(Average+) Loving Yamada at Lv999!

Series in one sentence:
Autistic introvert meets autistic extrovert.

Series in more sentences:
Akane joins an online multiplayer game for her boyfriend, but is dumped by him for another girl.
After having spent so much time and money on it, Akane keeps playing and begins to connect with her guild members more than she ever has, one of them being Yamada, an oddly stoic pro gamer who happens to live close-by.

A slow series wherein little happens.

The two main characters were too easily charmed by each other. They hardly interact -also thanks to the distant Yamada- yet whenever they see each other for a few seconds, one of them always seemingly does or says something pretty normal and it somehow makes the other woozy.
Why does Yamada, who literally doesn't care about anything, care?

I'm also surprised by how their blond friend took on this role of matchmaker, opposed to rival. I wasn't expecting it by the way he looked at Akane at times. I think the story would've been better if he pursued her.
His little sister was also rather quick at supporting her and Yamada as a couple, while she was seething of jealousy just an episode before.

I liked the voice actor for Akane, she has a pleasant voice and a very comedic delivery, even when nothing really funny is said. I also like lifeless autists like Yamada, but again, I didn't think his crush on her developed realistically.
The anime insists he's handsome and has female pursuers, so it's not like he's charmed by the experience that is positive female attention. He's already familiar. So, what does Akane bring to the table? That she's nice and pretty? Surely, he's met girls who are nice and pretty. None of the girls that approached him in the show seemed anything but.

I suppose it's her bubbliness and assertiveness that's supposed to make a difference, if I understood the blond friend correctly, but that basically means Yamada has to be forced into a relationship for him to want to get to know somebody. I'm not sure if that's healthy.
Granted, the anime doesn't make it weird, but it didn't give me a good reason for their attraction, either. We arrive at episode 11, and Akane admits not to know her crush. You are absolutely right, so then, tell me, why are you in love with him?

In the end, I was left unimpressed. Don't even know what the "level 999" in the anime's title is referring to.

(Average+) Hori-san to Miyamura-kun

Series in one sentence:
A love story starring every background character that's walked into frame once.

Series in more sentences:
The popular Hori and outcast Miyamura become two unlikely friends who're able to be and act like their true selves around each other, and have seemingly fallen in love since day one.
Their meeting opens up a world to Miyamura that was once unobtainable.

If they had just taken their time with this, we'd have a great anime on our hands, but they basically crammed a million episodes into the first episode alone, and further on the series, it's hardly about the main characters or their pursuit of understanding each other. Why is "Hori-san to Miyamura-kun" about all these other, objectively less interesting high school kids and their rushed romances? I didn't click on this to watch their drama.

The show is full of time skips, where characters will suddenly utter some kind of remark as if they've hung out for weeks. Scenes go by way too fast and whatever comes next doesn't always relate to what came before it. This is no way to tell a story. Further on the series I lost a tremendous amount of interest, because.. there hardly was a story anymore.

It would've been so easy to make this about Miyamura and his change of fate after meeting Hori. He's an outcast "emo", who rammed himself with piercings, contemplated suicide, and is haunted by images of his previous selves talking to him -there's plenty to work with.
Except, not really. The latter was a cool phenomenon that got introduced extremely late in the series, making it pointless, and his suicide craving was part of a short scene that didn't really reflect back in his present-day behaviour. All these interesting snippets got drowned out by his overabundance of friends and their boring "slice of life" adventures.

What's also important to mention is that Hori is a basket case; wholly unsuitable to have as a girlfriend. She often becomes angry and violent for no good reason. A sweet, docile boy has no business getting involved with a clingy, possessive girl like her, it's a recipe for disaster, not romance.
Miyamura gets hit, shouted at, is not allowed to show off his good looks, is asked to act criminal for her sexual gratification, and it makes me wonder: what is SHE doing for HIM?

