#arcaneanime

It's very nice, but the title feels a bit misleading.

The Yakuza's Guide to Babysitting may give you the first impression that it's going to be some kind of dark comedy with drama splashed in, but by the end of it, I was feeling much more Fruits Basket than anything else.

The last show I finished was Akiba Maid War, and the contrast between the two is stunning - while the yakuza as depicted in Maid War was unrealistic due to the over-the-top violence on display in every episode, Babysitting swings too far in the other direction. The Family depicted in this show feels less like the yakuza, and more like a group of roommates who happen to have a leader.

The main character Kirishima has a violent past, for sure, but the vast majority of this show is meant to be about him overcoming that. I can appreciate that as a story angle, but the problem here is that every conflict that comes up is solved ridiculously quickly to get back to the sugary sweet family comedy stuff.

It robs what could have been a more meaningful narrative of any stakes - towards the end, we of course get Kirishima running away because he's afraid he's going to relapse into the "demon" he was before the story began, but a search party is sent out for him and he ends up coming home without a fuss, despite the heavy angsting he'd been doing only minutes prior.

These feel like story beats that were hit for the sake of having a plot, rather than being written with any kind of intentionality, and it left me wishing the show could have been deeper than just being a cute time.

Basically, despite the title, it's essentially just another father-daughter show without much going on beyond that. It's a decent one, but don't go in expecting more than that.

World Trigger, from austere beginnings, made a surprise revival in 2021 and just blew nearly all of its competition out of the water.

I've talked about this show before, a very long time ago, but getting a full, higher-budget continuation this year was not something I'd ever expected to happen. World Trigger was originally aired before the perpetual-animation concept had really and truly fallen apart (sorry, Boruto and Black Clover) and aired over seventy episodes in its first "season", which clearly was meant to keep going, except that the author of the manga had to take an extended break from the project. Without any new manga chapters in sight to come back to, the show was cancelled.

But despite being initially ridiculed for its fairly poor production job (even for a Toei Animation joint), World Trigger had steadily been gaining an audience interested in its writing, worldbuilding, and its extremely interesting fight sequences.

In most other shounen anime, the main characters will simply develop brand-new superpowers as the plot needs, or through character development, or even just naturally as the show goes on. World Trigger's bread and butter lies in the hard rules of its universe, which basically runs on "what if Midichlorians but not stupid" rules. People have varying levels of energy capacity and a certain number of ways to use it, with their "trigger" abilities largely being shared powers that must be combined or utilized in interesting ways to fight against their enemies, and each other.

This leads to tons of extremely cool and unexpected moments where characters come up with plans like making a giant energy meteor that crashes into a shopping mall by just increasing the input of a regular environmental-destruction attack, or using a trigger that's meant to let you change your angle mid-air to create a fearsome pinball attack that bounces a projectile in a thousand different directions.

And then you have the main character Osamu, whose defining traits are that he's pretty decent at strategizing and has a far-below-par energy capacity that he must find a way to work around and make useful, which leads him to investigate less-used support powers that can combine well with his unique team in order to make himself useful in combat.

This show manages to juggle that with a massive cast that rivals any sports anime, and yet gives you a total sense of who everyone in a fight is and what they're capable of by the end of it. These two seasons cover the rest of the "Rank Wars" arc that pits the human characters against each other in squad battles to determine who gets to go on a mission to a neighboring planet, and every single one of these fights is incredible because of how many different ways the story is able to set them up and pay them off.

I really can't say enough good things about World Trigger, and while I think it's got a while to go before we get to the meatier and more emotional parts of the story, I'm immeasurably excited to have it back, and have the possibility for more of it in the future.

Someday, this war will end. But not today.

The title of Trapped in a Dating Sim will tell you absolutely everything you need to know about this show, on more than one level. The fact that it's written like a One Direction fanfiction title tells you the competency of the author, the length tells you that this is a Light Novel Anime, and the title itself tells you that it's going to be yet another goddamn dating sim isekai.

Mobsekai asks the daring, dangerous question on everybody's minds: what if the person being reincarnated was...a mediocre man with black hair?

Sure, it might look like he's got some circumstances working against him because he's reborn as a random peasant NPC, but by the end of the episode, he's already drowning in money and cheat powers by using his knowledge of the game to acquire a literal space ship.

I've got something of a personal, broad take on sports shows. Typically, if they're only one cour, it's seemingly never enough time to tell a complete and compelling story.

Salaryman's Club attempts to subvert this problem by deciding to speedrun a full tournament arc in only twelve episodes, and I'm happy to say that it mostly succeeds.

The most striking thing about this show is that it's a sports anime about adults, a rarity in and of itself. Given that the story is about working-class adults competing in what seems to be an amateur corporate league, it has to establish stakes beyond just "the seniors really want to win before the graduate". It mostly succeeds by executing the arcs of its two leads.

The more straightforward protagonist is Mikoto, a recent high-school graduate who attempted to play for champion-class team Mitsuhoshi Bank but failed due to an issue with PTSD caused by his high school doubles partner being injured due to his mistake. He gets recruited by the much more laid-back Sunlight Beverage corporation, and partnered up with the other main character. Over the series, he confronts the issues with his past and gains experience in his new position as a salesman while recovering his badminton career.

