I love this show and I'm looking forward to Season 2, but this episode was unremarkable. Tanya doesn't do anything particularly evil or murderous. She leads the 203rd Air Mage Battalion to raid lots of enemy camps in search of ingredients for pasta source, but it's war. She leds her subordinates on raids all the time.

It's fine, though. I've no objection to the episode.

The fantasy country of Salutania are plagued by magical monsters, so they summon a hero from another world! So far, so light novel... but it's gender-flipped. The "hero" is actually a female saint. Also, the Salutanians manage to summon two of them.

Our heroine is a Japanese office worker called Sei Takanashi. She knows she's not a saint and she doesn't have magical powers, so she's happy to let that other girl be canonised while Sei just potters around and does her own thing. (After decades of canon wars in Doctor Who fandom, I'm delighted to get a chance to use the word "canonised" in its ecclesiastical sense.) Sei's soon bored rigid, but she finds a magical potion research centre and elbows her way into a job there.

It seems okay. I'm grateful for the lack of combat focus. The title tells us what to expect, i.e. the traditional overpowered protagonist and presumably a bevy of potential romantic interests, but at least Sei's not interested in wielding a sword and killing people of other races. She wants to do research, learn stuff and make healing potions. Yeah, I'll keep going.

I spy a new modern anime genre, called "Let's rip off Made in Abyss". See also Deep Insanity: The Lost Child. Our protagonist in some kind of extreme SF world/future will have the job of exploring a labyrinth that's full of terrifying monsters!

Fortunately, though, this example looks quite good. Memenpu is a nine-year-old girl who's already graduated from college and is working as a miner with her dad, Gagamber. (No, not "as a minor". They dig stuff up underground.) She also invents mining robots and regularly pesters dad to let her go off and be a Marker, which means what you already know it means. As for Gagamber, he keeps insisting that she's a kid and isn't ready to make decisions like that.

You know what will happen at the end of the episode. Another example of Responsible Parenting in Anime, although in fairness there's quite a bit of discussion of this. (The episode's called "FATHERS&DAUGHTERS", it has two father-daughter pairs and there's a dad-dad conversation about all this in a bar.) I'm not entirely sure which way I fall on this discussion, but Memenpu is certainly determined to be exempted from conventional rules. The episode's full of energy. The worldbuilding's pleasingly non-generic. I'll give it a go.

"An illness that will cause his balls to burst if he doesn't ejaculate every three hours?"

The complication is that the patient (Yamada) has broken both his hands. The hospital's nurses are there to look after him... but that doesn't make them friendly or sympathetic about it. Nurse Tachibana is the one who's fulfilling these responsibilities in the first episode, but she goes about it with a face that suggests Yamada's forgotten to pay his bills or something.

"I'm busy, if you don't mind, so couldn't you hurry up and spurt it out?"

The premise surprised me. A little girl wants to be Santa... so she joins the Santa Company. They deliver presents to children every Christmas Eve, but they're an international conglomerate. We see their corporate video. (What's their income stream, though? Do they have profits? Is someone funding the purchase and delivery of all these presents?)

After that, though, this becomes an environmental lesson about garbage, plastic bottles in the ocean, etc. I approve, but that doesn't make the episode particularly interesting.

Sazae-san is one of those Japanese institutions that I've never really quite got... but this random episode I watched on YouTube was actually quite funny. Dad makes a mistake with his bentou (i.e. packed lunch), which takes him into Wife Getting Scary territory. Do not underestimate Japanese bentou culture. If your wife gets up at some crazy hour each morning to make your packed lunch, I strongly recommend being grateful at all times.

On this occasion, Dad's boss is about to steal Dad's bentou... until Dad's boss's wife also shows up. Yow. The men can't win.

There were some other stories in the episode, e.g. a child trying to perform paper theatre. Those were okay.

I nearly went on to watch the whole show. It seemed okay. The high episode count was part of what swayed me against it, I'll admit. I quite like the characters, but it's a computer game adaptation and the storyline went beyond "generic" into "I'm not sure if this episode even has a point or is trying to go anywhere".

Some youngsters are about to join the OSF (Other Suppression Force) become Scarlet Guardians, Saviours of our Planet. There's a boy (Nagi) who's interested in girls. His best friend (Yuito) is the heir to a famous dad and is the new recruit the TV commentators keep talking about, but unfortunately doesn't have any superpowers. There are some girls, but (despite his name) Karen Travers isn't one of them. Karen is the OSF's intimidating badass top soldier, with the nickname "Brain Eater" and the ability to destroy an Other in one blow.

The plot is... uh, something. Everyone joins up, basically. There are some fights against the Others, who look odd. Imagine a giant flower vase with sexy legs, high heels and a bone tail.

The episode's reasonably likable, but I'm not sure what it's trying to do. "Other" seems like an unfortunate name for extradimensional invaders. I don't dislike the show and I had a modestly good time watching this episode, but I'm getting a "shounen fighting anime" vibe from it and I'm not convinced that it'll fill 26 episodes successfully.

Is this a bad CGI anime? No, because it also has hand-drawn 2D characters. It's the latest anime from Studio GoHands, which produced the infamous Hand Shakers (which I quite like) and W'z (which I avoided). I actually don't mind the look of their shows, but I think I'm in a minority there and there are some downright eloquent haters of Studio GoHands out there.

