EPISODE ONE

Shortly after World War One (actually 1923), a boy called Hiiragi Kyouichirou leaves his home in the countryside to go to Imperial University. He's nice and idealistic, but he also has a sword. "My eyes see things not of this world. The souls of the dead."

So far, so serious.

The title sequence then has all the show's boys in two forms: normal-sized and a cute little chibi (the size of a small cat). Kyouichirou reaches Tokyo and finds that he's switched from the bigger size to the smaller. I'd be surprised too. The same thing then happens to several other boys and...

Cue some extremely Boys Love end credits.

EPISODE TWO

Okay, I don't need to see any more of this. This episode is mostly about swordsmen. They have stoic discussions about why they're now waddling about in cute fun-sized bodies. They transform back to their normal selves for some macho bragging with swords. "How amusing to see the great Tatebayasahi Kaito, head of the Imperial Army's commando unit, looking so shrunken."

Hiiragi eats senbei.

It's actually playing its premise surprisingly straight. I quite liked it, up to a point. (I watched two episodes before drifting away, after all.) I'd have definitely been watching it if it hadn't been for the samurai. Everyone has two bodies and they react much as you or I would when forced to swap between them. It's also not clear what causes that or to what extent the rest of the world is aware of it.

The show looks okay, actually. If you're a fan of samurai and/or gay overtones (so far only in the title sequences), I might even provisionally recommend it.

Tomoko was surprised to see me watching this. She knows about the Tales games and she nearly bought Zestiria, which apparently has quite good reviews. Anyway, it's a fantasy game franchise that's had other anime adaptations (not all well-received). Season 1 had war, dragons and invisible "heavenly people".

This is a Roze-centric episode. (It's usually transliterated Rose, but the Japanese voice actors are saying "Roze".) That's fair enough. She's an entertaining character. She walks all over some crooked merchants, shows off her professional knowledge and defends Sorei against the local military. Towards the end of the episode, though, we're also reminded of her dark side.

There's no Aliisha, alas, but she gets a mention. Good. We also see more of Sorei, whose name sounds like "Slay" every time I hear it. He seems to have a slight case of confusing himself with Jesus, but that's not unreasonable given that he's the Shepherd with legendary Malevolence-purifying powers. Malevolence is a real and very dangerous thing in this universe, so Sorei's goals are meaningful (if ambitious).

I enjoyed it. Season 1 was reasonably good and this looks as if it's continuing similarly.

Teekyuu's just... Teekyuu. It's just random stuff happening and/or being said so fast you don't have time to breathe. Theoretically its four girls are the school tennis club, but this week there's a national school newspaper contest, a tsuchinoko, sushi, dirty jokes, groping, eating girls' panties, a devil in Hell and very short negotiations over possibly selling your soul. (She doesn't.) Some of that might only be mentioned rather than seen, though. Personally I don't find it that funny, to be honest, but it's clearly acquired enough fans to keep going for eight seasons.

I quite liked ep.1 back in 2016, but there's less to this episode. I was fast-forwarding through the wrestling, so the episode only had ten minutes of content that I wanted to watch. I'm still moderately well-disposed towards the show, which is mildly reminiscent of the 1970s in its hot-bloodedness, but... well, it's wrestling. It has wrestlers in the ring. Watching this show will mean having to watch wrestlers.

There are female wrestlers this week, which is good, but they're just the warm-up act before our hero's championship match. Miss X tells them they only have ten minutes rather than the expected thirty. Apart from that... no, I'm afraid this episode really is about wrestling. Sorry.

I enjoyed Season 1 ep.1, but this episode did less for me even though I approve of this year's shift of focus. I wasn't tempted to continue. The show's still okay, though.

Heroes: Tokio (schoolboy, easily distracted by hot women), Calen (still in that transparent skirt) and a few new support people back at base. The station commandant is now blonde and beautiful, while the team's new robot sidekick is a narcissist who's fallen in love with Calen and has a suggestively placed activation button.

Villains: the usual three jokers. I get the impression that these are always the most entertaining loons in a Time Bokan series, so they're now the title characters. This hasn't made a lot of difference, really, but it gives the show a better excuse for sidelining the heroes.

