Wooper: We’ve cycled through all sorts of names for these check-in columns over the years, but the most appropriate one for this week’s post might be “catch-up,” as I watched three episodes of some of these shows in an effort to get current with the spring season. That’s a lot for an old man who rarely watches weekly anymore, but I’m enjoying my (temporary) return to the habit. I think I’ve settled on these five shows as the ones I’ll cover every two weeks, but there may be extras that pop in from time to time, including this one:
Lycoris Recoil: Friends Are
Thieves of Time – 1-4
I’m not a LycoReco fan, but I do have an affinity for short anime, so I decided to dip my toes back into the franchise for Friends Are Thieves of Time, whose episodes thus far range from two to four minutes. Not all of them have been released yet, but of the ones that have, episode 3 was my favorite, riffing on the series’ iconic poop parfait with a new potty-themed dessert. The moment of that new menu item’s reveal is bound to be one of the best parts of this mini series, so I won’t spoil it before the jump – unfortunately, it has to compete for presentational space with squealish voice acting and aggressive use of the show’s ending theme. Those two issues are constants in FAToT, but for those of you with an established love for this cast, the moments when the characters’ voices continue through the credits will probably tickle your brain. All four of these episodes take place entirely at the LycoReco cafe, so there’s been minimal action so far, but the character animation has been quite good. The horror-themed fourth installment takes a big swing (as big as can be taken in four minutes, anyway), while the first two episodes are more chill, Chisato/Takina centered affairs. One of them even features a conversation about what they’ll do on their upcoming Hawaii trip, indicating that Thieves of Time takes place before the end of the first season – that’s a nice piece of continuity for existing fans.
Shin Samurai-den Yaiba – 3-5
This must be the show I most underestimated when contributing to our season preview a month and a half ago, as I’m loving it so far. I’m not a battle shounen enthusiast by any stretch, but Yaiba’s earnest blend of action, comedy, and over-the-top villainy has made it one of my favorite spring series through five episodes. The art and animation are clearly its best qualities, but let’s put those aside for a moment to talk about the broad strokes of the story, which sees antagonist Onimaru send eight animal-themed “ogres” after Yaiba and co. in pursuit of his legendary sword. In just two episodes (4-5), one of them defects to the good guys, two are soundly defeated (one in dramatic fashion, the other humorously), three fail to frighten Yaiba into submission and become his temporary traveling partners, one is brushed aside by his master after he outlives his usefulness, and the last and strongest is marked as an upcoming antagonist. That the show balances all these developments while giving each ogre their own personality is a real feat; my favorite is the starfish from episode 5, who organizes lackluster traps that play into anime’s onsen and kimodameshi tropes, then complains that his master pays a pittance after his defeat. Then there’s episode 3’s introduction of Miyamoto freakin’ Musashi as a two foot tall, 400 year old swordmaster, which was quite funny for his character design alone, but he’s proven to be a valuable addition to the cast, as well (classic grandpa lechery notwithstanding).
Kowloon Generic Romance – 4-5
Now that’s how you do a cliffhanger! KGR has given us a couple lackluster variants of the technique in its first few outings (including Kudo’s misleading “murder” confession at the end of episode 4*), but the most recent reveal of Kowloon’s ruined exterior generated a ton of questions about what I’d watched, as the best cliffhangers do. For me, the most pressing question is what will happen when Gwen the former teahouse server steps into those ruins. Based on his conversation with Miyuki in episode 4, we know he has a clone that resides in Kowloon, but it’s not the type to disappear when his original version crosses the threshold. (We see an example of that phenomenon when one of Kudo’s elderly mahjong buddies, Mr. Chan, vanishes into thin air the moment his original steps into Kowloon.) Rather, I think there’s a link between Gwen and Kudo’s identities that would explain their shared knowledge of Kujirai B’s fate, as well as the former’s continued interest in the latter’s love life. Looking at this image of Gwen in the taxi cab on the way to Kowloon, his face bears a striking resemblance to Kudo’s. That could just be a quirk of Jun Mayuzuki’s style or the anime team’s translation thereof, but even so, I’m making it my pet theory that Kudo and Gwen are two sides of the same coin, be they clones, blood relatives, or something else. There was plenty of other good stuff here, especially with regard to the show’s dueling themes of authenticity and artifice, but I’m out of space already – I wish it had come along when I was still doing episodic blogging!
