i forgot that i wanted to do movie of the month last month too. for the record, Project A-ko won that easily.
welcome everyone to the lego blog. jujutsuk iasne. no manga again, though i did start reading CLAYMORE again and should hopefully be finishing that soon since i am just about done with Guimi Zhi Zhu (i think only around 100 or less chapters to go?). look forward to the return of video game of the month (you already know what it is).
anime of the month
the worst possible thing happened. i started to like precure.
only this season though. i mildly enjoyed season 1 and enjoyed like 3 episodes of season 2, and i really hate season 4 (and by extension, probably season 5 too since it's just more of Yes! Precure 5). Futari wa Precure: Splash Star does a lot correct though, so let's talk about that for a little bit.
where Futari wa Precure (and Max Heart) are pretty rough around the edges and have a large helping of episodes that are either just not very fun or look rough for one of a few reasons (namely bad animation or the visuals just not being great), Splash Star manages to overcome those visual issues by generally having higher quality animation across the board (even in the outsourced episodes) and utterly drowning everything in bloom. i think that look is really great for precure and they shouldn't have gone back to looking unpolished in season 4. season 4 is even worse in a way due to its new background artstyle consisting of scribbly lines and washed out colors; they just made it worse in every way.
but this is not the time to talk about precure 5. we're talking about Splash Star. where it makes leaps and gains over the original two seasons is that it seriously polishes the format. every episode is more enjoyable to watch due to either the better supporting cast or the significantly improved villains. the villains are especially important to this season being so much better because basically all of them are really funny (which also stopped being a thing in precure 5). but there's one thing that makes this season so much better, and it's the care it puts into a certain pair of characters that aren't the main cures.
michiru and kaoru tie this show together. these characters are the single best-written characters precure has ever had, and the only thing they do wrong is having them disappear for 20ish episodes in the middle of the show. without these two characters, this show would probably not be any better than season 1 (though still better than season 2 because that shit is ass). i won't go into too much detail about them to avoid posting spoilers on the internet (not that anyone reads these anyway).
this season is also massively aided by its setting in a seaside town. it feels like there's a whole community and there's a sense of togetherness that seasons 1-2 and 4 lack. this season also has a lot of good environmental messaging since the villains represent the destruction of nature, and that's also really cool to see. seriously, what the hell happened between this season and the next one? they just had to do this but slightly different and it would have been fine!
i've talked about this enough. i'm interested to see if Heartcatch Precure! dethrones this season as my favorite since its ratings are significantly higher than the rest of the series. I can't wait to watch Fresh Precure! after season 5 and Kibou no Chikara: Otona Precure '23 since that's the point when they stopped doing double seasons for one setting (and its ratings are also pretty high). i just have to keep chipping away at Yes! Precure 5 and eventually i will be free.
manga of the month
i also also didn't read manga this month (well, i didn't finish anything noteworthy). returning to our regularly scheduled programming once i finish lotm (which will be within the next few days probably).
video game of the month
it's silksong.
i've been waiting for this game for years. is it perfect? no. but that's fine. i still really like it (but i want to play other video games so i'm trying to finish it soon). i really don't have much to say about it because it speaks for itself. it's probably game of the year (though it might not take that spot when i do my yearly review).
there's a lot that Hollow Knight: Silksong improves on over Hollow Knight, but that doesn't make the latter irrelevant. there's certainly some stuff i prefer about the original, and i think silksong is different enough to the point where it's not a replacement anyway. i'm not even sure this game is one of my favorites, but it's definitely fucking awesome and an unforgettable experience.
final thoughts
now that it's october, i do have some big plans. i already watched Dororo to Hyakkimaru from 1969, and that was a really good time. in the honor of this scary month, i'm also planning to rewatch one of my favorite OVAs, Cossette no Shouzou. it's delightfully avant-garde and also pretty unsettling at times. in other news, i'm going to actually start watching Slayers again, and hopefully finally finish Saint Seiya by the end of the month.
i gotta go do something about dinner. i have disgusting leftover stir fry that i really don't want to eat. i might just go eat out again. -lego jujutsu kaisen