He's Godzilla, but he's also penguin-sized and the chatty friend of a little girl. "You do worry, don't you? Don't worry, I'll stay with you until I become King of the Monsters."

"What does the King of the Monsters do?" asks his friend. Godzilla ignores the question and trots home.

This was produced to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the original Godzilla film. Other Godzilla film kaijuu also appear in cute kiddie form, but it seems possible that Godzilla's the only one with enough sentience for speech. (I'd have to watch more episodes to verify that, though.)

Taeko is an office lady to whom mildly amusing things happen. She's selling stuff at a flea market and a bloke walks up asking to buy all of it... only to sit down where she'd been and put it all on sale himself, at higher prices. There's a mild pun around the Japanese phrase that's literally "I made a boyfriend". Taeko enters a shop and encounters a combined rice-cooker-and-TV robot with a grumpy face.

This series isn't worth hunting down, but it's okay.

RECOMMENDATION: go into this one blind. Avoid reviews and internet discussions.

At first I liked it, then at the end I became excited to see where this was going. It's set among students who have superpowers (mostly) on an island (why?). There's a gloomy protagonist who doesn't even protest when his classmates bully him and has serious self-esteem issues. There's a cute pink-haired girl.

Kill the enemies of humanity and save ten million lives.

Imagine you're a baseball-playing schoolgirl who can pitch an impossible breaking ball. You've worked at it and worked at it. It's taken you years, but you know you'll be able to bowl out entire teams with it. Your friends say you might be able to turn professional one day... but your catcher says it makes her look bad and orders you not to play it. It's such a wicked ball that it keeps beating her, not just the batters. You asked to practise with her, but she couldn't be bothered and she's not that interested in baseball anyway. Result: your team loses a lot.

Yomi Takeda is that schoolgirl. Yeah, I can imagine someone wanting to quit baseball after that. On starting high school, though, she meets a childhood friend who encourages her to pitch that ball and can even, somehow, catch it. At first, Yomi's scared. "You mean I'm allowed to throw it?"

That was charming. I'm not expecting the rest of the series to hit that level, but that episode made me care. (There's also lesbian tease for a certain kind of audience, e.g. "I'd never forget your scent" while rubbing your face in her midriff.) I'm still dropping the show, because it'll be twelve episodes of baseball and I rarely watch sports anime, but this was great.

It's 21st century Tenchi Muyo, so avoid it.

A mother and her baby are staying with the Tenchi gang. People drink coffee and eat desserts. There are conversations. Nothing of interest happens.

I disliked the protagonist. He's a selfish git who assumes that altruists are hypocrites. He's working at a convenience store where one of his co-workers is mute and is never seen to have a head. There's always something hiding it, e.g. animals, birds, camera angles, etc.

It's all fairly unpleasant and I was assuming I'd drop the episode when... DID SHITHEAD JUST GET KILLED? What happened there? I have no idea. Well, let's double-check:

No sign of the unlikeable bloke from ep.1. Instead, we have a scary, intimidating customer who's really a gentle mummy's boy inside. And again, a horror ending. Maybe. Possibly. I don't know what's going on, mind you, or even exactly what just happened.

I'll keep watching.

I was watching this show regularly for a while, but I drifted away from it. It's about some bloke who got reincarnated in a fantasy world as a slime called Rimiru and gained endless superpowers, skills, fans, worshippers, etc. He owns a town, inhabited by hundreds of monsters who think he's wonderful.

The show's nice and relaxing, but also fairly pointless.

This episode has Rimiru working as a teacher. A tiresome rival in the staffroom makes a fuss about a test, so they both bet that their own class will participate and win. The episode's pleasant enough, but its antagonists (that teacher and some thieves) are a bit cartoonish and hard to take seriously. Mind you, the thing about Rimiru having got his students possessed by benevolent spirits was weird enough to be mildly intriguing.

There's an invisible boy in the girls' toilets. Good news: he's dead. He's a ghost and he'll even grant wishes, at a price. (He doesn't like being accused of being a perverted ghost.)

