The Winter 2017 season has officially started and boy, am I glad! (Hey, I need something to stop me from going insane from all of this linguistics research!)
As I did for the Summer 2016 season, in this post I’m going to be giving you my first impressions of each series that I’ve watched so far. Whilst writing this post, there are some anime from this season that are yet to be aired, so I will instead cover the first impressions of those shows in my mid-season review post. ^-^
In this post, I will be covering the following series in the following order:
- Seiren
- Manasume-kun no Revenge
- Spiritpact
- Demi-chan wa Kataritai
- Idol Jihen
- Gabriel Dropout
Seiren
The first thing I noticed about Seiren is the animation style. It has an animation style that’s quite nostalgic, really, reminding me of the likes of Fruits Basket but not as nostalgic as the vibe that Orange would give, if you get the gist? No? Okay, moving on… Seiren is a twelve episode long series with three different, stand-alone stories involved; my prediction that there are four episodes which focus on each of the three girls that Shōichi comes into contact with. The first episode was all over the place, quite frankly, and that, along with the fact the only thing that grabbed my attention was the lookalike of Haikyuu!’s advisor and how the animation style that didn’t agree with me, means that I probably won’t continue to watch the series. Unless there’s some big woo-wah later on that grabs my attention, that is.
Masamune-kun no Revenge
This is surely going to be one of the best shows of the season. Unlike Seiren, I loved the animation style of this show – it was so clean and fresh, it reminded me slightly of the animation style of ReLIFE in some weird way. Some have commented on how the story doesn’t seem to be appropriate, however, I think it’s too soon to pass judgement on the actual story straight away. (Without reading the manga, of course.) Personally, I can’t wait to see what happens next for Masamune and Aki. My only hope in terms of plot so far is that we’ll be seeing a lot of the adorable Kojuurou. As long as the series keeps up with its fun, unserious plot, then I’ll continue to watch. A shout-out has to go to the great ED by ChouCho as well, which is accompanied by a similar realistic image of foliage as Orange, which, if you hadn’t guessed by now, I absolutely love. <3
Spiritpact
Now, I don’t watch many yaoi-based series. The only yaoi I usually appreciate is the occasional Prussia and Austria Hetalia fanfiction. So, for me to want to watch this show – it was quite a shock to myself. Hear me out, though. The premise of the show sounded great: a young man struggles to make his way through life earning money as a fortune teller and part-time computer repairer, stumbles across an exorcist who’s fighting an evil spirit, leaves and ends up dying where the exorcist asks him to make a pact with him to become his Shadow or whatever it’s called. It could have been great, but it certainly undelivered. Not only was the script itself bad, the actual voice-acting was terrible and it’s not often I say that about the actual seiyuus. The main character’s voice was annoying as heck and on several occasions, the animation for the mouth movements didn’t match with the voice audio. This was too bad to watch and I don’t know how I managed to watch the entirety of the first episode. Considered it dropped.
Demi-chan wa Kataritai
Okay. Remember how much I praised Amaama to Inazuma for being the cutest show of Summer 2016? Demi-chan wa Kataritai is, without a doubt, the cutest show for Winter 2017 and I’m definitely not alone on this front this time around – the hype I’ve seen for this show since the first episode aired is unbelievable. The show actually surprised me with how good it was. I began watching it with low expectations, but the delivery of the different demi-humans was done brilliantly and I can’t personally wait to see what happens concerning the succubus in the show. Hikari, the little vampire, is also freaking adorable. The scenery in this show has been animated beautifully and genuinely left me speechless, especially the use of the falling cherry blossom. This is another show where I can appreciate the music, particularly the ED where I like how they’ve animated the different coloured crayons to coincide with the piano playing in the background. I definitely recommend you watch this show if you haven’t already and I’ll definitely be watching this one week-in-week-out!
Idol Jihen
Of course, what sort of person would I be if I didn’t watch the idol shows of this season? The first one, Idol Jihen, didn’t disappoint, either. I began watching the show with mixed expectations, for, despite being hyped for it for a long time; I had been told that the show was “quite silly”. I disagree. It follows the story of political parties using idols for their representatives, basically, and if UK politics were like this, I’m pretty sure a lot more Brits would be interested in politics. (I’m thinking along the lines of more people liking Ed Balls after his ‘Gangnam Style’ performance on Strictly Come Dancing…) It’s a bit of a weird concept at first, don’t get me wrong, but I certainly don’t think this is the ‘sleeper’ anime of the season, nor do I think it’s disappointing on MAPPA’s front. I could understand why fans of the studio would be disappointed, particularly after the success of Yuri!!! On Ice, but they should at least give it a shot – just because it’s an idol show doesn’t mean it’s animated any worse. Plus, the music so far has been surprisingly good, which is always a bonus!
Gabriel Dropout
My, my, yet another disappointment from this season. I can see from my notes that I went a little OTT on this show and perhaps I was nit-picking slightly, but that doesn’t change the fact that I was extremely disappointed with this show. It depicts an angel called Gabriel, having the perfect life up in Heaven before being assigned to help the human world. However, instead of helping actual humans, she ends up playing a video game (which, may I add, seemed to come out of nowhere) where she sees the appeal of helping various different characters on there and starts becoming a NEET. If the pun in the angel’s name isn’t bad enough, there’s also a devil called Satanichia and a sadistic stalker of angel called Raphiel, whose names make me cringe so much. Satanichia’s laugh is as annoying as Renge’s from Ouran Highschool Host Club, so if you do watch this show, be prepared for that. The only interesting character from this show is Raphiel, who is probably interesting to me as she’s voiced by the talented Kana Hanazawa who, let’s face it, is in (figuratively) everything these days. The humour in Gabriel Dropout is extremely repetitive, so it’s not really an ideal show for me as I get bored of the same joke very easily. Not only that, the humour is also very OTT at times – again, not really my style. I actually got bored half way through the first episode, which probably wasn’t what the creators wanted considering the episode is separated into four 5-minute long ‘shorts’. I thought this was going to be fun and exciting show, but it really wasn’t fun or exciting to watch. Dropped.
So, with my continuing/dropped ratio being 50:50, the Winter 2017 season is somewhat unpredictable for me at the moment. I can only wonder what the other series are going to bring and hope that they’re somewhat better than some of the series I’ve already discussed! How about you? What are your first impressions of the season so far? Let’s have a discussion in the comments below!
Until next time!
– Amelia xo
Great overview. I usually start shows after they are finished, but for the first time I actually started watching a show that has just started called Fuuka. I saw the opening tune for this one, on Heyitszel’s blog, and it grabbed my attention. It so far has been a great series (even though there were only two episodes so far ). As for all these shows that you have named, a couple of them really sound interesting, so will be check some of these out 😀
I don’t know why I haven’t checked out Fuuka yet. All I’ve heard is good things about it, though, so maybe I should… ^^”
Wasn’t Spiritpact redubbed into Japanese? That might explain the mouth movement but to be honest that probably doesn’t change the fact that the show was pretty terrible. I’m continuing to episode two out of curiosity to see if the can make it worse.
Ah, you raise a point there, actually! But even in the original Chinese show, from the snippet I just looked at, at least, the characters still seem to be pretentious. Just seems to me that it’s a bad show, but of course that’s my opinion. :^)
Oh no, it’s definitely a bad show regardless of language or dubbing. On that point I totally agree even though I’m committing myself ot watching little more of it.