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First Impressions Reviews

Summer 2019 First Impressions – The Ones Within

Akatsuki Iride and seven other charismatic game streamers wake up in the world of a mysterious free-to-play game called Naka no Hito Genome. Now they are competing in real-life games with life-or-death stakes, but clearing several game tasks could earn them 100 million lives.  – ANN

Streaming: Funimation and Hulu

Episodes: 12

Source: Manga

Episode Summary: One fateful night, several “Let’s Play” video game streamers are offered the opportunity to participate in a special top-secret gaming session. Streamer Akatsuki awakens in a forest soon afterward, and he and a fellow streamer are soon pursued by a giant panda. Akatsuki’s thoughtfulness wins out when he identifies that the panda isn’t hostile. After clearing the obstacle, they’re approached by Mr. Paka, and alpaca-headed individual who fills them in about their special status.

Akatsuki and seven others were chosen to participate in this real-life streaming event, the goal being to grow a viewership of 100,000,000 individuals. They’ll be completing tasks in small groups to obtain genomic objects for some unspecified purpose. The first goal is to complete the 3 requests of “Kokkuri-san” (the Japanese equivalent of using a Ouija board to summon a spirit). While the others in the group are rightfully spooked when the spirit appears, Akatsuki’s kindness and offer of friendship allows them to fulfill the ghost’s desires.

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Summer 2019 First Impressions – Re:Stage! Dream Days

The story centers around the first-year student Mana Shikimiya as she pursue her dreams of winning at the Prism Stage, the competition that determines the top middle-school idol. – MAL

Streaming: Hidive

Episodes: 12

Source: Mobile Game

Episode Summary: It’s unusual for students to transfer schools right away in the Springtime, but that’s first-year student Mana Shikimiya’s situation. Despite being an oddity, Mana would really like to lay low and not call attention to herself. Unfortunately there’s a school-wide rule that all students must belong to a club or other extra-curricular activity, and so she resigns herself to that reality. After a member of the student council gives her a tour of the campus and its clubs, Mana feels overwhelmed by all the potential choices. By chance, however, she ends up passing a basement room in which the Lyrical Tradition Dance Club holds their meetings.

The president of the club is not-so-subtly looking for new members, and nearly dupes Mana into signing up despite the point of the club being a complete mystery. When Sayu, the only other club member, arrives for the daily meeting Mana learns the truth; despite its traditional trappings, the club is focused around the thoroughly modern art of singing and dancing to pop music. Mana turns out to be a natural, but suddenly insists that she can’t join. It seems she may have some kind of related trauma in her past, and though the club members are sure she’d be a great addition to the team, getting past that trauma may end up being too high a hurdle.

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Summer 2019 First Impressions – Granbelm

In a world that long ago featured the existence of magic, but has long since lost that ability. The story begins when the very normal high school student Mangetsu Kohinata meets Shingetsu Ernesta Fukami, who has migrated back to Japan from Germany, on a night with a full moon. – MAL

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: TBA

Source: Original

Episode Summary: Mangetsu is a typical high school student whose propensity toward helping others has resulted in her making lunches for many of her classmates. One evening, as the full moon shines brightly out her window, she realizes that she’s left a lunch box at school, so she goes to retrieve it. As she’s about the leave the school, the world seems to dissolve, leaving in its place an illusory world that’s somehow familiar, but very different.

Outside several girls in magical mecha entities battle one-another, and they wonder why Mangetsu doesn’t seem to have her own suit of armor. One of them, Shingetsu Ernesta, defends Mangetsu until she’s able to hear the truth – at one time, the world was filled with magic, but it was sealed away to save humanity. Now, those from magical bloodlines meet at the full moon and battle for dominance until only one remains. Soon Mangetsu numbers among them as her powers are awakened and she quickly learns to draw upon them.

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Summer 2019 First Impressions – Fire Force

In the year 198 of the Age of the Sun, Tokyo is a crowded cosmopolis. But the world’s most populous city is threatened by devils that cause people to burst into flame at random. The only ones who can stop it are the Pyrofighters, a team of specialized firefighters. The young Shinra, blessed with the ability to ignite his feet and travel at the speed of a rocket, wants nothing more than to be a hero, and knows that this is the place for him. But he’s not the best at following orders. – ANN

Streaming: Crunchyroll and Funimation

Episodes: 24

Source: Manga

Episode Summary: As a child, Shinra witnessed the death of his mother and younger brother in a horrible fire. As one with pyrokinetic abilities, he was blamed for the accident, but Shinra remembers having seen something terrifying withing the billowing flames. Now, his talents with fire have lead him to join the Fire Force, a group of firefighters who help put to rest the souls of infernals, those inexplicably consumed by flames.

