Kusunoki Tomori welcomes her successor.

31 March 2023 marked Kusunoki Tomori's final day voicing Yuuki Setsuna in the Love Live! franchise. Hayashi Coco (alt: Koko) assumed the role beginning April 1st. This is hardly the first time anime characters have been recast, and this particular handover seems to have been handled well, but part of me wonders how necessary it really was. As far as I know, Kusunoki Tomori is still doing voice work and has only stepped down as the voice for Setsuna because health issues make the physical requirements of the live performances too demanding.

The handover between Hayashi Coco and Kusunoki Tomori was posted on the YouTube.

Despite still claiming—even now—not to be a Love Live! fan, I consider Setsuna to be the franchise's best idol. (Shibuya Kanon is "only" its Best Girl and best character.) Of all the different Love Live! iterations, I regard Love Live! Nijigasaki Gakuen School Idol Doukoukai (Love Live! Nijigasaki High School Idol Club) as having the best music. This is in no small part due to how much I enjoy all of the Setsuna songs. Would I like them as much with someone else in the role? That remains to be seen, but I do know the Kasumi version of "CHASE!" from the Shuffle Festival album isn't quite as good as the original Setsuna one.

Nijiyon Animation was okay.

Personally, I think simply not having Setsuna appear during the live events ought to have been a viable solution, but this likely reflects a lack of appreciation on my part as to just how important those live events are to the franchise and its real fans. The production powers-that-be (not to be confused with the School Idol Deep State) surely fully explored every possible option and concluded that re-casting the role was the right decision.

Second-Generation Setsuna appears briefly in the Next Sky PV.

I don't know how many Nijigasaki-type things there will even be going forward, but I know there's one OVA already announced (Love Live! Nijigasaki Gakuen School Idol Doukoukai: Next Sky). I presume there are a lot of live events planned too. Thankfully, the reception to "Setsuna 二代目" appears to be very positive, so the newest Love Live! member at least shouldn't be facing an uphill battle for our hearts and minds.

This fucker is too stupid to live. And yet....

I haven't checked if Overlord season four is adapting a proportionally greater amount of the source material than the previous seasons did, but it feels like it. The anime has covered a lot of ground at breakneck speed, and it appears the remaining episodes will bring us all the way to the end of volume 14 (at least based on the content in the OP). Notably, the anime has already skipped past the Holy Kingdom arc that will be covered by the upcoming movie.

GET HYPED

For anime-only viewers, this timeskip occurs without explanation. Unfortunately for anyone relying solely on in-show context to fill in the gaps when it comes to events and organizations not explicitly depicted in the TV anime thus far, there is a fairly significant error that appeared in the official subtitles for episode eight of season four. Specifically, the Holy Kingdom and the Slaine (Slane) Theocracy are treated as being one and the same. They are not. It's an understandable mistake if the translation team is working without the benefit of knowing what the movie will cover, since the Holy Kingdom hasn't been previously introduced in the anime at all, while the Theocracy has been a fixture since the first season.

This old dude.

To clarify, the Kingdom is the country that has featured most prominently in Overlord so far. It's called the Kingdom because, you know, it has a king (the old dude). Last season and this season, there's also the Empire. This is the country with (can you guess?) an Emperor (the young blond guy who is stressed out all the time). We don't know that much about the Theocracy, but they seem to be religious douchebags who deserve to get thrashed. The Holy Kingdom is the country receiving humanitarian aid (the grain that Philip steals) from our intrepid heroes.

This stressed-out guy.

The Crunchyroll's subtitles mistakenly refer to the Holy Kingdom as the Theocracy, which is incorrect and wildly confusing because Nazarick regards the Theocracy as an adversary and would have no reason to provide it with humanitarian aid. [Update: They fixed it.] It's spoilers for the upcoming movie, but I'll leave it up to your imagination to discern why the Holy Kingdom would need humanitarian aid. (Spoilers: Because it gets frickin' wrecked. This wouldn't have happened if y'all had more R.U.N.E.C.R.A.F.T.)