As before, everyone's investigating Wacky History. This week it's Thomas Edison. This is actually educational, but I'd have felt more confident in my learning if the point of the show hadn't been to make jokes and pretend that history is all wrong. For some reason, the heroes and villains are now chasing "dynamonds". Their targets (e.g. Edison) will always be carrying one and both sides will be trying to take it for themselves. I think this is rubbish. I can see that it makes the show easier to plot, albeit in a simplistic way, but it doesn't make any sense and it introduces the plot hole of "why don't the villains just take Edison's dynamond from him by force?" Suzukky actually asks this. He's also big and strong, so he could have done it easily. I don't think the episode provides a particularly satisfactory answer, to be honest, with the real reason being "our villains are idiot flibbertigibbets".

The episode's amusing (e.g. Suzukky's karaoke attack), but I got a bit tired of it. I didn't really care about lots of directionlessly silly scenes in which the cast have forgotten their ostensible goal (the dynamonds). It's not going anywhere. That said, though, the episode's still full of jokes and energy, as well as being educational about Thomas Edison. I'm fond of the show. I just don't think it's for me.

It's a kiddie show based on a line of toys. It's also quite good and I enjoyed it, up to a point, but I couldn't help noticing some major logic issues. Frankly, even the target audience might have been wondering about some of these.

It's set in "the future, just a little after the present day." The police have Hyper Rescue emergency forces called 'Drive Heads', which surprisingly doesn't mean a strike force of Jeremy Clarksons. They're Transformers. A police car will turn into a giant robot. In this episode, thieves with a bag of money steal a mecha and go on a rampage, crushing cars and stomping through a police barricade. Stop the thieves, Drive Head! Our hero also stops a runaway train and saves a dog.

So far, so good. That was perfectly watchable. However...

1. The Drive Head pilots are still in elementary school. Even leaving aside the fact that they're like a military force going into combat zones, it's really quite odd to see small children driving police cars. This would be dubious even if they weren't going into emergency situations at top speed. Do they have driving licences? Have they been trained for all this? (In real life, the police have very intensive training across multiple training courses, e.g. pursuit training, riot van training, outriding, protection etc. It's tough and not everyone passes.)

2. Why are the police using children for this role in the first place? (Answer: "because they're in a children's TV show.")

3. The children go to school as normal. (This is cool, because the school gymnasium has a hidden chute to an underground giant robot car park.) The children aren't allowed to reveal their secret identities, but no one's thought very hard about their excuses for running off in mid-class to save the city. "I need to go to the toilet!" You're going to be gone for hours, mate. Do you always say that? Does anyone even believe you the first time, or do they all think you have a chronic crippling bladder problem?

There's a welcome bit of realism in the children getting tutoring to catch up for missed classes. (They don't like that.) However I'm still wondering why the police don't avoid all these problems by employing adults full-time. An emergency can happen at any hour of the day or night, after all. What happens if they're all asleep in bed? Do the children have an "on call" system?

I can think of one potential fix, which is that the cars' onboard talking computers are actually in partial control and can correct their drivers' mistakes. (Are the children even needed, then? Are they being put at risk unnecessarily?) That's just an unsupported hypothesis, though.

In short, it's both quite good and utterly daft. It's fun. The protagonist seems likeable so far and isn't psychotic in the slightest. He's not obsessed with a card game, doesn't HAVE TO BE THE STRONGEST!!! or anything like that. The show's very good at what it does, but at the same time its format begs all kinds of questions. There are thousands of equally silly kiddie shows made all around the world, of course, but I think this one's unusually startling because it's got enough realism to clash with the fact that it has child heroes. It's quite well done, if you don't mind lots of CGI robots and vehicles. Thinking about it amused me, anyway.

It's a beautiful day in the mountains. Green fields, blue sky. A girl's straw hat blows away in the wind, but another girl in a school uniform shows up and says "leave it to me".

She leaps into the air to catch the hat... and has a CGI Transformers sequence with music to become a jet plane.

I didn't like ep.1 in 2016. This is a big improvement, though, and I'd have probably kept watching if this had been the start of a new show. It's pretty good. Changes that made me like it better include:

(a) the detectives' cases actually feeling like investigations, rather than a swaggering opportunity for pretty boy heroes.

(b) Hanasaki appears to have gone through kidnapping trauma and now has some issues. Good. The guy was unwatchable in ep.1, being hyperactive, smug, irritatingly chirpy and basically the human equivalent of some small, loud creature you want to drown. He's calmer now.

