In Volume 3, the story continues with our protagonist shedding yet another identity and going to Pirate Land. Well, it's called differently, but basically it's a sea full of bad and good pirates, so we're getting a bit of a One Piece vibe. The hero continues to level up with impunity, which kind of makes the story stale, but the new lands and characters are fun enough. Next time, volume 4: Back in Backlund... yeah, it's not called that, but it should have been.

  In Volume 2 the story continues, with the action moving away from the small town of Tingen to the capital of Loen, Backlund. With greater powers come greater enemies and lots of adventure. Cutlefish's style is almost the same as for Volume 1, which means that I can see the manga images in my head while I am reading the text.

  While the fun is still there, it's getting a little old. Our protagonist behaves even more like a gamer advancing in levels in a game playthrough - edited so that we don't see the fails and reloads - and other than the world building which continues to be top notch, it all starts to feel a little repetitive. Yes, the author is moving the action to another city with another culture, with different characters, and in Volume 3 he continues to do so, by moving the action in the pirate infested seas. But even that makes it feel like each volume is another level in a game, compounded by the increase in "sequence" by the lead character. It's starting to get less and less believable that a noob that started "playing the game" a few months before can easily outmaneuver and overpower mature Beyonders, powerful evil spirits, demigods and even gods.

   Yet, you know the feeling. You've read the first 10000 pages, what's 17000 more, right? But I can't stop thinking what this world would have become if the author would have collaborated with a master writer who could have given the plot the emotional depth often found in much less creative works, but necessary for fully involving a reader in the fantastical world. This could have been the Chinese Harry Potter, I kid you not.

   Anyway, going back to reading the series...

  It all started with a Chinese animation, quite nice and flashy, but also very confusing. Also called Lord of Mysteries, I soon found out that it was based on a series of books by an author with the funny name Ai Qianshui de Wuzei (translated to Cuttlefish That Loves Diving) who published all of them as web novels. So I looked for it online and I found it - on the Internet Archive no less, so I guess legally free? - in EPUB format. I had no idea how many books there are and I just thought this was the first. I was a bit surprised that it took a longer time to load than other books, but I assumed it's some weird Chinese format or something. But no. What happened is that the epub contains ALL of the books: 1400 chapters, 27000 e-book pages!

  The writing style is very direct, it's not bad at all, but it feels different from the usual Western books I have been reading, even if it is an English translation. The world building is amazing, a combination of steampunk and interesting magic, with elements from all kinds of myths - ancient and modern. The story is a bit too linear, with the main character being good at everything and being rational and good and strong and ingenious. A bit of a Martin Sue. But I've only read the first volume, so this might change. Overall, I quite like this series!

  The first volume has about 130 chapters and tells the story of a "keyboard warrior" (an Internet troll, basically) who gets sucked in a fantasy world where magic is real. And before you groan and stop reading, even if it does feel a bit like the setup of a video game, it's quite a complex world with many cultures, interesting characters and complicated magic systems. I was saying above that the animation is confusing, that's because the first five one hour episodes cover the entire first volume. It cuts a lot of things off, reorders or combines characters and storylines, so that it kind of makes sense, but without having read the book I couldn't enjoy it. Also, the animation has more of an anime/manga feel with everybody beautiful and flashy and amazing visuals during battle. The book is less so, more grounded and makes a lot more sense.

  I have to say that writing a book like this is not easy at all. The author planned a lot of it before starting writing and it shows. A lot of effort has been poured into this series and it elevates it to levels above most books in the genre I've read recently. If I have one complaint is that the character gets everything right, even if he's just a kid who spent to much time on the Internet and should have very little life experience. He adapts to the new world like he's playing an RPG game and doesn't seem to feel anything amiss. He comes off as a bit of a psychopath that way, or at least high on some sort of autism spectrum.

  I've already promised myself that if the quality of the book doesn't drop significantly, I will read all of the volumes. In fact, there is no real separation of the volumes. It is indeed a book that has 1400 chapters. So if I stop it will be because I got tired or the writer really dropped the ball. I hope that doesn't happen.

