I'm a bit torn. I want to continue, but I'm seeing too many red flags.

It starts with magical girl parody that breaks the fourth wall and ends up being a dream sequence. The giant lizard baddie has a monochrome superpower that threatens the show's existence, since the viewers will complain and get the show cancelled if they think it's only black-and-white.

After that we meet our heroine, Saki, for real. She wakes up too late for breakfast and there's a joke about her mother giving her some food to eat as she's running down the street... which proves to be a plate of pancakes with whipped cream, fruit, and syrup. Amusing, yes. Plausible, no. We then discover that Saki isn't just a schoolgirl, but also an idol! A really bad one, admittedly, because she can't sing or dance, but still an idol. Huh.

Saki and her idol partner Sakuyo finish their idol set with a groanworthy reference to Cutey Honey.

For what it's worth, "ore" is a masculine first-person pronoun. Saki's going to become a magical "girl", but with a gender twist. This could well be funny, but it's also another go at the central joke of Cute High Earth Defense Club Love! and that I dropped after one season.

The episode had some good jokes, e.g. "it was a popular TV genre once", the yakuza mascot character and the hot super-idol who seems barely sentient and communicates in grunts. However I'm also sensing a style of humour I don't like. Fourth wall breaking tends to annoy me these days, unless it's genuinely clever. I'm ditching this show, which I suspect must be a bad sign since I'm practically the target audience. I watch lots of magical girl anime, but I'm also happy to watch bad taste, pisstakes and low comedy. Unfortunately this show didn't convince me. I got the impression of a show that's self-aware and commenting on everything, instead of being sincere.

I think it's a prequel to Magical Girl Apocalypse. It's by the same mangaka, anyway, except that Magical Girl Apocalypse hasn't had an anime adaptation yet.

It stars a meek girl called Aya Asagiri. "All I think about every day is dying." She's getting bullied at school. You might think you've seen this before, but you haven't. The pins, the razor blades, stamping on the neck, holding her head underwater to see how long she lasts... and that's before we get into the criminal acts. The lesser of the two will attract, in America, a maximum fine of 100,000 dollars and up to 18 months' imprisonment. The other one (with the other girls happily watching!) will, I think, get you fifteen years.

Then there's Aya's brother at home. I actually hate their parents more than him, but it's a close thing.

That's Aya's day. Then, one night, her computer shows her the Magical Girl Site, which promises to give you magic powers and a magical stick. The site's mascot is the creepiest thing in this episode, although I'm also disturbed by the sperm in the end title sequence.

(Why's it become fashionable this year to have live-action footage in the closing credits, by the way? Is it just because it's cheaper? I'd like that to stop.)

Yeesh. That was extreme. The bit with the cutter freaked me out. I'll be watching the series, partly because of the link to Magical Girl Apocalypse, but be warned that this show is almost as grim as it gets.

It's actually a sequel. Major was a 78-volume baseball manga (1994-2010) and a 157-episode anime (2004-2010). That show's protagonist was Goro Honda (later Shigeno), so this sequel stars his son, Daigo.

I'm not really interested in sports anime and I wasn't expecting this one to change anything, but it's another first episode and I watched it. It's pretty good. If you like baseball, I'd expect you to like this. The Shigeno family are a pretty likeable bunch, all supportive and good-natured. Daigo (age ten) is a bigger baseball freak than his sister, but even she's going to be joining her school baseball club next year and their mum used to play too. Dad's still a professional, currently being scouted for the Taiwanese national leagues.

"I love baseball because I love my father. He's strong and cool. My dream is to be like him."

Anyway, Daigo can't wait to join his local baseball club. When he does, he's instantly famous. "Shigeno" is a big name. Unfortunately it turns out that Daigo's got a couple of problems. Firstly, he has a slightly weak shoulder. He's ten. It wouldn't be right to use him as a pitcher. The coach tells him to hold off a couple of years and concentrate on getting himself ready physically. Secondly (and more seriously), Daigo assumed he'd be superhuman and obviously the best, like his father... and he's not. Maybe he's just normal, or maybe he's the type who goes to pieces if he can't do something perfectly first time. It's not a practice thing. You could imagine him practising until his arm fell off. Instead, sad to say, it's simply that Daigo can be a bit of a self-pitying dick.