This is product placement, isn't it?

Sorairo Utility (Sky Blue Utility) is only a single 15-minute OVA? That's it? You're kidding me! Well, that leaves me with one less show than I was expecting to follow during the Winter 2022 anime season. That's unfortunate, because it was nicely done. There is no shortage of shows about girls who obsess over a particular hobby, but this felt much more natural and realistic than the typical fare.

It happens.

I learned of Sorairo Utility from one of the hundreds of artists I sort of follow on the Twitter. Specifically, the director, Saitou Kengo occasionally mused about wanting to make a girls-playing-golf anime, and then suddenly it became a reality. I have no idea if there is ever going to be any more, but I'd certainly be in favor of it.

I did appreciate Reines sassing Waver.

Sort of unrelated aside from also coming out on 31 December 2021 is Lord El-Melloi II Sei no Jikenbo: Rail Zeppelin Grace Note - Tokubetsu-hen (Lord El-Melloi II's Case Files: Rail Zeppelin Grace note TV Anime's Special Edition), a short movie about magic shenanigans involving Waver's classmates from his pre-Fate/Zero days. I feel like I would have liked this more if I had a greater grasp on TYPE-MOON lore in general, but possibly not understanding is the normal and expected state.

Y'all are unconvincing girls.

Now that the second season of the Kimetsu no Yaiba anime is past its Mugen Ressha-hen (Mugen Train movie repurposed as TV episodes) arc and has aired four episodes of the Yuukaku-hen (Entertainment District) arc, I'm afraid my interest in the series remains well below the heights reached during the anime's first two cours. It's fine, but I feel as if I'm the wrong target audience.

I do appreciate Sawashiro Miyuki's addition to the series.

This is not unexpected, since my interest in Demon Slayer has always been something of an outlier for me; I don't typically watch or read popular shounen properties. I presume my disinterest with the current arc is because it is building up to its next big moments and it is complementing its narrative journey with the sort of flourishes and gags that I don't care for. I don't know how many episodes remain in this second season, but I believe it is continuing uninterrupted into the Winter 2022 anime season. I'm definitely still going to watch it, and not just because I don't currently have a lot other Winter 2022 shows on my radar. It's just unfortunate I'm not the right person to fully appreciate the series.

One of the rare scenes not set in the dark.

I never felt Blade Runner needed to expand into a franchise. Consequently, I had a lot of reservations about the 2017 sequel. That it turned out to be good (and arguably better than the original film) is something of a miracle. Unfortunately, the Blade Runner: Black Lotus 3DCG anime doesn't come close to reaching this bar. Not that it would be at all reasonable to expect it to, of course, and I'm not suggesting Black Lotus is a bad series necessarily. However, I am suggesting it didn't need to be made, or that it at least doesn't need to be a part of the Blade Runner world.

These umbrellas are so fresh.

Admittedly, being a Blade Runner property is the only reason I gave Black Lotus a chance, and it was sort of neat recognizing the callbacks in the setting and general atmosphere of the show. Catering to fans of an existing property will only carry a series so far, though, and there just wasn't enough in Black Lotus to keep me engaged. Maybe it got a lot better after I stopped watching, but its first four episodes were merely all right. How about next time, instead of setting something in the Blade Runner world, y'all set it in the world of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? How about that?

Nezuko gets to do something.

I enjoyed the first season of Kimetsu no Yaiba (Demon Slayer) and also thought its Mugen Train movie was good. I'm hardly alone in having this opinion, as the series proved hugely popular, resulting in enormous sales for the manga on which it is based. Similarly, Gekijouban Kimetsu no Yaiba: Mugen Ressha-hen did extremely well in theaters, surpassing Spirited Away to become Japan's box office champion. The movie follows the events from the first anime season, and there was initially some concern the second TV season would pick up from where the movie left off, thus making it required viewing from a continuity standpoint.

You sure about this?

