The Division, part three.

It's because I'm not American, I decide. That's what's missing from The Division.

This is my second foray into the ruins of Madison Square Garden, now with backup. Having someone to talk to has changed the experience, and I'm not sure it's for the better. It just gives me someone to complain to.

It's when we shoot our way through the repurposed stadium that I decide that The Division's problem is my own lack of knowledge of, or fondness for, the New York landmarks it uses. This could be any hastily-assembled field hospital we're spraying with lead and blood; I have no appreciation of the original location.

The second thing I accept is the unforgiving shooting. Another member has joined our squad, and we repeat the power station mission I completed yesterday. My carbine has come back into fashion against the flamethrowers, but there's no slack to help land headshots. I wish my controller was as precise as the fictional scope on my rifle; another shot passes a pixel to the left of its intended target without aim assist to pull it back on course.

We accept a bounty mission that tasks us with eliminating a murderer who, disappointingly, turns out to be just a gang member with a larger health bar and better drops. The target is, I'm told, a woman, which very well might be the first female enemy I've seen. I don't get close enough to see a difference with her character model.

Later, The Division makes a strong statement in the Dark Zone, where every figure in the distance must be regarded with suspicion. Compared to the desolate streets outside its walls, the Dark Zone is densely populated and thick with danger.

We get greedy with our looting and pay for it when the underground car park we've just cleared is invaded. I lose half my haul to the hooligans but accept it as a necessary lesson.

Extracting the remaining items from the Zone proves to be a tense affair; as we wait for the helicopter to collect our packages, several other players approach the extraction point. There is no way to tell, for anyone, whether the intentions of any other player at the table are nefarious.

My automatic turret is deployed in the final seconds before the helicopter arrives, one of several insurance policies intended to avenge their owners should someone get greedy.

The extraction goes smoothly in the end, my anxiety unfounded and my turrent unnecessary.

Afterwards, we go on the offensive: attempting to murder a player who assisted in fending off a spontaneous attack from NPCs. The plan backfires and we are quickly gunned down by the rest of the district. I lose nearly everything I collected, legitimately, before our ill-advised assassination attempt.

I notice I'm making a lot of comparisons between The Division and Destiny, none of which are yet going in Ubisoft's favour. With more forgiving and satisfying gunplay, Bungie's online shooter/RPG hybrid is more immediately fun. Its loot notifications celebrate each piece of gear you collect in a way that The Division's augmented reality-inspired labels don't - several times I pick up loot without being able to clearly see what the label says, or even before I can identify the icon telling me what kind of armour it is.

I carried no more love for the Cosmodrome into Destiny's early days than I do for New York in this beta, but the grandeur of the Mothyard's bright, wide spaces contrast against the dark claustrophobia of Lunar Complex in a way that the various streets of Manhattan cannot, weather system or not (although a shootout against rogue agents in a Dark Zone blizzard is thrilling in a way no Destiny fight has ever been).

The grid system of the streets constantly keeps me separated from events happening just a few yards away and gives me the overpowering sense that I'm running down corridors, being kept from seeing the landmarks that would reduce my reliance on the map.

It's hardly fair given the hundred hours I've dedicated to my Guardian, but there's a sense of ownership of the character, her weapons and her armour that I don't even feel the roots of with The Division. Maybe it's because I couldn't customise her, because this character is only temporary. Maybe it's because the real-world loot is so drab and samey; I've collected a dozen jackets and can't see any major differences between them. Destiny combined the functional and aesthetic elements of equipment, making the choice of boots a balancing act between being slightly more powerful and looking awesome. The Division lets me change my character's jumper, but I can barely see it and it makes no difference anyway.

I die for the last time, in flames, while exploring a contaminated checkpoint. I decide to return to my base, using fast travel from outside the Dark Zone, but don't make it through the door. The beta is ending soon; I will not benefit from any more upgrades. I don't even bother checking the stats on the equipment I salvaged from the Dark Zone.

I log out.

The Division, part two.

I'm outside my newly-liberated HQ, but all the quest markers for activating its subsections are still there. I log into the three laptops again and on my way outside I get a cutscene, which I skip.

I pick a mission because I like its bright yellow lightning bolt icon the best: I'm going a few blocks east and clearing out a power substation. I also have to rescue a man called Rhodes, but because I'm not paying attention to the subtitles, for most of the mission I'll think it's someone called Rose and will be surprised when she has a man's voice.