  Unique visuals, inspired by Japanese theater, tell the story of a hunter of demons, or mononoke. It's not action as it is basically a procedural, where the hunter needs to determine the root cause of the appearance of the demons. A bit too drawn out, but very nice otherwise. The weird graphics, the sounds, the weird symbolism all work together to build an unsettling feeling that evokes the supernatural without ever trying to fully explain it.

  Mononoke has twelve 20 minute episodes, where a story is told in two or three episodes at a time. It is a spinoff of Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales, by the same studio, that I have not watched. I just rewatched the Mononoke series - of which I remembered nothing - because Netflix just released a film called Mononoke - Phantom in the Rain (or Paper Umbrella?) and I wanted to know the context.

  The plot is as follows: an elfish looking person carrying a mysterious sword and advertising himself as a Medicine Seller is always in situations were mononoke appear. These are like ghosts "supernatural disease" created by the intertwining of the fates of people or whatever. There is a catch, though. The sword can only be drawn when the Form, Truth and Regret are known: the true shape of the demon, its physical manifestation and its spiritual manifestation. In other words, one cannot vanquish a demon without understanding it completely. Pretty therapeutic.

  In the entire series we don't learn who the mysterious hunter is. The stories, though, happen in different historical eras, thus implying he is not human.

  I can't say the anime is perfect, though. Scenes seem to be drawn out, kind of like Japanese theater itself where they move, say something very slowly, then everything stops, then they do it again. Maybe that would have been fine if not for unexplainable moments of verbosity when, after an episode and a half of saying a few words syllable by syllable, the hunter was suddenly dumping pages of wiki lore before doing anything. But I liked it and maybe the film will be more refined. Just have to see.

  The anime Dan Da Dan has a funny and endearing first episode where two awkward high school students dare each other to test each other's paranormal/alien beliefs. And what do you know? Both find stuff! But then it gets into the same terrible Japanese clichés of monster of the week and new nakamas and high school dramas.

   The start music is fun, too, which probably hits hard when you first watch the series, but then, together with the content, it fades into the background.

   But the first episode is worth it.

  What do you remember from the Terminator movies? It's the Skynet killer robot, obviously, the people who seem to always be related somehow, and a hero that needs saving for the sake of their work in the future, but running for their lives in the present. In Terminator Zero you get all of these, to the point that they feel a little overdone. But the animation is good and the story is interesting, adding some logical elements that I've only seen in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which I liked a lot and wanted more of. I loved that they set the action in a clearly different timeline than our own and also tried to make it clear the ridiculous cycle of trying to fix the past from the future.

  Unfortunately, they've decided to add children to the mix. And I mean children that need a nanny, not 24 year old Claire Danes. Most of the time it's the children and their very Japanese emotions filling the screen, while their father, a mysterious tech mogul, keeps saying cryptic things almost until the end of the movie for no good reason. The Terminator is thankfully not in the shape of Arnie and the human fighter from the future is a woman. It also is set in Japan. The series ends with a promise rather than with closure, although I doubt they will make a second season.

  It's eight episodes of 20 minutes each, but I think the story was a little too simple for 160 minutes and it could have easily been a more concise two hour animation film. What's the difference, really, between a series you release all at once and a feature film anyway?

  While I applaud stories said in animation - readers of this blog may already know that I believe that's how you do and say brave things today, especially in sci-fi and horror - being a Terminator story meant it was locked in some preestablished framework and couldn't be too creative. Just consider taking some pages out of Screamers, for example, and you understand what I mean. I would watch seasons and seasons of Terminator anime than hope for something decent in live action anymore. The thing is that they already are very far advanced in special effects, but those also cost a lot of money, meaning that you either underdeliver on viewer expectations or have to make a whole bunch of money to break even. Animation is not like that and it's also a lot more flexible.

  All in all I liked the show and I recommend it, but don't expect too much.

  Having seen the French animation film Mars Express, a combination of Asimov's robot stories and Blade Runner, which I enjoyed very much, I tried to find something else written or directed by the same people and so I found Lastman, an animation series with two seasons so far and a third to be released sometimes in the next years. And I loved it!

  Imagine the emotional drive and mystical mystery of Fullmetal Alchemist, but combined with the satirical view on society and monster of the week feel of Jojo's Bizarre Adventures and you get Lastman, only with the irreverent French touch enhancing the experience. Yet, while those shows were quite content to keep the same feel and story throughout their run, Lastman's plot evolves, the characters change, time passes in a meaningful way.