Anyway, this show's set in an urban jungle with badass boys who wave around guns while themselves being bulletproof or something. (As in "bulletproof like Superman". They have superpowers.) The episode's plot is basically "boys guns cool boys boys". You'd be tempted to offer money to anyone who can get through the first five minutes without hitting the fast-forward button.

Gundams are piloted giant war robots and an inescapable fulcrum of Japanese culture. They're everywhere. They're also boring. These Gundams, though, are super-deformed cartoon characters with eyes. I see no signs of pilots. They appear to be little sentient metal beings, albeit also stupid-looking.

It's nonsense for very small children. A plot summary of the first half would go "FIGHT FIGHT COMBAT BATTLE FIGHT no meaningful dialogue at all". Zzzzzz.

Imagine a hentai version of Life with an Ordinary Guy who Reincarnated into a Total Fantasy Knockout. (But not as good and not an isekai.)

Shion and Rui are two boys who go around picking up women... but Shion hasn't realised that he has an scary revenge stalker with magic powers. "Shion-kun, I'll make you understand a girl's feelings!"

This is in the shower, so Shion's half-naked when he wakes up. Whereupon he's female! And topless!

Rui comes into the shower and... yeah, this is hentai, so they're a lot more accepting of certain things than Tachibana and Jinguuji. Wow, Rui doesn't waste time. This show could end up being either funny or garbage, but I enjoyed this first episode, so I'll keep watching. It made me laugh.

Our hero dies in a vehicle accident (albeit an unusually spectacular one) and reawakens in a fantasy world! Welcome to another isekai!

GOOD THINGS: our hero, Rio, doesn't get everything his own way. He's a smelly orphaned slum urchin, he lives with three dodgy blokes who use him as a dogsbody and he's about to have an assassin trying to kill him. When he helps a princess, he's repaid by being arrested and tortured.

BAD THINGS: the arrest and torture is very, very stupid. The episode creates a bit of an excuse for itself, admittedly, since the torturer's the leader of the princess's bodyguard and so desperate to regain the face he lost when his charge was kidnapped. Even so, though, bloody hell. They don't wait for the kidnapped princess to wake up and tell her side of the story. They assume that this tiny, smelly slum boy was somehow involved in a royal kidnapping, which is absurd for multiple reasons. (If you were going to attempt a job like that, would you put your life in the hand of some random street urchin? Could someone like him ever have got within a hundred yards of the presumed target in the first place?)

That was so dumb that it damaged my faith in the show. Will other episodes display similar stupidity?

Rio has amazing magical potential. Obviously. It's a light novel adaptation. He'll also have all the girls queuing up for him. We've spotted the first of them already. She's the one and only member of the royal entourage who knows how to ask for things nicely, whereas the rest of her entourage seems incapable of saying anything to you that's not an order.

I'd been going to drop this, but then I changed my mind. We have a plot, important people who are bastards and a protagonist getting the shit beaten out of him. I'll stick around out, at least for another episode or two.

I hate this show, but it's improved. Those three unfunny schoolboys are still delivering a running commentary on everything they see, but the good news is that their prominence has diminished. We have five magical girls and lots of enemies, who this week are pirate-themed. The episode even begins with a recap of the story so far, which would have been unthinkable in the show's basically plotless early days.

This week, a baddie falls over. Then, at the cliffhanger, a ridiculously huge meteor with spikes (why?) descends slowly from the sky.

It looks fine, if you like idol anime. The twist with this one is that instead of already being idols, the girls are competing in a reality TV contest to become one.

They seem nice. They sing. They get up dizzyingly early to be on the safe side, or lecture each other, or eat too many snacks, or whatever. I liked them. I'd be happy enough to watch them in a different show, but... idols. Singing. And talking about singing. And getting ready to sing. And encouraging each other about their singing.

Naaaah.

Wow, this show's gone wild since I last saw it. I was expecting more of the usual shounen adventure, but...

Meliodias has eternal life, while Elizabeth has infinite reincarnation. For 3000 years, Meliodas has been watching Elizabeth die. (He's the show's perky child hero, by the way.) He's turning into a Demon King to try to break this curse, although I'm not sure if "curse" is an appropriate word here. If I were Elizabeth, from my point of view I'd just have infinite reincarnation that works in the expected way, so I could imagine getting a bit scared of Meliodas going all self-obsessed and deciding to "cure" me of eternal life.

Anyway, Meliodas's friends and enemies are turning into archangels and mega-demons for... well, yes, a fight. I know, I know. But the bit where they're standing toe-to-toe and studying each other's faces close-up is quite cool. There's a female demon who appears to be only wearing paint. There's also a lone demon in hell who occasionally turns into the human he used to be and/or gets trodden on by a giant hell monster.

It's pretty crazy, despite the genre-mandated fight scenes. These are strong story developments. If this is where they are already, in ep.1, I'm wondering how they'll manage to top this in the other 23 episodes.

It's based on a mobile phone game. It's okay. I nearly tried the second episode, just in case. It starts with purple blobs eating people and making a schoolboy justifiably unhappy about his chances of survival... but then a knight-girl arrives on a train and kills them. "This is a battle for the Seven Knights!" she says, but doesn't get (or need) six reinforcements.

It's like the magical equivalent of steampunk. That train could be any era up to Agatha Christie, but there's also magic, monsters, etc. And they're going to go to Magical School.

I don't mind the show at all, but this episode didn't really leave much impression and I'm not sure what its storytelling wants to do. Watching ep.2 would probably clarify that, though.