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tl;dr:A manga that is incredibly shallow but is amusing enough for its short length.

Lady Justice is about a high school girl superheroine. She has super speed, super strength, invincibility, flight, and the ability to sense malice in others. She’s completely overpowered compared to everyone else in the series. This includes the plain old criminals of course, but she’s also significantly more powerful than the superpowered villains she fights against. As such, there’s usually some sort of quirk in each story that prevents her from instantly resolving things. Sometimes it’s something like the villains having kidnapped someone or setup some sort of twisted game that she ... can’t just power through. But most of the time it comes down to the fact that while she may be invincible, her clothes certainly aren’t, and she’s very easily embarrassed. Thus she often struggles to fight without exposing herself.

This manga ended after only two volumes and was clearly axed. But compared to most manga that end in similar circumstances, that really didn’t feel like that much of a problem here. This comes down to how it didn’t really feel like there was anything all that important left unresolved. There is no overarching plot. There is an overarching villain that never gets properly dealt with, but they’re not important. For the most part this is just a series of short entertaining standalone stories. There are no character arcs left incomplete or mysterious things about character’s background left unexplained. There is a bit of a romance, but it’s so minor that it being left incomplete isn’t that big of a deal.

The manga completely lacks any depth whatsoever, and that may have been a major fault if this manga was longer. But a manga as short as this wouldn’t have been able to accomplish anything anyway, so that it was focused purely on quick thrills and steady comedy actually works in its favor at this point. The art is also nothing too special, but works well for the combination of ecchi and superhero action that it’s portraying. I enjoyed the short time I spent reading it and was left with a reasonably positive final impression.

As the title suggests and contrary to what the cover illustration may lead you to believe, this manga is a pretty generic isekai. It has a few things that make it stand out such as the protagonist, Souya, bringing two AI assistants and some other modernities with him when he gets isekai’d. However, the stuff other than the AI assistants doesn’t really matter all that much, and ultimately things play out in a pretty typical isekai format. He s the adventurer’s guild, becomes an archer, recruits two female elves into his party, and progresses through a multi-floor dungeon.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with any of that. ... A manga that sticks to a tried-and-true formula can still very much be good if it’s executed well. And as far as this manga gets, it is a pretty good execution. Souya is interesting in that he’s pretty reckless and hotheaded. His party also have pretty likable personalities. The bonds they’re forming with Souya also feel worth getting invested in. The world building also touches on a lot of intriguing elements.

The problem is that the manga is only two volumes long, and it seems to be a slow burn series. So as far as the manga gets, very little happens. There’s pretty much no value in reading this manga standalone. There may be value in reading this manga as an introduction to the novels it is an adaptation of. However, the light novels also seemed to have gotten axed at volume three, so that doesn’t exactly leave a lot of room for optimism. The art while not terrible, also isn’t all that great and definitely not worth reading the manga for.

tl;dr: An adaptation of a novel series that’s so short it feels pointless.

This film is the final installment in the Karakai Jouzu no Takagi-san series. It continues to focus on Takagi and Nishitaka’s budding relationship. The main story this time is of how the two of them find and take care of a cat during their final summer of middle school. The plot flows well and manages to hit some pretty strong emotional beats. The side story with Mina and her friends also helped with the pacing. And ultimately, the ending and epilogue are a pretty satisfying way to end the series.

With all that said, this film has a completely different feel to the rest of the ... series. There is far less of a focus on Takagi teasing Nishitaka or the two of them competing. Instead it focuses on a pretty generic plotline that progresses in the standard manner of such plotlines. The execution of this is good so the film is still good, but this film having such a different feel to the main series is kind of strange. It’s not like the main couple act out of character or anything. It’s just that this film focuses on parts of them that the series did not. That allows the film to be much more dramatic than the main series did. But in the process we lose most of the fun dynamic that the two of them had. All the investment that was built up in the two and their relationship is still there thus things still hit harder than if this film was about an original pair of characters. But it still felt like very little of the two was shining through and thus things didn’t hit as hard as they potentially could have either.

The way the art and animation in this film were handled is also kind of strange. Anime films often have certain types of shots to essentially show off that they have a higher budget. If you’ve seen enough of them you probably know what I’m talking about. This film certainly has a lot of those. However, the art and animation quality is pretty much the same as the main series, and not really up to the standard that films that have such shots generally have. Thus, these parts look pretty off. The soundtrack of the film was pretty good in of the usage of insert songs, though the non-vocal tracks weren’t particularly memorable. The ED was handled really well, with a montage that skipped through all the previous seasons and a song that worked well for that.

tl;dr: A pretty good conclusion film, though one that’s somewhat lacking in the charms of the rest of the series.

tl;dr: Another solid season with everything great about previous seasons and a bit more romantic progression.