Two years later, he's quit baseball. He joined the soccer club, then abandoned that too. His sister's mad at him, quite rightly. "You promised Mum you'd study hard and try to get into Fuurin Academy if you quit soccer." Well, that was a lie and he's just lying around playing video games.

You can see where this is going. Obviously he'll overcome his personality issues and return to baseball (although his friends and family will probably need to kick him pretty hard to get his head out of his arse first). He's a likeable boy when he's doing something he's passionate about. I wasn't fighting the urge to fast-forward through the episode or anything. If you like baseball, give it a go.

It's quite charming. It's a barely-animated slice-of-life episode about cats. Two of them get chosen as kittens to live together with their new owner. There's Daizu (who's so unresponsive that it's a surprise when he speaks) and Azuki (who's got a bit of an attitude.)

"Mame Neko" means "bean cat", incidentally. They're normal cats, but their owner names them after beans.

If it came on TV while I was in Japan, I'd watch it. It looks nice. However there's nothing essential about it.

Season 1 of this show could be a bit of a slog at times. Season 2 has been much more relaxing, though, because Rei's becoming more of a human being and less of a knot of social inadequacy. That said, though, he's not in this week's episode at all. This is the high point (in a good way) of Hina's bullying story arc.

Something I admire about this show is that it's been brutally honest about that bullying. No magic solutions. Good people get punished and bad people get given a free pass, because everyone else is scared that speaking up will mean they'll be next. (That's how Hina got targeted.) Even going to her teacher hadn't helped. Well, this week even that teacher becomes a victim.

You understand. You see where she'd been coming from. However she still deserves every bit of what happens here.

There are consequences. There are talks at school with the parents (or in the case of our orphan heroine, an older sister). There's an evil mother who points out that there's no proof. There are, even here, good characters who can't find the words when it matters and end up frustrated and wrongly blaming themselves. However, praise the heavens, there's also the headmaster. HE IS MY HERO.

It's a particularly strong episode of what's always been a strong show. It might also make you punch the air.

The episode never convinced me that it knew what it was about. It doesn't feel like a coherent story that's going somewhere. It feels like a half-digested story blob. Plenty of ideas and potential, but not much script clarity.

1. A schoolgirl (Hazuki) is thinking to herself in class about how she doesn't have any friends, but in a slightly grandiose way that suggests she's doing narration on her life.

2. We learn more about Hazuki. She wishes she could get on better with her new family (who seem fine) and she loves books so much that she'll run off and read one whenever something happens that she doesn't like. Oh, and her mother's dead.

3. A magic book appears in Hazuki's bag and she chases a magic girl.

4. Hazuki opens a door into a magic world, where she meets a nice lady who puts her into an onsen, then steals her clothes. Hazuki spends the last third of the episode naked.

5. Chase. Challenged to fight. Magical school? (Hazuki asks if it's like Harry Potter.) "Use your book to make clothes!" "I haven't made friends with that mage yet!" It's all a bit of a mess, really.

The show's also notorious for production delays and an animation quality nosedive. Eps.1-10 aired in Jan-March 2018, but eps.11-12 aired in April 2019.

The show's probably better than ep.1 makes it look. Apparently its characters are based on fairy tales and they have to learn to ignore their fates or something. The episode's quite likeable in its way and I'm reasonably fond of Hazuki, but even so I'll be skipping this.

Oh, good grief. There's a harem isekai anime called 'In Another World With My Smartphone'... and this isn't it. It's another one. Same principle. Same bland hero who's been transported to another world, only to find that he's the master of all and adored by all girls because he has a smartphone. (Why is it still working? Don't ask.)

This genre is the death of drama. It's basically a porn sub-genre (but revolving around ego-stroking rather than sex and nudity). The hero will face no challenges. Stuff happens Because He's So Awesome. It's just twelve episodes of him nobly saying "no" to girls who press their boobs worshipfully against him.

This one has a couple of mildly interesting twists. Technically it's a time travel show, not an isekai one. (Yuuto's travelled back to the Bronze Age, so he can make himself a warlord by discovering iron and ripping off the battlefield tactics of future military heroes.) Mind you, I suspect the Bronze Age didn't have glowing sorceresses who can fly, catch arrows in mid-air and summon people from the future. Yuuto's also aware of the silliness of all these little territorial wars and that his decisions can kill people.

