In today's episode 1 watches from worst to best:
Phantom World - The lamentations of the kyoanis in my twitter timeline fill me with an indescribable joy. The show sucks hard though.
ERASED - The setup is cool but I couldn't care less about anyone in it. It felt very rushed (I'm narrating every aspect of my life! Suddenly I'm at work! And have superpowers! And some high schooler has a crush on me! Hey its my mom! "Giving any of this time to sink in", what's that?) and is very obviously an adaptation in a bad way with the over-reliance on internal narration, kinda wooden script that feels like it would work better in manga or novel form, and strange pacing for an anime. I'll stick around for the concept, but so far this isn't impressing me like I feel it should be. I'll probably end up just picking up the manga instead if the anime continues to show symptoms of bad adaptation.
Oji-san and Marshmellow - The MC is kinda moe and that's about all this has going for it. But at three minutes per episode it's not like there's much time wasted watching it, so I'll probably stick around anyway.
Haruchika - It's pretty OK, better than the usual fare you get with this sort of concept. Despite being an obvious rip-off of some of Kyoani's work, I'm liking it better than any of its "influences". The main characters are fun and have a nice dynamic. We seem to have traded Kyoani's gay baiting for actual homosexuals, which I am very OK with. I also like the character designs and Namaniku ATK's style seems to have gotten a better shake here than it did in Chaika. All that said most of the animation was kind of average at best, with the band scenes being noticeably bad. The "mystery" aspect of the episode, while a good lead-in for the last scene, wasn't particularly interesting.
Active Raid - This sure is a Taniguchi show written by the guy who did Kamen Rider Kuuga and Akibaranger. The concept is neat and the comedy is fairly well done, but the mechanical designs are kind of "eh", the animation is so-so, and the female character designs look like they're from a two-bit ecchi manga creator (
and they are). I feel like I would like this more if the men and women didn't look like they were from two different species. I'll definitely stick around though, it's pretty good.
Girls Beyond The Wasteland - I was wondering where the Romeo Tanaka (guy who wrote
this thing) humor was in this show but then the Bitch Queen call happened and I don't think I stopped smiling from there until the end of the episode. The "Quiet and beautiful girl in class with long black hair turns out to be a weirdo and ropes MC into THING" concept is worn out as heck, but this show is breathing life into it. The MC is very likable considering the kind of MC you usually get in these sorts of affairs. Lots of characters are introduced quickly but despite that are well fleshed out in just a couple of scenes each, and I don't think there were any characters I disliked despite the light novel tropes and how many there were. It's a little obvious this is being adapted from a game script, but the show does its best to work as an anime and mostly succeeds at this. The humor, dialogue, and character designs are all pretty good too. There's nothing too special about it yet, but so far it's the most promising show of the season.
...oh god, an anime that's essentially "insert the most generic LN premise possible here" is the most promising show of the season.
