Julia's Reviews on Various Media

Sprigatito Love · Aug 10, 2025

I'm still watching it, and I can say this, I absolutely love it. But I may or may not be to lazy to finish the series....heh...

Juliko · Aug 11, 2025

Kinda surprised I didn't post this here until now. This was written on March 23rd, 2025.

Rating: 77/100

Hey kids, remember when Toei said they weren't going to animate more sequels for existing Pretty Cure seasons because Yes Pretty Cure 5 Gogo apparently bombed so hard that it nearly cancelled the franchise? Apparently they decided "screw that!" and in March of 2023, announced that two sequel series would be made for both Yes Pretty Cure 5 and Mahou Tsukai Pretty Cure, both of which take place after their main series and focus on the Cures after they've grown up. I didn't watch the Yes centered season because 1. I haven't seen both early seasons of Yes Pretty Cure 5, and 2. I legitimately cannot stand Coco's voice in his fairy form. I did, however, watch the entirely of Mahou Tsukai Pretty Cure back in 2020-2021, so I could actually watch Mahou Tsukai Pretty Cure II: Mirai Days without trouble. Though those of you who read my review for that series will know that I wasn't entirely impressed with it. The setting and premise were interesting, but the series really suffered from bland characters, a half-baked plot, terrible villains, a lack of stakes, not knowing what to do with itself most of the time, and making Ha-chan into a Mary Sue that everybody worships. Not gonna lie, I wasn't sure if this new sequel series would be any good. But hot damn, Mirai Days seemed to go out of its way to address all of my issues with it. Not every attempt it made succeeded, but it sure did try, and is still all the better for it.

It's been a few years since Mirai, Riko, and Ha-chan saved both the human and magic world, and are going down their own paths in life. Riko got to become a teacher at the magic academy, and Mirai has taken up becoming a secret witch hero who saves people in trouble. They both have their work cut out for them. Unfortunately, just when things are finally becoming peaceful, a new threat arises in the form of a mysterious man named Ire, who seems to want to mess with time itself. Mirai and Liko must become Pretty Cure once more and put a stop to whatever machinations he's planning. But who exactly is Ire and what does he want? Where's Ha-chan? Adding to the already mounting questions and mysteries, a mysterious little girl named Hisui, who resembles Ha-chan quite a bit, seems to be at the center of this new conflict.

Because of my dislike for the first series, my expectations for Mirai Days were pretty low. But I decided to give it a chance and see if it'd improve on the first series' problems. Damn, Mirai Days really exceeded my expectations on that front. For one thing, Mirai Days is only 12 episodes long, so there's much less filler and more of a focus on both the plot and fleshing out its characters, which is something the first series really struggled with. Because of its short length, Mirai Days has a much easier time finding its focus and its narrative feels tighter, never straying from its intended purpose. Granted, the actual plot has its own set of issues that I'll explain, but kudos to the series for at least making the effort to learn from its mistakes. The characters are also a marked improvement over the first series. For one thing, Mirai is much less of a stereotypical genki girl and her newfound maturity and worries give her much more depth than the first series really bothered to give her. She's much more down-to-earth, shows more complex emotions, and actually has tangible character flaws that she needs to deal with. Both she and Riko manage to get their own arcs that, thankfully, aren't hijacked by other characters. Even Ha-chan, who I initially hated in the first series, is far more mature and far less annoying here than she was in the first series, even if the plot still revolves around her. Speaking of Mirai and Riko, one thing I really liked about Mirai Days is that it shows how the characters deal with relatable adult problems like buying furniture for a house and applying for an ID, and how Riko, being from the magic world, struggles to do both due to being from a different world and not knowing how things work on Earth. That was a really nice, if morbidly relatable detail that I'm sure many in her position can relate to.

The villains are also a massive improvement from the first series. Mahou Tsukai Pretty Cure had terrible villains who not only didn't develop, but were replaced by equally half-baked, underdeveloped villains halfway through. Mirai Days repeats this pattern, but manages to create new villains that are far more compelling and dangerous. Ire, the new villain in the first half, manages to be far more than just your generic Saturday morning cartoon villain, much more competent, and more developed. Even when he's taken out halfway through by another villain, his replacement at least didn't come out of nowhere and was present throughout the series before he makes his true debut. Plus, he's also much more threatening and gives the plot more tangible stakes than I feel the first series did. I remember Isao Murayama, the series' scriptwriter, had mentioned in an interview that he didn't like how he wrote the villains in the first series, which made him try to remedy this in Star Twinkle Pretty Cure. While I still haven't watched Star Twinkle yet, I'm glad to say he managed to remedy his mistakes here quite well.

Not to mention the animation and soundtrack still manage to be pretty good. I do find it really funny that Toei picked Studio Deen to work on this anime, and they're usually known for not being very good. That said, giving credit where its rightfully due, they did a fantastic job at replicating the first series' animation and staying true to the show's original look. You could watch both series and never figure out that both were made by two different companies. I know I give Toei flack for constantly reusing music from other seasons, even when it doesn't make sense to do so. Here, it makes sense because Mirai Days is a direct sequel to Mahou Tsukai Pretty Cure. Plus, I actually liked both the opening and ending songs this time around. I admit, I wasn't a fan of the first series' opening, as I found it to be too poppy and obnoxious. Here, the opening has the same lyrics and singer, but the instrumentation is much better and more refined, opting for a more orchestral feel rather than the generic bubblegum pop. Also, thank God the ending didn't go for CGI dancing. That one also has a good song and great visuals that fit the feel of this sequel.

Seriously, Mirai Days addresses so many of my biggest issues with Mahou Tsukai Pretty Cure, so this sequel should be a total slam dunk, right? Well...it makes a valiant attempt to fix its parent show's mistakes, and while for the most part it succeeds, not every decision it made stuck the landing. For one thing, while I appreciate the show trying to have more conflict in its plot and trying to have more stakes, but in its attempt to escalate things, the story winds up falling apart in its last couple episodes needing to be resolved with a litany of Deus Ex Machinas that feel like they were just pulled out of the creators' asses just because they wrote themselves into a corner and couldn't figure out how to neatly fix everything. Not only that, Hisui, for all of her supposed importance, just flat-out disappears at the halfway point and she and another character are treated as little more than an afterthought. Everybody seemed to just forget about her at that point even though she was propped up as this super important character. I admit I'm not the biggest fan of Hisui, mainly because she was just an annoying kid who caused trouble and didn't listen to Mirai and Liko (Just like Ha-chan in the first series!), but even I think they did her dirty. Hell, the final episode leaves one character's fate completely unresolved. Not to mention there wasn't enough of Emily, Jun, and Kay. Also, why did they have to make episode 50 of the first series canon? So the first series struggled with having little plot and no stakes, Mirai Days had the opposite problem in that in its attempts to give the series more stakes and more conflict, it wound up getting too ambitious for its own good and fell apart. Also, Mirai Days' very nature as a direct sequel makes it impossible to watch without having seen the first series, and I doubt most people would want to watch a 50-episode show unless they have the time and energy to commit to doing so, or are already fans of Pretty Cure as a franchise.

And yet, even with those problems, Mahou Tsukai Pretty Cure II: Mirai Days still manages to be a strong sequel that, for the most part, learned from the mistakes of its parent show and be uniquely compelling. It has its missteps and not every decision it made stuck the landing, but I enjoyed this much more than I did the first series, which should tell you a lot. Not a bad way to celebrate Pretty Cure's 20th anniversary if you ask me. Hell, in my opinion, it's still a better milestone season than Happiness Charge Pretty Cure.

Juliko · Aug 12, 2025

This review was written on January 26th, 2025.

Rating: 82/100

Hey, remember when I reviewed that Japanese autobiography called Totto-chan: The Little Girl At The Window about 9 years ago? Guess what, in 2023 it got a movie! For those who don't know, in 1981, a woman named Tetsuko Kuroyanagi published a book centering on her experiences in an unusual elementary school just before World War II broke out. It became a best seller, and these days, she's known as a TV personality who, even at the ripe old age of 91, continues to host a daytime talk show she started back in 1976. I read the book, and while it was definitely cute and informative, along with being an effective commentary on how Japan writes off children who don't conform to society's rules, it was a bit too simplistic in its prose and rather episodic. I am kinda surprised it took several decades for it to be adapted into an anime, especially since another movie based on the Kuroyanagis, Chocchan's Story, came out in 1991 and doesn't have nearly as much fame and notoriety, though that one is more focused on Tetsuko's mother. But sure enough, Totto-chan: The Little Girl At The Window came out in December of 2023 to much success. I just watched a fansub of it recently, and I will say, the team they had work on this really did a stellar job at bringing it to life.

Just like the novel its based on, the movie centers on the early childhood of Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, affectionately nicknamed Totto-chan by her family and peers. She's an energetic, excitable, curious child who is perpetually entranced by the world around her, much to the consternation of her teachers at the school she attends. While she means well, her behavior makes her a poor fit for the rigid 1930s Japanese public school system. Her wealthy parents pull her out of school and decide to enroll her at a very unusual school called Tomoe Academy, where classes are held in empty train cars and students call the shots in constructing the classroom curriculum. Totto thrives in this new school environment, making all manner of friends and learning all sorts of new things. But all is not quite well in Japan, as World War II looms on the horizon and sinks its claws into not just Totto's school life, but changes everything for the people around her.

The animation and colors are bright and vibrant, indicative of how a child like Totto sees the world around her. The actual character motion is really good, and the backgrounds are given the appropriate amount of period detail. Occasionally, we're given glimpses into Totto and Yasuaki's imaginations, and that's where the animation pops off, elevating the film to a new level. The art style completely changes, ranging from bright, experimental colors with bold lines, to surrealist, abstract cut-out animation depending on what they're imagining, becoming a literal feast for the eyes akin to The Elusive Samurai or the works of Naoko Yamada. That's not something you can do in a silent, static medium like books, which this is based on, and the animation team really put their all into this one...although there is one thing about the movie's overall art style that feels really off: The character designs. Actually, it's not so much the character designs as it is the fact that literally everyone's lips are painted in a way that makes them look like they all did a terrible job at putting lipstick on. It'd be one thing if it was limited to just the girls, but even the boys and men have this problem, and this particular art quibble makes them look like porcelain dolls come to life, plunging them straight into the uncanny valley. It really says a lot when I prefer the art style for Chocchan's Story, which doesn't have this issue.

On the other hand, the soundtrack is also very nice, even if sometimes it tries too hard to play on your feelings, like that one montage at the end where Totto is running through town in grief and there's a sentimental song playing as she sees injured men coming back from the war. The ending song is also very cute and well sung. Speaking of audio, I really have to give flowers to all the voice actors here, especially the child actors who really sell their performances here. Liliana Ohno in particular, who was seven years old when she was brought on to voice Totto, does a fantastic job at selling Totto's personality, everything from her cheerfulness, brattiness, and moments of sorrow and wisdom really comes through here. By the way, the movie doesn't credit all of its voice actors, and I'm really curious as to who the narrator is. I'm guessing it might be Tetsuko Kuroyanagi herself, since the narrator's voice is clearly that of an elderly woman, and I can't imagine it being anyone else. Do correct me if I'm wrong though.

Speaking of the characters, the movie itself is a well made character study on Totto, showing her learning and growing under the tutelage of Tomoe's principal Sosaku Kobayashi and the kids around her. In a society where everyone, even children her age, is expected to "read the room" and follow any number of unspoken rules, she eagerly does whatever pops into her head at any given moment. While her father and mother love her, they are worried about her and don't quite know how to handle her at first. Mr. Kobayashi is a man who fights against a society that writes off certain children because they're "too problematic" or have problems that aren't their fault, creating a safe haven for kids who have additional needs that the typical Japanese school system can't offer, like Yasuaki, a boy suffering from polio. Other characters like Totto's parents and her father's orchestra instructor are also given quite a bit of nuance and subtle depth to them without coming off like its beating you over the head with melodrama. I do wish Totto's classmates had gotten a bit more characterization and focus though. That said, Totto herself is a great, wonderfully realistic depiction of an energetic child without leaning into being saccharine or overly idealized. She's a gigantic tomboy, an imaginative girl who does whatever she wants in spite of the consequences, would much rather play outside and watch street musicians rather than sit at a desk all day, throws tantrums if she doesn't get what she wants, causes trouble, and doesn't always realize her actions can get herself in trouble, but she's still shown as a genuinely good kid who wants to make her friends happy and do the right thing. She's the kind of girl I'm sure you've run into at least once in your life, and I could definitely relate to some of her experiences, such as when her baby chick dies despite trying to raise it as best she can.

In the background of this collection of highly emotional stories, history marches on. Slowly but surely, we see the effect on Totto's upper-middle-class Tokyo family as the war begins and then continues to its inevitable conclusion. Through the eyes of a child, we can see the subtle effects of war—candy machines becoming empty, her lunches slowly becoming less healthy, and the steady increase of more and more injured men in uniform. It's heartbreaking and also a great example of visual storytelling at its finest. Totto-chan is similar to In This Corner of The World where the story is more interested in getting you to care about the characters and be invested in them before the more dramatic stuff happens, and the more haunting war segments don't happen until near the very end of the movie. Because Totto-chan is primarily a slice-of-life movie, it can be easy to dismiss it as just being boring. However, I'm of the view that Totto-chan is at its best when it's focusing on its characterization and showing Totto's life in detail, because that's what the book is like too, and the harder hitting tragedies won't hit as hard if we aren't made to have some kind of emotional connection with them first. Totto-chan as a movie knows what it is and has no problem with being what it is, a character study on Totto's life and a commentary on childhood education and the problems that come with forcing children to conform to rigid standards.

There is one other issue I have with the movie that was also in the book. Remember in my review of the book, I mentioned that my least favorite chapter was one where Mr. Kobayashi lets the kids all swim in the pool naked? Well, the movie decided to adapt that chapter, and my issues with that particular scene from the book still apply here. Japan has no problem with showing children in the nude unlike the West, and while I understand the message its trying to impart—that children shouldn't feel ashamed or embarrassed of their bodies—it can still be discomforting to people who aren't aware of this. There ought to be better ways to teach kids that rather than let boys and girls swim in a big pool in their birthday suits supervised by a male teacher. If someone tried something like this in America, they'd be accused of being a pedophile and fired on the spot regardless of their intentions. Interestingly, the movie actually removes mention of the kids' parents protesting this in the book. I still enjoyed the movie even with this, but if you're one of those people who can't stand even the slighest showing of stuff like this in any media at all, I don't know what to tell you. Calling it now, the second some company tries to release this in America, I bet some soccer mom is gonna see it and petition for it to be banned and accuse it of being child pornography. I've long since stopped being surprised at the increasingly stupid things people have done in the name of protecting the children or some bullshit like that. I watched Jurassic Park when I was three and I turned out fine!