The harem stuff is glaring, though. It's clearly the point of the show, with everything else being lipstick on the pig.

It's a labour of love, funded via Kickstarter. I don't think it became a series, but the animation's impressive and the script's perfectly okay.

It's set in a world where a schoolgirl might have giant robot arms coming out from her skirt. These can lift trucks in the air and beat up baddies. (She's got a bad attitude. ) They look pretty cool, but the downside is that they bond to their owners and being separated from your mecha-arms will be fatal within days. They're actually aliens.

Good stuff: the Hikaru-Arma relationship. That was fun and ultimately charming. If this pilot had gone to series, I'd have been watching for them.

Unremarkable stuff: fighting a green-haired baddie. My attention wandered a bit there.

It's good for a 26-minute one-off. Those are hard to do. Looks great. Overall, I enjoyed it.

Apparently it's great. It's on critics' Best of the Year lists. It's doing a retro 1990s animation style, which I loved. It's a 50th anniversary celebration of the manga/anime Ashita no Joe, set in a SF near-future where boxers fight in metal exoskeletons that could punch through walls.

Unfortunately it's about boxing. It's a classically told sports anime, with boxing. There's a match. They're boxers.

This morning, I watched two sports anime. I just about, barely, gave a tentative thumbs-up to the one about beach volleyball. (That's Haruka Receive.) My problem with sports anime is that I generally don't care about the sport itself, but that goes double for boxing.

It feels like a children's show, but with one difference. Yuu is the small boy protagonist who's going to go on quests and stop monsters from making trouble... but not by fighting them. In this world, the monster problem's been solved. You just get a healer. Yuu has healer powers.

Unfortunately he's also scared of monsters. This even includes tiny fluffball things that resemble Pokemon.

However there's also the "girl in a bottle". (Well, a jam jar.) She's a fairy, she's made of water and she's more decisive than Yuu, sometimes to a fault. "My horoscope said this was the perfect day!"

It's cute and I approve of the show's message. This episode's character journey is warm and nice. Yuu running away isn't heroic, but he's going to have to get over that. I'll give it a whirl.

It's a cartoon with cats. They squash their faces in cardboard boxes. They play soccer. They hang from strings in order to bounce against each other, then finally they all climb in a big pan.

It's nice. It's peaceful. It's aimed at four-year-olds.

I love the idea behind this show. Whoever pulls Excalibur from the stone is King Arthur, king of England! Unfortunately that's not very difficult, so there are lots of Arthurs. (Look at the title.)

Unfortunately, the show begins with six wacky anime Arthurs bragging about their coolness, then beating up 10,000 other Arthurs in a fight scene that's not a fight at all. It's too one-sided. It's just more bragging, but with violence. This is either Awesum Badasses Being Awesum (if you enjoy this sort of thing because you're six years old), or a bunch of bullying narcissists (if you don't).

Then a dragon appears, so that our heroes can be violent (but just as smug and indestructible) against a less flimsy target.

That's the pre-credits sequence.

The rest of the episode is more watchable, but still basically a bunch of stuff I didn't care about. The protagonist, Danchou Arthur, is obnoxious. She wants to be fanservice. She wears bunny girl swimsuits, sexy maid outfits or nothing at all, then is surprised when everyone else facepalms. (This is a kiddie show, by the way.) She's the leader of that six-Arthur team. (Why?)

It's based on a video game franchise. There's a second season.

In outline, it sounds like ecchi harem nonsense. Those can be entertaining too, but this one has twists that make it a bit more interesting (and funny).

1. The Bland Nice Hero (Aki Shiina) has a personality! He looks so cute and androgynous that people keep either mistaking him for a girl or calling him a child. That's why he's moved to Tokyo. He wants to start a new life where people see him as a man! Even when Ayaka (the eponymous motherly buxom caretaker) is being odd, he just wants to demonstrate how reliable, sensible, etc. he is.

2. The house full of women is refreshingly sensible. On catching Ayaka and Aki in vaguely compromising situations, for instance, they know immediately that it's Ayaka's fault and only berate her.

3. Even the troublemaking Ayaka herself isn't sex-crazed or anything. She's maternal.

This isn't highbrow. Its most prominent element is Ayaka's bosom. I still enjoyed it, though.

CAVEAT: other people seem to have liked this more than me.

It's about three small girls, all colour-coded. Yellow is full of energy, but is also rude and likes talking about poo. Blue plays video games, believes in killing and hopes to find severed fingers. Pink is modest and normal. Together, they are... MITSUBOSHI COLOURS! "We keep the peace in our town!" Or, in other words, they run around doing nothing while calling themselves detectives, vigilantes, etc.

There's a cop who thinks they're brats. (He's not wrong.) There's a shopkeeper who sells amazing glasses. There's a cat that looks like a panda.

And that's it. It's slice-of-life, i.e. nothing matters and nothing happens. Everything will depend on whether or not you find the show's formula charming. Personally, I didn't really like two-thirds of the girls and I didn't laugh when they were trying to shoot Grumpy Cop with a rocket launcher. It's a decent comedy situation, sure. It just didn't land for me.

That said, though, its aimlessness seems fairly normal for a slice-of-life anime. I wouldn't call it bad as such. If you like this kind of thing, by all means check it out.

I have no idea what's going on with this franchise, although I've always quite liked what little I've seen of it. The 2015 episode I saw was a mobile phone game adaptation and had a schoolboy with amnesia in a monster battle game. After that, the 2017 episodes I saw appeared to be: (a) a kiddie CGI action show, and (b) an armageddon show heading for the end of the world and inescapable death.

Now I'm watching a CGI show about Lucifer the angel fighting with the forces of heaven. Her partner is Uriel. Their enemies are demons. Heaven's more high-tech than you'd expect, looking like Cloud City with dimension gates and Star Wars ships. Lucifer definitely hasn't fallen yet (e.g. she still has her halo), but Uriel being given an angel-killing blade suggests that a stormy future.

It's impressive and epic. It starts with a dull battle (thunderous CGI, zero character involvement), but the rest of the episode looks as if we're heading for drama and/or tragedy. I liked it.

REASONS NOT TO CONTINUE: (a) it's extremely CGI, (b) I'm not sure I have the processing power to handle Monster Strike.

It's a prequel spin-off of the long-running anime/manga Kaiji. (69 manga volumes and still going, last time I looked.) Kaiji is a gambler who gets involved in games of death. This episode conveys that in a four-minute info-dump with awesome old-fashioned stylised art and EXCITED SUPER-MANLY NARRATION. This isn't very interesting.

We then never meet Kaiji again.

Tonegawa is a baddie. He works for the Teiai group, which lends money to unlikeable idiots and then sends big, threatening men in suits and sunglasses to collect or else. We see them going about their gangster business for a while, which is even less interesting.

We then meet Tonegawa's mad, sadistic boss. "I want a front row seat to see the ugliest side of humanity. The most extreme of extremes. Our true nature: destruction, despair and death." Tonegawa gets given the job of organising this. Make it happen! Death games!

I didn't finish it. Apparently the show's a villainous workplace comedy and I've seen significant praise for it, but I couldn't be bothered. I didn't care. I'm equally happy for both the victims and enforcers to live or die. Obviously I've jumped ship at the worst possible moment, since the show's supposedly a comedy and I didn't last long enough to reach any comedy.

But what the hell. I liked the art style, though.

This manga's had both an anime and a live-action TV drama adaptation. This made me wonder if there might be more to it than I was seeing here... but no, I'm still dropping it.

It's about two schoolgirls, Koizumi and Yuu. (There are two more girls in supporting roles, a pink-haired one who wants to be the cutest girl ever and a green-haired in glasses who doesn't like ramen.) Koizumi likes ramen and has absolutely no interest in anything else in the world, including other people, politeness and having conversations. She'll read a book while you're trying to talk to her. I'd be interested in having her diagnosed.

Yuu, on the other hand, thinks Koizumi is hot. She keeps following her to ramen shops, trying to talk to her and ordering the same ramen. She can also see the positive in being completely rejected (again). It's only the first episode and already Koizumi's said, "Please stop stalking me."

