Summer 2018 Week 1

Introduction

The first week of the Summer 2018 anime season is officially underway! This week only six of the eleven anime I planned to watch have started, so future weekly reviews should be longer than this one. That said, of those six anime, I’ve only been able to watch five of them.

While I was looking forward to Back Street Girls, it appears that there is currently no streaming service which has picked this series up. Because of this, I won’t be watching this anime during the season, and will have to find it some time after it finishes airing.

Island

Island was the first anime I was interested in to start airing this season. However, it appears to be one of the anime which Crunchyroll is going to be pushing pretty hard this season, and those series tend not to end up being good.

The series appears to be a supernatural mystery which takes place on an island, but this island doesn’t seem to be the titular island. There’s apparently another island which only appears when something mysterious happens.

As for the characters, there’s Setsuna, the protagonist and time traveler, Rinne, another time traveler who also can’t go out in sunlight for some reason, Sara, the crazy shrine maiden, and Karen, the tsundere. Based off these descriptions, you can clearly see that Karen is the best character so far.

I think this series has potential, but it’s going to be a strange ride. Although I think this is a bit too predictable to be true, my early prediction is that the plot twist is Setsuna traveled back in time to kill himself.

Hanebado!

Hanebado! is a sports anime about badminton. While this isn’t really something that interests me, I figured I’d give this series a try because what do I really have to lose other than 22 minutes per week?

So far, this anime reminds me of Two Car, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. There seem to be a lot of supporting characters who I’ll never actually remember the names of just like in Two Car. In fact, I even had trouble telling the two protagonists apart in that one.

There appear to be two main girls in Hanebado! as well, and as of the first episode I’m not sure which one of them is the protagonist and which is the antagonist. Either these two will end up becoming rivals, or teammates, and it’s unclear to me which it will be at this point in time.

One Room S2

One Room Second Season is the first of three sequels I plan to watch this season. For those who aren’t familiar with this series, my review of the first season can be found here, but I’ll mention that it’s an anime short seen from a first person perspective.

The first episode of this season was simply a recap episode about one of the girls, Yui Hanasaka. Normally I’m not a fan of recap episodes, but I found this one to be pretty helpful. I’m not entirely sure if this part was recap or new content, but apparently she became “our” girlfriend.

How Not to Summon a Demon Lord

How Not to Summon a Demon Lord is my early pick for best anime of the season. At first I chose to watch it because out of the few isekai anime I saw airing this season, it seemed like the one that would either be the least bad, or so bad it was funny.

As it turns out, it’s a comedy isekai, but not quite in the same way that KonoSuba is. The general premise of this anime is that two girls from a fantasy game world summoned the protagonist from our world into theirs. They then attempted to make him their slave with a seal, but their seal was reversed and they became his slaves instead.

Diablo, the protagonist, is a demon lord and the most powerful being in the world. However, although he’s completely overpowered, he’s not your typical isekai protagonist. Because he’s an otaku, the only way he can get himself to talk to people in this new world is to stay in character and play the part of demon lord, much to his chagrin.

Despite playing the part of demon lord, he’s still a good guy deep down like many isekai protagonists. I think if his character was more of a jerk, like Kazuma from KonoSuba, this anime would easily be the best of the season, but for now we’ll just have to wait and see.

Harukana Receive

The final anime of this week is Harukana Receive, another sports anime, but this time about beach volleyball. Like with Hanebado!, I’m not really too interested in this anime, but at least it has better visuals.

So far, it seems to be a story about a girl suddenly finding out she’s good at beach volleyball, then competing on a team with her cousin, who used to be one of the best around, to win some tournament. Pretty standard stuff.

However, one drawback of this anime I’ve noticed so far is that the dialogue pacing seems a bit off. After one character stops talking, the gap before the next character starts responding seems a little too long. This makes for some pretty awkward sounding conversations.

Conclusion

Next week there should be a few more anime added to the weekly review, but I’m not sure how many of the anime I planned to watch are actually going to stream on Crunchyroll. I believe at least one anime I wanted to see was picked up by Amazon, so we’ll see if I end up watching it as it airs.