Instead, the Mugen Train movie is being spread out over the first nine episodes of the second season of Kimetsu no Yaiba. After this arc concludes on Saturday, the entertainment district arc will reportedly begin, although I'm unsure how many episodes that will run. Re-watching the movie as television episodes has not been ideal. It doesn't seem as if there are major edits or changes to the ordering of scenes to accommodate the time constraints of television episodes, but the experience seems flawed.

These are some eyebrows.

As far as I can tell, the reason for this effect is because of the weekly interruptions breaking up the impacts of both the narrative and the action scenes. It's a fairly obvious or at least foreseeable consequence of repackaging the movie into a different format, but more pronounced than I anticipated. Nevertheless, I don't think it would have made sense to re-create the entire arc with the television format in mind, so this probably was the best option. Besides, it's not as if the arc is actually bad this way—it mostly just fails to match its own standard.

Mei stares a lot in this show.

I don't actually know that much about the Godzilla franchise, but I'm under the impression that the movies typically start with people noticing something unusual, and then something really unsettling happens, and then everyone gets their shit wrecked, sometimes by Godzilla, sometimes by whatever Godzilla is fighting. This at least holds true of the few Godzilla properties I have seen, and it seems to hold true in the Godzilla Singular Point anime.

Have harpoon gun. Will travel.

Godzilla doesn't appear in the first six episodes of Godzilla S.P, but there is a nerdy grad student who wears birth control glasses that are constantly on the verge of sliding off her face. There's also an AI that's probably technically malware, and an old man with a bitchin' car and a totally sweet garage-built robot, and some regular dudes who don't have the greatest survival instincts, but are getting by so far nevertheless.

You have to be the size of a child to fit in this robot.

As an anime, Godzilla Singular Point is pretty good so far, and is probably worth your time once it hits the U.S. Netflix at, I dunno, some later date. Or at least it's worth your time providing you have any sort of interest in either Godzilla or nerdy girls who wear birth control glasses. At a minimum, it's better than the three-movie 3DCG thing that's already on the Netflix. That one just wasn't very compelling. I did feature Ueda Reina, though.

< Evirus> I remember hardsubbed signs on Nadesico DVDs which I still own.
< Evirus> Actually, still the last way I ever watched Nadesico. I've still never opened my Blu-rays.
<@Divine> It sounds like you have more unopened blurays than ones you've actually watched
< Evirus> This may, in fact, be the case.

With things the way they are now, you would think I'd be making some progress through my stack of unopened Blu-rays and DVDs, or my backlog of unwatched shows and planned re-watches. However, it turns out I already watch so much anime on a weekly basis that any additional free time get quickly consumed by all the other things that get displaced by anime watching and the pursuit of anime accessories.

Why are you wearing such a heavy jacket, Yukina?
Is it so you can dramatically strip it off later?

I do still see value in purchasing physical media, though. I think most people recognize that the oh-so-convenient streaming-based environment that we have presently is also somewhat capricious and occasionally prone to confounding moments of unavailability. The landscape itself is also less than ideal. For example, I was able to watch the Koutetsujou no Kabaneri compilation movies on the Crunchyroll, but I had to switch to the Netflix to watch the third movie.

Hopefully, all of these Blu-rays and DVDs will still be playable when I finally do get around to watching them. I have had CD-Rs die on me, but I haven't yet had an actual CD, DVD, or Blu-ray fail on me yet providing they've been properly handled and stored. (And not counting Manga Entertainment's End of Evangelion fiasco.)

You know things are serious when bayonets are involved.

I plan to continue buying Blu-rays of shows I like, even if the odds I'll ever actually watch them seem sort of low. I guess I am at least less likely to buy Blu-rays on release now, unless I really like the show. Since there's a good chance I won't watch them for years, it makes more financial sense to wait until the price drops later. The exception to this, however, are my occasional imports of Japanese releases, since they typically pack in a bunch of cool extras—something I wish U.S. releases would include more often, even if the prices increase.