I see that the next Ascendance of a Bookworm light novel (part 2.1) comes out next week, and it’s currently in the top 20 for “fantasy manga” and #1 for “children’s manga”.

Note that it’s not manga at all, nor is it the claimed 33 pages long. The publisher seems to have some severe tagging issues, but I’m sure they don’t mind the ranking and “#1 bestseller” marker.

I need to sit down and catch up on the anime. When last I checked in, they had a long way to go to get through the first three books, although it looks like they’ll be using some of the side stories that pad out the books as the Bluray-only episode 14 (a rare case where “buy the blurays” does not involve steam removal…).

And, yes, that’s Koyasu as Benno.

After the jump, an artist’s rendering of what the future holds for the Adorable Moppet…

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I should do this one for NaNoWriMo:

“Reincarnated In Another World As The Goddess Of Reincarnation, I Reincarnate People In Other Worlds As Reincarnation Gods”

On a personal note, I was surprised to wake up and still have electricity, as PG&E’s Five Year Plan of rolling blackouts merrily continues.

Dropped!

Didn’t I Say To Make My Abilities Average In The Next Life?. Episodes 2 and 3 confirm that this is a steaming pile. The problem isn’t that it’s a poor adaptation (although it is); the problem is that they think it’s a comedy, and they don’t know how to write one of those.

High School Prodigies Have It Easy Even In Another World. Let me be clear that the giant breasts were the only thing this show had going for it; episode 3 was so bad that their barely-delivered promise is no longer enough.

I’m willing to pretend that Business Hero’s takedown of Snidely Whiplash wasn’t suspiciously-contrived nonsense. I’m willing to play along with the genre clichés that are samurai girl, ninja reporter, and loli mad scientist. I’ll even give you Politics Hero With A Pistol, despite him being the most boring one in the group. But super-surgeon gal snapped my willing suspension of disbelief like a dry twig, and the wrap-up of the loli catgirl story combined with The Confrontation exposed what little story they have as an exercise in pointless plot twists. Seriously, I felt like watching an episode of Dokuro-chan to regain IQ points.

[catching up after finishing off the main story in Cat Quest and surviving the run to Zora’s Domain in BotW…]

(cover of the next Average book)

After School Dice Club: Ep 2, Enter The Crush, with game Cockroach Poker. Really didn’t need a boy in my gamer-girls-doing-gaming-things show. Ep 3: Incan Gold subtracts the boy, adds two older girls, and actually has a plot twist.

Ascendance Of A Bookworm 2 & 3: after the first one, I ended up reading the first two light novels, and it’s tracking pretty closely. This seems to be a rare case where they realize they have good source material and are actively trying to use it well. No complaints.

Azur Lane: dropped; due in large part to the giant (tee-hee) cast, the story is incomprehensible, and the fan-service is being done better by fans on Pixiv.

Didn’t I Say To Make My Abilities Average In The Next Life? Ep 1: “Ain’t no ‘Adele’ here!” I presume Mile’s first 2.x years in her new world will be told in convenient flashbacks. This is another case where I took a look at the light novels, and the anime team has jumped over several chapters and made some significant changes to what they’re using. It looks like the manga started in the same place as the novels, so this one has a whiff of trainwreck about it. Also, the novels quickly turn into girl-power-power-fantasy, with Mile not only being able to do anything while pretending to be “normal”, but also power-level her friends with a few quick tips. It gets old fast, even with her finally starting to figure out that she was sold a bill of goods by her reincarnation advisor.

High School Prodigies Have It Easy Even In Another World : Ep 2, Enter The Loli Catgirl. Our Business-Hero proves his worth to the village skeptic, and acquires his future waifu. Side note: Business Hero’s voice sounded familiar, and while his DanMachi character Takemikazuchi doesn’t get a lot of lines in the anime, I hear him a lot in the DanMemo game.

I missed Yuuna And The Haunted Hot Springs when it aired. An assortment of screenshots and short video clips convinced me to give it a shot, and I found it a perfectly delightful harem comedy. Sadly, there’s no US Bluray release, and Crunchyroll has the steam-and-lightbar-censored broadcast version, and they don’t have the 3 uncensored OVA episodes, so off to the torrents we go!

(NSFW after the jump)

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New anime series I’m going to give a shot:

• After School Dice Club (funimation): three high school girls play European board and card games. Ep 1: Marrakech. Highlight: class rep girl sports red half-rims.

• Ascendance Of A Bookworm (crunchyroll): reborn as an adorable moppet in a world without books, Our Heroine starts making them herself. Ep 1: creepy wizard uses drugs and magic to discover the secret origin of the adorable moppet.

• Azur Lane (funimation): a bountiful harvest of bountiful shipgirls. Ep 1: 95 seconds of blah-blah before they even show a girl, then all of them at once in the OP. Really feels like it’s only for people who already know a lot more about the game than the 95-second explanation they just gave, and have a large checklist of girls who must appear. I’ll give it at least until Belfast shows up. Quote: “war, war never changes”, sigh.

• BlackFox (crunchyroll): masked ninja girl battles the forces of evil in a future world, with a series logo that looks suspiciously like a Grendel mask. Ep 0: origin story, in which Our Hero is briefly introduced as an adorable ninja moppet, only to grow up offscreen and come home just in time to experience a tragic loss that leads her to swear revenge on two creepy guys.
     No, wait, this isn’t a series at all, and the “preview episode” I watched earlier this week is no longer available. It’s been replaced by a 90-minute movie.

• Didn’t I Say To Make My Abilities Average In The Next Life? (crunchyroll, but not up yet): during her reincarnation into another world, Our Heroine wishes to be average, but didn’t specify average what. Most promising element: series composition by the same guy who handled Endro!.

• High School Prodigies Have It Easy Even In Another World ([crunchyroll] (https://www.crunchyroll.com/high-school-prodigies-have-it-easy-even-in-another-world)): seven seriously-overspecced teenagers who more-or-less run modern Japan crashland in a fantasy world and proceed to take over. Ep 1: four minutes of blah-blah about how awesome each one is, followed by what’s sure to be only the first of many opportunities to show off their mad skillz. They opened with two pairs of giant boobs, though, so it can’t be all bad…

Saturday Update

Gave Cautious Hero: The Hero is Overpowered But Overly Cautious (funimation) a shot. The OP song was so bad I skipped over the credits, which is never a good sign. The in-your-face trope-awareness and self-conscious wackiness was… discouraging, to put it kindly. It would have been less awkward to have signs popping up that read “laugh now”.

Looks like Average starts Monday.

The producers of “High School Prodigies Have It Easy Even In Another World” (crunchyroll) certainly know how to set the mood with the opening scene:

Interestingly, the official web site has a full English translation.

After School Dice Club, in which cute girls do cute things with board games.

I think they’ve got me with this one…