It's more of Yamishibai's semi-animated horror! I've been watching this show for years now.

This week, a man's house-sitting for his friend. There's an important package being delivered. Could he sign for it and keep it safe until the friend gets home? Yeah, sure. The courier arrives, quite late. It's mildly unsettling seeing the hero of a horror story dutifully sign the delivery form for a mysterious and presumably evil package.

Next day, there's another parcel coming.

I won't spoil the ending, but you'll see it coming more or less when the episode's hoping you do. It's a little understated for Yamishibai, but still satisfying. For what it's worth, this is one of the stories they chose for live-action adaptation when they made a live-action Yamishibai series in 2020. Happy to keep watching.

A blond man goes around being nice, to a gentle guitar soundtrack. He looks after animals, goes pot-holing and dangles from a helicopter to say that he's here to help.

I saw English-speaking reviewers getting sniffy about this. They didn't see the point in the show, or else thought it was prejudice about regional stereotypes or something. I disagree, but it's true that there's less point in watching this if you don't speak Japanese and don't know Nagoya.

Kaito Jin has just moved here from Tokyo and keeps trying to get a girl he's met (Monaka Yatogame) to talk in the local accent. (She was raised by her grandmother and she's steeped in the dialect, but that's made her embarrassed about talking.) For me, though, it's a dream show. I lived in Nagoya and Tomoko's from there. For us, going back home means Nagoya. I loved this episode. When I told Tomoko about it, she wanted to watch it too and said afterwards that it was accurate, except that there weren't enough people outside Nagoya station when our hero walked past. (I hadn't noticed. I'd been too busy squealing at being able to recognise Nagoya station. How often do you watch anime and think "I've walked there!")

Animating hundreds of people is expensive, obviously, but there weren't even any taxis in the taxi rank.

For me, this is a must-watch. For anyone else, I'm guessing it's less so. Also, the episode did the obvious stuff that everyone says about Nagoya, so Tomoko's hoping they'll do more varied material later. I don't mind, though. For me, it's practically homework.

During a baseball game, a woman appears and yodels with lyrics including "someone annoying will appear and yodel without knowing anything about baseball". She then leaves. This is funnier than you'd think.

I think it's from the people who made an anime about a sentient fart.

They've replaced the theme song! Curses. King Cream Soda's "Geragerapou no Uta" was the greatest.

The episode's quite fun, though. Keita Amano's still the main character, but he's forgotten about youkai! He can't even see them... until, slowly, faintly, he sort of can. This amusingly disrupts his daily life, depite insisting that he's completely normal and that extraordinary things don't happen.

The episode then reruns its first half from the viewpoint of Keita's youkai friends. This is surprisingly detailed and explains everything we just saw, including the fart jokes. Personally, I wouldn't trust Jibanyan and Whisper further than I could throw them. All this is quite good and I considered going back to watch the whole show from the beginning. It's a fun episode. It's for children, but it's full of energy and laughs.

I was expecting trading card game battles, but the nearest it gets is five seconds during a flashback as someone says, "All face-up cards in your Spell and Trap Zone and Main Monster Zone are destroyed."

Instead, it's about hatred between mankind and a race of super-intelligent evolved AIs that look like robots designed by Apple. "Humans may have underestimated what it means for AIs to evolve and have free will. Ignis are immortal and have superior intellect than humans." Are the humans allies or enemies? The AIs aren't sure. They discuss it. We hear about an AI that caused a fatal accident, which is real and has already happened with self-driving cars. (It's rarer than with human drivers, but "rarer" isn't "never".) This AI, though, did it deliberately. All this is quite interesting... but our heroes' chosen solution is for the AIs to remove themselves from reality and disappear forever from the world of humans. I spy a cop-out from the writers.

We also see the apocalypse. Ghost Girl sent footage of Earth's final moments. What the hell?

The episode's not all that interesting, though. A frog and a pigeon are making a bad internet show. They're comic relief or something, but I wanted them dead.

A genocidal villain called Revolver shows up, asking the heroes for help. "My goal is to kill the Ignis. We'll eventually have to fight each other, but the immediate enemy is the Light Ignis's team." The heroes don't all take this well, since one of them had his parents killed by Revolver. The cliffhanger is a declaration of war, but next episode's battle will be with trading cards and so extremely silly. "Fine. Let's duel, Soulburner."

That was wacky and ambitious. I was impressed. I've just upgraded my opinion of Yu-Gi-Oh!. It's addressing quite sophisticated philosophical ideas, although its conclusions leave something to be desired. Despite also being the gazillionth episode of a long-running shounen franchise with hilarious multi-coloured hair, e.g. the navy blue and bright pink sea creature, or the guy who must spend hours a week on his pink, yellow and scarlet.

YU-NO is a landmark visual novel from 1996 that redefined the genre and is the ancestor of pretty much all modern visual novels, especially Steins;Gate. (Fans accused this modern YU-NO adaptation of being a Steins;Gate ripoff, but it's the other way round.)

Unfortunately, its protagonist's a dick. His name's Takuya. Only twenty seconds after the title sequence, he's joking to a teacher about her knickers. He'll sexually harass anything in a skirt. Apparently this was common for visual novels in 1996, especially pornographic ones. (As this one was.) That still doesn't make him easy to stomach, especially with dialogue like this:

YUKI: "Shimazu-san's nice to everyone else, but really mean to you. Shimazu-san!"

TAKUYA: "Yo, Milady."

SHIMAZU: "Could you please stop calling me that?"

TAKUYA: "How about 'Mio-chan, the school idol'?"

SHIMAZU: "Why are you trying to be irritating?"

TAKUYA: "Don't ask me. Are you on your period?"

This game's first adaptation was a four-episode 1998 hentai by Pink Pineapple. That might well have been less misogynistic.