That I could imagine watching. The girls are moderately entertaining, if you don't mind Koizumi being cold as ice. However it's also a foodie show, with Koizumi teaching Yuu about ramen varieties, ingredients, flavours, etc. (She's not interested in Yuu herself, obviously, but you can't shut her up once she's talking about ramen.) The show's obviously got a huge focus on ramen and the food lectures made me think of hitting the fast-forward button... so, yeah, it's probably not for me.

(I like ramen, by the way, but that's unrelated to my opinion of this anime.)

I was charmed. It's about a schoolgirl (Akari) and a quiet, well-mannered vampire who'd never bite anyone (Sophie). They meet in a deserted forest at night. "Don't worry, I'm just your run-of-the-mill vampire passing by. Nobody suspicious."

Akari has a huge doll collection, an obvious crush on Sophie (at one point fantasising about a wedding) and loves all things vampiric. She admires Sophie's house and is so over-enthusiastic that the vampire's the one who gets scared. The upside of this manic positivity, though, is that she's super-friendly and pretty much immune to all things that might freak out normal people. (Her parents are like her too.) "My name isn't 'human'. It's Akari."

She even tries to get Sophie to suck her blood. There's definitely a fetish there.

As for Sophie, she's a mildly deadpan immortal who buys things on the internet and watches late night anime. "I bet everyone writing reviews around this hour is a vampire too." Sometimes she finds Akari exhausting, but she'll soon find she's missing her when Akari disappears for a bit.

I really liked it. It's just a bit of fluff, really, but the characters and the comedy both worked for me. If the show keeps being this much fun, it'll be one of my favourites of the year.

I'd have probably liked this series with different protagonists. The client's a schoolgirl who's being haunted by the best friend she killed. Well, more or less. That's how she sees it, anyway. There's also surrealism, e.g. a mouth into Hades that's literally a face opening up in the ground. All this is good, but...

Muhyo and Rouji are kind of annoying and childish. Well, they're children. We first see them squabbling so much over a book that they manage to tear it in half. Rouji at least means well and is a nice kid. He's the sidekick. Muhyo, though, is a smug scumbag who doesn't just hunt ghosts. He executes them. "Mahouritsu" is a made-up portmanteau word, combining "magic" and "law", and Muhyo is a magi-legal expert in it.

It's not just that he's a petty little shit who needs slapping. It's not just that he's got no objection to a nice girl choosing to fall into Hell. He's BOTH.

Can I be bothered with this? I think that's the appropriate level here.

It's an idol show and not even a good one. It's the kind of idol show that reminds you that they're two-legged vermin who add nothing to the world. There's an unsuccessful idol group who are doing an idol contest (entrants: zero) and a live performance (audience: 28).

What makes the show a bit more interesting is its heroine, Hanako. She's the Idiot Foreigner. She can speak Japanese, but she asks if the tower outside the airport can turn into a giant robot and she thinks "idol" is another word for "monster". She's an idiot savant at dancing and choreography, but there's a comedy barrier to her joining her new friends in their idol group. She wanders off in the airport and doesn't even guess that her parents might be worried about her, but fortunately her mother's an airhead too. (Meanwhile her father's pathetic.)

The "animation" of the group's live performance is, uh, cheap. It would be a lie even to call most of it animation.

Would I recommend this show? Hell, no. Will I watch it? Well, I might take a peek at ep.2.

This episode was fine, so yes.

Hanako upsets one of the idols (Ueno, the purple one) by saying "you should all go on TV!" as if it's the easiest thing in the world. Ueno then repeatedly goes out of her way to be harsh to Hanako, even when Hanako's just improved all their costumes for a live performance. Ueno feels like a bit of a Token Opposition Character (and a jerk), but it's giving the episode a bit of an emotional journey.

I've watched two episodes and I wouldn't mind watching a third, so I might as well finish the show.

It's one of the bigger anime hits of recent years. It's a fun, exciting shounen adventure that's also been wise enough to space itself out to avoid the year-round grind. This has avoided the snail's pace pacing and/or filler hell of its siblings like One Piece, Naruto, etc.

This episode's a reintroduction. There's a bit of incident, with the class all gathering at the school pool in the holidays, but the episode's real purpose is to remind us of everyone's superpowers and personalities. It's a good newbie starting point... but actually even I was grateful for all these reminders. The show has a big cast.

There's no fanservice, by the way. This isn't that sort of show. The girls' school swimsuits wouldn't have embarrassed the Victorians, to the dismay of Denki and Minoru.