But even with all that, I still think Totto-chan: The Little Girl At The Window is not only a great anime movie as a whole, but a stellar adaptation of Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's autobiography, with a message that still rings true even today. I'm honestly surprised GKids hasn't licensed this yet since they've licensed other stuff similar to this previously, especially since Totto-chan is a TOHO property and GKids is owned by TOHO now. I actually hope it comes out on home video in the US soon, because this is a movie that needs to be seen and is a testament to how empathy and kindness should always take precedent over conformity.

Juliko · Aug 13, 2025

This review was written on July 2nd, 2025.

Rating: 50/100

Man, I really wanted to like Mono so bad, especially since it was created by the person who made Laid-Back Camp, a show that I never expected to like as much as I do. Laid-Back Camp was the type of rare show that knew what it wanted to be, even if season 3 was a bit of a downgrade compared to previous seasons. Now, I knew that the creator Afro made another manga, Mono, before this, but seeing as I'm still reading a bunch of other manga right now, I don't want to take on too many ongoing series at once. But an anime for it came out this year, so I figured watching it might be a good way to gauge whether I want to read the manga or not. Surely, since Laid-Back Camp was so good already, Mono would be just as good, right? Unfortunately, I might have set my expectations too high, and that's entirely on me. But even beyond that, Mono as a show is...mediocre, and I found it to be so frustrating to sit through, not just because it feels like it's trying to piggyback off Laid-Back Camp's success rather than establish its own identity, but many other things as well.

Upon starting high school, Satsuki Amamiya joins the photography club for one reason: The club leader, Makinohara. She spends her days constantly taking pictures of her like a creepy stalker, but when Makinohara graduates, Satsuki finds herself without purpose, and if the club doesn't recruit new members soon, it'll shut down. Through mere coincidence after a camera that Satsuki won in an auction didn't arrive on time, both she and her best friend An encountered Haruno Akiyama, an aspiring manga artist who wants to write a manga with high school students acting as the protagonists. Then, the duo encounter Sakurako Shikishima, the president of Cinema Club. When both clubs are on the verge of closure, the girls made the decision to merge two clubs into one, birthing the Cinephoto Club. Together with Haruno and the motoblogger Kako Komada, Satsuki and her group have a new goal in mind: to take pictures across real-life tourist spots in Japan to help Haruno out for her manga.

Honestly, I think it's best if I just get all my grievances out of the way right now, and unfortunately, there will be a lot of comparisons to Laid-Back Camp, though not for the reasons you think. For one thing, for a series that promotes itself as being about photography and taking videos, the actual photography aspect is completely ignored after episode 2, and even when photography and recording videos come up, it only happens on a couple of occasions. 90% of the show consists of the characters just visiting places, and only because Haruno keeps dragging them or ordering them around. Because of this, Mono as a show feels aimless and directionless, like it has no idea what it wants to be. Had it leaned more into its photography angle like Tamayura, it might have been able to establish its own identity and step out from Laid-Back Camp's shadow. Or if it wanted to just be about the girls visiting restaurants and tourist spots, that's fine too! Oh wait, Zatsu Tabi already did that this season. Because Mono can't decide what show it wants to be, it lacks focus, a problem that Laid-Back Camp avoided by not just focusing on camping, but having all the girls' travels and shopping trips revolve around it, so nothing in that show felt wasted or thrown to the side. Not to mention that sometimes Mono shoehorns in a bunch of weird horror/supernatural elements that not only feel completely out of place, but just feel like filler to pad out the show's run time, further adding to its complete lack of focus.

Speaking of Laid-Back Camp, the characters make cameos here and there in the show. Actually, let's talk about the characters. Unlike Laid-Back Camp, the characters in Mono are basic stock archetypes who never change, evolve, or develop whatsoever. Satsuki is the level-headed one, Kiriyama is the genki girl, Sakurako is the quiet snarker, Haruno is the walking disaster fail-girl, and so on. Unfortunately, they all lack the charm, nuance, and tight writing that made the characters in Laid-Back Camp so good. LBC actually cared enough to flesh out its characters beyond their initial personality types across its many seasons and movie, whether it be showing what they're like outside of school or camping (Which Mono doesn't. Seriously, where are these girls' parents?!), or adding subtle touches that make them feel like people rather than just moeblobs, like how Nadeshiko, in spite of her airheadedness, actually gets good grades in school and in the movie somehow manages to be good at doing construction work. Granted, Mono only has one season, but it completely fails to make its characters interesting or fun to follow whatsoever. Satsuki has such little presence that she might as well be a side character, and Kiriyama's constant high pitched screaming made me want to put duct tape over her mouth.

The biggest black mark on this show, I feel, is Haruno. The show really wants you to love this pathetic little girl failure of a mangaka, to the point of giving her so much undeserved screentime that she might as well be the main character. However, she often spends a lot of time causing problems for other characters and just being an annoying pest. Show, you promised high school girls partaking in photography. I did not come here to watch a grown-ass woman throw a temper tantrum, drag people across several cities, and wasting both their time and her own just to satisfy her curry craving, which results in her missing a deadline that day. This is especially bad when the episode ends with her getting it by going to the convenience store, which was close by, so she not only drove everyone to a bunch of far away restaurants for nothing, she basically screwed herself over and suffered no consequences. She could have just gone to the fucking convenience store the first time and she would have made her deadline! Not to mention the episodes that puts her or her mangaka friends into focus are all mediocre and don't really add anything to her character other than that she has friends. At least it's funny to hear Reina Ueda go full screechy gremlin mode sometimes.

With all that said, what does Mono actually have that's good? A few things. The animation is shockingly good, especially considering it's done by a new studio, Soigne. The backgrounds are stunning to look at, character motion is dynamic and kinetic, and it does a decent job capturing all the different locales the characters visit. Seriously, this is what Laid-Back Camp season three should have looked like. The music is also pretty good as well, almost as good as Laid-Back Camp's soundtrack. The voice acting is fine too, Kiriyama's constant high pitched screaming notwithstanding, and Sakurako's antics could be funny at times. Unfortunately, none of that comes close to saving Mono from being anything but just another generic moe show that's clearly trying to ride Laid-Back Camp's coattails rather than establish its own identity. If you want a moe girl show that actually goes into how photography works, has much more of a focused narrative, and stronger characters, just watch Tamayura! It may be more sugary and saccharine, but that actually bothers to explore photography in more depth than Mono ever tries to do!

Juliko · Sep 2, 2025

This review was started on July 27th, 2025, but not finished until today.

Rating: 78/100

ToHeart is an interesting beast. It's considered the second non-Hentai anime adaptation of a visual novel, only beaten out by the very first one, Nightwalker: Midnight Detective, which came out in the summer of 1998. The original game was an 18+ eroge and didn't have as much of a marketing push as previous VN adaptations, but the 1999 anime would go on to be pretty popular, selling 10,000 copies in terms of home video sales, which was considered successful back then. It even managed to get an English dub and DVD release in the US a few years later, and even got a sequel series, ToHeart: Remember My Memories, though I've heard said sequel isn't very good. I did watch the first episode of ToHeart on a whim years ago, but child me thought it was dreadfully boring and dropped it. My tastes have evolved quite a bit since then, and in light of the original game getting a remake that came out this year, albeit based on the all-ages version, I decided to go back and revisit it with fresh eyes. Man, child me was an idiot, because even if it's not the most faithful adaptation of the game, ToHeart the anime is surprisingly good, and has aged a lot better than one would think.

For the most part, the anime is the same as the game, focusing on two high school students, Hiroyuki Fujita and his best friend Akari Kamigishi. They've been childhood friends their entire lives, and they spend every day going to school, hanging with friends, and going through the daily doldrums. Unlike the game, which has ten character routes to pursue and you have to go through them one at a time, the anime makes the very smart decision to have it be more of a character-of-the-week format, where Akari and Hiroyuki interact with the different heroines in every episode and help them with their problems. So don't expect the anime to be a faithful adaptation of the game, because with it being 13 episodes, trying to cram all ten routes into that amount of time is absolutely impossible, and the creators seemed to realize this, which is why they made it more of an ensemble piece than anything, and any changes make sense when you watch the anime with this context. I mainly appreciate it because this approach allows characters besides Hiroyuki to have more to do besides fawn over him. For example, episode 7 has Akari meet and befriend Kotone, a lonely psychic whose powers cause misfortune to those around her, rather than having Hiroyuki be the one to approach her, which is a nice change because it gives Akari more to do besides stick around Hiroyuki all the time.

Yeah, because the anime decided to go its own direction and not try to adapt all the routes, the characters aren't exactly the most well-developed. They pretty much stay the same throughout the show, and I can see why people would think they're rather bland and uninteresting here. I personally don't think so, as even if the characters don't evolve throughout the series, I still found them fun to watch, and with the show's more down-to-earth approach, I never found them to be too obnoxious besides Shiho, and she's like that by design. I can't really comment on their characterization beyond this because as of right now, I've only completed Akari's route in the game and am making my way through Rio's route still. I can at least say that everyone is pretty faithful to their game counterparts, and while Hiroyuki as a male lead isn't the most memorable, I'll gladly take him over certain...other VN protagonists. coughKouheiOriharacough

I should also warn people that ToHeart is a very deliberately slow paced show, the very definition of a slow burn. It wears its slice-of-life leanings proudly, conflicts are as down-to-earth and grounded in reality as humanly possible, even with stuff like robot girls and psychic powers thrown into the mix, nobody is screaming to the heavens and bawling their eyes out over every little problem (besides Shiho, but that's par for the course for her even in the game), there's no overarching plot, and it has absolutely no interest in being anything it isn't. While many may find the slow, leisurely pace appealing and refreshing, especially compared to most modern anime, just as many won't have that level of patience. This is about as slow paced as Kamichu, Princess Arete, and the 1979 Anne of Green Gables anime, so if you're not a patient person and prefer constant high octane stimulation, you're not gonna get any enjoyment out of this show. Granted, ToHeart being slow paced has its own issues, and not every episode is a home run. Seriously, did we really need an entire episode about the kids constantly talking in circles around each other about concert tickets and dragging it out for way longer than it needed to? Yeah, episode 2 is the only dud in this show, IMHO.

But what ToHeart lacks in flair and spectacle, I feel it makes up for with sheer atmosphere and ambience. The animation by itself, while not the most eyecatching and vibrant, focuses more on bringing the characters to life in a humanistic manner. The characters move in a way that every motion is conveyed as a full-body experience when the scene calls for it, and when properly framed, lit, and contextualized, the show can look absolutely gorgeous, no small feat for an anime released in 1999, and by the same company that worked on Pokemon, at that. The backgrounds are beautiful watercolor paintings that really make the scenery feel like it's truly lived in, to which flowers must be given to the late great art director Shichiro Kobayashi. You may not know him by name, but anime fans have absolutely seen his background work before, as he's worked on anime such as Angel's Egg, the 90s Berserk anime, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Nurse Angel Ririka SOS, the anime version of Diary of Anne Frank (Yes, such a thing exists), Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, Nobody's Boy Remi, and a shit ton of other anime. The soundtrack is also an interesting point, using both traditional orchestral pieces and more modern (at the time) electronic synthesizer sounds. One instrument I found that's used quite a bit here is the pan flute, which you don't often hear in anime, and I really liked its usage of it here. It's a shame the pan flute isn't used more often in anime. I definitely appreciate the anime deciding to go with its own soundtrack rather than re-use music from the game, other than the opening theme song which I'm willing to forgive because Feeling Heart is still a nice little 90s pop song that's easy on the ears.

So yeah, at its heart (Yes, the pun is absolutely intended), ToHeart is still an anime made solely to promote the visual novel, and does have the whole "If you wanna know more about these characters, you gotta play the game" vibe going for it. But I think ToHeart is still a good show even with that context in mind. Even if you haven't played the game, I think the series by itself can still be enjoyed as a nice little sweet treat to relax to or wind down with after you've had a hard day at work. But for those who are fans of the game, I would recommend seeing this as more like a set of side stories taking place during the events of the game rather than a direct adaptation of the game. Or the anime equivalent of a fan disk, if you want to look at it from another angle. ToHeart may not exactly be an emotional rollercoaster or trailblazer, but for showing that anime adaptations of VNs don't have to be exclusively low quality porn, and just being a nice, wholesome time, if a bit too idealistic for its own good, I think it's worth checking out.

Juliko · Sep 25, 2025

Man, it took me waaaaay too long to finally finish my review of this. This review was started on June 30th, 2025, but not finished until today.

Rating: 84/100

No lie, I've been looking forward to Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma ever since its initial existence was first confirmed. I only got into Rune Factory back in 2022 because of Rune Factory 5, but since then, I've played the Switch ports for both 3 and 4. I'm not sure if I'm gonna play the first two DS games because of their...rather annoying mechanics, which later games would considerably improve upon. Many were worried that Rune Factory 5's rather unpolished presentation and many issues would bring about the franchise's death knell, but thankfully, those worries were put to rest with the announcement of both this and Rune Factory 6. I bought the Earth Dancer edition, which was delayed by a certain orange manbaby's tariffs and trade war, and it even received the honor of being one of the first games to make its debut on the Nintendo Switch 2. But now the question was: Would Guardians of Azuma learn from 5's mistakes and be better than it? Having played it after a 75-hour playthrough, I can wholeheartedly say: Hell to the yes! Actually, I'd even go farther and say that Guardians of Azuma is quite honestly the best Rune Factory game period. A bold statement to make, yes, but I stand by it.

What differentiates Guardians of Azuma from other RF games is that it takes place on a very Japan-inspired continent rather than the more overtly European fantasy settings of the mainline games. Which makes sense for a spin-off title. The story centers on an amnesiac youth who winds up in the land of Azuma, a cluster of floating archipelago afflicted by a mysterious blight resulting from a calamity known as the Celestial Collapse. The youth is eventually revealed to be an Earth Dancer, whose purpose is to infuse the land with runes and purify the blight. Basically an Earthmate, just with a different name. By doing so, Azuma's Gods are revived, albeit with their divinity severely weakened due to the Celestial Collapse. However, sinister forces want to kill Azuma's Gods and completely upend everything, with one of them being an acquaintance of the Earth Dancer. With help from the Gods and their partner Woolby, it's up to the Earth Dancer to put a stop to their plans and return Azuma to its former glory.

