes it shine and standout amidst of its other bigger bombastic episodes, it remembers that even in ensuing tragedy and darkness; something needs to be felt, not just moved.
16bit Sensation: Episode 8 – Echo
16bit Sensation’s conception as a manga about the past glories and passions of the niche eroge industry in the late 80s and 90s was an already an unusual premise, only made all the more stranger turning it into a original anime about a time travel story about exploring said passions and glories, blossoming into something somewhat poignant about the nature of creativity and imagination. Konoha’s own admission of being a relative outsider of much of the 80s and 90s culture it hangs on gives it a center of naïve optimism and belief in it, and the very best of 16bit deals with this very nature, giving a genuine spotlight to an industry that has sadly failed itself so much, time and time again.
Episode 8, however, plays against this very own structure and expectations; strangely instead focusing on Mamoru, the irritant PC-98 devotee, getting sucked into his own little time travel story after a blundering incident leaves him stranded into a dummied space in-between 1985 and 1990. As Mamoru struggles to, and eventually finds routine, an ennui sets in while he wanders and wonders about, the time and nature of this space, his strange, eccentric eroge developer companions, and his own mere existence. Its own very unconventional nature calls back to the free-spirited nature of 80s and 90s productions such as Urusei Yatsura and Patlabor, even recalling a bit of the ponderous and erudite nature of Mamoru Oshii’s own earlier, dreamlike productions. Its own elliptical editing, cutting in-between and fading into clutters of otaku culture, the receding emptiness of its own spaces, and ponderous rhythm of Mamoru’s own monologues all ensue into one of the most beautiful and haunting episodes of the year, all ruminating onto the idea of imagination and the culture and life of such a subculture.
Kawagoe Boys Sing: Episode 9 – Some Days I’m Sorry
Kawagoe Boys, an original anime by Ikuhara follower Jun Matsumoto, is the kind of original anime production that’s so prevalent nowadays; compromised, unnurtured, and messy – flashes of its theatrical Ikuhara school styling and eccentricity are far and few in-between, only ever sporadically livening up what could’ve been an interesting take on musical anime, focusing on the eccentric, ragtag group of choir boys.
Nobuyuki Takeuchi, one of the prime followers of the Ikuhara school, shows us what could’ve been, giving us an unusually stark and dour episode in showing the trials and tribulations of one of its choir members being forced to deal with the aftermath of their parent’s failures, and their position in the club being compromised, being forced to leave. In other words, it’s an episode awash in Takeuchi’s own darkly, theatrical, and rather glum worldview and sensibility, being entirely solo key animated and directed, all of which contribute into a cacophony of embittered feelings in probing, suffocating close ups and silhouettes as the glum, natural lighting permeates throughout its darkened skies, which feels like an episode so much more closer to Mawaru Penguindrum or Revolutionary Girl Utena than it has any right being, a heightened reality that is belabored by its tether to real emotions.
Hoshikuzu Telepath: Episode 9 – Planetary Gravity
In the wake of many of its lucky sibling slice of life/nichijou-kei series that were given the luck of the draw of being blessed with monumental productions filled to the brim with talent, Hoshikuzu Telepath has had to fight a rather uphill battle against the odds, being a rather low priority, “lesser” production given to a relatively small team that had to make due with its more modest parameters, much less said about Studio Gokumi, who seem to have inner struggles of their own. At the head of this forefront was Kaori, a rather underrated talent with the penchant for lackadaisical airiness and outward emotions, all the more fitting for a show all about the troubles and joys of a lonely girl trying to carve out her own space within her world. That is to say, in place of a thorough sense of authenticity and delicacy that it could not do, Kaori aims for sheer panache and chutzpah – using the broad stylizations of the 4-koma format into broad introspections and outward sincerity.
Who better to play upon those stylizations than Masayuki Kojima? A Madhouse adjacent director that always aimed, for better or worse, a deliberate and outward depiction of emotions in the most visceral, blunt way possible. Yet for as calculated as he might be, it works in favor of Hoshikuzu Telepath’s episode 9, which depicts the fallout of the club in a devastating and direct way, Umika herself feeling the backlash, sorrow, and confusion amidst her own reflection of her own failure. It’s an episode that surprisingly fits well into Kojima’s own schema, as his focus on the cause and effect of many of its blunt depictions of Umika’s sorrows only makes the accumulating self-realization given real emotional impact, the sentimental melodrama sings because it never leaves anything off the table, refusing to pull any punches with its approach to storyboarding, giving those emotions texture and weight in flashes of perspective, elaborate shifts in lighting, and a purely subjective view that values Umika’s perspective above all else. Even if the episode isn’t particularly well animated in any traditional sense, Kojima’s deliberation and clarity never comes off as dishonest, but an approach that feels as valid as any other.
IDOLM@STER Cinderella Girls U149: Episode 11 – What’s the Difference Between Grown-Ups and Kids?
Once upon a time, the once triumphant IDOLM@STER series used to be a cavalcade of director and animator talent, not only becoming a haven for would be creatives to cut their teeth on a big project that could best serve their ambitions, but also for like-minded individuals (even among passionate fans) to come together with a shared taste in sensibility and worldviews, a sensibility that evokes a taste for authenticity and specificity. Even if one were to find evidence of the contrary, and you don’t have to look far among the evidence of the crew’s certain bombastic taste for things all relating to character acting, effects animation, and emphatic direction, even among the fact that it’s still serving the needs of a gigantic franchise. Nevertheless, both IDOLM@STER 2011 and Cinderella Girls both seem downright stately and restrained and humanist compared to the bloated, maximalist incoherent spectacle that serves many of the mega franchises and hits of action and fantasy anime that the big projects have gravitated around to.
Atsushi Kobayashi’s episode 11 of U149 doesn’t provide an answer, but perhaps it allows us a peek or some kind of understanding of what this medium used to be capable of, whether we imagined it or not. Kobayashi’s immediately breathes an actual ethos into Arisu’s own predicament as she struggles to make sense of her own actual life and identity, a sense of authenticity and specificity in the way he depicts characters so naturally even within their own confines, so thoroughly intimate in its own surroundings and bits of character acting that never feels too much, yet its own uncompromising approach to depict life itself, through its gesticulating, eloquent detailing of manners, and shifts in raw expression remains wholly its own.
Ethos is the name of the game here, as every bit of the episode suggests something tethered to Kobayashi’s own worldview, his approach, and his demands that perhaps shoots for the stars too often. But yet even then, it all feels cohesive, and perpendicular to the goals IDOLM@STER had been striving towards, as it becomes not only a shared sense of unity amongst U149 and Arisu’s given meaning into the ideal of idols itself, but this crew’s own belief in breathing life and a worldview into these characters. It provides the kind of vision, of the kind of concision, omission, precision, selection, force, and weight that augments and exaggerates life and reality and the world around, which is why I became so enamored with this medium in the first place. It’s why the episodes I’ve chosen here all adhere to some kind of belief in this philosophy, because it’s the thing that’s near and dear to me.
As Arisu navigates through her conundrum, she remembers of all that is dear to her, her parents warm guiding hand, her seemingly physical manifestation of her dreams, the warm and tactile feeling of the city, her home, her friends around her, and her own strained outbursts. All of it seems to suggest life, and more like it.
Even in the unlikeliest of circumstances, a great year for anime isn’t and shouldn’t be an impossible ideal, despite an industry put upon wedge bets and calculated risks, of compromises and allures, of exploitation and greed. Anime as we know it is at its most fortuitous peak, its ill-conceived growth and popularity has made it to the top of a relative mainstream culture standing, something that feels both trendy and an event for a lot of people, but also a forewarning of its own crisis. None really describes this better than 2022, an oddly packed year with some of the most stand out productions in recent years, if not of modern anime entirely of its recency, showing that despite this industry crumbling on its own feet; its status as a beautiful cornerstone of pop culture residing between the subculture and mainstream can still shine, if ever so faintly.
With so many shows that stood out, it was hard to pin down a summary that accurately described how impressive this year was for me in general. So to sadly compromise, I had to choose a handful of shows that really left a mark on me, of things that I felt importance to mark, and of things that I felt were underrepresented and unloved.
The Orbital Children (Mitsuo Iso)
Despite the legendary Mitsuo Iso not being blessed with the fortune to realize so many of his grand projects, his influence is evergreen, as his realist and perfectionist tendencies have always been the benchmark of so many great then and now animators; an impressive career for someone in an industry that always seems to be in flux, where it feels like pocketfuls of history disappears within a tap, where only the present wins. That’s why to see his grand return with The Orbital Children was a huge surprise, to say nothing of an icon still willing to realize his beliefs about technology and the uncertain future, his ideas still feeling at once old fashioned in its upbringing but also prescient of the world around him.
For this reason, The Orbital Children’s premise of a group of kids trying to survive amidst a disaster approaching a gigantic space station, as they discover a past where humanity had left behind all its collective hopes and dreams of a future, is so affecting in its exacting detail and portrayal of a contemporary reality, a futuristic setting that feels as grand and lived in as it suggests. To say nothing of its depiction of a Generation Z cast, nurtured and influenced by an era of technological convenience, social media, and a both optimistic and cynical view of their futures. The Orbital Children doesn’t have the breadth and ease of scope of his grand opus, Dennou Coil, but in place has an thoroughness and tether to reality that none of his peers can match in its concision; zero-g shenanigans portrayed with a sheer density of volume and weight, establishing shots and layouts matching the grandiosity and realism of a consumer space station stretching far and wide, an immediacy and exaggeration of put-ons, tics, and small gestures that make his cast feel whole, but suggests worldviews and backgrounds that don’t seem out of reach.
None what defines modern sci-fi seems to really define Iso’s outlook, a 21st century timeline with a 20th century attitude, a pristine modern sheen clouded over cold and efficient industrialism, even moreso with the consumerist driven bent of brands, social media, and relative ease that casts over The Orbital Children’s space station and now-present future, sleek and intuitive, believable but mysterious.
