The source material's actually French, but it's pretending to be Japanese manga and conforming to all the standard shounen archetypes.

We have a boy who's determined to be a hero, in a world where monsters fall from the sky (literally) and sorcerors have to fight them. The boy, Seth, can do superhuman jumps across rooftops and punch house-sized boulders into the sky, but he's also not too bright. Dumb stuff he does this week includes:

(a) accidentally destroying a building with one of those punched boulders and hence getting chased by a herd of aarvark-cows.

(b) stealing magic books from his scary teacher, Alma, on the assumption that she won't notice. He wanted to show off to his friend, you see, but this does him no good because he can't cast the spells they contain.

The villagers don't like him, partly because he causes property damage and partly just because he and Alma are magic-users. You'd think magic-users would be more popular, given all that monster-fighting, but no. Everyone here hates them. (It comes across mostly as genre tradition, to be honest.) Give the villagers some burning torches and they'd be a mob.

It's okay. Nothing wrong with it. This kind of shounen hero stuff isn't my thing and I won't be continuing, but this episode was reasonably enjoyable.

That was interesting. I've seen this show called Bakemonogatari lite, but the difference is that Bakemonogatari has always struck me as interminable talk talk talk, whereas this is about something.

Its portrayal of high school life is scary. The rigid social strata might freeze you out forever for, say, missing the start of the school year. Sakuta Azusagawa talks to another boy on the way to school, which makes the boy's girlfriend angry with him. She doesn't want her boyfriend to be seen associating with the class loner.

This is taken so far that it becomes supernatural. There's a schoolgirl who sometimes can't be perceived by the rest of the world, so she's taken to dressing in bunny suits to test this. (She's also a celebrity who's taken a career break.) Azusagawa also has a little sister who's scared of strangers, has stopped going to school and has been seen to exhibit magical, spontaneous injuries.

There's lots of discussion, but that's because these are thoughtful people and it feels in-character for them. Azusagawa is an observer. They're saying and exploring things a bit deeper than usual. This show looks good.

A lot happened in that episode! You could turn it into a full-length movie. (Yes, just the episode.)

Hikari Tsutsui starts out as a self-hating otaku who thinks real girls are out of his league, has suppressed his own sexual desire and only cares about fictional characters. He's capable of being pre-emptively hurtful as a defence mechanism when someone's just trying to be nice. It's not always comfortable to watch him.

Iroha Igarashi is a beautiful girl with a reputation, so Tsutsui sees her as the enemy. In fact, she has man trouble but no friends. She's nice, underneath, but she should stop calling other women "ugly".

A lot of shows would take twelve episodes to cover the ground we reach by the closing credits. Can they really keep that up for 24 episodes? Probably not, but I'm willing to find out. The episode's also moderately charming. Tsutsui's characterisation is more broken and fragile than most main characters of his type, probably because this isn't a male otaku fantasy ego-stroke but instead a romantic comedy from a manga that was written for a female audience.

There's also a live-action film adaptation. I'll probably watch that too.

I'm ambivalent. I could have said "yes" or "no". It's by the bloke who wrote Record of Lodoss War, which I knew I'd watched but I couldn't remember anything about it. Looking up my old reviews, apparently I didn't like it.

This one starts with a demon lord trashing a diplomatic wedding. It's not clear what the hell we're looking at, but I'm pretty sure those were corpses hitting the ground. After that, the marriage is called off, because the bride seems to blame the groom. You're better off without her, mate.

Unfortunately this wedding had been going to unite the two great families of Generic Fantasy Land, so the world returns to war.

After that, we get an arrogant, high-handed mage who doesn't know how to say "thank you" and jumps into an unbreakable lifelong contract with some random kind-but-dumb swordsman she meets on the road. She has plans for him. She summons a monster for him to defeat, which will increase his strength when he absorbs its magical crest. (It's close, but he's lucky and wins.) After that, she boots out the villainous owner of a nearby castle and declares that she's going to declare a political alliance that will make enemies of all their new neighbours.

I don't really like her. She's definitely a dynamic character, though. Another thing I didn't really like was the sword fighting, which fortunately ended quickly but still made me worry about the possibility of a show with a hard-on for heroic sword fights. I see high-energy boredom ahead.