One particular game mechanic that Guardians of Azuma really builds its backbone upon is the introduction of town building. In this game, your player character becomes the chief of four villages, and it's up to you to construct buildings, shops, decorations, and so on. But unlike Harvest Moon: A New Beginning, you only get to mess around with town building in specific zones rather than the entire town, but to make up for this, you use these things to both boost your stats, generate income, assign villagers to man shops, and level up your village, earning you all sorts of boosts and bonuses. You can assign villagers to harvest your crops, water them, and plant seeds, but a lot of villager NPCs are useless so I usually just manage farming on my own. The farming aspect is also boosted by special items you receive from the Gods called Sacred Treasures. Ulalaka's drum speeds up crop growth, Kurama's fan harvests crops in large quantities, and Fubuki's parasol allows you to water crops over a wide area, which prove to be really useful, both on the farm and the field, often used to purify blight or get rid of an obstacle. Seriously, you'll be using these Sacred Treasures so much that it's almost pointless to use normal weapons. Not to mention the Sacred Treasures are where your Rune Points will be going rather than RP being a stand-in for general stamina.

Combat and exploration is massively improved upon here compared to RF5. The combat system is largely unchanged from RF5, but you get access to new weapons like magic talismans and bows and arrows, allowing for ranged combat, which can be very helpful if you're hitting enemies that might be a couple levels above you. One big change to combat is that you have a skill tree, and every action you perform every day gives you points throughout the day, which you receive the next day, allowing you to plan your upgrades and progression. One mechanic I really appreciated is the way you acquire recipes in this game. In previous RF games, you learn recipes or equipment blueprints by constantly eating bread, which to me always made no sense, and after a certain point, you can't learn recipes from bread anymore, making any you buy after that point completely useless. Guardians of Azuma has you learn them through tracking down frog statues and shrines throughout the land, which I feel is a much better, more organic way to learn new recipes, not to mention a great incentive to explore the world and put time into examining every nook and cranny.

The art direction is yet another massive improvement from RF5. The colors are brighter and more vibrant, the world feels more lived in, the setting feels more fleshed out, and the game actually runs pretty well on the Switch. I never encountered any bugs or glitches that either hindered progress or broke the game, and while there were a few framerate drops here and there, they were fairly rare in my run through. My only real issue is that sometimes the characters' mouths move awkwardly, especially on characters like Iroha or Clarice. But that's small potatoes compared to everything Guardians of Azuma improved upon. The soundtrack is also a feast for the ears, full of Japanese instruments that absolutely wear the game's setting on its sleeve...even if the high notes on those particular flutes trigger my auditory sensitivities quite a bit. Shame it never got a cute little anime-style opening like the other RF games did, but I'm betting that's because its a spin-off rather than a mainline game.

But you're probably wondering how the game handles the characters, and their associated romance and social aspects? To answer your question: Yet another improvement over RF5! The characters are much more fleshed out here, and in my opinion, Guardians of Azuma I think takes their development further than previous games did. Furthermore, rather than just giving the characters gifts, the game allows you to perform more activities with them such as inviting them out shopping or to their favorite places, going out to dinner, chatting about hobbies or favorite subjects, and doing so actually passes the time, so you're not simply wasting time padding out the game just to activate an event at a specific time. The game even goes so far as to have certain recipes locked behind bond levels, so if you unlock a character's level 6 bond, you can invite them to cook with you to unlock those specific recipes. The characters by themselves are all great, and you have 16 of them to pick from, so you're not exactly lacking in options, even though two of them are locked behind DLC. I married adorable wolf boy Fubuki on my first run. Oh, and Guardians of Azuma has a new mechanic where if you're already married to one character, after a certain point, you can marry multiple people on one save file by going into an alternate timeline via a location called the Fateweaver Shrine. Yeah, you can tell Marvelous really wanted to front load Guardians of Azuma and make up for RF5's mistakes here, and in my opinion, they succeeded.

Yet you can't have a game without a good story to scaffold it, right? Sure enough, Guardians of Azuma has a very ambitious story, probably more so than the rest of the series, and it actually really goes all in on worldbuilding and putting its established lore to good use rather than have it simply be window dressing. In previous RF games, the main character being an Earthmate was often just a flimsy excuse to justify having them be good at farming and not much else. Here, the main character being one actually feels important to the story this time around, and is actually explained rather than just handwaved away. What other RF game can you think of that does this? Granted, there are a couple of parts of the plot that don't feel all that well thought out, but compared to everything else, they're small potatoes. I do kind of wish RF in general would stop trying so hard to maintain continuity among all of its games, because it feels like the series is constantly stretching itself thin to justify being linked to the first game in some capacity. It'd be nice if the games would make more of an effort to stand on their own and have their own unique settings and timelines, rather than constantly build off the first game. Fire Emblem does it all the time, with some exceptions, as do series like Digimon and Pretty Cure. You'd think with Guardians of Azuma being on a different continent than the previous games, it'd be able to do this, but even Azuma can't help trying to tie itself to the early games in regards to one character.

My only other issues with Guardians of Azuma are as follows: The way cooking multiple recipes works is really clunky. Previous games would let you use multiple items even when cooking the same item, even if the item was a different quality level. Azuma, for some reason, forces you to manually remove an ingredient if a food item of a certain level is required, and there's no indication of if you even managed to succeed in doing so or not. The menu design in general is frustratingly obtuse, especially the cooking menu. The categories that dishes are sorted into are relatively arbitrary, and there's no way to filter the recipe list further, forcing the player to waste time scrolling through dozens of options to find the right recipe. Furthermore, when you level up or progress the story to a certain extent, the requests in the request board scale with your level, even beyond it, which can make fulfilling the requests impossible because you need to fight a monster at a certain level, but you haven't unlocked the location to find monsters at that level yet. Say, for example, you need to fight a level 50+ Buffamoo, but the only place to find them is locked behind story progression, in a very specific location, and there's theoretically no place to actually find a level 50 Buffamoo before then. So if you accepted a request before being able to access the locations where the requested level monster is, you're gonna be holding onto those for a loooooong time. Furthermore, once you complete the post game content, there isn't much to do, even with the whole Rewoven Fates allowing you to marry multiple people on one save file, so you'll be struggling to find stuff to do once you get everything done.

That said, I'm super happy I finally got to play Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma. I may have gotten into RF thanks to Rune Factory 5, but in my opinion, Azuma is the best RF game to date. Marvelous went all out to make this game as good as possible, and despite the issues I mentioned above, I think they absolutely succeeded in learning from their mistakes with RF5. It absolutely lived up to all the hype. Whether you're a long time fan of the series or a newcomer wanting to get your feet wet, I highly, HIGHLY recommend Guardians of Azuma, if only because it's a genuinely fun game that has a lot to offer. I do want to say one thing though: For the love of God, if I hear somebody compare this game to Genshin Impact one more time, whether it be because of the setting or character designs, I'm gonna rip my hair out! Just because the characters are elaborately designed, it does NOT mean the series is trying to rip off Genshin Impact! There have been character designs like this loooong before Genshin Impact ever made them popular, like, oh, I don't know, every single JRPG and/or otome game ever!!

Juliko · Nov 23, 2025

Racing The Clouds by Sydney Dunlap
Rating: 7.5/10
This was a cute book, all things considered. Nothing too remarkable, but I enjoyed the characters, the prose, and its themes about the perils of drug addiction and how it affects families. I do feel the resolution to the overall conflict was far too neat and tidy for my liking, making it far too happy, but I can imagine the authoress wrote it this way so kids actually dealing with Sage's situation here could have some hope for themselves and their families. I enjoyed this one, and might re-read it again if I feel like it.

Godzilla Minus One Novelization by Takashi Yamazaki
Rating: 7.5/10
I'm not a Godzilla fan by any stretch, but I did watch the Godzilla Minus One movie because I kept hearing so much praise for it, and to my surprise, I enjoyed it. So much so that when a novelization was announced, I bought it on release day. Obviously, prose can't really replicate a movie's visual effects, especially the visceral and grandeur grotesquery of the titular character, but I feel the novel did a good enough job of translating the movie to book format, even providing some much needed terminology for people who might not be kneedeep into sci-fi. The characters are nicely developed and its nuanced depiction of war as being a complete waste of human life is a much needed message in this day and age. My only real issue with the novel is that...well, it's literally just the movie in novel form. There's no new stuff added to it, nothing's been changed, and there's no new information presented, something I usually appreciate about novel adaptations of movies because they usually have room to do that. I still enjoy the novel for what it is, and it's an easy read.

Night On The Galactic Railroad by Kenji Miyazawa
Rating: 6/10
This famous Japanese children's novel hasn't exactly had a good track record when it comes to English translations, and the one I found by Sarah Strong was no exception. I felt the version I read to be rather disjointed, though from what I've heard, the original version is like this by design, heavily favoring stream-of-consciousness to represent Giovanni's thoughts. The story itself is good, if rather episodic and obtuse, and its themes of dealing with the concept of death and self-sacrifice still resonate today. I still hate that tutor though. I did hear the book is due to get a brand new translation some time next year, and I'm curious to see how that one fares compared to the four that it got previously.

Juliko · Nov 24, 2025

This review was written on April 1st, 2025. No, it wasn't part of an April Fool's joke.

Rating: 75/100

Japan's war movies really are a different beast from other countries' war movies, aren't they? American war movies tend to focus more on the soldiers, the action, the violence and death, or, for some reason, romance. I haven't seen war movies produced by other countries like Italy, Germany, or China, so I don't know how they go about it. I do know that the majority of Japan's war movies, or the ones I've seen at least, tend to place more emphasis on the children, the slice-of-life, and character development before getting into the war stuff. Grave of the Fireflies, In This Corner of the World, Totto-chan, Who's Left Behind, Barefoot Gen, Glass Rabbit, and more recently, Cocoon. Granted, I know a lot of this is because Japan doesn't like acknowledging their own war crimes and adopting a victim mentality, and I don't think I need to reiterate that Japan needs to do more to acknowledge its own part in World War II. However, I also feel that Japan's war movies and war media have value in their own right. Cocoon is an...interesting movie, not just because of how different it looks from the original manga, but the changes it makes in the adaptation process do make me raise my eyebrows.

Based on the 2009 manga by Machiko Kyo, which came out 65 years to the day that World War II ended, Cocoon centers on two girls, San and Mayu, who go to an exclusive all-girls school down in Okinawa in the closing months of World War II. The girls and their friends make the best of things as much as they can, but it's not easy. Later, the entire class is drafted into becoming rear-line nurses to care for wounded soldiers, hiding in a cave and turning it into a makeshift hospital. This makes things complicated for San as she's not too fond of men, but she perseveres with Mayu and all her friends by her side. But war is a cruel beast, and as the world around them burns to the ground, San and Mayu lose all of their beloved friends one by one. The road to survival becomes more hellish by the day.

One thing that really stuck out to me and others who read the manga is that the art style is drastically different from the manga. The manga opts for a more deliberately sketchy, childish, unpolished drawing style with watercolor backgrounds and screen tones, evoking a child's drawings. The anime opts for a more polished, Ghibli-esque look, which makes sense as one of the producers for this is Hitomi Tateno, a former Ghibli animator. I can only assume that the producers made the decision not to try to adapt Machiko Kyo's style to animation, maybe because doing so might have been too difficult or something. I don't hate this decision, as the animation for Cocoon is still gorgeous all the same. The Ghibli influence is clearly there, but the simplistic yet unique character designs, detailed backgrounds, and stunning imagery really bring this story to life in a new way. Hell, the actual director for this movie, Toko Ina, did the animation for The Chronicles of Rebecca and key animation for Eizouken and The Heike Story. For their first time doing a long movie like this, the team they assembled at Sasayuri did an amazing job. The soundtrack by Kensuke Ushio is nice too, though not one of his more memorable scores.

The characters, while fine on their own in the movie, went through quite a lot of changes in the transition from comic to screen. Many of the manga's characters were straight up cut out, with their fates given to other existing characters. One big change is the character of Tamaki. In the manga, she was just a vain, lazy girl who cared too much about her looks, couldn't handle the horrors of war, and is unceremoniously killed in a pretty horrific way. Here, she's still vain, but is much more proactive and helpful, proving to be an important confidant to San. Hina is also given slightly more relevance, though her manner of death is vastly different here compared to the manga. Actually, the anime changes a lot of characters' manner of deaths, assigning them fates that manga-only characters were subjected to. I can only assume this was done to streamline things, especially since the movie runs only an hour long, and the movie wanted to focus more on the characters that were more present throughout. The existing characters are fine characters, not the most fleshed out but still compelling in how they're children forced to grow up during a terrible time and made to see/do things no child should ever have to go through.

The anime even adds subplots that weren't in the manga. For one, there's a whole running thread about San making a birthday present for Mayu but not giving it to her because the twins made her a better present, and she doesn't give it to Mayu until the end of the movie. This was not present in the manga, not to mention all of the new scenes given to Tamaki and Hina to expand their characterization. But the anime removes just as much as it adds. For one, no mention is made of Yuri's back scars, and several characters in the manga aren't present at all in the anime. The movie also made the decision to remove a lot of the gore and violence (Except for one important scene at the very end), and even in the violent scenes they leave in, blood is...replaced with flower petals for some reason. I can only assume they made the blood and violence symbolic because the networks would probably get mad at them for showing children suffering graphically, but...I don't know, changing the blood to flower petals comes off as kinda silly when you're trying to show how horrific war is. The manga never tried to hide the fact that its characters died in really horrible, graphic ways, like being disembowled, blown to pieces, or covered in maggots. Plus, other war movies before this never shyed away from showing people being killed in horrible ways, so why did they have to tone it down here (Again, except for one scene at the end)? Did Japan's broadcasting standards change their rules about this or something, or was it because Cocoon was being broadcast on public TV and they didn't want it to be too intense? Who knows?