  The moment the second season, quite different from the first and perhaps even better, ended, I immediately went to read the comics. Used to the Japanese manga, I expected to find the comics being the exact same story and drawn characters as in the series, with all I would have to do would be to find where the anime ended and continue the story. Yet, as soon as I found them, the Lastman comics were very different from the anime! At least at first glance, maybe there will be some overlap in the middle or something, but I was surprised - pleasantly so - because now I have an entire new story with new characters to enjoy.

  So the story is about a lone boxer who stumbles upon a mystical mystery and has to take care of an orphaned girl, while supernatural monsters are hunting them down. There are also some fight tournaments, criminal city kingpins, magical drugs and a decadent and hypocritical society. A lot of characters, all of them having their own motivations, growth and occasional foray into the other side (villainous allies and heroic fuckups). And there is a lot of profanity, violence, humor and satire.

  Bottom line: I absolutely loved the series. Was one of the better highlights of my life in the last months.

  P.S. I am sure the idea of a powerful fighter protecting a girl named Siri from otherworldly magical monsters is just as new to you as it is to me.

  Mugen no Juunin: Immortal, or Blade of the Immortal, may confuse some people because it's one of many adaptions to the screen of the same story. There have been anime before, live action adaptions and so on. The one I am talking about is the 2019 one, that was released on Amazon Prime.

  Part Twilight Samurai, part Ninja Scroll, this is a story of a lot of characters on various sides, fighting each other for their own reasons, while the Shogunate is happy to influence the issue or downright force it, since it sees all swordsmen and by extension all people who choose to better themselves against all cultural pressure and outside any organization, as threats.

  The film focuses more on the character's motivation and the politics that lead to the situation they are caught in and less on the fight scenes. It's not like you don't get fight scenes, but many of the fights are bypassed when they don't actually further the story. At 24 episodes of 20 minutes each, it's long enough without swordplay porn inflating its duration, so I appreciated that.

  Now, the main character is Manji, the Immortal, a man who cannot die and regenerates any wound due to a curse, but in truth that's a detail that doesn't affect the story too much. One could easily do something similar with a guy who is just that good that every hit on him is superficial. There are some episodes and some characters dedicated to his particular affliction, but if you remove them, you still get a solid era storyline.

  The animation is really good, as well as the Japanese voice acting - I really like Tsuda Kenjirou's voice, and if I have to find one issue with the series, it's that there are too many characters. I understand why the same people who vote isekai anime every year as 10/10 would not be able to understand (or maybe even abide) such a complex story. And I say abide because it is sort of subversive, as well. It's not hard to understand how modern Japan got the way it did after such cleansings of independent thought.

Bottom line: a very good anime which I wholeheartedly recommend.

  If you liked Death Note, you will like The Promised Neverland. It's all about outsmarting your opponent and staying one step ahead to keep alive. If you like, this is the child of Death Note and The Island, the one with Obewan McGregor. The plot, though, is really convoluted and the "smart" things people do are not that smart. In the end, it becomes kind of boring. But it was a decent manga and anime, with a lackluster live adaption as well, but which was well received. So what do I know?

  Amazon apparently wants to do an American live action series. Why?

  The story happens in a classy orphanage where children 6 to 12 years old live happily waiting to be assigned to a family. Only this is actually a brain farm for feeding demons. Yeah, stick with me. Some kids find out and they try to make a plan to escape, while their mom/warden/brain dealer tries to outsmart them. I liked the anime's first season, have read a little of the manga from then on, but I do suggest the first season of the anime is the only thing you need to watch, and only if you like this kind of stuff.

  I've also fast forwarded the Japanese live action adaption and it's pretty much the same, with some extra scenes that prepare some of what happens next. Also, with some really weird casting choices and TERRIBLE wigs. So I guess even the Japanese mess manga adaption up :) Schadenfreude improperly felt!

  Bottom line: might not be bad, but the most interesting part is the premise, rather than the execution.