Then we have Tatsuru, who is one of the oldest members on the team at 32, and is approaching an age where he won't be able to play competitively anymore. He actually met Mikoto when he first started the Sunlight Beverage job and Mikoto was a child, and inspired him to take badminton seriously in the first place, but now he has to confront both the possibility of aging out of the game and the consequences of backsliding in his work.

It has to skip over a lot of stuff to get there, but Salaryman's Club does manage to competently tie up both of these arcs in full in only twelve episodes, and while it's a bit jarring to have entire matches happen offscreen, it does end up working in favor of the pacing.

Really, the thing holding Salaryman's Club back is that it's nothing too special. Despite the twist of the adult characters, it plays out like a pretty ordinary tale in its genre, making it a very enjoyable time, but not a particularly distinct one.

I hope it's understandable that this one took me a while.

Back in 2018, I was in a very different place in my life, but I stand by my decision to give the original MEGALOBOX a perfect score. Even though I was basically forced on a break from anime when NOMAD was airing, I managed to set aside some time alone in the dark to watch the first episode...and that, by itself, was also a 10/10. It took months for me to work up the nerve to actually keep going.

The worst thing that a second MEGALOBOX could have done was to try to be more of the first one, and full credit, NOMAD is absolutely not that. It's brutal, upsetting, and emotional, and it knows well enough that just doing a sports movie sequel would not be doing justice to the original. NOMAD takes the focus off of the ring (especially Joe's) and places it squarely on the aftermath of trauma.

Six and a half years after the conclusion of the original show, the Joe we are introduced to is so different that he's not even using the name anymore, going by the new title of the show - Nomad. He's washed-up, he's failing to fight, and he's addicted to painkillers to try and keep himself floating through whatever is left of his life. And he's being haunted by a hallucination of Pops, who we learn, has died.

This is, of course, a pretty far cry from how the first season ended, and one of the driving mysteries is how the hell things got so bad. It turns out that although Pops died of natural causes, the situation surrounding that event completely shattered the sense of family that the surviving characters had together, and having flown too close to the sun, Joe fell just as hard as Icarus did.

The first story arc is a self-contained tale of Joe encountering a community of immigrants hated by society for basically the reasons that they are in real life. While the story of Chief and the immigrants is effective in and of itself, and extremely moving, the first stumble of the season comes with its depiction of racism. While accurate, NOMAD misses the opportunity to show anything but the most obvious and overt bigotry, rather than the way said bigotry can manifest in smaller and more deep-seated ways.

Moving on from this, we get into the real meat of the season, which is the newly-clean Joe's efforts to reassemble his old life despite nobody that knew him now wanting anything to do with the former champion. This is followed by a more cyberpunk-themed story about a boxer who had left the ring for a career in law enforcement, became a local hero, and was nearly paralyzed from the neck down until a miracle machine came from a pharmaceutical company that would restore his body with the use of a computer implanted into his brain. The negative side effects, unfortunately, are threatening to rip his family apart.

I want to stress that NOMAD is a great show with many triumphant emotional moments, but unfortunately it ends up fumbling the ball in a few key ways that prevent me from awarding it with the same perfect score as its predecessor.

The first is in said depiction of law enforcement. It's squeaky-clean and without any interrogation of the systems at play, which is unusual for a cyberpunk-genre story, particularly when corruption is a theme in the side of the story involving the pharmaceutical company (who want to sell their miracle machine to the military).

The second is the final episode. Whereas Joe and Yuri's fight from the end of the original felt like it had massive emotional stakes, Joe and Mac's fight here doesn't really have any.It ends extremely prematurely in a way I can only imagine was written because they didn't have enough room in the episode to have both this last bout (which is constantly interrupted with plot flashbacks) and the story wrap-up, and since the penultimate episode is mostly just set-up for the fight, I probably would have spread it over both that and the last episode. Joe and Mac don't really seem to care who actually wins here, it's purely symbolic, but that also means that the audience likely doesn't care either.

The shadow of Hypnosis Mic's failure looms large here.

Visual Prison is a strange beast. It's a show that leans very heavily into the visual-kei genre, where normal-ish-looking-people perform as glam-rock demons, the twist here being that all the performers are vampires and they're having a competition with each other.

With more care given to its presentation, that might be really cool, but one of the first things the viewer will notice about Visual Prison is that despite being an A-1 Pictures original anime production, it looks mediocre at best and ugly at worst. The performances are, like Hypnosis Mic, done largely in C-G with lyrical text appearing on the screen, but the way these scenes play out is far less visually interesting despite the subject matter.

The other big problem lies in the genre of music. I have no issues with visual kei, by any means, but one of the ways that the groups in HypMic distinguished themselves was that they all had different styles and subject matters for their rap numbers. I could probably hear a track and tell you which group had made it, even though I find the voices hard to distinguish because I don't speak the language. With all of these groups playing some kind of dark-pop-rock that doesn't really have a lot to do with their individual personalities, it robs them of something that might make them feel unique from each other.