Anime spring 2017, part 2

Alice to Zouroku

Watched just 2 episodes and so far this anime evokes mixed feelings. A story about kids possessing supernatural abilities isn’t something especially new and it’s unlikely that it will be developing in an unexpected way or will surprise us with anything at all. Main characters are nice and I pretty sure that Zouroku, an old man and florist, is going to get universal admiration. I like how the series is drawn but 3D scenes are horrible and what’s even worse is that these awful boxes that are pretending to be cars are regularly shown on the foreground. One more thing that I didn’t understand is why the authors decided to include references to “Alice in Wonderland” because that doesn’t add anything and doesn’t make the show more deep and interesting.

Boku No Hero Academia 2

I can’t explain why but so far the second season is more interesting for me than the first one. Even though it’s become an even more typical shounen than it was before. Competitions, superpowers, friendship and attempts to overcome own weaknesses – we have seen all that before. Anyway, this anime is easy to watch and has all chances to be prolonged for several more seasons.

Gin no Guardian

Frankly, I didn’t manage to even finish the first episode. Couldn’t find a single reason to. What were we watching? A dormitory, several girls, a guy with an odd cat fighting thousands of zombies, the same guy sitting with a computer by the pool… and there we stopped. I think it’s a bad sign when a show doesn’t even try to attract, to catch a random viewer (were they trying to do that using this cat?!) I’d say I will read reviews of the episodes without spending any time on them.

Renai Boukun

One more show we’re not going to watch anymore. This is a harem anime, slightly resembling “Yamada and seven witches”, where an angel of love makes a mistake and writes the incorrect name in her “Kiss note”. If you write down names A and B in this note and put “x” between them then these people will fall in love with each other. The angel finds it really amusing to put many, many names in one line (like “AxBxCxD”), including her own name, and here we are – the love, hmm, polygonal figure (that wasn’t a triangle, for sure) is ready. Maybe for this cupidon it was amusing, for us – not so much.

Souryo to Majiwaru Shikiyoku no Yoru ni

I’ll be very short here – this looks like a hentai that has been splitted in several episodes. If I wanted to watch a hentai I’d find something more interesting. (Will be funny if I’m totally wrong and actually this is a good anime.)

Canadian beer variety ^_^

As Nastya was remembering “Sakamichi no Apollon” yesterday…

Another twitter style post: today was a jazz day – were on a London Jazz Orchestra show in Wolf Hall. What I can say – even though I’m not a fan of such music it’s always great to listen to people who’re playing really well. Found only a single video with this band and it’s not on youtube, and probably is supposed to be watched only by the most dedicated band supporters: you’ll have to spend some time opening up the site, enabling flash player and pushing the button “Play” (seems, it’s impossible to even switch to the fullscreen mode):

http://www.londonbigbands.ca/ljo.htm

Anime Spring 2017, part 1

Finally here come some impressions about shows we’ve already watched in the current season (spoiler – this season is better than previous one).

Eromanga-sensei

Watched 3 episodes and looks like we’ll finish this series. The story about Masamune Izumi, a young manga author (should I mention that he is a high school student?) whose sister doesn’t leave her room isn’t very special, characters are made from cliches and suspiciously remind of “Ore no Imouto” (Tsukasa Fushimi wrote both manga) but the anime might be an ideal choice if you want to watch something easygoing. This is a harem anime but its haremness is rather gentle; it contains ecchi scenes but they won’t make your eyes bleed. And no, Masamune isn’t Eromanga-sensei.

Tsukigakirei

I have to admit that everything isn’t as scary as I was worried it’s going to be. Tsukigakirei is a very calm, nice and slow anime about a boy, who’s going to become a writer, and a girl, who is a member of a school track field team and who gets nervous regularly. Seemed like they had nothing in common but… You know that premise, right? =) The anime is drawn very unusually and characters aren’t annoying – I can’t even ask about something more.

Laughing Salesman

This is about a salesman. Who is laughing all the time. And he helps people “fill the emptiness inside their hearts”, basically provides them with one or another way to fulfilling their dreams. But if a goal can be achieved so easily probably there’s a catch somewhere, don’t you think so? Every episode consists of two stories and no one of these stories will end well. Unfortunately, there’s no much depth in characters or their problems but anyway, “Laughing salesman” is something unusual and I’d recommend to try it out. And I haven’t said a single word about its style!

Rokudenashi Majutsu Koushi to Akashic Records

One of the anime we dropped immediately, after the first episode. A new replacement teacher comes to a magical academy and he shows himself as a, hm, bad replacement. He is lazy, doesn’t want to prepare anything for classes, has no idea what he’s supposed to be explaining during a lesson. His irresponsible and reckless behaviour drives nuts a main heroine, Sistine, who’s a talented mage and wants to do her best every minute of her life.

Why did we decide to skip this show? Stereotypical characters and stupid ecchi jokes, I believe these are two main reasons. Probably it might become better but I prefer to skip a show with such a vague perspective, luckily, we have a few really nice anime this time.

 

A day when it’s nothing to write about. Spent almost all day at work, still trying to grasp as much as possible and still fail regularly. It’s not that I’m doing bad (at least I hope that everything is more of less normal) but I’m pretty sure that I could’ve worked better.

Finished one more book that had been in my to-read list – “Cat’s cradle” and again, as it was with Neuromancer, the book was rather different from what I’d expected, probably will write about it with more details when I have time (will I have time?) 

I’d say this is a nice cosplay of Tooru-san from “Kobayashi-san chi no maid dragon”:

open

Just increased the number of games I finished on PS4 up to one. I’m done with Uncharted 4.

First if all – I’m really surprised that no one of the main characters is killed. I expected that it’d be Sully and was half-sure about Elena (especially after the scene where she imitated for a few moments that she’s dead) – but everything ended well. Elena and Nathan’s couple is simply great, all their dialogues; the relationships between Nate and his brother look like a sidekick, although we spend most of time looking at this pair. The final scene, with Cassie, was also superb, really liked it.

For me the game was difficult – especially shooting scenes, partially because I decided to go with the highest difficulty level that’s available at start (after the first completion it’s possible to play on crashing mode). After all it’s taken 23 hours and more then two weeks of real time to finish the game (I’m kinda slow, I know).

And now it’s Witcher 3 time! I think that it’ll make me busy for quite some time =)

Harem anime now do not even try to hide what they’re about. “Anime was a mistake”

На русском это даже забавнее, про “все девочки моего возраста любят члены” =)

Went to the library today, took a couple of books (will try to read Andrzej Sapkowski in English, although I heard that this translation could’ve been better). Then as advertisements victims visited Startbucks, wanted to follow modern trends and check out their new unicorn frappuccino, without luck though, everything had been already sold out. Nothing could be done, bought just normal coffee and went to the river’s bank again. Actually, that’s great to have a river not far from home, I doubt that we’d walk as much if we’re living in a different place.

And a couple of new photos: