The Cart Driver

Welcome to Scamp’s World Famous Anime Season Preview, this time covering Fall 2019 in what is the 11th year of me writing these posts. This time we a lot of sequels. I didn’t get an accurate count but roughly 64 of the anime airing this season are sequels. But we’ll get to them at the end, because first we are going to dig past the sequels and take a look at the new anime airing this season. Because there’s always something new worth watching. Well, almost always.

Rise Up! Animal Road

This new anime is an isekai (that is a line I’ve been writing a lot these past few years) about a masked pro wrestler who german suplexes a princess because she wants him to fight monsters (that is a line I have not written that many times these past few years). The author is the same bloke who wrote KonoSuba, and you can kinda see it too. I could never get into KonoSuba, but if I astrally project my mind into someone who did, it has a very similar sense of humour with a pretty entertaining cast of characters and overall incredibly silly tone. The staff and studio are fairly new though and the trailer looked garbage, but it’s a comedy so lives and dies by the jokes more than the visuals.

Beastars

I had heard a bunch of hype around Beastars, but I couldn’t tell if that was because it was an amazing manga, or because it was a decent manga being propelled up by furries. I read a bit of it and I think it may be more the former. The writing is really impressive and uses the anthropomorphism for thematic purposes. It won the acclaimed Manga Taisho award, which is about as high an award as a manga can get, with previous winners being stuff like Golden Kamuy, Bride’s Story, March Comes in Like a Lion, Silver Spoon, Chihayafuru, you get the idea. The anime is a full CG affair, but before you run away screaming at the idea of a CG wolf wearing suspenders, I’ll point out that it is by the same studio that made The One Good CG Anime, aka Land of the Lustrous. That one worked in CG partly due to excellent visual direction, but also because it was about crystal people fighting buddha cheese monsters that traveled across dimensions using what either looked like rorschach tests or my dad leaving our family. In other words, it was its own strange unique thing and I’m unsure if a deer in a suit will work as well in CG. Still, it’s one of the anime I’m genuinely looking forward to that’s not a sequel, so it better be good.

The Hero is Overpowered but Overly Cautious

This is an isekai anime (oh look there it is again) told from the perspective of the goddesses summoning the great hero from another world. So they summon this very handsome dude who is super powerful, only for him to be…look, it’s a light novel, just read the title. They tend to be very helpful like that. It seemed fine as far as isekai stories go. No slavery apologia in sight, which is a nice plus, and I quite liked the characters. Staff are fairly average but White Fox have are a studio I respect and tend to put their best foot forward when it comes to these isekai anime, with the likes of Re Zero and Goblin Slayer under their belt (no I don’t like Goblin Slayer either, but they did their best with the source material). I do have one rather serious problem with the trailer though. And that is the absurd bouncy boobs. Here’s the thing Anime Creators. I’m not going to pretend this light novel wasn’t inherently cheesecake in the first place. Heck I’ll even go so far as to say I think these ladies are quite attractive and would not be opposed to a little fanservice. Or even a lot of fanservice. But hyper breast bounce is not sexy! When the boobs look like balloons in a wind tunnel, I don’t get horny. I just feel a combination of sympathy and second-hand pain – like watching someone get nailed in a crotch with a tennis ball. That is not the feeling you should be trying to invoke animators! A little jiggle is fine, if only for the realism (look at that art, they clearly aren’t wearing sports bras). But don’t make it look like her boobs house angry terriers trying to escape at mach speed.

Azur Lane

Oh christ it’s the thing I keep seeing online ads for. The one where they say “come my master” as some big titty anime lady wants me to download a phone game. Azur Lane was a Korean phone game that jumped on the popularity of Kantai Collection a few years ago with its own take on battleships turned into hot anime ladies. KanColle faded away and Azur Lane took over, so of course we have to get an anime for it too. Considering it is being made by the staff behind the Grisaia anime I except this will kill Azur Lane as effectively as the KanColle anime killed that franchise.

Ascendance of a Bookworm

Ascendance of a Bookworm is an isekai story (that’s 3 of the first 5 anime in this season preview) where our main character dies under an avalanche of her own books and is reborn as a child in a medieval world with no books. Instead of being mentally scarred by books after her death, she instead misses books so bad she propels the culture several hundred years forward and invents the printing press. Unlike the last two isekai, which were more comedic nonsense cheesecake pieces, this is more earnest and will probably speak to you if you too have so many books you would be crushed to death if they all fell on you. I’ll admit though that despite not terrible source material, my expectations are low. The trailer looked pretty bland, the staff haven’t worked on anything of note, the last anime the studio worked on were stuff like Izetta and How Not to Summon a Demon Lord, and the director’s most notable anime was World Trigger, possibly the worst directed anime from the last decade.

