The reviews of this one suggest that I might think it's rather good if I stuck with it, but I bounced off this episode and for now I won't continue. I might watch it one day. However its main problem for me was intense heroes in space battles that had me struggling to stay awake. I get this sometimes. It's a bit embarrassing. If something I'm watching is too one-dimensional and there's nothing meaningful in the story or characterisation, my eyelids get heavy. This upsets Tomoko when we're trying to watch something together. Anyway, this show's macho fighty scenes were giving me absolutely nothing to engage with. I saw grim, one-note characters showing not an iota of anything that could be called a personality.

It's the 22nd century, Earth's been stomped by some aliens called the Festum and there's no Japan any more. Our heroes are living on a tiny island. There's a bit where heroes "shoot their allies", which I think means nuking a city before all the civilians had had time to evacuate. This sounds good, but I think would have been more powerful if I'd been able to believe that the speaking characters were human beings rather than plot dispersal units. I like melodrama, but this is flat melodrama.

After that, we meet some schoolchildren at school. This is better. However it then goes back to the intense one-dimensional fighter pilots.

It's a mecha show, which doesn't excite me to begin with. It's also Season 2 of a show that had last been on TV in 2004, when some were calling it one of the best mecha anime of the decade. (Mind you, it's also been called "another Evangelion rip-off", or "good but nothing special".) It also had anime films in 2005 and 2010, though. I'm mildly curious, but not enough to make me watch 26 episodes of mecha that might send me to sleep.

Not to be confused with Unlimited Fafnir, an unrelated 2015 series that involves a boy in a school full of girls who are really dragons.

It's the third season of the magical girl alt.universe spin-off from Fate/stay night. I wasn't grabbed by the parent show when I tried its first episode last year, but I'm hoping for better from magical girls. What the hell. Let's give it a whirl.

Don't expect taste, mind you. I think someone said they're elementary schoolgirls (i.e. at most 12 years old), but they have a "magical recharge" method that involves blushing, private time and deep kisses with tongues. This is observed by a flustered third girl, who then gets into a conversation with a fourth who's also part of the magical recharging scene. (It's a sort of triangle, but these girls appear to believe in open relationships.)

Meanwhile the start of the episode is all about going shopping for swimsuits. Two girls torture a third by trying to make her wear something risque, then their exhibitionist friend walks past in it.

The girls also have a big brother and tease him.

There are references to earlier seasons. "I can't believe there's an eighth card when there used to be only seven!" Okay, fair enough. The magical girls also have flying, talking rosettes.

It looks fun. It's lively, although also quite filthy. The girls are far too young for any of this, but the good news is that at least they only appear to be targeting each other. Looking at my old reviews, I see I was tempted to continue when I watched the start of Season 2 last year. Let's take the plunge now.

I've become a Fate-slash fan. Fate/stay night, Fate/kaleid line Prisma Illya, etc. Season 1 of this series is great and there was almost nothing this episode could have done that to stop me from wanting to watch part two of the story. (It is part two, though. Don't start here. Go back to Season 1 ep.0.)

We begin with SPOILER's vaguely sexualised captivity at the hands of SPOILER, which isn't nice. We already knew that SPOILER was evil, though.

The SPOILER-SPOILER relationship is explored in conversation and then in a more shocking twist than we saw in the Season 1 finale. I have a theory that SPOILER was actually doing it to try to save SPOILER's life, but it's still a bombshell. What follows that is fallout.

Sorry about the SPOILERS. I don't want to spoil the plot, obviously. This is a strong series of death, betrayal, etc. as the magical Masters and their superpowered Servants try to kill each other. I won't say any more, but trust me; it's good.

There's little point in watching more than one episode of this, unless you're a small child or interested in Japanese folk tales. It's a children's show. Each episode is split into three segments, each with a slightly different simplistic art style and the kind of storytelling you'd expect from fairy tales. That said, though, fairy tales can be kind of disturbing and I often got the uneasy sense that these tales might not be interested in happy endings or conventional morality.

The show also won the Japanese government's Children's Cultural Welfare Prize. It says so in the opening credits, probably to encourage parents to make their children watch this instead of One Piece, Cardfight Vanguard, etc.