Do it Yourself! (Kazuhiro Yoneda)
The iyashikei/slice of life/nichijou-kei genre that once prospered over a time feels like a distant past in a present now covered with suffocation of shows trying to be the next megahit, usually tending to action, (isekai) fantasy, sci-fi, romantic comedy or some incoherent amalgamation of either. The belabored days of that bygone era where shows about ordinary life and an appreciation of the mundane are long gone, even barring the few exceptions that pop up; such as Yuru Camp, Yama no Susume, or Non Non Biyori, even equally important are the stewards of the genre themselves, Kyoto Animation, still intently waving that flag as their banner and cause. One still feels like the ship has sailed, as sad as it sounds.
Do It Yourself! comes through with a throwback to that era like nothing else, while bringing in a worldview that speaks to our time and generation that feels potent and perennial. Whereas some slice of life stresses the important of relationships and the mundane world around you, Do it Yourself is a bit more closer to the broad hobbyist subgenre of slice of life, where people come together due to the base of their hobbies, as it becomes a pretext to the pleasures of niceties and connections due to shared compassions.
But DIY’s insistence and belief in the importance of harmony and handmade art is what separates it from the pack, as it comes through every facet of its design, its soft, pastel-colored labored backgrounds, awash with cool and warm tones, delicate and round, sleek and puffy character designs that radiate warmth and familiarity, brought to life with a delicacy and authenticity to their character acting that prioritizes a specificity to the cast. The DIY mentality isn’t just a formality, it becomes a ideal for the cast to come together to broaden their perspective of the world around them, in which their passions for woodwork and construction contribute to a gentle tactility that makes the world feel lived in. It’s a kind of beauty that can only be made through this deliberate collaboration of elements, of something that unifies them together, as much as the DIY mindset brings together the cast in their passions.
What comes through is not just a cut and dry hobby slice of life show, but a show that understands that slice of life is sometimes more than a subject it devotes to, but of moments in time, memories, and our day to day lives; to just be with the world and people around you, to chill and take it easy.
Bocchi the Rock! (Keiichiro Saito)
Bocchi the Rock is propelled by its youthful, playful exuberance that is supported by its equally ambitious and rowdy new web generation crew, hopped up on infusion of influences from animation history, otaku culture, movies, video games, and internet and video art. Whereas their previous generation privileged an expression of spectacle and raw expressionism, Saito and Kerorira seem more likely to privilege authenticity and impressions of moments; evoking a feeling of life and character rather than just imitate reality, and none show this more than trying to best ground Bocchi’s rather darkly comedic take on social anxiety, cynicism, and isolation into something into a universal coming of age story about growth and interpersonal relationships, all wrapped up in a story about a band coming together in the springtime of their youth.
What becomes of Bocchi the Rock’s relative simple premise blossoms into different visual registers and tones of a loner’s headspace, where emotional wholes become a playground to depict youth at its peak in all of its wild sensations. From claymation, live action film, glitch art and pixel art, stylized chibi art, comic book half tones and cross hatching, cut outs, cel-anime throwbacks, realist character acting to cartoony exaggeration and slapstick, the list goes on in the repertoire of Saito and crew: anything and everything can and will be used to depict the headspace of Bocchi and the gang’s hopes, dreams, worries and anxieties in trying to depict them sincerely in their depiction to bandom, especially in its much immaculately constructed musical scenes, finely tuned to the barest essentials in depicting them at its utmost mo-capped authenticity. Its insistence in never sticking to the same repertories might figure youth in its own way, it’s electrifying and never settles.
Although other slice of life shows made an earnest focus on the specific pleasures of the everyday, Bocchi the Rock’s lax and carefree energy comes down to a thin focus to how a slice of life show can instead be how the mundane can be contained to specifics such as Bocchi’s viewpoint: she thinks aloud, figuratively and literally, overthinking any situation that she sees fit, overpowering and intense in its presence with how the show visualizes them. Such becomes a precarious balancing act of playing up sensitive ideas of social anxiety and anti social behavior with a wry laugh and smile, at once never glossing over the inherent shortcomings of Bocchi’s personality, all the while giving ample development that allows her to open up and ultimately connect with others. But for every bit of nervous, sincere introspection for Bocchi’s own growth, it’s undercut with brash asides and stylization in its over the top comedy. It comes across as overwrought in its flippancy, playing the same blunt, comic and dramatic effect, over and over; sometimes too strained to convey something real about her inherent issues, sometimes straying too far to acknowledge something emotionally sincere. Thus, the basis of Bocchi the Rock’s themes may be universal and always relevant, but its unconventional presentation can feel pompous and narrow at times, especially for something so conventional in of itself. Perhaps only then can Bocchi’s own worldview feel as realized as it does, never wanting to be one or the other, clammed up but always looking forward.
Likewise, Saito and Kerorira sure might envision the Kessoku Band in their specific tics and demeanor in their individuality, but one can’t shake the feeling how it feels like they are at the whim of so many different artists’ wild interpretations as well as their own. Nijika, Ryo, and Kita do form the basis of Bocchi’s own growth and connections, but the show’s balance of trying to make them out to be fully formed individuals that truly do connect with each other on a personal level can feel a bit shaky when they’re always being propped up as actors for Bocchi the Rock’s never-ending antics and bits. Its sense of experimentation might often be lauded, synthesizing so many discordant stylistic elements into a purposeful blend—but what comes off is a sort of chaotic mush that strips all meaning besides the bottom line. The form and expression of many its experimentation in animation, storyboarding, and layouts are only what comes through to impress upon the viewer knowingly, not their actual characters related or defined in those moments, a scant of suggestion or nuance never really there.
Without the risk of allowing these characters to shine beyond the show’s experimentation, its boxed-in, claustrophobic 4-koma origins start to show, and if these are the limitations of 4-koma manga, then K-ON!! wouldn’t have been great as it was. It almost feels like at times it could not fully trust in them, to trust in their characters individuality to shine, despite truly trying to do so; Nijika’s confiding with Bocchi about her dreams, Ryo talking about the power of music being personal and real, Kita’s growing trust and admiration in the band and Bocchi herself, all moments that allowed them the space to be themselves, moments that were all too rare. What we’re left with is a show that feels hermetically sealed and closed off, a coming of age slice of life story without much of the detailing and incidental life arising from the spontaneity between people and the mundanity of life itself, a convenience that plays with only the barest essentials of its coming of age narrative and nothing more—the mark of an artist’s heavy breathing and gratified effort that loudly pronounces all of its overt meaning, just look at the conspicuous foreshadowing the show is already blunt about in its structure. Bocchi has already grown, don’t you already see?
Thus becomes a show that seems to unknowingly feel fleeting and transient, that for all its ideas of growth becoming something more than yourself, its boisterous ideas sometimes feel at odds with its conventional structure, its showiness overpowering the personal, its chaotic sense of harmony never fully finding that worldview it deeply wants to match. Saito’s then individualist approach doesn’t seem to offer an specific emotional sensibility like their peers Shin Wakabayashi or Shingo Natsume aim to do where everything comes together as a perceived whole, blossoming into something special, but possibly one that offers violent ruptures of beauty; never settling comfortably.
Perhaps Bocchi’s self conscious and slapdash style has more in common with Saito than one thinks, much like how how Bocchi is wanting to find her own direction in life, Saito might still be trying to find his own, even if it might be imperfect.
Vampire in the Garden (Ryotaro Makihara)
Vampire in the Garden is unusual in its conception, a wholly original work completely scripted and boarded by Ryotaro Makihara, a folk legend in his own right that worked on high profile Crayon Shin-chan and Doraemon films, as well being a budding partner to Masaaki Yuasa’s earlier projects. While known for his grounded, relatively pared down style that wants to best capture something in its relative motion, balanced and exhaustive in their depiction; Vampire in the Garden is anything but, being a post-apocalyptic action melodrama that’s parts sheer modern effects driven spectacle and parts 2000s loose and realist I.G. sensibility. This even extends to its strangely absurd setting, a somewhat indistinguishable mixture of a 1960s Soviet Union era industrial backdrop and 1800s Victorian opulence with totalitarian overtones, with Tetsuya Nishio’s loose and three-dimensional character designs feeling out of place and out of time.
All this forms into a rousing drama of mismatched youth who had been born in the wrong time, a human and a vampire feeling like misfits of their own respective, repressive society that does not value individuality, overworking themselves to the bone, if they’re not already killing off each other by the dozens. Vampire in the Garden wastes no time getting into the specifics, as its relative 5 episode format becomes a cornerstone of its economy of narrative and style, compressing whole fragments of sheer spectacle without sacrificing how attentive and thorough it can still be, even as it spirals out of control of its own world and its characters. It’s a work that best expresses how powerful the realist movement was, something that best evokes the feeling of life, through Momo and Fine’s anguish and propulsion through the particulars, an intimate palm gripped, a grimace perceived with despair, of hands pushing against back the world with everything they have.
Lycoris Recoil (Shingo Adachi)
Trying to conceive an original anime in an industry that is prone to compromises and disasters feel like a fool’s errand, a torrential of dashed hopes and worries that can never hope to fully live up to any perceived expectations. Even then, it’s only original anime that can dare to stand out and leave a mark that nothing else can. Shingo Adachi’s Lycoris Recoil stands out above the pack for its absurd premise, its chaotic production, and a director willing to go all in, gleeful in his amateurish energy. Which is why Lycoris Recoil’s absurd premise of a borderline secret police organization of cute girls becomes the basis of not just conventional drama, but predicaments of life, how to best help others and to appreciate life, overcoming the pressure to be something you’re not, and compassion in an unkind world. This, along with Adachi and co’s predilections of action films, slice of life and yuri anime, and noir mystery, becomes something of a smorgasbord of chaotic tones and ideas, but finds something central in the main duo, Chisato and Takina.
Only through Chisato and Takina does Lycoris Recoil finds a core to latch onto, as both become tried and true best buds, but also help highlight each other’s flaws and virtues that become the backdrop of the drama of Lycoris Recoil, both willing to lean on each other as they both grow up in an unkind world, both knowingly realize their positions as tools and weapons, but willing to fight against that.
The show’s then chaotic mixture of ideas becomes something to funnel through Chisato and Takina’s viewpoint, as they grappled with forces beyond their control, as much as the show’s sensitive focus on their relationship is just as important, the show’s fastidiousness and attentive care in how they are depicted; with Chisato’s sloven and energetic demeanor becomes a means to balance out Takina’s stern and stoic nature, calculating and deliberate in her actions and demeanor. Lycoris Recoil’s apex comes through Tetsuya Takeuchi’s episode, a breathless and mundane comedy episode about Chisato and Takina coming together to come hang out, Takeuchi’s immediacy becomes central in nailing their nuance and intimacy, their relationship blossoming into something special, even if their circumstances were anything but.