The omnipotent voice in my character's headset tells me - us? - to avoid confronting the cleaners. When I notice that they're carrying flamethrowers, I decide to ignore this advice. A lucky shot ignites a man's fuel tank and he explodes, spectacularly announcing my arrival to his nearby allies. This gang do not appear to use radio communications however, as I am able to use this same explosive sneak-attack at least four more times across the duration of the mission.

I descend through the facility's waist-high forest of crates and construction equipment and die for the first time, burned alive by a sociopath performing an over-enthusiastic homage to Bradbury. My reincarnation is quick and most of my equipment seems to have restocked itself, which removes the sting from the experience; the enemies have also reset themselves, but my tactical advantage of knowing where they're coming from - and how they're armed - proves too much for them to succeed in a second encounter.

I die twice more before reaching an obvious boss arena, where I kill waves of opponents long enough for their larger, better-armoured champion to arrive. He is defeated in an uncontrolled explosion when my missed headshot instead nicks his fuel tank.

Returning to the surface by elevator, I am informed that the engineer I left behind in the power plant has already beaten me to my headquarters and am instructed to meet him there. Since he's no longer in danger I decide to take a scenic route.

I find no fewer than three more military squads being badly outgunned by amateur militias, but only help one.

When I arrive at the base I talk to the engineer and unlock an ability which feels like it's been shanghaied from a different game: to deploy an automatic machine gun turret.

A hostage rescue mission catches my eye and I assist two soldiers in rescuing a third, by running ahead of them and killing fifteen men who have the temerity not to be in the army. Perhaps with military training they would have known better than to stream out of their fortified position and into the waiting crosshairs of my new carbine and ridiculous sci-fi turret.

I decide to take a less combat-oriented task next, searching for a missing person. The science fiction quotient increases when I find an area that recreates, in garish orange hologram, an event from long ago. This historical record does not appear to offer any clues to the woman's location, but my HUD nevertheless informs me that clues have been found and offers a new objective marker to continue the search.

I log out.

The Division, part one.

My beta experience with The Division, Ubisoft's third person RPG/shooter hybrid, is not off to a great start, and I've still not actually played any of it. Building my own character is what I was most looking forward to when I started the game and seeing the tabs greyed out is equal parts puzzling, disappointing and distressing.

Eventually, unable to generate even a remote facsimile of myself, I settle on a randomised, vaguely Asian woman; I'd just kept requesting a new face until I found one who looks like she's been through some shit.

But I'm still not allowed into the ravaged ruins of The Division's New York - there's a multi-minute video tutorial to watch, narrated by an Australian who sounds unable to decide if he's excited or not. I get brief instructions on using cover, special skills and grenades, which will shortly be explained by in-game prompts anyway, but am left to figure out how to sprint, shoot and climb obstacles on my own.

A brief cutscene ends with my character deposited in a safe zone; my HUD lights up with vendor and mission board locations, which I ignore.

I accidentally stumble out into the deserted, allegedly mean streets and make for the nearest non-main quest, a firefight between several heavily-armed soldiers and a trio of under-equipped rioters.

I manage to turn the tide of the battle in the military's favour, by single-handedly killing all three assailants and their two backup shooters.

This is the first of several fairly satisfying combat encounters; I am routinely outnumbered, but my use of cover, special skills and grenades suggests I paid much closer attention to that tutorial video than my AI opponents. It feels much more like an RPG than its obvious main rival Destiny, with damage numbers springing from bullet impacts, but it lacks the punchy satisfaction of Bungie's headshots.

After circling the block twice searching for a door, I enter a building and am tasked, via radio transmission, with activating a number of scanners; the building is uninhabited and filled with lootable containers, so at first I don't even notice the countdown timer. I find and activate the final objective with minutes to spare. I go to the roof to transmit the scan results and kill five more men.

Eventually I find myself at the objective for the primary mission, a besieged museum. Once again the military is being overwhelmed by an opposing force with inferior numbers, inferior training and inferior weapons; once again the deciding factor in the brief battle's outcome is my lone agent.

