In the past, my reviews were truly “2-cent reviews”, where I’d watch maybe an episode or two of something and post a short opinion of it. That worked, in a short-attention-span sense, but then that became too much to bother keeping up with. For many of those shows, I never got past the 3-episode milestone to really get an idea of what it’s like.

This time, I’m trying something different. This time, I’m going to watch an ENTIRE series. That’s more fair to the anime. To be honest, I’ve lost count of how many shows I’ve watched where I wasn’t all that impressed by the first couple episodes, kept going anyway, and then found myself really enjoying it.

“Hey you should review-”
Hey you should fuck off

I have to set some rules and limits here. No, I am not taking requests. Someone will try anyway but that doesn’t mean I’ll heed them. I will watch what I damn well feel like, and when I feel like. Whether I already have it or not will also play a vital role. Similarly, if it’s something I’ve already seen, then the chances of watching it again go way down (but it can happen). There’s enough anime to choose from that watching all of it is genuinely impossible. Gotta pick and choose.

Someone can still make the suggestion along the lines of “if you liked X anime, then you’ll like Y”. That’s different from diving into a series on account of someone too lazy to watch it themselves. So if someone asks “can you watch this anime and tell me if it’s good” they’ll get ignored. You want to know if something is good or not, then YOU watch it with YOUR eyes.

There are still going to be some shows where I don’t get past 3 episodes. That’s going to happen. I might make a mention of them in a different post, listing the anime I gave a chance but couldn’t keep up with for whatever reason.

No Naruto, no One Piece, no DragonBall, no Bleach, or other animated soap operas

I’m also going to steer clear of the ultra-long shows that started 20 years ago and are still running. Sure, I could eventually tackle a 700-episode behemoth, but with the amount of time required, I could easily cover dozens of other shows. For the most part, I’m probably going to limit this to shows with 26 episodes, give or take a few. I will probably make exceptions to this as appropriate.

You might wonder what I think about physical media. Physical media is not dead. It’s not going anywhere soon. It’s going to stick around for a long time yet. I like physical media because once I buy it, it’s mine. Nobody is able to tell me that I can’t watch something that I have on physical media or deny access to it. DVDs I bought 20 years ago are still just as playable now. When a company makes a bunch of DVDs or BDs, any that make it to consumers are out in the wild forever. The only way they can claw them back is by scouring ebay or Amazon for any second-hand copies, and that’s only if they’re really desperate.

Streaming is too ephemeral. It comes and goes, often without warning. When a company is streaming a show and then the terms of the license ends or they just don’t like having it anymore, they can shut it off, full stop. Downloading anime files is at its most effective when it’s fairly new, but that too can fade away. Torrents can lose seeds.

Does physical media take up physical space? Yes. If you live in a shoebox of an apartment, you may find streaming is more ideal, and physical media is no longer a luxury, or even desirable, becoming more of a liability. I get that. I can grok that. Then there are those of us with plenty of space, and physical media becomes an attainable luxury. We have the room for it and the wall of shelves required for it.

Sidenote: The “Billy” bookcase from Ikea is actually pretty awesome for manga and DVDs/BDs, if you don’t mind assembling furniture like a Lego set. You can get extra shelves, they can be spaced perfectly for manga/DVDs, and the shelves are deep enough that you can double-deep the rows if you want. Doing that, in a bookshelf about 32” wide and 72” tall, it can hold about 650 DVDs; a bit over 700 if you include the top of the bookcase itself.

I’m finding that having a high-resolution 4K TV is a double-edged sword when it comes to watching anime. When files are encoded at 1080p, they look great. (I have yet to find any video natively encoded in 4K, twice the number of lines of 1080p.) When it’s at 720, it’s still okay. When it’s at 480, which is about where DVD tops out, artifacts start to show up because the video player (either computer or BD player) needs to create most of the pixels out of thin air. For much older shows, such as .avi files with only 320 lines or so, I’m really better off watching them on my laptop with its smaller display.

Anyway, reviews will come up in batches, and each month or so. Each article will feature however many shows I felt like watching in the time between. I’m not getting paid for this one way or the other, so I don’t care if any reviews are “on time” or not.