This is another season of Takagi and Nishikata’s saccharine romance with all that entails. Takagi is still constantly playfully teasing Nishikata. Nishikata is still trying to one up Takagi, though she’s almost always able to read him perfectly and come out on top. And they’re absolutely adorable together. Things are moving in a more romantic direction and there are definitely stronger romantic moments than previous seasons. But that’s just a natural result of further progress in the slow burn romance that’s existed from the start. There aren’t any major unexpected ... jumps or anything like that. Things are still moving slowly but steadily. If you liked the previous seasons, then you’ll probably like this one. If you didn’t like the previous seasons, there’s nothing in this that will change your mind.

To get more nit picky as there’s not much more to say about the anime in general, I thought the anime team did a pretty great job. There were a lot of interesting concepts used, such as the first episode essentially being a mind trip, and the second being a silent film including the standard music used with such films. They also randomly threw in a short segment from the sequel to the sequel to the manga for some reason but it was awesome. The art animation were also pretty good for the type of anime it is. The OP was solid in of the song and visuals. The ED’s visuals were okay, but as with previous seasons it has a bunch of covers of popular songs by Takagi’s VA. She’s a great singer and the songs selected are generally great too, so this works incredibly well. The soundtrack, as with previous seasons, was decent enough but not particularly remarkable.

This manga is an incredibly generic love story about a couple in high school. The girl, Sakurai, is bubbly and outgoing. The guy, Nasuno, is shy and lacking in confidence. There’s not anything beyond that to their characters. They’re both really flat.

Their relationship also follows an incredibly simple trajectory. Sakurai is in love with Nasuno from before the start of the manga, but refuses to explicitly ask him out. Instead, she flirts with him incessantly in very obvious ways. He also falls in love with her pretty quickly, but he’s incredibly dense and risk averse so he also refuses to respond to her obvious affections. ... And thus the status quo persists right up to near the end of the manga.

The romantic fluff is reasonably cute, but it gets pretty repetitive considering there’s not really anything to the manga beyond it. There are no real subplots and the side characters have a negligible amount of presence. The ending is satisfying enough in the moment, but the manga is unremarkable enough that it leaves no lasting impression whatsoever.

The art overall has a good style and is high quality, but there’s very little outside of the color art that actually makes good use of it. The ecchi comes across really well but there’s also very little of it, only a few s per volume. I suspect that both of these are related. This is the mangaka’s first published non hentai manga, so him trying to avoid ecchi resulted in him being out of his comfort zone and not really using his art all that effectively.

tl;dr: An incredibly plain high school romance manga.

This anime is about a handyman named Saito that gets isekai’d into a fantasy world. The first few episodes are about him using his skills as a handyman from Earth to help a party out as they explore a dungeon, mainly through picking locks. However, the handyman per se aspect significantly decreases in importance after that, though it does still pop up from time to time. Instead the story is more so about any normal guy from Earth without any of the skills that people of the fantasy world generally have trying to come up with ways to be helpful, which I suppose still embodies ... the spirit of a handyman in a way. Overall I found the latter more interesting than the former, as the writing doesn’t really do anything all that interesting with his actual handyman skills.

It was enjoyable watching him finding new ways to be useful through being creative and working hard. This ties directly into his character arc, which was in overcoming feeling useless and unneeded due to his experiences in his original world. His dynamic with the rest of his party is pretty good too. There’s a warrior named Raelza that clearly has a massive crush on him, and their slow but steady relationship progress was pretty satisfying to watch. The remaining are a miserly fairy named Lafanpan and an old wizard that’s constantly losing his memory named Morlock. The four of them together have a pretty strong family type vibe which is pretty easy to get invested in.

The cast beyond that I found pretty weak. Even in the main party, I felt that their backgrounds were pretty weak and didn’t really help flesh them out all that well. The various side characters are even more underdeveloped. There are a lot and time is spent fleshing out pretty much everyone, but none of it is all that good. Pretty much everyone could be described as a an incredibly generic embodiment of their role, but with one major twist. Though these twists generally have little to no story significance. They’re just to spice up the character and add some humor to things. I didn’t really find anyone outside of the main party likable, and found quite a few of them annoying.