Speaking of questionable decisions, I have to go into spoiler territory here because there's two changes they made that I wasn't a big fan of. In the manga, San is almost raped by a soldier, and Mayu manages to save her and kill the man in question by suffocating him to death. San never finds out about it until Mayu tells her later. But in the anime, San wakes up as Mayu is choking the man and...stops her from killing him. Why? This change did nothing for the story other than have San find out Mayu's secret much earlier, and having San save him is out of character for her because she hates men. Not only that, the manga explicitly stated that the man who tried to assault her was one of the soldiers they helped in the makeshift hospital, which further traumatizes San because she can't fathom that someone she tried to help would repay her kindness by attempting to rape her. It's basically a scathing critique on Japanese imperialism and how, in Japan's crusade to become the strongest power in the world, they basically treated their own citizens as disposable and didn't consider how their actions would affect them. So changing it so that San saves her rapist from Mayu and having the rapist survive completely goes against the manga's anti-imperialism message. Later in the manga, San and Mayu come across another nursing unit that plan to all commit suicide together because they want to die on their own terms and not get raped by any soldiers that find them. For some reason, the movie made it so that San and Mayu's nursing unit, all their classmates, are the ones that do this, even though in the manga, they all died at that point, with the twins Mari and Yuri having starved to death immediately before this happens. Not only that, it dilutes the impact of an earlier scene supposedly showing everyone dying among gunfire, so it feels like a complete cop-out to have them survive only to then suddenly show them all committing suicide together when they had never established wanting to do so previously.

I honestly wonder if the producers consulted Machiko Kyo about the film and got her to approve of these changes, or did them without her permission. I want to like this movie, and by itself, it's a perfectly fine war movie about young girls trying to survive. You can enjoy it without having read the manga, especially since Machiko Kyo's works haven't been legally translated into English that I know of. But having read the manga and seeing the changes the anime made, I honestly recommend reading the manga, as it's a much stronger, more compelling, more visceral experience that'll stick with you. I still enjoy the movie for what it is, and I'll certainly watch it over a lot of the slop that's churned out these days, but again, I seriously question why the staff made the changes that they did, because a lot of them just straight up don't make sense if you know about the manga. Cocoon isn't a bad movie by any means, far from it, and as a standalone feature, it's still a sad, compelling movie that'll make you think. However, I think this is one of those times where the anime adaptation just doesn't do the original source justice, especially with how it completely discards the manga's original messages in favor of being just another sad war movie where almost everybody dies.

Juliko · Dec 30, 2025

This review was written on October 8th, 2025. Man, I never thought I'd wind up watching this series, for more reasons than one.

Rating: 55/100

Okay...I have some explaining to do. Years ago, I told myself I was never going to watch Mobile Suit Gundam Wing in any capacity, mainly because I'm not into mecha series, as I often find them too hard to follow a lot of the time. I have a really hard time keeping up with hard sci-fi and technobabble, as it all just flies over my head and does not compute in my dumb autistic brain, and Gundam Wing really leans HARD into all of that, which is why I gravitated towards stuff like fantasy and slice-of-life in anything I watch, read, or play. Though funny enough, one of the first anime songs I discovered, by accident at that, was Two-Mix's Just Communication, aka Gundam Wing's first opening theme, by way of a random Neopets webpage I found in the early 2000s that had it as background music in the form of a midi file. Remember those? I still have that midi file on my flash drive! The only other thing I knew about Wing was the fact that one of the characters self-detonated their Gundam, and that's because one of my college friends spoiled the events of that episode to explain something to me. But one day, I was bored. I wasn't in the mood for the other shows I was watching, Anne Shirley got delayed by several weeks, I couldn't watch the rest of one of my Full Moon discs because episode 19 had a glitch that made it unwatchable, and I found out GW was celebrating its 30th anniversary. I decided to break the oath I swore to myself and I watched the first episode...and now here I am having completed the entire series. Seriously, what is wrong with me? I'm a masochist, apparently. So as of now, I've seen seven Gundam series in their entirety: Both seasons of 00, Witch From Mercury, After War Gundam X, the War In The Pocket OVA, and now Gundam Wing. So what's my verdict? Eh, it's...nothing special. I know it's the series that exposed Americans to Gundam and popularized the Toonami block on Cartoon Network, but honestly, I don't feel the series is as good as people make it out to be.

Centuries in the future, in the year After Colony 195, Earth is surrounded by orbiting space colonies. The colonists are cruelly oppressed by the Earth Sphere Alliance, which uses huge humanoid fighting machines called "mobile suits" to control the populace. Behind this tyranny is the secret society called Oz, which has infiltrated the Alliance military and steered it towards its repressive course. Now, the space colonies are ready to strike back. Five young teenage pilots, equipped with advanced mobile suits called Gundams, are sent to Earth to wage guerilla war against Oz and its Alliance puppets. Relena Darlian, the teenage daughter of an important colonial diplomat, accidentally discovers the identity of a Gundam pilot who was shot down during his entry to Earth: a teenage boy named Heero Yuy. From there, Heero and the other four Gundam pilots find themselves having to blast their way through the various groups in power behind the UESA (and eventually their own force). The Gundams have near indestructible armor and enough firepower to overwhelm entire armies, but the pilots find themselves limited in making positive progress through brute force. In turn, Relena discovers her true family heritage and fights in her own way to bring about peace between the Earth and the colonies amidst various political power shifts caused by the Gundam rebellion.

Honestly, just the plot summary alone doesn't really do that great a job explaining just how off-the-rails the series is when it comes to its plot. For a series with 49 episodes, with every single one being mandatory viewing and moving the plot forward, this is not a series you want to use as baby's first Gundam series IMHO. Normally, serialized narratives are a good thing, but in the case of Wing, this format actually works against it in that in its attempts to constantly have stuff happen, it feels like the series is constantly trying to one-up itself at every turn, constantly introducing plot points and subplots at a breakneck pace, with little to no reprieve from any of it, oftentimes dropping them just as soon as they're introduced. For example, you know that whole thing where Heero accidentally kills a guy named Noventa, and the guy’s wife asks Relena to deliver a letter to Heero forgiving him for what he did? For all the importance that was given, we never see Relena give Heero that letter, nor do we ever see his reaction to it. Characters constantly go from place to place or change sides with little to no explanation, or behave when the plot demands it. As a result, GW lacks cohesion and feels completely disjointed, preferring spectacle and bombast over actually allowing itself to breathe or let the audience everything in.

Not to mention there are plenty of subplots that feel completely superfluous and unnecessary, that you could cut out from the show and it'd be to GW's benefit. The biggest example of this is episode 13. You'd think an episode titled Catherine's Tears would be entirely about fleshing out Trowa, his time at the circus, his relationship with his friend Catherine, and making him feel like more than just the strong silent lone wolf, right? Nope! 90% of the episode is taken up by this pair of awful, generic villains of the week who only exist to be cliche villains and make Zechs look like a complete idiot, whereas everything involving Trowa and Catherine is only in the last five minutes! False advertising, much? I did read that a lot of the show's narrative choices were due to director Masashi Ikeda being very loosey-goosey in his approach. In my opinion, that loosey-goosiness is GW's biggest problem. It's constant need for spectacle and lack of narrative consistency drags it down to an insurmountable degree, resulting in it becoming a convoluted mess that feels really bloated.

This unfortunately extends to the characters as well. For a series with 49 episodes, it has a huge cast of characters, but doesn't use its time to actually develop them, save for a select few, and even the development they do get feels slap-dash and cobbled together. Most of the characters feel either one note, or their characterization is wildly inconsistent, often changing with literally no explanation whatsoever, sometimes acting completely out of character. The biggest victim of this is Wufei, who honestly feels less like a character and more like a plot device. He starts off as an angry little misogynist or a prototype Sasuke, then he's suddenly helping the others for seemingly no reason other than the plot demands it, then he's back to working alone and being a dick, and so on. I always felt like the writers never seemed to know what to do with him, and considering the series was originally meant to just have four pilots in its early planning stages, maybe they should have stuck with that instead of shoehorning Wufei in here. The only characters I feel who got anything even resembling character arcs are Relena, Quatre, and Noin, who are quite honestly the most interesting characters in the series. But by this show's standards, that's still not saying much, and even they have their issues caused by the director's loosey-goosey approach. The characters have so much potential to grow into a memorable cast, but because GW is more interested in spectacle and bombast rather than proper characterization and storytelling, they're not given the chance to evolve beyond their base archetype, and they're not fleshed out and developed enough as a result, which makes it really hard to care about them and their struggles in any meaningful way.

This is made even more egregious by way of the existence of Episode Zero, a manga that actually explores the pilot's backstories and explains crucial parts of the plot, which were meant to be episodes in the series, but were scrapped due to production issues and members of staff either getting fired or quitting, and replaced by two fucking recap episodes!! Seriously, of all the episode ideas to scrap, why would you do this to episodes that would actually help to make the series better and convince the audience to give a damn about the characters?! I will admit, I do enjoy Duo as a character quite a lot. He and Quatre are my precious little murder muffins. Speaking of Quatre, what's the deal with his whole Space Heart thing? It's implied he has some kind of psychic/Newtype power, but it's only brought up twice, never explained at all, and never brought up again. Why even throw that in there if you're not even going to commit to it?! I'm also going to piggyback off another review on AniList, where that reviewer pointed out that Wing doesn't allow its characters to just breathe, take a break, or be anything other than soldiers in a war, merely cogs in a machine to serve the plot rather than steer it. You know what? They're absolutely right. Wing could have easily benefited from having episodes that didn't focus on the plot and actually showed the characters doing other things, and I mean for an entire episode, not just for a one minute scene and that's it. Seriously, how is it that Gundam X and War In The Pocket understand this better than Wing does?! Well, at least there's plenty of fan fiction that does just that. I know a lot of people like to complain about filler/anime original episodes and such, but having seen a lot of them over the years, I feel that the best ones can do a lot to both further a character’s development and show what they’re like outside of the main plot. It’s okay to have episodes where the characters aren’t worrying about the world being at stake for a while! I wish Gundam Wing understood this.

Wing's problems are so entrenched in everything about it, they're extremely hard to ignore. To springboard off this, I want to talk about the setting here. Wing's setting is a huge, sprawling world with a lot of space colonies getting caught in the war, but for all that it touts itself on Earth oppressing the colonies, we hardly know anything about the actual colonies themselves, the people living in them, and their history other than the narrator spouting it at us whenever he feels like it. They hardly receive any attention outside of their involvement in the war, and because of this, it's hard to care about them at all. An example of a series that actually did this right is the Gundam: War In The Pocket OVA. That series actually took the time to flesh out its setting—a singular space colony—show what life is like on there, flesh out the characters living on it, and actually tied it into the plot in a way that gets you to actually give a damn about it, so the setting isn't just window dressing or a chessboard so the characters can move from point A to point B because it's convenient. They say less is more for a reason! Wing's problem is that even though it has 49 episodes to tell its story, it still feels too big because it wants so badly to be bigger, more epic, and more bombastic, but every single attempt it makes ignores practically every basic rule in storytelling to get there, and a lot of the time it really loves to pull stuff out of its ass to make things more convenient for itself, like having most of its characters survive events that absolutely should have killed them and refusing to answer basic questions.

Now, I don't want to be a complete negative Nancy, and Wing does have some good stuff in it. One of its biggest highlights is the soundtrack, which is absolutely bitchin'. It's almost better than I feel the show deserves. It's sweeping, epic, and bombastic, almost on the level of Star Wars, with plenty of horns, oboes, percussion, and orchestras that truly make it feel big. I still find it hard to believe this was done by Kou Otani, the same guy who did the music for Haibane Renmei, Shadow of the Colossus, Outlaw Star, Popolocrois 1998, Digimon Ghost Game, and Tokyo Magnitude 8.0. You could claim that they got the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra to do the soundtrack for this and I’d believe you, that’s how good it is. Do I even need to mention Two-Mix's openings? Seriously, the fact that I can recite the entire first half of Just Communication from memory, and have been able to do so since I was probably eight or nine, tells you how memorable it is. I will forever be grateful to that Neopets webpage for introducing me to Just Communication and by extension Two-Mix. Minami Takayama, you a queen. I have less to say about the ending theme, but it's nice, even if it doesn't fit the tone of the show at all. Also, as someone who doesn't watch a lot of mecha anime, I did like the mech designs here, especially Wing and Deathscythe, though I have to question why they made every Gundam except Heavyarms share similar color schemes in the first half. The animation, for its time, is fairly serviceable, though there are times when it goes really off model and some characters are drawn with hilariously bad facial expressions that make them look constipated. I also liked the stuff it had to way about the dangers of using robots as tools of war, especially considering war drones and unmanned combat vehicles are a hot topic IRL. I honestly wish Wing had zeroed in on that rather than the constant serial escalation it tried to do for its ridiculously melodramatic, off-the-rails plot.

Sadly, none of those good qualities are enough to save Gundam Wing from being a campy, ridiculous, overblown, convoluted mess of Victorian proportions. Seriously, how in the world did Cartoon Network expect children to be able to understand Wing's plot? I'm a 32-year-old woman and I don't know what the hell is going on half the time! Wing could have been a better series had it restrained its scope, focused more on its characters rather than constant action and bombast, and bothered to flesh out its concepts and setting. Thanks for reminding me why I don't bother with mecha anime, Gundam Wing. That said, I'm not gonna deny its impact on Gundam as a franchise. Wing was the first Gundam series to be exported to North America and was, for a short while, the highest rated show on Cartoon Network of all time upon its premiere. Granted, its English dub is very rough, even if it did allow now famous Canadian VAs like Scott McNeil, Brad Swaile, Saffron Henderson, David Kaye, the late Kirby Morrow, and Brian Drummond to get their feet through the door. Wing helped pave the way for Gundam to gain exposure outside of Japan in general, so for that reason, Gundam fans owe the series that much. I still find myself liking Gundam X, War In The Pocket, and Witch From Mercury better, their own issues notwithstanding. But man, characters like Duo, Quatre, Trowa, and Noin were wasted on this series! They deserve better! While Mobile Suit Gundam Wing's impact on the Gundam franchise as a whole is substantial, its overall quality as a series leaves a lot to be desired, and nostalgia can't really do much to hide its massive flaws. I absolutely wouldn't recommend this as baby's first Gundam series, even if it was that for a whole generation of children who watched it on Toonami/Cartoon Network in its early days, and honestly, there are better Gundam series out there you can watch.

