I watched Season 2 ep.1 back in 2014 and fled at top speed. The chances of me picking it up with Season 3 were basically zero, but apparently the show's been improving. Darker, more dangerous story elements are coming.

That sounds promising, but I still won't be watching it.

It's a harem show where the hero (Shido) has to stop sexy female Spirits from destroying the world with "spatial quakes". How does he do this? Why, he takes them on dates and makes them fall in love with him! (Apparently they then stay in love with him, no matter how many other Spirits he woos and brings home to add to his harem.)

The episode I watched today is full of Adorable Harem Antics (ahem). "Darling, I seem to have burned my poor lips. Unless you kiss them, they'll never heal." The other girls then all start copying her.

Even ordinary humans aren't immune to our amazing hero! This episode's plot includes an evil doppelganger. When girls complain that Shido was sexually harassing them, Origami complains that she hasn't been sexually harassed yet and puts his hand inside her blouse. In the classroom. In front of everyone. Sigh. Boys and teachers are similarly smitten by Shido.

It's genre nonsense. Victimless, all in good fun and probably amusing if you've been watching the show from the beginning, but as plausible as an ice-skating goldfish.

We see a date. Bizarrely, Shido's in radio contact with a control room who tell him what chat-up line to use next. (He's a living romantic simulation game.) They vote on it!

QUESTION: "Why are you here?"

1. "For one reason only. To meet you."

2. "I - I don't know. I escaped late and ended up here."

3. "Since you're here, can I fondle your boobs?"

There's a shapeshifter who's desperate for Shido to call her pretty, which you wouldn't expect shapeshifters to get hung up about. She then sneezes, transforms momentarily into a different silhouette and takes offence at Shido for seeing this (which he didn't). What an idiot. She's going to be trouble, but the episode's already suggesting ways to foil her, e.g. make her sneeze, make her feel positive about herself, etc.

I've seen worse. The shapeshifter plot looks promising-ish, while it wouldn't be hard to find the harem silliness amusing. I'm not tempted, though.

It's about the real-world boy band, Urashimasakatasen. (The correct capitalisation is UraShimaSakataSen, or just USSS for short, because it takes its name from its four members.)

Anyway, they go to high school. There is comedy... um, well, it's definitely banter, at least. Watch this show if and only if you're already a fan of Urashimasakatasen.

It's a Chinese anime, with nearly-photorealistic CGI. (The action isn't all convincing and instead is capable of resembling a video game, while that little girl didn't quite convince me for some reason. I'd assumed at first that she was meant to be a small adult.)

The intro sequence is trying hard to be the Coolest Thing Ever. Bullets, fast cars, explosions, etc.

After that, for a while, the episode's quite interesting. A woman falls into water and, possibly, gets a bullet in the forehead. She then wakes up as a paralysed robot on an operating table. There are two kinds of mother-daughter relationship. I liked the conversations we were seeing.

After that, though, a Power Rangers villain walks through a shower of dramatically shattering glass. (You'll get hurt doing that, mate.) The episode then denegerates into a blob of stormtrooper soldiers, slow-motion bullets, car chases (with Mr Power Rangers chasing a car on foot) and LOOK HOW COOL WE ARE.

I woke up for the end of the episode, which has some interesting stuff again, but no. Overall, I liked half of this.

A human manager gets put in charge of some rubbish employees who are all shellfish. (In Japanese, this is a pun.) They order from Uber Eats, play video games and disappear promptly at 5pm (which is shocking in Japan). One of them's not even at work in the first place. He's sent a hologram.

The art's childish, the jokes are obvious and it's definitely not worth seeking out, but it's okay. Not too bad for two minutes. It's a continuation of a similar show called Asa Da Yo! Kaishain.

Yuko is the descendant of demons! Her destiny is to murder a magical girl and feed her blood to the family's demon god statue. (They currently use it as a doorstopper.)

Yuko's also small, pathetically weak and inclined to go with the flow. Her first reaction to learning all this is, "Nope, can't do that. Sleepy."