It strikes me that my equipment and weapons, at this point, are mostly what I've scavenged from fallen enemies. My tactical approach, too, has more in common with the rioters, given that I actually kill the people who shoot at me.

How do the soldiers know I'm not a bad guy?

I go into the museum, another safe zone; my HUD lights up with vendor and mission board locations, which I ignore.

I log out.

Tiny Noise

My favourite musician has announced that he's retiring from music to become a full-time baseball reporter, and released a 22-track album of unfinished songs and demos as a farewell.

It seems weird to describe what I'm feeling as "loss" or "grief", but Levi Weaver has had a profound impact on me in the short few years I've been aware of him. Being based in America and terminally indie, European performances were incredibly rare; I'm so glad we made the effort to get down to London last year and I got to meet him, to thank him in person. We'd had a couple of Twitter conversations and I wrote a long, personal blog post about how his lyrics made me re-examine my belief system; it sounds maybe selfish to say that I think he knew who I was when we were talking in Finsbury a year ago, but I felt like he was aware of our interactions - but I've been surprised before with "famous" people remembering individual fans.

I sing Kansas, I Decline to my son because he loves the chorus; from his changing table he ends up looking at the star-covered curtains in the nursery. We're Tornadoes When We Dance was the song for our first dance at our wedding. My hands automatically play Levi Weaver songs when I pick up my guitar; I only know how to play Spirit First because he was kind enough to show me on a livestream.

Today I'm going to be listening to a lot of Levi Weaver's songs.

Valkyrie Drive - Mermaid

Valkyrie Drive - Mermaid is, without a shadow of a doubt, the most offensively tasteless anime I have ever seen.

It is aggressively misogynist softcore pornography, in which women are sexually subjugated in order to turn them into literal objects.

There's fanservice, and then there's… whatever this is.

How does something like this get created? Who comes up with this sick bullshit, and how the hell do they find other people that like it enough to fund its production?

I'm finding it difficult to put into words how enthusiastically horrible this show is. Its closest relative, in my viewing history at least, would be Ikkitousen, a similar "sexy battle" show where female characters were the subject of simultaneous physical violence and lecherous sexualisation - though I'm not sure if it's better or worse that Ikkitousen "only" had the camera participate in the violation. Valkyrie Drive's constant insistence that the characters are willing(-ish) participants somehow feels more sickening.

I've tried to think of something - anything - positive about Valkyrie Drive, but every aspect of it from character design to the music is cheap and nasty. The only things keeping it from being instantly forgotten are how dreadfully it treats its characters and how spectacularly low an opinion it has of its audience.

The World

The first show I watched as it was broadcast in Japan, .hack//SIGN was part of a multimedia experiment spanning TV anime, OVAs, manga and videogames with a shared universe - a fictional MMO named The World - and long-form stories that fed into each other to varying degrees. .hack//SIGN was the first part of the franchise, although the PS2 games (offline single-player JRPGs, rather than actual online games) are probably more well-known in the UK.

I remember sitting up until two or three in the morning, waiting for the torrents to finish so I could see the newly-fansubbed episode. I wasn't even engaging with any other fans on forums, reading and sharing theories about what was happening in the show. I was just obsessed with it, desperate to find out how it ended. Now, 13 years later, I can't even remember the ending.

I've never managed to rewatch it though, until now. I tried, when the UK DVD release first came out, but I couldn't even finish the first disc. What had somehow been so engaging in 2002 just seemed tedious and boring. The show is stubbornly paced, dripping character and plot information over the first several episodes.

I'm now six or seven episodes into my second proper viewing and the glacial progression of plot isn't as frustrating as I found it a few years ago - I'm appreciating the importance of showing how The World operates and how its players approach their time there, but a few things are sticking out as bizarre.

There appears to be zero administrator presence in the game. The closest thing to a moderation team would be the Crimson Knights, a hardcore RP guild inexplicably led by low-level axe-wielding mage Subaru. They appear to have contact with the game's operator and even mention getting access to server logs for their investigations, but appear to have no enforceable power over players.

Of course, since there seem to be next to no players anyway, maybe they just make up enough of a majority to do as they please. Most of the game's areas seen in the show appear to be abandoned; you'll occasionally see a couple of players walk past a main character, but it's rare even at what look to be spawn points. The "Aqua Capital", the only urban area shown, is sparsely populated, and at least some of the people you see must be NPCs anyway.