I was on the fence. I nearly said "yes" and continued. I would have if my reviews of Record of Lodoss War had been more positive. I also probably would have had this been a 12-episode season. If you like this kind of grand fantasy genre, with lots of war and politics, this looks like a solid, sincere example of it. The characterisation is a plus point, if we assume that Silucia is going to get more likeable later on.

I'm not sure where this is going. Might be okay, might be unpleasant. I'll take a slight gamble.

Schoolgirls are conducting raids and possibly killing people. We see guns, swords and rockets, after all. "Twenty puppet guards and ten human ones." We see one girl shoot someone three times while he's lying on the floor, although the sound is a "pffft". Dart gun or silencer? It's not clear at that point, but it later becomes likely that those were "memory-erasing bullets".

They claim to be good guys who've been fighting evil since the Warring States era. Their opponents are Moryo, a global crime syndicate. We've only got their word for that, but there's one bit where they seem likeable. ("Because you helped that policewoman.")

Fortunately, though, our thoroughly nice protagonist is Momo, who has super-senses. (She can tell your physical and emotional state by licking you.) She wants to be a policeman like her father, but has confidence issues.

To be honest, the episode's fairly generic. Explosions, fight scenes, etc. Vigilantes vs. sinister syndicates. It's also got quite a lot of violence, e.g. a chase where both sides are using rockets on a public highway. I liked the character-building bit where Momo gets a lesson in confidence, but to be honest my main reason for continuing was a cameo. An amphibian climbs out of Momo's pocket. "He's a frog who's received ninja training."

I'm not confident about this one, but what the hell.

They're spies who aren't affiliated to any government. Not sure how that works. They have beyond-007 gadgets like invisibility cream. If you don't join them, they wipe your memory. If you try to leave, they wipe your memory unless you agree to be a civilian collaborator.

Momo gets a tedious, unpleasant mentor. She's equally harsh on herself, but that's no excuse. The training includes lessons in trusting nobody and in how to be a two-faced bitch, while this is her attitude to timekeeping:

"You're five minutes early. In future, be ready to go thirty minutes ahead of time."

Piss off. Give Momo the time you want her to arrive. I bailed without even reaching the closing credits.

ReLIFE is great. I loved Season 1 and I'd been looking forward to these OVAs, which will hopefully conclude the story. The only thing I'm wondering is whether or not they'll have the same ending as the live-action movie. I won't object if they do, but you never know.

Anyway, Arata Kaizaki is the show's protagonist. Real age: 27. Apparent age when he's taking the drugs: 17. He's at school, trying to learn things about himself and get his life back on track. Oh, and so far he's been careful not to shag any schoolgirls. That said, though, Kaizaki's not the main character of this episode and instead it's Chizuru-centric. I'm very happy with that. Chizuru's funny, especially her blank-eyed Determined Face at one point during the planning for the school's culture festival, although there's a lot more to her scenes here than laughs.

I'll avoid saying any more. Spoilers. However Onoya made me laugh, it's interesting to see how much a certain person has guessed and how far Yoake's prepared to go with his stonewalling. I'm looking forward to this hugely... but be warned that there's probably no point in watching this if you haven't seen Season 1. That's okay, though. Begin at the beginning! This is an excellent show and everyone should watch it.

1. No one seems to like this show. The few reviews I've found of it are unenthusiastic, to put it mildly.

2. The main character doesn't have much characterisation.

3. There's a stupid scene early on where Derrida and Nathan tell their boss about a bug they've discovered in the AI program in their company's world-sweepingly successful DZ robots. (We're talking about the year 2050 equivalent of Apple, Microsoft and Google put together.) He's not interested. He says he won't recall anything and spouts cliches. Admittedly this is partially explained later by the revelation that he's evil and has military plans, but it's still absurd that a company that big, with that many resources, would even pretend to believe that its best tactic for dealing with a bug of that seriousness might be to stick its head in the sand.

4. It's a story about travelling back in time and changing your own past. I'm not wild about that genre. It's inherently prone to disappearing up its own arse and/or making you wonder about the possibilities of infinite dramatic cheats.