I also found what they did with Miyamura's design a bit of a shame. They reveal he has all these piercings and tattoos, but there's only one instance where he wears the full set, and pretty much all throughout the anime he wears layers of clothing that cover up his body.
What's the point if he's embarrassed about his own fashion style? Why is he wearing earrings at all, then.

This ended up being so boring, would not watch again. A wasted idea.

(Average) The Tale of the Outcasts

NOTE: Stopped watching after episode 7.

Series in one sentence:
Bland Beauty and the Boring Beast.

Series in more sentences:
A child with the gift to see demons is sent to a human trafficking organisation, disguised as an orphanage, where she meets up with a friendly beast every night.
When she gets sold to a sinister buyer, he decides to save her and they promise to forever spend their days together.

But there's not yet a peaceful life waiting for them, and many battles are brewing in the country.

I was hoping for something simpler, that Wisteria would get adopted by Marbas, not all this sudden war crap. It wasn't the story I expected when I clicked on this, I just didn't care for anything that was going on, though I tried.

I'm almost wondering if the girl wasn't better off staying in that shit orphanage, because the moment she steps outside, both she and Marbas enters crazy conflicts they were blissfully unaware of 5 seconds prior.

The anime doesn't spend much time on anything. Wisteria gets her brother back moments after she laments having lost him, and instead of reuniting with her only family, she chooses the cat man she's only known for a month, who watched her ass get beaten up every night and settled on letting her get raped by a grown man. The only thing that changed his mind was the news the dude wasn't going to make her his child bride, but his torture toy. Okey, what's the difference? Lol, fuck this guy.
But well, that's a detail Wisteria doesn't know, so of course, she thinks she's got a real saviour on her hands and gives up her eyesight for him.

Her becoming blind was an interesting turn of events, but the show doesn't really do anything with it. She's still her happy self and always looks people straight in the face when she opens her eyes.
Wisteria herself is your typical little girl character, bland, with the only interesting detail being her blindness. I don't buy Marbas' affection for her, because there's nothing to love. If I were a bored immortal demon, meeting her would only make me more suicidal.

Speaking of Marbas, his demon design is distractingly lame. I've seen Deviantart furries more appealing than that thing, and him saying he won't turn human because women otherwise keep falling in love with him was such a throwaway line, because that literally didn't happen once in the series.
I begged the anime to make him discard that stupid cat form and stay human, but I guess Makoto Hoshino was really proud of that drawing he made when he was 7.

So boring, couldn't finish this, but I suppose it's not impossible someone else could.

(Average+) Romantic Killer

Series in one sentence:
Magic potato wants the declining Japanese population to fuck and tortures one single asexual redhead to get it done.

Series in more sentences:
Anzu is a high school girl with no interest in romance, but when she gets visited by a magical being who claims to have been hired to implement dating sim logic to a real person's life, she soon finds herself surrounded by boys one could call "handsome".

Oh no.. They messed up tremendously here, and I don't think the writer realizes it.
There's a story in this story, that of Kazuki, which was so damn good, it made me realize how pointless everything else was.

This should not have been a harem anime.
This should not have been about a girl getting tortured by a magic potato.
This could've been a real drama, about a young boy running from an adult stalker, struggling to live again. His scenes of panic were so intriguing and his backstory narratively the best in the anime, it made the rest feel like clutter.

The first episode was pretty boring. It's this repetitive conversation between the main character and the magic potato, going like "You're gonna meet boys now and I'm taking away everything you love!" and "No, I need those things, why're you doing this?" over and over again. I was eating breakfast when it started, finished my food, and that brainrot on a script was still going. I had to watch the entire anime in 1.5x speed in order not to abandon it on sight.

The idea that love will help a dying race repopulate is laughable. Nearly half of babies born in the world are unintended pregnancies. What the potato should've done is flush all forms of sex protection through the toilet, because the vast majority of humans are mere animals who'll never have the restraint not to get nasty, even in the face of risks like pregnancy and disease.
In fact, the modern world has access to so many helpful measures, and there are still people who don't make use of them.

I would've been a better potato.

