Supernatural Season Two: Hell's Bells

Given how much the show uses classic rock and specific songs to highlight certain scenes, I'm going to give each post the title of a song that I feel is thematically appropriate for it. With that out of the way, I forgot to mention in season one's post but I consider Supernatural's first season to be one of the best first seasons of television in general. But thats just it, its the first season. No matter how good it is, its a starting point. The real question is if they can keep it up? Season two does well in that regard.

The first episode of season two kinda sets the tone for the brothers' emotional state for the rest of the season. So in order to properly talk about the season, I'm going to have to spoil it. Here goes: The first episode of season two continues on from the end of the first season, specifically from a pretty bad car wreck the Winchestors got into at the hands of a demon. Dean is in a coma and his spirit is wandering around the hospital looking for something thats killing patients in the place. The twist is well...its not actually a thing that needs to be hunted. Its a reaper just doing its job and Dean is on its list. The parts with John (their dad) and Sam make it look like John is just eager to find the demon that took their mother and he is, but not for that reason. He trades his soul and the gun that can kill it for Dean's life. On top of that, part of the price tag is John dying. I still remember seeing this episode back in the day and that twist left me with a lump in my throat. Before he dies, John also alludes to the demon (Yellow Eyes) that started all this having big plans for Sam.

The monster of the week episodes are pretty good this season even if a lot of them don't really hit the same level of memorable of season one's. Now, with that being said, there is one absolutely fantastic episode in this season that really lives up to the first season's motw quality and its easily one of my favorite episodes in the show. Its the episode "Tall Tales". Sam and Dean roll into town to investigate a death at a college linked to a supposed urban legend. They find nothing in the college's or town's history even remotely fitting said legend. So they get stumped and then things get weirder. A dude gets abducted by aliens and another dude gets mauled by a gator in the sewer. Just what the hell is going on in this town? Spoiler: Its not ghosts, aliens, or even sewer gators. Its all the work of one charismatic son of a bitch simply known as the Trickster just screwing with arrogant people for the hell of it as well as doing minor things to cause Sam and Dean to annoy each other so the can't figure out whats actually going on. The Trickster is probably my favorite monster of the week in the entire show or at the very least the 6 or 7 seasons I've seen (and this won't be the only time he shows up). I just can't properly express the level of charm the Trickster brings to the episode and the actor does great job.

The drama portion of this season is about Dean coming to terms with John's sacrifice. John isn't just gone on some hunting trip, he is never coming back. John's death still hits kind of hard these days but for different reasons. Its mostly because of Dean's reaction to finding out his father gave his life and soul to save him. Normal, snarky, confident Dean just goes dead silent for a solid minute and legitimately considers selling his own soul to bring him back when a demon makes the offer. Its downright chilling to me. Dean isn't the only one getting an arc this season, Sam gets one centered around why he was having visions in a few episodes of season one. Yellow Eyes is actor is great in this. Dude practically oozes menace to the point where he can convincingly threaten to show someone what their family's intestines look like with a big ol' smirk on his face.

This season seems to have switched the quality of the monster of the week episodes with the dramatic bits. Like I said earlier, they're still good but the drama just ended up more compelling this season. Its kinda of understandable why tho since it was about time to give the characters more depth than they had in the first season. As good as Supernatural's motw episodes have been these first two seasons, that can only take a show so far. The monster lore portions of the episode are still pretty sweet. Like I said in the opening, its a pretty good season that carries the torch well enough even if its motw episodes don't quite hit the level of season one's.

Cyberpunk Edgerunners

Normally I wouldn't talk about a show like this because I am not well versed in the genre or the table top RPG that Cyberpunk 2077 is based on but I couldn't stop thinking about it for a week after I finished it. I'm going to approach this post from two ways: 1. How the anime itself worked out for me and 2. Just how much it uses stuff from 2077. This isn't going to be a full-on review in my usual style and will be me just talking about how the show did its thing.

Premise: David Martinez is having a really bad time. A poor kid getting bullied at a corpo school and whose mom is just barely keeping everything together in order to raise the scratch to cover his tuition. On top of that, during one really bad day, he and his mom get caught up in a gang shootout and she dies. Pushed to the edge by the city's madness, David falls in with a crew of Edgerunners just to survive and feel some semblance of control or purpose.

