Ok here are my brief thoughts for the bottom ten shows I'm watching this season

-A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics has been growing on me quite a bit. While it isn't anywhere near as good of a comedy as Hinamatsuri, it has a similar vibe with magical weirdos bumbling around the modern day. A lot of its better moments are thanks to the knight Livia and her homeless misadventures. She's great, and she's been getting a lot more focus than I expected. The one episode where she wound up in a cult was some A+ goofball shenanigans. I'm enjoying the princess Sara being a detective too. Each episode feels better than the last, and I'm excited to see if that trend continues.

-Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included is a pretty generic harem comedy, but it has been improving with each episode too. The best decision it made was focusing less on the angel. Towa is the worst girl they've introduced so far. She's just there to fulfill the "sexy caretaker" fantasy, which is boring. The main guy's coworker is a lot more fun with her tendency to take everything to extremes. My favorite is still the regular school friend Tsumugi. She has a crush on the main dude but now she's competing with a literal angel. It's funny watching her struggle to wrap her head around that crazy situation and futilely try to convince herself that she still has a chance.

-Astro Note is way below the other two slice-of-life comedies, but it's not bad. All the characters having wildly different art styles is occasionally absurd enough to be funny on its own. I also like the talking dog who has to pretend to be a regular dog. Honestly, the worst aspect of this show is the two main leads. The chef guy's only character trait is that he likes Mira, and I don't know why because she barely feels like a character at all aside from her cluelessness. Maybe the whole sci-fi aspect will go somewhere eventually. I at least don't mind watching this one every week.

-Kaiju No. 8 is getting a lot of hype, which makes me think this anime just isn't for me. I liked the first episode because it focused on disposing of kaiju bodies. Once the main guy transformed, though, the whole thing suddenly turned super generic. Now he's in a testing arc that feels like the exact same thing as My Hero Academia's testing arc only with lamer characters and way more boring abilities. I don't like that the main guy's central motivation is impressing his judgmental childhood friend. The comedic moments aren't working for me at all either, it just makes him seem pathetic. I wouldn't call Kaiju No. 8 bad, but it definitely hasn't won me over yet.

-As a Reincarnated Aristocrat, I'll Use My Appraisal Skill etc is fine as far as isekai go, but that still puts it pretty low in the season overall. I like the premise of the main dude gathering talented inspaniduals to carry him through an inevitable period of turmoil... but the actual recruitments have been pretty boring. I'm beginning to worry the entire season will be little more than a prologue to a much more interesting story that's never actually told. Overall, everything about this is fine. I like the characters well enough. I'm just disappointed at how long it's taking to get to anything interesting.

-Unnamed Memory is my biggest disappointment of the season. Episode one introduced a story with a lot of potential for the main couple to slowly grow closer. Episode two was already showing cracks in the quality of the adaptation as it skimmed past introducing its entire cast of secondary characters and jumped right into a fantasy monster fight I didn't care about because it had no buildup. Then the third episode happened and all my hopes for this adaptation evaporated. This anime is taking what's probably a good story and zooming through it so hard that everything about it is falling flat. The only nice thing I can say about it is that it at least isn't as bad as these next four.

-Gods' Games We Play gave me some hope in the first episode when the two main characters played an interesting variation of Memory, like it was a neat way to introduce them to each other. Then the second episode was a poorly animated game of hide-and-seek where there was no hiding or seeking, main dude just won with bullshit cheat powers. All my hopes for the show instantly disappeared, and the next two episodes were somehow even worse. This kind of high-stakes game story requires the author to be a clever, and very little so far has demonstrated that they're capable of that.

-Oblivion Battery is a baseball anime that, in my opinion, fails on every level. For the most part it tries to be a comedy... but the main comedic focus is on the most juvenile jokes imaginable. Lots of jokes about nipples, poop, and pornography. In the latest episode, the guys all met one character's mother and the big gag there was that she called them all loser virgins. Lady these kids are less than half your age. They're freshmen in high school, they're like fifteen. Calling them virgins isn't funny, it's just creepy and weird that your mind even went there. Oh, and there are bits about baseball too I guess. That aspect isn't handled well enough to be memorable next to the onslaught of bad jokes.

-Grandma and Grandpa Turn Young Again had an absolutely terrible first episode where half the jokes were about everyone in the family wanting to bang their sexy grandparents. Thankfully, the incest angle pretty much disappeared after... but that makes me wonder why the hell this series chose to introduce itself like that. A disappointing number of jokes still boil down to "grandma and grandpa are hot now", but at least their grandchildren don't want to have sex with them anymore. Instead, it's just turning into a mediocre comedy. It isn't offensive, but it doesn't have much going for it either.

-Highspeed Etoile is baffling. Like, after four episodes, I have no idea what this anime is even trying to be. The races are boring, just ugly CGI and cars driving in circles with absolutely no effort to try and make it exciting. A lot of the time it doesn't even focus on the races, though, and those parts are somehow even worse. Two of the four episodes were pretty much the exact same thing, the main girl Rin runs into one of the most famous racers ever and she's such a braindead moron that she doesn't recognize them so they just kind of hang out. This feels like a story that should be focusing on her as a prodigious talent. Someone who, despite her quirks, will come to dominate the world of racing. If that's where the story is actually going to go, I hope it starts soon because so far it just seems like Rin is a shitty racer. She's gotten dead last in every race and the racing season is half over. I hate her so much. This has a 4.84/10 on MAL and that still feels way too high.

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**R.O.B.A.Z.O.I.D**

Anime & Manga Discussion Topic 298: Anime is Saved

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Hey, Champ! Don't worry, even if you really did look for underage sex, which you clearly didn't, you'll always be The Champ to me!
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**R.O.B.A.Z.O.I.D**

Kuge will be on "To Catch A Preditor" next week. (serious)