Juliko · Jan 14, 2026

My first completed review of 2026, and it's for a show that's...absolutely whack-a-do. Review was written on January 11th, 2026.

Rating: 54/100

Man...how in the world do you even BEGIN to describe the whack-a-do insanity that is Sasuke? No, I'm not talking about the infamous Naruto character Sasuke Uchiha, I'm talking about a 1968 anime that these days people only know about because AnimEigo decided to randomly release it on blu-ray this past October. Before this, the only thing people knew about it was a scene involving an exploding dog that made the rounds. I was curious about it and decided to buy the blu-ray, since 1. I want to support AnimEigo, and 2. I love me some historical anime. Apparently Sasuke is one of the earliest known anime to be about ninjas, and a lot of tropes and narrative thumbprints it established would influence other ninja series like Naruto down the line. Now that I've seen the whole thing...eh, I wouldn't say Sasuke is very good, but it does make for a very entertaining watch even without its historical significance.

Based on the 1961 manga by Sanpei Shirato, Sasuke takes place in the Edo Period, where ruthless feudal lord Ieyasu Tokugawa rules Japan with an iron fist and sends all manner of assassins to kill those who oppose him down to the very last. Among these opponents, there is also the Sarutobi clan and its best warrior, Daisuke Ozaru. When Ozaru's wife is killed, his son, the titular Sasuke, finds himself traumatized and with a target on his back. At first, Sasuke assumes he is alone in the world now, but a mysterious vagabond helps him out of many a jam...who turns out to be none other than Ozaru himself. Within this war torn land, father and son embark on a dangerous journey, with Ozaru training Sasuke in the ways of the Sarutobi ninja in the hopes that they can strike back against Tokugawa's tyrannical rule, fighting all manner of different enemies along the way. Yeah, if you're thinking Ozaru is going to spend the entire series hiding his identity from Sasuke, don't, because he reveals himself in episode 3. Good thing the show dropped that plot point early on, as it'd be kind of pointless to drag that out for 29 episodes straight without making Sasuke seem really stupid.

You also shouldn't expect Sasuke to be a happy fun time as a show either, because it is dark. Yes, Sasuke looks like a precious little button of a boy (And was voiced by an actual child actor!), but the show itself is extremely violent, dark, and has absolutely no qualms about showing both people and animals dying in brutal ways, with or without any actual blood. One episode has a dog being blown up because a girl sewed a bomb into its leg, another episode has wild dogs being eaten by crows with their corpses shown in full view, horses get blown up by shuriken bombs, another episode has a whole group of children accidentally killing themselves because they tried to imitate a ninja technique and their dad couldn't be bothered to teach them how to execute said technique safely, so on and so forth. If you're someone who can't stomach this level of violence in anything, you'd best skip this show. Considering this was made in 1968, when anime was still fairly in its infancy, there was still a lot of experimentation going on to see what shows could get away with showing on TV. One could argue that Sasuke was the most violent anime to ever air in Japan in that time. Do correct me if I'm wrong, though. That said, for all of Sasuke's attempts to be a serious action show, a lot of the time it borders on being downright silly, both because of it being a product of the 60s and therefore held back by the technological limitations of the time, and because of a lot of narrative decisions it makes.

Speaking of the animation, yeah there's no beating around the bush, this is a show from 1968, so of course it's going to look fairly choppy and limited. I'll give the animators credit for doing their absolute best when it came to actually animating the fight choreography within their technical limitations, even if a lot of it involved showing characters moving super fast with blur lines. But there are times when certain frames and animation cycles will be re-used over and over again, cels will just slide into the frame to simulate a character moving or walking, other times the camera will just linger on a character's face for a long time, and so on. One thing I especially noticed is that sometimes a character will talk even if their mouth isn't moving, or vice versa, their lips are moving but no sound comes out. I will give Sasuke this, while the watercolor background art isn't particularly bright, I like how it uses a lot of grays and thick, smudgy charcoal lines for things like barren trees to really convey just how oppressive the world feels to a child Sasuke's age.

Moving onto the audio, I don't have much to say on the soundtrack, other than that it can be very loud and obnoxious when utilizing certain instruments. Sasuke as a series looooves its shamisens, and you'll be hearing those a lot throughout the entire series. I will say the opening is pretty catchy, and I often found myself singing it whenever I was in the mood. I've only seen the Japanese version of the series, and AnimEigo's blu-ray also has a...random English dub that was just never put out into the public eye until now, which I haven't seen yet. Based on what I've heard of the original language, the acting in Sasuke is admittedly rather mixed, often bouncing between stiff and stilted to over-the-top and theatrical. I'm admittedly surprised the producers decided to have Sasuke be voiced by an actual child actor, which is fine, but even his VA had moments where he was rather green, particularly with the constant repetition of one sound bite of him laughing. A lot of the overdramatic acting resulted in a good chunk of the story not coming off as serious as the series seemed to want it to be.

Granted, the story and characters themselves aren't really much to write home about, even if for the time it might have been considered the best thing out there, and from what I hear, the anime only covered the earliest parts of the manga. Sasuke is mainly just about Sasuke and his dad fighting a bunch of cliche bad guys every few episodes, Sasuke learning responsibility and ninja skills, and helping people with their problems. The characters don't really develop all that much except for Sasuke, and even what he gets is fairly inconsistent. Sometimes he'll be a little badass and other times he'll be whining about his mother and screaming her name constantly for the 100th time. Ozaru I'm the most mixed on because sometimes he seems like a decent dad, other times he'll be a real dick towards Sasuke even when the situation doesn't warrant it. The villains are mainly just cliche cartoon villains who are just there to go after Sasuke or cause problems, and there's a TON of villains Sasuke and Ozaru have to deal with. I can only imagine Sasuke and its manga were one of the first to really try for a story that had more stakes, so I guess a lot of this is due to being a product of its time and not really getting a fine grasp on things like character development yet.

Honestly, you'll probably only remember Sasuke's story because a lot of it is pretty...batshit. It does try to explain how most of the ninja techniques work, even if a lot of it still relies on your suspension of disbelief, but other times it goes in pretty crazy directions just to do what it wants to do. For as dark as the show tries to be, it can be downright silly most of the time too, and I don't think it was intentional. Whether it be because of the limited animation, or just how unhinged and insane some of the narrative decisions in some episodes are, there's so much in this show that'll make your jaw fall to the floor. Even some of the many animal and child deaths start to become rather unintentionally funny after the 20th time in a row. I almost wonder if people would be better off treating it as a comedy because of all the crazy shit that happens in the show. I did find myself enjoying Sasuke because I kept wondering just what kind of shenanigans the show might pull out every episode. Or all this could be my lack of familiarity with Sanpei Shirato's work in general. I don't know if Sasuke's manga ever got an English translation of any kind, fanmade or no. Also, for anyone wondering, episodes two and three have uncensored child nudity involving Sasuke, complete with uncensored genitalia being shown for long periods of time. Those are the only two episodes that have it, but I wouldn't blame you at all if you dropped the show for that reason.

In conclusion, Sasuke tries to be a serious historical ninja show, but it being a product of the 60s and how crazy it gets prevents it from achieving true greatness. It does make for fun riffing material, or something to watch with friends while you're smoking marijuana. Sasuke is a wild ride, though historical significance doesn't always translate to quality. I certainly don't regret buying the new blu-ray, but I doubt I'd go back to it.

Juliko · Feb 5, 2026

This review was started on December 28th, 2025, and only finished today.

Rating: 77/100

More Spy x Family? Of course there's more Spy x Family! What did you expect? The series is one of the most popular shounen manga currently running right now. Did you really think Wit Studio and CloverWorks weren't going to make a third season? For all we know, they probably have plans to make more seasons in the future. I still haven't caught up on the manga, and yes, I know I need to remedy that, but I wasn't going to miss out on more of the anime, even if I still have gripes with it for a variety of reasons. I know I still need to finish my watch of the Code White movie. This season covers three specific arcs: Twilight's backstory, the bus hijacking arc, and the Winston Wheeler arc. And man, this particular season addressed quite a bit of my issues with earlier seasons, especially the second one, in terms of both its overall structure and giving characters some much needed development.

One of whom is Loid/Twilight. Before this season, we knew nothing of his background and how he became the experienced spy that he is now. This season lays out his backstory in full, and boy, they don't pull any punches here, not to mention giving some much needed context for a lot of his behavior and why he's so driven to be the best spy he can be. Of course, his backstory isn't in here just for the sake of contextualizing his character. Whether it was intentional or not (And I'm guessing it just might be), the final quarter forces Twilight to come to grips with his imperfections as a human being, and in a way, he's becoming Loid Forger, the very mask that he conjured for Operation Strix, in all the ways that matter, building onto what his backstory had already established.

But he's not the only one to benefit from more time in the spotlight. Like back in the previous season, both Yor and Damian get time to show what they're like beyond their base archetypes, though Yor doesn't really get a whole arc dedicated to her this time around. I will admit, my biggest gripe with this season, beyond just Yuri and Nightfall being annoying like usual, is that the springboard for the final quarter hinges on Yor being gullible and believing everything those catty bitches she works with tell her regardless of whether what they're telling her is true or not, and I seriously wish she'd stop latching onto everything they say to her. There's a reason why I hate the drawn out misunderstanding trope with every fiber of my being. But back to talking about character development, Yor also winds up becoming more involved in the plot by way of the introduction of Melissa Desmond, Damian's mother, which can open up a lot of interesting storytelling possibilities when it comes to the progression of Operation Strix, something I'm sure the manga has capitalized on at this point. Like with Yor, Damian gets more to do in this season as well, what with the bus hijacking arc that forms the middle of this particular season. I won't spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen this season or read the manga, but this season gives Damian more depth and dimension than he had in previous seasons, which I'm always happy about.

Another way in which this season improves on the previous one is its overall structure. By that, I mean it feels better put together. For example, the previous season had a good arc with the cruise ship, but that was in the middle of the series, and the beginning and end were lackluster. That season started weak, had a strong middle, but ended on a whimper, with it playing its best cards at a bad time when it could have saved it for the end of the season. The producers seemed to realize this and had this season cover three specific arcs, all of which progress both the story and the characters, and don't feel like needless padding thrown in to kill time before the next big thing. This season of Spy x Family remedied the flaws of the previous season, though whether it'll be able to keep up this momentum should it get more is still up in the air.

I've already talked about how good the animation and music are in previous reviews of previous seasons, so I won't belabor the point here, except that I really like this season's opening theme, not just for its unique visuals but for how thematically symbolic it is to this season's themes as a whole. So yeah, this season of Spy x Family was definitely stronger than the previous season was, and a good return to form. I know, I still need to read more of the manga. Don't worry, I'll get to it when I can! It's all but a guarantee at this point that if there are more anime seasons in production, I'll watch them for sure. Though again, I could do with less Yuri, Nightfall, and the catty girls Yor works with.

Juliko · Mar 27, 2026

This review was just finished today.

Rating: 57/100

Man, I really wanted to like Tamon's B-Side. Shoujo manga nowadays don't always have the best track record when it comes to getting good anime adaptations, and even the ones that do don't get to last very long, which definitely worries me in light of the news of both Red River and From Far Away getting anime adaptations. I didn't know much about Tamon's B-Side getting into it, and I figured it'd be a decent time killer based on what I've heard about it. Now, I will admit, I've never read the manga, so my review is based only on the anime itself. Unfortunately, rather than enjoying it, I just found myself constantly annoyed with it the entire time. I do know a little bit about how the idol industry works in Japan, though not to the extent that others that have done extensive research on it have. I tried, I really tried, but I just found Tamon's B-Side as a show to be extremely tedious, annoying, and oftentimes pretty tasteless.

Based on the manga by Yuki Shiwasu, the story goes as follows: High school girl Utage Kinoshita works part-time as a housekeeper so she can afford her fangirl obsession with Tamon Fukuhara, her favorite member of the boy band F/ACE. When work serendipitously sends her to the home of her idol, she discovers that the real Tamon couldn't be more different from his wild and sexy onstage persona! As it turns out, Tamon is a pessimistic, neurotic, insecure mess in real life, and what's worse, he's threatening to quit! Utage refuses to let anyone stand in Tamon's way—least of all himself. What's a fangirl to do but roll up her sleeves and support her favorite singer with everything she's got? Yeah, this has idol fan fantasy all over it, all of it played for comedy and comedy alone. Now, as far as basing its entire premise off a single joke goes, Tamon's B-Side does manage to get some good mileage out of it, such as all the crazy ways Utage has to remind herself not to cross the line beyond just being a loyal fan, and how Utage's face explodes into pink goo every time Tamon so much as breathes in her direction when he's in Hottiehara mode. Plus, the sub translation by Michelle Tymon really helped in this regard, doing a stellar job of doing both a faithful translation and incorporating the kind of teenage internet slang that you just know kids these days will either cringe at or throw out just for funsies, complete with its own jokes.

Unfortunately, if my rating isn't an indicator, I wasn't big on virtually everything else. My first gripe is with the plot. If you take away both the whole singer/loony fan aspect and all of Japan's idol industry quirks, you pretty much just get yet another cliche "insecure man has to be constantly helped by a Manic Pixie Dream Girl" story, only with a very creepy power imbalance involved. It's not enough to have Tamon just be an anxious and insecure person, no no, he's basically made to be the most pathetic, whiny, neurotic mess humanly possible, to the point that he'll say things like wanting to be taught how to take selfies without throwing up without any hint of irony, and has to be dependent on Utage, a high school aged girl, and require her help for even the most basic things. There's an inherent tastelessness to this whole setup that I just couldn't ignore. The guy needs therapy, not some fangirl screaming at him whenever he has an episode, and why would someone like Tamon even want to be an idol, where he has to put on a completely different persona on the regular anyway? Not to mention that we have no idea why Tamon is such a mess, so his two contrasting personas feel much less like different facets of him and more like two different personalities stuffed into one body that the creators slapped together because it makes for funny comedy. It kind of undermines the whole premise of the series exploring the faces that people put on for the benefit of others. Also, the fact that he actually attempts suicide in one episode is not only played for laughs, which is just abhorrent to me, his reasoning for it just makes him come off like a whiny bitch rather than the troubled individual the show wants me to see him as. Sorry, but I think Bocchi The Rock pulled off having a perpetually anxious, neurotic lead character better because not only do we actually see why Bocchi became the way that she is, the other characters in that show have personalities and lives outside of helping Bocchi with her issues, so they feel like more well-rounded characters. Not to mention Bocchi doesn't play suicide for mean-spirited laughs and actually treats Bocchi's issues relatively sensitively.

