Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 17 · 12:53am Sep 23rd, 2021
A day late again, but I had to spend yesterday evening getting some things ready to enter in the county fair. I'm going to pick up a bit of a theme in the also-rans, but featured items this week are megalobox and Noein, after the break.
I'm going to review these separately, since they tell different stories, and I liked one better, due to subjective reasons, which I will get into.
megalobox is the story of a boxer in a near-future world who's relegated to fighting in the underground venues, where there isn't a lot of money to be made. Many fights are fixed, and the main character Joe is mostly unwilling to play along with that. His attitude gets his manager in trouble repeatedly, since he'd promised various outcomes Joe refused to deliver on. Joe sees a way out, though. If he can win his way into the real professional high-end boxing league, he can earn enough to get out of this rut.
Boxing in this world makes use of a worn apparatus they refer to as "gear," which provides some armor protection but also boosts how hard you can punch. Joe prefers a simpler time, plus the one set of gear he owns is in particularly crappy shape (similar to crappie shape but less fishy), and he can't exactly afford any, so he chooses to fight without any. And he still wins. Thus he gains a huge fanbase who like to watch the up-and-coming "gearless Joe."
There's a tiny bit of corporate intrigue, as the boxer perceived as the best is backed by the company that runs the system, but mostly it's about Joe trying to navigate his way through the strategy of each fight while his manager (who has a real name, but everyone calls him Pops) tries to keep the creditors off their backs. In the meantime, they build their own training gym in the badlands outside of town, and a raggy group of kids starts hanging around. Before long, it's like they're a family.
In general, I'm not really a fan of sports-based anime (we'll get to some more of that later), but it really depends on what's the focus of the story. If it's the game action, then only if I'm a fan of the sport to start with. But if the focus is on the strategic aspect or the character arcs, then I'm more on board. This show did a good job of developing its characters.
I would have watched this anyway, because Toonami aired it, but I have a friend who's become a connoisseur of boxing anime. I'm not sure why. megalobox was constructed as a bit of an homage to an old series called Ashita no Joe, and he loved that one, calling it easily a rival to Rocky as the best boxing-themed character story. He also keeps trying to get me to watch Hajime no Ippo. But I did really like this. The art is great, I remember thinking the music was also good, and the story ended up being compelling.
Rating: good.
13 episodes, relevant genres: drama, sports.
Then recently, a sequel series came out, and it took me a while to notice it. megalobox 2: Nomad skips 5 years after the first one ended. Joe is in really rough shape, and it takes a while for all his problems to come to the surface. Apparently nothing much came of his fame, and he's just kind of wandering around through the same underground fights he used to. There's an initial plotline that resolves after only a few episodes, but then another starts, and it does bring back in some tangential references to the first. I only review things up here that I rated very good or excellent, and you've already seen I only gave the first season a good, so no surprise I liked this one better. That's very subjective, though, and I'd actually recommend them as equal quality.
While the first focuses more on the fights themselves and the strategy involved, there aren't as many fights in the sequel. It's more focused on the character-based drama, and that's why I liked it better, but for someone who enjoys strategy and sports more, they may well have the opposite view. The hint of corporate intrigue from the first one comes back in spades, and there are a good 4 or 5 subplots maintained. It's a more complex show. The band of kids who used to hang around him are somewhat grown now, and the main ones return. They were all made into rather interesting characters as well.
The art is just as good, and I liked the music even better. The opening theme is a fun enough tune, but the closing... it starts off being enjoyable enough, but I love the way it ends. My only complaint about the plot is that I thought the resolution of the final fight was pretty dumb.
Rating: very good.
13 episodes, relevant genres: drama, sports.
Noein is one of my all-time favorite series, yet it's rare I encounter anyone else who's seen it. It's just really imaginative, it has a distinctive, quirky art style, and the music is superb. While the music can get repetitive at times (certain themes get used a lot, though that's not the composer's fault), the quality is really up there. It struck me how a number of the pieces sound like legit classical music. I've got quite a few things saved off the soundtrack.
