Recommend me an anime, Sher Khan! (Version 2)

[Derpy Hooves]

If you like space operas, epics, political intrigue, history etc, go for Legend of the Galactic Heroes, the late 80s OVA. It's long, but amazing. Any TW fan would love it

Also, Flinn, as an Italiano, you may have heard of Lupin III. Great series, highly recommend every Lupin III related anime. I'll also recommend the original Mobile Suit Gundam. It's not a kiddy show, it's got a lot of adult themes to it, takes war and the effects of PTSD seriously. Also the little technological bits here and there are pretty forward thinking for its time.

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

As an Italian, surely Flinn, you must have watched Saint Seiya.

[Flinn]

yes I know well both Lupin III (best car he ever had was that FIAT 500) and Saint Seiya (though I only watched the original series, long ago).

I'm now watching two more anime

- The Drifters, mostly fantasy, with some badly butchered characters (historically), funny (I love to see Hannibal and Scipio argue) and nice battles, medium gore

- Onihei, surprisingly good, both in art and in plot. The best depiction I've seen of what being a Samurai meant and also a lot to learn about the Edo period's life. I devoured those 13 episodes.

[Derpy Hooves]

Yeah I almost went as blue jacket Lupin for halloween this year
Onihei was great. If you want a great depiction of Sengoku Jidai samurai, I recommend Hyouge Mono. It's really good

[Flinn]

Yeah I almost went as blue jacket Lupin for halloween this year
Onihei was great. If you want a great depiction of Sengoku Jidai samurai, I recommend Hyouge Mono. It's really good

Thanks, I'll give it a try, if I can find it somewhere

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

Currently watching Ousama Ranking. This might be my favorite currently airing anime.
Also watching Jujutsu Kaisen, Kingdom season 3, Black Clover, and Hero Academia.

Hero Academia is now beginning to lose my attention. Not even sure what is happening anymore.

Kingdom while basically what I expected is missing a lot of the good stuff from season 1 and 2.

Jujutsu Kaisen while something I should like, is going by too quickly and just has random fights that are not explained. The fights themselves while looking quite good are really hard to follow. This show has really bad pacing issues which might be the only thing that actually holds it back, significantly.

Black Clover doesn't take itself seriously and I don't take it seriously. So we have a good understanding. Unfortunately a lot of it has become uninteresting and really generic even by its own standards.

[Knight of Heaven]

I enjoyed the new season of kingdom. Also waiting for my hero, but im not too hyped for it either. Watching the new season of demon slayer. Tanjiro is annoying me now, with the constant crying.


I enjoyed Jujutsu kaisen enough to keep following into the second season.

Black Cover i dont bother, it has lots of episodes, i dont have that patience or time for it. Besides the MC is annoying af.


I watched a Gundam anime from 2015 recently. And i loved it. Mobile Suit Gundam Iron blooded orphans. Only two seasons, and its great.

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

I enjoyed the new season of kingdom. Also waiting for my hero, but im not too hyped for it either. Watching the new season of demon slayer. Tanjiro is annoying me now, with the constant crying.


I enjoyed Jujutsu kaisen enough to keep following into the second season.

Black Cover i dont bother, it has lots of episodes, i dont have that patience or time for it. Besides the MC is annoying af.


I watched a Gundam anime from 2015 recently. And i loved it. Mobile Suit Gundam Iron blooded orphans. Only two seasons, and its great.

I also have to watch God of Highschool.

Haven't started Demon Slayer because I want to get through Golden Kamuy first.

The fact that Black Clover is such a joke and the protag is idiotic and makes squawking sounds is kind of what I find appealing about it. But I agree it is too long and 50 episodes in it becomes very tedious. But I would say it is like Fairy Tail but done better. It is basically Shonen tropes taken as a joke. The problem is when they don't do anything with it and turn it into a generic show. It doesn't work once it gets serious.

[Derpy Hooves]

I dropped Black CLover because of the squawking protag. The Winter season is really lacking this year. 13 shows on my watch list, the least amount in about a decade maybe lol. But seriously, Ousama Ranking is the best one of 2021, and might be of 2022, we'll have to see about that.

[Knight of Heaven]

Its this one i was mentioning

[ggggtotalwarrior]

I’m not really an anime guy usually outside of a few outliers and this show isn’t exact anime so much as anime style, but Castlevania is actually pretty good

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

Castlevania isn't anime.