Momo is a superhumanly strong magical girl who goes to Yuko's school. Any fight between them would be like an butterfly attacking a grizzly bear. Momo ends up giving Yuko food and boxing lessons. You've got to laugh at the sight of Momo bending down like a mother to listen good-naturedly to Yuko's threats to her life.

That said, though, there are also hints that all's not well in Momo-world. She's rich, but apparently friendless and lonely. Yuko, on the other hand, is dirt poor and a disaster area, but also has a supportive (evil) family and friends at school who are amusingly relaxed about Yuko growing horns and a tail.

Looks fun. Definitely continuing.

Yup, another isekai story. They're everywhere. They're generally an anti-drama power fantasy, but sometimes they're okay. I enjoyed this one, although I'm half-expecting the formula to have got stale by ep.12.

The hero's a game designer who gets sucked into his own game. In here, he's a Demon Lord who makes people think he's going to eat them. (Physical appearance: tall, sharp suit, smokes a lot of cigarettes.) He can also insta-kill demons and access the world's game system with administrator privileges. Fortunately, though, he's also nice.

What I liked about the episode was the people he met. Aku (possibly female?) is small, polite and has been so badly treated that you can make her cry just by not treating her as untouchable. Her village sent her to die as a sacrifice.

I even felt sorry for the statue that grants evil wishes. I'm quite looking forward to this.

I'd been ordered not to watch this alone. Tomoko wanted to see it too. At last, we've made a start... and it's good. The show has a big reputation and so far at least it's living up to it.

Tanjiro is a nice boy with an amazing sense of smell. He's got lots of siblings and they live in the mountains. It's the kind of wilderness where it could be almost any century, because life is heavy clothes, tramping through snow and trying not to get eaten. If there's any civilisation, it's going to take hours of walking to get there.

Bad things happen. There's a demon slayer, a semi-survivor and scary teeth. Tomoko and I will be watching all of this.

That was great! I've always vaguely liked this show, but I'd never considered watching it regularly. It'll soon hit a thousand episodes, after all, and they're all the same. It's just a never-ending sequence of murder mysteries, which is fine but not appointment viewing.

However this story surprised me. Stuff's been happening! Conan can now transform back into his adult body, but this has a time limit and he needs to take a drug to make it happen. He's going out with Ran! Their relationship is developing! They're being teased by their classmates at school, especially since everyone's on a school trip to Kyoto and you've got people like Sonoko Suzuki gleefully making herself unwanted and emailing unnecessary photos because she thinks it's funny.

I'm actually curious about where the show's going next, which is unbelievable in a show that's been going nowhere every week like clockwork since 1996. Apparently this special story was so well-received that it made headlines in Japan and the manga writer/artist (Gosho Aoyama) did key animation for ep.928. Mind you, high school students going to Kyoto for their school trip is a bit lame. Primary school, maybe.

That said, this particular murder mystery isn't the best. I like the characters, the situation and the mystery, but it all looks a bit silly when you eventually find out what happened. What a bunch of idiots. However the show's been livened up no end by Conan's unstable two bodies, his revived relationship with Ran and the opportunities this poses for classmates to be annoying. The animators' rendition of Kyoto is also top-notch. (Even I recognised some of it!) That was pretty good!

Apparently it takes liberties with the source material, skipping lots of it. That doesn't sound good, but I enjoyed the episode. Our heroine, Misato Kurihara, is a twelve-year-old girl in a magical world with nanomachines (yes) who used to be a Japanese schoolgirl in her previous life. She's fun, she meets nice people and the episode's light and entertaining. She also had an unusual request of the angel who reincarnated her, which is amusing too.

The episode's bad guys are a bit odd. They're deliberately being played as cliches, with the tone a bit too broad and cartoonish. That fits with Misato's otaku worldview and genre awareness, though. I'm going to speculate that this will be amusing characters in a show that's wallowing in being by the numbers. Well, I've watched worse.

