No Clever Title?! Summer 2020 Recommendations!
A note off the top – this review contains some more NSFW-than-usual images towards the bottom due to the ‘risque’ nature of a couple of anime. If you’re at work or on the bus, you might want to come back later. You also better be wearing a mask.
I apologize for being a few weeks behind on this. I usually try and get something out around week six so the four of you that see this will not have to binge-watch too many episodes to get caught up. I feel even more ashamed given that there are really not that many interesting shows that I am watching this season.
Before you send me hate mail, death threats, and Donald Trump memes, know that I have not yet watched the second season of Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu, Enen no Shouboutai, or the third season of Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Comedy wa Machigatteiru is because I am trying to rewatch the preceding seasons to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything. It’s frustrating not remembering who a certain character is. In fact, I just finished watching the first season of Enen no Shouboutai this evening, so I will probably start on season two tomorrow.
Regardless, when it comes to those three anime, they’d be on the list if I had watched them yet. In fact, consider this a recommendation for all of them because it’s very unlikely that they’re bad.
So now on to the shows I have actually watched!
Maou Gakuin no Futekigousha: Shijou Saikyou no Maou no Shiso, Tensei shite Shison-tachi no Gakkou e
No problem starting off with my favorite that isn’t a CGDCT anime. It’s also the winner of the longest name award which is why from this point on we’ll just call it Maou Gakuin.
Maou Gakuin is a story about a land where there are demons who go to school, heroes who go to school, reincarnation, and zettai ryouiki and everything is cool. Except, in this case, there is the actual former king of demons who is reincarnated, enrolls in the school for demons, and is basically declared a special needs student due to their corrupt and bad testing practices.
Anos, the real demon king, having been declared a misfit, embarks on a journey to reclaim his former glory but finds a ton of treachery afoot, likely as a result of the current regime trying to maintain power.
My explanation is terrible, but the show isn’t. Despite being so very, very overpowered, Anos is a cool character who isn’t as hateful as you would expect a demon king to be. He’s also really nice to his classmates, including two sisters, Misha and Sasha who work with him to solve the mysteries of the school and find out why no one knows Anos’ name.
Misha is a cute little shy thing and Sasha is a tsundere, but she’s not as terrible as most of them are. She’s quite tolerable and adorable. I’m interested in seeing what happens to them at the end of the series. Anos also has a fan club full of cute girls to cheer him on.
Maou Gakuin is available on Crunchyroll.
Uzaki-chan wa Asobitai!
Uzaki-chan wa Asobitai! answers the question, “What if a girl I went to high school with followed me to college, insulted me, went drinking with me, stalked me to my job, insulted me some more, played games with me, and was four feet tall with 72FFFFFFFFFFF breasts?”.
I don’t have to explain the show much more than that. That’s literally the premise. Obligatory will they/won’t they when it comes to falling in love, but more or less, Uzaki is just a hyperactive weirdo who for whatever reason is obsessed with the protagonist and wants to hang out with him.
He found it annoying at first, but she’s come to grow on him, and as the story goes on there’s a bit more backstory between them. All in all the show is kind of cute, has humorous moments with some of the side characters who in their own way want to help Uzaki and Sakurai hook up, and is kind of nice to watch people be able to hang out and play during these times where we can’t really do that in real life.
Something that really points out how this show is and how serious it takes itself is this nearly four-minute, mostly uninterrupted rant by Uzaki about mint chocolate chip (or as she refers to it, Choco-Mint).
The only thing I hate – I hate it more than anything else anime-related right now – is the cutaways to this fucking wide-mouthed cat. I don’t know if that cat has a bigger role in the manga, why it’s in the opening credits and in the middle of the damned logo, or if someone at the studio thought it would be hilarious, but I hope whoever came up with that cat drops their cell phone and cracks the screen.
Jerk.
Anyway, Uzaki is on Funimation!
Houkago Teibou Nisshi
Cute girls doing cute things while fishing? Sure, why not? Houkago Teibou Nisshi is exactly that. There’s no overarching storyline, like a huge fishing meet coming up, or someone needs to catch 100 pounds of kelp in order to save the clock tower. No, Houkago is a slice of life school club show plain and simple.
The main protagonist, Hina, has moved back to where she used to visit a long time ago and hooks up with her old childhood buddy, Natsumi. She ends up joining the Breakwater Club, a club that focuses on fishing around the piers and embankments of this small coastal town.
