Board 8 > post anime here and I will talk about them

(+) Yeah! (+)

I have not
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Also I nominate Re:Zero
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I liked Monster a lot, have only seen the anime. Been meaning to check out his manga like 20th Century Boys etc for sure. Do you recommend 21st Century Boys as well?

Me on Utena, I love the movie, and I enjoyed the early episodes of the show (especially the soundtrack), didn't get around to watching the full thing though. As far as alternate quick take movies go, Utena's is one of the better ones I think.
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Psycho_Kenshin posted...

Been meaning to check out his manga like 20th Century Boys etc for sure. Do you recommend 21st Century Boys as well?

you have to read them both, 21st is just the ending of 20th

I don't know the exact details but it had something to do with how the story was published. the author had to put out the last few chapters or volumes as a different story with a different name.
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Right on, good to know.
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Utena's movie is ridiculously fun.
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Pluto and Billy Bat are also very good (though not as good as Monster/20CB)
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I thought billy bat started good and went really off the rails

I probably would have been less disappointed if I realized ahead of time that urasawa wasn't the only author
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Billy Bat could have been his best work if not for the end being so meh
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And he started on the ol' judo girl dramedy Yawara!, the guy sure has range.
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Billy Bat has a lot of issues. Mainly too many timeskips and cast changes. Makes it harder to care about the characters.

I haven't read Yawara, but I did read Happy!. It also had a lot of issues (mainly repetitiveness and slow pacing), but it did have a few pretty damn excellent moments.
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bumpo
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JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
@Punnyz



A pretty cool show that I think starts off a bit slowly. I've heard many people agree on the consensus that the first part is more or less the weakest part. I'm kinda glad I was told this, too, because I watched the first part and probably would have stopped if not prompted to continue. The first part really just comes across as a super generic shounen with almost nothing going for it. That being said... I still haven't actually even scratched the surface of what this series has to offer yet. I still haven't quite finished the second part.

Anyway I've mentioned several shows so far in this topic as having an issue where the pacing is a bit too slow. Things are too spaced out, there's too much pause between dialogue and events, etc. etc. This show... kinda has the opposite issue? Not sure I'd call it a problem per se and it's not exactly 'rapid fire' either like the recently mentioned Teekyu. I think more what I'm getting at is that the show is VERY densely packed. Every time I watch an episode I feel like a ton of stuff happens in every 20 minute sitting. Reminds me very much of old comic books where every panel had pretty dense text boxes and completed an entire story each issue, as opposed to modern comic books where it's all about splash pages and racing through dialogue with barely anything happening in 24 pages. JoJo is more similar to the older comic style.

I normally just watch one episode and put the show on the backburner again for a while. The fact that the plot is very simple and the characters are entertaining in a shallow way makes it easy to do this. Anytime I want to come back to this show I can pick up where I left off, and not feel like I'm missing anything.

Mushishi
@Yankees



One of those shows that I've heard much about, and I've gotten word that it's very good, and it sounds like it might be worth checking out, but I know that I'll probably never get around to watching it. Too many episodes. Can't be bothered to even start.

Paranoia Agent
@trdl23



I've seen snippets of Paranoia Agent and I feel like I understand it about as well as people who have seen the entire thing. Not super interested in ever getting around to watching the entire series.
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Im not sure if that means youre super insightful or if you think PA is super confusing. It isnt the latter, I assure you!
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I think you dropped Shinsekai Yori way too soon. I will freely admit the first few episodes can be rough but once it gets into the lore that anime evolves into god-tier.
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I dropped Shinsekai when they were still in school pretending to be the X-men
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I just don't think I have the attention span anymore for the "wait for a few episodes before it gets good" anime.
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I thought the early episodes of Shinsekai were amazing, and it gets bad in the final third, so I definitely wouldn't say you dropped it too soon.
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I was into shinsekai from ep 1 too iirc
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Yama no Susume
@GranzonEx



Another one of many shows that is good but not great. To be honest I barely remember anything about it, although I did enjoy watching it at the time. I couldn't tell you any of the character names, what their traits are, or even who my favorite was.

