What’s that? New anime are already airing? What!?! I’m only on episode 3 of the new Steins;Gate! The only anime I’m up to date on is Megalobox…wait, that’s over already? Oh fuck I’m not even caught up on that. What’s that? I’m moving house in literally two days time and have barely registered what is happening in the world of anime and they are making an anime out of friggen Banana Fish? How long have I been out of it? Have they made a Full Metal Panic sequel yet? Har har I’m so funny…what’s that? You’re kidding.

Welcome to The Cart Driver Dot Com’s anime season preview, Summer 2018 edition! Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go back to packing boxes, swearing at the heat in the UK, and catching up on what looked like a really good spring season. Have at it!

Banana Fish

Years ago I used to make fake charts of anime that everyone would love to come out but never will. I stopped, partly because I ran out, but also because they kept making anime of everything I put on those charts. Banana Fish was one of them, an edgy violent shoujo manga from the 80s about gangs, drugs and gay sex, the kind of thing you would never imagine getting an anime today. And yet here we are. By friggen Mappa too. With a staff list with backgrounds in KyoAni and Wit. It is like someone had a weirdly specific wish to the anime gods and it has somehow come true. Anime of the season right here, if it wasn’t for the fact this next anime exists.

Chio’s School Road

Look man, just watch the trailer. I don’t normally ask this of you, but this one time you kind of have to. The anime is about a girl trying to make it to school on time. That covers roughly 0.001% of what you will see in that trailer. Just do it.

Six million bucks is mine!

Angels of Death

Japanese indie game built in RPG maker ends up being wildly successful and becomes a well-produced anime is the stuff dreams are made of for the creator. A very late-10’s kind of dream so I can’t actually work up any of my usual cynicism for this, even if it’s being adapted by JC Staff. A girl gets trapped in a building with a series of “serial killers”, which basically mean “wacky folks” in a comedy/horror adventure game. Staff and studio aren’t amazing but hey the game has good reviews on Steam. Then again people give any old visual novel shite on Steam good reviews no matter how much the writing might be tedious drivel so perhaps not the best way to judge.

Harukana Receive

I want to have a little rant here. I’m all into sports anime. I can dig all girl sports anime. I even am OK with a little bit of dat booty jiggle in  my girls sports anime. But when I saw the girls costumes in this I found myself weirdly irritated. Those are not the swimsuits you play beach volleyball in! Those things are tight and compact for a reason. Not these stringy bollocks these girls are wearing. Look, let me show you a good example of this is another all-girl sports anime.

Hanebad!

See! that trailer has some boob bounce, but it works within the context of them leaping about like mad people playing badminton while wearing appropriate clothing while being lesbians. That’s more my style. And I’m the kind of nutter who thought Keijo was quite good. Wait…actually maybe that makes me a horrible hypcrite? Errr let’s move on.

Cells at Work

When I was but a wee child there was a cartoon called Ozzy and Drix about a white blood cell and flu pill in a buddy cop comedy fighting diseases. I can’t remember if it was actually good or not, but it was always a neat idea for a show. Well Japan heard my plea for more like that, albeit like 20 years later, and here we are. Normally I’d assume this would be something where all the blood cells turn into cute boys who then do bugger all except act out stereotypes, but no! It has a diverse range of characters in sitcom scenarios while fighting evil diseases! Oh, and it’s David Production with the director of Jojo’s and Drifters, which is as solid a staff listing as you could hope. Secret sleeper hit of the season incoming.

Planet With

Planet with…what exactly? With an early 00’s anime aesthetic complete with maid? Anyway, the actual interesting thing about this anime is it’s by the author of Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer, that beloved manga of years ago that never got an anime (although if Banana Fish got an anime then hey you never know). I’ll admit I never got the fuss around it, to the point that after reading the first few chapters I thought I had accidentally started reading a completely different unrelated manga and had to go back and read reviews before I realised this was genuinely the thing people were going nuts for. So what is this one about? Generic Potato-kun has magical monsters attack and he must team up with cute girls to save the day and stuff. Idk sounds about the same as Biscuit Hammer, but as I said, I never got the appeal of that. JC Staff adapting with a completely uninspiring staff list.