(c) Kobayashi is arguably the most important character. He's the immortal who keeps attempting suicide and is trying to hold Hanasaki to a promise to kill him. Kobayashi can at least be depended on to take things seriously.

This episode was pretty good. Not good enough to drag me back to a series I'd already passed on, admittedly, but still watchable and entertaining. The tone's settled down a lot. There's a plot involving invisible men uploading illicit photos to a website. (There's an amusing reason why our heroes accept this case, even though it's hardly life-and-death.) I enjoyed it.

Apparently it's an ecchi harem anime. I've just been googling it. I'm expecting my opinion of this anime to go downhill in future episodes. However I quite enjoyed what I saw here and I'll keep watching, despite yet another anime sister with inappropriate urges.

Kazuya is the show's hero. You can tell because he's the only boy in a title sequence full of girls. He'll be taking a certain amount of physical punishment from them, but the good news is that he seems pretty tough and won't get upset about, say, getting stabbed in the arm. He's a decent chap. He's also not driven by his dick, which is convenient because he's going to be facing some surprising situations.

There are plenty of girls in the title sequence, but so far we have (in order of appearance):

1. CHISATO, who gives Kazuya a kicking at the start of the episode because... well, because they're in an anime, really. He grabbed her boobs, but that's because he'd been asleep at his school desk. She doesn't seem too interesting yet.

2. KIRIHA, a magical being that used to be Kazuya's mother's obi (a kimono sash). She's also arrogant, rude and high-handed. She calls Kazuya an idiot, trashes his room and sends him outside to buy snacks for her. However she does save his life when a magical wig (really) is trying to kill him and she seems like a decent person really, if a bit abrasive. She's also utterly without feminine modesty. Did she give him an unwanted hand job in that bath scene?

3. KAZUMI, oh dear. She's his sister and the best reason to stop watching this show. The anime industry is broken.

That said, though, the sexy content isn't actually as prominent as all that. It's there, but the episode's more about Kazuya and a blue-haired magical entity that's known him since he was a child and is liable to have impressively animated battle scenes involving white ribbons. Kazuya might have memory issues. Kiriha was assuming he'd know who she was, but then again Kiriha assumes a lot. I might regret continuing with this, but I enjoyed this episode.

I'm not completely sure where this is going, to be honest. The pacing's gentle (to put it mildly) and the cast are capable of seeming pretty clueless. We start with our heroes starting a new year (their third) in intermediate school. There's a girl (Mizuno Akane) who's in the track and field club and a boy (Azumi Kotarou) who wants to write novels. They seem nice. They don't know each other, but they're going to be in the same class.

Unfortunately, though, they're both the kind of teenager who'll turn into a petrified blob of excessive consciousness on finding that they've been taken to the same restaurant by their respective families. They get on fine when they talk, but they're terrible at getting that far. They exchange a few friendly words, then at school never talk to each other.

Time passes. Kotarou posts off his novel. He buys a book from a nice bookshop.

Then, one day, Kotarou has to move some school equipment. Akane sees this and helps him. They're still nice people.

That's it. Roll end credits. I've no idea what's going on here, but I have no particular objection to finding out. There's something subtly different with the art, as seen most clearly in the end credits. I'm mildly curious, at least.

Tsukipro is a franchise about fictional idol groups, but it also releases real albums (as well as drama CDs, mobile games, anime and stage plays). It started with Tsukiuta, which got an anime series in 2016. (I enjoyed its first episode, but I didn't keep watching.)

This year, we've got another anime. If Tsukipro didn't give you enough pretty boy idols, here we have even more! (The franchise includes female idols too, but they're heavily in the minority and they're being kept firmly offscreen here.) There's going to be a two-day concert called TSUKIPRO LIVE 2017, which excites everyone because it's twice as long as the last one. The line-up will be:

Six Gravity (6 boys), Procellarum (6 boys), Fluna (6 girls), Seleas (6 girls), SOARA (5 boys), Growth (4 boys), SolidS (4 boys) and QUELL (4 boys)

...and that's only just over half the idol units in the agency, since they're not using VAZZROCK, VAZZY, ALIVE, SQ, Infinit0 or ROCK DOWN. That's lots and lots of characters. Some of them get invited to head office.