Speaking of well-rounded characters, as a whole, this is also where Tamon's B-Side is lacking. Like I mentioned above, the series tries to explore the idea of how the faces idols put on for their audience are just a facade and how they can be just as flawed and human as everyone else is off-camera, but it's hard to really care about what it's trying to convey because Tamon's B-Side leans way too hard into exaggeration for literally everything and everyone, characters included. I already mentioned my issues with Tamon, as the lack of reasoning as to why he's such a neurotic mess gives me little reason to care about him in any way, though having his fellow idol coworkers treat him like shit for petty reasons doesn't endear me to them either, furthering the show's tastelessness in regards to how it treats legitimate conditions like anxiety. Not to mention it makes me question why, again, a person like Tamon would even want to be an idol in the first place considering how horrible the environment is for him. While I can appreciate that Utage as a heroine isn't a spineless wallflower in the face of adversity, is passionate about how much she wants to help Tamon, and does grapple with wanting to be closer to him and wanting to keep an appropriate distance as a fan, Japan's idol culture being super puritanical and all, she still doesn't have much to her besides worshipping Tamon. Actually, none of the other characters are all that interesting either. The same issues I have with Tamon are repeated with all the other members of F/ACE, as their supposed authentic selves are just as banal and archetypal as the fabricated, artificial personalities they market to the masses. Ouri being a jackass makes some sense considering his upbringing, and most people in the entertainment industry tend to let their fame and privilege go to their heads, but the second the show made Ouri fall in love with Utage because how dare she like Tamon and not him, I rolled my eyes. The only member of F/ACE who doesn't suffer this problem is Natsuki, who actually does have a decently fleshed out backstory that makes his behavior make a lot of sense, though by this show's standards that's still not saying much.

Maybe my indifference to the show is because I'm not into Japan's idol industry and the whole oshi/idol parasocial relationship it's trying so hard to promote and show as desirable and attainable. Actually, that's why Tamon's B-Side doesn't work for me: For all its attempts at getting comedic mileage out of it, it's still trying to portray the idol industry as being this great thing even when it pays lip service to how bad it actually is for the people involved. Japan's idol industry only sees its human performers as perfect, marketable products, with even the slightest flaw being enough to cause a huge scandal and tank their entire career even if the issue isn't something that should be made into a big deal or was just a one-time offense outside work. This isn't even exclusive to just singers either. Look what happened with Maya Imamori in No. 1 Sentai Gozyuger. Tamon's B-Side wants to milk the idol industry and all its quirks and idiosyncrasies for comedy, shilling it for all its worth, and all the gags about how Utage will be murdered if people find out she even associates with Tamon beyond being a fan and how Tamon is treated by both his boss and coworkers are just utterly tasteless and very troubling. Like, I don't expect Tamon's B-Side to be the next coming of Oshi no Ko or anything, I just don't want it to gloss over how bad the idol industry actually is and want the show to treat it and Tamon's issues with more gravitas and sensitivity. Oshi no Ko had plenty of its own issues in its attempts to portray how unforgiving and cutthroat the entertainment industry can be. Do I even need to talk about the whole Hana Kimura debacle? Tl;dr, I don't like that Tamon's B-Side makes light of how utterly awful the idol industry can be to both idols and fans and tries to make the parasocial relationships between fans and idols seem presentable and desirable.

Furthermore, the music isn't all that great either. All of F/ACE's songs are your typical boy band bubblegum J-pop you've heard in a million other things, offering nothing you haven't heard elsewhere. The animation is...fine, for the most part. I actually think the CGI performances looked surprisingly good...though do they really have to render the guys in CG when they're just on stage talking and not just singing? It really took me out of the immersion. I will also say that the voice acting is fairly good too. I definitely got a laugh out of Saori Hayami going against her usual typecast and going full ham as a loud, loony fan who's probably off her gourd in more ways than one. Gimme more Hayami being a screechy gremlin! Let her do more character archetypes besides the motherly housewife or the smart girl. But that's all the praise I have to offer for Tamon's B-Side. If there does wind up being a second season, I probably won't watch it. If you're into this, good for you. You got more enjoyment out of it than I have, so more power to you. I just found Tamon's B-Side to be an annoying, tasteless, irritating vial of snake oil that turns me off more than anything. I'm not sure if I want to read the manga considering how much I disliked the anime, but who knows? I'm just happy to be done with this show.

Juliko · Mar 31, 2026

This review was written on February 24th, 2026.

Rating: 76/100

So...this show just randomly came out of nowhere. Love Through a Prism is a historical shoujo anime by Wit Studio, directed by Kazuto Nakazawa and with scripts by one Yoko Kamio, who shoujo manga fans will know as the mangaka behind Boys Over Flowers, or Hana Yori Dango. I've never read the manga or watched the anime myself, and from what I hear, there's a lot about it that really hasn't aged well and comes under quite a bit of scrutiny nowadays. That said, when I saw that first trailer for Love Through a Prism on Twitter...not gonna lie, I went "Hell yeah!!" Seriously, everything about this just screamed tailor made for me. After years of literal scraps, we're getting an original historical shoujo anime, whose premise involves a girl going to art school and finding love. How could I not be excited about it? Now, to be fair, I know Kazuto Nakazawa as a director can be pretty hit or miss. Fena Pirate Princess was definitely not one of his better works, but with Love Through a Prism being a more down-to-earth project, having more episodes, and written by someone with years of experience in the shoujo genre, it has more room to flesh out its characters and story. So what's my verdict after seeing it? Well...it tried. Love Through a Prism is definitely a breath of fresh air in an era saturated with bad isekai and hype machines, and it's a good show, but it doesn't really rise beyond good IMHO.

In the year 1914, 21-year-old Lili Ichijoin travels from her native Japan to London, England to attend the prestigious St. Thomas Art Academy to major in oil painting. She has loved painting since she was a kid, but her strict mother would much rather she give up on painting and take up the kimono business. That said, her mother does allow her to attend St. Thomas under one condition: Become the number one student at school within six months. Should she fail, she must return to Japan, get married off, and take over the family kimono business. Lili's time in London proves quite fruitful, meeting all manner of people, such as the eccentric top student Kit Church, to her flighty but well meaning new friend Dorothy Brown, but becoming top student at St. Thomas isn't going to be an easy task, and Lili is more than willing to take up the challenge.

Okay, I need to get this out of my system now, because I encountered a startling amount of people who think this, and I want to set the record straight. Reading this premise, you're probably thinking "Wait, isn't this just an anime version of Emily In Paris?" To that I say: What in the world gave you that idea? This and Emily In Paris are absolutely nothing alike, other than the very base premise of a woman going to a different country and that both are streaming on Netflix. That is where any and all comparisons end, and to claim Love Through a Prism is just an anime version of Emily In Paris mandated by Netflix is doing the show and the people that created it an extremely gross disservice. For one thing, Love Through a Prism actually has likeable characters and doesn't constantly indulge in offensive stereotypes about different countries every chance it gets. Furthermore, Love Through a Prism isn't even the only anime/manga/game with the premise of a character going to a foreign country and getting to know the people and culture around her. Remember Ikoku Meiro no Croisee?

Alright, now that I've gotten that off my chest, let's talk about the show. From an animation standpoint, Wit Studio really brought their A-game here. Backgrounds are nicely detailed and richly painted, character motion is upbeat and dynamic, and what little CGI is used thankfully doesn't stand out too much a lot of the time. I will say, it was pretty ballsy of Kamio-san, a mangaka who usually writes stories about high school kids in Japan, to go out of her comfort zone and have a story take place in early 20th century London. Now, I can't comment on whether her portrayal of it and its people are accurate, as I'm not British and I don't have much knowledge of British history. I have heard that some hair styles and fashions used are a bit inaccurate from other sources, but again, I can't comment on their accuracy myself. Hey, I'll applaud Kamio-san and the team working on this anime for at least trying, and from what I can see, they succeeded in at least bringing London to life on an artistic level. I do have less to say on the soundtrack. It's nice, but not very memorable, and I did find the ending song to be a bit grating.

I will admit, I am very conflicted on the characters. What do I mean? They're not bad or poorly written or anything, far from it, even if they do still adhere to your typical archetypes like the tomboyish girl, the brooding loner, the supportive best friend, the comic relief, and so on. Lili definitely carries the whole show on her shoulders with her boisterous, take-no-crap personality, and she has the kind of 90s shoujo anime lead zest that's quite refreshing in this day and age...even if the anime indulges in one trope that I really hate, and that's having the girl be given myriad opportunities to tell the guy she likes how she feels, with many characters flat out SCREAMING IN HER FACE to do so...only for her to squander it every single time. Kit as the lead boy is...fine. Nothing you haven't seen before, though if you're familiar with Boys Over Flowers and know how much of a repugnant piece of shit the main guy in that was, Kit is a massive improvement. However, I do feel one of my biggest issues with the show is that it focuses quite a lot on Lili and Kit at the expense of other characters. Peter, Joffrey, and especially Sakura get hit hard with this, as while Lili's friends are all decently likeable characters, they don't get much time in the spotlight, nor do they really have their own character arcs that allow them to grow and change over the series. Sakura, being mute for most of the series, is literally nothing but walking background scenery, and we never get to see how she overcomes her muteness. The show teases Peter having an arc focusing on his insecurities as an artist and jealousy over Kit's talent before finally coming to terms with his flaws and what he wants to do in life...but any development he does get, and the path to him actually having these revelations, all happen entirely off-screen. We only see the aftermath, not the journey to get there, so it feels like the show is skipping out on fleshing out its side characters in favor of focusing on Lili and Kit's romance. The only character who I feel really got to develop and have a whole arc is Catherine, who starts out as the haughty alpha bitch who hates Lili, but has to look inward and realize her relationship with Kit is never going to go anywhere, and the show did a fantastic job bringing her to life and actually showing her changing and evolving over the course of the series. Which is way more than I can say for the rest of the cast besides Lili, Shin, and Kit.

That said, for all my issues with the characters, I will say this: Yoko Kamio's writing for the male characters here is a massive improvement over Boys Over Flowers by a country mile. These days, one of the biggest criticisms people lobby against Boys Over Flowers is that the male love interests that the series expects you to like, root for, and care about often came off as extremely mean-spirited, cruel, and downright abusive a lot of the time. I know the manga pioneered and popularized a lot of tropes and cliches that other shoujo series would capitalize and improve upon over time, but if there's one trope that needs to die, it's the idea that a violent, rude, abusive boyfriend makes for an ideal partner. Thankfully, it seems like Kamio-san realized this as the years went on, and the male characters in Love Through a Prism are not only much more cordial and respectful, but whenever someone does do something they shouldn't, they always get called out at the very least, and Lili's reasons for falling in love with Kit make much more sense. Hey, at least none of the guys here are violent towards the girls or attempt to rape them, so here you actually have damn good reason to want to root for the characters and hope for them to get together. Kit's only problems are his devil-may-care attitude and not bothering to explain himself at crucial moments, which, while definitely frustrating at times, is much better than being a flat-out abusive piece of shit whose actions the show tries to bend over backwards to justify and romanticize.

But improvements in some areas don't always stop Love Through a Prism from following other classic yet frustrating shoujo tropes, like the aforementioned miscommunications and misunderstandings during crucial moments, a group of bullies picking on the main girl because the main guy likes her and not them, the main girl not realizing people are actively being cruel to her until they flat-out tell her to her face that they are, and so on. The story doesn't have any twists or turns, and you can predict what'll happen from a mile away. I will say, the final few episodes are some of the best in the series, from deliberate artistic decisions that go against convention (You'll know what I'm talking about) to having the characters actually handling certain issues like actual adults and talking things out maturely. The series could have easily gone the cliche route with how two characters get together and eventually break up, but Love Through a Prism actually decided to take the smart route in a way that pushes the characters' development further and ends things on a surprisingly satisfying note.

I do want to talk about one other thing before closing out this review: The English dub. Netflix apparently decided to go the extra mile for this dub and hire all British actors for it, which makes sense as the series takes place in London. But this isn't actually a common practice for English dubs, and the only anime that did get British VAs for their dubs were a smattering of OVAs that Manga Entertainment dubbed back in the 90s and early 2000s, and even those dubs were...of questionable quality at best. Other anime that did take place in England often just hired American VAs entirely. Video games have been hiring British VAs since the 2010s, like Xenoblade, Hundred Line, Dragon Quest, Metaphor ReFantazio, and so on. This does seem to be changing somewhat, as some anime have started hiring more British talent, and I'm glad to say that Love Through a Prism's dub is fairly good all things considered, the occasional off lip sync and stiff performance notwithstanding. I'm always down for learning about new talent like Leader Looi, Christopher Bonwell, Shaun Mendum, Alex Wingfield, Feliks Mathur, and so on. The only performance I thought was rather uneven was Catherine's VA, who sounds fine when she's talking normally, but sounds like a raspy old lady when she's screaming. Shame, because I know she's doing her best.

In conclusion, Love Through a Prism is a nice little historical shoujo anime that isn't going to bring the house down anytime soon. But in an era where the anime industry is still at the mercy of the glut of bad isekai that get churned out every season, it's quite a breath of fresh air. There are plenty of shows like this that I do find are better, like Ashita no Nadja and everything in the World Masterpiece Theater, but that's not to discount everything Love Through a Prism managed to do. Honestly, it's infinitely better than how Nakazawa's last attempt at directing a show, Fena Pirate Princess, turned out. He definitely hit a home run with this one, though I wonder if that's because he had Yoko Kamio help him out. Still, if you want a nice, breezy shoujo anime that looks good, feel free to give this a shot. Netflix certainly isn't going to make much attempt to promote it, and from what I hear, another movie with a somewhat similar premise, Paris ni Saku Etoile, just came out in Japan and might overshadow it. I'm curious to see how that one is compared to Love Through a Prism.

Juliko · Apr 25, 2026

This review was just finished today.