Yashiro Nene wants help with her love life! She wants to attract a particular boy's attention. Unfortunately, it turns out that ghosts are rubbish at that kind of thing. (The results of the "bump into him" strategy were particularly amusing.)

It's a light, amusing episode. I love the art style and its painterly colouring. The characters are nice. Happy to continue.

OFFICIAL BLURB: "The story will take place 100 years after the world was destroyed in the 21st century due to environmental destruction and depletion of resources. The story follows four girls who work at PARK, based on a real store in Harajuku that follows the theme of 'Fashion x Otaku x Creation.'"

ACTUAL EPISODE: schoolgirls buy drinks. One of the girls has blue skin.

It's a thin layer of plot over a very, very blatant toy advertisement. Yes, even compared with other shows like this. The toy will pose as its name appears in big letters, like the last shot of an TV advert, and the show is clearly far more interested in this than in, say, the heroes' characterisation. For what it's worth, these heroes are twelve-year-old twins who look eight, but are allowed to drive high-speed cars along busy motorways and fly Transformer planes to save the arse!

...sorry. That's "Earth", not "Arse". But the pronunciation's the same. Japanese has neither a TH sound nor the diphthong vowel in the English words BIRTH and EARTH, so they'll say those words as BAAS and AAS respectively. What I'm about to recount isn't what the showrunners intended, but it's what the voice actors are saying. "Arse" is this show's favourite word. The twins have lots of arse energy, but can they save the arse? Three UFOs approach the arse to turn our arse energy into dark energy. "I'm going to take your Arse Energy!" Horrors! Your arse shouldn't live in the dark! Fortunately, though, our heroes have an arse handle, so their arse energy is full!

Oh, and the twins talk about wetting themselves. No, I'm not mischievously mishearing another word this time. They really do keep saying the Japanese word for wetting yourself ("chibiru"). Even the narrator says this is no time for that.

It's paper-thin nonsense and our heroes' dad is annoying.

"Whatever you desire is here. Climb the tower and you will have everything."

In other words, climbing that tower will grant all your wishes and let you own the world. The only problem will be the other 1000000000 adventurers who also want to beat that tower. Furthermore, it looks as if you'll get given lots of arbitrary weird tasks. Here, our meek hero has to break a ball without getting killed by a train-sized sea serpent called the White Steel Eel. There's also a girl who thinks he's handsome and gives him a sword, to the unexplained shock of various supporting characters who say things like "you can't do that" and "you'll be executed if the king finds out".

The source material's actually a Korean web comic. It looks okay, but also sort of pointless.

I enjoyed Season 1. It's about a boy called Kazuya Kagami and his tsukumogami (a household object that's acquired sentience). She's an obi sash, her name's Kiriha and she's the kind of confident, unstoppable girl who'll attach herself to someone but only rarely listen to a word they say. She also has an antiquated speech pattern.

She was already regularly wanking off Kazuya in the bathroom in Season 1, whether he liked it or not. (He'd generally respond with maidenly distress.) She's still doing that now, but even more so. This is an OVA, i.e. not meant for TV broadcast, so we have nudity, nipples, offscreen hand jobs plus semen, offers to perform paizuri and the girls tying Kazuya to a post so that they can look through his porn.

It's quite amusing. Shameless trash, obviously, but the Kazuya-Kiriha relationship is quite nice. (Be warned that the main cast are almost all still at school, though.)

TV and hence toned down, unsurprisingly, although Kazuya still wakes up with four girls in his bed. "How did this end up like this?" he asks plaintively.

It feels as if we've returned to normal. There's a plot, with supernatural beings that our heroes must track down. (This week, there's lonely underwear that ends up flying into the sky to, one hopes, the Afterlife of Happy Knickers.) We're also reintroduced to Kazuya's classmates. Kiriya keeps no secrets from them, even including the fact that she's not human. This is refreshing, although I could have lived without the class's cliched overreaction to the naughty bits.

Yup, I still like this show.

"Six Gravity and Procellarum, Tsukino Talent Productions' best male idol groups, are preparing for this year's edition of the..."

No. Just no. Watch this only if you live to watch anime pretty boy idols doing nothing of interest, beyond the occasional slightly creepy CGI dance number.