MAN AT AGENCY: "We called this meeting because we have something to tell you."

FINN: "Please, please, let it be 'we're going to feed you head-first into a mincing machine'."

It's not.

We get a title sequence of pretty boys dancing in unimpressive CGI to music I didn't like. After that, we get lots of scenes with no dramatic content. The usual term is "slice of life", so I suppose this is "slice of vapid celebrity life". A boy gets excited. A boy films a documentary. An emotionless purple-haired boy gets negative about his workload, but his manager promises that they'll handle it. A boy goes to college. A boy goes swimming. A particularly pretty boy does modelling and explains why he loves cooking.

"The article's about men who are more beautiful than women, right? That's perfect for Rikken!"

That said, though, the episode gradually becomes less meaningless. It focuses on one of the groups, SolidS, and shows us how they feel about the challenge. They're the most experienced of the second day's idol groups, so they'll bear some responsibility for taking a lead and supporting everyone by being the anchor. They discuss their insecurities and their ways of thinking around them. They worry about whether Shiki's started writing the new songs they'll need.

The episode's okay, I think. I didn't have a problem with it, despite having no interest in pretty boy idol anime. It's not letting itself get sunk by its huge cast. It's achieved a workable focus on its four core boys and it's managed to make them seem like believable people. I quite liked them. I wasn't having to fight too hard against my utter lack of interest. Tsukiuta ep.1 was better than this, I think, but they're worth checking out if you're a fan of this genre.

I'm really not sure about this one. I wasn't keen on half of the couples... but the other half was okay and it'll be quick to watch. It's lots of little romance stories. The animation looks incredibly cheap, but I don't care about that.

COUPLE #1: the girl's called the boy outside into the snow and she's about to deliver a love confession. The boy's waiting. Ten minutes later, a pile of unrealistic snow has gathered on his head and he's still waiting. That was the episode's first annoyance for me. The boy and girl both like each other and they're both on the verge of saying so, but unfortunately they both: (a) have an attitude and (b) don't have the guts and are useless.

You could call that romantic and nice. However the couple themselves are a bit rubbish, albeit in a realistic way.

Score: 6 out of 10.

COUPLE #2: a boy and a girl are in a classroom. The girl's also her class representative, but she's lazy and doesn't do her job. The pedantic, easily intimidated boy finds this frustrating and asks why she became class representative. Answer: "because I like you!" No hesitation there. She's a flirt, a tease and a leg-puller, while the earnest boy's a splendid victim for all that. I quite liked these two.

Score: 8 out of 10.

COUPLE #3: a boy sees a girl smoking at school, but he says he'll let her off if she'll give him a kiss. I boggled. BUT SHE SMOKES! Is the guy some kind of sicko? (In fairness he does tell her that she smells, but then he goes ahead and kisses her anyway. Ewwwwwwwwwwww.)

This couple have some bite to them. She's a bit of a delinquent who says she'd kiss anyone for money. He turns this into a discussion of how much she'd charge to sell her body, then unzips his fly. (We don't see it.) On being asked if he's gay, he says "No, I tested that". (He doesn't elaborate.)

Score: 4 out of 10 for the eww, but double that if you can imagine kissing a smoker.

COUPLE #4: a boy and a girl are in the school astronomy club. The girl's been telling the boy for years that she loves him, but always in a joking way. Can she manage to overcome herself? This couple felt the most real to me of everyone in the episode. Watching her is a bit frustrating and/or exasperating, but you completely understand where she's coming from.

Score: 8 out of 10.

I'm on the verge of ditching this show, but on reflection the things I found the most off-putting were trivial (the visual gag with the snow on the head, which struck me as taking the piss, and kissing that smoker). I liked half of the episode. I suppose I could just try ep.2 and decide then... but okay, yeah, I'll watch the whole series.

It's an old-school magical girl show. The cast are fifteen years old rather than eight, but otherwise it's ticking all the boxes. Talking mascot character? Yup, it's a hedgehog. Defeat a monster of the week? Yup. Super-enthusiastic heroine (Amatsuki Meguru) who's going to become a magical girl and win over a broken bird (Kisaragi Sumire) who's currently cold as ice and doesn't want to fight monsters any more, but will of course see the light and become our heroine's best friend in a few episodes' time? Yup, yup, yup. Wacky muggle classmates? Yup.

