It's quite nice and telling a surprisingly complete mini-story, despite being only 90 seconds. A girl finds a boy, or last least gets to the first stage with him. (He gives her half a steamed bun. I like those.) Another girl encourages our heroine and we saw some childhood flashbacks (again offering her food, or protecting her from a dog).

This is on YouTube, for what it's worth.

I quite liked this one. It looks like a children's show, with simple, crude character designs, but it was broadcast in the middle of the night in Fuji TV's Noitamina slot, which is aimed at a mature audience.

Prince Bojji is a child who can't talk except in incoherent noises and is delighted to meet a weird sinister 2D black blob thing that wants to steal and sell his clothes. His parents were giants, so I'm not sure why he's not gorilla-sized even at five years old or whatever he might be. (Mum's little finger was the size of his torso.)

Bojji also has a brother (Prince Daida) who's not much bigger than him, but can beat the captain of the guard in sword combat.

It feels like a fairy tale. The blob thing (called Kage) is apparently an assassin, but has the ability to hold one-sided conversations with Bojji where they both understand each other. Somehow. I don't think even they know how that works. That was quite nice. Meanwhile, the royal court employs people who can attack you with snakes. It's quite fun. I did some googling about this series and apparently dad (the king) is a complete bastard and the first half of the season has some pretty dark revelations, but its second half is mostly just lots of fights.

I'm sure the show's quite good. You could do a lot worse.

Our hero walks into his classroom to find the student council president at his desk, with her knickers down, masturbating. This seems unlikely to happen in real life. (He ejaculates on the door at the exact moment she has an orgasm at his desk.) She later says she's an exhibitionist, but that hardly seems like a sufficient explanation. She also says, "To appease the malevolent gods in this world, it is the duty of perverted women to make any hard cocks ejaculate!"

On going home, he finds a girl in his room. She also has her wicked way with him. (She also appears to have been sneaking in early in the morning and sucking him off while he's asleep.) Then there's a third girl in the bath, who calls him "big brother" but is actually a childhood friend. Guess what happens again.

There was a 2018 hentai called Real Eroge Situation! and this is its follow-up. It's pretty silly, but inoffensive. No one's being forced to do anything against their will and the girls are super-enthusiastic.

This episode's moment of greatness is at the beginning, when its Overacting Ham Narrator of Awesome says, "TRADING CARD GAME REBIRTH!!!!!!!!" After that, it's all downhill. Rebirth is the greatest game ever conceived and everyone in the world plays it, but this anime is focusing on bubbleheaded girls. They're bubbleheads in the sense that they're cartoons with oversized heads, but also in the sense that they'll spend lots of money buying rubbish to give them better luck at drawing cards.

"You should just buy more cards!" says Bubblehead #2.

"Yes, I should," agrees Bubblehead #1.

The most interesting thing about this show's characters is that half of them live in Nagoya.

The gods meet every thousand years to discuss the future of humanity. Are we worth preserving? Let us live a bit longer, or wipe us all out? This time, everyone reckons we're a waste of space and we should be turned to chutney.

Then, a Valkyrie suggests some Ragnarok battles. Or are the gods afraid that the mortals might win?

...and then my computer crashed, so I'll have to continue tomorrow. The show's idea is quite funny (as are Aphrodite's boobs), but it's a Netflix anime. Also, it's a Netflix anime. This is a top priority problem, so it needed saying twice. Is this anime going to become a fighting tournament or something?

I was right, unfortunately.

There's a roaring crowd and lots of pumped-up commentary. (Just shut and get on with it, please.) In an arena are two stupidly huge men with stupidly huge muscles and no suggestion of personality. The commentary goes on so long that Muscles #1 hasn't quite managed to finish an attack on Muscles #2 before the closing credits.

Sod that. Mankind and the gods can both die out if the alternative is twelve episodes of this.

The episode starts with a massive panty shot from a girl whose boobs are 90% uncovered. There's no reason for this. Later, maids get their tits out and have cold, self-interested sex with the lead character while he feeds vampire-like on their memories without their knowledge. Why, yes, there's an uncensored version of this on the Blu-rays.

As for the episode's plot, our "hero" Keyaru gets treated like a lackey by other heroes, so he vows to go back in time and make their lives equally miserable. He's a healer who can regrow limbs, which is said to be almost unheard of but the baddies still look down on him as useless and dishonourable. (This is absurd. Anyone who's played an RPG would treat this guy's abilities like gold dust.) They turned him into a drug addict, etc. Sample dialogue: "They kept abusing me and treating me like livestock." "You really think I'd heal someone like you?" "Die, you disgusting piece of trash."

Apparently the show's selling point is rape revenge. Our hero is going to brainwash and rape girls.

Minato Kiyomizu wakes up in hospital after a 203-day coma. His little sister's gobsmacked to see him awake and looking at her.

Apparently, he used to be a champion water polo player, but he remembers nothing about the game and his muscles have atrophied anyway. His friends show up, he starts rehab, etc. It's quite good. (Also recommended to anyone who likes well-muscled boys in swimming trunks.) The tone's nice and the cast are likeable. If you're into sports anime, this looks like an easy recommendation.

I'd been expecting to dislike this. A 28-year-old failure is bitter about his contemporaries being more successful than him... then suddenly time winds back, he's 18 years old again and he can attend college all over again with them! Gee, he sounds lovable. Furthermore, this is a double-length episode, which might mean, "We weren't confident of hooking our audience with our unappealing first episode, so we've bolted our first two episodes together in case that works better!"