The episode was basically okay. It's serious and sincere. I liked the little girl, Maaju, and her birthday party. The show's playing with SF ideas like cryogenics, time travel, post-apocalypse, robot TV announcers and a girl who can magically appear from thin air in a pink energy blob swirl.

Thinking about it, though, I suspect that this might be the kind of time-travel story that begins with attention-grabbing trigger stuff in ep.1, but then gets less and less interesting later on as you can't escape from its level of drama and characterisation. Just citing other 2018 examples, if you're lucky, you'll get Iroduku: The World in Colors. If you're unlucky, you'll get Island.

I was very tempted to continue. Thinking of Island, though, I'm pretty sure that I'd have regretted it.

It's sort of okay. I watched it all, without screaming and turning off the video. However the other Robot Girls Z shows were funny, whereas this one's just sort of there. It fills its short running time. It's hard to imagine it running full-length.

It's no longer a parody of psychopathic city-destroying heroes. The city's already been destroyed. Z-chan and Gre-chan are living together as a loving couple (with an intense lesbian mood shot per episode), but other Robot Girls will appear too.

Every episode has a fight where the loser sustains clothing damage, but: (a) it's carefully exposing no naughty bits, and (b) the usual art style is cartoonish and everyone's two heads high.

It's a bit silly. It's nothing special. I don't mind it, but I'm not sure I see the point of it.

Four men cook food. A busy woman walks down a city street, but then sees a bamboo-lined path to what looks like a secluded grove. It contains a cafe! She goes in!

I hit the fast-forward button.

I already know what's in this show. It's going to be relaxing, soothing and pointless. It's the thing to watch if you're not in the mood for drama or anything happening. What I saw in my fast-forwarding was people ordering and consuming food as the busy woman found inner peace and healing.

Obviously I won't be watching this show. I'd sooner watch a blank screen for 24 minutes, which could even be argued to be basically the same thing. It will undoubtedly be wholesome and nice. Sometimes it might even be amusing. Above all, though, it will also be boring.

It looks excellent, but it's about marathon-running. That's not just any old sports anime, but one where the chosen sport is just running for miles and miles. I can't see myself watching 23 episodes of that... but the show does look strong. It's based on a novel, by the way. Not just a light novel, but a proper novel that had a live-action movie adaptation in 2009.

"Do you like running?" asks Haiji Kiyose. What makes this unusual is that he's saying it to a fleeing shoplifter.

We meet an apartment block's all-male tenants. They're an interesting, lively bunch, although you might not want to be stuck in a lift with them. (They're also far more varied than the cast of most sports anime, being wildly different in their life ambitions, anti-social habits, levels of sloth, etc. They'd also probably all run a mile to escape from anyone who tried to make them go running.) The tenants hold a drinking party to celebrate the arrival of a new, tenth man who'll be taking the last available room. At last, they're full! What no one but Haiji Kiyose knows about, though, is a highly unusual clause in this apartment block's contracts.

I approve of this show. I'd recommend it to people, if they don't mind watching running.

It's good, but it was controversial.

CONTROVERSIAL: there's a nine-year-old girl who gets naked in a goofball comedy misunderstanding scene with our sixteen-year-old protagonist. It's actually quite funny and tame by anime standards, but one hopes that that's not a harbinger of more.

GOOD: our hero (Yaichi Kuzuryu) is a sixteen-year-old shogi professional. His introductory scene feels a bit silly and rubbish if you've seen March Comes in Like a Lion, but fortunately the show completely changes direction when Ai Hinatsuru shows up. She's nine. She says he promised to make her his disciple. This doesn't sound like a realistic proposition, but he can't break a promise without at least offering her a game of shogi to test her.

She nearly beats him.

I really enjoyed all this. Both Yaichi and Ai are likeable and the game is conveyed well. I want to watch more of this story. The episode's shogi content is detailed and interesting, although it can get a bit silly when it comes to the personalities involved. (Ayumu the chuunibyou is absurd, although the Ginko-Ai anomosity is funny.) It feels like a good shogi show.

VAGUELY CONCERNING: it's by the author of No-Rin. (There's nothing questionable about that show, incidentally. My problem was that I found it kind of bland and dull.)

Time will tell whether the show's basically fine, reprehensible or what. I enjoyed this episode, though. It was funny and nice. I'll keep watching.