Henceforth, the show grappling to find something central that ties all this together becomes equally frustrating and invigorating, which becomes at worst cloying and hypocritical of what it had built up, but at best honest and true to its characters that it probably ever could have been. Chisato’s insistence that she would rather help those personal around them, and that the world isn’t of her concern, might best describe Lycoris Recoil’s ideals—that the world is of what one makes of it, especially of a minor work in a big world.
2022 feels like the year of nostalgia in a lot of ways, with a lot of year’s best shows tackling that sense of familiarity with a lot of knowing throwbacks, either in their aesthetics or tone. Teppen takes on the mantle of nostalgia of feeling like a throwback to 2000s anime comedies, with a zippy and frenetic tone and early flat, but bright and colorful digital paint aesthetic that favors angular, heavily stylized character designs that’s always emoting in its extreme antics and exaggeration. Even its storyboarding feels archaic, playing around with ornate and playful sense of direction, with use of onscreen text and reaction faces bubbles and split screens and extravagant close ups, limitations that can make characters feel alive in their own right. Moreso, it outright plays up dated references such as Mission Impossible and 24 parodies, old 2ch memes, Naruto Shippuden, old mecha and toku references that one wonders if the nostalgic affections really are sincere.
Teppen extends this sense of nostalgia to its setting and premise, where a group of manzai comedians enrolled in a boarding house strive to win a “Grand Prix” that’ll take them to stardom. But that’s the sheer extent the premise even goes so far, when the real meat and bones is how it uses the premise as an excuse for the characters to hang out and goof off, many of its great episodes are atypical in their episodic lunacy. “An episode where the Invaders have a nearly 20 minute monologue as they constantly loop on a bus.” “A tokusatsu play involving every group in the show that ends in disaster.” “A hot springs episode that continually gets more absurd to the point a murder mystery happens.” These episodes typify the sort of breezy and absurdist comedy that Shinji Takamatsu became a peerless master of, which Teppen is no short supply. It gives off the vibe of even some of the best comedies of its ilk, scant traces of Akazukin Chacha and Goldran are felt throughout. Even amid complaints about this show not being typically funny, its peppering of jokes and absurd punchlines become a way for the pleasures of niceties of character, using the absurdity as a broad, warm characterization for many of its characters. A good joke should make you laugh, but a mediocre one might make you smile all the same.
Chainsaw Man (Ryu Nakayama)
Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Chainsaw Man strangely took the world by storm, it’s brand of offbeat and raunchy humor interspersed with a borderline nihilistic but ultimately heartfelt worldview spoke to a wide audience’s collective desires and anxieties beyond its Weekly Shonen Jump upbringings. Fujimoto’s style was also its source of acclaim, an infusion of all kinds of pop culture so near and dear to him, the likes of popular movies, manga, and anime all put on the same immediate footing: Chainsaw Man being an insane mixture of horror, comedy, action speaks to itself, never settling for any clear tone. Those influences ultimately brought him to a story of a young man dealing with the cruelty and harshness of the world around him; brought to life with the feeling of an explosive, grindhouse B-movie, a stylized and grimy aesthetic with a “cinematic” take that feels spontaneous, an awareness that a camera is capturing every action and moment, his snappy, rhythmic paneling takes advantage of the sequential art of comic books in this way: the scraggly messiness of Chainsaw Man is shown in all of its fervor.
“Cinematic” is the word that, depending on your purview, might have negative or positive connotations. Without going too much into specifics, it’s a tagline for would-be marketers and artists willing to stamp any kind of legitimacy on their work, after all, movies are in-fact the greatest seventh art; so why not take advantage of it?
It wouldn’t be fair to Chainsaw Man’s anime director, Ryu Nakayama, to suggest anything of that sort. But it might help pinpoint how messy and discordant his vision for the adaptation is, being a front and center hyper-realistic take on Fujimoto’s manga. It’s easy to see why Nakayama would ascertain this bold vision so clearly, Fujimoto’s easily greatest influence is cinema and its properties to capture life, and Nakayama took it to heart to use the foundation to build something that is unique for an animated adaptation.
I say fairly, because animation’s penchant for photorealism isn’t new, whether we’re going from the Classical Hollywood tradition of character driven animation to the late 80s-90s realist movement that got kickstarted with Akira, commercial animation had always been tackling the idea of “realism” and how to best capture that in animation. Nakayama’s vision was a work that got away from all the concessions of the limited view of Japanese animation, all the short hands, stylization, and exaggerations gone from the ether; only the sheer thoroughness and volume of bodies and gestures in motion matter; only a sense of physicality and tether to reality in its direction and storyboarding matter; only an understated art direction that emphasizes the overcast, muted palette of its world matter.
It was then an adaptation for all its good will, appropriately had sanded down the edges and ambiguities that the manga had, despite staying by as close to the script as possible. Saying it’s restrained isn’t even appropriate description, since Nakayama’s vision is anything but. It’s an adaptation fighting against its born source material with its good will and ill intentions, a distorted Chainsaw Man where a lot of its vapid, raunchy sensibilities had been replaced with faux A24 gloss and pretension (telling of Nakayama and crew’s preferences!), telegraphing a lot of its intentions and technical brio in such an overblown, if not immaculate way. But at the same time, it captures a discordance that was still at the core of Chainsaw Man itself; a contemporary reality not just born out of cruelty, but indifference and listlessness, the overcast tones and realist vibe capture an impending sense of loneliness like no other, so when the blood and guts start flying; the energy really does snap into place.
But even then, despite it all, it still feels confused. To say nothing of the numerous inventive EDs, as well as Gosso’s episode 8 and Yoshihira’s episode 10 respectively that capture Fujimoto’s madness better than anything else, they’re still exceptions in a show overtly controlled by Nakayama’s bewitching vision. Nakayama’s take may be as immaculate and densely as it shows and suggests, but it might be best in those moments where it takes a risk, submitting to the madness of it’s ludicrous, lowbrow origins.
On Air Dekinai! (Jun Aoki)
On Air Dekinai! comes from the mad genius of Pop Team Epic, Jun Aoki, who steadily came onto the scene with his band of indie connections and rebel rousers to produce an anthology-esque comedy series that played against the grain of TV anime in inventive ways. While Pop Team Epic represents the chaotic fervor that deliberately plays up the limitations of TV anime and the absurdity of popular culture in fun ways, On Air Dekinai might represent a surprisingly understated register from him, focusing on the particulars of an TV AD trying to endure the madness and rush of the behind the scenes of a perpetually busy TV station.
In other words, in place of Pop Team Epic’s flippant jumbles of styles, On Air Dekinai settles on Jun Aoki’s clean, simplistic and cartoony style that favors a sort of an immediacy in which raw expression comes across through clearly with his predilections of gross exaggerations, wild antics, and odd, sometimes diminutive proportions. What comes into place is a genuine feel of his characters, something that feels rooted in a sense of lived experience that comes through strongly also in its depiction of the specifics of the TV station crew and the bizarre jobs they take, each dealing with what feels like genuine, loosely based accounts of a TV station crew. On Air Dekinai might as a whole feel too uniform to his other works, but one where Aoki’s raw sensibility really shines with how naturally funny he can be in playing up the ridiculousness of his characters and premise alone, Mafuneko continually biting the dust and consorting with their awful bad luck comes alive through the way Aoki makes their reactions and acting feel effortlessly funny, and strangely sympathetic.
Tatami Time Machine Blues (Shingo Natsume)
Tatami Galaxy was an eclectic take on the time loop conceit, one of which a selfish and introverted college student started reliving his college days, the drama predicating on the fact that he would never find peace and joy no matter what he did, which became a conceit of its own of intense self-reflection of missed chances and regrets. Yuasa’s take on the material was warped and audacious, a perfect representation of someone overeager to get what he wants, abstracted to the point of stupidity of the follies of his youth; never quite the person to stand around and look at things in a different way.
Tatami Time Machine Blues flips the script, quite literally, by grounding everything with a tether to reality, making the eponymous boarding house an actual real place that feels tangible and alive. Rather than feeling hectic, it feels relaxed. Rather than the cold and unforgiving seasons of Fall and Winter, it takes place in the everlasting Summer, feeling effortlessly languid and listless in its atmosphere. Most of all, Watashi is a loner here, but surrounded by loving friends, which includes an even chummy and affable Ozu. Even the time machine conceit is used as more of a comedic take on how different perspectives are the cornerstone of our understanding of the world and people, exuding a sense of continuity that sparks a tension in its narrative that Tatami Galaxy couldn’t ever do. It’s effectively far more cozy, spending a lot of its downtime playing around with the dynamics of the cast, with the time machine drama just being a goofy way for the characters to goof around and learn more about each other all the while.
It might be another “timeline” in Tatami Galaxy’s wheelbarrow, but Tatami Time Machine Blues sings the original’s virtues all the way, by not just honoring its legacy, but adding onto it with eager eyes.
Yama no Susume: Next Summit (Yusuke Yamamoto)
Yama no Susume’s evolution from a bite sized, cutesy slice of life all about the pleasures of hiking, to a fully developed coming of age story about maturity and growth and the beauty of the natural world, has been an exciting one. Yusuke Yamamoto’s great love of the outdoors and natural amicability that colors his work, which is often underrated how much of a great director he is in his depiction of the mundane, and his elaborate structure that highlights the growth of the cast, that has steadily become far more developed and nuanced these past 3 seasons that other slice of life wish they could do.
If not for him, it’s the absurdly powerful team surrounded by Yuusuke Matsuo, a Kyoto Animation expat who had grown a sizable reputation for being a strong designer but also great character animator, a strong sensibility rooted in the particulars of everyday life and people, a depiction that feels natural and at ease. Yama no Susume represents this sensibility best, as not only does it depict hiking in all its struggles and pleasures, but the growth at which the cast becomes so attuned and experience in their hobby but also life itself. By the fourth season, Yama no Susume’s greatest strength becomes how the gradual passing of time has paved the way to the slow maturity of its characters, either physically or mentally, which becomes apparent with the way different animation directors and animators take on their characters in various ways, giving them life in ways they are shown in a different perspective and style.