I was wrong and it's rather nice. (Incidentally, I'll refer to the first and second halves of this episode as "ep.1a" and "ep.1b".)

Firstly, the show's not too quick to roll back time. Most of ep.1a is about the loser life of our 28-year-old hero (Kyouya Hashiba) in 2016... but it's not really his fault. He played safe with his university choice, i.e. he didn't go to an arts college for film, TV and games, but then ended up choosing that industry anyway because he loved it. Whoops. He got recruited by a slavedriving games company that went bankrupt. He's actually a smart chap who works hard and would be an asset to any company (which we see in action), but his luck stinks.

I wouldn't call him bitter. He's friendly and nice. He just thinks he made some bad choices ten years ago, which is true.

Then, once we're back in 2006, his arts college is fun. There's a lecture about how this is an fast-moving industry with minimal job security and lots of failure, which is sensible and needed saying. The show also has worthwhile things to say about Hashiba's habit of comparing himself with more successful people. His lazy housemates are a laugh. Hashiba also doesn't have the advantages he'd expected from being ten years older and having real industry experience. (He has classmates and even housemates who are far cleverer and have a better grasp of the fundamentals.)

More likeable and intelligent than I'd expected. Definitely continuing.

This is photorealistic-ish CGI, not even pretending to be hand-drawn. It starts out with lots of military, helicopters, "they're heading for the crash zone" dialogue, etc. I tuned out. It's the kind of nonsense where the script might well just be a bunch of catchphrases. Americans, White House, big tough guy who doesn't suit his suit, etc.

Things improve when the surprisingly athletic zombies show up. I laughed at the one on the chandelier. There's also a welcome breathing space when a girl tries to talk to a mute child in a wheelchair. Basically, though, this is a load of macho CGI Netflix and you already know your tolerance level for it.

It's about a restaurant. The waitresses are a blonde girl with horns who's excited that the chef is making corn potage today and a brunette girl with elf ears who's pleased to see chicken curry.

Elsewhere, the episode briefly switches to telling a story that's not about food. An adventurer takes a goblin-killing job. She commits a small genocide of the little monsters, then wonders if they might have some treasure she could steal!

There's a magic door in the dungeon. She goes through it... and it's the restaurant! WHERE SHE EATS FOOD! (She foodgasms about this with restaurant reviewer dialogue.) Then, later, the blonde waitress goes home and MAKES SOME MORE FOOD! In fairness, everyone who watched this season seems to think it's very good, but I'd guess that's because most people watching Season 2 of a show would have already watched and enjoyed Season 1. That would filter out viewers (like me) who'd go insane if forced to watch cartoon people eat food in a restaurant for twelve pointless, drama-free episodes. Actually, that's twenty-four episodes now. Bloody hell.

Season 1 is excellent, but it took me months to force my way through it. I had every intention of continuing with Season 2... and yet it sat there unwatched. I didn't want to start it. I believe everything good I've heard about it, but my problem is that the show's dedicated to clobbering Subaru with grief, tragedy, pain and forehead-slapping bad decisions. Yes, he'll get a happy ending. Yes, you'll be pleased for him.

But the prospect of actually watching the episodes somehow felt off-putting. Too much like hard work. 25 episodes of this second season, with a third season announced. Naaah.

Anyway, this episode has lots of conversations. A friend of Subaru's has a go at him for being a twat (which is fair), then he talks to Roswaal (sounds as if a lot's happened between them), Ram (briefly), a girl called Ryuuzu who's growing a naked copy of herself in a crystal and then finally Emilia. There's tragedy for her, which shouldn't surprise anyone who's familiar with this show. She runs off.

It's a decent episode and I'm sure I'd have enjoyed it even more if I'd been following all the story so far. It's not gruelling, unlike significant chunks of Re:Zero. I'd even recommend this show, despite personally ducking out of it.

Episodes: 2 x 18 minutes

There's lots of backstory in this episode that I only got afterwards by googling. What I saw here was a police state that stops people from playing computer games. The hero works at a host club and owes money to criminals. Nothing particularly interesting so far.

Then, though, a rebellious city district is assaulted by dog mecha. A shark mecha appears to fight them. The cute war robot designs are appealingly silly, but they're still mecha. What's more, our hero's shark mecha is powered by a Battery Girl who can't fight unless he's burning with mecha love, posing embarrassingly, declaiming catchphrases, etc. The show appears to be trying to revive my non-existent passion for this (in my opinion) largely pointless genre.

"We all had it as children!" the episode protests. They love mecha. But, no, sorry, I'm not Japanese and so I didn't watch all the children's mecha series they're celebrating here.

A teenage girl is studying for exams and says, "I feel awkward talking to my dad these days." Her father, though, says, "I feel awkward talking to my daughter these days."

Mum and Dad realise that their daughter's probably hungry with all that studying, so Dad makes her some dodgy-looking onigiri and they bond over these midnight snacks.

These are on YouTube. They're worth a look.

A female samurai has a dead dragon on a (very big) cart. They're entering a Japanese castle to meet a lord.

Anyway, it's tied into immortality legends. There will be assassins, the asking of a name and a man crumbling to dust. It's okay, actually, despite being about samurai. The characters aren't interesting, but the historical setting is quite nice and I like the story construction and the way its revelations tie together.