The cast is all enjoyable, Hina who is the most precious thing on the planet, isn’t really into fishing and hates the dirty part of it like gutting and touching the fish, but does her best. Natsumi is a tomboy who loves to fish, Kuroiwa is basically a lazy old man trapped in the body of a high school senior, and Oono is the black-haired, kind of gruff-looking one who is of course shy and soft-spoken.
The show also has a pretty catchy ED sung by the cast. You know I am a sucker for those.
I am happy the show is back. It was paused in the spring because of COVID, but they have resumed it and it clearly wasn’t rushed because all of the animation looks great. It was worth the wait.
Get hooked (get it?) on Houkago over at Funimation!
A couple of miscellaneous things before I move on to give you one last chance to ask the guy on the bus to stop looking over your shoulder.
Some other shows I am watching or planning on watching from this season:
I’m working on getting caught up on the preceding series so I can watch Toaru Kagaku no Railgun T. This is the third season, and I have only made it a bit through the first right now. Enjoying it quite a bit.
Gal-gaku.: Hijiri Girls Square Gakuin is a cute little short that I am pretty sure is just an infomercial for a J-POP group, but as I said, it’s cute and it’s short. Sadly it also got delayed due to COVID, but it recently started back up.
I talked in a recent Wayback Wednesday post about the parent show, but am enjoying the sugar pile that is Umayon. Probably not worth watching if you haven’t seen Uma Musume.
I’m watching Monster Musume no Oishasan but to be quite honest I am pretty bored with it. I think I am a couple of episodes behind as I am not bothering to watch it every week. If you like mythological creatures and lots of pseudo-sexual noises made by a doctor’s patients, you might like this show.
I got sick of Kanojo, Okarishimasu after about four episodes. People still insist it’s a good show, so I will try and get back into it. I’ll let you know on Twitter if I fail or not. Now, on to the pervy stuff.
Dokyuu Hentai HxEros
Welcome to the Power Rangers if they were powered by sexual energy!
This show is about an alien race that goes planet to planet stealing sexual energy from the citizens for reasons. One of the Ecchi Rangers is Enjou, a boy whose childhood friend had her mojo taken by these aliens! It turned her from a sexually promiscuous child into a busty, fridged high school girl!
Out of context that sounds really, really sketchy. Hell, even in context it’s not really that great. At any rate, Hoshino, the girl, ends up actually having the most power of them all, so she joins the Rangers and helps to fight the aliens with her reluctant sexual desires that she’s starting to get back.
This show will probably be better when the Bluray version comes out as it’s highly censored right now. There’s a ‘less censored’ version that shows off panties but still blocks nipples, which is weird, especially considering how uncensored the next show I am talking about is.
I will never understand Japanese censorship.
The show is funny and is worth watching if you’ve got nothing better to do. You can find the probably very censored version on Funimation, but will likely have to look around if you want the less censored version. As a disclaimer, I have not watched the Funimation version so I don’t know if it’s fully censored or just kind of censored. They did, for a while, show Ishuzoku Reviewers.
Peter Grill to Kenja no Jikan
Peter Grill is a show about a dude named Peter Grill who wins a gladiator competition and is declared the strongest man in the land. This is great for him for a while till several women come to him in order to get his seed so their children can be strong warriors as well.
Normally one wouldn’t consider this bad but the women are very aggressive in getting what they want. The biggest complication is that Peter is in love with and in a relationship with one of his guildmates, so naturally, he doesn’t want to cheat on her, even if the sex with the other women has no emotion to it.
Well, Peter has no willpower and ends up fertilizing the gardens of these women on multiple occasions because this show takes place in a time before the concept of family planning and they just have sex every night rather than waiting for the time they would be the most likely to get pregnant.
Anyway, Peter ends up in hilarious situations due to this, all while trying to keep things from Luvelia, the woman he loves yet for some reason continues to call her “senpai”. Social etiquette is something else in Japan I will never understand. Calling people senpai when you’re getting married to them, onii-chan when they’re not actually your sibling, and the fact using someone’s given name can cause your head to explode in embarrassment. I mean, I saw the governor the other day and called him dickhole as a term of endearment, so I would be bad at Japan, I think.
Speaking of censorship, you can watch this on Crunchyroll and it is heavily censored. Unlike with HxEros, the uncensored version that you will have to find on your own so I don’t get a DMCA notice is fully uncensored. There are certain ‘lines’ that aren’t drawn to keep this from being full hentai (though to be fair no actual sex scenes are shown).
The show isn’t bad and at 12 minutes it won’t tie you up all day. Worth a watch if you like this kind of show.
Thanks for reading and stay safe! Only four full months remaining of 2020, so hang in there!