By the fourth season, things feel as routine as they ever could be, as Aoi and her friends had settled into their respective passions and friend groups so cozily in a way that feels rewarding as it is touching. It seems as if things could never change, as we settle into their routines once more: a cold and breezy fall winter, warm tea, good friends.
Mob Psycho 100 III (Yuzuru Tachikawa/Takahiro Hisui)
Mob Psycho’s anime adaptation has been the lofty peak most productions have been wanting to aspire to, but shamefully can’t. An adaptation led by the wide-eyed Yuzuru Tachikawa, an ambitious director with a pompous swagger that’s eager to break the norms with a team coming off the streak of Space Dandy and Concrete Revolutio with an aspiration to crush One Punch Man, it’s easy to see the collective energy coming together to make some of the most ambitious projects in modern anime.
Tachikawa saw and felt that Mob Psycho 100 was a mundane, messy world brought to life by the collective absurdity and eccentricity around them, so he saw fit to imbue the adaptation with something that springs to life with sheer color and energy yet grounded enough not to break away from what it wanted to tell: an understanding and appreciation of a chaotic world. Mob Psycho’s adaptation might come alive through the way it breaks against the norms of polish and unity, but it’s always unified in the form of traditional animation, where raw movement itself is what properly characterizes theme and characters, so that even when Miyo Sato’s paint on glass comes onto screen, what we feel is not just the raw expression of the form, but what it characterizes said expression or character in that moment. We’re jolted because it defines those characters, not overpower them.
Even though this approach has its limitations in feeling closed in and uniform, especially of Mob Psycho S2 itself, where watching the much beloved Mogami climax leaves one a bit wanting, a cacophony of incredible layouts and character and effects animation that’s dulled by its voyeuristic over eagerness to show off, it still retains a bit at its core how much it prioritizes theme, character, narrative, and how it can come alive.
Mob Psycho 100 III feels like a team that’s grown as much as Mob does, even highlighting how much he’s gotten much better through little bits of character acting and direction, more confident in his gait and walk, more open in his attitude and approach to people, as much as how the Tachikawa and co had gotten more confident and assured in telling this story. That’s why arcs like Broccoli and ???% are imbued with such nuance and confidence in the way spectacle can be a form for the characters grand emotions and ideals, Ekubo’s final fight soars because of the anguish and physicality on display, his emotions crying out, never breaking away from his perspective. Mob’s breakdown is challenged by people like Teruki, who’s solemn plea to mob is elevated by the sheer conviction in Teru’s gaze and body language, gripping everything he’s got as the world gets torn asunder, fleeting away.
But perhaps none show this better than the UFO episodes, one of the few moments in Mob Psycho that’s strictly comedic, where Mob and his friends get first contact with actual aliens; dopey and lanky looking weirdos with cute button eyes that even despite their strange appearance, Mob and friends become welcoming to them as they hang out and learn about each other. It’s delicate and natural, a conveying of people coming together intimately as mundanely as it could be, so that when the boisterous after credits scene of Inukawa being kidnapped happens, it’s still as familiar and sincere as it ever could be.
Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer (Nobuaki Nakanishi)
What makes a good adaptation? If it’s faithful, sticking to the source material closely as it could, even steadfastly copying panels wholesale? Or maybe if it takes a direction of its own, preferably under a capable director who could take it under their wing and make it their own? Or maybe it’s a mix of both, something that strongly takes consideration of its chosen medium and how to properly adapt it to such, while preserving the spirit of the original work? Perhaps it’s something that can only be judged on a case by case basis, as it depends on the work at hand.
Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer covers none of these.
Being a cult hit manga off an equally beloved cult author, Satoshi Mizukami, Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer is a prime essential 2000s shonen manga work, using the base of action battle manga as pretense for a coming-of-age story about people learning what it means to live and grow up, all amidst during an absurd apocalyptic scenario. It’s easy to see why people were clamoring for an anime adaptation of some kind, an adaptation that was willing to realize its potential for good. Rumors spoke out even amongst Mizukami himself, who had hopes for an anime dashed twice, one being ill conceived timing and the other at the mercy of committees and sponsors, who were quick to nail the project down before it even got going.
Flash forward to today, where an industry wracked with overproduction, disasters, and copious amounts of labor issues than ever before, comes an announcement of a Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer anime in 2022. The results were as expected of a niche cult manga finally getting an anime, it was poorly planned and managed; being handled by a primarily outsourcing studio who only recently taken under main productions of their own, but a director brought out of semi-retirement that hadn’t directed much of anything in the past 10 years, put two and two together and much of what was known can only be surmised as an unequivocal incoming disaster. Not only that, but it was a whopping 24 episodes, which is now conceived as practically unmanageable in this current climate.
Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer’s anime comes as a pragmatic lesson about how much this industry will throw anything under the bus if it allows them, and Biscuit Hammer’s broken production of melting in-betweens, messy layouts and background work that have no perspective or depth, extremely rushed and poor key animation and storyboarding that seems to drain any depth or emotion from the source material. Combine that with the fact this is still 24 episodes, where the staff are absolutely suffering to make ends meet, which is evident from the fact that they’re not able to finish episodes in time for broadcast, resulting in retakes and corrections that can’t change what is essentially a disaster.
It may be one of the worst anime in recent memory, if not of all time, squandering every little good bit to the detriment of its handling of its staff. The worst of it all, it affects nobody but the people working on it, nothing but a whimper, another bad footnote in an industry filled with them.
Honorable Mentions
These are shows I also loved, but couldn’t or didn’t want to flesh them out into bigger pieces.
Extreme Hearts (Junji Nishimura)
Masaki Tsuzuki’s new original anime pertaining to idol and extreme sports is as fascinating as it suggests, and as wild as the best of Nanoha could be, but its shamefully short length never fully reconciles the ambition of the premise. However, its sense of amicability and showmanship, as well as sheer fun it exhibits, make for a good time.
Akiba Maid War (Soichi Masui)
PA Works might be a shambling corpse that never got its promised heyday in the sun after the Maquia incident, but Horikawa still sees fit to try and do original anime, which is always appreciable. Akiba Maid War is the next fit in that piece, an ultraviolent bender that combines the sleaze of Akihabara and influence of Nikkatsu-Toei yakuza movies. It’s a late night anime that earns its title, as its episodic hijinks get more and more unhinged as the show goes on, even developing into a genuine homage and somewhat satirical take to its influences, the myths and values of the yakuza movies contrasted with a dash of feminine, cutesy aesthetic dressed over it, making it seem as ludicrous as it does affecting.
Machikado Mazoku 2-Choume (Hiroaki Sakurai)
Discounting the masterful Mewkledreamy, Machikado Mazoku is far and away Sakurai’s best work in years. Machikado gets to the core of Sakurai’s vibrant and dry, but warm and benevolent sensibilities perfectly, as well as Shamiko and Momo being some of the richest characters he’s ever really handled (Sorry Di Gi Charat-heads, I got your back still). What comes through is a work that is brimming with energy despite feeling so limited, and a benevolence that doesn’t feel dishonest, but a genuine core of the work.
Love Live! Nijigasaki S2 (Tomoyuki Kawamura)
Nijigasaki is a work that could never really stand up to the mainline Love Live series on a purely production level, but Nijigasaki takes risks the mainline Love Live series never really could. Although far weaker than S1, Kawamura’s more understated take on Love Live still comes through with some standout episodes, as well as peerless character driven focus where practically every character shines in their own way.
Princess Connect! Re:Dive Season 2 (Takaomi Kanasaki)
I don’t think it’s controversial to say the Princess Connect anime is one of the best mobile game adaptations ever conceived at this point, Kanasaki’s dry slacker humor livens up what would primarily be a harem comedy into a work that stresses the importance of genuine friendship, giving it a work with a worldview it could’ve never had. Although it slacks in comparison to S1’s focus due its dry insistence on its lore, the airy and goofy comedy episodes along with the more bombastic, animator cavalcade action episodes can still go toe to toe with S1’s best.
Cool Doji Danshi (Chiaki Kon)
Cool Doji Danshi has that josei-muke genre dressed all over it, pretty boys galore going about their day, but at its core is a very relaxed, endlessly relatable slice of life show about male friendship and the manners we go about awkward social situations in our day to day lives. Supported by an equally pleasant, delicate aesthetic befitting of its josei/shoujo origins that underscores life in its lighthearted moments even when we bluster about, and you got yourself something genuinely refreshing among the crop.
My Dress-Up Darling (Keisuke Shinohara)
One of the better “girl teases boy” romantic comedies, Dress-Up Darling achieves something at its core that its competitors seem to lack: an approach to actual intimacy and love. It helps that our leads are more than just charismatic foils, they feel like genuine, defined characters that are propelled by the fastidious depiction of their relative contrasts and demeanors, which only makes the romance all the more believable and sweeter as they grow from another.
Kaguya-sama wa Kokurasetai -Ultra Romantic- (Mamoru Hatakeyama)
Essentially the finale for Kaguya-sama’s anime itself, Hatakeyama’s final goodbye to Kaguya is his overall funniest, as his crew put some of the funniest and most inventive episodes in the entire series, even while the production was under duress, the SHAFT school coming alive even more than usual. Hatakeyama’s peak might not be for Rakugo or Rozen Maiden, but the rap battle in Episode 5, which is king shit.
Summer Time Render (Ayumu Watanabe)
As far as blockbuster shounen adaptations go, Ayumu Watanabe’s Summer Time Render puts a good rap in playing up its thriller dressing to its breaking point. Watanabe being a grade A craftsman as he is, a lot of Summer Time Render’s best virtues is in the way it appreciates all the plastic, base pleasures of the thriller conceit in animation. The kind of work that’s entertaining in its craft because of its efficiency and no nonsense in delivering a good yarn. It might be shallow, but it’s continuously interesting, with its pointed storyboarding and layouts playing around background and foreground in audacious ways, canted angles and panning and use of fixed shots to the extreme, close ups so suffocating they feel right out of a Yamauchi anime, the buzz of cicadas emblazoned with the streak of motion blur or transmitted light.
