Rate the last anime you watched out of 10

I need to give that show another shot one of these days. I watched the first episode back when it was airing, and it did nothing for me, so I just dropped it. I've been baffled by its popularity ever since.
Yeah while I enjoyed it I have to agree it doesn't really change much after the first episode. I think it only really gets going in the second half when the rest of the main group shows up as it felt pretty lacking with only Tanjiro leading the show. Zenitsu and Inosuke really added a lot to my enjoyment of the series.
 
Demon Slayer 2nd half was more interesting than 1st half of the season.

The story for the most part was kind of standard, but I did like the direction it started to go in, so I'll see if that continues with the movie when it comes out.

Ufotable definitely elevated the quality of the show with the animation work though.
 
I need to give that show another shot one of these days. I watched the first episode back when it was airing, and it did nothing for me, so I just dropped it. I've been baffled by its popularity ever since.
I enjoyed it as well but probably nowhere near as much as others as I didn't understand the extreme popularity either heh.
 
Just be careful, I'm sure Neil.T will be admonishing you about that too, lol...
Nah, no way, man. Each to their own and all, you know?


But yet...

@awadama fever!!

. . .

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"Let's see you grit those teeth!"
 
Ground Control to Psychoelectric Girl
I'd been vaguely interested in this one for a while, but decided to buy it when I found out that it was based on LNs by the author of Adachi & Shimamura (probably my favourite anime of last year). Unfortunately, they couldn't be more different.

A&S is a low-key yuri romance, with its greatest strength being its well-rounded, convincing, and sympathetic main characters. Ground Control is a screwball harem comedy featuring a bunch of over-the-top weirdos, who are rarely more than the sum of their quirks, and who are all unconvincingly in love with a typical male protagonist cardboard cutout. Worse is the amount of redundancy between characters, with two or three having the same overlapping quirks, making them so similar that even characters in the story sometimes mistake them for each other. It doesn't help that some of these endlessly repeated quirks are tedious (the "my name's not X, it's Y" one gets used half a dozen times per episode).

The first few episodes make a strong impression and are funny, and the last few start to get back in the groove. The show was a preliminary 8/10 based on the first three episodes. In the middle though, it turns into a repetitive haze that I can barely remember. Shows that lack in drive or structure are often excused as being slice-of-life, and there are plenty of those that I enjoy, but this feels more like slice-of-nothing in places. Sometimes the dialogue turned into such hollow white noise that I kept zoning out and had to replay entire scenes to check if I missed anything significant.

It's possible that I just wasn't in the right mood for a series like this, so I'm planning to watch it again at some point, but for now it gets:

6/10
 
Mardock Scramble

This is a film trilogy each one being approx an hour long.

I won't spoil it. This has a very Ghost in the Shell feel, speaking of shells there are a lot of egg related references.

Our female mc gets naked as often as possible, I was wondering if she was a nudist! Sometimes it made sense, other times it felt like she was naked just for the sake of it.

Film 1 was my fav, by the end of film 3 some of it's narrative had lost it's way.

7.5/10
 
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Mardock Scramble

This is a film trilogy each one being approx an hour long.

I won't spoil it. This has a very Ghost in the Shell feel, speaking of shells there are a lot of egg related references.

Our female mc gets naked as often as possible, I was wondering if she was a nudist! Sometimes it made sense, other times it felt like she was naked just for the sake of it.

Film 1 was my fav, by the end of film 3 some of it's narrative had lost it's way.

7.5/10
I hated Mardock Scramble. I only watched the first movie once, and immediately got rid of it. It's hard to think of a story where a supposed protagonist does so little protagging. She's this passive lump that's just...there. IIRC there was a car chase where her car was on autodrive throughout, so she just sat there while the car did everything for her. That felt emblematic of her role in the whole story. And don't get me started on the laughably juvenile way they tried to make the villains edgy.
 
I hated Mardock Scramble. I only watched the first movie once, and immediately got rid of it. It's hard to think of a story where a supposed protagonist does so little protagging. She's this passive lump that's just...there. IIRC there was a car chase where her car was on autodrive throughout, so she just sat there while the car did everything for her. That felt emblematic of her role in the whole story. And don't get me started on the laughably juvenile way they tried to make the villains edgy.

I could definitely see why you'd think that, she wasn't the strongest protag in the world, although in her defence she was kind of thrown into the role and was a pretty broken person from previous events that you learn about later.

She got better as the protag in the next 2 films, although in my opinion the next 2 films have weaker narratives and world building, so swings and roundabouts.

