Blood Lad: This series is all upside. It has a cute girl, cool action, a great sense of humor, and a feeling of adventure. The first five minutes or so were better than the rest of the episode, but oh well. So long as you don't expect anything great from this series, you'll never be disappointed. It's obviously going to just be more of the same from here on. Cute girls, good action, a gigantic long quest, and lots of humor. What it won't have is anything deep or interesting to say, any memorable characters you could ever actually grow to care about, or a believable plot you could relate to. For that, you have to watch genuinely good series like Railgun. Blood Lad is just entertainment, a good way to pass 30 minutes out of every week.
Fantasista Doll: I don't like this series. Normally, I'm a huge fan of magical girl stories, in fact, I'd say they're my favorite genre by far. But Fantasista Doll fails as a mahou shoujo anime. Rather than the girl transforming into a magical warrior who has to put her own life on the line, she uses gladiator slave warriors to fight for her. And then she somehow claims credit when her doll wins and the other doll loses. It's like Pokemon's animal cruelty, except a notch up because now we're having human slaves fighting with each other for the entertainment of their masters. Maybe the story didn't want to give out that vibe, but that's how it feels like so it's already failed. It was bad enough when Devil Survivor 2 had people summoning monsters from a cell phone to fight for them, while just standing on the sidelines doing nothing. But now we have humans fighting for other humans, as they stand on the sidelines and do nothing. And instead of fighting for survival like in Devil Survivor 2, Fantasista has dolls fighting each other just for the fun of it. I can't stand the central premise of this story, so no matter how well executed the story is, there's no way I can see myself liking it, now or in the future. To make matters worse, there's a mysterious masked man who wears a cape and says pretentious things in the background for no reason, and five separate dolls who look like their personalities were all mass manufactured in an assembly line, way too many characters for a writer to realistically support, from the beginning if they were going to go with this premise her cell phone should have only summoned one doll, but ugh, how on Earth can the story support 5 at once, all doing the same thing for the same reason? How much character differentiation can you have when everyone is exactly the same at bottom? Dropped.
Kiniro Mosaic: I had high hopes going into this series and they weren't disappointed. This is the 4th anime this season that is a gathering of cute girls doing cute things together. But by far, this series has the cutest, most sugary sweet, most drippingly nice girls of them all. The girls who try to learn each other's language in order to be more friendly with each other, which constitutes a lot of work when they could have instead just made friends within their own nationality, is a touching story of the triumph of love over all obstacles. The silly mistakes the girls make as children just makes them all the more endearing. Really, they could've retitled this story, "kittens and puppies mewling and purring the animation" and it would've served the same overall purpose. My only complaint is that the series has no problems in it, so it can't really be a story per se. It has no plot, no antagonist, nothing to work with for material at all. Stories like this without potential can never become better than mediocre watchable entertainment.
Uchouten Kazoku: This series is insulting. The artists clearly didn't even care about the audience and just wanted to make something artsy, edgy, and new. I hate this type of modern art crap. They didn't even bother to draw the character's ears right. Talk about not giving a flip about your audience. The main character is a transvestite who shape changes into a girl while still talking with the low voice of a boy and walking/talking like a man, which makes him a cognitively dissonant eyesore all episode long. The fact that everyone just accepts him as is and doesn't tell him to quit being so disgusting already just makes it all the worse. But he's not the worst of the bunch. The other characters are even more annoying. An old man who thinks he's better than everyone else, despite his apartment being a total mess, drinking and smoking constantly, and being rude to everyone for no reason. Someone should just kill him already. And then there's this random painted whore girl who drinks, smokes, kisses people just to establish her female dominance over them, mocks people, talks with an annoying accent like she's so great for no reason, and also needs to be killed as soon as possible. Rarely have I seen such a collection of awful characters. Never mind protagonists, these people are worse than 99% of antagonists in other series. This is truly the bottom of the barrel. I'd rather watch Free's gay porn than these people degrading themselves and each other just for the hell of it, as some sort of modern art statement about the nihilism and meaninglessness of this world or good art standards that include ears. Dropped.
Still to come: Watamote, Silver Spoon, Hyperdimension Neptune, Kimi no Iru Machi, and Gatchaman Crowds. I'll handle them all in a final first impressions post, and then rank the watchable series in order of how excited I am to see them each week all together. This will help us discover how good the summer season is compared to previous seasons of anime, and what viewers should be concentrating on if they only want to watch the very best. For today, 2 out of 4 successes isn't bad.
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