3D CG models for the girls. Three DJ music sessions in the first episode. Sorry, no, this episode wasn't for me.

For what it's worth, this anime is part of a music media franchise that also includes live DJ performances and a smartphone rhythm game.

A schoolboy gets chased by an invisible teddy bear that catches him and cuts his throat. There's a huge blood spray. "You Lose," says the corpse's mobile phone.

Next, another schoolboy's friends are telling him about some "cutting edge street art". (Corpses are being turned to pixelated holes in the ground.) Our hero (Kaname Sudou) finds a free-to-play game on his mobile phone and starts the game, even though his terrified friend is yelling at him not to. A snake immediately comes out of his phone and bites his neck.

It's attention-grabbing... but it's yet another Battle Royale. These can be good, sometimes, but I need to be able to empathise with the participants. Here, I couldn't. It's got lots of uninteresting male characters (including the protagonist) and a hot female one with a unfortunately predictable plot role. The episode's events are basically just run, hunt, fight, die, etc. There's not much morality, e.g. Hot Girl's non-reaction to twelve murders, unless you count wondering if it might be fun to hunt the killer. It's not bad as such, but I wasn't even tempted to keep watching this one.

It's a Jun Maeda series, so it's going to make me cry. This first episode, though, made me laugh. I knew I was going to watch the whole thing in under two minutes.

Two boys are playing basketball. A small girl walks up to them and announces high-handedly that she's God. One of the boys (Youta) is very nice and polite, but is basically reacting exactly as you or I would in this situation.

They're great. I love them both. Naturally, this is anime and so Youta's scepticism is about to get nuked, but he rolls with it. Odin mentions in passing that the world will end in 30 days, but for the time being she's going to meddle in his life and try to get his childhood crush to fall in love with him.

We first meet the heroine, Natsume, while her dad's alive and she still has both arms. These things don't last.

The next time we see her, she's no longer a small girl. She wants to become a soldier to change things. The Gadoli have wiped out 90% of mankind and some members of the cast think the fighting will never end. Unfortunately for Natsume, being one-handed is a problem in the military. She's given a job cleaning the outside of the monster robot that everyone lives in.

The episode's perfectly okay, but not a must-watch. However, I've heard that the show as a whole is really ambitious and has a hell of a plot twist coming soon. It's on lots of critics' "Best of the season" lists. I'll give it a go.

Kabuto Hanadori is a chuunibyou, so he arrives late for class, dripping wet and carrying a puppy. He wears an eyepatch and he's given the puppy one too.

"This little guy cried and begged to come with me. He says we share a strong bond from a past life, whatever that means. He was a ferocious foe indeed. But now I remember. He was my constant companion in countless wars. The hound of hell, Cerberus! As Sturmhut, the knight who rules over light and darkness, I've reincarnated across many lives. And amidst my battles, I learned of a gate to the demon world that lies in this town. Should that gate open, this world will become a living hell. Though I fought and failed to stop the demons..."

Everyone in the class is bored. The teacher doesn't interrupt to tell him to shut up and sit down. Why not? I didn't believe that. There's a tsukkomi character (i.e. the straight man) whose grades have fallen since Hanatori started sitting next to him. Ahhhh, I can't be bothered with this.

In Japan, this show is one of the mega-franchises. It'll broadcast its 1000th episode this year. Abroad, though, it's not quite so big. Partly that's because some people avoid this kind of long-running show, unless they can be bothered to go back twenty years and watch it all from the beginning. Partly (in my opinion) it's also because the licence holders insisted on a mind-destroyingly bland international title (Case Closed), perhaps due to nervousness about legal issues with the name Conan. (If so, they were being silly. Their use of it is clearly a reference to Conan Doyle, which would surely be safe.)

Partly, though, it's because this show is completely and absolutely okay. It's fine. It's television. You might watch it if it came on, but equally you wouldn't go hunting down 965 episodes of it.