INU-OH (Masaaki Yuasa)
Masaaki Yuasa’s beautiful tale of art and its relinquishing freedom and passion it can exhibit, even as it can come crashing down and misunderstood. It’s also heartbreakingly a goodbye, a kind of overt bleakness shrouds over it even despite of its optimism. A movie where animation is as free as it could be, movement and dynamism being at the forefront. Right and truly, my favorite anime of the year.
Just kidding, the best anime of the year is actually Donbrothers.
Just dumping my personal list on here for record keeping and to organize it in a presentable manner. No real salient thoughts, but I’d like to write some sometime. I actually have a ton of lists like these and have thought about dumping all of them here, but I’m lazy so nah, maybe though, the idea sounds pretty fun.
TV Anime
Sonny Boy (Shingo Natsume)
2. Heike Monogatari (Naoko Yamada)
3. Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid S (Tatsuya Ishihara/Yasuhiro Takemoto)
4. Uma Musume S2 (Kei Oikawa)
5. SSSS.DYNAZENON (Akira Amemiya)
6. Tropical-Rouge! Precure (Yutaka Tsuchida)
7. SK8 (Hiroko Utsumi)
8. Odd Taxi (Baku Kinoshita)
9. Super Cub (Toshiro Fujii)
10. The aquatope on white sand (Toshiya Shinohara)
I played a hell of a lot of games this year, so much to the point that I’ve finished more games this year than any other year; so, to practice my writing, I decided to challenge myself to write about a selection of games I played this year that really left an impression on me. While it was tempting to write about every game I played this year, I wanted to make it a bit easier on myself since I’m a malcontent who already dislikes his own writing enough as it is. So for my purposes this was a good compromise, just so in case I don’t end up abandoning all my writing like I usually do. Basically, this is going to be more off the cuff and jumbled than I’d like, but I think that’ll be a fun way to write for me. This is also in no way ranked in any order of quality, just to put it out there.
With all that said, I hope you enjoy what I’ve written, it’s probably not every good, but it was fun.
Madworld
Madworld is an interesting curioso from the heydays of the Wii’s middle period, a no-frills M rated beat-em-up that took no compromise from the promising ex talents of Clover Studio? Surely the success spoke for itself.
Sadly it spoke for itself too soon, as it was swiftly derided as an crude mediocre effort that couldn’t even stand up to the other Wii exclusives of its time, especially for something so gabbed and hyped up about for the rare M-rated Wii game from a cadre of great ex-Clover talent. Specters of the same criticism popped up and followed it everywhere it went; it was a shallow, style over substance title that relied too much on its structural and mechanical gimmickry that felt way too simple and relaxed, its saving grace is its high strung edgy 90s western comics influence and stylization, ala Frank Miller and Sin City and The Punisher and its vulgar, hardcore hip hop soundtrack. But even then, the question begged if its glamorous, irreverent take on hyper-violence was that any different amongst other triple A bloodshed spectacle at the time, its gaudiness almost unflattering to most eyes.
Having revisited it this year, I was struck by how unflinching it is, the chromatic black and white sharp 90s American comic book art direction with the grotesque, burly and exaggerated character designs only complimented the no fuss arcade gameplay, its most interesting aspects isn’t how rudimentary it seems, but how much it gives you options and leeway to play around with its fun scoring system. Take Madworld as a traditional action game that expects you to keep up momentum through its movement and input and it seems as shallow as it gets, but take Madworld as an arcade action game that goes for maximum thrills and style that focuses on inventive uses of finishers and environmental traps to rack up multiplying combos to give the highest score and thrills, its pleasures are bountiful.
It’s clunky as it gets, and it’s obvious the Wii motion controls could never be as precise as a regular controller would be, but the mere act of motion itself only further engages the player on more visceral and morbid terms. There’s no stop to the boundless anti violent screeds that video games regularly love to posture, but here all you’re expected to do is to maim and torture a sub sector of humanity’s worst ills and freaks, reveling in enough of the absurdity in all of its showy, reality TV glory. There’s almost something more to Madworld’s almost endlessly thrilling and sickening worldview of violence, as there’s a distinctive oppressive tone that permeates through Jack’s cynical monologues in between missions and the callous spectator ship of the DeathWatch games itself of the announcers milking everything for a laugh.
But between the game’s desire of ramping up the gore and challenges for fun and profit and the narrative seeking to expose the sorry state of the world it inhabits; it only seeks to see if there’s really an end to all of this madness, if there’s really anything more to get out of it.
Ace Combat 6
Ace Combat 6 is a gauchely sentimental and naïve war story, more hopeful about its ideas of courage and selflessness in a time of great strife than the implications and destruction of warfare itself. This really coalesces into one of the most ambitious Ace Combat games in terms of sheer scale, focusing on the spectacle of a war raging on, narratively, mechanically, and structurally.
None show this more than the setup of the missions being large scale operations that feel far more open ended with multiple objectives to consider along with an even increased focus on squad control. It pushes on the idea of being a small part of an undeniably huge war effort even more so in game, where the focus isn’t on small skirmishes anymore, but large-scale ones that have dozens of units and entities on a battlefield, having the player mix and match their priorities on the fly as they so choose. Even if it becomes prone to its own lack of genuine variation and winding structure, Ace Combat 6 inhibits the idea of a propulsive war bursting out of control as fast as it peters out far more viscerally than its peers, the dread and anticipation of war being as thrilling as it gets.
Likewise, AC6’s story continues the track of providing different narrative devices to show different perspectives that follow the ongoing conflict, but instead of focusing more intently on the player’s journey of their resulting escapades, AC6 decides to focus on different figures who are affected, indirectly or directly, of the ongoing conflict as it progresses throughout. These reach from a disgraced military general, a doting mother who’s lost her child, a troubled lover worried about their spouse, disenchanted soldiers seeking to claim gold, and even moments involving the opposing Strigon ace team, all showing small little moments and perspectives in a way Ace Combat understands best. Even then, this became a point of contention, as it became prone to being disconnected and listless without much connection to the player and the actual narrative, notwithstanding its oft cited campy dialogue that seems far too earnest and maudlin in nature than usual as it is with AC games. It’s almost understandable, considering AC as a series understands the debilitating and chaotic nature of war better than most games could even try, with AC6 having less bite than many of its contemporaries. Even so, with AC6 being divorced from the baggage of the complexities of the Osean and Belkan histories the franchise regularly pits itself on, it instead focuses on an oddly smaller scale story about the mettle of the human spirit, of courage, selflessness, and cooperation. Especially as its missions find their strengths in genuine large scale affairs that feel rewarding just by participating in them and feeling the weight and escalation of it, like taking down a giant heavy command cruiser, liberating Gracemeria and having a dogfight with the Strigon ace in the middle of it, and being saved in the nick of time after you get trapped behind enemy lines being swarmed by hundreds of enemies.
Other Ace Combat games have done that better, but I believe there’s worth in Ace Combat 6 capturing the feeling being part of something bigger than yourself, of feeling a genuine sense of progress of fighting for peace alongside everyone else, and seeing that blossom.
STALKER: Clear Sky
Whereas Shadow of Chernobyl was a grimy, damp game whose world was an active force that pushed against the player in many ways that accentuated the near post-apocalyptic tone that hung over the game, Clear Sky keenly plays upon the opposite in every way befitting of what a real prequel could be. Clear Sky is a little before the catastrophic event that would define SOC, so it’s brimming with life, warm pastoral scenery amongst slow, industrial decay as nature sets in to retake the land before them, the Zone yet not a dangerous wasteland. Despite many of the factions embroiled in territorial disputes and growing pains, a lot of them are bursting with ambition and enthusiasm in exploring this newfound territory, this shows itself clearly with the Clear Sky faction themselves; a group willing to dedicate their lives learning about the Zone, not destroying it.
All of this reinforce how incredibly lived-in and alive the game world is, as the A-Life system is the most well realized and advanced than it had ever been in any STALKER game, much less most open world games since. You’ll have constant AI territory wars that can constantly change the landscape (which you could even participate!), pocket full of independent STALKERs exploring on their own leisure throughout the world, PDA announcements about small little events happening throughout the world, large swaths of mutants roaming the lands and staking out even their own territory, all acting independently from the player within their own systems. It’s beautiful in ways most open world games haven’t figured out, thinking it must serve in need of the player at all times to keep their attention, which is either filtered through a lot of busy work or needlessly obtuse mechanics like hunger, sleep, temperature, or thirst and breaking the momentum cause you become a slave to it. Clear Sky doesn’t need to answer that question, but instead plays it out with its own world unfolding before the player and how they choose to react to it.
It also makes it one of the most difficult STALKER games, as it becomes far unpredictable and unforgiving than it lets on, having one of the most bizarre loot systems that make items scarcer as the games on, game balance being a tightrope act in how the AI willingly breaks the game in strange ways due to their emergent AI and weapon damage and accuracy, and the gunplay being far more finicky to control with its recoil and hit markers. It quickly becomes apparently that this isn’t a game where the world actively pushes against you in deliberate ways, it’s a game where player must willingly adapt and claw their way out to survive on a moment-to-moment basis, where it gets to the basis of what STALKER does best: making you adapt and think on a moment’s notice on your terms.
Umineko: When they Cry
What do we get out of mystery stories? Is it the thrill of finding out the truth? The exposure of lies and deceit? The comeuppance of criminals getting their just dues? Or maybe it’s the empathy we are instilled when we are confronted with the tragedy and emotion mysteries inherently have?
Umineko seems to want to understand and ponder, not just deliberate and impose, on these questions for how we understand and approach mysteries. For what starts out as a genuine murder mystery about a massacre of a wealthy family and the consequences, large and small, that follow suite from the aftermath of Rokkenjima Massacre, becomes far stranger and more complex, as it continually changes and distorts its own perspective through a veil of different stories, different mysteries that start to draw on the tragedy of the Ushiromiya family.