This is a simple story with simple, easily forgettable characters. It doesn't particularly do anything wrong, but it doesn't do anything excellent enough to make it leave a strong impression. If you think 'cute girl' shows are boring this would definitely not change your mind.

The main character of this series is afraid of heights but yearns for adventure and so she gets into mountain climbing as a way to help her get back into outdoor hobbies. Like many, maaannyyy anime the main concept is explored but not resolved. If you're interested in watching a story that spins the wheels without ever touching the brakes, but doesn't actually take you anywhere in the end, then this is the show for you.
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forgetting the insanely good animation I see

Or did you not watch S2, which is the vast majority of the series (S1 is less than an hour long)? There's a ton of stuff that happens. And it's getting another season this summer, so obviously the story isn't over yet...
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I didn't even know there was a second season, honestly.
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Hiking with Hinako was great

IIRC the MC wasn't afraid of heights, she went hiking as a way to reconnect with her friend and ended up loving it
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bumpo
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OniAi

two strikes
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School Days
@FL81



School Days has the honor of kicking off another section of the list mostly containing things I haven't seen and don't have much to say about. Guess we're in for a few more weak write ups before we get back to the ones with substance.

Anyway I've actually heard quite a bit about this show. I more or less know what it's about and I even know about the ending and stuff like that. With all that in mind I don't think there's ever any point in me actually watching this show anymore. Seems like it's not my type of thing, but it might be good just for the sake of the journey. But I kinda already ruined the destination for myself. Oh well.

Doraemon
@handsomeboy2012



Aside from hearing the name "Doraemon" I actually have no idea what the hell this is aside from knowing it's a classic anime. My image search turned up a bunch of results of a goofy looking blue cat. With that in mind I decided not to look into it any further. Why ruin the surprise for myself? Honestly there's a greater than zero chance I might check out Doraemon one day, I've always known this -- despite not knowing too much about what this series is about I know it's one of the classics so there is a chance I just check it out one day while bored. Now I know it's apparently about a blue cat.

Madoka Magica
@PrinceKaro



Okay I actually have seen a little bit about this and I guess I do have some stuff to say about it. Madoka is a show that I tried to watch while it was airing but couldn't really get into it. I think the issue for me is that I've seen and read other similar materials already that were just done better (in my opinion, of course). So while other people were having their minds blown by this shit to me it just felt like a less good knock off of some pretty good manga.

I did watch up to 'that' point where people will now tell you to at least watch before you quit. I just found myself not caring about anything that was going on in the story, nor was I invested in any of the characters. My friend and I discussed the series at some point afterwards so I'm pretty well aware of how the rest of the plot pans out and stuff. It still didn't seem like anything I was particularly interested in watching unfold. The animation and visuals are kinda cool but as I've mentioned a few times in these write ups that alone does almost nothing for me in terms of enjoying a series.
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Almost there
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I love deconstruction/subversion shit so madoka has always interested me but I'm also not into the magical girl genre so who knows.
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MariaTaylor posted...

Aside from hearing the name "Doraemon" I actually have no idea what the hell this is aside from knowing it's a classic anime. My image search turned up a bunch of results of a goofy looking blue cat. With that in mind I decided not to look into it any further. Why ruin the surprise for myself? Honestly there's a greater than zero chance I might check out Doraemon one day, I've always known this -- despite not knowing too much about what this series is about I know it's one of the classics so there is a chance I just check it out one day while bored. Now I know it's apparently about a blue cat.

A+ writeup

pjbasis posted...

