This is a short anime that I picked up during the Autumn 2016 season. It follows Tokine who is an office worker who occasionally gets transported into a parallel dimension thing and generates energy by solving quizzes. I reviewed this week to week here.
Review:
There’s not a lot left to say about this snore worthy anime that I didn’t cover in my weekly impressions. I picked this up because I love quizzes and riddles and while week one gave us a ridiculously obvious puzzle I kind of hoped that each week I’d have something to try and solve. Unfortunately, after week 1 we either didn’t get a riddles because every second episode seemed to follow Tokine and her friends around the real world, or the riddle required massive leaps in logic in order to solve them so either way not exactly a show to play along at home to.
Even that would have been fine if the characters had occasionally risen above lackluster but tragically Tokine and friends are a vapid and personality devoid bunch and as a direct result their interactions are about as fascinating as watching paint dry.
Toward the end of the series we meet someone else who, like Tokine, is able to solve the riddles but other than one brief moment of rivalry she then disappears from the show to never be seen again which leaves you wondering why they even bothered to introduce her.
It’s the first day of the year so let’s look back at the year that was. I know that at the end of Summer I did my first reflection post looking back at the anime I’d watched and I purposefully left D Gray Man and Sailor Moon Crystal 3 off the lists because nostalgia was strong with those two. But now we are at the end of the year and I’m not playing nice anymore. I’m giving my lists of top 10 best and worst for 2016 and finally the results from the reader’s poll.
My rules:
I need to have watched the whole series (or as much as has aired in 2016 – I know some of these are continuing on).
My judgement is entirely based on the entertainment I got out of watching the anime.
Feel free to suggest your own top 10 best or worst in the comments.
Starting from the best.
Yuri on Ice
D Gray Man Hallow
Natsume Yuujinchou
Assassination Classroom 2nd Season
Snow White with the Red Hair Season 2
March Comes in Like a Lion
My Hero Academia
Alderamin on the Sky
Erased
Sailor Moon Crystal 3
Yeah, I can’t believe it either but Yuri on Ice actually edged out D Gray Man Hallow on anime I enjoyed watching. Neither anime is perfect (and I’ll happily admit to the flaws in both) but when it came to pure enjoyment I couldn’t beat either of these and in terms of the anime I’ll rewatch the most from this year, these 2 are the top picks. So why Yuri over D Gray Man? D Gray Man Hallow always had the advantage of nostalgia, but if I take that away, while I would have still enjoyed Hallow (assuming it made sense) it wouldn’t have been as enjoyable as the viewing experience for Yuri. In terms of the anime I sat waiting to the minute for the episode release, Yuri on Ice definitely won out.
However, for everything you enjoy there is a show that you watch and wonder why. Once again, I know there are worse anime out there, but these are the anime I watched all the way through and really wonder why.
Starting from the worst.
Taboo Tattoo
Big Order
Lost Village
Hitorinoshita
Divine Gate
Dimension W
Nazotokine
Norn 9
Undefeated Bahamut Chronicle
Bloodivores
What was pleasantly surprising was how few of the Autumn season found their way onto this list. Mostly the shows I watched in Autumn were more boring than terrible (though I did avoid a few shows that I knew were going to end up in this category so they didn’t count on the having watched them criteria).
The Reader’s Poll
I was surprised by some of the results and not surprised by others. Probably the biggest issue is there were only 54 votes total so from a data point of view this probably isn’t the most valid survey. Anyway…
Yuri on Ice (7 votes)
Assassination Classroom 2 (6 votes)
Mob Psycho 100 (6 votes)
Tanaka-kun is Always Listless (5 votes)
Bungo Stray Dogs (3 votes)
Erased (3 votes)
March Comes in Like a Lion (3 votes)
Kiss Him Not Me (3 votes)
Flip Flappers (3 votes)
Grimgar of Fantasy of Ash (3 votes)
With that I say goodbye to 2016 and welcome in 2017 for a whole new year of watching anime.
