Anime’s Season Of Strong First Episodes

Like nearly all industries across the globe, the anime industry has been seriously affected by the covid-19 pandemic. Many studios suspended production on their in-development shows, resulting in a number of anime that were to premier in the Spring getting pushed into this current Summer season. Other shows were pushed even further out in the calendar or canceled altogether.

Summer 2019 anime premiers of new shows or new seasons of returning shows numbered in the low 30s. This Summer that number has been pretty much halved, into the mid-teens. With all of those production problems in mind, I was prepared to have to grade this Summer’s animes on an adjusted curve. Imagine my surprise when a bunch of the Summer anime shows started of with a killer first episode.

OK, I wasn’t that surprised that the delayed second season of Re: Zero − Starting Life in Another World came out of the gate with a kick-in-the-feels first episode. That kind of gut punch is the bread and butter for Subaru and his compatriots. But I was a bit surprised at how well it tied back into the end of the first season, a staggering four years ago, while also setting up the first major conflict of the new season.

Higher on the surprise meter was the return of Fire Force. The last season ended in a pretty bog-standard shonen story arc, a bit of a let down from the wilder previous arc that greatly expanded the story of Shinra and his past. This season’s first episode was more tightly written and did a great job of filling in any new viewers to the characters and the general story, while couching it in a better, more exciting fight than most of the previous story arc. Also, way less gratuitous fan service.

But a pair of new anime shows really started out amazingly strong with their first episodes — Deca-Dence and The God of High School.

Decades hence
Looking at the team behind Deca-Dence it shouldn’t be a surprise that it started out so strongly. The first anime by the studio NUT was The Saga of Tanya the Evil, which put a creative twist on the typical isekai opening episode of a character in the real world getting killed and appearing in a new world. But while Tanya was an adaptation of a novel, Deca-Dence is a wholly original animation, written by Hiroshi Seko, who wrote for Attack on Titan, Kill la Kill, Ajin, and Panty and Stocking With Garter Belt, among many others.

The first episode drops you right into the far future world in which a race of monsters called the Gadoll have wiped out 90 percent of humanity. The remaining 10 percent live in city-size mobile fortresses like the title one, Deca-Dence. The story follows the orphan girl Natsume who wants to be one of the warriors that fight the Gadoll, but because of her prosthetic right hand is assigned to doing hull armor repair under a team leader named Kaburagi, a tough, taciturn man with at least a couple of deep secrets.

The first episode accomplishes a ton of excellent storytelling, from building the world, to showing the action of fighting the Gadoll, to revealing just enough hints at the mysteries and secrets of Deca-Dence to make us want more. It is some of the most effective storytelling I’ve seen in a long time.

OMGoHS
Not to be outdone, The God of High School opened just as strong as Deca-Dence — perhaps even more so considering it had to prove it was more than just an endless tournament arc anime. Based on one of the most popular Korean manhwa Webtoons, The God of High School introduces the three main protagonists; fun-seeking Taekwondo expert Jin Mori, ditsy sword fighter Yu Mira, and serious karate expert Han Daewi, in a crazy chase scene in downtown Seoul that is animated beautifully, full of action, excitement and humor.

After that the episode jumps right into the tournament that gives the show its name, setting up the structure of the overall show, introducing other ongoing characters, and like Deca-Dence, hinting at much deeper — perhaps darker — secrets behind the official The God of High School fighting tournament.

Both of these new shows left me really wanting to know more about the world they exist in, the people in that world and the story those people are a part of, in just one episode. Fingers crossed they both stay as strong going forward.

Not to end on a downer, but there was one first episode I was really disappointed in. After four years we finally got a third season of My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU, or Oregairu as it is called by its Japanese portmanteau. If you are a fan of the series, you know that the end of Season 2 was a bit of a disappointment. Not only did it not resolve the primary love triangle at the center of the story, but the dialogue was so stilted and badly written that it actually may have moved things along but we just couldn’t tell.

I was really hoping that would change in Season 3, but the first episode starts off being just as obtuse as the past one, four years ago. I understand that three really close friends (or more) can start to talk in a kind of in-the-know shorthand that they comprehend perfectly, but writing tip folks — your audience isn’t actually any of those people. Some times you really do have to spell it out for us. As Replay Value pointed out on his YouTube channel, the theme of the second season of Oregairu, if not all of the show, is about how subtext has to be elevated to blunt text — sometimes even slap-in-your-face blunt — for any relationship to avoid misunderstanding and to be truly genuine. When Hachiman spells this out clearly in episode 8 of Season 2, it is the last piece of clear text between the three main characters about their relationships we get.

Get it together, Oregairu, and stop messing up my grading curve.

There are a surprising number of hot garbage ecchi shows this season like Peter Grill and the Philosopher’s Time and SUPER HxEROS, and one potential sleeper hit. Rent-a-Girlfriend is funny and adorable and could be the feel-good anime of the season. With college-age main characters the humor is smartly adult about its uncomfortable situations, and not 13-year-old-boy “adult.”

If you haven’t yet definitely check out Deca-Dence and The God of High School. And maybe try Rent-a-Girlfriend for some breezy, cute fun.

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