Fate/Grand Order Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia

Oh christ there’s more Fate. The Fate/Grand Order phone game has ended up being more popular than marijuana and generating more porn than the collective step-sisters of America so this franchise must roll on. It takes the story from the phone game, and we all know phone games have great stories. Ooh also the staff and studio are the same folks who teamed up with Trigger to make Darling in the Franxx. So whatever problem Saber comes across in this anime I’m sure would be solved by teen pregnancy, since that’s how Franxx ended.

Special Crime Investigation Unit Special 7

This has proven to be a weirdly difficult show to get a grasp on. It’s an anime original series set in Tokyo about a special police force who get into cool action set pieces. Which is fine, OK, now tell us whether it will be any good. The answer to that is “fuck if I know”. The staff has worked on lots of magical girl series in the past, which tells us nothing. The trailer didn’t tell us much, with serviceable animation and a bunch of bishies. The anime studio is completely new with this being their first anime, although it shares that distinction with Tanya the Evil and that was an incredible anime. So it’s a mystery for now.

Babylon

Boy if the last anime was a mystery, than this is a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a tortilla made with inscrutable flour. Another brand new studio, this one called Revoroot, adapting a mystery novel where the police uncover some crazy shit. I can’t find any English translations of the novels nor the manga made from them, but I do know they were written by the same bloke who wrote Kado. You know. Kado! Everyone knows Kado! That CG anime from a few years ago about the giant dimensional cube and the white haired dude who had hands but no arms like Rayman? The one with the very silly ending? OK fine I was the only person who watched that, I know. It was pretty intriguing even with the bad CG and worse ending, and would be interested in seeing what else he has in him. Apparently he has Babylon…whatever the fuck this is.

Blade of the Immortal

Ah finally something I know a lot more about. Blade of the Immortal is one of the most critically acclaimed and most popular manga of all time. A 30-volume samurai epic that ran from 1993 to 2012, sold over 5 million copies around the world, and was the subject of a pretty crappy anime in 2008. Now we have this new anime, funded by and streaming exclusively on Amazon Prime worldwide. On paper everything looks great. Ex-Madhouse director who directed Steins;Gate and a bunch of older hyper-violent series which would fit this source material. Script writer worked on the Good Psycho Pass series. My one big problem is it’s being animated by LidenFilms. Possibly my least favourite studio around today. They have proven to be very reliable at taking solid source material and making it worse. The trailer didn’t do much to assuage that worry with its washed out colours…although I suppose that is this director’s house style so I shouldn’t be surprised. Again, on paper this could be a defining anime to close out the decade. But something is rumbling in my gut and it’s telling me this won’t catch on. Or that rumbling in my gut is telling me I ate too many brownies.

Welcome to Demon School, Iruma-kun

I was going to open this by referencing Hayate the Combat Butler, until I realised most anime fans from today have no idea what Hayate is. So in the first episode of Hayate, our main character is standing next to Santa and crying. He says “Santa why do I not get any presents” and Santa says “ho ho ho because your parents are poor”. Then his parents abandon him with a massive debt to the mafia and he has to become a butler. Great parents. Well the parents to Iruma-kun are very similar. The series start with his parents selling their son to the devil in exchange for cash. However the devil doesn’t want to take him to a remote English village and marry him when he’s old enough because that would be fucked up. No instead he wants to dote on him as a grandson and send him to demon school. It’s a totally fine shounen comedy – there’s usually one like this per season. Its design is quite dated so I don’t think it will take off, but it seems totally serviceable and something 13-year-old me would have loved.

Kabukichou Sherlock

This is an anime original project by Production IG, who have a lot of very impressive anime original projects under their belt, so I’ll pay attention to anything new they make. This one is a Durarara-style story set in the Tokyo back alleys with mysterious shady and wacky individuals solving mysteries and the like. The trailers look well animated and has a cool jazz soundtrack. But the anime are only as good as the writer and director on board. The director has mostly done shoujo anime adaptations, while the writer has a lot of series to their name, but in terms of anime original material there is 91 Days, which I enjoyed quite a bit. I just have second thoughts at the way some of these characters are presented, especially…Ms. Hudson…a very bad attempt at a cross-dressing bloke. Japan has a very bad history with that sort of character. At the moment I’m finding it very difficult to look beyond them in the trailer. I’ll always check out an anime original Production IG series, but I’m keeping my expectations in check.

Kandagawa Jet Girls

This anime original series is about girls on jet skis powered by how big a cleavage they have. It is by the director of Quasar aka the tit sucking anime, and the trailer features some lovely awful jet ski CG. Wooh!

