In 2014, ABC aired a single season of the fantasy-themed reality competition show The Quest. It was essentially Survivor but LARP; challenges, medals, and eliminations ("banishments") with a scripted high fantasy storyline set in the kingdom of Everealm. Naturally, I was the only person who watched this show, and it was never renewed.
Until May 2022, when a new season unceremoniously dropped on Disney+, now starring teens! Unfortunately, The Quest (2022) sucks, but isn't it nice to know that Disney will reanimate literally any corpse in their vault?
Saburo is a modern Japanese high school student who gets isekai'd back in time to the Warring States period, where he lands directly on top of Oda Nobunaga, the eventual "Great Unifier" of Japan. Nobunaga notices that he and Saburo look identical, and he takes the opportunity to peace out of his own life, leaving Saburo to take his place. Saburo proceeds to use his complete lack of tact (and the snacks, porno mag, and japanese history textbook in his school backpack) to earn the loyalty of everyone around him. Amazingly, this works, and he's way better at being Nobunaga than the original Nobunaga ever was.
I don't know much about Japanese history, and that made Nobunaga Concerto a little hard to follow. Years pass between episodes and events, but the characters don't refer to that explicitly, and that made it difficult to get a sense of the timeline. I also missed what would have been cool character reveals. There's a part where a character adopts a new name, and I think I was probably supposed to gasp in surprise. Still, it's nothing that skimming a couple Wikipedia articles can't solve.
Despite not being the target audience for this show, I really enjoyed it. The actual historical Oda Nobunaga was considered to be a fool in his teen years, and explaining that away in the anime by making him a crass high schooler from the future is really funny. I thought the CGI animation would be off-putting, but combined with the art, it was actually super charming and unique. And the voice acting! This show was absolutely not cheap to make, considering how well-acted it was. There's a scene in one of the later episodes where Nobunaga's wife tells him how happy she is to be with him, and I completely melted. Overall, this was an incredibly pleasant surprise considering I only started watching it because of its bizarre cover art.
Oh boy. I was excited for this one but after finishing the full season, it is not nearly as good as the hype suggests. The first half is pretty solid though! Prince Bojji, a deaf and physically weak boy, is the heir to the Kingdom of Bosse. He befriends Kage, an orphaned shadow who initially tries to take advantage of Bojji's naivete before they become actual best buds. After Bojji's father, King Bosse, unexpectedly eats it, there's a succession crisis and Bojji's younger brother Daida takes the throne. This blows, so Bojji and Kage take off on an adventure. Meanwhile, a mysterious woman who lives in a mirror does some crazy magic to return King Bosse to life, resulting in Bosse possessing his own son's body. Nice setup! Love it. This part of the show is great: it has a charming and distinctive art style, Bojji and Kage are fun underdog protagonists, the plot moves along at a lively clip, and we get a taste of the complex motivations behind everyone's actions.
Unfortunately, the second half of the show squanders all of this goodwill. Bojji goes through a one-episode training arc and becomes stronger than god, the pacing grinds to a halt, and everyone's loyalties constantly switch for no fucking reason. After Bojji returns to the castle, they spend what feels like 50 episodes on one fight in the courtyard. There's a point where a character shows up with a giant club, uses it to KO everyone, and then immediately heals them. The way the mirror lady's arc is wrapped up is total garbage nonsense. There are no stakes to anything since the only people who die and stay dead died before the events of the show. Also, we get barely anything about the titular king ranking!!!!!!!! It's so disappointing that the plot ended up being an irredeemable mess, because there were so many things to like about this show.
Fujimoto Tatsuki is the mangaka behind Chainsaw Man, the series I could not shut up about during it's original 2018-2022 run, and Fire Punch, the series that was too fucked up for me to get past a single volume. Goodbye, Eri is his latest one-shot, and if you only read one thing by Fujimoto, it should be this. It's got all of his calling cards in one convenient 200 page package: movies & filmmaking, meta-narrative, ambiguous reality, emotional devastation, and one really stupid thing to tie it all together. I don't want to give away too much of the plot, because it's honestly too weird to explain, but it's approximately about a kid who starts making movies as a way to cope with his mom's death. Dark for sure, but the last page left me grinning like an idiot.
If you wanna get ahead of the next Chainsaw Man or Jujutsu Kaisen-level hype train, you need to start reading Dandadan now. Momo's a girl who believes in ghosts, and Okarun's a boy who believes in aliens. After a dare that goes very wrong very quickly, they find out they're both right. From there, it's unpredictable, funny, and stupid as fuck. The overarching plot is a quest to retrieve Okarun's testicles, which were stolen and subsequently lost by a yokai in the first arc. Momo's grandma is basically Bayonetta. The fashion is impeccable, the emotional beats hit, the romance is so cute and actually feels like it's moving forward.
okay see you next month bye