Anyway, glad to have ruined this review of what's supposed to be a simple comedy, but here's the thing, this anime took its sweet time to become funny. And I still don't know if it actually was, or just the 1.5x speed that made the interactions seem more on point.

Anzu's struggle isn't one I fully understood. She clearly has a preference for men and responded pretty excited to hear she'd get to meet attractive boys, until her video games, chocolate, and cat were taken away, then her viewpoint suddenly shifted. Why? This is just a temporary rule that'll get lifted when she falls for someone, so why not play along with this game you showed initial excitement for, allow yourself to get enamoured by the men you very clearly find attractive, and get your stuff back? What's the problem here, why is she fighting it?
I must've missed something while I was listlessly stuffing my face.

When Kazuki got stuck at her house during a storm, I finally started having a decent time with this show, because it was my first glimpse of what the story could've been. Anzu offering him instant noodles for dinner, her lame pyjamas, her winning board games to an infuriating degree -these things would've been much more fun to witness if they weren't done on purpose. Anzu should've been an aromantic, clumsy geek.
It was a bit confusing to see how he contacted her when he needed a place to stay -surely this popular kid has actual friends to ask help from- but alright.

Later, another rival spawns into existence, claimed to be her childhood friend. It's eventually revealed the boy is a late-bloomer Anzu used to actually hang out with and not someone who got brainwashed with magic.
And so, I started wondering again: what is the point of this magic potato? Anzu is apparently already surrounded by boys who adore her. Potato argues she was too distracted by her hobbies to notice them, but who says she would've been distracted like this forever?
As the series progressed, I was mostly entertained, but this doesn't change that the motives of the potato and Anzu were truly bad. The general plot was bad.

For a harem anime, it did alright in the sense there were at least two "candidates" I felt made a good chance with Anzu. In most harem animes, there's really only one person the main character has obvious interest for, or none at all.
Nevertheless, when you have a story with such a large cast, characters are bound to get shoved aside or not be written that well. The rich kid was one of those, he added nothing. Nothing another character or plot convenience couldn't take care of.

In short, turn on 1.5x speed, ignore Anzu's weird self-boycot, have an extremely high tolerance for stupid cutesy potato comic relief, and you'll have a decent time with this otherwise average high school harem anime.

(Average) Bastard!! Heavy Metal, Dark Fantasy

NOTE: Stopped watching during episode 19.

Series in one sentence:
Inuyasha the Barbarian Whore Wizard.

Series in more sentences:
Mankind is deemed defective by the goddess Anthrasax, but before she can destroy Earth, she's sealed away. Time passes and humanity rebuilds itself, but a dark army of rebels wishes to take over the world and wants to resurrect this dangerous being for that purpose.

The leader is a powerful sorcerer, taken down by a high priest, who makes sure to track down his reincarnation to lock his true self away. His daughter is tasked to look after the boy, kept around as means of giving them an edge in the battle against evil that's still at large, but Dark Schneider does what he wants, and with "the kiss of of a virgin" as the only means to free and lock him away again, Yoko has an important role to play.

This ended up being a boring, basic story with boring, basic battle scenes that needed charming characters to carry itself. And though the introduction of Schneider raised me off my seat, he turned into a let-down pretty much right away and is the sole reason I can't stand this show.

You wouldn't believe how much of a chore it was to watch this through, and I really wanted to for the sake of this review, but when episode 19 arrived and he started fondling the princess in the presence of two holy men, her royal guards, and her own father, who all totally ignored it, I gave up.
I've struggled through alot of nonsensical semi-porn before this scene even emerged, my patience was tested a little bit more every time, and this was the nail in the coffin.

Don't care that I almost finished the series, I'm not finishing it, the cookiecutter plot isn't worth my attention, so why would I be curious to see how it ends. I know how it ends: Schneider wins and everyone who likes Schneider wins, because no one ever dies in this series and there's always some previously unmentioned ultimate spell or move they pull out of their ass when it matters.. while there's always some crowd narrating the fight.
I'd call the repetitiveness of it all hilarious if I were in a better mood.

