First Look: MARS RED

It’s 1923, and Major Yoshinobu Maeda has been sent to Tokyo after reports of an actress being severely injured on stage. The wounds were near-fatal, yet she had completely recovered after only four hours. 

First Look: Koikimo

A high school girl makes the extremely ill-advised mistake of saving a businessman from falling down the stairs. Fully convinced that this means they are destined to be together, the man then proceeds to bother, harass, stalk and proposition her for the remainder of the episode and I can only imagine the rest of the show. This is supposed to be funny, by the way. Yeah.

First Look: Horimiya (live action)

Kyouko Hori and Izumi Miyamura both have a side to themselves that they don’t share with their peers. The two seem to be complete opposites of each other, but after a chance meeting outside of school, they quickly realise that they aren’t so different after all. 

First Look: Tropical-Rouge! Precure

Manatsu Natsuumi is excited to move from her island home to the big city to stay with her mother, but she’s reckoned without the machinations of the Witch of Procrastination, who looks to suck out all the motivation of the citizens. Fortunately Laura the mermaid has been sent to the surface world to find the legendary warriors who can battle the Witch and soon Manatsu finds herself fighting monsters as Cure Summer!

Lightning First Looks: Winter 2021

It’s been an incredibly busy time over at GLORIO Towers, what with the new season and also gestures at everything. As a result we haven’t been able to roll out our customary slate of First Loooks, but here instead are some quick bite-sized opinions on everything we’ve been watching.

First Look: D4DJ First Mix

Rinku is a very enthusiastic girl who grew up on a small African island, and while she may be unfamiliar with a lot of things, she really likes H Jungle With t’s 1995 hit single Wow War Tonight. 

First Look: Dropout Idol Fruit Tart

Ino moves to Tokyo with dreams of becoming an idol. Unfortunately the agency she joins is full of failures and they can’t even afford to keep their house. With no other way to pay the bills, the girls team up to form a new idol group.

First Look: Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear

Yuna is addicted to a fantasy VRMMORPG and logs so many hours that the creator gifts her a special gear set that looks like a cute bear. The bear suit is extremely powerful, but accepting the gift comes with a cost.

First Look: The Day I Became a God

Yota Narukami is a approached by a little girl who claims to be a god, and she informs him that the world will end in thirty days. He is naturally skeptical, but a series of events leads him to wonder if she might be telling the truth.

First Look: Taiso Samurai

Jotaro Aragaki is a 29-year-old widower and father who has devoted his life to gymnastics but is now staring down the barrel of retirement, having performed poorly over recent years as he battles both aging and a persistent shoulder injury. However, he’s loathe to tell this to his daughter, and a chance encounter with a foreigner ninja (and a group of mysterious ‘agents’ hot on said ninja’s tail) are about to change the course of Jotaro’s life.

First Look: Maesetsu! Opening Act

Mafuyu and three other college students want to be successful manzai comedians, so they go to a high school and… mime a band performance? They spend the rest of the episode thinking it’d be nice to be comedians. 

First Look: Adachi and Shimamura

High school delinquents Sakura Adachi and Hougetsu Shimamura spend their days cutting class, playing ping-pong in their secret hiding spot, observing the rest of school toiling away at gym and cultivating a relationship they both realize can grow beyond mere friendship anytime soon.

First Look: Akudama Drive

In a crime-ridden cyberpunk version of Japan’s Kansai region, an Ordinary Person gets caught up in a death game involving several “AKUDAMA”, the most dangerous class of criminal.

First Look: Noblesse

Raizel, a powerful noble freshly awake after 820 years of slumber, is enrolled in a high school, presumably to learn about the customs of twenty-first century society. He is looked after by his servant, Franken(stein?), and a newly-acquired bodyguard with special abilities, himself an escapee from an experimental lab. However, Union, a nefarious secret organization that probably wants to rule the world or something, is hot on Raizel and his team’s trail.

First Look: Ikebukuro West Gate Park

Ikebukuro: where you will apparently never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. In this violent and crime-ridden district, where yazkuza and youth street gangs rule the streets, a young man named Makoto protects his friends by mediating disputes among rival groups, while also saving innocent children, defenseless single moms, and frowning very heavily on drugs. Remember kids, drugs are bad!