No one knows what caused the appearance of the infernals in the first place, though one of the duties of the Fire Force is to attempt to deduce the cause of these seemingly random fiery transformations. As Shinra goes on his first mission, he begins to experience the parallels between his own experience and the situation at hand. It’s this understanding that allows Shinra to draw upon his pyrokinetic power and put the infernal to rest.

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Summer 2019 First Impressions – Wasteful Days of High School Girls

There are three high school girls: Tanaka, nicknamed “Idiot” for her low test scores; Kikuchi, nicknamed “Ota” for her obsession with boys-love stories; and Saginomiya, nicknamed “Robot” for being a genius but emotionless. Together with a colorful cast of characters, the hopeless girls live wasteful days of youth. – ANN

Streaming: Hidive

Episodes: 12

Source: Manga

Episode Summary: Nozomu and her friends are about to start their first day of high school, but even with all the big changes that are likely in store for them she really only has one goal – to become popular with boys. That might be an issue, since she’s only now realized that her high school is girls-only, she doesn’t have any childhood friends to hit up, and her two closest friends are a girl with a robotic personality, and an otaku – not exactly experienced in the romantic arts. Even their homeroom teacher immediately quashes any latent fantasies about teacher-student relations – he drastically prefers college women, especially those in business attire interviewing for jobs, and has no interest in getting fired for the sake of a forbidden romance.

Nozomu tries her best to troll for male prospects, approaching strangers in the hallway between classes and asking them to introduce her to their male friends. Of course, she doesn’t endear herself to anyone since she’s given most of them unflattering nicknames already. Still, she has vivid (unrealistic) fantasies about meeting boys and leaving an impression as an “interesting woman.” The difference between her idealized life and her reality earn her the nickname “Baka.”

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Summer 2019 First Impressions – If It’s For My Daughter, I’d Even Defeat a Demon Lord.

Dale is a cool, composed, and highly skilled adventurer who’s made quite a name for himself despite his youth. One day on a job deep in the forest, he comes across a little devil girl who’s almost wasted away. Unable to just leave her there to die, Dale takes her home and becomes her adoptive father. Devil or not, Latina is beyond adorable, and the adventurer soon finds himself head over heels with being a parent. – ANN

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: 12

Source: Light Novel

Episode Summary: Dale has never had to think far beyond his next mission or his next meal, but when he finds an orphaned devil girl in the forest one day, he’s suddenly forced to look beyond his own day-to-day survival. The girl has one broken horn, marking her as a criminal – but one would be hard-pressed to come up with any scenario in which a kid her age should be banished in such a way. Dale learns that her name is Latina, and he takes her back to his home in the walled city of Kreuz.

After cleaning Latina up, Dale considers his options. He’s barely 18 and his job as an adventurer keeps him away from his home base for days at a time. But the “perpetually under-funded” city orphanage probably wouldn’t be that happy to have yet another mouth to feed. And Dale has a support system in Rita and Kenneth, the proprietors of the restaurant where Dale rents a room. Rather than dump Latina in the hands of strangers, Dale chooses the path toward instant fatherhood, with all its challenges and surprises.

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Summer 2019 First Impressions – Dr. Stone

Taiju is about to confess to the girl he loves when a mysterious force hits the Earth and turns every human into stone. Taiju and his friend Senku wake up thousands of years later and begin to rebuild society. – ANN

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: 24

Source: Manga

Episode Summary: Senku is a scientific genius, and Taiju is a lovable meathead. But neither boy’s particular strengths allow them to escape the mysterious green light that envelopes the Earth and turns all of its people to stone. By sheer force of will, Taiju holds onto his consciousness and vows to finish his confession to his crush, Yuzuriha, should they ever break out of their stony prison.