By the way, over the next 4 weeks my Tuesday’s Top 5 post is going to do a recap of 2016. Top 5 Female Characters of 2016 is up first, followed by Top 5 Male Characters of 2016, Top 5 Visually Interesting Anime of 2016 and finally Top 5 Opening Themes of 2016. Then I will move on to something different but I felt January was a great time to recap the previous year.
Over to you: Which anime was your favourite or most hated from 2016?
The last of Nazotokine episode offers little more than any other though it does give kind of half-hearted explanation for the locations of the quizzes and then reveals enough information that if you were in anyway interested you might want a sequel. Basically Tokine solves another riddle and we have a chat before she returns to the real world.
That’s it. We’re done. Oh, except Hacchin showed up in the real world for some reason. Really glad this series is over and really not sure what I can say in a full series review that I haven’t already said so I’ll think about that for a little bit.
The movie finishes in Nazotokine, they go to work, and then a light show. As usual, Tokine gets excited and we end with yet another riddle. Part of me has taken to wondering if this wondering if this whole show is some sort of travel advertisement with the quizzes thrown in to break up the random segments of scenery and discussions by the girls about various events.
Honestly though the show doesn’t change. Week after week we get the same tone and formula without any real variation and it is definitely getting dull.
Here’s a lesson I shouldn’t have needed to learn. Don’t watch Nazotokine after Yuri on Ice. I could have just stopped that sentence with ‘don’t watch Nazotokine’ but at this point I’m more or less committed.
However, after Yuri on Ice what was probably just another run of the mill episode from this series just felt so incredibly banal that I was actively checking my twitter feed while watching. And I didn’t miss anything. The former cabaret girl introduces herself, there’s some half-hearted rivalry and then they solve the riddle and return to the cinema. Case closed. This series hasn’t done anything new or upped the stakes and now I’m just waiting for the end.
What was the point of the wrestling in Nazotokine this week?
They went (after the hot springs) we saw a fight and then they went back to Tokyo and went to a cinema. Maybe it was this show’s lame attempt to say, ‘Hey, we don’t always follow the formula of go somewhere and start a quiz; sometimes we go somewhere and nothing happens’.
That aside, I liked the reveal when we finally went into the quiz this time. I’d been wondering when that would happen and it could make the next episode interesting (note: I said could not would). Of course this all seems basically like filler give it really was just moving us between locations with a random intermission where nothing happened but wrestling.
Tokine solves the dragon’s quiz and asks yet another unanswered question. Nazotokine has really become predictable and dull at this point and time. The riddles aren’t really solvable from an outsiders perspective particularly as you can only see the parts of them Tokine is focusing on and there just isn’t enough of anything else happening in this show. predictability would be fine if Tokine herself was more than just a one note character but she isn’t and none of the other characters have any discernible personality. All and all you can probably save yourself some trouble and if you haven’t already been watching this, don’t start it.
Nazotokine has Tokine solving another riddle with the movers and once again the answer was either obvious or indecipherable depending on your view point. It actually kind of seems like there was a lot of unnecessary clutter this time around which made the solution seems just a bit lame. Then of course we have the girls talking over Korean BBQ and next we are clearly headed to the hot springs. But in case you were falling asleep by the ho-hum nature of the episode we’ll introduce some weird characters right at the end who may or may not have any significance. Nazotokine was underwhelming once again but its hard to really be too annoyed at it.
Tokine goes to help her friend move. They gush about the apartment and then the movers and then both of her friends and the movers leave to go downstairs for plot convenient reasons. Two of the movers return just in time for Tokine to transport them all into Quizum (?) and then we see the puzzle before the episode ends.
Really not certain what the point of this show is at this point. It repeats the same formula over and over and we are learning nothing about the main character that we couldn’t have figured out in episode 1. She’s not growing or developing at all. There are no other characters that we know enough about to care and Hacchin (or whatever his name really is) isn’t interesting enough as an antagonist/villain/whatever he’s supposed to be. That would all be fine if the puzzles gave us something to think about but they just don’t.
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