Lord of Mysteries ep1: A Chinese animation with unusually ugly designs and an incomprehensible plot about people 'transmigrating' into strangers and having to acclimatise to life in unfamiliar places and times. Unnecessarily mysterious for the sake of mysteriousness rather than entertainment, the pacing is sluggish and the constant jargon disengaging. There are some good ideas here in the underlying scenario but I was bored out of my skull for this first episode and won't be continuing.
Private Tutor to the Duke's Daughter ep1: It doesn't bode well when a show looks so generic that I didn't even notice it in the Crunchyroll listings at first, and nearly missed its premiere entirely. The hero is a talented student who fails his exams at magic school and ends up being recommended to tutor a little rich girl (and her equally cutesy young maid) instead, with the goal of unlocking her magic power in a way that nobody else has managed thus far. I'm sure that there will be some shenanigans with the lead's failure actually being a setup of some kind (or deliberate) because he's perfect and there's nothing he can't do; is he an airhead or is he actually super manipulative? Anyway, he's so mild that nobody especially questions anything he does, and he doesn't seem to especially care about his life's work ending in failure himself. The famous, feisty redhead girl from his past looks as though she'll be arriving to make his life more complicated at some point but it's all just tropes and low stakes scenes of boring-looking magic; not something I feel interested enough to continue after the last hundred or so broadly identical light fantasy shows.
Detectives These Days Are Crazy! ep1: A silly gag show about a grown-up child detective who has been left behind in the modern world, and an energetic high school girl who is desperate to be his apprentice and solve hard boiled mysteries by his side. It's not a bad idea for a concept and it's occasionally funny to see the female lead ploughing through cases with such enthusiasm. Where I'm struggling is the male lead, who is intentionally portrayed as unimaginably old and outdated (he's not even all that ancient-looking) as a running joke. However, he's completely useless in every other way too, with zero common sense or willingness to learn about new things. And he's way too interested in girls a fraction of his age. He quickly becomes emotionally and functionally reliant on his giddy new assistant despite constantly undermining her input; I'd honestly rather he left and this became a detective-themed version of last season's NinKoro instead.
Takopi's Original Sin ep1: Goodness, this show is rather dark! And all the better for it. Takopi's Original Sin merges a cute 'kid meets alien' mascot show with a bleak tale of (quite realistic) childhood neglect and suffering, making for an uncomfortable viewing experience as we see just how nasty our world can be through the fresh eyes of an adorable creature from another place. Sensitive viewers should not take the content warnings lightly but everything that happens in this harrowing first episode is deliberate and it was a pleasant (unpleasant?) change from the low stakes fantasy capers which clog up most of the anime listings these days. I believe it's only planned to run for half a dozen episodes so it's an easy commitment and one worth making for a show which actually has a story to tell.
Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show ep1: What in the world did anime fans do to Crunchyroll to deserve these horrible subtitles? They're factually inaccurate (translating different numbers as the same number on multiple occasions, changing characters' names at random), they don't flow and they frequently make no sense at all! Given how cheap proper subtitles are compared to a full dub I feel annoyed about how little respect Crunchyroll has for its audience to fall back upon obvious machine translation without a single proofreader; shame on them! The show itself is fairly mediocre - a bunch of vainglorious streamers are thrown together into an otherworldly 'death game'-ish scenario and forced to learn why so many of their peers have been succumbing to sudden comas - but the subtitles make it memorable for all the wrong reasons. The bright colours and designs are pleasant enough but the cosmic horror themes from the ending weren't as central in the first episode in favour of showing off the streamers' irritating personalities, which made it very hard for me to care about any of the characters' survival. That's always a bit of a flaw in this kind of show.
R
