I was somewhat excited to watch this anime series. It’s only 12 episodes for its first season so it was over pretty quickly.
It was fun and well done but too short to be satisfying or really have an impact. I may need to skip unfinished anime adaptations1 entirely given there’s so much old catalog I could be watching instead. Also now I understand how people get into reading the manga’s while they wait for the adaptations to catch up.
The Kaiju No 8 story is—how could it be any different with such a name—a standard monster beat ’em up. The characters are a bunch of young kids. Things escalate steadily with increasingly powerful and shadowy monsters attacking them. The suits and the group dynamics are somewhat reminiscent of Attack on Titan. As a standard shonen monster beat ’em up anime, it’s fine.
It’s just that there’s nothing in the story that sets it apart, there are no deeper themes that are explored, no interesting motivations, no moral or emotional payoffs worth talking about and no standout characters with staying power. I don’t think I’ll remember much about this show six months from now.
Jujutsu Kaisen
I couldn’t help but compare it to JJK which knocks every one of those dimensions out of the park. I never got around to writing a proper review for its S2 other than this:
The long awaited Hidden Inventory and Shibuya Incident arcs turned into a treat to watch despite the continuously escalating power levels and its sprawling cast of characters and villains. —2023 year in review
S2 was such a phase shift for JJK moving from low stakes happy go-lucky teen show to massively hard bouts of apocalyptic fighting and loss (Nanami…). So many of the characters (“My Brother!”) in JJK have depth and huge fan popularity (Panda-kun, the guy who speaks in Onigiri). Just go on TikTok and see all the Shibuya incident foreshadowing, the Satoru Gojo montages and the number of ships that are doing the rounds.
- I have currently open: Jujutsu Kaisen, Spy x Family and Frieren. [↩]