It's not really a drama. It's a framework for puzzles, which are the only interesting part of the episode. The first one doesn't require language skill and I should theoretically have got it, but I was too focused on trying to see kanji in there.

The second one, though, I actually paused the episode to give myself time to think... but I still failed. The problem is that "base" and "land" have too many possible translations. Verb? Noun? Adjective? Does base mean "lowest part", "conceptual foundation", "crude" or "military headquarters"? "Iron to soil" is the one I should have focused on, because those words are unambiguous and were hence my best chance of solving the problem.

I couldn't take the rest of the episode, but the format's unusual.

It stars five pretty boys who pose for the camera and will make you want to kill them. Four are schoolboys and one is a teacher so beautiful and young-looking that you won't believe for a moment that he's older than his students (or even male). Tomoko assures me that they cover the spectrum of pretty boy types. Delinquent, youngest one, teacher, brainbox in glasses, etc. (The latter is incapable of courtesy and needs stabbing.) Halfway through, they get transformed into cheap-arse CGI anime versions of themselves to solve the riddles of the Sphinx.

No no no. You'll be playing it to friends and family, as an example of bad Japanese television to laugh at.

It's obviously aimed at children, with very simple art. It's quite amusing, though. Naoko Watanabe is an ordinary schoolgirl who, if she gets angry, turns into a fire-breathing Godzilla dinosaur called Gauko.

Naoko and the show are genre-aware, knowing what should normally happen in anime/manga. (Naoko's assumptions never come true.) Her classmates at school include humans, animals, ducks, kappa, etc. For some reason, there's a baby trying to make trouble. (I wonder if the show will have an ongoing plot?) The episode's perfectly reasonable and occasionally amusing, e.g. the hot-blooded boy at the end shouting "AWESOME! COOL!" on seeing Gauko's rampage and then immediately getting splatted.

It's a Netflix Original Anime, surprisingly.

I've watched all of this series to date, but I'd been expecting to drop these last few episodes. It's a super-episodic gag anime without the slightest shred of plot. I've seen it all. It's okay. That's enough, I thought...

...but this might be one of the funniest episodes I've seen of this series. The episode's five segments are all good. Saiki's utter disdain for his idiot friends makes for good comedy reactions. The segment about his dad's online gaming was full of jokes and amusing observations about online gamers. Maybe they chose all the best bits from the remaining manga chapters for this first episode, but even so it looks as if I'll watch this to the end.

Oh, wow. I've got to watch this.

It's an isekai show. Masato is a teenage boy who's sucked into a fantasy game world with an otherwise all-female cast! Job description: HERO! Ridiculous power fantasies! A protagonist with insane levels of magical attack right from ep.1! We've seen this a million times, especially in recent years...

...except that here Masato's mother is coming with him. What's more, she's the one with the super-amazing mega-insta-kill attacks. Masato's rubbish. He makes a bird drop from the sky. That made him sulk for a while, especially since mum tried to encourage him by being excited about it.

There are other features I enjoyed. Masato isn't sucked into the other world by God, but by the government as a beta tester. He'd filled in a form. Incidentally, the show's handwave about this is amusing, via a literal King of Info-Dumping. "We used special technology that we can't explain easily to put the users themselves in the game."

Imagine if this happened to you. Most Annoying Thing Ever. Or, as a premise for an anime, awesome.

It begins with a schoolboy (Natsuo Fujii) and a schoolgirl (Rui Tachibana) in bed. The girl puts on her bra and gets up. They've both just lost their virginity, but the moment couldn't be less romantic. It wasn't even Fujii's choice to go to bed and he's all confused and tentative about it, while Rui was just picking some stranger for her own dispassionate reasons. "It's just... it was like 'So that's how it is.'"

What's more, Fujii's in love with someone else. This someone is hot, kind and a teacher. She's definitely not interested in him, unless maybe perhaps a tiny bit of her is.