This week, our heroes are going to see the making a "superhero vs. kaijuu" movie. Naturally, the victim of the week meets Death By Kaijuu. (The standard joke in Japan is that Conan is a shinigami. Everywhere he goes, people die. The total number of people killed in this series is a lot higher than the number of murders in Japan per year.) What follows is normal, watchable detective stuff. There are twists after the end credits.

Incidentally, it's a series of lots of short serials. Had this been a two-parter, I'd have watched Part Two... but it's a four-parter. Naaah.

In this random episode, everyone plays baseball. Throughout. It's all the same game. It's a match. The show really gets into it, as is right and proper. I'd I'd thoroughly approve of this if I were a baseball fan. By the end of the episode, though, it's still only the fourth inning.

"I'm told the temperature will rise throughout the day! However, it won't be any hotter than our team already is! We wholly devote ourselves to baseball every day!"

It's about fishing. Fishing. The cast look like nice girls, but... words fail me. This show expects me to watch 12 episodes of people fishing.

I'm not going to watch this anime, but this morning I had some episodes on in the background anyway while I was doing something else. Before I knew it, they'd moved on to killing and cleaning their catches. A fish was being held on its back, clearly still alive, while Hina got ready to stick in a big knife. Eurgh. Yes, I realise that that's part of fishing, but eurgh.

A digimon is a "digital monster", just as a pokemon is a "pocket monster". They live in the internet, aka. the Network. Think of them as the native life-forms of the digital universe. Sometimes the nice ones team up with children from the real world in order to fight baddies!

I've seen some Digimon. I watched Digimon Adventure tri., although admittedly that was a mildly divisive "several years later" sequel with changed character designs. This, though, is going back to basics. The gang are all children with Shounen Hero hair again. The animation's superb. There are some nice moments, like Taichi and Agumon blinking at each other.

Unfortunately, though, I found it weak at conveying what was happening and making it feel part of a narrative. In the real world, trains have become incapable of stopping and it's just a matter of time before there's an accident. We enter the digital world (how? why?) and Agumon fights cartoony monsters (why?). It's unclear how these are connected to the trains. They must be, obviously. That's the whole point. Cyberattack. Cyber-monsters. Same thing, right? Handwave, handwave. In the actual episode, though, the effect is to weaken the links in your head between the Agumon action scenes and the potential train crash that we're supposed to be worrying about.

Agumon becomes Greymon. Why? What for? Oh, because the episode's scaling up from little monster fights to big monster fights. They then activate a program and the real world is magically okay again.

I'd been half-expecting to watch this series. It's a kiddie show with a million episodes, but it inherited the timeslot of the 2018 Gegege no Kitarou (which was superb) and I already had some familiarity with the franchise. This episode needed to do more to convince me, though.

I like the theme song. ("Gau" means "roar".)

Naoko Watanabe is a schoolgirl in a simplistically drawn children's anime. She's walking along promising not to get angry and turn into Gauko (a fire-breathing dinosaur)... only to discover that she's been helping people in that form. Does she lose her memories of being Gauko? She frightened off an aggressive hornet and saved her robot teacher from flying into traffic.

Oh, and she also stomps a fake Gauko who was wearing a dinosaur costume and making trouble for laughs.

It's a Netflix Original Anime. I quite like this show, but I don't feel the need to watch five hours of it (if you include the 2019 season).

...well, I say "boy". That's really the camera, since this is one of those first-person protagonist shows where the camera shows what he sees. We definitely hear him, though, which is comparatively unusual.

He's grovelling on the ground and asking to see a girl's boobs. The episode is their fairly off-the-wall conversation.

His tactic works.

I honestly wasn't sure about this one. Ep.1 hadn't blown me away, but the idea was potentially amusing and they're only three-minute episodes, so what the hell.

I watched ep.2 and it was okay. I watched a few more, but they still weren't very interesting, so I gave up.

The obvious problem with ep.1 is that the characters are cliches and fairly dull. This is for meta-fictional reasons. They're meant to be cliches. If they weren't, it wouldn't be a bad game (and the show wouldn't be able to take pot shots at genre staples). I'll admit that I was mildly amused by the game's three heroines being described as "easy" (at least when it comes to the generic protagonist) because that's mandatory in pseudo-harem anime nonsense.

