So, there's good news and bad news about season one of DC's Legends of Tomorrow. Bad news first: the early episodes are pretty bad. There are too many characters to get a feel for any of them right off the bat. Also, the villain, Vandal Savage, comes across pretty much as a complete wuss. Sure, he's got some kind of immortality thing going on, but with a ship full of super-people it should be a cakewalk to take him out. All the reasoning behind why this doesn't happen requires some major hand-waving.
Good news: it gets a lot better, around halfway through. Suffering through that poor early stuff gives time to introduce each character, and their various struggles/relationships/etc start to be more meaningful. Savage is still kinda weak as the major big-bad, but he gets help in a way that makes at least a little bit of sense. The last 2-3 episodes are really pretty good.
Sadly, that's a lot of time spent to get to the good stuff. If you're a DC comics fan, or watch Flash/Arrow, you'll probably enjoy Legends of Tomorrow just to see what they've done with the characters. If not, this one might not be for you.
Some more thoughts here: http://ineffablebob.blogspot.com/2016/05/dcs-legends-of-tomorrow.html
NGNL was very disappointing to me. Obviously I was expecting something other than what they were providing.
Details at http://ineffablebob.blogspot.com/2016/02/no-game-no-life.html
This is a solid adaptation of the books and I greatly enjoyed it, but I think that's largely because I'd read the books first and knew a lot of background that they aren't able to cover in the TV format. Highly recommend checking out the books, as they expand quite a bit on what the show was able to fit in. Fair warning - the romance is still pretty cheesy in both formats. :)
I tried to like Macross 7, for the sake of the Macross franchise. But it's just awful. I've watched a lot of cheesy shows in my time, but this one just does nothing for me. It feels like someone looked at the original series and said, "hey, they used music to overcome fighting, we should do that too" but forgot to include any reasoning behind it. And then decided "super musician-pilot-bike rider-street fighter with no social skills" and "spoiled teenage girl being marketed to older men by her mother" made for good central characters.
I got through the first 10 episodes or so, then gave up. Went and read the summary on Wikipedia instead, so I'd know what happened for the sake of any tie-ins with the other Macross series.
I suppose the music might be considered a redeeming quality, if you like the mid-80s pop rock style. It was all right, but suffers from the same issue as most music in TV series...horribly repetitive. The same 2-3 songs over and over get old extremely fast, no matter how good they might be. Maybe there was additional music later in the series, but it wasn't worth suffering the awful characters long enough to find out.
I enjoyed No 6 quite a lot. Great characters and a big-mystery plotline that kept me interested all the way through. I would have liked a little more background on the forest people and Elyurias, but not knowing that didn't detract significantly from the story. Well worth the watch!
This would be a solid hour-long radio drama. Too bad someone decided to make it a 90 minute movie.
I'm enjoying watching, but I feel like the show is moving at breakneck speed. We've got the whole fleeing-Krypton backstory, the big dramatic world debut, secret identity reveal to two co-workers and an entire government agency, rogue aliens, another Kryptonian, multiple big alien fights, all in the first two hours. Feels like they're trying to cram an entire season into a few episodes. The pace of other comic-based shows like Flash, Arrow, and Agents of SHIELD feel much slower by comparison. I'm afraid Supergirl is going to get to a point where it'll feel boring simply because it slows down to a more normal pace.
Occult Academy has an interesting premise, with time travel and mysticism contributing to a big-mystery story-line. The series is short, only 11 episodes, and that's a good thing.
With such a short series, there isn't a lot of time to get off track, but unfortunately they still managed to make several episodes in the middle feel disconnected. Didn't think much of the "romance" subplot, either, which was very shallow and really contributed very little to the story that couldn't have been handled in a much simpler manner. The mystery aspect didn't work too well, I'm afraid. By the time we got to the last three episodes, I'd seen most of the "twists" coming a mile away (though I'll admit that there were still some mild surprises in the very last episode). And is it really necessary that Maya is constantly dressed like a streetwalker? (I know, it's anime, but still.)
The good news is that several of the characters are very likable, mostly the sub-storylines are engaging, and the overall story moves along nicely since it is so short. The Akari arc was especially good, and even the "near death experience" arc wasn't too bad.
I enjoyed Occult Academy despite the flaws, but if it had been any longer, I might not have had the patience to get through it.
