One Chance Anime Party!

Good day dear readers and thanks for joining me for more anime based fun! Today I will be giving a quick reaction to the first episodes of eight different animes, all of which I watched for the first time last night. Why not join me to find out what they are and what I thought of them.

For those of you who follow me over on Twitter you will know that yesterday (February 28th) was my birthday. Since we are still in lockdown and nothing is open, my options for celebrating were limited but I still wanted to do something a bit different that would be memorable. So in the evening I sat down and watched the first episode of eight different animes to see if I could find anything worth watching.

This is something I’ve done before and I would encourage you to take a look at my previous one chance anime party post as it features some really interesting shows!

Getting back to the here and now, lets jump straight in and take a look at the shows I watched.

*Spoilers* for the first episode of each of these series.

Hell Girl: Fourth Twilight

I’m not familiar with any of the previous incarnations of Hell Girl but the first episode captured at least some of my interest. About a girl who can be summoned to send others to hell, the supernatural element is quite fascinating and the real world story that leads to her summoning was hard hitting and difficult to watch. I’d be interested in seeing an exploration of the supernatural characters as this first episode built a bit of tension between them but if it is all as heavy as this I’m not sure I’ll be able to watch it.

Somali and the Forest Spirit

Quite a charming and fairytale-esque depiction of an unlikely relationship between a little girl and a golem, I quite enjoyed the first episode and found it to have a good level of humour despite being quite dark and in parts quite scary. I’m not sure if the world it depicts is something I’ll enjoy over an extended period of time but I’m interested to see what format the show will take so I may well watch another episode.

Fruits Basket

I had no idea what this was about going in but it is fair to say that my guess that it was a nice little slice of life show were blown out of the water hilariously in the first episode. I’ve come away from it with more questions than answers but the characters were all very likeable and I now feel like I need to know more about whatever it is that’s going on because the whole transformation thing had me in hysterics.

Theatre of Darkness: Yamishibai

I have never seen anything like this before in my life and would recommend that any horror fans out there check it out – especially as the first episode is only 4 minutes long! It uses a kind of still animation I’ve never seen before but it works ridiculously well for a horror anime depicting Japanese urban legends. The first episode was one of the scariest things I’ve seen in ages and will stick with me for a long time for both its style and its storytelling.

Hitori No Shita – The Outcast

Probably the weakest of the bunch, this one was set in a small Japanese village where some grave robbing zombie madness is taking place. It seems as though the story will follow the main character, a college student who’s family have some kind of strange history, but unfortunately neither the story or the characters stood out to me at all and I found it hard to follow and hard to care about.

Bungo Stray Dogs

I had quite high expectations of this based on things I’ve seen other people say but to be honest it totally failed to grab my interest. It wasn’t that it was bad, but just that nothing about it was very interesting. I’ve seen shows where people have supernatural powers so many times and this didn’t really offer anything new and it wasn’t particularly charming or funny. To be honest I was bored by the end.

Durarara

This is one I’d definitely like to see more of. It was exceedingly stylish and the black rider has got me fascinated. The boys who seemed to be the lead characters weren’t particularly compelling but there was something I really liked about the way they toured round the city’s danger spots. At this point it isn’t obvious to me where the story is going or how the boys link to the black rider but it definitely has some cool vibes going on!

Mob Psycho 100

This is exactly what I needed at the end of a long anime marathon and a large number of beers. Basically One Punch Man but with a different type of combat, the first episode introduces Mob – a high schooler with crazy powers, and his mentor – a total faker. Their relationship is spot on and each line is delivered so perfectly that it had me in stitches the whole time. This is definitely going on my watch list right away!

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So there is my short but sweet take on eight interesting animes. But which ones do you think I should keep watching and which are for banishing? Let me know your feelings on these shows below in comments and make sure you join me next time for another instalment of Shoot the Rookie!

Thanks for reading,

Pix1001 x

All of these shows are available on Crunchyroll (at least in the UK)