Tag: Romance

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Anime Reviews First Impressions Reviews

Summer 2022 First Impressions – When Will Ayumu Make His Move?

Streaming: HIDIVE

Episodes: 12

Source: Manga

Episode Summary: Urushi is the leader of her school’s shogi club, but unfortunately it’s not quite a club since there are only two members – herself and Ayumu. Both of them love playing shogi together, but it’s obvious that their matches contain a significant amount of emotional subtext. Love may be in the air, although neither of them is confident enough to come right out and acknowledge it.

Ayumu is a master troll, constantly complimenting Urushi in ways that can only be construed as distinctly romantic. Urushi is more than happy to call him out, although when she does he never acknowledges his motivations as anything other than pure respect for his senpai. The two even find themselves sharing an umbrella on the way home from school one afternoon – are they really being truthful with one-another and themselves?

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Anime Reviews First Impressions Reviews

Summer 2022 First Impressions – Call of the Night

Streaming: HIDIVE

Episodes: 13

Source: Manga

Episode Summary: Ko Yamori can’t sleep, so rather than stay home and keep trying to catch some elusive Zs, he decides to leave his apartment and walk the streets at night. The city at night is a completely different world – quiet, glowing in the colors of the street lights – and traveling those roads is like discovering an entirely new world. As Ko tries to buy a beer from a vending machine, he’s suddenly approached by a mysterious woman dressed in black who teases him for being underage. She takes him along on her nightly stroll and shows him what her world is like after the sun goes down.

As the hours tick on, she invites Ko back to her apartment to “go to sleep,” which Ko interprets as some kind of overture. He’s not interested in dating but decides to pretend to sleep until he can find a way to leave. But it’s not sexual gratification the woman is after – it’s her next meal. Ko learns that she’s a vampire, and that despite serving as her blood drinking fountain he’s not destined for that same fate. For to become a vampire, he must fall in love with a vampire. Considering his disinterest in love (and the vampires disinterest in creating other vampires) this seems impossible. But with Ko’s “day” life becoming more and more distant and his night life becoming his reality, he decides to take on the challenge of falling in love, and getting his new vampire friend to love him back.

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First Impressions Reviews

Summer 2022 First Impressions – Engage Kiss

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: 13

Source: Original

Episode Summary: Baylon City is ground zero for the mining of the mineral orgonium. Of course, as with the extraction of most natural resources this one comes along with some unintended consequences, one of which is the release of demonic entities who cause destruction around the city. Shu Ogata is a former employee of a private military/security company experienced in dealing with these demons, but after setting out on his own his costs quickly got out of control and it’s become a struggle for him to simply keep the lights on. The only thing keeping him afloat at this point is his relationship with a girl named Kisara, who seems to be attracted to Shu in spite of his many flaws and helps to pay off his debts.

When Shu manages to snag a contract (by severely undercutting his competition), he has to call in some favors simply to prevent himself from getting immediately killed. But the biggest favor is one given to him willingly, because Kisara happens to have incredible power at her disposal. The only issue is that, in order to release that power, she and Shu have to “reinvigorate” their contract on a regular basis via the power of a passionate kiss.

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Anime Reviews First Impressions Reviews

Winter 2022 First Impressions – Sasaki and Miyano

Streaming: Funimation

Episodes: 12

Source: Manga

Episode Summary: Miyano is a male fan of BL manga – a “fudanshi” in the parlance. This is something he generally keeps under wraps until he meets the rough-and-tumble Sasaki, who intervenes to stop a fight Miyano witnesses. Miyano is happy for the intervention, and even happier that Sasaki seems interested enough to appreciate the BL stories that Miyano loves (even if Sasaki is a bit freer with his attention that Miyano tends to like).

Sasaki, for his part, not only finds that he enjoys spending time with Miyano, but also seems to appreciate Miyano’s soft features and earnest nature. The longer that the two maintain their friendship, the closer that Sasaki is to coming to terms with the fact that his admiration is steadily becoming closer to affection. He eventually realizes that he has feelings for Miyano, but does Miyano reciprocate those feelings?

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Anime Reviews First Impressions Reviews

Autumn 2021 First Impressions – Taisho Otome Fairytale

Streaming: Funimation

Episodes: 12

Source: Manga

Episode Summary: Tamahiko is the second son of a wealthy family, but when a car accident kills his mother and injures his dominant hand, his father and the rest of the children are all-too-willing to remove him from the family and abandon him to his own devices. Now a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist due to his circumstances, Tamahiko is more than a little surprised when a young lady named Yuzu shows up at his doorstep claiming to be the bride his father has arranged for him.

The situation turns out to be one of debts repaid and not necessarily one with Tamahiko or Yuzu’s romantic interests in mind, but Yuzu takes to her responsibilities in a diligent and kind way in spite of her new prospective husband’s poor spirits. Yuzu knows that this was all essentially a transaction between their parents, but in spite of that she wants to know the real Tamahiko and for them to fall in love with one-another eventually.

