After the Last Exile debacle, I decided not to commit to watching another show all the way through. Instead, I just watched a few episodes of a bunch of shows to see if they would catch my attention and induce me to keep watching. This is everything I checked out.
Kore wa Zombie Desu ka?
Based on the first episode and the episode descriptions I looked ahead to, this is a pretty by-the-numbers 2012-era harem light novel anime. The main character was murdered and brought back to life as a zombie by a demanding cute female necromancer. He meets a “masou shoujo”, who dresses like Sakura Kinomoto but hacks up monsters with a chainsaw. Apparently he meets a ninja later.
The first episode made me chuckle a few times, but after I watched it I felt like I’d seen everything I wanted out of this world and these characters, so I chose not to continue.
Kaleido Star
I had big ambitions to carry this one all the way to the end. I made it to Episode 7, I think. It’s a cute shoujo-style story about a girl who dreams to join Kaleido Stage, a Cirque de Soleil-style prestige circus. The star of the show doesn’t believe in her and gets in her way, but with the help of her friends, she manages to succeed.
The tone reminded of a more lighthearted Gakuen Alice, but the characters were nowhere near as strong. Even when Gakuen Alice had some boring plotlines, I kept watching it because I was invested in Mikan, Hotaru, Natsume, Narumi-sensei, and the other characters. Kaleido Star had reasonably solid plots, aside from the contrived drama in Episode 5, but I just didn’t feel as invested in the characters as I wanted to be. The animation is sometimes janky, and the humor is inoffensive but repetitive and uninspired. The show is good enough that I’d probably watch it under other circumstances, but right now I really want to erase the taste of Last Exile, and this didn’t leave a strong enough impression to do it.
World Conquest Zvezda Plot
I lost interest about halfway through the first episode and started looking at Twitter. Yes, that is mostly a testament to the mind-corroding power of Twitter, but World Conquest Zvezda Plot also just failed to really grab my interest. At some point I might go back and try to watch the first episode again to give it a fairer shot.
Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku wo!
I watched the first four or five episodes of this. A few years ago I probably would have enjoyed its mockery of the isekei genre’s “real life RPG” tropes and jokes centered around cute girls who get horny about weird things, but I’ve seen too much of this style of humor now and it’s worn off. The gratuitous ass shots come off as skeevy, not funny, and I groan whenever the show resorts to jokes about the main character being mistaken for a pervert, which it does pretty much whenever it can’t figure out how to end a scene. It’s easy to watch and inoffensive enough (as someone who’s used to anime skeeviness and cliches) that I probably could have made it all the way through, but I wanted to aim higher.
Yuru Yuri
I watched about half of Season 1 a couple years ago, and also read the manga pretty extensively. Watching Episode 1 again, it kinda failed to get me, and the humor seemed really clunky, but I remember the same thing happening the first time I watched Episode 1 a couple years ago, and then again when I read Chapter 1 of the manga after that, so I think Chapter 1 just wasn’t very good and the series took some time to hit its stride.
The Ancient Magus’s Bride
This is where I finally hit it. I am enjoying this a lot. Very beautiful art, interesting world, and lots of feels.
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