I love deconstruction/subversion shit so madoka has always interested me but I'm also not into the magical girl genre so who knows.

i think i like deconstruction and subversion stuff too but it probably has to be stuff where i can at least appreciate the references. ttgl is one of the only giant robots shows i've ever seen and it seemed like pure garbage, but if i were a fan of the genre then maybe i'd have liked it more. so i'm not sure about madoka (though i liked cardcaptors)
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madoka fundamentally doesn't work as a deconstruction of the mahou shoujo genre to begin with. it doesn't even attempt to address any of the issues with the original genre. it's just kinda doing its own thing.

subversion... eh, I'd give it to you, maybe. I don't agree but I could see why someone would say that. I just don't think it's really as intentional as people believe. from the very beginning there was an air of expectation that this show would deliver more to the audience than a typical mahou shoujo. if anything, it didn't subvert expectations at all. it simply built hype and then delivered on that hype. I can say this as someone who watched it while it was airing -- everyone was in on it and was waiting for the turn to happen since before the turn even happened.

any standard mahou shoujo tropes that were subverted are purely incidental as far as I'm concerned. I doubt they were thinking very much about CCS, Pretty Cure, Sailor Moon, etc. at all. maybe Utena? my instincts tell me that it was directly influenced by subversive materials to begin with and never intended to match the expectations of the original genre.
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to clarify what I mean there... so a subversion takes the ideas from an established story structure and then goes against the expectations of the audience. but a story that comes along later and just copies a subversion isn't really subverting anything; they're just copying what was already done. all they're doing is contributing to the established story structure of a new genre.
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Doraemon was my childhood anime when I had zero concept of an 'anime'. Most people here are American and wouldn't know about it, but where I live it was THE anime. I used to rush home every day after school to watch it on TV, and here probably anyone younger than 30 today has seen it at some point. Kinda like Pokemon except older and more popular.

Anyway it is a (kind of educational?) kids show and I grew out of it. There is a basic premise and some backstory but almost no actual plot line so I don't really recommend it unless you like slice-of-life stuff or have time to kill. The manga and especially some movies are pretty good though.

I've watched Doraemon (called Ding Dong in Hong Kong) when I was in elementary school. Crayon Shin-chan was also very popular. I remember watching DBZ in Cantonese as well.
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Doraemon was the name I grew up with but I'm also familiar with the old translation thanks to old manga I still have.

Also didn't expect to see another Hong Konger to show up on Board 8

interesting little anecdotes on Doraemon!

Pop Team Epic
@Pirateking2000



Pop Team Epic is supposed to be weird and funny and you can kinda tell just by looking at it that this is not a normal show. I've heard pretty good things about it. It's something that I will probably check out at some point, maybe even in the near future. Actually, when this was nominated for me to discuss, I tried to use that as an excuse. I said; 'Hey, I'll try to watch this before the write up comes around so I can give it a fair write up.'

I did not do that.

Heaven's Lost Prophecy
@YOMAMMA9998



This show is apparently about a teenager who .... Yeah, I stopped reading there. Probably not anything I'm interested in. From the images that came up it looks like it was about some red haired girl, and probably her relationship with the protagonist. Whether that be romantic, some kind of battle genie, a magical fairy that helps him play epic card games, or whatever else.

More importantly Dragonball is tomorrow and Haikyuu will be the day after that.

Hype!
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MariaTaylor posted...

Hype!

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Are you trying to make your My Hero writeup coincide with the premier of Season 3? lol.
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haha not intentionally or anything!

just doing 1 a day, or more if it's series I don't have much to say about
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i grew up in canada but my childhood was also full of doraemon and crayon shin-chan, which were rented from the chinese video store. i think i preferred the doraemon movies to the tv series, but i also had more of it available to me. my favourites were the one with the mech, and the one with the animal planet iirc.

DBZ was interesting because i watched different bits in either cantonese or english, and i identify the characters equally with both voices.

also, as i'm watching it for the first time rn, i'll nominate Outlaw Star
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Have you watched/read Gintama?

I'm a little over 50 episodes in and it's pretty good, but it hasn't really hooked me. I know it has the reputation of continuously getting better, though.
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Hmm, I dunno about continuously getting better. Felt pretty inconsistent for the entire series to me.
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I haven't seen Gintama yet. it seems like one of those series I might be interested in watching, sort of, but there's so many episodes that I feel confident saying I will never start it.

and I sorta guess you just cut to the front of the line by asking it that way

but also this means now I don't have to do an official write up for Gintama

so there we go
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Yeah, there are an absurd number of episodes. I actually just resumed watching after getting kinda burned out 30 or 40 episodes in sometime last year.