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Anime Reviews First Impressions Reviews

Summer 2021 First Impressions – Girlfriend, Girlfriend

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: 12

Source: Manga

Episode Summary: After years of knowing each other, Naoya asks his childhood friend Saki to go out with him. Their relationship is very… competitive and passionate, mostly due to Naoya’s extreme sincerity. Naoya may seem like an uncomplicated man, but his situation becomes uncharacteristically messy once a second girl, the quiet Nagisa, also confesses her love to him. Naoya is taken, but Nagisa is so incredibly cute. What’s a guy to do?

Naoya’s answer is to beg Saki to let him date both her and Nagisa, and after some protracted begging she relents. The three then begin living together under one roof (Naoya’s parents are out of the picture). At first things don’t seem half bad – Saki hates chores and Nagisa’s a great cook. But when the discussion turns toward the girls’ sexual expectations, suddenly they find themselves in the middle of another blow-up argument. Is this an arrangement that can actually work?

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Anime Reviews Reviews

Horimiya – Snapshots of a Relationship

What’s important in a relationship? I think most people would answer something like “communication” or “shared interests,” and I think we can all agree that those are at least some of the basic things that make for a successful partnership. I might be tempted to ask a different question, however – what moments are important to a relationship? That’s a much more difficult question to answer, because as a rule our brains don’t always keep track of memories that, at the time, might seem insignificant.

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Anime Reviews First Impressions Reviews

Spring 2021 First Impressions – Osamake: Romcom Where the Childhood Friend Won’t Lose

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: 12

Source: Light Novel

Story Summary: Haru has fallen in love with the beautiful, talented, and smart Kachi-san. He’s even managed to develop a sort of rapport with her, after confessing to reading her published work. But just as he’s building up the courage to ask her out officially at the end of the cultural festival, he learns that she’s already dating someone – Abe, a handsome fellow student who’s just made his acting debut. How can Haru compete with that? He takes some solace in the arms of his childhood friend Kuroha, a spitfire with an older-sister personality at odds with her small stature. Kuroha has always loved Haru, and to help him deal with his troubles she proposes that they pretend to date in order to make Kachi jealous. But Haru might also have feelings for Kuroha that he can’t reconcile with this situation. And he’s also holding on to a trump card of his own.

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First Impressions Reviews

Winter 2021 New Anime – Premieres for Saturday, January 9th, 2021

The first couple weeks of a new anime season sometimes feel like running a marathon – it’s a long haul task of watching new episodes, constructing coherent thoughts about them, and then moving on to the next one in a relatively short amount of time. From the outside it might seem like a pretty easy job to sit at a desk and watch anime, but as a lone blogger it can get pretty intense especially since I’m editing my own posts without the benefit of an outside force reminding me not to use certain pet phrases too much (for some reason, this season has been all about the word “albeit” for me, even though I haven’t used it that much in the past). The urge to self-edit in the midst of the writing process is tempting, because then the second pass takes less time. Unfortunately, it’s so easy to get hung-up on finding the perfect phrasing that I find that methodology to be more limiting. It takes training to let oneself word vomit to the benefit of the final product.

I hope folks are enjoying these little asides at the beginning of my posts; I have a difficult time getting started sometimes, and providing a window into my thought process seems to help me a get into a writing frame of mind. If you’re not keen to read vaguely-related personal things, it’s easy to just click the “continue reading” button and skip to the good stuff.

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First Impressions Reviews

Autumn 2020 First Impressions – Tonikawa: Over the Moon for You

Fly me to the moon…

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: TBA

Source: Manga

Summary: When Nasa Yuzaki was born, his parents named him something that reflected their aspirations and ideals for him, and since then it’s followed him like a curse. Other people chuckle because it reminds them of the space agency “NASA.” In order to live with this burden, Nasa throws his heart into studying and training his body, his goal being to distinguish himself and overshadow his own name. Things are looking good for him until he sees a beautiful girl walking down the street one snowy evening. As he crosses the street to meet her, he gets hit by a truck. His body is a wreck, but he absolutely must know they mysterious girl. Delirious with pain, he asks her to date him. She agrees – but only on the condition that they get married. This is the last thing Nasa remembers before falling unconscious.

After his recovery, his school aspirations don’t seem quite as important. Nasa decides to go to work instead, and lives modestly on his own. One day he hears a knock on the door – it’s the girl he was so smitten with, and she’s come to collect on their promise. She introduces herself as Tsukasa, provides a marriage registration certificate, and leads Nasa to the prefectural office in order to legally formalize their union. While this is all moving incredibly quickly, Nasa seems powerless to resist (nor does he seem interested in doing much resisting). Tsukasa entered his life like the mysterious Princess Kaguya, and unlike the Emperor and Woodcutter, he’s not going to let this woman go.

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