Something I've noticed recently is my tendency to reimagine shows I'm watching - trying to figure out what the core idea or theme of the series is, and how you'd reshape the rest of it to work as a live-action film or TV show, that might appeal to someone who's not interested in the animated version. These thought experiments have varied results, from realising that Evangelion is basically unadaptable, to wondering how a mainstream audience would react to a GATE series that's basically Game of Thrones meets Generation Kill.

But it's also resulted in my trying to come up with a back story for The World; how it would end up in a place where the company running the game appears broadly uninterested in what's happening to its players, and why there are so few of them anyway.

My headcanon, as it stands, is that the game's been running for years and its popularity is fading. The only people left are high-level players with established friendships, and solo players like Tsukasa using it to escape real life and be alone. The developer has all but abandoned development and moderation, allowing the Crimson Knights to police the userbase. Rumours of hidden items and players unable to log out are being dismissed as forum jokes or creepypasta.

I'm hoping to get all the way through .hack//SIGN again, but I'm already feeling the fatigue starting to set in. Fingers crossed my curiosity about the ending keeps me going, even if we never find out why The World is still running.

Volume

I want to like Volume, but it's making that so difficult.

The new game from Thomas Was Alone designer Mike Bithell, Volume is a top-down(ish) time-attack stealth game, where you creep around levels avoiding and distracting guards, stealing diamonds and (eventually) attempting to overthrow a corrupt dictator.

Mechanically it's solid; you can see enemy vision cones, duck into cover and distract guards with a variety of gadgets. Levels are short and varied, in colour as well as challenge, and if the 100 "campaign" levels aren't enough there's a level editor and a huge list of maps created by other players. It also looks great, with levels deforming and rebuilding themselves out of flat triangles at the start and end of each mission.

The missions are just a little too short, however - and you don't carry equipment over between them, so you'll pick up a gadget in one level and then not see it again for three. Progression feels stilted and uneven; there's no sense that you're getting more powerful, and no excuse for the loss of tech between levels (or the restriction to a single gadget at a time). You're dumped back to the Level Select menu after every map, breaking up the flow even more. Some levels are grouped together with the implication that they're all in a single location, but aside from the portrait indicating whose house it is there's no consistent theme between them - and you're back at the menu after every one anyway.

But where Volume really falls apart is the story - or more accurately, the way the story is told. Voiceovers play constantly, either distracting you from the game itself or being ignored as you figure out your approach to the next section. The conversations seem designed to span multiple levels, but restarts (either due to failure or manual resets) will reset to the start of the current dialogue. Lines are accompanied by an on-screen subtitle box which covers a huge chunk of the bottom of the screen, blocking your view of anything to the south, which you won't read anyway because you'll either be listening to the dialogue or paying attention to guard patrol patterns.

The end result is occasionally brilliant, but frequently annoying. Constantly stop-starting between missions and with a story it doesn't seem to know how to fit between such short bursts of action, Volume is ambitious but deeply flawed.

And it corrupted my save data when I completed a user-generated level earlier. I don't know if I can force myself through those opening sections again.

Charlotte

I don't know when chuunibyou became such a big deal in anime, but it seems to have exploded from nowhere. All of a sudden, every high-school anime seems to have a character with delusions of grandeur based around their (maybe genuine?) belief that they have supernatural powers or a long line of historically-significant past lives. The term is apparently a genuine "middle-school second-year syndrome" where young teenagers act out elaborate fantasies to varying degress in an attempt to... I'm not sure.

The most visible example of this in anime is Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai! - an insipid moe show about a guy indulging a younger student's delusions until she falls in love with him - but these characters seem to be popping up all over the place these days.

In most anime cases, the afflicted character doesn't actually have supernatural abilities; they just pretend or imagine that they do. What makes Charlotte a bit different is that not only do its characters actually have powers, it explains why the chuunibyou phenomenon is so short-lived.

Similar to mutant powers in X-Men, abilities in Charlotte emerge during adolescence, but disappear by adulthood. So the various characters' superpowers - which range from mind control to telekinesis - will only be usable for a few years.

The other great thing about Charlotte's superpowers is that each one has a ridiculous limitation that makes it practically worthless.