Hmm... let's go with Great Teacher Onizuka
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Dragonball
@FakeAccount3000



Dragonball is one of those franchises that almost every person you ask would have something to say about it. You could ask my grandmother what she thinks about Dragonball and she would have something to say. For this write up I'm going to talk about the anime and the manga, and I'm going to hope that I can fit it all into one post. We'll see when we get there.

This is definitely probably one of the first anime I've ever seen. Checking on wikipedia it seems the series was first released in the west in 1989 and then again in 1995. Based on my best memory I can clearly remember watching at least part of the 13 episode run in 1995, but the weird thing is that at that time it felt like something I had already seen before. So I think there's a good chance I had at least seen snippets of the 1989 release, though I was only 2 or 3 at that time so who knows how well I could have remembered it. Anyway needless to say it felt different from any other cartoon that I had ever seen before. Just by looking at Dragonball, especially back then, you can see at a glance that it has a completely different style than western animation. This striking sense of unique flavor is what made me really interested in Dragonball from the very first time I saw it and is probably responsible for me getting into a lot of series in my youth.

Funny enough I never went back and watched the full Dragonball series during any of the later times when it was released more fully. I think too much time had passed and my tastes had changed more toward other types of shows by that time. Basically watching Dragonball when I was really young allowed me to get into the anime style from a young age, and this gave me more time to refine my tastes very early on. Since my tastes were already refined by the time they got around to localizing it, I had already moved on to other stuff.

When Dragonball Z was airing on Toonami I watched it about as much as any other 90's kid. I definitely remember the periods when they would just play reruns over and over while we waited for new episodes to be released. It's crazy to think how long of a period of a time I was actively watching Dragonball Z, especially considering that during a lot of time when I was a kid and a teen we didn't even have cable all of the time. I watched all of the Saiyan, Namek, and Cell Saga. By the time the Buu Saga aired I had pretty much moved on from the series entirely. I had a harder time keeping up with it and just lost interest. Still, those were some pretty good times and I created a lot of good memories watching this show and discussing it with my friends back then. It's probably not coincidental that when the Buu Saga aired I was a teenager, and my friends stopped thinking DBZ was cool, and so we didn't talk about it, and this contributed to me not caring as much about the show either. All that being said, now that I've read the entire manga, I can say the Buu Saga is god awful so at least I know I wasn't missing out on anything.

After this I didn't think about Dragonball very much for quite some time. I could remember it fondly as a series that gave me some good memories but I knew that it wasn't a franchise I would be able to appreciate on any serious level. At that point I've already seen other much better anime, and plenty of much better shounen... which is pretty low on my list of genres to begin with. Still, eventually, I got around to sitting down and reading the manga one day. After having read it completely I can say it was... pretty good! A little better than I expected, honestly, but the Buu Saga is legitimately so bad that it ruined my impression of the entire series.
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With the manga being the most complete version of the full story and the most fresh in my mind, I'll use that as my discussion for the actual Dragonball material as I move away from my impressions and discussion of my history with the show.

Early Arcs: These are pretty funny and entertaining. The sense of adventure is nice, but the whimsical feel of the story can be a detriment at times. It's hard to feel as emotionally invested when the plot is largely driven by random events, and when Goku or the others can sometimes overcome obstacles with a random joke. This is fixed later on.

Piccolo/Final Tournament Arc: All this material near the end with evil king piccolo appearing, the last boudokai or two at the end of what is considered "Dragon Ball" with Goku still as a kid or a teen, is pretty much great. This is among some of the best material in the series and if it stayed this quality all the way through I'd easily give it an 8/10. Every character feels important in some way, the threats feel real and serious, you have more of an attachment to everything that's going on because the story is less whimsical but you have 100+ chapters of familiarity with the characters.

