Where we're going, we don't need roads.

Last week, I provided a quick rundown of what I expect to watch this season. This post augments that one by including additional titles that I plan to try, but won't necessarily watch all the way through. By the time I finally post this, the first episode of Shuumatsu Train Doko e Iku (Where Does the Doomsday Train Go? or Train to the End of the World) should be out. This is an original anime with Mizushima Tsutomu attached, so I'm more optimistic about it than the rest of the shows I'm considering. In many of those cases, I've only read potentially misleading descriptions and won't even have necessarily watched the corresponding trailers.

I don't know anything about you.

Astro Note is one of those anime I know nothing about. I believe the first episode has already leaked, but I remain wholly ignorant about its contents aside from learning it's an original anime. It's enough to warrant a try out of general principle.

Have I even seen any fan art of you? You don't look familiar at all.

Blue Archive I know only from fan art. Based on that, I'm confident the series will be about scantily clad schoolgirls making passes at their teacher while toting around firearms designed by people who know absolutely fuck all about guns. I did watch a trailer, and it mostly seems to feature only the shrimpy kids. Where are all the aerodynamic students?! Are the shrimpy girls the ones who are popular among those who actually play the game? Did fan art lead me astray?

I assume this has nothing to do with Boukyaku no Senritsu.

Boukyaku Battery (Oblivion Battery) is a baseball anime with an amnesia gimmick. Curiously, it's the catcher who lost his memory, and not the pitcher. I could totally see how this story would work with a now-clueless pitcher taking cues from a knowledgeable catcher (you know, like in Bull Durham), but having a catcher who doesn't know what he's doing sounds like a bad time for a battery. I also noticed there's an ONA from 2020 with these characters except set after high school, while this new TV series is set at the beginning of high school. I'm not sure what the deal is, but I'm going to assume the ONA adapted material from later in the original manga, and it's not the TV series aging everyone down to make them more relatable to an adolescent audience.

As for the rest of the new Spring 2024 anime that I'm going to try out...

• Jii-san Baa-san Wakagaeru (Grandpa and Grandma Turn Young Again). Everything I know about this comes from its title. I can't tell from the promo art if I'm looking at the couple while they're old, but they look oddly young, or if I'm seeing them when they're already young again, but they still look oddly old.
• Unnamed Memory. @frog_kun raved about the source material years ago. My taste and hers often don't align, and she tends to be a lot more enthusiastic than I am about the same titles, but it's still enough of an endorsement to warrant a try.
• Seiyū Radio no Ura Omote (The Two Sides of Voice Actor Radio). Hasegawa Ikumi is in it. I don't think she's voicing one of the leads, though.
• Ooi! Tonbo is about golf. Eh. Golf.
• NIJIYON ANIMATION 2. Yeah, I'm watching more because they're making more. It's a vicious cycle.

Beware the golfer with one club.

Someone on the IRC opined, "Tonbo is...it's like a kid's anime? But not really?" I didn't know what he meant, but I sort of understand after watching the first episode. It's Tonbo herself. She comes across as much younger. She's in her final year of middle school, but I would have no trouble accepting her as a seven-year-old child instead. Perhaps that's deliberate, since that's about when she lost her parents. A synopsis I saw described it as a car accident, but didn't specify where. Was it on the island? That seems to be the sort of small community where everyone knows each other. If it happened on the island, and there was another car involved, surely she would still see the driver of that vehicle all the time.1 How awkward. (My guess is it was off the island, and she moved there when her grandfather became her guardian.)

Your name is Igaiga now. Deal with it.

Anyway, Ooi! Tonbo does seem tonally odd. I'm probably overthinking it, and it'll turn out to be an actual kid's sports anime. It does have familiar clichés such as when the pro golfer guy narrates amazing techniques that he spotted in a split second. However, the source material apparently runs in a weekly golf magazine (presumably for adults), so maybe the tone actually is weird for what it is. Not that I'm expecting something darker. This is surely an anime about good times on rustic golf island as a former pro golfer fleeing his old life gets his act together again with the support of genuine small-town folks and through the power of unorthodox golf techniques. There are already 49 volumes of the manga, though, and it's still ongoing, so anything can happen.

Note 1: I suppose all of the other occupants in a multi-vehicle collision could have also died, but I feel as if accidents that violent require speeds I wouldn't expect on the island. Probably they died off the island, or in a single-vehicle accident, or the entire parental death thing is an unexplained bit of the backstory that I'm completely overthinking. [Update: The second episode confirms their deaths occurred off the island.]