Otosaka can take control of someone else's body - but only for five seconds at a time, and his own body is catatonic (usually having faceplanted in the street) for the duration. Takajou can "teleport" - but in practice just moves imperceptibility fast in a straight line until he's stopped by an impact. Tomori can turn invisible - but only from one person at a time, remaining in plain sight to everyone else.

The three of them make up the core of the student council at their school, which is specially set up to find and gather children with powers, protecting them from discovery and experimentation until they're old enough for their powers to disappear.

For the first six weeks the show has been pretty lighthearted, focusing on the ways powers can backfire or be misused for comedic effect (and profit). It's had some serious moments - Tomori's back story and her behaviour when revealing it to the protagonist are at odds with her usually-carefree personality, which is jarring - but the final moments of the most recent episode have taken a turn towards a darker tone that will hopefully drive the story with a bit more force.

B-type H-isms

This might sound like an overstatement, but I'm standing by it: B-gata H-kei (subtitled Yamada's First Time in the US) might be the best romantic comedy ever made.

It's certainly the best I've ever seen, although it's perhaps more accurate to call it a relationship show than a romantic one.

It's not just surprisingly honest about how difficult high school crushes are, but also about how they are difficult; self-consciousness and doubt, jealousy, the pressure to get everything right - the protagonists spend much of the series' running time trying to figure out if they like each other, why, and whether their other half is even worth the trouble of this pursuit.

Yamada initially just sees Kosuda as a means to an end - a first sexual partner to give her the confidence to embark on her quest to bed 100 guys. Kosuda is, no doubt, smitten with Yamada from the outset - but as a timid loner he's mostly just happy with attention from the prettiest girl in class.

But over the course of the series - a thankfully brief 12 episodes¹* - Yamada is forced to admit that her continued focus on Kosuda (and rejection of other would-be suitors) is about more than the first notch on her bedpost.

Few anime romances take this much time to show the development of a relationship from the initial attraction into deeper feelings, and B-gata H-kei not only manages that easily, the series does it with an honesty and sweetness that I'd not expected.

And it's hilarious into the bargain.

¹ Not that I wouldn't like to see more of the couple as their relationship develops further, but a couple of subplots already felt like padding. A 22 or 26 episode series would have been overkill.

Shenmue III is going to suck

Listen, I love Shenmue. I've completed the original Dreamcast game a half dozen times, and attempt to play through it every year at Christmas. But it seems like a lot of people have forgotten something about the game:

It's really not good.

The controls are even more obviously dreadful than when the game was released, sixteen years ago. The last decade and a half has been incredibly unkind to the visuals. The story is over-padded, dumb and poorly paced. The script and dialogue are laughably awful. The Virtua Fighter-based combo system has been surpassed by modern combat systems, leaving Shenmue's battles feeling sluggish and boring. The one thing it still does better than nearly any other game I've played, the minute details of the world that Ryo could explore, pick up and examine, was all but dropped by the first sequel, leaving little hope that a third installment will reduce its scope in exchange for focus.

The Kickstarter for a third installment has, at the time of writing, just passed its $2,000,000 funding goal - a thirty-fifth of the Dreamcast original's $70 million budget - with 31 days remaining.

If I'm honest, I never wanted Shenmue to continue. The second game's out-of-nowhere cliffhanger, with a levitating magic sword, was the final straw; the believable, realistic world of Sakuragaoka and Dobuita was what I loved about the game, and by introducing overt supernatural elements - seemingly out of nowhere - the game had lost me.

I'm surprised the Kickstarter has been this successful. As vocal as they were, and continue to be, Shenmue can't have enough fans to justify the kind of budget that's required to produce a game that'll satisfy them. This campaign is undoubtedly a kind of financial proof-of-concept for a larger investor - maybe Sony, since they hosted the announcement at their E3 press conference - to put up the rest of the budget.

But who's going to buy the game apart from the people already clamouring to support it? Who's going to be willing to jump straight into the third installment of a sixteen-year-old period kung fu series? Shenmue isn't going to appeal to the Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed crowd, which is where all the money seems to be, these days. How many people remember Shenmue as anything other than a forum joke?

Especially given the terrible pitch video on the campaign page. My brother sarcastically described it as "really pushing the upper limits of what the Dreamcast can do"; to me, it looks like a particularly impressive third-year computer arts student's showreel. I guess it looks like a $2 million game, but that's not what the series' fans want, and I'm sure it's not what Yu Suzuki wants either.