Aguu: Genius Dolls

I like new Studio Deen. They have been doing far more fascinating anime in the past couple of years, certainly ever since Rakugo. This looks neat too. It’s adapted from a stupidly popular Chinese webcomic of all things, with literally billions of views online. A horror story about ballet dancers and creepy little creatures with lots of violent sewing imagery. So obviously a perfect fit for the director who previously did *looks at notes* Hetalia Axis Powers.

Angolmois

Did you know the Mongols tried to invade Japan but failed, essentially putting a stop to the spread of the Mongol horde? I didn’t, and in researching this anime ended up down a historical internet hole. Did you know it was one of the very first wars in which gunpowder was used fairly extensively with what were basically early grenades? It was also where the katana was ultimately invented to cut through the leather armour of the Mongols? Anyway, Angolmois is set in that era, which is fairly new in the world of anime. Not much else to report though, it’s the relatively new studio Naz who did Hamatora which I keep accidentally writing as Hamtaro.

Shinya! Tensai Bakabon

Was going to ignore this at first since I thought it was one of those 3 minute kids anime. But upon further inspection I think it’s trying to be the next Osomatsu. Adaptation of ancient manga and TV series from the early 70s, was called “Meet the Boneheads” in English. Now it’s being modernised with the same character designs but a wacky colourful visual design and decidedly off-colour humour. I could do with a new Osomatsu considering the actual second season of Osomatsu was something we would all like to forget.

Revue Starlight

The latest Bushiroad-funded mega franchise with games and manga and stage plays and the lot. If it’s funded by Bushiroad you know it will be rolling in dough and have cute girls who will probably be idols. It’s a little different this time in that the focus appears to be Takarazuka, the all-female style of stage play with fabulous costumes and the wet dreams of lesbians worldwide. I’ve been staring at this for a while trying to come up with a good excuse to watch it, since it’s by Kinema Citrus whose last anime was the Anime of the Decade-worthy Made in Abyss, and has a bunch of the staff from Yuri Bear Storm which is the best Ikuhara anime don’t @ me. But no matter what way I look at it, it’s another Love Live-clone. It’s wearing different clothes, and quite fancy Takarazuka clothes too. But it’s just not a genre I’ve ever liked.

Sirius the Jaeger

Next anime by Masahiro Ando, the guy who did Sword of the Stranger and general big name who gets relatively free reign to do anything he wants if someone funds him. Last time he turned to Kickstarter with Under the Dog, but that was a bit embarrassing in retrospect. They spent all the marketing and promotion talking about “saving anime” when at the time anime was generally looking like it was on the up and only improving. But now he’s got the studio PA Works behind him for this anime about historical 1930s musical instrument-wielding vampire hunters. It will have some very nice action scenes and animation at least, we can say that. Story? Who knows, it’s an anime original. Could be the next great anime. Could be the next Argevollen.

Grand Blue

Grand Blue is a quite popular seinen manga about a guy going to university and joining a scuba diving club. Or at least that’s what the plot description is. The first chapter consisted of a dude who wants to fuck his cousins instead ending up in a club full of buff naked dudes then getting passout drunk and attending lectures in his underwear. It’s closest in tone to something like Moyashimon in its setting and slightly risque slapstick sense of humour. I really like the directing, Shinji Takamatsu, who has a knack for good comedy with School Rumble, early Gintama and Daily Lives of Highschool Boys. Not sophisticated but a good idea of comedic timing which is half the battle. Looks like low-brow fun which I am all for.

Island

I’m pretty sure I’ve time travelled back 10 years to when everyone still though Clannad was the best anime ever and Jun Maeda was the hottest writer on the scene. This is so Key anime from the magical realism single male lead surrounded by girls acting way too young for their age and with massive eyes and delicate bodies. It is adapted from a visual novel because of course it is. OK I’m done being in 2008 take me back to 2018, the anime are better there.