"Dark Schneider" is a man who can be funny, but everything about him is ruined by his womanizing behaviour. He is unapologetic in his pursuit of the puss, and that makes every single relationship he has with a woman mean absolutely nothing. Every pretty face he meets he somehow manages to swoon, till the point of them shedding tears for him. How am I supposed to take these crybaby virgins seriously. Please, you just met the guy, you're embarrassing yourself.

I don't know why they worked this hard to make Schneider unlikeable. Perhaps he was made for people who enjoy characters like James Bond. You know, hero characters who sleep with every bombshell they meet, especially enemies. And of course, he's so good in the sack, he immediately turns these enemy babes into allies. 
But Schneider is a dirtbag who won't even keep his hands off the woman he calls his child, and the show kept repeating to a suspicious degree how he and that woman are "father and daughter". But regardless of their connection, how hard is it to back off from people you've known since they were a tiny child..?! Would it have been that hard to write this girl to be the only woman on Earth he doesn't care to molest? Their story arc was torture to sit through, it was clearly an incest fantasy, and I hoped the girl was going to die in their fight, not because I hated her as a character, she could've worked, but because I wanted this side story to forever fucking end and never see Schneider grabbing her tit again. Foul.

What's also foul is the concept of keeping a rapist around as an ally, and having the victim talk to him like he's a friend now. Gara should've gotten his head caved in by Schneider, I could not stand the sight of that man after his introduction episode, but the anime insisted he was a good honorable soldier or some shit. Are you kidding me.
Granted, he didn't star in any other lewd scenes after that, but.. that makes it all even more strange. Why introduce him and his men as a child predator rapists, if he's (apparently) neither and keeps his cool throughout the rest of the series?

Concerning the main girl lead, Yoko, I expected her to stay by Schneider's side to try and keep him on the right path, but she doesn't even appear all that often in the show. And every time she doesn't, Schneider has free reign to fondle or try and bang some stranger, right after proclaiming his devotion to Yoko, because he's genuinely in love with her, but you could've fooled me.
His interactions with her were the best, since she has some form of authority over this otherwise narcissistic madman, and yet, I can't say I liked the way she enforced it. She has no other strategies except putting her hands on her hips and getting violent or threatening him, especially in moments he least deserves it.
Is this how she trained Lucien to stay so uselessly meek? This was really abusive behaviour.

I also don't feel like the show explained what made the high priest think Schneider, their enemy, would be useful to them. It's not like his seal forces him to obey Yoko, he chooses to.

Speaking of Lucien, what is this brat's deal. He's supposed to be 14 (?!!?!) years old, but looks 10 and acts like a braindamaged 3-year-old. I'm not trying to be cute with my description, this is Lucien.
I think the story tried to take the "innocent angel" route with him, but they went too overboard with it. Yoko nearly gets molested in the same room he sleeps in, and he goes back to sleep because she tells him to. I guess it's supposed to be a joke, but him complaining about how tired he is right after she's been kidnapped makes it seem like this is how he is. This boy is low IQ trash, and seemingly the show knows, because he rarely makes an appearance as well.

The anime is a bit of a tonal mess, like plenty of animes are. On the one hand, it tries to be serious, but then inserts uncomfortably lewd scenes or equally out-of-place humoristic moments, and none of it makes for a good overall experience. Every time a joke was made, I needed a second to recognize one was made at all.

Anyway, this was a bad ride. When you start watching, it's alright, but you soon understand the formula and find there's nothing interesting there. Yoko and the princess should've been one and the same character, and it's fine for Schneider to be flirty, but not a molester. His adoptive daughter could've been kept in for that romantic drama, but have Schneider treat her like an actual father would.

If you like bland battles, bad drama amongst people with a non-existent emotional connection, and half-assed pornographic scenes that come out of nowhere, there you go.

I can't believe this is getting a second season.