Tag: Fantasy

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Anime Reviews First Impressions Reviews

Spring 2021 First Impressions – I’ve Been Killing Slimes For 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level

A truly just God.

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: 12

Source: Light Novel

Story Summary: Azusa is a 27-year-old office worker who keels over and dies one day from overwork. When she arrives in Heaven she learns that God has a soft spot for women, and Azusa is allowed to reincarnate as an immortal witch and live her desired “slow life.” The only monsters she encounters near her highland home are slimes, and she defeats around 25 of them a day to provide herself with money enough to live a modest life. Eventually 300 years pass in this manner, and a verification of Azusa’s strength reveals that she’s now maxed-out at level 99. This is an inconvenient secret that might spell the end of her lazy days at home, but of course rumors being what they are the news of her power soon spreads across the land. Eventually a dragon named Laika shows up at Azusa’s front door, and after a short duel accidentally smashes the home Azusa’s enjoyed for 300 years. Later, Laika returns in human form with repair funds and a request: she wants to become Azusa’s pupil and learn how to become strong like her.

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Anime Reviews First Impressions Reviews

Spring 2021 First Impressions – The Saint’s Magic Power is Omnipotent

Streaming: Funimation

Episodes: 12

Source: Light Novel

Story Summary: Sei is an overworked office employee who, after being made to stay late yet again, returns home under dark of night only to be magically summoned to an alternate world called Salutania which suffering from the proliferation of a terrible miasma. In this world a figure called a “Saint” is said to have the power to hold back the miasma, but in dire cases where they do not appear organically they are often actively summoned into duty through magical means. Sei arrives with a second woman and Prince Kyle seems to take to her more quickly, whisking her away and leaving Sei to spend her days alone in boredom. But a chance meeting introduces Sei to a magical research institute, where her prior interest in herbal remedies translates very well into the distillations of magical potions. She has a knack for it, too; despite having had no idea how to use magic when she arrived in Salutania, it turns out that her magical abilities are powerful and seemingly bottomless. When a group of knights is attacked by a monster, Sei’s special 1.5-strength healing potions turn out to be a boon.

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Anime Reviews First Impressions Reviews

Spring 2021 First Impressions – Fairy Ranmaru

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: 12

Source: Original

Story Summary: The Fairy Queen summons a representative from each of the fairy clans to form a heroic team. Their task? To go to Earth and collect “attachments” from humans who are suffering. Fairies have rules of conduct that limit them from experiencing love (physical or emotional) with humans, yet their mission involves understanding the root causes of such things and reacting to them. Ranmaru, of the powerful Light Clan, poses as a quiet transfer student, but he almost immediately identifies a girl who’s being bullied out of jealousy. He rescues this young lady and uses the purity of her heart to put a stop to the tormenter. The Fairy Queen has received her first payment, but are her intentions truly on the up-and-up?

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Anime Reviews First Impressions Reviews

Spring 2021 First Impressions – Full Dive

Streaming: Funimation

Episodes: 12

Source: Light Novel

Story Summary: 10 years ago VRMMO games reached the peak of realism. However, since people play games to escape reality, it was decided that games should go back to being more game-like. In the ensuing years those games lost much of their popularity. However, that doesn’t stop Hiro, a former member of his high school track team who now spends most of his time gaming, from seeking after the most recent installment of his favorite VRMMO series. After coming up short on funds, he ends up at a shady game store where a bubbly-yet-cunning shopkeeper named Reona dupes him into buying a completely different, older game with his hard-earned funds. Hiro loads it up anyway and is initially pleased with how realistic it is – until he finds he can experience pain and then accidentally kills an NPC. When he finally encounters Reona inside the game, she’s upset to discover that Hiro’s in-game title has already become “Best Friend Killer.”

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Anime Reviews First Impressions Reviews

Spring 2021 First Impressions – Dragon Goes House-Hunting

Streaming: Funimation

Episodes: 12

Source: Manga

Story Summary: No matter how great or small, all creatures need a place to call home. Letty, a red dragon, is left having to find a new one after he manages to let his family’s egg get stolen by monster hunters. After wandering the land and getting into trouble one too many times, Letty finally gets a tip about an elf named Dearia who lives at the foot of Yggdrasil, and seems to have a knack for housing the many fantasy creatures who inhabit their world. Letty wanders for days to find Dearia, only for Dearia to find him; after some so-called heroes hassle Letty, the powerful elf lets loose on them and… neutralizes the threat. Perhaps now that Letty has met the person he seeks, he can finally find a place to call his own.

