I’m not sure what’s weirder, putting up a review of a currently-airing series just five episodes in or the fact that those five episodes officially include two “story arcs”, but there you go. My Her Academia’s seventh season has kept its strong ties to the manga source material and got to the start of the final arc in record time, which at least means this review won’t take long to write! Let’s take a look…
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The next batch of older anime reviews was originally just going to be me finally re-watching and reviewing the original Evangelion series / film but between me planning that and now Hideaki Anno’s prior work, Gunbuster, was released on Blu-Ray here in the UK so I thought, why not? When it popped up in a recent Super Robot Wars game that featured the series I thought how some of the character designs were familiar but I didn’t remember much of anything else, so I assume it was one of those anime that aired in the late 90s / early 00s on the Sci-Fi channel that I watched but never recorded / rewatched, so I was looking forward to this! Was I right to look forward to it? Well…
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The second, anime-exclusive arc (though again this is my first time experiencing the series anyway…) sees an expansion from Sand Land to Forest Land and introduces an “evil angel” to go along with series lead Beelzebub’s “nice demon” schtick and it works well. They also go from evil ruler of Sand Land to nice ruler of Forest Land, though he has been overthrown by the military, leading to a good old fashioned underground resistance story. Overall it was a fun watch, though I’m happy to see there won’t be any more after this, the setting and the characters already feel pretty thinly stretched… Let’s take a look!
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As a quick little break between older anime reviews I took a look at the adaptation of the sadly now late but certainly still great Akira Toriyama’s Sand Land over the last week or two, that’s the anime series that’s half a cut-up version of the film and half an original story, not the film adaptation or the video game adaptation… that’s a lot of adaptation for a short manga one-off from over 20 years ago! Anyway, these episodes are the film cut up into six with some added bits, but given I never watched the film it was all new to me (beyond a vague memory of having checked up about the manga online in some form or fashion over the years…) So let’s take a look!
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After spending an extra review’s worth of time with the Fishman Island arc it’s time to bring it to a close, thankfully. Okay, the finale has some classic One Piece “satisfying villain beatdown” about it, but really thanks to not really caring about either the villains or the new good guys it doesn’t have the same impact as it has done in previous, or indeed future arcs. Either way, let’s take a look and get this arc out of the way for good…
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The Fisman Island Arc continues to chug along with an extended flashback in order to set up a lot of the characters and conflict that have already been of central focus so far and completely failed to gain my interest… In fairness, the flashback does hit heavy with the theme of illogical racism that is the core focus of the Fishmen, but once we get back to the present day I still can’t say I particularly care about any of them… Which makes me sound like a Fishman racist (whatever that means in real life) but I’m just talking about the lead villains and the stuff… Anyway, Let’s take a look!
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Okay so the plan was to split this arc in half but upon writing the first review (523 – 553) it was far, far too long. Despite not really liking this arc at all there were enough subplots, flashbacks and new characters that there’s just too much for one review if I want to keep it to a reasonable word count, so I’ve split THAT review in half and I’ll now review it in three. With that, here’s the original opening paragraph:
So we have finally reached it, the point where a lot of more casual One Piece fans often tap out of the show. Hell, I was really enjoying watching it back then but these episodes once a week? Nope, I ended up dropping it and it took a few years for me to get back into the show, and even then I just skipped to the final few episodes of this arc and then continued from there, so this is actually my first time watching a lot of these episodes, and boy do I understand why. At least I could get a few out of the way in one week, but that didn’t help much. Is it completely irredeemable? Well, no, but what’s good about the arc is mostly contained in the next half (um, two thirds…) of the story, these episodes are pretty poor all round… Let’s take a look anyway!
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At just six episodes long the “Return to Sabaody Arc” is pretty much just a reintroduction to the Straw Hat crew, revealing their post two-year time skip looks before moving on to the first proper story arc in the New World, which um… yeah, I’ll get to that next time. That doesn’t mean the arc doesn’t have some merits though, and certainly some future arcs could’ve learned a lesson about being more concise, but there you go. Let’s take a look!
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In a sentence I never thought I’d ever type, I wrote an obituary for Akira Toriyama for Anime UK News, which can be viewed by clicking HERE.
Heartbroken doesn’t even cover it… My reviews of Dragon Ball Z later in the year will have a slightly more impactful feel now. RIP.
It’s finally time to do another little run of older One Piece episodes, following on from my review of the all-time classic Marineford arc a while ago (okay, a good while ago… there was a lot of Wano in that time though!) I’ve actually had this and the next review on my PC for a good while now, it was just the soul-sapping Fishman Island arc that slowed the older reviews to a halt, but I’m happy to say I’m over that hurdle so let’s look at the next three One Piece arcs (because the first two are really short). The Post War Arc is less about the direct fallout from Marineford and more about Luffy coming to terms with Ace’s death by remembering his childhood with Ace and a young boy named Sabo, followed by preparing for the next era of the series. Let’s take a look.
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Hogan Reviews 