I had a blast with this show. I started it only planning to watch the first two episodes and before I knew it, I was on the final episode. The fights in this show are absolutely insane looking which is to be expected from Trigger. The way the show visualizes how the Sandevistan works is absolutely gorgeous and beautifully done. It left my jaw on the floor every time David used it. The show looks stunning across the board. This show is one hell of a trip.

Night City is rough if you're not working for a corp and thats putting it mildly. If you don't get killed as collateral damage in some gang attack, you just might run into some random spaced out psycho in a back-alley who'll blast your head off at a moment's notice. Thats not even getting into the amount of gonks on the street who might try to mess with you as you go about your day. The only way to survive as a runner is to chrome up so you don't fall behind and the more you add, the more your clock ticks down. I figured out how the show would most likely end by the halfway point and I was still on the edge of my seat.

I'm not gonna lie, I've spent way too much time roaming Night City in 2077. In all honesty, I've spent more time than I should have farming Night City's mooks for item drops. Its basically my go-to game these days when I'm not playing stuff on the Switch. However, it did not occur to me just how long I've spent playing it until I saw this show. I knew exactly where every scene was taking place just based on minor background details. It more than did the city justice. Even the show's soundtrack is pulled from the game and I'm almost certain I heard a few sound effects from the game here and there. I think I may have also seen a few quickhack menu displays from the game fly by at one point.

Do I recommend the show? Definitely. Everything else aside, its a Trigger anime and it goes hard on the spectacle. I honestly think it would be worth a recommendation on that aspect alone. Overall, I had a great time with the show. I don't see any way to continue the story from this season but if there were another season and/or anime spinoff, I'd like it to be sort of a season long anthology type of show. I'd love to see a season centered around the gangs of Night City and how they interact. Maybe also a season about corporate power struggles and skullduggery.

Samurai Sentai Shinkenger Review: Coming Full Circle

I finally decided to go back and finish the first Sentai I ever saw. I was watching it on youtube back in the day before the toku purge happened. I remember just being in awe of what I was seeing. I finally got the chance to get back to it. Back in the day I got into the late 30s before everything got hit. So lets take a look at the show that got me into Sentai. Without this show, I probably wouldn't be active in the Sentai fandom if not the toku fandom as a whole. Note: There will be spoilers for Shinkenger's final arc because I need to talk about the overall arcs of two characters. Without further adieu...To the field!

A horde of monsters appear from a gap in a wall to terrorize a child. In what is probably my favorite introduction to a red, a man appears and effortlessly cuts them down. He is the 18th head of the Shiba: Takeru Shiba. After noticing that the Gedoshu attacks are becoming more and more frequent, his advisor Hikoma suggests finally calling Takeru's 4 retainers into service.

Characters:

• Takeru Shiba/ShinkenRed: Takeru is a take on the stoic red but is also very uncomfortable with his position as Lord. Mostly because he doesn't like the idea of his team potentially sacrificing their lives for him for a very good reason: He isn't actually the Lord, he is a decoy. The man was just a kid from a regular family raised to take the Lord's place. Dude's only role in life was to fight the Gedoshu until the actual lord mastered a way to banish their leader completely. Being ShinkenRed was his entire reason for living until that point and he was so lost once the true Lord returns that he finally accepted Juuzo's offer to duel to the death because he thought he had no other purpose.
• Ryunosuke Ikenami/ShinkenBlue: I don't think I've seen a blue like Ryunosuke, ever. Dude is a serious guy but is loud, energetic, and extremely expressive while he does it. He just seems so enthusiastic and Hiroki Aiba does well in the role. He does Ryunosuke's whole schtick in a way that keeps the character from crossing into annoying territory. Ryunosuke's passion is kabuki which definitely explains his overly dramatic way of doing things. As for his arc, Ryunosuke is extremely loyal and devoted to his duty. The dude devotes himself to serving Takeru with his whole heart so naturally when he finds out Takeru isn't the Lord, he is torn between his duty to the Shiba clan and his duty to the person who has lead him into battle all this time. All of that combined makes him my favorite Shinkenger and potentially even my favorite Blue in Sentai as well as one of my favorite characters in the entire franchise.
• Mako Shiraishi/ShinkenPink: Mako's dream is just for a normal life. She wasn't allowed to have a childhood because of her samurai duties. She kind of takes on the team mom role because of that. Mostly confronting the others when she notices something wrong and lending an ear. It kinda didn't actually hit me until her last focus episode that she was hiding her own issues that went beyond her dream of a normal life. It honestly makes me think that her samurai training costing her time with her parents is probably the biggest reason for why thats her dream. That realization and seeing her crack like that honestly made me tear up a bit.
• Chiaki Tani/ShinkenGreen: Chiaki is a bit of slacker but is also pretty self-conscious and a bit frustrated about his skills since he is the least trained of the main five. Dude has to think fast and improvise because of that. He uses his frustration as the drive to improve and attempt to outdo both Ryunosuke and Takeru. The man is legitimately improving in each focus episode he gets and I love it. Heck, even when he admits to Ryunosuke that he isn't as good as him or Takeru, Ryunosuke straight up tells Chiaki that he brings something to the team that they can't: His ability to improvise and adapt. As cliche as that trope is, I dig it.
• Kotoha Hanaori/ShinkenYellow: Kotoha was not supposed to be a Shinkenger, her older sister was until she got sick. She is a sweet, kind girl who calls her self clumsy and useless early in the show to the point where she is convinced the only thing she had to offer the team was her life. That coupled with the insult monster episode really hurt more this time around. Just hearing her say "It doesn't matter because its all true anyway" hurt me because I've been in that position myself more times than I want to admit. Her episodes are fine tho episode 22 just kinda does nothing for me. Her ultimate arc is her learning to accept that she is not just her sister's replacement, she IS ShinkenYellow.
• Genta Umemori/ShinkenGold: Takeru's childhood friend. Genta is loud, energetic, and goofy. His more goofy antics work well when used to balance out Ryunosuke's serious antics. Due to not being from a samurai family, he adds a nice bit of normal guy dynamic to the team. His dream is pretty simple: He wants to own his own sushi restuarant. When Takeru was revealed to be figurehead, Genta didn't change much if at all. Yeah, he was shocked like everyone else but he wasn't blinded by or conflicted with his duty to some fancy Lord like the others were. Genta is just some regular dude loyal to his best friend. It made Takeru being sad when Genta had to leave town as a kid hit even harder in hindsight because Genta was probably one of the few people in Takeru's life that saw him as a regular person.

Villains:

The villains are fine though I wish Doukoku did more. He spends most of his time drinking and being angry. I get his whole deal is that he is a heavy hitter who can't leave the boat, I'm just more used to this type of villain being a background fixture or springboard for other villains to do their thing instead of being constantly hyped up as a major threat. Granted when he does finally do something, it feels like an earth-shattering moment. Shitari is interesting in that he basically plays the same advisory role for Doukoku that Hikoma (called Ji by the Shinkengers) does for Takeru. The main difference being that Takeru cares about the people under him while the only one Doukoku seems to have a soft spot for is Dayuu to the point where he can tell her mood by the subtle difference in that one tune she plays. Dayuu was betrayed in life by the man she loved who took another woman as his wife, then she burned the entire family alive and fell to the Sanzu River, taking his soul with her. Her story is actually pretty damn chilling to the point where went I wide-eyed at her accepting her situation and finally letting go of everything: Her regrets, her anger, her past, and her very humanity. Thats probably the biggest "Oh shit!" moment in the show for me. So...uhh...yeah, Dayuu is my favorite villain in the show. She is pain, regret, anger, and every other negative emotion all wrapped up in a big ol' box of denial.

If you had asked me which Shinkenger villain was my favorite way back when I started the show back in the day, I would've said it was Juuzo. Juuzo is a man who lives for battle and I mean that literally. He wants nothing more to find an opponent that can satisfy his bloodlust to the point where he decided to become a monster instead of letting a disease kill him. All he wants in the world is to find that one opponent who can potentially kill him so he can feel the joy of fighting for his life. The man got so engrossed in his final duel with Takeru that he forgot his sword (Uramasa) was sentient and thats the only reason Takeru didn't die. Villains who live solely for battle are usually hit or miss for me but Juuzo is definitely a hit. The man is arguably more of a monster than Doukoku to the point where its kinda terrifying. His duels with Takeru were definitely the most tense moments in the show.