I am capable of enjoying a show for things beyond the characters though, NGE for example, actually I didn't really like many of the characters in NGE at all (Shinji, get in the robot!!), but the show itself was good and it had some interesting concepts, so I still enjoyed it.

The best combination will always be shows where the characters and the story are both good. Unfortunately these are kind of rare.
 
I am capable of enjoying a show for things beyond the characters though, NGE for example, actually I didn't really like many of the characters in NGE at all (Shinji, get in the robot!!), but the show itself was good and it had some interesting concepts, so I still enjoyed it.

The best combination will always be shows where the characters and the story are both good. Unfortunately these are kind of rare.
I'm fine with movies that have thin characters as long as the events are satisfying (I own every Godzilla movie, after all), but protagonist inaction is a more fundamental problem since it drains all the fuel out of the story's tank. In almost any situation, the most boring thing a protagonist can do is nothing. Off the top of my head, the only time I've been moved by a protagonist's choice not to act was in Slipstream, the Yoshiaki Kawajiri directed episode of Leiji Matsumoto's The Cockpit, and that took masterful writing and direction to pull off.
 
It's hard to think of a story where a supposed protagonist does so little protagging.
Maybe you're lucky enough to have not seen Production I.G's Loups=Garous, then. 😬

That unenviably became my yardstick for passive, pointless MCs, and Mardock, for me, is not even within visual range of it.

This has a very Ghost in the Shell feel,
Undeniably so. It was written by Tow Ubukata, who would go on to write Ghost in the Shell: Arise for Production I.G, so he must've already been a fan.

Speaking personally, I actually do rather like the Mardock Scramble trilogy. I can totally see the narrative problems in it, and I agree that part 1 is the best, which obviously isn't great for a three-parter, but I like the setting and the ideas, and above all I can't help but care about what happens to its characters, which is more than Ghost in the Shell has ever managed for me, as unpopular as that view might be.

I'm sure a big part of me being invested in Balot as a character is her being voiced by the living legend who is Megumi Hayashibara (Rei in Evangelion). She cared deeply about her role, as the accompanying interviews with her in the extras on Kaze's Blu-ray box set really reinforce.

So yeah, I'm a fan of Mardock. I'm sure our fellow AUKN member @Adam-M would probably say the same (clearly liking the series enough to have Oeufcoque as his avatar character.

Fun fact to end on here: Mardock Scramble, (originally a series of novels by the aforementioned Ubukata) before being made into a three-part anime by studio GoHands was originally planned to be adapted by Gonzo instead, with character designs by Range Murata (Last Exile). See this article here:
 
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Fate/Stay Night Heaven’s Feel III: Spring Song - Well this achieved what I wanted to adapt the best route in FSN and show it off to a wider audience. Ngl 40 mins in after a certain scene I knew this was the best one of the trilogy and the best Fate anime easily, can’t wait till I can recommend it after FZ but still you should still watch FZ -UBW -HF. Now to wait till a Fate adaption or/ and a FHA adaption. I will get into more specific scenes when MVM and AoA release it as I still don’t want to spoil it yet.
10/10
 
Fate/Stay Night Heaven’s Feel III: Spring Song - Well this achieved what I wanted to adapt the best route in FSN and show it off to a wider audience. Ngl 40 mins in after a certain scene I knew this was the best one of the trilogy and the best Fate anime easily, can’t wait till I can recommend it after FZ but still you should still watch FZ -UBW -HF. Now to wait till a Fate adaption or/ and a FHA adaption. I will get into more specific scenes when MVM and AoA release it as I still don’t want to spoil it yet.
10/10
So jealous of you all with the imports... Can't wait for a UK release (and thanks for avoiding spoilers!).
 
Fate/Stay Night Heaven’s Feel III: Spring Song - Ngl 40 mins in after a certain scene I knew this was the best one of the trilogy and the best Fate anime easily, can’t wait till I can recommend it after FZ but still you should still watch FZ -UBW -HF.

So jealous of you all with the imports... Can't wait for a UK release.
OK, I'm all set - got all of those Fate Japanese imports lined up and ready to go! I'll have to call the neighbor couple over to start in on the Fate series very soon! Gonna have to get jealous-er, hedgy! ;)

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Speaking of the Fate Series, would it be advantageous at all to watch the original Dean Fate/Stay night series first, before starting in on Zero, or should I not bother? I'm asking before I show the Fate series to my neighbors, which will be sometime later this year. I've already seen Zero and UBW myself, and I have the original series on Blu-ray, but have never watched it.
 
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