But even if I'm not going to play it, I do hope Suzuki gets to finish Shenmue. Closure's been a long time coming for its creator as well as its fans - let's just hope Shenmue III doesn't end on another 14-year cliffhanger.

Netrunner

I'm terrible at Netrunner but I love it anyway and not an hour goes by that I don't wish I was playing Netrunner except when I'm actually playing Netrunner (when I wish I was playing Netrunner better).

I went to a tournament on Sunday (and came second last, above the guy who rage quit after three rounds); a bunch of us get together on Tuesdays on the pub and play for a few hours.

I've played eighteen games in the last four days, only won four of them, and I'm already wondering when I'll get another game to try out this HB deck I've been trying to get right.

I can't remember the last time I was this monumentally bad at something but still enjoyed it this much.

ToraDora! Christmas Club

Every December, there's a ToraDora! rewatch on r/anime. One episode a day, from the 6th to the 30th inclusive, so that the Christmas Eve episode aligns with the actual day.

I've seen the show through twice, but never dubbed; this year's Christmas Club is an excuse to try out the English track - though it took me longer than I should probably admit to find the audio settings on my Blu-ray copy.

From the snippets I'd heard in trailers and on YouTube I wasn't 100% sure how good it was going to be - I'm generally pro-dub, but I know that some are better than others, and shows with a strong comedy bent are particularly difficult to adapt successfully. So I had a little bit of trepidation firing up a full episode. But imagine my surprise when it turns out to be awesome. It's been a long time since I've watched a dub where the actors "clicked" with their characters this fast; it usually seems to take two or three episodes for them to really get into the swing of things. But right out of the gate, Ryuji and Taiga are spot-on - and Minori is perfect. The script's absolutely solid, too - nothing sounds forced or awkward, even the jokes flow naturally.

And it's funny, into the bargain. Not just the visual/slapstick stuff, which works in any language, but the line delivery had me laughing more than it ever did in Japanese. (Reading jokes doesn't have the same impact, no matter how funny they are.)

So I'm totally sold on the dub. It was incredibly difficult not to just marathon the entire thing to see how they did later scenes and characters (including Objectively Best Girl, Emi, whose appearance I'm really looking forward to for more reasons than the usual).

I was a bit worried I wouldn't have much to say about ToraDora on a third viewing - and second group discussion - without repeating myself, but this has given me a whole new appreciation for the show and the characters.

Yokosuka, 1986

The weather in Yamanose on November 29th, 1986 is how Ryo Hazuki refers to the day his father was murdered.

He doesn't even mention his father to anyone but Ine-san and Fuku-san. When anyone else brings up "the day it rained", he insists he's okay - before immediately demanding clues for his quest for revenge. His sights are fixed so firmly on revenge - on Lan Di, then sailors, then the Chi You Men, then Hong Kong and beyond - that his father fades away behind the anger, only taken out to be used as a key to unlock otherwise closed doors on the road to vengeance.

After Hazuki-sensei is killed, he only appears twice, in semi-secret flashbacks triggered when you inspect a bowl of carrots or the cherry tree outside the dojo. It's not long before the only person still thinking about Iwao Hazuki and what he might have wanted is Ine-san. He'd have wanted you to take over the dojo, she insisits. She's probably right.

But every step Ryo takes after he wakes up, three days after the rain, takes him away from the spot where his father died. Away from the places and people that might force him to accept and move on from his loss. Every discovery, each clue about Iwao's past - the mysterious key in a desk drawer, the basement behind a hidden door and all the artifacts in it - should give Ryo pause, cause him to consider who his father used to be, and who he decided to become. At the very least, it should surprise him.

But any curiosity is burned away by the need to move forward, to move away from the loss and the responsibility he's been left with. Every attempt by Fuku-san, Ine-san or Nozomi to get through to Ryo is either twisted to help his need to run away or regarded as a hurdle to be overcome.

And what's he going to accomplish, in the end? We're probably never going to find out, at this point - the saga ends in a cave in China, with Ryo really no closer to the answers - or the revenge - he was looking for.