The only mildly interesting thing is the girls' weapons. Meguru's magic wand can turn into a mace or a ball-and-chain, while Sumire uses a naginata. You can use those to kill samurai on horseback. Unfortunately, though, baddies just disintegrate when you hit them instead of exploding in gore.

There's also something subtly off-putting about the pacing. Is this a first-time director? Has he ever been in charge of anything before? Let's check the internet... shockingly, yes, he has. I'm actually a little shocked. There's something slightly broken about how this show is liable to introduce its scenes and let them play out, although on reflection my least favourite element is straight from the script. (Meguru's muggle friends are one-dimensional cliches. There's a cross-dresser, a girl who dresses as a sheep and a fortune-telling girl who carries cards and divining rods. There's also a fourth one who's, um, uh, hopefully in possession of hidden depths we just haven't seen yet.)

That said, though, I enjoyed it anyway. Meguru is very likeable and oh so keen to be a hero and help people. The genre cliches work, despite being so familiar that you can sing along to them. Maybe I'll warm up to the muggles. I want to see Meguru thaw out Sumire. Oh, and there's also a probably accidental hint of darkness when Mr Hedgehog claims at the end that they have to get the Sacred Energy. In this genre, that's more likely to be a villainous line, even though he's also Meguru and Sumire's boss. (Maybe Sumire's emotional distance is because he's been secretly manipulating her?)

Apparently it's a spin-off of an earlier show called Kaitou Tenshi Twin Angel. I'll watch this, but I'm not expecting to find myself feeling the need to go back and catch up with its predecessor.

I'd already watched the first 37 episodes, so of course I was going to continue. For me, this is just the episode between ep.37 and ep.39. I can still describe it here, though.

It's a big apocalyptic fight. If you jumped into it cold, you probably wouldn't see much to persuade you to keep going. It's fine, though, and I enjoyed it because I had all the backstory at my fingertips. Last week, a girl asked out Rokuro, even though everyone who knew him must surely have known he and Benio were a couple, and asked if there was a girl he liked. Benio was listening. He got interrupted. Now she asks him the question herself, although again we don't get an answer.

The bulk of the episode, though, is a demon levitating a chunk of the city. It looks like a square mile, airborne on a base of rock and concrete. What's more, his demon pets are eating everyone on it and they'll have finished their meal in a couple of hours. Understandably this keeps our heroes busy, including various support ones from the Council of Twelve. We meet the money-grubbing onmyouji who's always annoyed me by being a one-dimensional cliche, but in fairness the medical one here is just as much of a gimmick character.

Oh, and I must mention the title sequence. It was introduced some time ago, but it's weird. It shows us a discordant monochrome world where Benio and Rokuro are eating on opposite sides of an intimidatingly large, formal dinner table. Benio photographs Rokuro and causes him pain, making him drop his knife. It turns into red roses. After that, the table gets pulled into asymmetrical geometrical shapes that suggest discord between the couple. We see a puppet being jerked about on its strings, then a plane turns into a cloud of butterflies. After that, fighting.

What is that? What on Earth is it trying to say about the show? Title sequences are taken very seriously, so I'm not expecting it to be meaningless surreal imagery for laughs.

I'm going to guess that we're two episodes away from the season finale, because this show seems to operate on unofficial ten-episode seasons rather than the TV industry's usual three-month cycle. In practice, of course, the episodes never stop rolling out, week after week, but that was the feeling I got after ep.20 and ep.30. The episode's fine, I think. If you're already watching the show, you'll keep going. If you're not, don't try to jump on here.

GOOD NEWS: it's an all-female cast.

BAD NEWS: motorcycle sidecar racing.

The cast are all fine and I'd have happily watched them in a different show. We begin with Miss Info-Dump impersonating 1987 Robin Williams ("Goooooooood morning, Miyakejima!") and explaining that "I, Ai Makita of the Miyakejima Girls High School Broadcasting Club, will provide running commentary!" There are seven driver-passenger teams, all waiting on the starting line. We meet each one and get a one-line summary of their characterisation, which is fine...

...but then they start racing in their motorcycles. They care about motorcycles.

I don't, so I turned it off.