In a world with a 1920s aesthetic, it's nine years since a "War of Unification". The ultimate weapon was fairies. Today, violent people are either looking for a Black Fairy Tome or trying to stop the first lot of people. A mafia is also involved, somehow. A girl joined them to look for another girl, because they were the last two survivors or something.

The story is... well, let's assume that it's too broad for us to see what's happening at this early stage.

"You can use fairies. Your very existence is illegal." (How does this work? How can you make a person's existence illegal? Their actions, yes, but the fact that they're living and breathing? Sounds like bollocks to me.) This fairy user is offered the choice of being arrested or of joining a government agency that's presumably sinister.

Naaah. I've learned that it's better to avoid series that aren't clear in ep.1 about what they're doing.

It starts in the past. Someone's dead and a baddie is carrying her to a temple or something. "It was wrong of me to try to love someone." However the body isn't technically dead, since the heart is still beating. A wizard puts her in a crystal and spends more than thirty years trying unsuccessfully to revive her.

I'm not sure why he removed all her clothes before putting her inside that crystal, but ours not to reason why.

We now jump to the present. That flashback was characterisation for the baddie, which might possibly maybe hypothetically be how he's eventually defeated in XXX episodes' time. That's a wild stab in the dark there. The point of this episode is setting up the latest bunch of baddies for our heroes to fight. (It's ep.290 of a long-running shounen anime. That's part of the formula.) There's a new superweapon, so he's "now a threat to all mankind" and "a foe more powerful than any we've faced before." The baddie has a twelve-spriggan council who are kind of fun. They're preparing for the battle of Ragnarok, in which they'll "temporarily exterminate mankind". That's an unusual notion.

The episode's fine. It didn't tempt me to go back and start watching the whole series from ep.1, but it's a good, solid example of what it is. The cast are lively and I wasn't bored. Natsu is funny when he talks macho bullshit that makes everyone happy because they believe him. (That was intentional comedy, right?) If you like shounen action series, this example of the genre looks reasonable.

I've heard that it's quite good... but it's more Fate/InsertSomethingHere. I've seen enough of that franchise. I love Fate/Kaleid liner Prisma Illya to pieces, but otherwise it's lots of deathmatches where no one ever seems to notice that they might as well be playing Russian Roulette with five bullets in six chambers.

This one has a different premise, mind you. Mankind will cease to exist in 2016, so heroes will time-travel back to the past and try to change history. This is ep.0, though, so it's all about character establishment for the Mash. She's a designer baby with degenerating cells who's only got a few years to live, she's too innocent to see anything except the good side of people, etc. I don't dislike her at all, but you might as well put a halo on her and been done with it.

The episode's quite good, but also atypical of the series. Fewer fight scenes, no deathmatches. Hence its episode number of zero. I'm not planning to continue with this series, but I'll be watching its first episode of 2020 tomorrow. That's ep.12. Maybe that'll be good enough to make me watch the whole thing?

It's the ULTIMATE BATTLE that all fighters shoot for! AT THIS VERY MOMENT, various brands are holding fiery preliminary battles for the right to participate in FIGHT LEAGUE!! One of the brands, GGG, is holding the GGG Cup, where fighters use their prized gadgets to win their way to the top!!!

(Disappointingly for anyone looking for puerile innuendo, there's no such thing as a GGG cup in bra sizes.)

There's nothing here, really. The episode starts and ends with team fights. (I presume they're just computer games or something.) I was mildly interested by the grandfather who didn't like his granddaughter talking about battles, but otherwise this is ten minutes of dead time.

Yesterday, I decided not to watch Dororo and Vinland Saga. (Reviewers sing their praises.) Today, I decided to watch all of Fire Force. (Reviewers hoot and throw things, at least in Season 1.) Ah, well. I dare say I'll regret it, but this ep.1 was quite fun. It starts with a man spontaneously combusting on a train. A fireball explodes into the station and a fire demon climbs out. The fire force who turn up to extinguish it have a nun who prays for the man's soul.

This is a good start.

There's also a boy who wants to be a hero, but has unfortunate teeth and a slightly painful backstory. These firefighters include pyrokinetics, which makes more sense than I thought at first. (Presumably they can control existing flames, as well as starting new ones.) I liked the moment where a man thanks our heroes for putting his wife to rest. I'll give the show a whirl.

It's the cooking anime with food so delicious that diners have an orgasm as their clothes fly off. That doesn't happen this week, admittedly, but people get pretty excited just looking at the cooking in progress. Apparently it's arousing to watch ingredients get chopped.

Our heroes are fighting the Elite Ten, which means another food tournament. Someone cooks a crocodile. This show is ridiculously silly and very successful, but it's also basically a sports anime except with food instead of kicking a ball. This one isn't for me, but my anime-watching colleague at work is a fan.

I gave up and fast-forwarded. I'm sure it's fine if you like international piano competitions. Lots of concert pianists. Everyone taking it Very Seriously. Discussion of judging, scoring, etc.

At least ep.1 last year had children and a forest.

I'm not calling it bad, though. I didn't see enough of it to judge. It just didn't grab me personally, that's all.

Fruits Basket is a big deal. Natsuki Takaya's original manga was an international hit (because it's excellent) and got a 2001 anime adaptation by Akitarou Daichi (who's a genius). Bizarrely, Takaya didn't like that anime.

This will be a much more faithful adaptation.

It's good, unsurprisingly. You'd have to try hard to mess up Fruits Basket. It starts disconcertingly and I wondered if I'd accidentally started with ep.2 or something, but it soon settles down. It's a bit harder-edged and more serious than the 2001 anime, but also less funny. Look at the episode ending, for instance.

It's well worth watching. It's doing its own thing, without trying to compete with Akitarou Daichi on comedy. (Probably wise. Don't pick fights you can't win.)