Back Street Girls

A rather cheaply made production of three yakuza who get gender realignment surgery and follow their dreams to become successful idols. Yay, what a heartwarming comedy wait actually nobody knows they are trans? Well I suppose you could make a dark comedy about society’s inability to deal with cute trans people? Wait, actually they were forced into gender realignment surgery and live every day in depression? That’s kinda fucked up? I follow a few trans folk on Twitter and the ones I’ve seen talk about it despise this thing’s mere existence. I sorta get why, since it’s basically saying getting gender realignment surgery is the worst thing ever and something to live in shame and depression about forever, and this is in anime where men dressing as women and trying to rape our squealing pretty boy protagonists are still a popular trope. But I look at it as it’s like being trans in reverse, where you are forced into a gender you aren’t comfortable with and see the world from the opposite point of view. Could be a hilarious yet biting look at sexism and anti-trans feelings in the world. It’s not. But yah know, it could be.

Thousand Noble Musketeers

In the curious and yet unsurprisingly popular genre of “let’s make a game about historical things and re-imagine them as hot girls/boys” comes this one about historical guns now as cute boys. One of them is Brown Bess. Another is Springfield. It has the acclaimed director Kasai Kenichi, who did Nodame Cantabile and Honey and Clover. I used to be a fan of the guy, but with the benefit of hindsight his best anime were basically mostly the work of the source material rather than his directing I feel. The boredom of Bakuman deciding to be a romance anime looks worse and worse overtime.

Mr. Tonegawa

A Kaiji spinoff manga about the hilariously evil business boss and his lackys. I wouldn’t say this would be the kind of thing I was looking for from Kaiji, but then the 15 second trailer showed the boss lying down on top of the four backs of generic suited men on all fours and it brought a little guffaw out of me so hey maybe it will be fun. Doesn’t look like you need to have watched Kaiji to understand it either, and since there was always something a little off about Kaiji that meant I never fell in love with it like some people did, maybe a comedy would be more to my liking.

Miss Caretaker of Sunohara-sou

By the wonderful folks who brought you Prisma Illya comes a harem anime about old ladies perving on a tiny young teenage boy. I’d call it creepy except I was a young teenage boy once too and the idea of a bunch of older ladies wrapping me up in the breasts sounds like my idea of a good time so I can’t really be that critical.

Sleeping Princes and the Kingdom of Dreams: The Animation

Phone game adaptations always sound so dramatic and it takes a bit of reading comprehension before you get to what it’s really about. In the world of dreams, various kingdoms must band together to fight off the dream eaters and to do so the noble princes of each kingdom AHA there it is! It’s a game about collecting handsome princes! OK cool done here.

How NOT to Summon a Demon Lord

What’s the name of this genre again? The one where people get reborn in another video game world? Reincarnation? Anyways, there have been a lot of these in the past decade, mostly coming out of the light novel sphere. Most of them have been crap on a stick, but it’s not necessarily something wrong with the genre inherently. Just the fact that they are always in the same fantasy MMO game and so many give the main character superpowers thereby reducing all possible conflict and become more about harems than drama. You know what is probably an inherently bad concept though? Sexy slavery. It is quite kinky I suppose but once you move beyond kink and into hilarious hijink relationships then maybe it stops being kinky and starts making you wonder what on earth has made this a newly popular trope.

Seven Senses of the Reunion

At first I saw “based off a light novel, in the popular MMO” and zoned out straight away. But then my disengaged brain flicked back to life when I saw what the story was about. It’s…well, you remember Ano Hana? The friends splitting up after the friend dies and then she comes back as a ghost? Well it’s that if they all were friends in an MMO. So it’s less another reincarnation power fantasy and more Ano Hana ripoff, which I suppose is more original based purely on it being a less crowded space. It’s a lot more cutesy than Ano Hana but definitely going for the same bawly melodrama if you’re into that kind of thing.