Fourteen shows

This anime season might be the death of me. I don't think I've ever tried to keep up with this many new series' at once; even back when I was reviewing new releases, they'd come in four- or five-episode chunks on a DVD every couple of months, which doesn't require anything like the same kind of brain real estate to keep track of.

But I have, at the moment, fourteen shows in my Currently Watching section on MyAnimeList. Disclosure: only twelve are currently airing, and I've not actually started three of them yet. The rest are between two and four episodes into their run, which is usually the point where I start culling shows - but so far they all seem like keepers, to some degree.

And someone's asked me about Akame ga Kill - which I didn't bother with last season, but now I'm wondering if it's worth a try...

Currently airing

Amagi Brilliant Park (3/13) is from Kyoto Animation, famous for moeblob trash like K-On!, and author Shoji Gatoh of Full Metal Panic! fame. It follows a cast named mostly after American rappers (the male and female protagonists are Kanye West and 50 Cent, respectively) trying to save a theme park that's actually a mechanism to harvest positive energies for powering a magical kingdom in an alternate reality. It's not as funny as it seems to think it is, with a lot of its humour falling a bit flat for me, but it looks great - expect nothing less from KyoAni - and the characters manage to carry off the surreal story remarkably well.

Danna ga Nani wo Itteiru ka Wakaranai Ken (3/13), or I Don't Understand What My Husband Is Saying, is based on a 4-koma manga about a normal office worker and her shut-in otaku husband, who makes a living as a blogger. It makes fun of the stuff that geeks accept about our hobbies, but never feels mean-spirited. Also, if this doesn't convince you to give DannaKen a look then nothing else I say will ever convince you.

Denki-gai no Honya-san (3/12) is a slice-of-life show revolving around the employees of an Akihabara doujinshi store. It has a similar attitude to nerd culture as DannaKen, but coming from the retail perspective it peeks behind the curtain a little into how these kinds of stores operate. The cast is universally likable and quite varied in personality, history and appearance, and it's got just enough shipping fodder to satisfy, even if it's unclear at this point where any of it's going.

Gundam: G no Reconguista (4/?) hooked me in seconds, with its gorgeious retro designs and animation. I'd initially thought there was no CGI in the show at all, but rewatches of the first episode dashed that misconception pretty effectively. Still, the 3D is kept to a minimum, and so far none of the actual mecha action has been anything but hand-drawn 2D. The story is a bit more sloppy and convenient at this stage than I'd like - I'm already predicting the shifting alliances, not that either side seems particularly bothered about keeping enemy combatants away from their tech. I'm hoping it tightens up a bit soon, but hinestly it's such a joy to watch that I'll stick with it to the end anyway.

Log Horizon 2nd Season (2/25) is a disappointing continuation of the excellent first season. With animation duties transferred from Satelight to Studio DEEN, existing character designs have changed subtly but entirely for the worse, and a couple of the new female characters are much more predictably "anime" than really suits the established aesthetic. The pacing has seemed off for the first episodes as well, with less emphasis on Shiroe's genius-level manipulation of various parties, but the plot has been more combat-oriented so far so hopefully it'll get back on track. I'd like to see more of the old cast as well - Akatsuki has been almost entirely sidelined, especially disappointing as she was woefully underserved by the first season.

Ore, Twintail ni Narimasu. (2/12) is this season's strongest contender for "Dumbest Plot That Might Just Work". Officially translated as Gonna Be The Twin-Tails!!, the show is about a high-school student with an obsession with/fetish for twin ponytails who is given a bracelet that will let him battle alien invaders determined to steal all the twin ponytails from Earth. The bracelet also turns him into a girl (with twin ponytails, natch), though it's disappointingly lacking an elaborate magical girl-style transformation sequence. The most important thing I can say about this show is that it doesn't give a fuck what you think. It's here to have fun, and nothing is going to stop it. It helps its case by being genuinely hilarious in places, and while its innuendo occasionally oversteps the mark it's usually moved onto something else by the time you'll notice anyway.

Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso (2/22) is almost certainly going to destroy me. School romance shows about musicians rarely end well, and while I don't expect this to go full White Album 2 on us, Your Lie in April is shaping up to be a total heartbreaker. Aided by gorgeous animation, great music and an unexpectedly thrilling first-episode reference to Laputa, I'm hooked.