Mecha: The origami are fine but the ones outside of the main five kinda fees like they lack any impact outside of the "Oh hey, we got a new mecha!" aspect of their debuts. Maybe I'd feel different about Squid and Lobster if they interacted with Genta like the main five's do with them. I find it amusing that the only thing Kyoryu Origama adds to ShinkenOh's arsenal is a new sword and hat. I don't like Samurai Ha-Oh and its probably one of my least favorite final mechs in Sentai. The robot itself is fine but the other half of the combo is just a platform for it to stand on. Ideally since it can't move that well, it should be used solely for the beam finisher instead of trying to choreograph around its bulk.

Music: The opening theme goes hard, a bit harder than it needs to but its still an amazing song and the opening sequence just gives me chills to this day. Its a fantastic hype machine and I always end up singing along with it. The ending theme is a great tune to close the show on and I've caught myself humming it more than the opening theme. The battle theme "Example" is a banger of a song even if its not one of my favorite battle themes and I wish it had shown up more than twice. However, my favorite piece of music in the entire show is easily that tune Dayuu plays on the shamisen. It perfectly captures her sadness and its a fairly haunting tune. 

Final Thoughts: I feel a bit like I've come full circle with this show in more ways than one. Not only did I finish the show that got me into Sentai but I finished it in the same place I started it. It was good to go back and finally finish the show. I've changed so much over the years and grown in regards to being a reviewer and how I analyze and talk about these shows. Back in the day when I first saw Shinkenger, I thought "Oh, I'll just watch this show to see what its like", I never expected to end up having seen at least 799 episodes of Sentai and thats only counting the Sentai I've finished. It just blows my mind to think about all the shows I've seen since that day. I'm a sucker for sword fights so naturally Shinkenger's action was and still is my jam. I knew the reveal with Takeru was coming ahead of time since I've been in the fandom for so long but it still hit like a truck regardless. Shinkenger is fantastic and while I don't do top 10s anymore due to stuff after fluctuating pretty frequently after number 5, for now Shinkenger is my number 6. It occurred to me while writing this post that Shinkenger is now technically both my 1st and 16th Sentai.

Kamen Rider Ryuki Review: The Start Of A Journey

You're probably wondering about that title...well, it actually has nothing to do with the show. It has everything to do with me since this was the toku show that I consider to be my official entry point into the tokusatsu fandom. Sure, I had seen Dragon Knight before-hand and I've been a Power Rangers fan my entire life but I don't really count them for this since I wasn't active in the fandom at the time. I remember exactly what I was doing when I first stumbled across this show. It was 2011-ish and I was sitting in the college cafe bored out of my mind while waiting for my next class to start. I was looking up Power Rangers clips on youtube when I noticed this little show had snuck its way into my recommended feed and I couldn't resist giving it a shot. It probably sounds weird that a Rider show was my entry point into the toku fandom at large when I'm such a big Sentai fan. So please indulge me while I take this little walk down memory lane for its 20th anniversary. Since I'm going all out for this and its an old show: SPOILERS AHEAD! Without further adieu...TATAKAE!!

Shinji Kido is an intern for the ORE Journal. While investigating a series of missing persons incidents, he finds a strange deck. He is attacked by a dragon from inside a window and manages to escape. While trying to save a friend from another monster, he falls into Mirror World. He gets saved by Ren (Kamen Rider Knight) and contracts with the dragon when it shows up to eat him. From there, he gets embroiled in the Rider War while vowing to use his powers to save people from the monsters on top of trying to solve the mystery of this man who only appears in mirrors.

The show features a lot of Riders and its probably got the most (well except for maybe Gaim). Its actually something I find pretty fascinating about the show is that most of the Riders pretty much have their own reasons for fighting in the Rider War. It shows what can go wrong if the wrong person gets ahold of that kind of power. Shinji and Raia are the only ones who aren't out for themselves and even then Raia wants to stop the war out of revenge for the death of his friend. Kanzaki purposefully picked people who would be willing to fight and kill each other just to get their one wish. Because there are so many riders in this show, I'm only gonna go over the major 4 so this will pretty much spoil who the top contenders are in the show.