While the reader is more than welcome to play along and try to figure out the mystery of the massacre on their own terms, it also tries to show the uneasy, catastrophic effects of truth and lies, how neither should be taken on face value, and how much it can distort and warp people’s perspectives and worldviews to the point of insanity. But even as it dives deeply into the effects of truth and lies, it embraces them fully, allowing the story to breathe and explore so many different perspectives and truths, giving weight and nuance to a murder mystery that can’t be neatly categorized and filed inside a box, much like how the Ushiromiya family are far more multifaceted and genuine than they seem. Umineko seems to understand that perhaps mysteries, and how we accumulate our own truths and lies, can be dehumanizing and sensationalizing to how we understand others, despite our need and want for some kind of answer, some kind of meaning to it all. It’s such a grandiose, intricate tale that it’s easy to see why it’s considered Ryukishi07’s grand opus, its sense of gravity and scale expanding far from Higurashi’s small town dynamics to a grand, generational family tragedy that extends far beyond its initial scope.
Much as Umineko concerns itself with wrangling about its own story as a “mystery” and how much if it is “fantasy” or not, it quickly becomes a plea, that there is always more beneath the surface, that there can’t be a “truth”…but many kinds of truths.
Carnevil
Arcade games are a natural extension of what amusement parks really are, thrill rides that focus on intense, short bursts of pleasure and spectacle. Light gun games are a great example of this, a genre so focused on sheer spectacle that much of it is stationed on rails, going through a series of set pieces that requires the player to practice their twitch aiming talents.
Carnevil is one of the purest illustrations of this ideal, being set in a nightmarish, haunted amusement park filled to the brim with the most ghoulish, universal Halloween-esque carnival horrors of slasher villains, killer clowns, mutilated mascots, and the lumbering undead, just to name a few of the many attractions that you’ll see as you’re set on rails, quite literally, armed with a shotgun to destroy everything in sight. The pace is almost nigh unusual for a light gun game as its momentum is at a nonstop speed, going from one screen to the next, cluttered with insane amounts of detail, obscenities, and enemies that becomes overstimulating as it is exhilarating. It represents the best of Midway’s 90s period, a glut of excess spiraling out of control all in the player’s hands.
Drakengard 3
Yoko Taro has gotten an unusual amount of attention and popularity over the years for someone so biting and unconventional, it’s been a real pleasure to see him rise to the top amongst all the other big shots in the industry. Whether or not you think his popularity is earned or not, you can agree that he is absolutely one of a kind, with a track record like the Drakengard 1 and the Nier series being as bold as they are. Even so, as interesting as those titles are, the one game that has yet to still get a sway in the public conscious is Drakengard 3, which also happens to be Yoko Taro’s best game.
Drakengard 3 is the intermittent halfway between the frustrating, broken Drakengard 1 and the more deliberate, focused Nier. There’s an actual structure to the game that branches off more naturally, the combat is a little more fine-tuned for actual combos and variations of moves, the bizarre, open arenas are traded off for smaller, linear segments; just to name a few “quality of life” improvements that this franchise had developed. But even as things get a little more polished, Drakengard 3 still only makes the experience a little more than bearable, the repetition of its design and mechanics and exceedingly janky performance barely running at full power makes for an ultimately strange, often frustrating experience.
It quickly stakes its own identity from the grim, melodramatic theatrics of the first Drakengard and instead opts for an often darkly comedic, absurdist farce. Casual, frivolous banter laced with lowbrow humor, eccentric displays of hyperviolence, horror, and fourth wall gag comedy, exceedingly neurotic characters that take their quirks far and wide to the extreme, and a bombastic manner to the way they take all its irrational ideas come together in Drakengard 3 in a hypnotic way. Drakengard 3 never mistakes itself for anything else, as the pulsing theme of the work is the secretion of violence and madness that permeates through its characters and in its world, even from the offset, as the narrator calmly tries to explain the game’s own backstory, before being outright murdered by its own protagonist in a flippant manner. Zero is an unapologetic murderer trying to take down equally awful people, but it plays it off for laughs in its cynicism; not to downplay said conflict and drama, but to highlight the sheer absurdity of the situation, something the kindly, naïve dragon Mikhail counteracts by giving it a genuine warm center to the work, his naivety a calling card to how much of it is a tragedy as it is a farce.
As it goes on, Drakengard 3 begs the question, what’s the point of all this? Is there really anything meaningful to be found Zero’s vengeance? Even as Drakengard 3 finds itself surprisingly bittersweet conclusion, the answer it finds amongst its flippant bloodshed and madness, is fairly simple:
Meaning has to be found elsewhere.
Sonic Adventure 2
2D platformers must be able to facilitate movement on a flat plane in a concise, organic flow, the early Sonic games are great examples of transforming the obstacle course design philosophy of 2D platformers into something that requires greater precision and momentum, with stage hazard gimmicks and puzzles, multiple routes, and a faster sense of speed being the foundation of what makes the best Sonic games tick. The question then begs itself of how you transform that into 3D, where it becomes three dimensional, expanding a broader view of space, and perhaps thus a broader view of verticality and freedom? Mario 64 after all, reaped the degree of freedom gained from acquiring a 3D space, making a new language with its 360-degree dynamism, a greater sense of immediacy in being in a space.
Sonic never properly understood this question, and it’s up to debate whether or not that became the series downfall to properly adapt to its times. Sonic Adventure 1 was an ambitious curio that took the hub-based system of Mario 64 and transformed that into a more segmented, narrative adventure with similarly linear levels that wanted to capture the zeal of 2D sonic in a 3D space, fast paced, speedy levels that focused intently on a core mechanic for every different story it had (rail shooting, racing, fishing, beat-em-up, and of course platforming). The drive was there, but had yet to blossom into something far more concrete, which is where Sonic Adventure 2 steps in.
Sonic Adventure 2 is the most confident a 3D Sonic game has ever been, doubling down on the foundation set in from Sonic Adventure 1 to really step outside from the pack of 3D platformers who taken the Mario 64 bible to heart. If post-Mario 64 platformers emphasized the freedom and exploration, Sonic Adventure 2 almost borderline narrow focus on sheer speed and movement through linear levels became a reaction to that, having an visceral sense of immediate momentum that requires the player to keep the pace going as much as they can. Speed becomes such strong core of the game that it even starts to extend thematically, an rambunctious genuine adventure story all about racing down to the clock through all the doomsday and nigh apocalyptic incidents rummaging along city streets and military bases and the occasional ancient dungeon, all while having a soundtrack that feels like an amalgamation of trendy 2000s pop hits, techno, reggae, hip hop, garage and punk rock, jazz, you practically name it. It brims with such an fiery, youthful energy that never stops.
Sonic has always been the rebellious, punk reaction to Mario, if only that spirit kept up in modern day as much as Sonic Adventure 2 did.
Rance Quest Magnum
The Rance games have always been a bit hard to offhandedly recommend because of the subculture it spawns from and the flippant and facetious way it handles certain sensitive topics in a casual way. You don’t have to look far to find the memetic images of Rance deliberating on many of his horndog choices, which is as funny a way to accurately describe all sorts of eroge, but maybe one that can go a bit too far giving people their confirmation bias about this medium. In other words, despite Rance being a genuinely interesting and charming fantasy series, its more insidious side is hard to ignore in many aspects. As for me, I love this series, I love spending time with its characters and its genuinely strange, charming world that feels like a blend of contemporary reality, sword and sorcery fantasy, steampunk, cyberpunk, Japanese mythology, and most importantly, otaku culture. Its characters are so wide and vast that it’d be hard to talk about even just a handful of them, but a great amount of them feel like defined and charismatic well-rounded characters that have much greater importance and agency that one might think; which yes, even extends to Rance, who I find charming and heroic as much as a total shithead sleaze.
I feel that’s why Rance Quest Magnum is the perfect distillation of the series, which trades the more grand scale narrative driven stuff like Sengoku Rance or Rance 6 for a series of episodic adventures exploring its world and characters in a relaxed way. Magnum isn’t defined by a series of narrative beats and peaks (though it does have that, despite having no actual plot), but more about small little events and moments as you go through the gargantuan number of quests. A lot of times, it feels like a great hang out game, where the comedic banter and gags of Rance and his crew feel like the focus as much as the outfitting and leveling your team and exploring dungeons is the main focus. They also don’t just have to focus on Rance, but many, many of the side characters and party members you meet throughout the game, having their own developments and moments that feel like they build on the tapestry of the game’s eccentric world, even tackling fairly serious ideas like living in a world with malice and trying to see the good in it. This all really adds up to a game that’s insanely chock filled with content, leading to a game that’s practically 100+ hours in length considering the amount of quests and scenes to see, which sounds enough like a commitment, but the breeziness and relaxed structure and tone of the game doesn’t make it feel like a chore, but a rambunctiously fun time with no frills.
Like all the best Rance games, they all particularly nail the genre they hone in on for that entry. For the dungeon crawling RPG, it’s a endlessly charming game that feels like you’re at home with its characters and world.
Cyberpunk 2077
When it comes to the vicious hype cycle of the standardized triple A title, people can be understandably irked when the expectations don’t match up to the perception already built up for it. Cyberpunk 2077 became another unlikely proponent of it, being scrutinized for its promises, hype, and reputation stemming from a long development cycle and a much beloved, artist driven consumer first studio. Everywhere it got clamped down for every little thing, its messy state of the game taken the first pot shots as it was an understandably unoptimized mess filled to the brim with bugs and inconsistencies within its design, to say nothing of the fact that its much touted scale and freedom promised within its RPG design felt nothing but half-baked empty promises, its cyberpunk setting made out to be nothing but empty pretension and gloss done better by many of its greater contemporaries: Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, Shadowrun, the list goes on and on.
The basis for many people’s complaints aren’t ungrounded, there are numerous developer accounts that the game simply wasn’t ready to be shipped in its sorry state as it is, evident enough as it is that they’re still willing to pump out updates that might not ever fix its core problems. Not to mention that CDPR is and has never been a huge studio, especially compared against the behemoths of such studios like Rockstar or Bethesda; their much often lauded magnum opus, The Witcher 3, was still a result of much growing pains still trying to grow their studio. Everything starts to point to a team whose ambitions grew outsized from the start and promptly backfired on them spectacularly.