Saiyan Saga: This continues what I consider to be the most high quality stretch of the story. Despite the time skip, the way it's done always made me feel like we didn't really lose much time or much of the plot. We just kinda jumped to the next major event in Goku's life. It's been long enough for him and Chichi to have a kid, but Goku himself doesn't look or seem much older. This is also where the development of Piccolo as a character really begins, and since he is probably the best character in the manga you can really say this arc shines because of his involvement. The villains are among the best in the series as well.

Namek Saga: This one is still really good but slightly less good than the last two. I still consider this to be part of the high point in the series (basically containing these three chunks of the story), but you can tell it's on the border of where the story starts to decline. Having Vegeta eventually become a good guy was kinda nice, and I do think he's a cool character, but having to set it up by following him around so much on Namek... I'm not sure if I really enjoyed it that much. I don't know how they could have made this arc any better honestly, and I don't have any major complaints about it. Still very solid, but it just didn't feel as great as what came before it.

Cell Saga: This arc is a step below the others so far but it's not quite bad. There's some really good parts about it. Anything involving Piccolo is fantastic. This is actually probably his best arc in addition to the Saiyan Saga, or rather, you can look at it as his payoff for the development and training he's gone through since then. A lot of the other characters feel more superfluous than ever before in this arc but it does still contain somewhat of a classic Dragonball feel where everyone plays some kind of role. It just so happens that most of them have a role that involves 'not doing shit.' Cell is not as interesting of a villain to me as the previous ones, and we have far less minor villains for the B and C tier heroes to bash around, or even for Goku to just godstomp himself. As a result this arc ends up being pretty disappointing by the end. It's mostly training, hype, build up, and then Gohan... a character I care very little about... steps in and saves the day at the end.
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Buu Saga: Actual garbage that I'd probably rate a 2/10 at best. I forced myself to read through it because at this point I was closer to the end of the story than I was the middle, but I do regret every minute I spent reading even a page of this. You can almost tell that Toriyama stopped wanting to write the story and just started making shit as stupid as possible so he could get the series cancelled. That's the only explanation I can muster for how bad this is. This final arc along was enough for me to give Dragonball a 6 rather than a 7 or an 8, because while it's really only a small part of the story it is actually that bad that it drags the score down by that much.

One thing I really love about the manga is that you get a better sense of how characters grow throughout the story. You can say the same for the anime as well, but this is mostly difficult to keep up with because there are so many episodes and each episode takes so much actual 'time' to watch. You'd probably have to pay very careful attention, marathon hours and hours of dragonball a day for weeks, or maybe watch the series multiple times to start picking up on some of the meta development of all these characters. But when you're reading the manga and you fly through the story all at once, at your own pace, I feel like it's much easier to enjoy the payoff for certain characters. Even events that take place years apart within their lives can happen within a few hours from my perspective, and that really helped me get into the characters of Dragonball a lot more. The standout is, by far, Piccolo. There are also a number of cool characters in the series, and I honestly don't think there are all that many bad characters.

Most of the story isn't very complex, most of the characters aren't very deep, but this manga still has its own very simple charm. If you had asked me after only watching DBZ if I'd recommend this my answer would probably be no. Based on the anime I thought this was just an okay series that gets a lot of hype. Based on the manga though... I think this is a potentially great comic that kinda got ruined at the end. I'd recommend it to anyone who I thought might enjoy a battle/adventure series, but I'd probably warn them ahead of time to temper their expectations before going into the final arc.



Oh yeah, I haven't watched or read Super, but I may read it after it finishes.

I have seen some of the movies but I don't care about them that much.
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The best thing about dragonball is it that it realizes that fictional tournaments are essentially drugs and sex combined.
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MariaTaylor posted...

You can almost tell that Toriyama stopped wanting to write the story and just started making shit as stupid as possible so he could get the series cancelled.

i think toriyama got sick of the emphasis on fighting and wanted to make it silly, like dragon ball used to be

but inevitably it went back to the Z style and the blending was bad
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Thank you for the really long response :)

It was a real gateway anime for me too, except I had to buy the vhs tapes because I didnt have Cartoon Network

In retrospect probably not a coincidence the end of the cell saga was the last vhs I got back in the day.