  OK, so I really don't like Battle Royale kind of crap. I didn't like the games, I didn't like the manga and I didn't like the movies. The idea that people would want to live so much that they would just risk everything, kill everybody and entertain their captors feels offensive to me. Yet regardless of the genre and my aversion to it, Deadman Wonderland is a dumb story, with dumb characters and unoriginal ideas. Imagine a combination of Jojo's Adventures and Squid Game, but without any of the nuance or intelligence of either. Kids with special powers in a prison fighting each other under the control of psychopathic wardens.

  I stopped watching almost immediately. You can't portray the audience of the "hunger games" in the story as mindless soulless ghouls, manipulated and entertained by psychos, and expect me to be entertained by the content of the show. But even if I didn't make that connection, everybody was acting like they were mentally retarded. No, thanks!

  Every time and again I feel nostalgic about anime and manga. There are so many of those that I loved as I was growing up and later, so I periodically come back to it, hoping to get that feeling at amazement for a great story told well through drawing and/or animation. Yet if the Japanese are good at anything it's churning consistently decent product efficiently at scale. While their characters always seem to want nothing more than to grow in level, they keep doing the same things over, and over, and over again, nicely tucked in bento boxes for easy consumption.

  In Kaijuu No. 8, a guy who always wanted to join the force defending humanity from kaiju (giant monsters) is infected with a kaiju like thing and thus gets his wish. It's the typical shonen manga/anime thing where people protect their comrades, gain levels of power that are nicely quantified and monitored and overcome obstacles through the power of their feelings. It reminds me a little bit of Bleach, which was also about a guy who was fighting in a force dedicated to killing monsters, while being part monster himself.

  The problem I have with this is not that it's bad, but that it has been done before, almost identically. The comrades are the same, they have the same motivations, the psychopathic villains are the same, the levelling up is the same, the fights are the same, the feelings are the same. At no point does the story stop to look at the people in all of those destroyed buildings in Japan, on the political complexities of having a military force that is not the country's main military force gain so much power and influence. There is no attempt to communicate with the kaiju, once the intelligent and articulate ones appear, no attempt to find out where they are coming from, either. Just a mindless grind of ever increasing power in both sides. There is no explanation on what powers the monsters or the weapons, no real reason why individual people fight monsters without support, no attempt to understand how a human became a kaiju and so on and so on.

  The biggest issue in this story is not "how is it possible a human turned into a kaiju?" but "if he uses this more he will may not be able to turn back into a human". Like the most important part is not the safety of the country or its people, but the fascistic obsession to racial purity.

  Bottom line: after watching the first 10 episodes of the anime I read the manga up to chapter 108. There is nothing there. Nothing new. Just more characters with levels, people emoting on mindless battles and people surviving by the power of their shared feelings. If you like that kind of stuff, perhaps you should join the army. They kind of think the same way.

  I really tried, but it was impossible to enjoy, especially after the second season started. It's like someone took the wrong bits of Naruto, Fullmetal Alchemist and Bleach and mashed them together in this mindless story. I was pushed to it by the very nice writing YouTube channel Savage Books, but in this case they messed up. Or maybe they were talking about season 700, the manga or whatever.

  So in Jujutsu Kaisen there is this kid who is preternaturally strong, but also kind, good looking and loves his grandfather. In hospital, grandpa tries to tell him something ominous about the boy's parents, gets interrupted, then proceeds on spouting some nonsense about helping as many people as you can, even if it's just one, then promptly dies. And then it appears his friends in a spiritualist high school club are about to unleash an ancient curse, so naturally someone from a secret society comes to take care of it, the boy gets in the middle and ends up eating a mummified finger that gives him demonic powers but also a demon inhabitant of his body.

  All well and good, but then it's just one full season of Japanese Hogwarts, complete with one dimensional quirky characters, dangers that seem to be handled exclusively by untrained kids, manic teachers and disgusting evil villain who attacks randomly and usually pointlessly. The inner demon barely makes any appearance and to be honest, his allies and friends seem a lot more unhinged. I would have maybe watched the mind numbing uplevelling of the main characters some more if they didn't completely change page in season 2.

  The animation is different, the characters are different and, even if I know the regular ones will return in a few episodes, I couldn't make myself care. I understand that almost everything in Japan has a form and the more derivative and ritualistic something is, the more powerful - hell, it's the same in Western society, we just don't openly admit it, but this was being derivative in all the wrong ways, then changing things in the worst possible direction. And of course, it was terribly boring as well.