The flow of the anime is very strange and caught me pretty off guard. The first few episodes are short and lighthearted skits focused on comedy that jump around between a bunch of different characters without much of an overarching plot. The setting has somewhat of a dark fantasy feel, but nothing dark happens. However, after that things start getting much more intense. There’s actual arcs with storylines that take place across multiple episodes, though there’s still not really any sort of overarching plot. Things get much darker both in of actual sad moments, but also in of throwaway edgy stuff. Nothing too bad ever happens though, despite it constantly baiting the viewer into thinking it has, which can get grating. There’s still a good amount of light hearted comedy mixed in which works surprisingly well. There’s also quite a lot of serious action. Most of it is pretty shallow, but it’s still really exciting in the moment. Ultimately, everything felt incredibly messy and rough, like things don’t fit together all that well, but there’s a sort of charm to that and in the end I was pretty satisfied with it.

The art and animation were pretty good. The character designs were pretty solid as well. The OP was solid in of the song and visuals. I liked the song of the ED but wasn’t really a fan of the visuals. The final episode did something really amusing with the ED that I enjoyed. The soundtrack was also pretty solid.

tl;dr: A comedic dark fantasy like with a lot of interesting elements that lack cohesion.

Wolfsmund is a manga that’s somewhat about the Swiss fighting for their freedom from Austria. That’s the backdrop to things and the final volumes focus on actual historical events, but most of the manga is directed towards events that are purely fictional. The focus of the manga is on Wolfsmund, a gate fortress in St. Gotthart , and it’s sadistic bailiff Wolfram. St. Gotthard did exist in reality and did have strategic importance, but as far as I am aware neither Wolfram nor Wolfsmund actually existed. The manga also incorporates some parts of the legend of William Tell, who is a Swiss folk hero, ... though in a pretty half assed manner.

The first quarter of the manga is about various rebels trying to sneak their way past Wolfmund, but Wolfram catching them and punishing them incredibly cruelly. This is episodic, and most of the episodes have absolutely no relevance to the eventual overarching plot. These episodes are very heavy on blood and gore with Wolfram enjoying using various means of physical and psychologic torture on his victims. The manga tries to flesh out his victim and have the reader empathize with them, so this can hit pretty hard. But beyond that these stories have no value. There’s no real message other than how Wolfram is a terrible person and the middle ages were an awful time. These parts start out interesting, but once you get over the shock value they’re pretty dull.

The middle half is about the invasion of Wolfmund by the rebels. This includes various schemes being enacted in the build up to the assault as well as the actual battle itself. But it’s mostly just both sides trying to slaughter each other in a pretty basic manner. There are special weapons and tactics used by both sides, but they’re pretty abrupt and not well developed. There are a lot of them, and they’re just kind of thrown out there when they’re needed and then never mentioned again. So, the battle itself just isn’t that interesting. Furthermore, while the manga does a good job of fleshing out Wolfram as an awful person, it doesn’t really flesh out the Swiss fighting him at all. Most of the cast beyond Wolfram is throwaway as well and only matter for the small part of the story they’re in. Thus, I found it somewhat hard to get invested in the results of the battle.

The final quarter is about other battles in the fight for Swiss independence. The focus is on the Battle of Mortgarten, which historically was actually an important battle. The battle itself is pretty interesting here, but it’s still hard to get invested in things. While Wolfram had quite a lot of time spent in making him feel worth rooting against, the attempt at doing so with the rest of the Austrian army was haphazard at best. The focus during this phase seemed to be to showcase a historic event and also convey a message of optimism by showing a small force beat a much larger one. However, both of these really don’t fit the rest of the series. I don’t have any problem with a manga accurately trying to chronicle historical events, but considering most of the manga doesn’t try to do so at all, suddenly switching to doing so is a weird shift. And the sudden message of optimism is completely out of place considering the brutality and despair throughout the earlier portions.

I also felt the art was mediocre. Obviously with the type of story this manga has the art isn’t supposed to look good per se. But the art in this also doesn’t really contribute much in of the tone or atmosphere. There’s a lot of blood and gore, but beyond that the art is really plain.

tl;dr: A very messy and muddled story with a heavy emphasis on extreme violence.