PART ONE: "The Bunbuku Teapot"

A tanuki (aka. racoon dog) takes a liking to a poor man who's helped him. In return, it offers to help him scam money off strangers! It'll transform itself into a scary wrought-iron teapot that could probably be used as an offensive weapon, get sold for lots of money and then run away as soon as their victim's not looking! Wahay! The poor man doesn't want to do anything so horrid, but the tanuki guilt-trips him into accepting. Remember, kids, stealing is harmless and fun!

Their chosen victim is a monk. Presumably they couldn't find any blind orphans. Fortunately the monk has his servant fill the teapot with water and boil it on the fire, which is exactly what the tanuki deserves even if the voice actor is making no effort whatsoever to make "ouch" sound painful. (It's that kind of children's show.)

To my surprise, the story had a positive ending. However this is only after the tanuki gets stuck as a teapot and bemoans not being able to play tricks on people any more.

PART TWO: "The Anbarayami Horse"

An old man has a horse. He's nice to it. You like them. You're less keen on the oni (demon) that jumps out of the horse's stomach and says it wants to live in there for a year, causing it pain. Apparently it's played so many tricks recently that it needs to lie low for a bit until the heat dies down. This must be a bad sign.

The oni does exactly what it said it would. No tricks. I was flabbergasted. It carries out its promise to the letter, which means the old man and the horse don't have a fun year. They're more than compensated afterwards, though.

PART THREE: "The Stone Door of Heaven"

This is a tale of the Japanese gods who created the world. There's Susanoo, who likes going crazy and breaking things. He's big, hairy and looks like bad news. In the original myths, he and his sister Amaterasu have a bunch of children together (using magic items) before he goes berserk with rage, destroys her rice fields and kills one of her attendants. They've toned that down a bit here. He's upset about his late mother. You shouldn't laugh, though, because what he wants is to join her.

He also cried all day and got the sack. I didn't know that gods could be fired from the post of being a god.

Anyway, Amaterasu hides in a cave and puts a rock over the entrance. Since she's the sun goddess, this plunges Japan into darkness. Bad news. Ame no Uzumi does a dance to persuade her to come out, wearing a completely transparent dress that would have been a lot more interesting in a less child-oriented art style.

Susanoo then gives up on meeting mum for now and goes off to have new adventures. As it happens, these will include an eight-headed dragon, but I'm going to have to find other Susanoo episodes of Folktales from Japan if I want to see for myself.

I'm glad I've sampled this. It's not actually that absorbing to watch, but I did find it mildly disturbing at times and I'd watch a Susanoo series.

Souma Yukihira is a fifteen-year-old boy who loves cooking. Practically worships it. Only the tiniest portion of his brain isn't focused entirely on food, he wants to study cooking full-time as soon as he leaves middle school and he wants to spend his life cooking in his father's restaurant. He's not alone, though. Everyone loves cooking. His dad loves cooking. Cooking is the reason for the universe's existence.

Cooking is so wonderful, in fact, that eating food gives people super-foodgasms. I've added the "super" because anime has lots of ordinary foodgasms. A girl can eat a fried egg and suddenly be moaning, blushing and almost passing out. Here, though, that's supercharged. Even horrible food gets sexualised. Eating squid in peanut butter is like being tentacle-molested, hentai-style. Souma's potatoes in bacon will make your clothes burst off as you swoon in a sea of sparkles, screaming that you want to keep tasting his meat juices.

Incidentally the manga artist, Shun Saeki, used to draw hentai.

It's so silly that it's funny. For me, though, the bloodlust-like cooking intensity had already been silly before the foodgasms. It's burning hotter than some shounen battle manga. Land sharks will swear to leave you alone forever if they can just get their lips around some more of your meat.

That said, though, apparently it's really good. My anime-loving work colleague says it's his favourite show. I believe all the praise. I'm sure Souma's cooking adventures are indeed excellent, with boo-hiss antagonists and lots of impassioned wok-work. Apparently the original manga's even written in collaboration with a chef. However so far I don't think the show's for me. The super-foodgasms and the manic cooking hysteria don't do anything for me. It's too far removed from anything I can process even as a fictional reality. I spent 25 minutes saying "this is silly" and "but it's just food". However if you think you can cope with that (and some very prominent boobs), apparently the show's a stonker.