*I’m not ruling out Kudo’s involvement in Kujirai B’s disappearance and/or death, but the way his admission was temporarily hand-waved at the start of the next episode was very lame.
Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX – 3-5
My biggest issue with GQX right now is the character of Shuji, the mysterious pilot of the Red Gundam. As in the “Beginning” compilation film, his introduction midway through episode 3 was swift – Shuji’s very first meeting with Machu resulted in his recruitment as her partner for the Pomeranians, and by the end of the episode they’d already won their first Clan Battle match. But they entered the battlefield from separate locations and did nothing in the way of strategizing, and the same was true for weeks 4 and 5. The combat scenes are some of their only opportunities to communicate with each other, at least on screen, but their cooperation invariably boils down to Newtype magic rather than a meshing of their personalities. To be clear, I don’t want GQX to become some tactics-heavy mecha series, just for some of the mystique surrounding Shuji to be dispelled so that Machu’s fascination with him will feel less farfetched. To make matters weirder, episode 5 ramped that fascination up to infatuation with girl talk from Anqi (implying that she had caught on to the younger girl’s crush), plus a scene where both she and Nyaan got half naked to cool themselves off while hanging out with him. Shuji’s character motivation is to go to Earth, as it’s what he says the Red Gundam wants to do (he claims to be able to hear its voice), and Machu’s immediate desire to accompany him and escape Side 6 defies belief – as far as Enokido scripts go, GQX has nothing on FLCL in depicting teenage restlessness. Credit where it’s due, though: the show’s 2D visual direction remains impeccable.
Apocalypse Hotel – 3-5
Was anybody expecting a 50 year time skip to start off this show’s third episode? I certainly wasn’t, but it’s not an impossible move, given that the main cast were robots. I say “were” because the cast received a major upgrade in episode 3: a tanuki family who chose Earth as their new home after fleeing their own war-torn planet. The family played a major role in the last three weeks of Apocalypse Hotel, especially their daughter Ponko, who enlisted herself as a Gingarou employee to make up for her family’s initial abuse of the hotel’s hospitality. Ponko is a fantastic addition to the cast, with enthusiasm, charming naivete, and bravery at her disposal – the last of which was on full display during her confrontation with a massive sandworm in episode 4. The sandworm scenes were merely “good enough,” but her team-up with Yachiyo and Ze-chan (Ponko’s nickname for the environmental monitor bot) solidified her as a member of the team, and the tanukis’ contributions to the hotel’s new distillery did the same for their entire family in episode 5. The show is progressing well, then, but it’s also great on a moment to moment basis. Ponko’s attempt at using a walkie talkie to communicate with her dead grandfather (she’d been told it let you talk to people who were “far away”) created the perfect mix of sweetness and sadness, and Yachiyo’s bartender talk with an unlucky-in-love alien guest added a bit of sophistication to the show’s typically humorous air. Moments like these give me confidence that the show will handle the eventual reveal of humanity’s extinction with grace.
Lazarus – 4-5
Well, I got my wish – both of these episodes saw the whole Lazarus crew cooperating on individual missions, rather than splitting into two person teams. Of course, both missions were essentially dead ends, and they operated on some questionable logic (why would a pharmaceutical CEO encode his company’s clinical trials as audio files and post them to SoundCloud, of all sites?), but each of them had their bright spots. Episode 4’s nightclub action scenes were undoubtedly some of the smoothest this year in anime will produce, while the follow-up’s elevator fight took the opposite approach, emphasizing its key frames to create a guide for defeating multiple security guards by using their uniforms against them. Chris’s sex appeal and Doug’s dorky dancing in the former story hooked me into their characters a bit more, while the hacking battle in the most recent episode was quite well-paced, even if the GUI presentation was preposterous (director Watanabe will be turning 60 in just a couple weeks, after all). My least favorite part of these two episodes was the raging misogyny of the stock trader in the nightclub’s VIP scenes – the show made him such an asshole that it felt like our heroes were battling chauvinism rather than searching for leads on the world’s most wanted man. His just desserts coming at the tail end of an entertainingly preposterous helicopter vs drone chase put a band-aid on that awkwardness, though. There are still some things about Lazarus that don’t work for me, but so far they’re outnumbered by the things that do.
The post Spring 2025 Check-In – Weeks 4-5 appeared first on Star Crossed Anime.
