I've been meaning to get to the One Piece in some form for quite a while, and Episode of East Blue seems like as good as any a place to start, or maybe even better, since it encapsulates a lot of the early One Piece adventures and character backgrounds. And fortunately, this also coincides with the Netflix live-action TV series, which, as I say, is miraculously good. Well, maybe it's less a miracle and more really hard work from the cast, writers, set designers, and others. It's really, really good. Go watch it!

My Anime News Network review of Gundam UC Episode 1

Dragon Ball Z has one of those dubs that's extremely popular despite it being such an affront to the original material. Why is that, I wonder? I'm guessing it's mostly nostalgia. The same people who rave about how you have to watch DBZ dubbed are the ones who rant when there's a slight translation difference in any other anime. Hypocrites, in other words. If a company did today to an anime what Funimation did to DBZ decades ago, there would be a huge controversy over it, and you know it.

Ghost in the Shell: Arise is convoluted as all get-out and much of it confuses the shit out of me. Trying to keep track of the dozens of factions and their motivations is mind-bending work and I could only get the basic gist of parts of it. Is it just me? Am I not smart enough for this anime? Or is every new chapter of Ghost in the Shell just addicted to complexity to a deleterious degree? Join me as I try to make sense of this damn thing.

Super Dimension Fortress Macross, the original Macross anime, is sure a classic of anime. But it has its share of issues, too, that make it not quite make my top 30. To be honest, I barely watched any of the episodes past 27 for this review, because that's where the story basically ends. I've seen the rest of the episodes, too, don't get me wrong, but they're hardly worth mentioning. I think I covered the penultimate episode in a Christmas video I did years ago. It's still damn good anime, overall.

My Dailymotion page

Another Mid Year English Dub Review has me going through all the English dubs of the anime I've reviewed so far this year. I even threw in the Rebuild of Evangelion series, though I only touch upon that briefly. In fact, I just noticed that I didn't really talk about the dub studios much. I'll be more thorough at the end of the year.

Pen Pen stranded me in the UK a couple of videos ago and I'm still cross about it. But hey, that flat cap I bought in Scotland is a very cool hat. Just don't expect to see my sprite wear it.

My Dailymotion page

It's been a little while, but I'm back! More Otaku Evolution to plug into your mind and blow it away... with its mediocrity.

Actually, I'm strangely proud of this one. I did get a bit sidetracked into talking at length about the Rebuild movies, but only as an avenue to compare the different endings of Evangelion's story, like the TV show's end, the manga's end, etc. I feel like I probably won't get to doing review videos for the Rebuild movies, so this was my chance to talk about them while I was covering The End of Evangelion. But the movie EoE truly does stand on its own as a brilliant work of a visceral emotional gauntlet.

Ahhh, tragedy porn. A lot of my favorite anime has tons of melodrama, but when an anime really overdoes it in an annoying, nihilistic (in a negative sense) way, it ceases to be tragedy and starts to be tragedy porn. Casshern Sins is, at the very least, borderline tragedy porn, the way that Now and Then, Here and There was. But unlike NTHT, it doesn't have a lot of redeeming qualities that pushes it out of the mire of wallowing. It's just this endless march into hopelessness. But don't get me wrong, tragedy porn can still be somewhat good. It's just that Casshern Sins is just kind of "eh"/okay, at best.