Usogui is a manga centered around Kakerou, an organization dedicated to ensuring that its can gamble in a fair manner. However, these gambles often involve extreme games and prizes, and thus ensuring that these gambles are allowed to proceed properly requires Kakerou to have immense political and economic power. Furthermore, the way to take over as the leader of Kakerou involves first making a major contribution to Kakerou’s political and economic power, and then winning a life staking gamble with the current leader of Kakerou. This manga follows the super gambler Madarame Baku as he uses gambles to gain the economic and political power ... necessary to then sur the leader for control of Kakerou.

The highlight of this manga is definitely the games. There are a lot of unique games with quite a lot of variety, ranging from simple and quick games like battleship to longer and more complex games like full on reenactments of MMOs. All of the games have mind games within them, but a lot of the bigger games often have more explicit games within the games as well with the players essentially gambling for elements of the larger games. These are pretty much all incredibly well designed. The games have a good amount of depth to them and the mangaka uses that depth really well for a very suspenseful plot. There’s pretty much always some sort of big twist secret plan that the protagonist had in mind from the beginning. However, even if you know that there’s some sort of twist coming, these twists are still generally pretty surprising and thus exciting.

Unfortunately, these games are often bogged down by other aspects of the manga. This manga has way too much of an emphasis on physical fights for a battle of wits manga. Having physical fights play into things is fine, but the fights here felt pretty disconnected from the battle of wits aspect. As in, the outcome connects to the overarching story, but the fights themselves are just long brawls between the fighters without any sort of tactics of strategies. The fights aren’t horrible, but they aren’t all that great either. And as all that matters is the outcome, the fights feel like a waste of time. Especially as they interrupt the much more interesting mind games and battle of wits going on.

It also doesn’t help that everything relating to gambles is overexplained. It basically felt like the mangaka was operating under the assumption that the reader forgot what was going on after each chapter. So there is a lot of reexplanation of the rules as well as commentary by observers on how players are doing despite it being immensely obvious if you are even somewhat following along. That may well have been for the best when the manga was originally running and was being released chapter by chapter. But when reading through it all at once this just results in significant amounts of the manga being pointless. Sure, you can just skim these portions, but trying to parse what’s important and what’s not still slows the manga down to a crawl at times.

The overarching plot also isn’t very good. The base premise is really interesting and it does some really interesting things with it, but things don’t come together all that well. I think the biggest issue comes down to how the plot seems to be entirely focused on big twists at the expense of all else. These twists are well written in a way in that they’re the type that are slowly built up to over a long stretch of time. But at the same time, just because a story is full of major unexpected twists with good foreshadowing doesn’t make the story overall good.

The cast is also really weak. Baku is likable enough and easy to get invested in. His allies Kaji and Marco are also decently well developed. But everyone else is lacking. Pretty much everyone has some sort of attempt at an interesting background that influences their motivations or some sort of character development. But none of it lands all that well and it’s hard to care about any of them all that much. Also, the ending is a complete mess, wherein it basically feels like the mangaka wasn’t sure how to ends things, so after the final game he just showed a bunch of random stuff and left it to the reader to interpret what it all means and how it all comes together. It wasn’t a bad ending, and thus for a manga like this where I cared mostly about the games I would say I was satisfied with it, but I certainly wouldn’t consider it a good ending.

The art I have mixed feelings about. Overall, I don’t like the style and I think most of the time it doesn’t look very good despite it being very elaborate. The character designs overall I thought were pretty bad too. However, there are times where things come together just right and the art is amazing.

tl;dr: A manga with great high-stake gambles full of suspense, but pretty weak in of everything beyond that.

*This is a review of both seasons.*

Ace Attorney is a franchise about lawyers duking it out in the court room in an exaggerated manner. The two seasons of the Ace Attorney anime adapt the first three games, also known as the Phoenix Wright trilogy. The first season adapts the first two games, though it skips the extra arc, and the second season adapts the third game. While the third game is the longest of the three, this difference also comes down to how the second season of the anime has more anime original content. The first season has one anime original episode, while the second ... season has five.

Ultimately, I feel that only these anime original episodes are worth watching. There isn’t much of a reason to watch the adaptation of the game arcs. For those that are completely new to the franchise, this is a significantly inferior way of experiencing the story as compared to the games. I would firstly argue that interactivity is a core part of the experience. The various arcs have been written in such a manner that they intend for the player to slowly solve them themselves, and thus just don’t work as well when experiences ively. But even if one does not wish to actually think about things and play the games properly, the games have a “story mode” that plays itself and allows the player to simply experience the story. I would still recommend this over the anime.