The plot has to do with multiverse theory, where every decision point spawns off new universes for each possible choice made. It takes a while for that to come out, though. Main character Haruka certainly doesn't know that at first. She just knows that she's trying to hang out with her three good friends Ai, Yu, and Isami, and Miho is kind of a member of their circle, too.
Periodically, these strange doll-looking mechs appear out of nowhere and start wreaking havoc, which results in some other people with seeming superpowers appearing to fight them off. While this other group would seem to want to protect Earth, they end up breaking into factions as well, and various ones of them switch sides more than once. One of them seems oddly focused on keeping Haruka safe. Yet Haruka seems to have a strange power of her own, one she uses unconsciously.
Bit of a spoiler, but it turns out the mechs and the superpowered people are from different multiverse futures, and they're at war for a reason that's a little complex, but a dumbed-down (and thus incorrect) simplification is that they're battling over who gets to be the "correct" future. And the seeds of how multiverse theory gets involved aren't just from the future, as several characters from the present are also trying to cause or prevent such dimensional rifts. Really, I think the series does a great job developing its characters. The event that serves as the splitting point and source of conflict for these factions is a nice climactic reveal, as well as the way this circle of friends turns out in each timeline, including some that may already be inevitable. And even that is a bit of an oversimplification. There are tragic circumstances spawning both universes, though not quite the same event, yet they result in the same feeling of loss.
Not only does Haruka get embroiled in this war happening around her home, she gets sucked into each of the alternate timelines, and the series does a good job of her feeling starkly lost yet still finding little bits of familiarity.
It's a clever series, good on all fronts, and it gets my highest recommendation.
Rating: excellent.
24 episodes, relevant genres: action, adventure, sci-fi, drama.
Side dishes ahoy!
Angelic Layer: Battle Doll (26 episodes)—Lead_Colored_Sky recommended this to me upon seeing I'd liked Chobits well enough, and they're supposed to be in the same universe. Apparently a couple characters do appear in both, though I didn't notice. In Angelic Layer, there's a widespread fighting game by that name that functions a little like Pokemon. Players have a small android they send out to fight, but they have only one, it's only active when on a game table, and they have no capacity to think for themselves; they're directly controlled by the player. Each player customizes how they want their angel to fight. Main character Misaki gets introduced to the game by virtue of seeing it on a giant TV screen outside the train station, and she instantly falls in love with the way the smaller, faster angel defeats a bigger, stronger opponent, since she's small and uncoordinated at sports. She's in the city because she was raised by her grandparents after her mother left for undisclosed work-related reasons, and now she's going to live with her aunt in Tokyo while attending what seems to be a fairly exclusive private school. The show hops back and forth between what's going on with her and her mother, so it doesn't leave things as a mystery at all in terms of that plotline, but I will say it's still the show's most compelling one, especially from Misaki's side. Her mother really made some dumb decisions for bad reasons, but Misaki trying to understand those is still engaging. The game aspect of the show, not so much. There's never any tension as to who will win a fight, at least not when Misaki is a participant, since they paint her as a phenom. Even then, the strategy aspect rarely works, since plot convenience determines how effective attacks and defenses are, in stark contrast to the very thing that attracted Misaki to the game: how can light and fast win against big and strong? The same attack will be devastating or easily shrugged off, depending on what the plot needs. The reveal of what the game's technology was developed for in the first place was a cool touch, though. As to the connection to Chobits, I'm guessing these angels are the precursors to the persocom androids, yet... angels are small, and persocoms are full-sized, and then a new mini-sized persocom is billed as an advance. That doesn't quite jive, unless they go through the same cycles we do as to whether a big or small cell phone is cool. Rating: good, relevant genres: drama, action, games/sports, sci-fi.