The secondary problem is that they know they're in a game, giving rise to self-aware dialogue that's not technically breaking the fourth wall, but wouldn't be very different if it were.

Anyway, the show starts with the cast relaxing between adventures because the next player hasn't logged in yet. They learn that the reviews of their game stink, so they decide to stop following the script and go into ad-lib mode in an attempt to improve things.

This is a random episode, almost certainly not from 2020.

There are two half-episodes here. The first one has Nobita wheedling some Nikumenain pills from Doraemon, which mean that whatever he does, people will forgive him and won't get angry. Nobita is an idiot. Nobita wriggles out of his mother's natural response to him getting zero in a school test. He then pushes Takeshi Gouda in the river and draws on his face, after which he has fun with his teacher.

Other children try to imitate him. This doesn't end well.

The other half-episode is about one of Nobita's friends who's been telling his little brother in New York that he's the most popular boy in Japan, gets full marks in all his tests at school, etc. The brother's coming to visit. Doraemon and Nobita are more sympathetic to this than I'd have been.

It's been highly praised by reviewers, but I didn't warm to the cast. The lizard-headed protagonist, Kaiman, bites people's heads (as in putting their heads completely inside his sharp-toothed mouth), cuts them into bloody chunks, slashes off people's fingers and at one point bites off a girl's face. When his friend gets transformed into a bug, he's more concerned by the fact that the sorceror responsible has been eating Kaiman's gyouza.

Mind you, it transpires that killing sorcerors undoes their spells.

There's a bloke who smokes while sitting on a big mushroom, which might be a Lewis Carroll reference. It's extremely weird. And violent, of course. And set in an industrial gothic urban nightmare. It's unusual, but I'm honestly not sure.

Apparently, these people are supposed to be lovable despite murdering people with hammers, feeding their livers to people in restaurants, complaining about cheap rubbish bags when a severed head falls out on the street, etc. Sorry, I don't see it. "Why am I so irritated? I just killed a sorceror like usual, that's all."

Apparently there's a bonus anime I can also watch, called Dorohedoro: Ma no Omake. "Nope" to that too.

I enjoyed Season 1 enormously without finding it particularly well-written. Since then, to my surprise, it's become a favourite. Working from home during the coronavirus lockdown, I'll often have anime playing on my headphones as background radio... and this show's great for that. It's light, it's funny and Mamako's always a laugh. She always sounds as if she's talking to small children, e.g. "Okaasan pun-pun!" in ep.1.

That said, though, this episode is nonsense. This show's always been on the borderline between lampooning anime's fondness for incest subtext (normally with siblings) and plunging shamelessly into it. This OVA is the latter. It's diving in head-first. We have naked embraces, near-kisses, amnesia-fuelled romantic declarations from characters who don't know they're blood related, etc. (We also have some interest from the other girls, in case you wanted this to be a harem comedy too.)

The funniest character is Shiraase. "This is a laugh... I mean, dreadful." This is a swimsuit episode, because Shiraase says so. She's effectively evil, but she also gets killed. (Don't worry; it's a computer game and her deaths are a running joke. She always gets better.)

My notes say "OH GOD". It's shamelessly embracing cliches, for comedy. The amnesia impacts are all stupid, but the episode knows it. If it hadn't been done with a wink, this would be trash. I rolled my eyes a fair bit, but I also enjoyed it.

The first Dragon Quest series was 1991-92. This is a new adaptation of the manga based on the video game franchise... but I also quite enjoyed it. Our hero, Dai, was raised by monsters, but he idolises heroes (who fight monsters). One day, four somewhat evil heroes arrive on Dai's island in search of one of his friends. Dai eagerly cooperates.

The monsters are fun (although often obviously CGI). I liked Grandpa Brass, the lump shaman who looks as if a rock monster took a dump and is smart enough to realise that the "heroes" are baddies. Dai's friends also include a giant squid capable of tipping ships.