Shinji Kido...where to begin...the man is my kind of hero. Dude just goes out of his way to help people when he gets the chance. He even outright tries to reason with the other riders and talk them out of fighting each other despite them telling him to fck off. He just can't help but throw himself into a situation that he feels needs to be resolved. On top of that, he can't even bring himself to kill someone in the Rider War. Just the impression of having killed someone was enough to devastate him to point of not wanting to transform again despite the risk of Dragredder eating him. Dude wears every single thought going through his head and every emotion he feels on his sleeve. Its his greatest strength and greatest weakness. You'd better believe that a lot of other riders take advantage of this fact too.

Ren is fighting in the war because his girlfriend is in a coma thanks to Kanzaki's experiments. The man is also...well kind of a dick in early Ryuki. He makes your modern asshole secondary riders look nice by comparison. The man nearly beats Shinji to death in the second episode to take him out of the fight. He is seemingly only stopped from killing him by Yui breaking a window to get his attention and has the nerve to say Shinji owes him the money he spent replacing the window. Despite all his crowing about how Riders can't co-exist, it feels like his heart isn't in it early on so his story is one about finding his resolve.

Kitoaka is a hotshot lawyer who is fighting in the war for one simple reason, he is dying from an incurable disease. He starts out valuing money, luxury, and his own desires because he knows he doesn't have a lot of time left even without the Rider War being a factor. Over the course of the show, he eventually grows and becomes a little more selfless, especially when Asakura gets involved in the Rider War. Something I really dig about how him is how he butts into fights. Its never some flashy or ominous entrance, he just straight up announces his presence by shooting people in the back. Its pretty fitting given his situation, he doesn't have the time to make a show of it.

Asakura is just straight up cold-blooded and he honestly kinda scares me. The idea that someone this unhinged became a rider is terrifying. The man joined the rider war just so he could fight and kill people. He was specifically chosen by Kanzaki for that purpose. He holds a particular dislike for Kitoaka because he played a direct part in putting him in jail. The man makes for a great villain because out of all the riders in the show, he is the one that Shinji absolutely can't even remotely reason with. The man loves dropping bodies too much. The show itself doesn't say what he could wish for but Episode Final (the movie) does. His wish is for the rider war to never end because he is enjoying it that much. I'm so tempted to track down his jacket. Its one of the most iconic looks in Rider imo.

Ryuki has a decent amount of timelines and quite a few endings. You've got the series timeline, two timelines branching from the ending of the 13 riders special, Episode Final's (the movie) timeline, and the Rider Time special continuation that basically ends Ryuki's story. I love this aspect because well...everything in Ryuki seems to be canon in a sense. In the last episode of the tv show, Kanzaki outright says "No matter how many times I do this, it will always end the same". All of the endings are rather bleak except for the tv series ending where the existence of the Rider War itself is undone. Thats probably why the Rider Time special continues from the tv ending instead of simply rebooting it for a new timeline. The Rider Time special is honestly the most fitting ending Ryuki could hope to have. There is no way the Rider War could really end without a lot of death. Its about as "happy" an ending as Ryuki could expect to given the 13 rider special and Episode Final have even bleaker endings. Rider Time's ending is downright chilling once you've seen everything Ryuki related.

Final Thoughts: Ryuki just has this kind of magic to it. Its engrossing from the first episode though I'm not sure how much of it is from the show itself or if its from the fact that except for two episodes, every episode ends on a cliffhanger that blends into the next episode. Either way, its was addictive for me at the time and it still is today this day (I rewatched a chunk of it as a refresher for this review since I've already seen the show twice). I legitimately had to force myself not to binge it. If you haven't seen this show yet, I give it a whole-hearted recommendation.

Supernatural Season One: Wayward Son

It was only a matter of time before I touched this show. This is probably one of those shows that may or may not need an introduction depending on who you ask. I'll be honest, I tapped out of this show around season 6 or 7 and caught a few episodes here and there afterwards. I've been curious how well it plays out given some of the things I've heard so I figured I might as well start from the beginning as a refresher. This isn't going to be too detailed and is going to be more of an overview of how the season went down for me. Note: I don't know how often these posts are gonna come out because in addition to working late, I've been rewatching this show in bursts in-between various korean dramas on netflix. Now, lets take a look at the first season.

