Hai to Gensou no Grimgar Blu-Ray Fully Subtitled:

Thanks to the good people over at Doki Fansubs, Hai to Gensou is fully out in blu ray.  Now's the chance to rewatch the best series of 2016 in full.

I've already taken the opportunity to do so, so that's one more show off my giant rewatch list to prove that when I endorse a great anime I mean it.

I also finished Galaxy Angel's blu-ray season 1, the only season currently subtitled in blu ray.  There were some funny episodes and it looked amazing, but overall it was much less impressive than I remember.

Naruto is on a break until September 29th, at which point they'll be releasing two episodes at once.  The series is slated to end on October 6th.  I guess that means no Naruto this fall, we'll have to wait until winter for it to pick up again.  But this is no different from all the times Naruto switched to filler and wasn't worth watching anyway for seasons or years at a time.

I will be severely disappointed in Naruto if they don't animate the Scarlet Spring Gaiden.  The light novels are only semi-canon because they aren't written by Kishimoto, just approved by him.  The manga was done entirely by Kishimoto and is actually one of the best arcs in the entire series.  If they don't animate all the light novels, oh well, no big loss.  But you simply cannot leave this story out.

Either way, we're reaching the end of an era.  Bleach's manga has ended, and now the mainline Naruto anime is ending.  It took decades, but we've finally arrived.  It's a brave new world from here on out.  One Piece is still going but it's a shadow of its former worth, so it may as well have ended already.  Fairy Tail's anime is already over and the manga is nearing completion as well.  There's no new big shonen story that can fill in any of their shoes.  Dragon Ball Super will have to end sooner or later as well, Akira Toriyama probably isn't that interested in keeping it going for long, when he was already sick of Dragon Ball after Buu.

Perhaps the era of epic length shonen action series is just plain over.  It was a fad and now it's done, and it's just not coming back.  Now more serious, shorter, and more to the point series like Akame ga Kill! can take to the fore.  More happens in a single chapter of Akame than 100 chapters of One Piece, so this is altogether a good thing.

Instead of animating thousand episode long shonen action series, maybe they can take that budget and talent and animate 48 episode long Rewrites, the way Rewrite should have been done from the beginning.  If all series were given even 1/100 the love and dedication that One Piece has been shown, the overall quality of anime as a medium would be so much higher.