Rating: 86/100

There's a lot of debate nowadays over what counts as a true video game. Some say only games that have deep, in-depth gameplay count as video games. Others say games like visual novels or kinetic novels don't count as games because their gameplay consists of just either reading or choose-your-own-adventure stuff. If you want my opinion on this whole debate, I only have this to say: I think it's stupid to have arbitrary standards for what should count as a video game or not. Whether it be elaborate first person shooter stuff, or just simple tales of a woman living her life, who cares whether it should be classified as a true video game or not? You can say that about literally any form of media or art ever. It's like asking whether a movie only counts as a movie if it has such-and-such things in it. Video games are just another form of storytelling at the end of the day, and you can literally do whatever you want with them. There's really no limit to what you can do with a storytelling medium except yourself and money. Hotel Dusk and Another Code art director Taisuke Kanasaki didn't let that stop him from doing what he wanted, and that was creating a little short game called Dear Me, I Was... And yes, that's the actual title, and yes, it's given that title for a specific reason that I won't spoil.

Dear Me, I Was... is a very short, very linear video game focusing on the life of a young woman and the people around her. The game never tells us anyone's names, and there's zero dialogue. No joke, you can complete the entire game within 45 minutes. This game is like Bambi in that it shows the entirety of a woman's life, from the untimely death of her father when she's a child, to making her first friend in school, finding her first boyfriend, and all the ups and downs, joys and tragedies big and small, and the decisions she makes throughout, good and bad, with her passion for art being the framing device connecting it all together. There's nothing inherently special about the heroine and the people around her, and honestly, that's the game's biggest strength. The game depicts an ordinary woman and her life in as down-to-earth and grounded a manner as possible, and its this tender restraint that allows its emotional beats to hit. The game doesn't beat you over the head with melodrama, nor does it ever feel calculated or desperate to wring the tears out of you. It's confident enough in its presentation that it lets you form that emotional connection to the heroine naturally and organically. The heroine could be anyone you'd see on the street in real life. Dear Me, I Was makes great use of "Show, Don't Tell" something that many struggle to make good use of.

But the game's lack of dialogue isn't the only thing that sets Dear Me, I Was apart from other games. For one, Kanasaki-san made the deliberate choice to make use of rotoscoping. Rotoscoping is an animation technique that animators use to trace over motion picture footage, frame by frame, to produce realistic action, created and popularized by animator Max Fleischer. Rotoscoping involves a lot of unique technical skill that, if done badly, can make the characters fall square into the uncanny valley. Dear Me, I Was isn't the first video game to make use of rotoscoping, and this isn't even Kanasaki-san's first rodeo with it. I haven't played any other games that use rotoscoping that I know of, but I enjoyed how it was used here. The character designs did lean into realism, capturing the subtle yet commonplace human movements, but the equally deliberate usage of a watercolor visual style help to both keep the character designs from looking creepy or disjointed, and play into the heroine's passion for art. Basically, the game looks great on a visual level, and it uses its visuals to good effect, showing the heroine's world being vibrant and colorful during her happier moments, to having it be depicted in muted blues and grays during the sad parts of her life, another good use of "Show, Don't Tell."

You're probably wondering what the gameplay is like. Honestly, there isn't much of it. Some moments involve clicking on things, such as showing the heroine eating breakfast or putting in a key to unlock a mailbox, or dragging objects around, such as dragging a pencil cursor to show the heroine drawing or a hand icon for just pulling items out of an open box. Interactivity is minimal, and because the game tells a completely linear story, you could pretty much call this a kinetic novel or basically an animated short film in a video game form. But is that really such a bad thing? Dear Me, I Was isn't interested in giving you easy answers to what's going on in the story, as it invites you to fill in the blanks yourself with your imagination or your own interpretations. The moments depicted in these vignettes are recognizable, such as one's first death, the joy of making a friend that shares your interests, the moments of quiet solitude and sorrow, allowing you to be immersed in this woman's life and how it unfolds. You learn about these characters through their actions and how they impact the heroine, rather than overlong exposition dumps, and while I do wish I could have learned more about these characters, such as their names or why they do what they do, what Dear Me I Was offers is still substantial enough to chew on.

In conclusion, Dear Me, I Was... is a very short yet poignant video game that isn't interested in being anything except what it is, and I love it for being what it is. Yes, it could have been either a movie or a book with its lack of gameplay and interactivity, but does that mean it shouldn't exist as it is? I missed out on this game when it first came out, as while I did own a Switch 2, I haven't set it up yet (And still haven't), so I wasn't sure if I wanted to buy a super short game exclusive to a console I hadn't set up yet. Waiting turned out to be a good decision, because on February 12th, 2026, Arc System Works released it on other platforms, including PC and the original Switch, the latter of which I played Dear Me I Was... on. If you're looking for a short, poignant game to kill 45 minutes with, I highly recommend Dear Me, I Was. It's not going to bring the house down any time soon, but I immensely enjoyed my time with it.

Juliko · Apr 26, 2026

Ohhhh lordy, this book. This review was written on March 12th, 2026.

Rating: 47/100

No joke, when Seven Seas first announced they licensed this light novel called I Wish I Could Meet You Again On The Hill Where That Flower Blooms and read the premise, my first thought was "Wow, I wonder how much this is gonna try to romanticize or glorify Japan's World War II history?" Yeah, let's face it, Japan doesn't exactly have the best track record when it comes to acknowledging its own war crimes, especially in regards to what they did in countries like China and Korea, and would much rather never give them a second thought. Having studied the formation of modern Japan in college, this even bleeds into their media and pop culture, where Japan always portrays itself as the victim rather than the perpetrator, and that aspect should absolutely be scrutinized and criticized. Granted, I do feel even Japan's own depictions of WWII in their own media has value outside of that and shouldn't be wholly discounted. That said, even they aren't above treating their own history rather thoughtlessly, so I was sure this light novel about a modern-day girl being sent to 1945 and falling in love with a kamikaze pilot would be a lazy, overly romanticized mockery of World War II. To my surprise...yeah, it's exactly that.

14-year-old Yuri Kano can't stand how boring and suffocating her life has become, and has started acting out. She doesn't care for school, hasn't made any friends, and annoys her teachers with her outspoken nature. After she gets into a fight with her mother, Yuri leaves to go cool her head, hiding in an old air raid shelter. But to her surprise, she finds that she's been transported to the year 1945, right in the waning days of World War II. As she's struggling to make sense of what's going on, she encounters 20-year-old Akira Sakuma, a kamikaze pilot who helps her out. Yuri tries to adjust to her new surroundings, but finds herself falling in love with Akira, even though she knows she shouldn't. Can love bloom on borrowed time, or will history tear them apart before it ever has a chance? Honestly, I think you already know the answer to this question. But yeah, not one of the more compelling premises for a book like this, and having a modern girl be magically sent back in time just feels lazy to me, like the creator couldn't be bothered to just make a historical piece about someone who actually lived through the period and show what their life is like, something In This Corner of the World, Godzilla Minus One, and Ushiro no Shoumen Daare did quite well IMHO.

But hey, it's like I always say, even a cliche premise can be done well with good writing and execution, so surely its prose and character writing can make up for that, right? Well...the prose is good. I never had trouble following what was going on, and its descriptive enough to be engaging but not so much so that people in its intended demographic can't comprehend it. It's fine for what it is, and the authoress mentioned in the afterword that this was her first novel, so it's to be expected that someone's first attempt at writing isn't going to be groundbreaking. I unfortunately can't say the same for the characters because they are all about as bland and generic as white rice. Every single character has one archetypal personality trait that they never grow out of, and even Yuri's whole arc of going from a bratty teenager to someone more appreciative of what she has falls completely flat because her growth feels less like she organically changed into a better person and more like she instantly becomes nicer the second she falls into 1945. It also falls flat because of something else I'll mention further down. Plus, everything comes much too easily to Yuri, so it never feels like she's truly challenged or forced to confront her views. Not to mention Akira is way too perfect for his own good, bordering on an overly idealized Gary Stu who can do no wrong, and all the other characters exist just to shill Yuri and nothing else. The only character who I found to even be somewhat interesting is Itakura, a minor character, but he leaves the story as soon as he gets any semblance of character.

Not to mention the very thing this novel tries to sell, the romance between Yuri and Akira, is also its biggest detriment. I don't buy their romance at all, namely because 1. Yuri falls for him literally at first sight, 2. There's no point in getting invested in it because Akira being a kamikaze pilot pretty much telegraphs that it'll never happen, 3. You really expect me to believe that Yuri would suddenly want to devote herself to a guy she's only known for a few days at most, who she only sees at rare intervals because of the nature of his work? 4. Akira actually reciprocates her feelings at the very end, and I honestly can't fathom why he'd find himself falling for a 14-year-old girl he's only known for a few days considering he's accepted that he's going to die in battle. Finally, six-year age gap. Ew. I honestly think Shiomi-san would have been better off had she made the main character someone who actually lived through the period, or had her be well acquainted with Akira, because not only would it be more interesting, it'd make whatever fleeting romance they'd have more palpable and genuine. Though Shiomi-san stated in the afterword that she made the MC a modern day girl sent back in time because she felt readers would relate more to Yuri upon seeing that people growing up now consider World War II to be too far removed from their own lives to relate to. I can understand the sentiment, but this just feels like a really lazy way to do it.

Now, to the novel's credit, it does make a valiant effort to condemn war itself, the violence that ensued from it, and the whole concept of kamikaze pilots. I don't know if this particular bit was in the Japanese version or part of the translation, but it very subtly mentions that Japan attacked other countries as well, though doesn't go into detail beyond a throwaway line, and even mentions that the Yasukuni Shrine is now considered controversial due to enshrining the remains of war criminals. It's not the most damning condemnation of its own war crimes, but hey, I'll take what I can get. I think at this point we ought to just accept that Japan is never going to outright condemn its own war crimes in any of its pop culture. You certainly don't see anime covering stuff like, say, the Rape of Nanking. The authoress clearly meant for this to be a historical coming-of-age romance with the message that people who never grew up during war need to appreciate what they have and not take it for granted. Now, I'm not opposed to the message here, as it's a much needed one, especially in these trying times, and considering how entitled people have gotten in the past few years, there are definitely people who need that message hammered into their heads.

However, I think the novel completely botched its own message too. The prologue is meant to show Yuri as being a bratty teenager who annoys her mother and teachers, and she does do so, but both her mother and teachers are depicted as so comically, exaggeratedly cruel and mean-spirited towards her that I couldn't bring myself to see Yuri as being entirely in the wrong. The teacher yells at her for the oh-so-terrible crime of not paying attention in class and then throwing a tantrum like a toddler when she snarks at him, and the book wants us to sympathize with Yuri's mother, saying that her husband left and has to work two jobs to support her. However, in practice, we never see Yuri's mother be anything except angry, even emotionally manipulative, and abusive towards Yuri. Seriously, what is it with Japan and trying to convince people that parents who slap their kids, call them a spoiled brat without irony, and say guilt-trippy things like "You always cause me so much trouble all the time! What are you going to do to make it up to me?!" or "You're no child of mine!" means they're good parents? Furthermore, the novel also violates "show, don't tell" by not attempting to show Yuri's mother being kind to her except for one scene at the end, reducing any moments they might have had together to just one-off paragraphs that don't amount to anything, which further undermines its message of being grateful for what you have. Because of all this, the message of not taking your life for granted comes off more like "Hey, kid, you really ought to appreciate the mother that yells at you, hits you, and calls you names. You need to be happy that you get to go to school where you get treated like garbage for existing by teachers who couldn't give two shits about you." Like...why should anyone be grateful for people who do nothing but berate them and treat them like garbage? I mean, sure, Yuri does act like a brat sometimes, but lots of teenagers pulled the shit she did at least once in their lives, and I find the idea that she has to just accept being treated like a leper for...just being an annoying teenager to be absolutely abhorrent. It'd be one thing if the novel was longer and expanded more on the other characters to give them more depth, but alas, tis not to be.

In the end, I Wish I Could Meet You Again On The Hill Where That Flower Blooms is just another cliche time travel romance that ultimately doesn't really have anything new to say. It only uses World War II as a backdrop for its trite love story, doing little but making a mockery of WWII and all that happened in it. If you look at it from that lens and don't expect too much from it, you can find a short, sweet read that doesn't offer much in the way of substance. I might check out the live-action movie and see how that fares compared to this. I know they changed Yuri's age from 14 to 18 in the movie, which gets rid of the icky age gap aspect of it. If you're a history buff who expects it to be treated with the weight and gravitas it deserves, give it a miss.

Juliko · May 3, 2026

This review was written on July 5th, 2025, but not finished until last night.

Rating: 86/100

I think it's safe to say at this point that The Apothecary Diaries is not only one of the most popular light novel series currently ongoing, but its anime adaptation is lauded as one of the best out there. Hell, we just got an announcement that a potential third season is in production! I liked the first season despite not having read the manga or light novels before this, and I really need to get around to fixing that. But I wasn't going to miss the second season, if only because it covers novels where the plot really ramps up in terms of stakes and scope. Sure enough, season two absolutely delivered on that front, even if parts of it don't quite jive with me for personal reasons. But hey, I won't say no to more adventures with everyone's favorite poison loving gremlin.

Taking place immediately after the first season, it's business as usual at the Rear Palace. Maomao spends her days serving Lady Gyokuyou as her apothecary and poison tester, though this time around she's pregnant with her second child, and Maomao is assigned to help make sure the birth goes smoothly. All manner of new things happen, such as adopting a new kitten, educating the servants to help them become literate, a fancy caravan bringing in goods from the capital, and to top it all off, Maomao even makes friends with a new servant girl named Shisui, who is...quite quirky in her own ways. But looks can be deceiving, as underneath these mundane, every day happenings, a sinister plot is being carried out that could completely upend everything, and Maomao finds herself caught in the middle of it all whether she wants to be or not.

Usually when anime get a second season, their animation quality tends to drop a little bit. Thankfully, this was not the case for Apothecary Diaries. It still looks just as good as the first season did, and even the points where it doesn't aren't all that noticeable unless you really take the time to look. The soundtrack is also just the same as it was in the first season, though I did notice a significant drop in insert songs, with there only being one in this season compared to the first season. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I liked all the insert songs in the first season, short as they were, though the one we got here was just as fantastic, especially if you know the context in which its used. I admit I wasn't a fan of the second opening, as I found the song to be a bit too hard rock for my tastes, though I understand its visuals and thematic purpose.