The premise synopsis for this is gonna be tricky because the series goes places after the first season that would sort of render that pointless. As you'd probably expect from a show that managed to last 15 seasons, where it starts certainly isn't where it ends up. Anyway, even though I just said all that, here goes: Basically Sam's brother Dean finds him at his college and ropes him in to looking for their father who hasn't come back from a "hunting trip". Sam agrees to help out this one time. The twist? They hunt monsters. They do their thing, kill a ghostie, and Dean drops Sam back off at college only for Sam find his girlfriend pinned to the ceiling before the place catches fire. So Sam goes back to the hunting life to find their dad and whatever the hell did this because its not the first time this has happened to them.

This season is something I like to refer to as "Demonic Scooby-Doo" and I absolutely adore it even though I'm a known wimp when it comes to horror. They use their dad's journal as a way to retrace his footsteps and that leads to said Scooby-Doo-ish shenanigans. I wasn't unable to tear myself away from the screen during pretty much every episode even though I've seen them all before. I think that says a lot about how well this season holds up for me. 

My favorite episode out of the entre season is the episode "Hell House". Its a pretty damn good ghost story with a twist. Essentially the brothers investigate a haunted house covered in odd symbols and when their usual tricks don't work on the ghost they start digging into the symbols. Spoiler (for this 15 year-old episode of a tv show): They find out through researching one of the symbols that the ghost in question isn't a ghost...its a Tulpa. A Tulpa is basically an idea given form when so many people focus on it that it suddenly pops into reality. Due to the Tulpa taking the form of an urban legend that two bored teens in town literally made up two weeks prior, it becomes a game of telephone (as urban legends tend to do) and the creature evolves as the tale changes. So its effectively one of the few things they've hunted that they can't actually kill.

I'm a sucker for monster lore so every episode's breakdown of how the monsters do their thing was always pretty interesting. One particularly funny thing of note to me is how the show handles vampire weaknesses. It outright says the classic lore is bullshit and that only two things can harm a vampire: 1. Injecting them with deadman's blood to weaken them and 2. removing the head. That second one makes me laugh every time I remember because barring ghosts and demons (and a few other outliers), pretty much every single thing the brothers hunt can effectively be killed if they remove its head.

Peppered throughout the first season is drama about Sam working out his issues while looking for their father as he goes about returning to the hunting life. If I'm being honest though, that part is pretty much unnecessary. Let me explain: The show's monster of the week episodes are so good that they overshadow the plot related ones. In that sense, them following the notes in their dad's journal in hopes of finding him really just kind of feels like a way to get them into those situations. I don't really have much else to say about this season other than that it is downright fantastic and its no surprise to me why the show took off.

Isekai World Tour: Sword Art Online: Aincrad Arc

Lets rip this bandage off and talk about SAO. I'm going to handle this differently than my other posts in this series. I'm going to split this show up by arc as opposed to season so each arc will get its own post (also because there is only so much Kirito I can handle in one viewing). This mostly because the first arc of SAO ended up being more enjoyable than I remembered and its really in Alfheim where my issues with it as a whole start cropping up. Welcome to the next stop on the Isekai World Tour!

Premise: The hottest and most anticipated new mmo has dropped. 10,000 lucky players log in to get a feel for the game and everything is going fine...right up until they log out. Suddenly they're transported to a town square as the sky goes red. The Game Master appears and tells them that they're stuck here until they beat the game and if they die in the game, the nerve gear will fry their brains. He congratulates them for being able to play his little game and wishes them luck.

I surprisingly enjoyed this arc more than I did the last time around. Its not bad but its not amazing either (well, outside of two episodes) and I have a few minor issues that don't break the arc for me. Kirito is still op as hell tho. The first half of the arc was really good but honestly, it gets kinda boring once Kirito and Asuna get together. Its one of those things where the constant time skips makes me not believe their relationship because its not shown on-screen until they get together. I legitimately said "WTF!" out loud when Asuna tells another player that Kirito is her reason for living. The arc is at its best when its just Kirito bumping into people and helping them out. Easily the best episodes in the arc for me are episodes 5 and 6. They're a pretty sweet murder mystery about players somehow getting PK-ed in safe zones. Its a fantastic episode that gives a decent amount of insight into how certain aspects of the game work. 