When Taiju finally does manage to break free, he finds the landscape almost completely transformed. Senku has been awake for 6 months already, and tells him the news – it’s now 3,700 later than when they were transformed, and the world has essentially been thrust back into the stone age. But Senku has a goal, and with his brains and Taiju’s brawn, he believes it’s a realistic one. He plans to use scientific knowledge and technique to recover humanity’s lost technology, and restore civilization to its former glory.

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Summer 2019 First Impressions – O Maidens in Your Savage Season

The girls in a high school literature club do a little icebreaker to get to know each other: answering the question, “What’s one thing you want to do before you die,” One of the girls blurts out, “Sex.” Little do they know, the whirlwind unleashed by that word pushes each of these girls, with different backgrounds and personalities, onto their own clumsy, funny, painful, and emotional paths toward adulthood. – ANN

Streaming: Hidive

Episodes: 12

Source: Manga

Episode Summary: Kazusa and the other members of the literature club start to realize that the world of novels is saturated with adult concepts of sex and sexual metaphors. When news drops of a new novel from one of the club’s favorite authors, focusing on a character who creates a “bucket list,” the girls discuss what sorts of things they want to do before they die. Bluntly, one of the girls says that she’d want to have sex, and this sends the others into a tizzy. While the other girls in their class seem comfortable enough talking about sex day in and day out, Kazusa and company aren’t comfortable with the concept at all.

Kazusa starts to feel like she can’t escape the subject of sex; she and her best friend start to mis-hear sexual words in everyday conversation, and the way some other girls talk about her childhood friend Izumi causes her to react in ways she never expected. When she goes over to deliver a hot meal to Izumi (since his parents are out of town), she walks into the last situation she would have wanted to – she catches him with his pants down, pornography playing on his laptop. Kazusa runs away and wishes that sex weren’t such an overwhelming topic. It’s confusing, a little scary, and completely foreign, and she doesn’t know if she’ll ever be comfortable with it.

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Summer 2019 First Impressions – Demon Lord, Retry!

Akira Ōno is a regular guy who works at a company that manages an online game. He often plays the game as his character “Maō” (Dark Lord). But one day, when he logs on, he is whisked into the game’s fantasy world as his character. There, he meets a one-legged girl, and begins his adventures alongside her. But as he is a powerful “Dark Lord,” various nations and holy maidens journey to defeat him, and he stirs up trouble everywhere he goes. – ANN

Streaming: Funimation

Episodes: 12

Source: Light Novel

Episode Summary: Akira is just about to shut down the server of the online game he manages. It’s been a good 15 years, but it’s time to move on. Just as the clock strikes midnight, Akira sees a flash of light. When he comes to he finds himself in another world, dressed suspiciously like his character Hakuto, the Demon Lord of legend.

He meets a little girl named Aku as she’s being chased by a demon. Hakuto’s skills are such that he makes short work of the beast. He sees Aku as a benefit to him – since she’s a local, she can help him navigate the landscape. He makes a try at finding a way back home; unfortunately the wishing shrine he finds is almost out of juice, and his wish to go home turns out to be invalid anyway. The shrine’s Idol does leave him with a frightening tool, however; a ring filled to the brim with evil power. After closing off some loose ends in Aku’s village, the two start making their way toward the capital.

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Summer 2019 First Impressions – Astra Lost in Space

In the year 2063, travelling through space has become commonplace. Eight students from Caird High School, along with one child, set out for a school camp on a nearby planet. However, the students are then mysteriously transported 5,000 light years away from home, with no way to call for help. Aboard an abandoned spaceship they call the Astra, these nine students slowly try to make their way back and figure out why they were transported in the first place. – ANN

Streaming: Funimation

Episodes: 12

Source: Manga

Episode Summary: The first episode is double-length, but I’ll endeavor to keep the summary succinct.

Aries is excited to be attending space camp, but that doesn’t mean her scatterbrained ways are in check at all. After almost forgetting her passport, she dumps her suitcase at the spaceport and ends up getting her bag stolen. Luckily a kind stranger, who she learns is a boy named Kanata from her high school, helps her out. After she and her classmates gather, they board the ship for camp. They’ll be spending a week on Planet McPa, a nature preserve where they’ll be relatively safe. No sooner does the group set down on the surface than they’re confronted with a strange spherical object. Their curiosity turns to horror when the entity begins to engulf the group one-by-one.

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