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Anime Reviews First Impressions Reviews

Spring 2021 First Impressions – Seven Knights Revolution: Hero Successor

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: TBA

Source: Smartphone Game

Story Summary: The world was once saved from darkness by heroes chosen by the Goddess. Now that the land is once again haunted by terrible, demonic beasts, individuals called the Seven Knights wield the souls of those heroes. Nemo is a student about to enter Granseed Academy, when his village is attacked by man-eating demons. Luckily he’s rescued by Faria, one of the Seven Knights. As they ride toward Granseed Academy, their train is attacked by a demon and Nemo is summoned by the Goddess to receive the power of an ancient hero. Using the power of succession, Nemo helps rescue Faria.

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Reviews Short Takes Simulcast Reviews

Winter Simulcast Check-In, Week of 1/17/2021

Hi, all. This post should be significantly shorter than the previous check-in, mostly because I’m just cleaning up a few episodes of shows that hadn’t had second episodes at the time I wrote the first post (or which I cut for time and my own sanity). If you’re a new reader, it might surprise you to know that I do actually like to write things other than episode reviews! Yet, I find it helpful to go through the process even if writing about it isn’t as interesting as it could be (though maybe some folks out there find it interesting to read).

I’ll mention this again – these recaps won’t be a weekly feature of the blog, but if there’s an interesting episode of anything in particular in the coming weeks I might take time to write in more detail about that episode specifically.

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First Impressions Reviews

Winter 2021 New Anime – Premieres for Sunday, January 10th, 2021

By the time this is posted, it’ll be Friday. This week has been a long one, mostly because I’ve been kind of sick, working from home with no change in scenery, and hoping that I don’t end up feeling worse before I get better. On the plus side, I’ve been sleeping a lot better than I have in a long time. I have a cat, whom I love very much, but she has a bad habit of waking up around 4:30am and deciding that’s when my husband and I should also wake up. She’s also one of the loudest cats I’ve ever had the pleasure to know so there’s no ignoring her when she starts her morning routine. Luckily she’s dialed it back a little bit lately and instead of pawing at my face with her foot to get me up, has been a lot more willing to curl up and go back to sleep on the bed with me.

The better sleep quality has the added benefit of allowing my thoughts to remain more coherent (at least I think they are; the jury’s still out on whether other folks agree). While I still have a bad tendency to get distracted while I’m writing (I’m blaming the internet for being so interesting all the time!), at least I’ve been able to write.

Just as a note: after this batch the premieres start trickling off a little bit so premiere dates might be combined into fewer posts.

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First Impressions Reviews

Winter 2021 New Anime – Premieres for Friday, January 8th 2021

It’s amazing how much things can change in a short amount of time. Yesterday during the day I was all geared-up to come home and watch anime, but then before I went to bed I started to feel suspiciously cruddy. Now I’m working from home and hoping that all I have is a case of the creeping crud. Luckily I don’t feel too poorly, but I’m a little irritated that the only places I’ve been for quite a while (aside from work, which is fairly isolated) are “the grocery store” and “the other grocery store” and I still managed to catch something.

On the upside, it does mean I get to use my lunch time to watch a little anime to maybe catch up a little bit (not that I’m stressing). This group of premieres is the largest so far, but if this post gets too long I might split it in two so that I don’t overwhelm folks.

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First Impressions Reviews

Winter 2021 New Anime – Premieres for Wednesday, January 6th 2021

Well, as I’m writing this it’s definitely been an interesting couple of days in the United States. To be honest, it took a day or two to get enough sleep to feel like I could pay attention to an entire anime episode and write coherently about it. I think there are some folks who can use media to escape from whatever happens to be going on; my anxiety is just too terrible to let up for 25 minutes so I can take in an anime episode. But I’ve been wanting to watch anime, so I’m going to give it a try and see how far I get.

Most folks will notice that the look of the blog has changed; while I wasn’t really planning to switch things up at this very moment, a friend let me know of some image compatibility issues that were showing up on the mobile site so I figured it would be a good opportunity to make a change to my very out-of-date theme. I may be tweaking things in the coming days, but this is pretty close to what I wanted.

Note: There is a small spoiler for Hortensia Saga in its review. It’s one of the main conceits of the series and if you’re looking closely enough you can identify it on your own (even though the show itself is not keen to call it out directly), but I know more than one person who missed it until participating in discussions afterward, so if you’d rather go in completely blind you can skip the second review in this post.

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