The characters really benefit from the second season's tighter focus on its plot, evolving further than they did in the first season. Several of those who were introduced late into the first season become the centerpiece of the second season, and are used to fantastic effect here. Even the new characters, running the gamut from virtuous to villainous, are equally compelling and complex, but I can't explain in detail because doing so would require me to delve into huge spoilers, and the mystery behind everything is this season's entire backbone. Let's just say that everything manages to come together for all of them, and everyone has a part to play in this elaborately, delicately written show. Besides, how can you go wrong with seeing more of our favorite little green haired, blue eyed, poison loving shitgremlin? I'm still kind of on the fence with Jinshi though. I understand what the series is trying to do with him, but I still find myself being put off by some of his more dubious and questionable actions towards Maomao, especially his lack of respect for her personal boundaries, though to be fair, the series does call him out on it.

Speaking of Jinshi, there is one aspect of the show that I admittedly don't like, and I know fans are gonna hate me for saying this: I hated the so-called "frog" scene. Yeah, I said it, but before you pull out the pitchforks, let me explain. I have two reasons for not liking this scene. One, it feels too reminiscent of the whole boob groping gag that I really hate in anime, even if it is a huge plot reveal. Two, and this is my main reason for hating it: I honestly feel the whole thing felt really contrived in that the whole incident happened because Maomao happened to fall in a way that just so conveniently landed on Jinshi's package, in a way that felt really unnatural. Basically, it makes no sense for Maomao to fall on top of Jinshi in a way that her hand would just slide all the way down to his dick, and the way it happened just screamed to me that the writers made it happen this way rather than allowing the story have it happen naturally. Like, what person, when falling on top of another person, would wind up having their hand slide all the way down to someone's penis? If you're trying to stop yourself from falling, a guy's dick wouldn't be the first place someone would want to put their hand! If you want her to find out that Jinshi isn't really a eunuch, fine, but couldn't it have been done in a way that made sense? For example, why not have Maomao's knee accidentally rub against his crotch? Since she'd be laying horizontally on him, with her knees being in close proximity, either one of them could easily rub against him in a way that Maomao could feel, and it'd still clue her in on what's up! It'd still be icky, sure, but it makes much more sense than having it so that Maomao's hand just...magically lands right on his balls like it had a magnet on it specifically designed to attach itself to them. I know this is a weird thing to harp on, but I just couldn't help but find the whole thing to be really forced and contrived, what with all the ridiculous, bizarre leaps in logic made in order to have Maomao find out that Jinshi isn't a eunuch! There were so many other ways they could have had Maomao find out Jinshi's secret, and they chose the most ridiculous and frankly unrealistic way to do it.

I do have one other issue with another character's actions near the finale, which I'll hide under spoilers: When Loulan confronts her mother over her actions, she at one point slaps a woman because, as she claims, the woman in question fell to her mother's corruption and ignored her child Kyou-u. However, it was established that Loulan's mother Shenmei forced the people of the Shi clan to partake in drug-filled orgies, actively looks for any opportunity to hurt someone for shits and giggles, and ruled over her entire town with an iron fist. For all I know, this might be more elaborated on in the light novel, but from the audience's perspective, Kyou-u's mother was probably blackmailed into doing Shenmei's bidding so Kyou-u wouldn't get hurt or killed. When you look at it that way, Loulan is basically victim-blaming this poor woman when the latter is just as much a victim as everyone else is under Shenmei's thumb, and that just left a really bad taste in my mouth, especially since Loulan was established to not only be a decent girl who wants to stop her mother's reign of terror but knows about everything she's been planning. You'd think Loulan, also a victim of Shenmei, would be more sympathetic, especially since she witnessed her sister be continually abused by Shenmei for most of her life. I know this is also a weird thing to harp on, as this is just one small scene near the end of the series, but it left enough of a bad taste in my mouth that I couldn't overlook it.

But compared to the first season, season two's flaws are rather miniscule, as everything else about it manages to shine quite brilliantly, if you couldn't tell by the score I gave it. Season two of The Apothecary Diaries brings the series to new highs, adding onto what makes the series so good in the first place. It certainly does help that not only are we going to get a third season, but an original movie featuring a wholly new story by the series' author. You can bet I'll be watching those as soon as they drop! I'm especially curious about season three as I hear the novels that'll cover has an arc that focuses on Lishu, and if there's a character in this series who absolutely deserves a happy ending and needs to get the hell out of the Rear Palace, its her. So yeah, while not without its flaws, season two of The Apothecary Diaries hits another home run, and I can't wait to see what else season three and the movie have in store. I really ought to finally get around to reading both the manga and light novels.

Juliko · May 7, 2026

This review was written on April 29th, 2026.

Rating: 43/100

Fun fact about me: One of the first anime I watched in its entirety fansubbed was a little show called Harukanaru Toki no Naka de: Hachiyoushou. I was about 12 years old when I found it and back then I thought it was the best thing ever. I can't tell you how many HaruToki songs I downloaded off dark corners of the internet at that time, and I even watched the OVA for the second video game without subtitles. Now that I'm an almost 33-year-old woman, my tastes have changed and evolved quite a lot since then, and I've started revisiting some old anime I used to watch. I plan on doing the same with Hachiyoushou next month. Just now, I finished a rewatch of the OVA adaptation of the second game, called Harukanaru Toki no Naka de 2: Shiroki Ryuu no Miko. Honestly, I have no idea why I rated this an 8 on MAL when I first started up my account on there. There's no denying it, Shiroki Ryuu no Miko is literally nothing but an animated commercial for the video game it's based on and has absolutely nothing else to offer beyond that.

I know people like to riff on the first game for supposedly being a rip-off of Fushigi Yuugi, but Haruka 2, from what I can see, is literally just a rehash of the first game, complete with its characters having the exact same looks and personalities as their Haruka 1 counterparts. The only real change from Haruka 1 is the fact that the main heroine this time around, Karin Takakura, is pulled into Kyou to sort out a conflict between the retired and current emperors, which is causing evil spirits to start terrorizing the town. I'm guessing there's a lot more to this plot in the game, and apparently this OVA covers the first couple of chapters. Not that it really does a good job at explaining anything to you, because the OVA can't be bothered to make any coherent sense whatsoever. For one thing, everyone talks about there being a conflict between two emperors, but we never even so much as meet or see them, nor do we even know why they're fighting in the first place. Not to mention there's some sort of conflict going on between Kazuhito and Akifumi, a pair of brothers who are the Crown Princes, but we never learn why they're estranged other than Kazuhito is evil and is the cause of the evil spirits terrorizing Kyou in this entire OVA.

Yeah, if you haven't guessed, three episodes isn't anywhere near enough time to flesh out any of the characters in this story, and there's a LOT of them. Not to mention, again, the Haruka 2 characters are literally just the Haruka 1 characters in all but name and slight redesigns. None of them grow outside their assigned archetype, both the heroes or the villains, and they all talk in the same cryptic yet nonsensical dialogue in which they never explain anything that's going on, so they're all about as bland and interesting as slabs of wood. Hell, one girl does nothing but sit around staring at a crystal ball for the entire OVA, so what was the point of even putting her in there?! I found Karin to be especially annoying to watch, as all she does is act indecisive and never bother to ask any critical questions, such as why someone who is allied with her suddenly wants to take her into the woods and FUCKING KILL HER, even after he changes his mind about it! How is it that a webcomic I'm reading on DeviantArt actually bothers to show how being transported to another world, away from everything they hold dear—and actually questions and fights against her circumstances—better than this does?! But of course, because Karin is uber special and has the magic Deus Ex Machina power, everything is all hunky-dory when the plot decides that its convenient.

I admit, when I first learned about the Haruka series, I thought every other Haruka anime was made after the Hachiyoushou TV series. But just recently I found out that the OVA Ajisai Yumegatari predated it by two years and was meant to be a sidestory taking place in the game's universe. Similarly, Shiroki Ryuu no Miko's first episode came out in 2003, the year before, but didn't finish until 2005, just before Hachiyoushou finished its run. In light of this, a lot of things about the animation for both suddenly make more sense to me. Hachiyoushou has a brighter color palette, but it looks much more blurry and washed out. Shiroki Ryuu no Miko has a more muted, earthy style and looks a bit more clean and smooth, but actual character motion is still fairly limited. I also noticed on my copies of the episodes that some scenes involving fast paced movement or transitions from one scene to another had the framerate sped up. It's easy to notice because it always happens during a panning shot or when the camera is moving really fast, and I found it extremely jarring. The CGI effects weren't all that good either, which is an easy tell that this is an early digipaint OVA. The music is fine for what it is, but I found the singer they used for both the opening and ending themes to be way too loud.

What else is there to say, really? Harukanaru Toki no Naka de 2: Shiroki Ryuu no Miko is just a glorified commercial for a video game and nothing else. For all I know, all my complaints about it might have been rectified in the game itself, but if you're not Japanese, good luck playing it because no English translations exist for any of the Haruka games at all! This OVA won't make any sense at all to anyone who's not already a dyed-in-the-wool Haruka fan. And believe me, I actually do want to play the games because they actually do sound interesting and cool! But I honestly don't see any point in anyone watching Shiroki Ryuu no Miko. I'm glad it got completed English fansubs, but that's about all the good I can say about it.

Juliko · May 15, 2026

This review was started on April 16th, 2025, but not finished until today. Man, it took me way too long to finish this review.

Rating: 80/100

Come on, you guys all know by now that I love My Happy Marriage. I practically gushed about it in my review for season one. It's not the most original story in the world, but in my opinion it really manages to do a lot right with the material it has that makes it stand out from other Cinderella-type stories like its contemporaries and predecessors. The first season proved to be pretty successful for Netflix to the point where a second season was commissioned. Hell, as of this writing, there's confirmation that a new anime project for it is in the works, a three-episode sequel special that will also be released on Netflix. I was definitely looking forward to the second season, albeit with some trepidation because I really hated volume 3 of the light novels because of both one character and what the series did with said character in the end, which I'll get more into further down. Overall, I liked the second season of My Happy Marriage, but I do feel its not as strong as the first season, for several reasons.

Taking place immediately after the first season, Miyo and Kiyoka continue living their lives until they hear news that a mysterious group called the Gifted Communion is causing trouble. Kiyoka and Miyo are sent to the countryside to investigate, with Miyo staying at Kiyoka's villa with his parents. Unfortunately, Kiyoka's mother Fuyu dislikes Miyo and wants nothing to do with her. But crochety in-laws prove to be the least of Miyo's problems. The summary I just gave mainly covers volume 3 of the light novel, but something you should know is that unlike the first season, which just covered volumes 1 and 2, season two decided to blow through four whole novels' worth of material, resulting in the pacing being faster and a lot of content getting cut in the process. On one hand, I don't necessarily mind that they did this for some, as I absolutely hate Fuyu and didn't want to go through half a season consisting of just her being cruel to Miyo. On the other hand, this does result in this season feeling rather rushed, and not allowing the character interactions and atmosphere to settle down and breathe, which is one of the things that made the first season so good. The first season took its time and let you take everything in, whereas season two really wants to get to the meaty stuff right away to the point of having some characters behave differently than how they do in the novels.

Not to mention the anime makes quite a few changes and divergences from the novels. Some changes I appreciated, others just made me raise my eyebrows. At one point, Kiyoka gets kidnapped by a rogue member of the Usuba family, and Miyo, Kazushi, and a shikigami taking on the form of Kiyoka's younger self go to save him. The anime depicts the whole sequence as a blood-pumping action scene, really raising the stakes in a way that forces the three of them to work together and save Kiyoka by any means necessary. Nothing like this is shown in the novel at all, and Miyo manages to reunite with Kiyoka without much trouble. Even the context in which Kiyoka gets kidnapped is changed. In the anime, Miyo is desperate to warn Kiyoka that he is about to be targeted, but he gets shot by Arata before she can do so. In the light novel, she manages to tell him, and he gets kidnapped the very next day, with Miyo feeling as though she didn't do enough to prevent it from happening beyond just warning him. None of this really hurts the quality of the anime, I feel, and I can understand needing to leave certain things out because of lack of time, but purists probably aren't going to like that these changes were made at all.

Of course, even with a lot of those changes, the backbone of the show is still the characters, and they do still manage to grow and change quite a bit over the course of the series. This season also introduces several new characters, all of whom play their roles well and allow the current cast of characters more to do outside of their usual circles. These characters also serve to both highlight and advance Miyo's growth over the course of this season, such as Kiyo, Kaoruko, and Usui. I won't lie, while I appreciate that the anime removed a lot of Fuyu's more overt cruelty towards Miyo in the novel, I still can't bring myself to like her, if only because I can't jive with the idea of a character who was presented as 95% antagonistic all throughout her time on-screen and then the story backpedals and goes "Oop, she's nice now, so let's just forget how unambiguously awful she was to Miyo!" at the very last second in a super awkward, forced manner. I'm also still not too keen on Arata, even with his reasons for acting the way he does in this season being explained, though I'll give him this: He's much less of a tool here than he was in season one. The highlight of the season is Miyo's growth, and she really comes into her own here, especially in the final set of episodes, where she becomes much more proactive and awakens her powers. People who complained about her in season one will be very happy to see the results of her growth in this season.

The animation and music are still in top form too...though I really wish Netflix's awful video compression and encoding wouldn't make the footage look so pixelated, especially when there's a lot of movement. Seriously, they need to fix that, because the show looks gorgeous and it deserves better than to be subject to awful video encoding! And how can you go wrong with Evan Call's soundtrack? You can't, that's why. Thanks to this and Frieren, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Evan Call stan and he's still putting out bangers here. The new opening and ending songs are very nice too, even re-using the same singers from the first season. Both the Japanese and English audio are great as usual, the latter being an interesting case since Netflix switched dubbing studios from Iyuno to VSI Los Angeles due to the big Netflix leak of August 2024. The ADR staff changed, but they still did their due diligence and kept the core cast, which is more than I can say for certain other dubbing studios (coughcoughPixelogiccoughcoughPantyAndStockingSeasonTwocoughcough). Plus, the actual quality of the dub never suffered any dips, which is always a good thing.

In conclusion, while season two of My Happy Marriage does suffer from rushed pacing and trying to do way too much in a short amount of time (A problem that is, unfortunately, commonplace in this current era of anime), it's still a fairly strong series and a good follow-up to season one. I'm always down for more time with Miyo and Kiyoka, and you can bet your ass I'm gonna check out that three-episode special whenever that drops. Also, hey Netflix, let companies license your stuff for home video and stop being stingy about the dubs!

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