While the anime has the boons of voice acting and proper animation, there are way too many issues with what truly matters, the script. It keeps the core of the arcs the same but changes things up in order to speed them up. This is necessary because the anime simply doesn’t have time to go through everything the games do. However, in the process it has to write around certain aspects, resulting in much more extreme jumps in logic by the cast and far more plot holes. Furthermore, the games scripts convey a lot of information to the player with the clues that matter being hidden within for the player to extract. The anime doesn’t have time to do so and conveys only the parts that matter. Not only is this unnatural, but it makes the mysteries much more obvious and easy to predict as compared to the games. Thus, the only possible reason for a newcomer to choose the anime over the games is hating reading. Though why such a person would want to get into a franchise about lawyers is beyond me.

What about for those that have already played through the games? Outside of the anime original episodes, this anime doesn’t really have much to offer them either. All the issues already mentioned about the adapted will likely seem even more glaringly obvious to those that are already familiar with the subject matter. It’s just a weaker rehash of the same content without adding anything new to it. The animation is decent at best and while the voice acting is good, ultimately it doesn’t really feel like it conveys anything that the exaggerated expressions in the games didn’t already do. I suppose for those that have played the games many times and want to play them many more times this may serve as a change of pace. But otherwise, there’s really no reason to watch this over just replaying the games.

With that said, the anime original episodes are pretty great. There are a few that better flesh out the childhoods of Phoenix, Edgeworth, and Maya. There’s also a completely new arc that had a very different flow to the other arcs and ultimately worked much better in anime format. The OPs of the first season and EDs were also decent enough. But the OPs of the second season were genuinely fantastic. I’d highly recommend fans of the franchise to watch only all of this, and skip the rest.

tl;dr: A pretty awful adaptation with some pretty good original content episodes sprinkled throughout.

tl;dr: A sequel season that focuses less on battles of wits and more on long term plot and character development, for better or worse.

The third season of Classroom of the Elite follows follows Ayanokouji through to the end of his first year at Tokyo Metropolitan Advanced Nurturing High School. In the same way that Ryuen was the focus of the second season, this season is focused on Sakayanagi, the leader of Class A. However, she’s very different from Ryuen in that she’s someone that has history with Ayanokouji and is fully aware of what he is capable of, and wants to challenge him head on ... without any pretenses. That only occurs near the end of the season though, so the majority of this season is her simply messing around with Ayanokouji’s class without trying all that hard.

This season continues down the direction that the second season started going down in that the focus on games and tricks is pretty much gone completely. There’s still strategies and planning involved, but they’re more just something happening on the side rather than the core of each arc. There aren’t really any epic twists where Ayanokouji turns things around and subverts expectations or anything like that. Thus, there simply isn’t as much room for Ayanokouji to shine. Furthermore, while Ayanokouji is still manipulative, his machinations are much more on the nice side as compared to previous seasons. For example, there’s nothing on the level of what he pulled when trying to take control of Karuizawa. As such, Ayanokouji has a much softer and less edgy presence as compared to previous seasons. To be frank, I’m not much a fan of that.

The focus of this season is Ayanokouji initiated character development. The majority of what Ayanokouji does this season is simply listen to people’s backgrounds and then respond to them. Ichinose and Hirata’s background comes into focus and they overcome their traumas. Meanwhile, Ryuen manages to pick himself up and come back better than ever. And Karuizawa continues along the path of increasingly becoming Ayanokouji’s loyal pawn. Though the biggest highlight was probably Horikita growing out of her brother’s shadow. Most of the character growth wasn’t all that deep, but it all being intermingled and happening in parallel with everything else going on worked well.

In addition to that, there was also a lot of setup regarding the general state of the academy and where things are going to go from here. I feel that the author, Kinugasa Shougo’s, bad habits are starting to shine through in this regard. In his other works, it feels that a lot of the time he had no idea where he’s going with his stories. He’s great at writing things in the moment and is a master at building intrigue through foreshadowing, but a lot of this build up and foreshadowing goes absolutely nowhere. This has begun to manifest this season. A lot of what was set up in previous seasons has been thrown away in favor of new stuff. And the new stuff is really cool as well. But I’m not sure how much I can trust that this new stuff won’t be thrown away either.

The art and animation are pretty similar to the previous season so there’s not really anything much more to say about them. The OP and EDs are decent enough in of the song and visuals. The soundtrack was more intense than previous seasons and I felt that worked better.