Risibly bad CGI soldiers jump out of a plane in order to fight someone. No one has a personality and your eyes will rebel at the idea of trying to tell these men apart anyway. You'd assume that this was zero-budget throwaway garbage... but it's a YouTube Originals series by Gen Urobuchi. Seems pretty typical of him. He's the most high-profile writer in anime, but I don't like him much and that's another reason for me to avoid this series.

The Urobutcher isn't primarily interested in characters, you see. He's capable of creating them, but he builds his stories first from theme, challenging ideas, politics, grimdark, pessimism, etc.

It's been puzzling me for years why I had such a negative reaction to Urobuchi's Puella Magi Madoka Magica and I think the answer is that the girls' behaviour isn't rational. Given the situation as presented, it doesn't make sense for them to fight. Watching them fight is frustrating. Urobuchi basically set up a no-win rat trap with 100% guaranteed death, then piled on ever-increasing levels of misery and despair for the rest of the series. The show's saved by Madoka triumphing anyway at the end, as it remembers that it's a magical girl show and we get a happy ending, which is satisfying and very nice, but it looks as if that wasn't enough to outweigh the preceding episodes for me.

Of his other series, Psycho-Pass rides on its nightmarish Phil K. Dick idea well enough to sustain its first series, but it's also one-dimensionally dour and these days I'm bored with it. Aldnoah.Zero I actually sort of like. Fate/Zero I bought the DVDs, but then I started watching them and immediately put them in the bin. His Godzilla films are dreary. Thunderbolt Fantasy is extremely popular, but makes the mistake I see with a lot of Urobuchi stuff of thinking I'm automatically going to be interested in soldiers, samurai, fight scenes and Tough Guys Being Oh So Masculine.

One of the Maoi on Easter Island has arms. His name's Mowai-kun and he happily waves these arms, accidentally squashing a pink fox who's cross about that and will certainly be back next week. The end credits have live-action brats doing unlovely dancing.

Ojamajo Doremi is a twenty-year-old magical girl show. I like this micro-episode's art, but the story's just a snippet of conversation between two of the show's characters.

It's been running since 1988, making it the third longest-running anime series to date, and it's often quite funny when I see it on NHK in Japan. I'd be interested in checking it out properly some time, but I'm not sure that would mean. Watching the whole series would be impossible, but it had a 47-minute movie in 2000.

Here, I just watched some random episode on YouTube. Three horned things (presumably oni) want an old bloke to make something again. He extorts food out of them. Not one of the better Ojarumaru episodes, but what the hell.

Chitose is an emperor penguin who lives in Kyoto. Everyone loves her. It's nice, but aimed at five-year-olds.

It's written by Mari Okada (Anohana, Dragon Pilot, WIXOSS and lots more). It's got a serious critical reputation. It's pretty much mandatory. It's about five schoolgirls who read filth to each other and then discuss it, because it's literature and they're in a literature club.

They're not experienced. They go to school with girls who are, but they're normal (i.e. often ignorant, pompous or idiots) and almost certainly drawn from painfully honest real life. I'm expecting this to be one of the landmark anime of the year. (It also got a live-action TV drama adaptation the following year and I'll be watching that too.)

That was better than I'd expected. I'd been under the impression that, these days, the One Piece anime crawls at the speed of frozen molasses. This episode, though, moves along perfectly well. It's got action, fights, villains, etc. (It probably helps that I think it's based on an entire manga chapter, rather than half of one.)

I'm not a fan of the latest theme song. "Yes! We've got super powers!" Repeat often, add plenty more gratuitous English and have it drag on for 2 minutes 40 seconds. In fairness, though, it averages out since the episode had no end credits.

Luffy's having a fight with Katakuri in the Mirro-World and apparently he can see the future now. Wow. However that's not helping him. He gets stomped into the dirt, shot with paralysing darts, impaled on a fairly disgusting weapon and subjected to the kind of beating that leaves you in the middle of a ten-metre-wide crater. There's blood. He loses a tooth. Is Luffy going to lose a fight? Meanwhile Luffy's friends are having fun elsewhere, as are yet more villainous showcases for Eiichiro Oda's beyond-insane character designs. Especially Chicken Man. This show is basically a twenty-year experiment in how crazy-looking anime can become. One Piece is mental. Right now we're on the Whole Cake Island and a baddie is ordering everyone in town to break all their mirrors so the Straw Hats can't come out of them.

It's quite fun. It's too ludicrous to be about anything, really, but it's still a laugh.

I watched Season 1. It was okay. People who knew animation were going gaga over how amazing it looked, but the storyline didn't do that much for me. Saitama is a superhero who's so strong that he's kind of bored with the whole thing, but no one acknowledges him because he's not cool or famous. (No enemy lasts more than one punch against him. Hence the name.)

