This time on KanColle, good golly, Fubuki is really rather boring.

I mean, it’s not normally that much of a problem in the show, because a certain degree of grounding is necessary so that things don’t feel too weird then they throw the girls into a bloodbath of a skirmish. The problem this time is that the episode is straddling something of a tonal middle ground – for all the jokes about Yamato not being a hotel, it’s not an outright comedy episode like the Kongou-class or the Akatsuki-class episodes, but it’s definitely not an action episode like last weeks. It’s really just a kinda toothless episode about the melancholy of being an undeployed shipgirl.

Which isn’t to say it’s an awful episode of anime – despite all, any episode of KanColle is something at least I tend to enjoy more than an awful lot of other shows – but it’s definitely been the weakest episode so far for me, and that’s definitely because Fubuki is just that darn boring.
(more…)

This week on KanColle, well, I guess a Light Aircraft Carrier appeared.

At this stage of the series, I think it’s probably pretty obvious that the gag episodes of KanColle, rather weirdly, actually have substance more to them in addition to simply being more entertaining to watch on a surface level. It’s partially because they’ve continued to struggle to make Fubuki a particularly entertaining character, even if she is surrounded by crackpots like Kongou, but mostly it’s just lacking a certain density of content in comparison. There’s less going on, and there’s fewer goofy historical references to enjoy picking apart.

Which isn’t to say that episodes like this aren’t entertaining, but it does leave me with considerably less to write about.
(more…)

I have to admit, this weeks episode of Cinderella Girls didn’t pan out in exactly the way I was expecting. I mean, it was pretty obvious that Mio was setting herself up to some kind of fall throughout the entire episode, but the usual conclusion to this kind of thing tends to be something disastrous happening during the performance itself – stagefright, dance accident, forgotten lyrics or what have you – rather than things technically going without a hitch.
(more…)

The German submarines are attacking, and they’ve already conquered Pixiv.

There’s an event running in the KanColle game at the moment. As in most of these games, the reward for actually partaking is accquiring some rare in-game items, which likely won’t be available otherwise for months, for progressing beyond certain points within the duration of the event. One of the new ships introduced to the game as a reward item is the German-build submarine U-511.

The German ships in KanColle tend to attract a little attention regardless of the specifics, in so much as their designs and art are provided by Shimada Humikane (or Fumikane), best known as the character designer on Strike Witches and Girls und Panzer. U-511 is no different, but there’s a bit more of an arc to her than there is with most shipgirls.
(more…)

I do wonder what the Japanese anime industries obsession with Pop-up Pirate variants is. I mean, it’s not quite common enough a thing for me to consider starting up an entirely new blog segment for recording their appearances, but this is hardly the first time I’ve seen such a game in anime, if maybe the first I’ve see with a cat involved.

Anyway, it’s somewhat hard, coming out of this weeks episode of Cinderella Girls, to not retrospectively feel that we were a little bit spoilt across the last two episodes of the show, at least where the animation production was concerned. I would say that it was, therefore, somewhat unavoidably disappointing to get something which was just kind of ordinary after two episodes lead by particularly idiosyncratic and accomplished animation directors, but the fact is that there are even a handful of real continuity clunkers in this episode that really shouldn’t have slipped through.
(more…)