Is then there a single stimulating idea or worth found in this bloated, triple A elephant of a game? I honestly believe so. What makes Cyberpunk 2077 genuinely worthwhile is the way it approaches its RPG systems and quest design with a nuance and delicacy in its presentation and focus, that puts the player into the space of certain, real experiences. The real heart isn’t in its bloated, obtuse main quest, but many of the varied and genuinely human side quests that explore at the heart of a cyberpunk society, how people live in it by circumstance and how they grapple with it. There are quests entirely driven by dialogue and non violence, but hanging out and talking with people, like scuba diving with a friend, helping Johnny reform his band, hanging out with a former rockstar and talking about their regrets and memories, helping a man cope with his religion being used for profit and gain, a murder mystery that slowly dives deep into the murkiness of a global internet, restoring a rollercoaster to its former glory, a corporate conspiracy that unfolds beyond a player’s eyes…powerless as they are to confront it. All of these are bolstered having an intimate presentation that always brings the player down to eye level with many of its characters, with elaborate and nuanced character animation that always pays attention to a character’s posture and gestures and how they act in that moment in time.
You (mostly) aren’t an ubermensch waiting to trample on people and win their hearts and minds through skill and stat checks. It instead gives you choices how the player would react and express themselves, and how the game wants to player to treat the game as its own living world with actual people, even if there’s not many actual emergent “choices” to make it like a traditional RPG. This puts an interesting spin on the western RPG that always revolves around you, the player, and how reality and people warp through your discretion and actions, which can often feel disconnected and apathetic in the worst of them. It’s not always successful, and the game does resort to the old routine of killing and power leveling a lot of times as the weight of its premise and scale continually topples over itself, but the game’s ambitions soar when they really make it.
Valkyria Chronicles
Valkyria Chronicles is an oddly beautiful game about war, with its parched pastel colors and pencil stroke style and romanticized and sentimental anti-war views, it’s easy to see it as the actual distant cousin of Sakura Wars, its optimistic and sunny rays gleaming on over. However, Valkyria Chronicles separates itself by grounding its setting and conflicts with obvious real world parallels, much noticeably World War II, and how much its anti-war narrative focuses on the perils of war against fellow man and how history is controlled much by revisionism.
Its beauty extends to a certain kindness inherent in its design, as compared to many other strategy games willing to see units as expendable faceless grunts, Valkyria Chronicles wants to give every grunt a name and personality with their own unique stats and abilities to match. They even grow as the game goes along as you keep them alive, with different traits they gain and little mini biographies that get updated, not to mention how they have their own connections and biases against other people in their squad.
It gives the game an far greater emotional center than what is expected, as the game even disposes of the grid based bird’s eye view typical of a lot strategy games in favor of a boots on the ground third person view that values direct control. The context vastly becomes different as you become aware that the units on the ground aren’t a bunch of drones, but actual people you need to care for and be cautious about considering many of their own unlikely quirks and personalities that can quickly mix up a mission.
It gives such a human element to a strategy game that I never properly appreciated on my first time through, and a stronger anti-war sentiment than a lot of games that need to filter everything through bloodshed and violence. Valkyria Chronicles finds that answer in the mettle, courage, and selflessness in the way a real battle could play out.
Tsukihime
Despite Nasu slowly becoming more and more popular due to the massive resurgence and subsequent popularity of Fate as a mainstream property with its stream of anime, video games, and mobage alike, it’s easy to forget that he used to be a real subculture nerd and writer that was already diving deep into doujin VN development, becoming something of a cornerstone and figure of his time. None show this better than Tsukihime, a VN that he had conjured up with Takeuchi Takeshi during high school, which shows off its rather offbeat, rough charm through its angular button eyed character designs, photo filtered backgrounds, and midi soundtrack. Not only that, but its mixture of urban horror and mystic fantasy has an alluring, raw blend that are parts interesting and evocative and gleefully bizarre and immature.
Tsukihime is distinctively Nasu in the way it explores regret manifesting in extreme forms, generational trauma, and a way to live for tomorrow. It’s particularly noteworthy how many of the conflicts in the game are personal and understated, with many of its fantastical undercurrents kept in the background, much of it a mystery, but an important catalyst that keeps binding the characters together. The Far Side portion shows the best parts of the VN the best, with the winding circle of tragedy of the Tohno family and Hisui and Kohaku being a real highlight, but Arcueid’s and Ciel’s predicament are just as interesting with how they deal with the weight of their respective histories crashing upon them, even as the VN sags and never quite makes that balancing act into fleshing it out more. Which says as much for the kind of ambition Nasu was aiming for even as young and inexperienced he was, fleshing out those premises into something more with Fate/Stay Night. As it is, Tsukihime becomes a great example of the doujin eroge subculture, exploring ideas that could never be done elsewhere.
Real Heroes: Firefighter
The saddest part of the modern game industry today is the breakdown of the middle-range; modest, but spirited studio efforts that had the backing and management to make the most of it without little foresight from publishers and producers. With the triple A and indie games just being an extreme distillation of the market today, it’s hard not to feel saddened that such ambition and variation seems to have faded away.
Real Heroes: Firefighter is a game from a bygone era that exuded the middle-range mentality incredibly well, a somewhat rough and messy piece of work emboldened by a sense of real ambition and heart in trying to capture the firefighting experience. It’s an FPS that doesn’t focus on any prospect of violence, but rather of procedure and containment, as despite its arcade mechanics, focuses intently on adapting to situations at hand before they get out of control. It has some real meat to its encounter design and variety, using fire extinguishers and hoses that have you focus on resource management, spreaders and saws to open up obstructed areas (that actually need you to perform the action precisely and carefully), leading other firefighters and rescuing civilians navigating through variations of obstacles and hazards, all of which really get you into that mindset of genuine procedure.
It also happens to genuinely funny and sincere in ways you don’t expect a game of its caliber to be either. Surprisingly scripted by the two writers behind a Call of Duty game no less, Aaron Ginsburg and Wade McIntyre respectively, you aren’t just attached to a bunch of a robotic NPCs, but actual characters with discernible, distinct personalities that have a great dynamic with one another where they’re always bantering around, it even extends to an eccentric number of civilian NPCs that get into all sorts of bizarre incidents, like one being where a man asks the player to rescue his friend cause they happened to owe him 5 dollars, or a man pleading the player to save his prized chinchillas in the garage, or the man insisting keeping 50 gallons of gas in his house is a way to combat a government conspiracy, just to name a few. That doesn’t even speak of the many eccentric set pieces in this game alone, like a boss fight with a flaming planetarium that shoots fireballs at you or saving film reels of classic films from a cinema. It’s a game with such enormous heart at every sector of its design, and a great reminder of the type of middle range we sadly lost.
MUSICUS!
Setoguchi Renya likes to often ask the perennial question about humanity: what is the meaning of life? Is there purpose for why we were born, or is it all pointless? Is there really an answer, or are we just searching for nothing?
Setoguchi filters the improbability of this answer and question through MUSICUS through the veil of music and art, as it follows a young man, Kei Tsushima, on the delicate eve of adulthood, as he strives and struggles to find his place in life as he lives day to day listlessly in ennui; until he begins to get wrapped up in a growing interest in music and how it quickly starts to defines his life. Setoguchi understands that life is an accumulation of experiences and moments, as it explores this through 4 entirely unique routes that explore different pathways to how his life could’ve ended up, none of which find an “answer” but different kinds of truths and experiences that make up how life is colored in different and meaningful ways.
Its focus on a slow passage of time with very few time skips show much of the VN has fervent, tireless focus on Kei’s life as Setoguchi takes his time to sensitively depict his thoughts and experiences so thoroughly in a way that begins to sketch out a fully realized and well rounded person, especially as he changes and grows differently throughout all 4 different routes. It captures the feeling of life best as it is; people come and go, things change or disappear, and life goes on, specifically as it captures the heartache and pain of trying to find meaning and purpose in life and art and of the listless heartache of being lost and disillusioned in the search of that, and the destructive obsession that can lead from it.
Words can’t really describe how much this VN means to me, and how much Kei and Mika really mean the absolute world to me, I don’t think I can ever hope to properly describe this VN the justice it really deserves, as it dives into something so personal and real to me. As it is, MUSICUS doesn’t have, nor it could, have a clear answer to all these big questions. But it tries its best to understand and seek its own answers, even if it’s never clear cut, as it’s something to believe in.
Silent Hill 4
Silent Hill 4 is a confounding masterpiece, a real diamond in the rough in every way possible, but a dispiriting slog that makes me wonder what was intended and what wasn’t. Being set in an unconventional apartment setting that breaks away from the titular Silent Hill even as its influence and connections run in the background, it makes bold and alarming declarations about the game it wants to be and what it wants to achieve from the rest. Gone are multiple save points, everything must be managed through the apartment, which can be slowly more and more unusable and unstable due to the hauntings. Gone is the bottomless inventory, you need to manage your inventory because of the limited slots, and how you can only store any extra items at your apartment. Gone is a sense of non linearity, but something that feels a bit more segmented and smaller due to how the player must manage how they maneuver through obstacles and enemies, something more pronounced than before.
Silent Hill 4 flips over many of the series traditions over its head for something much more raw, an increase in combat and survival, taking a smaller focus on puzzles and exploration. It’s a game about the erosion of safety and the familiar, of abandonment and madness, as the player is subjected to so many annoyances and terrors in how the mechanics of the game continue to push you back over and over. The holes quickly become a sight of frustration, the apartment becomes slowly more and more discomforting to stay in, and the combat never relents with how much they try to swarm you in numbers; not to mention how some enemies are outright invincible. It challenges the series conception as a slow burn horror series that gained much of its ambition and identity through its narrative and atmosphere into something more mechanically and systematically driven that is draining and demanding on the player.
You could call it masochistic and half-baked which is more than fair, as it’s something you can’t really ignore. But Silent Hill 4 feels like the logical endpoint for the series, and one of the scariest games in the series because of it. After so many years of finding the horror in the mundane and psychological, what can you really do after that point? Silent Hill 4 answers that by going back to the player.
Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon
The beautiful thing about western adventure games is the way it can give a great sense of place, of being in a world. Much of the best adventure games really take in that sense of wanderlust, from Monkey Island to Myst to The Neverhood, invoking a sense of play that invites dicking around, hanging out, and exploring. Being based on a series of genre blending novels of sci-fi, comedy, fantasy and drama, and essentially episodic stories about a group of eccentric compatriots who regularly hang out in a bar and regale their personal stories; Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon is one of the masterpieces of the genre in this regard, having mountains of goofy and expository flavor text on item, character, and speck you can click on, as well as endless, mostly pointless but charming dialogue trees that don’t necessarily have any importance to the plot, but add texture and charm to the world around you.