One Piece (who knows how many episodes, and it's still going on, but I'm done with it)—I started out liking the quirky characters and their gimmicks, but it eventually got on my nerves. After sticking through about 3 seasons of it, I just lost interest. I won't go into a plot summary, as I can't believe anyone out there doesn't know what this is. The simplest version is an interminable story of a pirate crew seeking a treasure, and with as many episodes as there are, there has to be a lot of tangential stuff. Rating: meh, relevant genres: fantasy, action, adventure.
And now I'm going to hit a bit of a theme. One Outs fits in here, but it was part of my search for a good baseball anime. I've mentioned this before, but there are a number of series I liked that had a great baseball episode, and I wondered if anime could do a whole season of just that. Turns out... not really, but they aren't bad series. There's still one I haven't watched, and while it's considered to be the best, it's also one where baseball is more a side focus of the series. With that, I'll delve in, from the worst to the best, though all these came highly recommended, so even the worst one isn't bad.
Princess Nine (26 episodes)—there are two schools side by side, one for boys and one for girls. The boys' school has a great baseball program and one of the biggest prospects in the nation on its team. The woman who's president of the schools' joint board doesn't see why the girls' school shouldn't have a team as well. As these things go, though, the problem is finding enough girls who even want to play. She offers scholarships to target some girls, most notably main character Ryo, whose father was a legendary pitcher before he died (but who had a cloud of a possible cheating scandal over his head). The game action was fine for the most part, but it got too fan-service-y for me at times. Nothing too bad, but the girls deliberately showing a little too much leg or muttering about how their boobs are getting all hot and sweaty in their uniforms to throw their opponents off, since they only have boys' teams to play. And bad advice, like throwing even harder in the late innings when you're tired and your shoulder hurts. This one was dominated by cliche in two ways, both in several of the character types on the team, the way the romance is handled, and how quickly the girls get good even though there's not really that much raw talent. The bad girl track star recruited as a leadoff hitter, the beauty queen who can't play but sees this as a publicity opportunity, the chunky girl who of course plays catcher because she's the only one who doesn't get knocked over by Ryo's pitches. And then the school's tennis star, who's expected to be world-ranked this year but gives it up to play baseball since she sees it as more of a challenge, and to try outdoing Ryo for the affections of that aforementioned star on the boys' team, whom she's known all her life. Throw in an even more cliched near-death experience for Ryo, and this is just okay. One thing that did surprise me is that none of these shows take the too-easy path of the upstart team winning everything. This team does get eliminated. Rating: decent + baseball = good, relevant genres: sports, drama, romance.
TAMAYOMI: The Baseball Girls (12 episodes)—the title means something but is also the two main characters' names (Tamaki and Yomi) mashed together. This is a school that did previously have a girls' team, and a lot of the local schools do, such that there's a whole league. However, the school had some sort of scandal the previous year that led to its team being disbanded. Tamaki and Yomi are first-years who love the game and want to start up the team again, but the school is reluctant to yet, and so are any potential players. They do find enough and start to compete in the league, and this might have been the best of the bunch in having real-feeling game action and strategy. It's also the most realistic in how well such a team could do. They win some, they lose some, and while they do win their first game of the tournament, the show stops there, leaving it open-ended as to how well they do from there. I think that was a good move. While I think it had the most realistic game action, I think baseball wasn't so much a focus of the plot. This felt more like a slice of life series that happened to be about baseball. Rating: decent + baseball = good, relevant genres: sports, slice of life.
