I normally don’t read or watch other people’s anime reviews, largely because I am lazy but often because everyone has their own opinion of what they constitute as good and bad. Reviews are pretty wide-open, and very few professional reviewers I think hit the right marks without being overly bias or pandering to specific people. Roger Ebert is probably one of my favorite and more trusted movie reviewers because even in the movies he gives negative reviews to, he doesn’t go to lengths to ruin it for those who are genuinely interested. In my own short reviews, I am pretty bias to myself really, and sometimes /a/ but not too much, because /a/ hates what you like. I sometimes will side with the hivemind because I agree with what they think, but I will quite often drop or score low series I think really didn’t even try, like Kampfer of B Gata H Kei.
So the commotion started on /a/ this morning when someone posted a link to TGWTG’s Masakox reviews on Infinite Stratos and Kore wa Zombie Mind you, I am not a fan of Nostalgia Critic, but that’s not the point.
I found both reviews to be pretty good, another reason why hivemind /a/ can be shit for opinons, because they probably either didn’t watch the series or the review. His review of Infinite Stratos was surprisingly pretty accurate, and paralleled some of my thoughts as I watched the series. But if you’ve watched even a handful of harem shows, the male lead is always used as the punching bag by the girls even if they all in fact want his nuts. From personal experience, this is about right actually. I expected this from the first couple episodes because of the conditions that were being set in the beginning, he is the only male who can pilot an IS, in a world dominated by female pilots. This would mean that world is the opposite of how we perceive our world today, where men would be the ones to dominate machines like this. Honestly I could have enjoyed this show without “foreign girls” but really it was probably more of a component to make them stand out above the other girls from the beginning.
As for Kore wa Zombie, I probably disagreed more with his review of this than the other one. If I thought this kid had issues with fanservice in the IS review, he seems to have a bigger issue with it in this one. Without even reading his other shit or knowing anything about him I would say he is more of a seriousfag about his anime. I think a lot of people expected something like Zombieland made into an anime, or perhaps something closer to a srsbins Highschool of the Dead, but Kore wa Zombie plays off of the cliche “X joins the party” series only with a house, making it more akin to Sora no Otoshimono than anything else. However, what did it for me besides the awesome OP, was the fact that the male MC wasn’t a huge pussy, wasn’t a huge dick either, and the level of action to fanservice was pretty balanced in my opinion, much like Yumekui Merry has been this season. In contrast to his IS review, Masa seems to drop the ball on KnZ by not even getting out of the gate into the later episodes to see how much better it gets in its basic execution, even the “killer” isn’t what you think they are. He gave it 4/10 which I thought was pretty shitty even, it deserves a 7 or 8, but for him a 5 or 6 would have been fair.
I’m almost interested to see if he reviews Madoka, because that is still a tricky one for me to tackle. I love the show, but at the same time I feel there is something underneath it all that has me a bit miffed at it, perhaps the fact that they kinda mislead you quite a bit, which I like, but man it kinda sucks.
I don’t think I’ll ever review anime on Youtube or video of any sort, if I did, I would do it more Zero Punctuation style, but I couldn’t rip off a good thing like ZP, the man is too good at trolling everything you like, except Portal.