Bottom line: no more "Sorcery Battle" for me.

P.S. Oh, hell, it's even a sequel. Yuck!

  The premise of Ninja Kamui is interesting: superhuman ninjas join forces with a Mark Zuckerberg caricature in order to control the world. Yet some people left their shinobi order and decided to lead their own lives and that cannot be tolerated. So high-tech ninjas, a combination of robot and magical fight techniques, are sent to kill these deserters. Inevitably, one gets pissed and decides to kill the assholes. The animation is very good and the initial idea great.

  But from then it just goes downward: the same boring Shōnen tropes, the faceless armies of disposable goons and their sadistic freak of a commander that need to die every episode, the dedicated policeman and the sexy hacker sidekicks, the cruel shinobi overlord, the psychopathic but weak man in power. Even the fights are derivative, bringing almost nothing to the table.

  Worse, this is an original anime production, meaning you can't go online and read the manga and they release one episode per week on HBO. Best wait until its inevitable cancelation and watch it all at once.

  I can't say that The Unwanted Undead Adventurer is not fun, or addictive, or that I didn't watch the first four episodes of the anime and then read all the manga till chapter 59. Because I did. That being said, it felt like hentai! This guy wants to be an adventurer, which is exactly what it sounds like, a computer game "career" that involves going to mysterious dungeons and fighting and killing monsters to increase in level. However, he meets a dragon who eats him and poops him as a skeleton. Only a skeleton that can use three methods of magic and can increase in level like a motherfucker. He reaches unfathomable levels of skill in days which he failed to do as a human in ten years. And as he does that he evolves into higher level monsters.

  An interesting premise, which I hoped would reveal some sort of kinship with the creatures he mindlessly killed as a fascist adventurer and so a dilemma that can only be solved by character development, but no, he just keeps killing "monsters", gets more and more female loli allies while he gains more skills and meets more and more outlandish characters which are either fully fledged good guys and allies or bad manipulative rich enemies and nothing in between.

  I guess it is a product of this era, where people write literature and manga from the only life experience they have: other manga, TV, movies and computer games. And since movies and TV series are increasingly idiotic and losing market share to the more addictive computer games, I guess those win. And here it is: a story which is no story at all, with heroes that increase in "level" but don't evolve at all as characters and with rules that are followed as tight as a Japanese accountant's anus.

  Such a disappointment, since the story started so fun and, even if it were rooted in MMORPG mechanics, could have evolved (pardon the pun) into an interesting satire. Alas, it goes on as deadpan as it started, taking itself seriously despite any connection to reality. The characters don't behave like people, more like NPCs, the world is completely mechanical and boring once you think about it, and you almost wait for the moment when they introduce the loot box or the pay-to-win articles.

  At first, Shiki feels boring. Nothing really happens in the Sotoba village and, when vampires come to live there, no one bats an eye. When people start getting mysteriously sick and die, people first worry then, finding no easy to swallow explanation, get used to it. When strange things start happening, people invoke reason and "the way things are" and refuse to see what's there in front of their eyes.

  There is something terribly creepy in Japanese horror because, at the heart of their culture, normality is paramount. Things have to be in order, regardless of the desires of individuals or even whole social classes. The cleanliness and politeness of the Japanese, that we Europeans love to admire, are mere consequences of this oppression, which happen to be positive. Yeah, that's a thing in almost every culture, especially those which boast liberalism and freedom (God forbid you are not a freedom loving liberal!), but the Japanese take it to a different level.

  In truth, if they would have left it at that, a small village committing suicide by denial, it would have been powerful enough, but Shiki just starts from there. Because you see, when people turn to vampires, they don't get possessed by demons or lose their feelings or turn into instant psychopaths. Instead, they retain their personalities, but have to deal with the unstoppable feeling of hunger for human blood. And once they get it, they do what people do best: rationalize it somehow as a positive, necessary and unavoidable thing.

  So my advice is to stick with the story, even if it starts kind of slow and obvious. There is a lot to unpack, even if basically it is a harsh criticism of the small mindedness of people. I liked it a lot. You can read the manga online or watch the 22 episode anime. It is a complete story, there are no sequels and there is no point in there being one. I watched the anime and I liked it. I think in this case, it might be better than reading the manga.