It's fine. Decent episode of a good show. (I've heard that Season 3 isn't quite as good as Seasons 1-2, but I'll still be watching it.)

It's a Chinese anime that's apparently, um, strongly reminiscent of Fate stay/night. Fair enough. People who've watched it have enjoyed it, but I'm not even much of a completist when it comes to the real thing.

We start out following some bloke's ordinary life, but soon he's taking a book off a shelf and a magical voice is talking to him. Before long, there are FIGHTS!!!! The title sequence promises even more FIGHTS!!!! If that's what you like, by all means give this a shot.

This is serious garbage-diving. This show is infamous. I'd been looking forward to it. Obviously it's appalling, absurd and badly made, but those are its selling points for trash connoisseurs. What I hadn't expected was to dislike something rather mundane about it.

It's about a schoolboy hero (Yuu) who tries to write light novels, but has never had any success with them. He has the artistic awareness of a parasitic tapeworm and he gets all his inspiration from other light novels. He even tries to deliver five-hour lectures to his sister on why the genre is artistically important. This week, one of his submissions gets booted at a competition's screening stage, with these comments:

(a) "It's an easy enough read, but littered with cliches."

(b) "We can't see anything appealing about your female characters."

(c) "How about writing little sister characters? They're popularity magnets."

Obviously our hero focuses on (c), because fixing the others would require self-awareness and the ability to consider writing quality. Oh, and he also assumes that it's impossible to write about sibling characters unless you have incestuous feelings. I don't mind him being an idiot, though. He's a schoolboy. For all his faults, he's probably writing better stuff than I was at his age.

However, Yuu has a little sister, Suzuka. She's strict, intelligent, hard-working, etc. She's perfect. She's also written a light novel that won first prize in this competition. (The moral of this episode: having intelligence and thought processes will improve your writing.) However it would be inconvenient for her to admit publicly to having written a light novel, so she asks a gobsmacked Yuu to be her public stand-in.

Sounds good? (Well, no, but never mind.) The problem is that the episode's built around Yuu having serious conversations with professionals who think he's the writer of someone else's book. It's annoying. It's a contrived situation that could have been easily avoided by explaining Suzuka's circumstances to the organisers. Yuu's telling frustrating lies and wasting everyone's time. These scenes made me reach for the fast-forward button.

That said, let's talk about the good (i.e. appalling) stuff!

This episode has:

1. a little sister who secretly wants to shag her brother. When he asks why she wrote a light novel about secret incestuous yearnings, she announces that she was possessed.

2. an editor who puts Yuu's hand on her boob. "Knowing what breasts feel like will have a huge impact on your work, won't it? If you don't mind using mine, you can grope them whenever you like."

3. an illustrator with a reputation for filthy drawings and a name that means "extreme sex face". She introduces herself by shoving Yuu's hand between her huge boobs. "Hearing you call me beautiful makes me so happy, I could orgasm!"

4. a filthy-mouthed woman in her twenties who looks pre-pubescent and shows her tits and knickers.

It's legendary. It had key animation from a studio that had only been doing in-between frames and finish animation. They couldn't finish ep.7 on time and the TV station had to repeat ep.6 instead. Some people watched this show just to see how bad the animation would get. One of the episodes' closing titles has a credit for "Shoujiki Komatta" (i.e. "we're in serious trouble").

I'd been looking forward to a train wreck here. Unfortunately, though, it's built around a deception that made me lose all patience with the episode.

It's about Akkun and Nontan, his girlfriend. Nontan is a happy, bubbly girl who thinks everything Akkun says and does is cute. This suggests that she's either super-perceptive or barely sentient, because everything Akkun says and does to her is abusively rude.

As soon as she's out of sight, though, we learn that he thinks of her as an angel, a saint and the most beautiful girl in the world. He thinks he'd die if he walked next to her. He's her stalker. It's unclear how they managed to become boyfriend and girlfriend, but I presume God rewrote reality. (All other explanations are less plausible.) This is actually quite funny, although that's a provisional judgement since I've only seen one three-minute episode. The abuse isn't as uncomfortable as it should be, partly because Nontan only seems to hear it as love declarations and partly because Akkun's just so weird.

I'll continue. It's different.