Master of Ragnarok & Blesser of Einherjar

Guy gets transported to another world similar to a magic medieval fantasy, randomly obtains harem, he gets all his knowledge from a smartphone…wait a second, didn’t we just get this? In Another World With My Smartphone? Come on guys, you’re not even trying anymore.

Asobi Asobase

On first plot description I figured it was going to be one of those boring cutesy 4-komas about girls playing games together. Then I saw the promo image and watched the trailer and realised it was basically…well, you know that scene in the second episode of Hinamatsuri where the two girls play rock paper scissors and then point in a direction, using their psychic powers to warp each other’s faces into deformed features? It’s a series full of those faces and kind of nothing more. It has the profoundly infuriating Seiji Kishi directing, but I suppose if you were going to give Seiji Kishi anything to direct with his complete inability to understand tone, it would be something like this. He’s not actually that bad a comedy director.

Jashin-chan Dropkick

It’s a slapstick comedy about a delusional gothloli summoning a snake demon girl and then they hang out. I suppose the closest comparison would be Dragon Maid except a bit more weird, judging by the trailer certainly. I mean the promo image has her wielding a chainsaw. I wish I could summon a demon snake girl to live with me. I tried watching that anime with the spider girl from last season but while spider girl was objectively the Best Girl Ever, the show itself was kinda awful. My kingdom for a good monster girl show so my highly specific and very weird fetish can be sated.

Phantom in the Twilight

Have reverse harems become more popular than harems now? The girls are buying these anime where the boys are not? It hasn’t done anything to improve the overall quality of anime since they are fairly universally as bad as their genderswapped counterparts. This one is about a girl who goes to London and meets lots of hot dudes in a magical cafe. It has everything: Britain, hot guys, and cakes. What more could you want? Well, maybe if one of the guys didn’t have a fucking awful rat tail in his hair then maybe it would be better. Do anything to stand out now.

Holmes at Kyoto Teramachi Sanjō

Girl ends up in yet another cafe with yet another bunch of hot dudes? Sorta, it’s more a mystery series than a reverse harem set in magical cafe, which is now its own genre. ‘Mystery’ like Beautiful Bones or other light novel mystery series like that. I tried to learn more about the series but the character descriptions and overall visual design were so generic that I got halfway through eating my own arm off before I realised what I was doing.

Happy Sugar Life

Who here loves lesbians!

*everyone cheers*

Who here loves paedophiles!

*silence, one person in the back goes wooh and gets escorted away by police*

I mean, it’s a psychological horror series so I suppose fucked up stuff is fine and all, but given the parade of universally-agreed upon awful anime the staff have previously worked on, along with the brand new anime studio, I think this may end up in the “future terribad viewing” pile.

Hi Score Girl

This was originally canned over fears they would get sued by Capcom because the series is full of references to Street Fighter. However the creators assured them that nobody would watch it because it would be an awful CG anime. Phew!

Lord of Vermilion

Based off a trading card game, because it is the new 10’s and that is what we make anime out of now. It appears to be a contemporary fantasy series with a fairly unexciting staff list. I want to tell you more, but there’s no trailer and I’m not going out buying a set of trading cards. I’m not that dedicated to this season preview.

Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs

What if ghosts were, like, totally hot babes and shit. Yeah. I’m tired.

Sequels

Not much in the sequel camp this season, apart from the Big One. Overlord is one of those reincarnation anime that had a little more about it than others with its notable sense of loneliness and regret the main character had, but then it focused on all the wrong parts and instead tried to be a dark fantasy series. Free is now in college so the boys are now men and therefore legal. Yay, now I can touch myself guilt-free! Encouragement of Climb still has the worst translated title in the history of anime and that includes Cat Planet Cuties. Oh, and Attack on Titan. I really like Attack on Titan. I know now it’s not cool anymore since everyone is now into the hot shit that is My Hero Academia. But while I like All Might and Co, my heart is never truly with it because it’s so formulaic and generic. Titan captures my imagination and is so clearly its own thing and I really do like the series a lot. Also it doesn’t have Mineta. My Hero Academia has a Mineta. Checkmate atheists.