Taisho Baseball Girls (Taisho Yakyu Musume, 12 episodes)—this one doesn't need the qualifier of baseball to elevate it to a good rating. I think it's a good series to watch from a historical perspective. I assumed Taisho would be the school they attended or the region where they live, but it refers to the Taisho Era in Japanese history, around the 1920s. Main character Koume attends an all-girl high school, and out of the blue, a classmate named Akiko conscripts her to form a baseball club. They were more acquaintances than friends, but Koume is the type who goes along with what people tell her to do, so she agrees. But this is a turning point in Japanese history. Half the girls at the school still wear traditional kimonos (as does Koume) and half wear the new fashion of the sailor-type uniforms (as does Akiko), mostly according to what each girl's parents will allow. Koume's parents run a restaurant, while Akiko's are rich for undisclosed reasons. The only real cliched thing here is how the American lady who teaches English at the school is an obvious choice as faculty advisor for the club, and of course she not only knows the game inside and out, but she's also a phenomenal player. But the charm here is how these girls convince enough classmates to form a team amid this era of women being seen as unsuitable for such things, meant only to learn sewing, cooking, and marry off to form connections. Indeed, Koume and Akiko are both pledged to arranged marriages in the future, part of the reason Akiko is on the warpath to do something women aren't supposed to. And realistically, this team isn't good. It takes them many tries before they can even beat a pick-up team of elementary school boys, then that much more to finally beat a junior high boys' team. It's not really about baseball—it's more a piece about using baseball to look at the role of women at this moment in Japanese history, and I found it an interesting, thoughtful take on it. Not that they come to any resolution, as it's about challenging barriers, not necessarily breaking them. I'd recommend this to people as a look at gender roles or as a historical piece. Rating: good, relevant genres: sports, historical, slice of life.
One Outs (25 episodes)—the worst team in the Japanese League has a star player Kojima who by chance finds some people playing a bar game related to baseball. It's just a single batter versus pitcher contest that the bar patrons bet on, and there's one pitcher, Tokuchi, nobody can hit, even though he doesn't throw that hard, because he can outthink them. Kojima wins a bet due to a technicality and makes Tokuchi come play for his team. However, the team owner is the typically villainous one who doesn't care his team is terrible because he's maneuvered that into being nicely profitable for him. So he signs Tokuchi to an unusual type of contract where he'll pay a certain amount for each out he gets, but he gets back a lot more for each run he allows. Suffice it to say Tokuchi can give up few runs if he wants to make any money, much less avoid owing a lot. At this point, it becomes more of a strategy-based gambling show, though one you might not understand if you don't know baseball's rules. One the show actually gets wrong, unless the Japanese League differs on it. In the US, if a pitcher throws a pitch without all nine fielders standing in fair territory, he will be charged with a balk. Still, it's fun to see this owner try to outsmart Tokuchi, including continually adding new terms to the contract, while Tokuchi squeaks by on sheer skill or knowledge of how to manipulate the rules. I particularly loved the episode where he's suffering an awful loss and trying to get the game nullified through a rainout, even manipulating the other team into wanting the same thing. Definitely a good series for baseball fans, but I think it would appeal to strategy or gambling fans too, though it does just stop without coming to any sort of ending. Rating: good, relevant genres: sports, strategy, drama.
Seen any of these? Did I convince you to try any of them? I'd like to hear about it in the comments.
Last 10:
vol. 7 here
vol. 8 here
vol. 9 here
vol. 10 here
vol. 11 here
vol. 12 here
vol. 13 here
vol. 14 here
vol. 15 here
vol. 16 here
Ah, the algorithm has caught on. I'm getting ads from VIZ Media to read Urusei Yatsura.
Another neat blog, I've never been super into sports anime either. The closest I got was Keppeki Danshi! Aoyama-kun which is about a soccer team who's star player is a clean freak.
It felt more like a slice of life character piece with soccer sprinkled on top, which is probably why I liked it.
I apparently watched Angelic Layer and liked it, but I never finished it, so who knows how much I actually saw. Plus, this was back in my college anime bingeing days, my tastes have definitely changed since then.
Quite right. Though whether a precursor or developed at the same time the main connection is the scientist seen throughout Angelic Layer. He was also the creator of the Persocom and the father of Elda and Freya in Chobits.
you watched Angelic Layer and didn't tell me? For shame...
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I didn't know you were a fan! We shall have to discuss this on Discord. I do have more thoughts than I put down here, as I try to keep these reviews fairly brief.