I didn't mind the show. I didn't quit or anything. However I don't particularly feel the need to add another twelve episodes of this to my life. This new episode looks like more of the same. There's an anti-Saitama, who's revered by everyone as the world's strongest hero even though he's a coward with no powers. The two of them play computer games together.

In principle, this is an amusing idea. The episode looks like a perfectly decent continuation of Season 1 and I have no objection to it. Thinking about it, I think I'm bailing because I find the show kind of colourless. Everyone's a superhero who has super-fights and cares about their super-ranking. The show's subversion of this is amusing, but in the end it's not leaving that super-spectrum. Characters either care or don't care about superhero things. This episode's anti-Saitama actively dislikes being seen as a superhero, which is a good start, but all he has in his life instead is... uh, computer games. He's not trying to get married, or annoy his next-door neighbour, or even build the world's biggest tower of empty beer cans. I'd have liked beer cans.

That said, though, even Season 1 fans have been disappointed in Season 2. The writing's gone downhill and the animation's gone from "industry-wowing" to "mediocre". Doesn't sound for me.

I quite like the idea. YouTubers are trapped in a real-life game where they have to get 100 million views in their live stream. You could have evil fun with that, in a Danganronpa way.

Unfortunately, this one has annoying characters and a silly execution. The first game challenge has a mega-giant panda, probably about 30 metres tall. No one comments on the impossibility of this. As for the cast, the male protagonist Iride is sensible and nice, but by the end of the episode will have promised to follow a ghost into death. As for the others...

(a) Karin is abusive and punches Iride in the face because she has boobs. I presume she'll turn out to be a tsundere who's less obnoxious underneath... but her tsundere surface is too annoying for me to care.

(b) Kudou is 100% attitude and 0% tolerability.

(c) there's an arrogant bloke whose first action is to kill an animal.

I'd be happy if everyone except Iride got pushed off a cliff. I don't mind the girl in orange, admittedly, but she seems so timid that I'm not expecting her to do anything. As for Yuzu, she seems the intelligent, sensible member of the group... but she also says "nyan". You are not a cat. Stop talking like a cat.

Nope, no, not for me. The show might be trashy, low-rent fun if you turn it into a drinking game, though. With luck, maybe some or all of the cast will die bloodily.

The first half's a massive cliche, even down to the big-eyed, old-fashioned art. Clueless harem hero and personality-free zone, Joro, is oblivious to the attentions of his sexy childhood friend, Himawari, and his beautiful student council president, Cosmos! Can they keep their knickers out of sight? Can they confess their love to this nonentity?

Then, to my surprise, they do... and there's a twist or three. Joro isn't the human potato he's been meticulously pretending to be. He's genre-aware. He's a massive scumbag. Mind you, I liked the fact that he immediately comes clean to both Himawari and Cosmos about their clash of interests, thus avoiding the plot sludge of Idiot Comedy Misunderstandings.

I've been told that the show degenerates from parody into straight harem, but what the hell. This episode made me laugh. I'll watch it and judge for myself. I'm also encouraged by my anime-watching colleague's verdict of "the crappiest show I’ve seen in a while, yet somehow surprisingly watchable".

Our hero's head is an arse and looks about 70% of his body weight. (The fun title sequence also has a poo-headed thief, but he's absent this week.) Two blue eggs with beaks can't go on their honeymoon because they've lost their plane tickets. Tarou left them in his bag, which looks identical to the bags of a talking horse and a bank robber.

Naturally, our hero's ultimate weapon is a fart that leaves everyone unconscious. I love the fact that this show exists.

Half the episode is a "nya-nya-nya-nya nya nya" theme song. The second half feels like an improvised (and not funny) conversation between two voice actors with minimalistic Flash animation. Our heroes appear to be a rabbit and a panda, drawn as if by eight-year-olds.

The original 2018 TV series is weak, but maybe sort of okay if you're generous. It's about a shop that sells sexy armour in a sword-and-sorcery fantasy game world. It's also based on a four-panel gag manga and has only four-minute episodes.

This episode, though, feels chunkier. It's five minutes long instead of four. Not a big difference, I know, but the bar is low. Kautz puts on a pair of X-ray spectacles and finds that they show the world as it really is. "I'm Beherin, a demon from the spirit world."

The screen goes blank and Kaurtz gets nervous about when the show pushed a joke too far in ep.6 and got bashed online. There's even sleaze! Non-explicit sleaze that doesn't show any naughty bits, admittedly, but that's still slightly less weak beer than the 2018 episodes. (Given the show's premise, you'd expect sleaze to be a prerequisite.)

That was okay. I'll finish the series.

It's a cartoonish kiddie CGI show and I couldn't find any episodes of it, but there's a 25-minute YouTube collection of its opening and closing title sequences. To my surprise, this music-based show has bad music.

Mizuki Hijiri has just transferred to a new school and she has a good line in deadpan. "Sou nanda" made me laugh, for instance.

The Outburst Dreamer Boys are gormless freaks, guaranteed to ham it up and behave like idiots. It's quite fun.