Then, eventually, there's some extreme news. Life's going to be complicated. I thought this was really good.

It's Japan's number one anime franchise. Hands down, no contest. Nothing else is even in the race. It's a kiddie show, but also an unstoppable juggernaut that's been running forever. Natsuki watched this with me. It's pretty good, for what it's worth. (This isn't the first episode of 2019, incidentally, but just a random one I happened to watch.)

As usual, Doraemon produces a new gadget, only for Nobita to find a way to be stupid with it. The episode's divided into two 12-minute segments.

GADGET: Photo Suction Stick. It can take people from photos and make them real. (If you have multiple photos of the same person, you can even make multiple copies of them.)

HENTAI POTENTIAL: massive. First, buy a porn mag. (Incidentally, what would happen with photoshopped photos?)

HOW NOBITA USES IT: his mum tells him to weed the garden, so he creates an army of Doraemon clones to help him. Naturally, en masse they're useless. This is quite funny.

GADGET: Armadillon. A bit like an armadillo, it lets you turn into a ball and become impregnable to physical damage. (Your body really does transform physically, by the way. You don't just roll up.)

HENTAI POTENTIAL: none, unless you have a fetish for farts and dog saliva. You could turn into a ball and sneak into places undetected, but you might as well use Doraemon's Doko-De-Mo Door if that's all you want.

HOW NOBITA USES IT: he shares it with his friends, plays pranks on bullies and generally messes around. This looks fun, actually. It made Natsuki laugh. Mind you, he does have a misadventure with a hill, a bully and a dog.

I need more Osamu Tezuka in my life. He's the father of manga. He's important. This is a new Tezuka adaptation... but naaah.

There's an unnatural baby and a samurai dad who kills a priest. The title character (Dororo) is a thieving smart-arse brat. His victims beat him up and are going to kill him, but unfortunately don't finish the job.

The show's well regarded and was on critics' "best of the year" lists. I'm tempted, but the world won't end if I skip an anime or two.

My occasional encounters with this show are getting less obnoxious, but also less interesting. Xiao Yan no longer makes me hate him, but he also does nothing worth watching. Look, snake women! Look, a fight! It's a competent CGI action spectacle with nothing under the surface.

Other features of this episode include hypnosis eyes, pink/purple magic fairy wings and a master with a smoke/steam body. There's not even enough here to talk about.

One day, everyone in the world turns to stone. 3,700 years later, two schoolboys have woken up... and they were conscious throughout their period of petrification. Civilisation's gone. All they have is a forest and each other.

One of them is Senku Ishigami, an arrogant genius with shounen hero hair. He believes in science and he understands what a painstaking process it is. "Only one year after I started experimenting. That was quick!"

The other is Senku's friend, Taiju Oki, who's in love with a girl (still petrified) and is passionate in all things. He's not stupid and can have good ideas, but he's nowhere near Senku's intellectual level and they're both happy to give him all the grunt work. If it requires physical strength, TAIJU WILL DO IT!!!!

It's really good. The episode has a stronger emotional basis than I expected, with Taiju's crush and the petrified people who've shattered over the millennia. Senku's trying to wake up the human race, but there will be people that won't work on. I like his respect for the scientific method. I like both of our heroes. I even like the slightly old-fashioned shounen character designs, with big eyes and lots of intensity.

And, at the end, a bird is freed.

I'd heard that this show was good, but I wasn't expecting to love its first episode. Which I sort of did.

It's a lot better than I'd expected. It's got a light touch. It takes the mickey out of its own title, which is the same as before but with a second exclamation mark. Two boys promise to take each other to heaven, then a battery bends over to show its arsehole. Food is eaten, making the boys look pregnant. Apparently the Water Civilisation is going to disappear!

The second half has the mandatory trading card game battle. You can fast-forward through that, although obviously you shouldn't be watching this in the first place. It's a merchandise-driven anime that exists to sell the Duel Masters trading card game to small boys... but I've seen worse.