Forgotten Summer 2016 Anime Reviews

Happy All Saints’ Day and first day of NaNoWriMo or NaBloPoMo–whichever you prefer to undertake.  I’ll be undertaking the latter.  The challenge for National Blog Posting Month is to post once per diem for the month of November.  Usually, I get through with a combination of original articles and reblogs.  So, you just might see a post of yours up on Medieval Otaku this month. 🙂  At the same time, my reading challenge on Goodreads shows that I need to finish fifteen more books, i.e. I need to read about two books a week until the end of the year–sounds doable.

It occurred to me that I never linked my summer anime reviews on Beneath the Tangles to this blog.  That was remiss of me, and here they are: Alderamin on the Sky, Active Raid, Berserk, and Sweetness and Lightning.  That season, I also had the pleasure of finishing 91 Days and ReLife, which went unremarked upon.  Below, I hope to correct my overlooking of them.

Enjoy!

1) ReLife – ★★★★ 

I think this show was one of the more popular ones in the summer 2016 season and with good reason: the characters and their personal dramas were deftly portrayed.  I can’t say that I disliked a single one.  Also, Arata Kaizaki’s plight of not being able to gain good employment despite his college education and then being given the opportunity to return to high school for a second chance hit home with me.  You see, I happened to graduate college during the Great Recession, and I myself did part time work in addition to being plagued with nightmares of having to repeat high school.  (I gather that such nightmares are not that uncommon?)

I must say that my strong identification with the main character accounts for some of the high rating above.  Other bloggers thought that the tension died down a little early in the story.  But, the anime made me honestly care for all of the characters–whether they were twenty-seven or seventeen.  So, I enjoyed this redemptive high school drama more than I thought that I would going into the show.

2) 91 Days – ★★★ 1/2

I’m a lenient grader: when I rate a show three and a half stars, it means that the show did everything right and I would watch it again.  At the same time, it doesn’t strike me as especially memorable (four stars), nearly a masterpiece (four and a half stars), or a masterpiece (five stars).  91 Days counts a good revenge story in that it shows both the emptiness of revenge and how sinful man is drawn to it nevertheless.  In addition, it gives us some interesting characters, beautiful backgrounds, action, intrigue, and a rarely used setting in anime.

I could barely stand Fango.

Stay tuned tomorrow for seven more such reviews on anime from more recent seasons and some from further in the past.  Wish me luck on this year’s NaBloPoMo!