Digimon (season 1)
Digimon is a great series and I wish I appreciated it more when I was younger.
It's an isekai anime where the entire main cast can barely tolerate each other. It's got a joke dub with a lot of passive-aggressiveness, plenty of absolutely ridiculous lines and a surprising amount of genuinely funny one liners.
The animation is about as good as you'd expect from a late '90s kids anime and the dub has a few awful voices, but none of that matters.
The story is fun and varied. I actually found the parts of the story in the real world to be a bit more interesting than the digital world stuff, but there's always something going on. It's more centred around adventures than battling, but obviously there are battles too, because there are monsters and they need to battle to get stronger to transform to sell more stuff.
Again, every character seems to hate each other. Every episode is filled with snide comments and it's amazing. They're stuck in a weird world together and I guess they're supposed to win using the power of ~friendship~ but they'd rather just argue and throw bitchy comments around. Excellent.
It does nothing out of the ordinary, but it's a fun story with a lot of silly stuff (and the dub is actually funny).
There are Digimon who are literally just walking turds, a singing monkey Digimon with an Elvis voice (Presley, not Costello), some blood(!), one of the characters' dads smokes (take that, Sanji), actual death gets mentioned (not just "destroyed" or "sent to the Shadow Realm"), there's a 666 reference and a scene where a Digimon does a poo in someone's car - the whole thing is just a wild ride from start to finish - 9/10
New Game!
It's a bit hard to rate this. It’s OK. There’s nothing especially good, but there’s nothing too bad either.
The whole thing is so sedate. Is it relaxing? Is it just boring? I don’t really know.
I’m fairly sure I won’t remember anything about this show in two weeks, but it wasn’t awful enough to give up on. It was a challenge staying focused on it sometimes, mostly because there’s not much to focus on.
The characters generally aren’t interesting and they don’t do much. Someone eats another person's dessert from the fridge once and there’s a minor dispute about the thermostat. There’s also a cat for some reason. That’s about all that stuck out.
Nothing funny or sad or exciting or unexpected happens. Obviously it's a slice of life anime, so I'm not expecting someone to turn Super Saiyan Purple or eat someone's leg or whatever, but New Game! is just...nothing.
There are some really nice settings and backgrounds. The office has a lot to look at - each work area is distinct and looks great. There are also scenes in stores with some very appealing shots. The computers/monitors/etc are all well detailed too. If/when you get bored, you can pause and have a look various bits of gaming equipment.
Again, it's not an awful series. I've seen a lot worse and I've also seen a lot better. I wouldn't recommend New Game! to anyone, but I wouldn't tell anyone not to watch it either - 5/10
. Add a bit of violence and a sort of medieval setting and I’m in.. just wish we’d got more 