Shingeki no Bahamut: Genesis (2/?) is a weird one. With a visual style somewhere between Attack on Titan and Space Dandy, a main character who acts like a cross between the latter's eponymous hero and Cowboy Bebop's Spike Spiegel, and a tone that just barely holds together between the action, drama and comedy, it's going to take a lot more episodes before I can decide how I feel about it.

Shirobako (2/?) is about five women who met in their high school's animation club and now work in the anime industry. A number of characters are inspired by real anime directors, composers and producers, and repeated in-universe conversations about one near-disaster seem to be references to actual production problems on Girls und Panzer. It's hard to see what the long-term plot goal is for the show; I'm watching it almost like a documentary about anime production, and the names and job titles that pop up on-screen when a character first appears seems to suggest that's the intention.

Backlog

Nisemonogatari (1/11), the second part of the lengthy *monogatari franchise, is proving difficult. I persevered with the (deliberately?) obtuse Bakemonogatari mostly for its cinematic flair, but starting Nise, I'm not sure how much longer I can put up with the unnecessarily-wordy plot digressions, creepy fanservice and frankly unappealing main characters. If it had a better long-term story I might be convinced to stick around, but honestly it might have to go. It's been weeks since I last watched an episode.

Shoujo Kakumei Utena (14/39) has been on my "to watch" list for literally years at this point; seemingly almost as influential on the industry as Evangelion, if nowhere near as successful commercially, I've got something different than I was expecting so far. I mostly wasn't prepared for the humour (or the rodent sidekick), and I think I expected more to be made of Utena's princely aspirations. There's been more filler than I anticipated too, although with a 39-episode runtime I guess they can afford momentary diversions. Still, I watched eight episodes in a row last night, so it must be doing something right.

Not started

I'm going to try Girlfriend (Kari) despite its dumb name and dating-game origins because I saw it described on Reddit as a harem show without the male character at the centre, which has intrigued me. I don't know what's going to set it apart from slice-of-life shows in that case, but I guess I'm going to find out.

Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de, or When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace is about a highschool literature club who are given supernatural powers, but nothing else about their lives has changed - there's no world-ending threat to defeat. That sounds like an interesting enough setup to give it a couple of episodes.

Based on a long-finished manga and with a plot synopsis that sounded like shonen tedium, I was pretty certain I'd just give Kiseijuu: Sei no Kakuritsu (Parasyte -the maxim-) a miss, but I've seen enough buzz about the series - and the seventeen-year-old beatboxer who provides foley sfx - I've been intrigued.

Isolation

"If it sees you," our instructor states bluntly, "you're already dead".

We file into the next room. I pick up the flamethrower as instructed - it only has two shots, but while it won't kill her it will scare her off temporarily. I scour the cluttered crates for anything else that might be useful, finding nothing, and open the door.

Steam and flame pour from exposed pipes; the station is full of noise and movement that distracts and startles. My first instinct is to hide, and I obey it.

I pull up the motion tracker: no contacts. This doesn't really reassure me.

The objective marker pulls me to the left, but as I round the corner the lights cut out and I stop dead. The motion tracker shows a single blinking dot moving towards me. I panic and start making my way down a nearby corridor - a dead end.

I stuff myself into a small locker, my heart beating so strong and so fast that I can feel it in my hands. The motion tracker still shows movement to the left, but from my cramped perspective at the end of a corridor I can't see—

She's there.

I hold my breath. She snarls. She starts to move away. When I think I have space, I move out of the cupboard, inching my way closer to the most dangerous thing I have ever laid eyes on as every fibre of my being screams to get back in the cupboard.

She moves behind a stack of pipes but I can still see the spikes on her back, silhouetted against the warning lights. I check the tracker again to make sure she's not moving.

When I focus back on the room, I realise I've lost sight of her.

Cowering behind cover, I keep staring at the tracker for signs of movement. A ping, much too close. I start to move backwards, trying to get a fix without giving my own position away.

She has her back to me.

I glance behind, and see a door. I can make it if I run, I think.

I stand up and sprint. I don't know how close she is, but the thump thump thump of her feet on the steel floors terrifies me. I smack the door release and run through in a blind panic. I turn around just in time to see her secondary jaw shoot out, into my face, and everything goes dark.

I was so scared I'd forgotten about the flamethrower.