I preferred the episode when it seemed to be deconstructing the concept of a hero. It's not. It's a shounen adventure show for small boys. It reminded me of Dragonball. The baddies are called "fake heroes" by the lovely King Romos, who could get Christmas work as a department store Santa Claus. I'm not the target audience and I'm not planning to watch the rest of the series, but I still quite enjoyed this episode.

This episode was okay, actually, but it's from Netflix. The CGI I can handle. The characters look acceptable and there are some lovely bits, e.g. the deer. As for the story, it's an unremarkable but perfectly watchable fantasy with Tudor buildings and a big, bad dragon. I enjoyed the episode's gleeful willingness to kill named characters.

But... y'know, Netflix. How many good anime have they put out? Devilman Crybaby was excellent, admittedly, but that one was obviously special from the start. This one's just another CGI thing that was fine and had its cool moments but would probably look a bit thin if I rewatched it. I'll give it a miss.

It's a CGI anime from Polygon Pictures and Netflix. It's also a transparent fantasy metaphor for whaling.

Nope, not interested. None of those are good things, especially the whaling. Kill, butcher, eat, sell, eurgh. The show's design looks great, admittedly, if you can stomach the not-bad CGI. It's got zeppelins in the clouds, wiggly anemone whale-dragons that barely even look like vertebrates, a bit a steampunk aesthetic, etc.

But no.

I gave Season 1 a miss in 2018, but reluctantly. It had sounded like my cup of tea. A witch called Yurine summons an immortal snake-demon called Jashin who can only return to hell by killing Yurine. Cue lots of failed murder attempts, followed by Yurine's bloody ripostes.

Unfortunately, I hadn't found it funny. Its gore cycle did nothing for me.

Yurie Hanazono summons a demon (Jashin-chan) for no reason. She thought it sounded like fun. She also doesn't know the spell to send a summoned demon back home. (She has no excuse for not realising, but simply hadn't bothered reading the last page of her book.) Given all this, there's only one way for Jashin to escape from the mortal plane... KILL YURIE! Sounds reasonable to me. Go for it. The summoner's asked for it. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done, as Yurie keeps inflicting super-gory injuries on Jashin that would have been massively fatal on a mortal. And we're supposed to find this funny.

I don't like this show... but, even so, I was looking forward to giving it another chance. Maybe I'd missed a gem?

Answer: no. I'm skipping this season too.

The voice actors are funny. Unfortunately the knives, spears and bloody impalings aren't. (For me, anyway.) I also didn't see the point of the scenes with the Jashin-chan council in her head, starring different versions of her. They're building up to a gag, but it didn't really work for me because the scenes don't matter.

The episode improves a bit when we meet the supporting cast. (There's an angel who feels guilty about having made lots of devil friends on Earth, for instance.) They get together and have yakiniku silliness... but the silliness is pointless too.

There's also fourth wall breaking. "This is our second anime adaptation."

Absolutely not.

There's nothing wrong with the show, but it's so generic that it barely has an identity. Light-hearted, likeable girls! In a universe without men, but plenty of lesbian ship tease because it's adapted from a Manga Time Kirara Carat four-panel manga!

There's a grumpy child actress, a shy model with big boobs, a musician and a pink-haired heroine (Sakura) who's moved to Tokyo from the sticks. She wants to be an idol. They're all going to be idols. The show's twist is that they're all a bit rubbish at their chosen careers and they're employed by a dodgy agency that has them living in a part of Tokyo so dozy that it barely counts as "urban". They eat curry for every meal because it's cheap and healthy and cheap.

I don't dislike the show at all, but it's a bit empty and it's going to be about idols.

Eighteen seasons! One every year, with a new episode almost every week (and the associated manga started in 1999). Wow. That said, though, my main reaction to the episode was "kiddie anime". The first half has our nine-year-old hero, Satou, having all his friends transferring into his school and joining his class. (Aren't there any other classes in his school?) One of the transfer "students" is an annoying smug baddie alien blob called Megane who steals Satou's shoes from his locker. No one in the class remarks on Megane's appearance.

The episode's second half is a card battle in an arena.