This Just Anime!

This week we're back on our vampire grind. Netflix just dropped the 5 episode series, Vampire in the Garden and naturally we watched it. We've had a lot of vampire content in recent memory so we'll go into what worked for this one, what didn't and ultimately discuss whether 5 episodes was enough or too many even? From there Nick has something that's been bugging him because of a comment online, so we're going to make a defense for last minute recap episodes. And finally with anime more popular than ever is it becoming too dang expensive to stream all of the titles as they come out? Are Disney and Netflix looking to be serious competition to Crunchyroll? Who knows? Not us, but we can sure speculate, so join us as we figure out how much it costs to consume this much anime. 

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This episode is so casual it came out a day later than normal. Wow.  That's right it's back, we haven't done an episode of the casualcast in a while, but basically instead of having a set outline we just wing it and talk about whatever wanders through our pretty little heads. This week we're talking about why Kaguya Sama's rap battle is maybe the best thing ever to be animate, why we're romcom apologists but hard on fantasy and isekai titles, and our nervous anticipation of Devil is a Part Timer, a series we both remember fondly that hasn't been touched for like 8 years. We're also talking about weird stuff like Dark Souls and Nick's life as a recently bald individual. We'll be back to a stricter format this week, but for now we hope you enjoy our ramblings and musings. 

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Netflix seems to have a thing for anime movies with the word bubble in the title, and so this week we're reviewing Bubble. It's an post apocalypse parkour take on the classic fairy tale The Little Mermaid. It's maybe a loose interpretation, but Wit studios put a lot into this one so we're gonna talk about what worked, what didn't and overall whether we recommend it. But that's not it for this episode, we're also going back to last season's predictions to see what came true in Nailed It. And of course we're making some bold new ones that we'll have to check in on next season. It's a pretty wild season so far and power rankings are already shifting so check them out on the site if you're curious. 

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The title of this episode pretty much says it all, but if you're new here goes. We're ranking every new title this season via a good old tier system and picking a couple of titles in each category to talk about. We're also describing every single dang new show with only one sentence that we make up completely on the spot, because we masochists or something. 
We're also covering returning titles, but we don't do the sentence for those because we have to draw the line somewhere. That sound good? Then what are you waiting for, listen right now! Also on a serious not we're linking well known VA and generally good dude Billy Kametz's gofundme page this week. He was recently diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer and that pretty lame to say the least. And since our healthcare system in this country is questionable at best this is the best way to help those in need, so if you're a person who wants to help here's a pretty easy way to do so, even if it's just a little bit it means a lot. 

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We're bringing you a whole bunch more first impressions this week, there's still a lot to like this season and also some things to maybe dislike. We've once again pre sorted a whole bunch of premieres into promising, undecided, and disappointing starts. Between this week's episode and last week we've got our first take on just about every new title this season so if you're not sure what to try this season we've got you covered. Next week will be our normal Powercast and rankings will be live on the site  as well so get ready for spring and start watching some anime!

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Winter is over, snow is melting, and we have a whole new crop of anime popping up to sample. This week we're going over a whole bunch of first impressions that Nick conveniently sorted into promising premiers, jury is still out, and disappointing starts. Our general outlook on the season is strong, we have some promising fantasy titles (for once) as well as a whole bunch of slice of life and romcoms to get us excited about, we also have a good few shows with weird totally out there concepts that may prove to be some of our favorites. We'll be going over a whole crop of things fairly quickly and then the other half of the season next week, before bringing it all together for one big Powercast in two weeks. Winter rankings are still up on the site if you want a last look before they disappear forever. 

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It seems like just a couple weeks ago we did an awardscast... maybe because we did. But Winter 2022 is officially in the books so naturally we've gotta talk about it. As usual we're running down the top 5 new and returning titles respectively and then diving into handing out some This Just Trophies. The first few categories are the ones most people might think of like best main character or art direction, and then we delve into the stuff you're really here for. What was the best almost sex scene of the season? Who would we not want to be trapped in an elevator with? And perhaps most importantly who is the best girl's best friend girl of Winter 2022? Check out the site if you want to follow along or see the full rankings of where your favorite titles ended up. 

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After a restful 2 weeks off we're back, and boy do we have some stuff to catch up on. First off we give our take on the latest news about Crunchyroll ending free viewing with ads starting next season. Then we've got the much awaited conclusion of 86 to get to. After a few delays we finally have our ending, but how did it measure up to our expectations? We've been hyped on this series pretty much from the start, so is it the ending we wanted? From there we couldn't do another episode without covering My Dress-up Darling and how it's seriously taken over the season, Marin is queen of best girl mountain and there's nothing anyone can do to convince us otherwise. And that dovetails nicely into our final topic where we give Cloverworks Studios the respect they deserve, and give you our top five of their titles. Despite being a young studio they've been dropping serious heat since the beginning, and show no signs of stopping. It's good to be back, hope you enjoy!

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2021 seems like it finished just yesterday, even though it may or may not have been two months ago, time is a mystery so who can really say anyway. Whatever the case, we're taking a look back at 2021 and doing our awardscast for the entire year. We've got a whole bunch of This Just Trophies to hand out and a really solid year of anime to look back on and decide the best of the best. As usual we've got some serious categories and some not so serious ones, and of course we have to crown the official best girl's best friend girl for 2021. There were a ton of good titles last year, and while we don't have time to talk about all of our favorites, we're sure  as hell gonna try. So enjoy, and let us know what your favorites were for 2021.

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We've got a ton of news this week, which is very exciting, the bad part is not all of it is good. Biggest stories of this week are Lord of the Rings and Nier Automata anime projects being announced, new seasons of Komi Can't Communicate (Yay so soon!) and Classroom of the Elite and also Spice and Wolf. Most of those are pretty exciting, we're also having our taste put in to question as Sonny Boy has been much more well received than we expected, and a couple of other tidbits as well. Then we get into the Ranking of Kings controversy largely about an allegory to imperial Japan colonizing Korea which definitely affects our enjoyment of the show. We'll provide the article about it for some added context. We also wanted to take a minute to express our support for Ukraine and offer our two cents about how war is never the answer and how we can loosely tie it to anime. And in last week's one big thing we've got news on the death of Funimation and Crunchyroll supremacy.  

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