It all adds to the breezy and casual charm of the game, being a set of episodic stories about hearing out and solving your friends personal problems, big and small, mostly mundane, and mostly goofy. Even so, it’s also one of the few western adventure games to have a genuine worldview and theme by the end, as it grasps and holds onto that idea that laughter and kindness is just a few ways we communicate with one another, embracing that communal vibe with such humanity in a way that really embraces the way adventure games are an accumulation of small actions that develop into meaningful connections.
Metroid 2
Metroid 2 starts out with an simple, but unknowingly bleak basis: an extermination of a lifeform. Set out on a knowing genocide, the game’s limited black and white color palette emphasizing the dark and muted tones and droning ambient noise soundtrack and small 4:3 ratio only serve to make the experience a discomforting, claustrophobic experience. It was interesting coming onto this from Metroid: Zero Mission, a bright and poppy game that was pulsing with energy and adventure…to Metroid 2, where its damp atmosphere that felt desperate in its fight for survival to make it out of alive. Having to eliminate 47 Metroids, the game’s linear structure focuses primarily on the progression of going deeper and deeper to the point that the caverns turn out to be more intricate and complex as it goes on, with the scarcity of resources being more expounded until the battles became numbingly hard.
Metroid 2 is such an oddity in how it turns its own formula into something an outright survival horror, whereas any other Metroid it feels like you’re getting stronger and having a greater sense of progression, in Metroid 2, it feels like an inevitability, all in service for a genocide you hope to survive.
Kaze no Notam
Kaze no Notam is all about casting yourself to the wind, steering yourself wherever it takes you. To throw caution to the wind, as the game’s minimalist and saturated low-poly nature makes it out to seem like pocketful of abstracted, sparsely populated all waiting to be explored in its nook and cranny; of cityscapes, rustic green mountains, shifting burning red deserts, futuristic landscapes, castle villages with a gleam of fog covering up as far as the eye can see. Equally important is its jazzy symphonic synth music, with its mellow rhythms and tempos casting a sense of transient ambience and a pulsing center. However, the game is far more intimidating than it seems at first, with the control of the hot air balloon being finicky with its steering and the strong winds willing to push you out of every direction into adrift, ever so clocking down score-based system that feels like it’s reading you on the drop.
But if you take it slow, take it easy, and pretty much go with the flow, you’ll find a truly relaxing game that puts you in a state of Zen, emphasizing a sense of patience and serenity as you drift away through the clouds. It really emphasizes one of the best things about video games: of exploration and sightseeing, looking beyond.
Danganronpa A.E. – Ultra Despair Girls
It’d be easy to talk about how rough and undercooked this game is when it comes to the raw gameplay, which is…some faux 3rd person shooter that sorta tries to be a horror game, except it can’t really balance the tight rope act of also being action packed third person shooter that throws waves of enemies at you without recourse with the occasional brain teasers. UDG isn’t bad on these premises so to speak, since there is a lot of strange, inspired set pieces and puzzles that are interesting on their own right, even if they don’t come together.
What makes UDG tick is how it brings all this together into the most cynical and downbeat Danganronpa game Kodaka had ever written. Because UDG isn’t stuck in its usual trappings of a distorted killing game, it instead takes the gruesome overtones of the killing games to its real world, having a DR game closest to being night apocalyptic in its setting. By having the player traverse through a city that is practically downbeat and devastated, finding disturbing notes of breakdowns and confessions, bodies strewn all over, and abstracted stylized areas retrofitted like some nightmarish childish wonderland, the player is beholden to all sorts of horrors. This even extends to how the main characters, Komaru Naegi and Touko Fukawa, can’t even begin to properly understand the gravity of their situations as they bicker amongst each other all the while having despair and ambivalence for their situation and the people around them. Even the villains are just misguided, traumatized kids who have a distorted sense of right and wrong, opposite to that are the supposed victims, the adults, who are being hunted down for sport and vengeance, completely get hopped up on their selfish just cause of hope to enact their own warped sense of justice.
All of this congeals into exploring the inherent hypocrisy and gray sides of hope and despair, even if it being so unrestrained can come off as silly and too full of itself. Kodaka at this point genuinely seems to have reservations about what DR is and what it has become, and wants to highlight this gnashing cruelty that conspires from it when it’s not being filtered through an exaggerated killing game for once as it escapes into a real world.
Half-Life Alyx
I often wonder if FPS is at a bit of cyclical dead-end, as we are at the point where artists are rehashing from the same slate of games (Quake, Unreal, Doom, the list goes on of the respective ID Software and 3D Realms catalogue) ad infinitum without properly understanding where those games were coming from and what they meant for those times. I’m not entirely bagging on this revival, as I do appreciate stuff like Doom Eternal and Dusk and Ultrakill who have admirably taken their inspirations beyond those of mere posturing. But a lot of times I feel like there’s a sense of regression happening, especially from the developments that Half-Life had ushered in trying to push the envelope further for what it meant to be an actual narrative, set-piece driven FPS that wanted to explore new pathways into storytelling and experiences for games.
Half Life 1 brought the player closer to an actual sense of place with an immediacy to match, Half Life Alyx wants to reinvigorate and bring about that same sense of evolution with its more intimate focus that can be obtained with VR. If VR can a different kind of kinesthetic flow to the FPS than just a greater degree of movement, it must be in the form of how it can provide an more immediate flow and awareness in how you navigate and inhabit an environment. Alyx really accomplishes this by having smaller, more detailed and fleshed out areas and arenas, with little bits of everything feeling interactive, from more mundane things how you heal and reload, to how you simply pick up stuff as you scavenge for resources with the gravity gloves feeling intuitive and snappy to control.
But if there’s a fundamental core that makes Alyx work is how it distills its own experience, focusing narrowly on exploration and shooting, rather than having a cavalcade of half-baked set pieces and mechanics like Half Life 2 did. The experience legitimately becomes more focused as a result, having a methodical pace to the shooting with the deliberate encounter design using sheer enemy variety that require you to be precise with your aiming and positioning, and an overt horror atmosphere with the scarcity and resource management, and its commitment to taking its time to tell its story through its dialogue and world, as the momentum and intrigue never stops for a second.
If nothing else, Half Life Alyx invokes a new spirit in the FPS, maybe not necessarily a huge leap as Half Life 1 did, but a necessary reaction that proves there’s still some spirit left in it.
Caligula 2
Caligula 2 from afar doesn’t seem to instill a lot of confidence, a somewhat uneven, turn based combat system based on timing and buffs seems a bit shallow and sluggish to play, the rough model work and environment design is garish and messy, despite having an intense stylization that’s endearing, and the obvious Persona influence in its structure and narrative work is enough to ward off anyone who doesn’t have a passing interest for odd JRPG curios when they can just play the very thing it takes its influences from.
What separates Caligula 2 from the pack for me, is its enduring spirit and vision that it exudes despite how messy it can be. If the first Caligula focused intently on taboos and ideals, Caligula 2 wrestles with the idea of regret and how that takes different, complex forms in people, and how it affects them deeply. It takes its ideas of human psychology and complexities incredibly sincerely with actual bite and empathy, going through a veil of genuine social and psychological difficulties arising from modern society, all filtered through a strange, idyllic utopia that happens to be a garishly beautiful and stylized high school fantasy governed by a bunch of extremely popular vocaloid artists by a god who thinks they know better. The game’s style, awash in saturated poppy colors, and stylized, pointed, and glossy character designs, laden with a pop soundtrack symphony of disco, hard rock, techno, and dance music, all contribute an energetic, youthful energy that amazingly masks and accentuates its themes in a unruly way.
In particular, the cast is a particularly important part of its charm, as they come from variation of all kinds of different backgrounds, different natures, and even ages, with equally complex and ambivalent thoughts about the world they now live in, and the past and present lives they were living, and had lived with. Even the relaxed sense of banter and dynamic they have with one another feels incredibly charming with how they grow more comfortable with one another, especially with how big the cast is. This particularly shows itself in its character episodes, obviously similar to how Persona does it, but more intently focused on the characters themselves and their issues more prominently, rather than having the player’s cipher immediately solve their problems, but rather talking it out and trying to empathize and understand them on their own terms, with may or may not have an immediate answer, which feels more sensitive and real. Even notably, as progression is locked as the story progresses through the game, having a more natural development to how they all round out their arcs. If anything, the high school setting isn’t just a fancy backdrop, but a way to explore the cast’s personalities and dynamics, especially as they are given a new lease on life to explore ideas of second chances.
By the end of Caligula 2, I was surprised at the extent it was willing to push far to explore certain taboos and modern problems, and the enormous love it has for its troubled characters, giving them a lot of genuine growth as well as having an actual dynamic with one another that feels sincere and incredibly endearing. It’s fitting that about a game about trying to understand the difficulties and messiness of reality, recognizes that it might not make much of a difference in the end either way, but it wants to try for the people who are willing to listen.
Once upon a time, in the far future, lay dormant a inconspicuous dormitory. It was creaky, well worn, and a relic of its past, but it housed a sense of warmth all the same, especially in a future that was aggressively progressing the society and world they lived in. The individuals who lived there were a bundle of outcasts, a nest of troubled individuals seeking refuge from their own insecurities, troubles, and flaws in a future that was presumed and uncertain. But what they realized that together, they had the makings of their own family, despite their own pasts and virtues. They lived happily, making the best of their circumstances as they pushed towards their own future, with all its uncertainty, with real hope.
But it wasn’t meant to be.
Tragedy soon strikes them on a unassuming, chilly Christmas night. Gray Christmas, a catastrophic event soon to be etched in their own history, would soon irreversibly change the courses of their own lives. Everyone would soon have to grapple with a disaster that will forever be in their mind, body, and soul.
Kou Kadokura, a young man who was thrust in the middle of such an event, completely destroys his sense of self as he sees the destruction of all things that mattered to him. His future, bleak in all its essence, is what drives him to a road of vengeance. Having become a hardened mercenary, he had set out a path of mindless destruction, constantly trying to affirm his justifications and reasoning through his pain. Kou Kadokura is a m Continue reading →
Mebae Drive 