So I watched a decent amount of stuff recently, figured I would talk about them. Finished TTGL about a month or so ago, amazing anime. I had actually started it earlier, but dropped it after the hotspring episode in a bout of facepalm, though after watching the whole thing I was kind of mad at myself for doing so. After that episode, the anime is kind of like a snowball of awesome rolling down a hill, it just keeps getting bigger and bigger until you have an oversized ball of awesome by the end.
It rather left a feeling that anything I watched immediately after wouldn't seem as good, so I decided to just watch a something random that I haven't looked into at all, and decided on Kurohime. The anime itself actually started out decent, and I was actually surprised at how into it I was despite it being somewhat predictable. Then a certain character dies, and while I knew it was going to happen from pretty early on, the show ends up just slowly collapsing in on itself from that point on. For some reason after that point the character interactions just seemed to fall apart, doesn't help that the villain cast ends up being either uninteresting or just WHAAA... in terms of motivation. Anime also suffers by trying to have a darkish tone and just failing it up miserably with the overall lightheartedness when there isn't fighting, though I could be misremembering it since it's been like a month since I've seen it. Would probably peg the show around average collectively, with the first half being above and the second below.
Watched Kurozuka, which is interesting, if a bit confusing. The anime can be a bit hard to follow at times, but once you get to the ending, everything just kind of falls into place. You end up feeling really bad for the main character's situation, and also while I don't want to give it away, Kuro herself probably makes the likes of Aizen jealous for the amount of mind fuckery she pulls on the main character. It's a decently interesting anime for dark humor, though it has a few weird segments that kind of bring it down a bit.
After those two, watched Phantom: Requiem for the Phantom. I honestly liked this series alot, up until like the last 3-4 episodes, at which point things from being believably realistic in nature to just sort of "WHAT?" Putting that aside, I found Ein's and Zwei's interactions to be a joy to watch. Seeing Zwei attempt to free Ein and himself from the underworld that they were forcibly dragged into, despite Ein's own resistance to the notion of being free, was really damn interesting to me. It was an amazing anime to watch, and then near the end there's a battle that just kind of makes you go uggghhhh, and then after that brief stint it goes back to not failing and ends with a bittersweet ending. Really high quality in my opinion, not quite perfect, but pretty close, if only that one stint near the end didn't bring the overall experience down so much.
Most recent thing I watched is Black Lagoon, which is just pure unadulterated awesome. Pretty much moving this up to my favorite Seinen. Revy is awesome, Rock is awesome, Balalaika is just pure amazing win. It's a surprisingly thematic anime, and the back and forth between the characters in and out of battles is done really damn well. The battles themselves basically fall into the unbelievable shoot em up type when Revi is involved, but they're still really damn interesting and well done. The blend of existential themes and action in this anime are just amazing to me, I honestly can't wait for the third season to come out this year.
