The schedule. Made in Abyss: The Golden City of the Scorching Sun will be alight, I guess.

Bastard!! The production values are only ok but hell has finally frozen over. LIDEN FILMS produced a presentable adaptation that doesn´t skip any plot beats on top of that! Many viewers will be confused why the promised "boundary-pushing" edge fest lacks gore, nudity or sex and has this much levity. Nudity and gore are rare until Vol 18 in the manga. That volume introduced Porno Dianno -she looks just like one would think- and throws the already splintering plot in the trash. The mangaka then fully gave up, moved over into a Seinen magazine and unwound into a hard-to-follow comedy porno without real continuity. There is even a time jump to fully weed out the previous audience. Aka. me. The first 60% of the manga pushed Shounen Jump boundaries but not Shounen demographic boundaries. Devilman was published 12 years earlier and went waaay further. So did Jump´s very own Fist of the North Star 4 years before Bastard.
The Netanime on the other hand skipped gnarly executions that would have been in ep 1&2, ep 6 didn´t feature the pornographic sex scene the fully redrawn Kanzenban version of Vol 2 has, ep 8 lacks a head explosion and so on. Even the 90s OVAs added nudity and settled on a grittier tone but the 2022 version remains committed to staying presentable to 13-year-old-boys. That was the manga´s demographic for a decade so fresh viewers can only stay for the plot. The bonkers later stages of the manga will simply never be reached due to the faithful and thus slow pacing.
I prefer the 6 much faster-moving OVAs from the 90s due to better designs, animation, colors and all the skipped fluff but those only reached 2/3rd into Vol 5. S1E13 ends 1/5th into Vol 5. I wouldn´t mind an adaptation till Vol 12 and then transition into an original ending leading to a 3 season show. The manga starts ripping of Evangelion a few volumes after Vol 12 and one thing is not like the other... In summary: Don´t expect a Hard-R Dark Fantasy near-hentai and set your expectation for a horny yet flaccid 80s-themed teen action/comedy/fantasy hybrid instead. For that the anime works fine and it´s not an isekai! 6.5/10

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners airs in September and the trailer looks rubbish so I don´t know if I will watch more than 5 minutes. The Cyberpunk 2077 comics weren´t good either. The setting has tons of potential but even CD Project Red is failing to utilize it.

Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer Planet With was a bust but this manga is long finished and quite good. Mizukami´s 2nd best work even. I am not jazzed about the team doing this and the manga is 10 volumes long. It’s too early to panic but the trailer looks rather cheap… I have nothing to watch this season if the studio misses the mark.

One Piece Film: Red will be about an idol who is advertised as the daughter of Shanks. Clearly a fake-out and I dislike the premise. Osomatsu-san: Hipipo-Zoku to Kagayaku Kajitsu will be the first of 2 new films and the last 2 Gundam G no Reconguista summary films also come out this season. There is a notable slide in quality during the 3rd film due to the anime becoming incompressible halfway through so I don´t expect too much from the touch-ups.

I also read EU/US comics and am a librarian.
Manga-Masters, My ANN-Lists + Imdb

Studio Trigger made the best anime of the season? WTF, I stand corrected.

Bastard!! Part 2 had slightly worse production values and the plot slowed to a crawl but that is right out of the manga. I'll watch another cour if they make one but that´s about it and I can only recommend this to a niche audience. The 90s OVAs are all one needs from this IP. 6/10

Bee and PuppyCat had its partially remade Netflix debut late last season and it´s half an anime as all of the streaming eps were done by OLM (Pokemon). Cross Steven Universe with candy-colored space horror and you know what to expect. 7/10

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners the semi-prequel to the game has even less to do with the genre´s purpose and is mostly style over substance but at least it doesn´t have a prominent copaganda subplot. Lol CD Project. The main issue, outside of the strong reliance on cliches and the fact that the full plot happens in the year 2076 (the game confirms this), is the pacing. The miniseries feels like watching the 2 Gurren Lagann summary movies instead of the 2 cour show but I don´t think that this plot could have worked if it was twice as long either. Do you want STYLE STYLE SYLTE, gratuitous nudity, GORE GORE GORE and strong animation for 98% of the runtime then this is your show. 13-year-old me would have loved it. The anime doesn´t overstay its welcome either so the sugar rush never fully wears off but I will admit that the first 6 eps are better than the 2nd half of the plot. Keep Akira Yamaoka as the composer and everyone else but get a new writer and I will certainly return if more is made. 7/10

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean. The animation budget took another hit and I can´t say that the pacing changes helped the plot all that much. Dragon's Dream still sucks and Yo-Yo Ma was a bit easier to follow here but having the worst parts of this story back to back turned half of the eps into white noise. The next 14 eps will feature the best parts of Stone Ocean but that won´t leave too much breathing room for anything. Part 6 is destined to remain an also-ran for this IP despite being the "finale" to the original timeline. My nonexistent hope for a (proper) adaptation of Part 7 shrunk some more, especially if I consider the big gaps in between the random episode drops. 6.5/10

Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer the pacing was more or less where it needed to be until things accelerated later on and the anime looks about as awkward as it gets. A bunch of small changes also made the characters and tone more generic. Read the manga but this is a semi-acceptable companion piece. I might finish this but don´t bother. 5/10

Made in Abyss: The Golden City I bounced off the manga and the superior anime (the manga´s paneling is hard to follow and the fetish bait is out of control) but checked back in again and have now written it off for good. The plot becomes hard to follow misery porn that refuses to commit to its bleak tone as things just work out for the main cast through Shounen bullshit. 5/10

Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury The prologue is by the numbers and is only used to establish a bit about the backstory of the protagonist. We´ll see in October but I dislike the writer so I´ll keep my expectations muted.

Tekken: Bloodline is only worth your time if you are a fan of the games as there will be too much context missing otherwise but I can´t say that I wasted my time. The 3D models blend well with the 2D elements even if the triangle shading is distracting. The choreography is solid and the writing is... fine. The whole thing is just over 2 hours and that is too short for the number of characters and lore present. This is an easy show to figure out. Watch it if a trailer intrigued you and stay away if you have no idea what Tekken is. 6.5/10

The Tatami Time Machine Blues This isn´t a sequel to the 2010 show and instead a remake of a play based 2005 movie with the same characters and art style. Night Is Short, Walk On Girl suggested that the 2010 anime needs to be left alone and this cemented it. 5/10

Yurei Deco has convinced me to give up on Dai Sato. His writing is a decade past his prime and only getting less coherent. The art ain´t it either. 5?/10

The Laws of the Universe: The Age of Elohim (part 3 of 4?) turned out to be the most tedious Happy Science film yet and no ironic LOLs can be had either. This was so bad it´s bad. Goddamn you El Cantare and at least one more of these remains... I also tried out Drifting Home due to the director´s previous film Penguin Highway this is just a badly structured kids flick. Netflix has little luck with anime films. The Macross Delta conclusion movie blows btw and the tie-ins to the 80s show amount to a bunch of nothing. The fast-forwarding to get to that bit was a waste of time. Worst Macross ever. The accompanying Frontier sequel short is another mess that put a cliffhanger on top of the original cliffhanger and the TV version is now rendered non-canon. Ok?

I also read EU/US comics and am a librarian.
Manga-Masters, My ANN-Lists + Imdb