Erufailon4

Just earlier this week, it was announced that Wakanim (and its parent company Funimation) would be migrating their anime content libraries to Crunchyroll, meaning they would essentially cease active operations (adding new simulcast episodes) at the end of the current Winter 2022 anime season. Back in September of last year, I  wondered  if Wakanim would eventually be merged into Funimation, as AnimeLab had recently done, but it seems the higher-ups at Sony made a better decision and merged them both into Crunchyroll instead. Only time will tell how this will play out in practicality - a lot of Wakanim titles are for now region-locked in Crunchyroll and many have yet to be migrated at all - but one thing is certain: the anime streaming field is now more centralized than ever, with the plus side that for a consumer a Crunchyroll monopoly is still miles better than a Funimation monopoly. (Not so much for the workers behind the scenes though.)  Meanwhile in Finland, it's a ...

A bit of a slower month than the previous one, but there were still a couple of items that ended up in my collection this month - a gorgeous KyoAni masterpiece and some laid-back  Yotsuba&! goodness. Let's get started.  Violet Evergarden: Eternity and the Auto Memory Doll  (UK Collector's Edition Blu-ray) This one is actually a Christmas present from a family member, it just took a while to arrive from the UK despite being ordered well in advance. Well, good things are worth waiting for: it's a high-quality set with a lot of cool physical extras - 40 pages of storyboards and a short story never published before in English, just to name a few - and a solid blu-ray of one of my favourite entries in the Violet Evergarden  franchise. (Be sure to check out NormanicGrav's unboxing post for a more detailed look at the set.) I don't have a lot of Anime Limited's releases yet, but I plan to get more this year.  (Presumably ordered from Amazon UK. SRP: £44.99. Arriv...

I'm trying out a new blog post format, where I go over the anime/manga/etc I've added to my collection in each month. Still a work-in-progress, as I'm figuring out what is the best way to display the pictures. Most of these are Finnish releases, so the information is not of much use to English-speaking folks, but I've included the places I've bought each of these from and the price. (This is not  an advertisement for any of these products - I'm not affiliated with any retailers or publishers, and these are purely my own opinions.)   Attack on Titan vol. 34 (Finnish edition) Even as an anime-only for AoT, there was no way I was going to miss getting the manga's historical final volume on the day it was released in Finland, December 8. The volume marks the end of an era, concluding the manga's 6-year run in Finland. I won't be reading it until after the anime is finished, but in the meantime it'll sit comfortably in my bookshelf, its spine standin...

Due to various IRL circumstances I couldn't get this out on New Year's Eve as I said last week, but New Year's Day will do. As we head into 2022, let's for the last time look back upon last year. This is my (pitiful attempt at ranking) Best Anime of 2021 list. Enjoy.  There'll be three lists: one for non-sequel TV anime, a bonus one for sequels, and another bonus one for movies.  Top 10 (Non-Sequel) Anime:   10. The Case Study of Vanitas This vampire steampunk fantasy has been given a pass by many due to it looking like "fujobait", but make no mistake: this show's eroticism comes in way more flavours than that. And even apart from that, there's enough action and intrigue to keep you pleased even if you're not into hot vampire-on-vampire action. This has been a year of vampire anime, but only this one reached my top 10 list (although I haven't finished Irina: The Vampire Cosmonaut  yet).  9. Sonny Boy When you give an experienced director fr...

Welcome back to the second part of Erufailon4's Best Anime of 2021 series. This time I'll be going through my top 10 openings and endings of the year. Easy task, right? ... Right?  So yeah, this is going to be a very arbitrary list that is more of a reflection of how strongly I feel about each entry at this moment, rather than any judgement of quality. All of these OPs and EDs are excellent, and ranking them was not easy.  Now then, let's get started.  Top 10 OPs 10. Re:Zero Season 2 Part 2  OP "Long shot"    This was one I was not initially the biggest fan of, but it grew on me eventually. The song is okay, and the lyrics vaguely fit the series, but the best part is the visuals, which are at some points very striking and hold quite a lot of meaning too - child Emilia with blood on her face, as well as the quick sequence of Subaru, Emilia, Ram and Beatrice's eyes with their most important persons reflected in them, are some of my favourite shots in the OP. ...

It's December - exactly three weeks before the end of the year, to be precise. You know what that means? It means that time has come to look back on the year and its many bangers. This is Erufailon4's Best Anime of 2021 series, part 1: my top 10 key visuals of the year.  Included may be any anime series that aired at least a half of its episodes in 2021, and anime movies that were released in my home country (and usually also internationally) during the year. Without further ado, let's get started.  10. Takt op. Destiny  KV2  It's not a very flashy or otherwise eye-catching KV, but despite that I personally like it quite a bit. Takt op. Destiny  is a road trip series (at least that's my impression based on the admittedly few episodes I have seen) and this KV certainly communicates it at a glance. Having the characters in the middle third and the upper and lower third be filled with the open blue sky and the asphalt of the road creates a nice balance. The charact...

It's crazy to think that now, with 49 volumes behind me, I'm halfway through the currently available volumes of One Piece . It's an intimidating series, and it did take me a while to get here, but once you get to a point like this, the dream of one day catching up doesn't seem so impossible anymore.  I started reading One Piece  in December 2019 - almost exactly 23 months ago. That means my average reading speed has been about two volumes per month, but of course that's not quite the reality: I've taken many breaks, some many months long, and to make up for that, some months I've read multiple volumes! Below is a chart that shows where I've been in the story at any given time:  (Interactive chart can be found here .) Divided into sagas, my progress has been roughly this:  East Blue:  December 2019 - March 2020  Alabasta:  March-November 2020  Sky Island:  November-December 2020  Water Seven:  December 2020 - September 2021  Thr...