Yurikuma Arashi – 12 Review

Wonderful! It only took you twelve episodes and getting caught in a deathtrap together with Ginko! Talk about great timing!

Maybe it should’ve been a sitcom. The way Ginko and Lulu just invite themselves into Kureha’s home (scenes about how Kureha’s house is dusty and how Ginko’s and Lulu’s idea of a nice home includes having frame-hives for bees for example), the haughty class-presidents who constantly die and somehow every new class-president gleefully performs the role the same way (maybe show a scene of the drama-club performing a play called “How to be an evil class-president – And Death”) and a school-president who’s basically a hoarder with all her boxes. You know, make it a fun series instead of this overly serious atmosphere the series had most of the time.

Yurikuma Arashi – 11 Review

After all, love is game for try-hards. It’s why stalking is such a GREAT way to earn love.

Yurikuma Arashi is the only series where after watching it once you can say you’ve seen the series three times already.

Yurikuma Arashi – 10 Review

That’s nice and all… but I don’t think that has helped Ginko in ANY way to win Kureha’s heart again. She might as well have talked about worldpeace.

You need a lot of patience for this show. Sometimes it even feels like this series believes its audience to be full of idiots. The way this series can’t stop itself from talking about its one-dimensional characters and straightforward story, you would think each episode is trying to introduce new viewers to the show. Really, whatever happens currently in the series and the reasons that lead to that are all laid out for you each time in every episode. There’s more talk about what I already know than what I don’t know in this series. At the start, the series was still a little mysterious but now the plot is people explaining everything, even the stuff that needed no explanation. And the explanations are frigging boring as well!

Yurikuma Arashi – 09 Review

Guess, Kureha likes to shoot first and ask later…

Good thing this series has Kureha to drive the plot forward. After all, I can’t imagine an ordinary person to change her opinion on things that radically that fast – multiple times! Maybe next week she will hate her classmates again who she had become friends with in this episode because why not, right?

Yurikuma Arashi – 08 Review

To quote a running-gag of the Archer-TV-series: Phrasing!

Does anyone even care that a frigging comet has caused all bears to become the enemy of mankind? I mean, not that it was different before that comet hit earth but you know you’re in trouble when animals start to talk to each other and shit. You could say, this series is the Yuri-Version of Planet of the Apes except you know the bears actually look like humans because Romeo & Juliet is great but bestiality isn’t, I guess.

Yurikuma Arashi – 06/07 Review

Well, then again who actually would want to follow the social cues of a frigging cult, right?

Right now this series’ story feels like one of those that needs to be reminded that brevity is the soul of wit. After seven episodes it still feels like each new plottwist is based on someone sharing new information with the audience. Due to that the series never seems to move on and capitalize on the consequences of the happenings. So far the series has been circling around an unchanging status quo while explaining why that status quo exists. The death of Sumika has been the only meaningful event of this series. All the other stuff just has been a setup to clarify the situation. And yeah, none of this is very entertaining.

Yurikuma Arashi – 05 Review

That was a ridiculous fanservice-moment. It would’ve been better, though, if it hadn’t been like the third daydream-fanservice-sequence in this episode.

I’m still kinda hoping that this series is going for something deeper than “love is good”. Right now it isn’t a very remarkable series. It’s stylish but somewhat ordinary on the story-front. And the characters haven’t developed much depth either. It’s all catchphrases with the dialogue in this series but genuine emotional moments that delve deeper into the reasons for what the characters are doing come rarely. This series needs one hell of a third-act-reveal to make up for this somewhat ordinary first half (with the style being the only remarkable thing about it).

Review-Roundup: Yuri Kuma Arashi 04, Aldnoah.Zero 15

Yeah, sure, that’s how brains work. A few more episodes and Inaho can use telekinetic powers like Scarlett Johannson in “Lucy”, I guess.

This time I review:

Yuri Kuma Arashi 04: Flashback-time! Apparently the Bear-World resembles a fairy-tale-kingdom and the bears send their criminals to the humans – because they can’t give up on their love. Seems like love is a crime no matter where you go in this series.

Aldnoah.Zero 15: Inaho is Odin and Slaine gets adopted. There’s also a war going on… I assume. People certainly fight and die a lot. Why they keep fighting, though, is anybody’s guess…

Yurikuma Arashi – 02/03 Review

Kureha’s house at the crossroads with one road having a sign for humans and for the other other street one indicating bears.

Is Yurikuma Arashi too artsy for its own good? Maybe… I certainly feel like telling the series to get on with it. Its repeating elements may serve a narrative purpose by coming up quite so often without much change but I would rather have meaningful stark changes than a series repeating itself for the sake of when it will make an exception. Even something as artsy as this series can get get formulaic when it just doesn’t move on. I mean, first of all, I’m not even sure what this series’ endgame is supposed to be. Really, more than a question of like and dislike, it’s a question of curiosity and indifference with this series. You either wait for the end in order to get the whole picture or you just leave disinterested. This series certainly ain’t a crowdpleaser.

Review-Roundup: Absolute Duo 01, Binan Koukou Chikyuu Bouei-bu Love! 01, Yuri Kuma Arashi 01

All of Yuri-Kuma’s dialogue in its first episode is like this: Grandiose, not very deep and rather passive in how it just describes things that are happening. You really got more out of watching the background and what the characters were doing than listening to the dialogue.

This time I review:

Absolute Duo 01: A dude falls in love with a silver-haired loli who’s also into him because he’s special. After all, he has mastered techniques that a woman can’t learn since her frail woman-body can’t handle the whole thing.

Binan… 01: Some dudes meet an alien who turns them into magical “girls” who have to battle darkness. It’s funny because they are guys and really just don’t give a shit about the whole thing.

Yurikuma Arashi 01: Lesbians, bears and a ton of weirdness. The main-girl loses her lover but gains two bears in the process who want to “eat” her. Also it’s another anime where a post-apocalypse civilisation has to surround itself with a wall to ward off evil (you could fill a book with those at this point, I feel like).