Boskov's Anime Recommendations 3

I think this might end up becoming a monthly thing, me binging on different anime series and then giving my recommendations for them. I’ve got no problems with it, personally.

So once again we have another list of anime series that I recommend. As usual, all of the anime series listed below can be found at https://www.watchcartoononline.com/.

So let’s get this list started…

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My Bride is a Mermaid

I can honestly say that after only two episodes, this series became an instant favorite of mine. It’s a rom-com that is incredibly funny. The series follows Nagasumi, a junior high student who visits the Seto Inland Sea on summer break with his family. While swimming, Nagasumi gets swept away and nearly drowns only to be saved by an actual Mermaid named Sun Seto (surprisingly no jokes are made about her name sounding like the word sunset), but due to Mermaid Law, any human that witnesses a Mermaid in their true form must die, or else the mermaid herself die. To make matters worse, Sun’s father is the head of a Mermaid Yakuza Gang, the Seto Group, and isn’t about to let his daughter die. Instead Sun’s mother saves the day by suggesting Nagasumi marry Sun which would spare both their lives. The father refuses to accept Nagasumi and constantly schemes to either kill the boy or drive Nagasumi and Sun apart with the aid of his gang’s elite, to the point that he and the rest of the Seto group pull some strings to get themselves employed at Nagasumi’s school as faculty and teachers. The series is just one comedy after another and has an all-star voice cast including Todd Haberkorn, Caitlyn Glass, Chris Sabat, Monica Rial, Cherami Leigh, and more.

If you’re looking for a great comedy series, I full-throatedly endorse this one.

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And You Thought There is Never a Girl Online

Another rom-com (I tend to enjoy comedies), this series focuses on a male otaku gamer, Hideki, who plays an MMORPG known as Legend Age and is part of a small four person guild known as the Alley Cats. Before the start of the series, he confessed his love for another female avatar, asking that this avatar, Nekohime, marry his, assuming Nekohime’s player to be a female. However, Nekohime claims she is actually a male (a crossplayer: gamers who play characters the opposite of their own gender. E.g. men playing as women and vice versa). This leaves Hideki crushed and skeptical of love itself. Fast forward to the start of the series. Hideki’s avatar, Rusian, is married to Ako, a female avatar (apparently, the marriage mechanic grants special in-game bonuses) and assumes that Ako is just another male character. However the Alley Cat Guild Master proposes they have their first ever Offline Meetup, only to discover that all four of them attend the same school AND that twixt the four of them, only Hideki and Ako play as their natural gender. After the initial IRL Meet Up, the series starts depicting the main cast in-game as their IRL selves. Ako also turns out to be obsessively in-love with Hideki IRL and seems to have a highly difficult time of distinguishing between real life from the virtual life.

The dynamic between Ako and Hideki is quite obviously on the creepy-stalker side as Ako even goes so far as to confront Nekohime (the crossplayer who rejected Hideki’s proposal) in real life. It’s a fairly decent series though.

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Accel World

Written by the same author who created Sword Art Online, Accel World focuses on Haruyuki Arita, a short and overweigh bullying victim in 2040s Japan. He one day comes face-to-face with the enigmatic Student Council President, Kuroyukihime (which means black snow princess), who introduces him to an online fighting game called Brain Burst. The game is unique in that allows its players to heighten their cognitive functions several times over, to the point where real-time is slowed significantly to their perception, granting them a unique edge in the real world. In order to keep doing this though, they have to fight other players to earn Burst Points. If a player’s burst points reach zero, the game forcibly uninstalls and takes away the player’s memories of the game altogether and can never be reinstalled.

In game, Haru becomes the first “Burst Linker” to gain the ability to fly, playing under the alias of Silver Crow. He becomes infatuated with Kuroyukihime who reciprocates his feelings. Kuroyukihime is a level 9 Burst Linker known as Black Lotus, and is the underground leader of one of the game’s “Legions” (Brain Burst’s versions of guilds or clans) and desires to reach level 10 in Brain Burst which would enable her to meet the game’s creator to find out why Brain Burst was created in the first place. Haru becomes one of her faithful and most loyal of subordinates and she treats him quite well. Personally, I admire the dynamic twixt Haru and Kuroyukihime as she sees him for who he truly is, and not some short fat kid.

The series is fairly short at 24 episodes and focuses only on a few story arcs while the manga goes a little further. It should be noted that AW and SAO take place within the same universe only twenty years apart (SAO takes place in the 2020s and AW in the 2040s) and in one of the later episodes in the anime, they explicitly show a NerveGear, a major plot device from SAO, as one of the early forms of “Full-Dive” technology. There’s also a crossover videogame with AW and SAO called Accel World Vs. Sword Art Online that’s available on Steam for $50. The game further solidifies the reality that both series exist in the same universe.

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My First Girlfriend is a Gal

Another rom-com of sorts. This series focuses on Junichi, a perverted high school boy who, on a dare, confesses to one of his class’s “Gal” (or Gyaru) students, Yukana Yame. His initial interest in her is to get his V-card punched and Yukana sees through this ploy right off. However, she sees something in him and agrees to become his girlfriend. Over the course of the series, Junichi discovers he has genuine feelings for Yukana, going so far as to attempt to sabotage the attempts of two of his pervy friends to sneak a peak of Yukana and her “amply gifted” friends while they’re in the bath. Yukana reciprocates these feelings as well, after a misunderstanding nearly splits them up.