No Guns Life

This is about a dude with a gun for a head. It’s also a gritty crime noir story about war veterans. It’s also about a guy with a gun for a head. It’s being done by Madhouse, a pretty excellent studio, and is being made by the staff who all made Overlord, which was a solid adaptations and showed they have the chops. It’s also about a guy who has a gun for a head. It sounds all quite interesting but I was unconvinced by the manga. Something about the writing wasn’t up to scratch, but that may have just been a problem with the fan translated version I read. Also it’s about a dude with a gun for a head. That is such a silly premise I can’t get over it.

Houkago Saikoro Club

Have you always wanted to play modern board games but don’t have any real life friends to play it with and playing them with your parents is too embarrassing? Well now you can experience the joy of playing board games second hand via the medium of cute anime girls. Yay I’m very excited oh god I’m so lonely.

Ahiru no Sora

On the outside this just looks like a pretty generic shounen sports anime. However Haikyuu also looked like a pretty generic shounen sports anime and that was great. Haikyuu had the wildly talented crew from Production IG doing the adaptation for them. Ahiru no Sora has the folks who made Aho Girl. Ah, what do I know. You never know if a sports anime is any good until like 8 episodes in, so my cursory reading of just the first chapter didn’t really tell me much except that BOY this sure is a generic shounen sports anime.

Assassins Pride

Her outfit looks stupid. This reminds me of those mid to late 00s anime that were all trying to be Shakugan no Shana. Given that this is by the staff that made My Sister, My Writer, my anticipation levels are through the basement.

Rifle is Beautiful

The story is about a girl trying to revive her school’s gun club. The promo material for the show includes the voice actresses for the main girls forming an idol group called Rifling 4 where they all pose with giant, multi-coloured rifles. It’s weird man.

High School Prodigies Have It Easy Even In Another World

It’s an isekai story (yes we’re back on this bullshit again) about a bunch of really smart kids going to another world and enacting glorious colonial dreams. You know they are smart because the author says they are smart, but it all falls apart when the author themselves is an idiot so the actions the characters do makes them look like idiots.

Young Disease Outburst Boy

It’s a reverse harem series if you wanted your reverse harem to be full of chuunibyou boys . Which sounds like the most obnoxious harem ever and would convert me to lesbianism in seconds.

Val x Love

Hey are you a pedophile? Fantastic! Then I have the anime for you! It’s about a dude who has all these underage ladies who have to get horny for you to unlock their magical powers. How convenient.

Didn’t I Say to Make My Abilities Average in the Next Life?!

This is about a wizard lobster with a robotic claw who dreams of being a princess so tries to disguise himself as a soldier in the Napoleonic war and ha ha no it’s another bland ass isekai.

Are You Really the Only One Who Likes Me

It’s a reverse harem and oh I can’t be arsed, aren’t we nearly at the end of the season preview?

XL Joushi

This is about a woman who is a tester for XL condoms. Then she meets a man who has an XL dick. That is literally the plot description. It’s not porn because it runs on TV. I think that’s how it works.

Sequels

I think I’ll start with Psycho Pass season 3 as it really is worth breaking down who is on this due to the astonishing quality difference between season 1 and season 2. It was purely in the writing capacity that season 2 of Psycho Pass fell apart, which could probably be attributed to handing the scripts to Tow Ubukata, the fellow responsible for the scrambled nonsense of Mardock Scramble. Butch Gen wrote season 1 of Psycho Pass, then he returned for the movie and guess what? The movie was really good! So who is writing the scripts for season 3? Tow Ubu-fucking-kata. OK season 3 also has Makoto Fukami who also worked on the scripts for season 1 and the movie alongside Gen so maybe he’s the secret genius behind the whole Psycho Pass franchise. I want to be excited because I really do love Psycho Pass and the trailer looked excellent. But without Gen I just have no faith.

Of the 15 sequels airing this season that I counted, the only other series I’m looking forward to is the return of My Hero Academia. I hope it’s back to the quality of season 2 because I honestly thought season 3 was a bit of a let down in comparison. I’m sure lots of people who aren’t me will be excited for the return of Chihayafuru after all these years. Food Wars is on what I think is it’s final season. Hi Score Girl ended up being something of a sleeper hit and I’ve been thinking about going back to it some day now that it has a sequel. Sword Art Online is back, now in a horrific world of its own creation. Yes, it is the reason we have so many ruddy isekai anime chugging around. We Never Learn will continue trying and failing to be as popular as the Quintessential Quintuplets with a new season. Seven Deadly Sins continues to be one of the most popular anime out there that is curiously barely watched by any regular anime fans. Radiant is something I am happy exists but will be equally happy to continue ignoring. Kono Oto Tomare continues the tale of angsty boys playing instruments that look like someone designed a guitar based off of someone frantically explaining it to him in an elevator. Fairy Gone is something I really wanted to like but it scorned me by being awful, and I’m kinda shocked it’s even getting a sequel. Finally Granblue Fantasy the Animation is the actual most wildly successful anime this season in Japan and nobody else gives two flying fucks about its existence.