Fall Anime Tournament Bracket Review

Bloodivores Vs Cardfight! Vanguard G Next

Not a difficult choice this first round. Bloodiverse was interesting, tense, and well animated. Cardfight is obviously intended for a younger audience and gets pretty bogged down in the card/gaming elements. Some of the fights could be cool, and have some bursts of neat animation. But aside from a sort of quaint nostalgic feeling for game/toy related anime, and a few decent action snips (no single sequence ever quite measures up, as they tend to be full of distracting "points" graphics and cutaways to the game table where people are playing the cards themselves.

Bloodiveres runs away with it. It starts off fast paced and does a decent job of maintaining that pace while also introducing the world and characters. I was pretty psyched after the first episode of Bloodivores for more episodes.

Cardfight left me kinda cold.

Bloodiverse advances.

Much tougher choice here. Tiger Mask W is fantastic. It has a wonderful oldschool feel to it, very "baki-like". Very entertaining. I'll definitely continue watching this.

Shuumatsu No Izetta is just plain amazing though. The story is complex and interesting, the visuals are spectacular.

Tiger Mask W is great. I love it. But in the end, it's really no match for Shuumatsu no Izetta, which is a much more intricate and complex thing. Still, Tiger Mask W is blugdeoningly old school in the best possible way and one of my favorite new anime.

Shuumatsu no Izetta advances.

The new Digimon is a great little anime for kids. Very full and rich world. But it is a kids anime still. While I can sort of find entertainment in just about any anime, I definitely gravitate (being an adult n all) toward more mature storylines.

New Season of IBO is full of characters, action, and awesome visual action sequences.

Mobile Suit Gundam IBO Season 2 advances.

Monster Hunter Stories is gorgeous and not quite so overwhelmingly visually busy as some of the other kid-aimed monster collector anime mentioned so far. The world feels both more solid and more fantastical than the other shows. The additional CG effects scenes are well done and mix with the other more traditional styles, and remind me a little of Zoids, which I used to love.

Time Bokun is a bit messier. Some neat little sequences, and definitely doesn't take itself too seriously. But ultimately it's a bit of a mess. It has some fun little ideas in it, and is pretty cool in its goofy little way. Ultimately though, it's one of those anime that never quite seems to pull itself together into anything too coherent. It's a goofily entertaining little anime. But not great.

Monster Hunter Stories advances.

so this one turned out to be tougher than I thought going in. I fully expected All Out! to be an easy throwaway and thought I'd really like Brave Witches.

Turns out, while All Out! is indeed fairly formulaic, it's also quite a bit more focused than Brave Witches.

animation-wise, it's Brave Witches hands down. Some awesome sequences.

But, I could not get past, as is the case with a lot of anime - the ridiculous amount of fanservice injected into the mix with Brave Witches - which is about little girl witches going to school to defend humanity against evil aliens.

Literally almost no characters seem to wear anything but panties.

like ever.

They're all decked out from the waste up. But then - apparently there is no need for anything - well, I guess some super short skirts.

And, in some anime, the fanservice doesn't really bother me that much. But with this - it really does seem to aspire to a certain height with its story and pretty nifty visual imagery. It feels super out of place in this for a number of reasons (the age of the characters, the dramatic nature of the storyline, and the otherwise fantastic visual choices).

What could have been a pretty top-drawer anime for me, I found that I couldn't get into just because of the constant sort of "underage panty sniffer" vibe it gave off far too often.

All Out! also has some similar stuff tossed in, but only fleetingly, and the anime itself has a sillier vibe, so it seems more at home. Also it's doesn't hit you over the head/constantly assail you with it in the aggressive way I felt Brave Witches did.

so, surprising even myself:

Ima give it to All Out!