Interestingly, WatchMojo.com rated Yukana number 10 on their top ten worst anime girlfriends. I don’t really agree but (shrug). The series doesn’t have any nudity per say but plenty of fan service as three of the four female leads have outrageously large boobs and one of them tends to wear skimpy clothes all the time.

There are a couple of points about this series though that annoyed me. The first is how brazen the series is with one of the side characters and his pedophilia. Minoru, the large and overweight one of the “pervert trio” (Junichi’s three perverted friends), openly admits to his obsession with younger/little girls to the point you’re begging for him to end up on Dateline NBC, sitting down to talk a moment with Chris Hansen. Even in the final episode when Minoru ends up helping to save the day, I find it hard to cheer him on.

The second point is what I think is the translation team at Funimation getting political and letting it seep into their work. There’s a scene in the seventh episode where the main cast confront the increasingly perverted manager of a cosplay café over a special event where the main girls would be reading erotica books to the customers. The manager then goes into a misogynistic rant and makes a few comments that seem like the translation team is trying to make a stereotype of some kind. I might be overanalyzing this or seeing things that aren’t there but I’ll let you be the judge on that.

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KonoSuba: God’s Blessing upon this Wonderful World

Last month I gave my endorsement of In Another World with My Smartphone and that’s basically the ideal story of what would happen if a kid from our reality dies and ends up in a parallel world. KonoSuba on the other hand, is basically the least ideal story but in a comical way.

The story focuses on Kazuma who dies in an embarrassing way and ends up before Aqua, a Water Goddess who offers to reincarnate him in a parallel fantasy world with strong RPG elements. He’s allowed to take one thing with him to this parallel world and he ends up, out of spite for Aqua’s cockiness, choosing Aqua herself. As a result, they both end up in the parallel world with the condition that they defeat the Devil King, an evil lord seeking to take over the world (as a villain usually does) in order for Aqua to be restored to her position as a goddess.

However, Kazuma and Aqua are ill equipped to be adventurers and have below average stats. As a result, the prospect of defeating the Devil King is nigh impossible. Along the way, they form a party with Megumin, a powerful young Wizard who only knows how to use advanced Explosion magic (but can only cast it once a day as it drains all her energy) and Darkness, a female crusader with masochistic tendencies and can’t even hit stationary targets at point-blank range with a sword. As a result, the party is almost guaranteed to fail at virtually any quest given to them due to their own deficiencies.

The series is very comical and a great show that I hope goes on for quite a while longer. The series is at least two seasons of 10 episodes each with a couple OVAs. The series is not in English yet but does have English subs.

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Sword Art Online II

My first blog recommending anime series recommended SAO as well so this can be considered my review of SAO’s Second Season.

Many SAO fans are likely to agree that the first season of SAO was the best of the series compared to Season 2. I’m inclined to agree as Season 2 is great at the beginning but tapers off. The first half of the first season is an intense life-or-death scenario where if players die in the game, they die in real life. The second half of the first focuses on Kirito, the main male lead, fighting his way to free Asuna, the female protagonist and his main love interest, from another game where her consciousness is trapped so there’s a lot of real-world dangers and threats throughout the first season.

The second season still maintains that feel for the first half with the Gun Gale Online arc before losing that life or death feel in two smaller sub-arcs.

The GGO arc deals with a plot where two players of the game Gun Gale Online have died IRL after getting shot (or shot at) in game. Kirito is asked by a Japanese government agent to investigate as neither of them can come up with a theory as to how a person killed in GGO can die IRL since the SAO incident in the first season.

The second half of the season is split into two smaller arcs, the Calibur Arc which focuses on an in game quest the main cast goes on to retrieve the Legendary Holy Sword Excalibur. The final arc of the second season is the Mother’s Rosario arc, which focuses mostly on Asuna and her interactions with a small guild called the Sleeping Knights led by a highly skilled player named Yuuki. These two arcs might not have the same life or death consequences as the first season or GGO arc but the Mother’s Rosario arc offers some character development for Asuna as well as a heartwarming (and heartbreaking) story.

There’s also an SAO movie: Ordinal Scale, but I’ve not been able to find it in English Dub and I’d prefer to watch it that way but Watch Cartoons Online does have it in sub so I’ll let you know.

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I can’t let this recommendations list go without including at least one Ecchi series…

Masou Gakuen HxH

Masou Gakuen HxH is set in a dystopian future where strange machines from an alternate dimension are invading Earth. The only way to fight them is by using Heart-Hybrid Gear which is surgically implanted within young women, the HHG bestowing unique powers on each of the (busty) young women its implanted into. Only one male has ever had a HHG implanted but his abilities are support based and enable him to restore the energy of the all-female Amaterasu HHG team. How does he restore their energy you might ask? He has to perform a Heart Hybrid with the other team members, basically he has to get pervy with them in order to restore their energy. The series cleverly establishes that if they don’t keep their energy levels up, the HHG will end up killing them so it literally becomes a case of “have sex or die” harem scenario.

If you don’t mind censorship, most of the episodes of this on Watch Cartoons Online are censored, with a few uncensored episodes that slip through the filters. If you’re after uncensored, check elsewhere. Definitely NSFW, even if watching the censored version.

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So that wraps up this anime recommendations list. I wonder if this’ll become a thing with me. We’ll see.

Boskov