[ggggtotalwarrior]

Well yeah but it’s the closest thing to anime I have enjoyed recently hahaha

[Derpy Hooves]

My problem with Castlevania is how anti Christian the writing seems to be, like the writers have contempt for it

[ggggtotalwarrior]

Yeah it definitely seems a bit weirdly over the top anti Christian especially in terms of how basically every “satanic” creature/being/entity is real and full of human killing power while there didn’t seem to be a Christian equivalent, but also I think to the fact that this is an alt history of a roughly 1400s Catholic Church during an era where it was so blatantly corrupt and excess that it fractured from movements to reform it that I can kind of head canon it as “they’re not true believers, etc,” for the reason they’re basically powerless.

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

I never understood that in movies like The Exorcist or The Conjuring. If actual demons exist then where are angels, God, Jesus and so on?

The Castlevania universe was never strongly pro-Christian to begin with. Not least of all because it was created by Japanese people who don't really understand or like Christianity or its world view. In their eyes Deus is an arbitrary and tyrannical deity, not much better than Satan. This tends to be reflected in their material. For example in one of the Castlevania games Satan was defeated by Dracula, who apparently is bad but not as bad as Satan, and replaced Satan as ruler of the underworld, therefore technically making him a hero.

Anyway I've already spoken about the Castlevania series and why I didn't like it. Which has nothing to do with their presentation of Christianity and more so to do with how sloppy and disappointing it is after season 1. The whole show is just talking while trying to give itself an anime appeal but really isn't consistent with anime. But the real take away here is that anime is a dying art form. Other than that Japanese cartoons still exist, but with different art style and vastly inferior animation quality than what we had 15 to 30 years ago.

Castlevania is not anime but uses a Japanese property. The animation quality especially in the latest seasons looks like it was animated on their cheapest Adobe software. The fights are few and far between. But they like to spend more time on pointless dialogue and B-tier political schemes and fedora tipping. I can hardly believe that this is the same as the Castlevania games. The problem is very likely that it was written by incompetent hipsters and outsourced to a poor Texas animation studio. This is so not anime that it isn't even animated in Japan, Korea, or China.

Anime was so successful that it is being copied globally. Castlevania etc are all cheap anime knock offs. But anime itself in Japan is already deviating significantly. It thrived in a period of low wages and limited animation technology. Without that anime has basically outgrown itself as a medium and started to rely on universal appeal and computer software. But the anime we get now generally looks like crap. Even past shows with limited budgets still had the appeal of cell shading but now they are just using CG openly. When even Studio Ghibli is making films using CGI that is a strong sign that the medium has declined beyond what we would have expected.

[ggggtotalwarrior]

You're quite the pessimist Oda but also I don't entirely blame you

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

You're quite the pessimist Oda but also I don't entirely blame you

I prefer the term "realist".

Made a slight error. Castlevania was animated by a Texas studio called Powerhouse Animation which outsourced to a South Korean studio. But holy crap they must have been animating it during breaks. Though my point is not that it was not animated by Koreans but rather that it did not conform to existing anime standards which these Korean animators are required to have.

Castlevania Season 1 doesn't look too bad. It is passable especially for a first season. They were notably struggling with Season 2. Honestly the series just ends with Season 2, don't know why they kept it going. Season 3 which sucked also has animation that looks like Corel Draw. With Season 4 they switched from Mua to Tiger Animation.

For the record Tiger Animation is their current animator from South Korea. Western animation frequently has relied on South Korean animation. Just as Japan has come to rely on South Korean animation in the past decade. Tiger Animation goes back to the 1990's with shows like Spawn.

They are also one of the many studios that is contracted to work on the DC animated films. As someone who has watched all the DC animated films I can really see the drop in quality both as animation and story writing. One of their most recent films "Justice League Dark: Apokolips War" was incidentally one of the worst in my opinion, only topped in poor animation and writing by "Wonder Woman: Bloodlines".

Now I can't really say much on the topic of Tiger Animation as a whole but with DC properties at least they didn't go with a faux anime art style. That is really the biggest issue for me. The fact that people confuse this with anime, which studios do intentionally. But is obviously not anime. Even though anime and Western animation tends to have a lot of Japanese work done on it, even anime, as poor of a state it is now has better standards than these western shows. Castlevania doesn't, and again I stress how unbelievably bad Season 3 looks.

But it is this attempt to copy anime styles across the globe (South Korea, China, USA, etc) and the obvious declining quality of Japanese anime, which has made anime redundant and is killing anime.

[ggggtotalwarrior]

Honestly I only watched the first two seasons then dropped off which could very well explain why I don’t have the level of loathing you feel for it, especially if the animation is noticeably that much worse

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

Well I didn't really like season 2 either. Thought it was a disappointment and complete waste of potential.

Which I did explain why I thought that season 2 was bad in the Castlevania thread.