Kirito is a weird protagonist for this kind of story because the people he meets are more interesting than him. I would've loved to see an episode centered around Klein or the merchant guy. Outside of Asuna, the supporting cast isn't there consistently. I honestly would've preferred if this arc had been an anthology following Kirito as he helps people out during his traveling because the relationship with Asuna and her guild don't really add anything until the final two episodes. Actually now that I think about it, this show might have been better off if each episode had a different pov character in general.

I'm torn on the Yui episode, its an ok episode but its also a bit manipulative. Spoilers: Kirito and Asuna find an amnesiac girl while on vacation and adopt her while they try to figure out who she is and if and she has any family. She isn't a player, she isn't even human. She is a mental health algorithm designed to study and help people acclimate to SAO. The system admin forbad her from doing that so she could only watch on in horror at the players' mental anguish until her code bugs out and she seeks out the only two happy players in the game: Kirito and Asuna. See the problem yet?  Yui is designed to poke, prod, and study people's mental state and because of that, she inadvertently sort of controls the responses people will have to her. So I'm not sure how much of their "family" was legitimately Kirito and Asuna liking her and how much was Yui's programming accidentally causing them to react that way. It leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth the more I think about it.

Final Thoughts: All things considered, the arc is ok and it held my attention well enough. As mentioned earlier, the second half of the arc is a let down compared to the first. The show makes a point of saying a few times how emotionally scarred and terrified the player base is due to being stuck in the game but it only really shows it in one or two episodes thanks to all the timeskips. Sadly from what I remember of the next arc of the show, its all downhill from here.

Air Gear: The Power Of One Fantastic Idea

Lets get this out of the way: I love Air Gear. Its honestly one of my favorite anime and not because of the plot, characters, or really any event that happens in the show. Thats not to say its a bad show, its just rather standard and nothing to really write home about. What makes the show stand out for me all comes down to one simple and admittedly fantastic idea. This is gonna be more in-line with how my Isekai World Tour posts work instead of it being a full on review.

What is that fantastic idea? Its one simple part of the show: The Air Treks. Air Treks (ATs) are these sweet rollerblades with an exceptionally powerful motor thats both small enough to fit in the skates and powerful enough to let the user ride up the sides of buildings and jump far enough to fly through the air. They are amazing and really give the show its own distinct feel. They're basically the backbone of the show imo. I'm gonna be honest, I don't like sports anime. I find them to be insincere and can't get into them due to not finding the love of the sport believable. However, I whole-heartedly believe every single second of Air Gear. When the opening theme (Chain) kicks in while a character describes what their first time riding was like and how ATs changed their perspective on life or let them forget their troubles, it legitimately feels like they've found their wings. I get hyped every time the show pulls that trick. Hell, I suck at rollerskating in general and have a massive fear of heights but I'd probably be willing to risk breaking my neck just to feel what its like to fly. I want to be able to feel the wind on my face, take off like a rocket, soar through the air, and scale buildings with nothing but wheels attached to my feet. Thats how well the show sold the idea of ATs to me.

As mentioned earlier, the rest of the show isn't much to write home about. The main character and his friends are about what you'd expect and they don't really go outside of that. They're slackers when it comes to everything accept ATs and one is pretty pervy for the sake of a joke. The dub itself is 2000s as hell to the point where I'm pretty certain the reason it makes some of the jokes it does is because they were certain it wouldn't air on tv. The plot is as a bog standard as it gets for a sports anime as well. Despite what I said about it being a good mood setter for flying scenes in the show, I'm not really that big on the opening theme, it just works really well in those scenes. Its not bad, its merely ok. The ATs are what push the show from ok into great for me. In fact, after rebinging it all, I desperately wanted more Air Gear content. The way this show treats the ATs alone is enough for me to give it a recommendation. As of right now, my only option is to read the manga and oh boy from my research into that thing does the manga get stupid. Honestly, I think the show was right to end where it did but I wouldn't be opposed to a season two.