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Still something of a light schedule this season, and of course the dubbed shows are trailing behind a bit.

Haikyuu – Another season with a single set of matches in a tournament. However, writing-wise it’s still all of a piece with the previous season, as a few things finally come together for Hinata. Once again, it’s a pretty small focus for 13 episodes, but the writing holds up.

Journey of Elaina — Smudge and I picked this up at the start of the season, saw most of it… and then introduced it to the guys in the dubbed version, which is just getting started. It’s kind of a magical version of Kino’s Journey, with a fairly episodic format, and some very different tones between stories.

Arte — Renaissance Italy (drawn without reference). Actually, we have a feeling the original manga artist has a decent grasp on Italian clothes and architecture, but the production studio worked entirely from his art. In any case, its a fairly good, if cheaply produced, period piece.

Is it Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? — Smudge and I actually saw the Sword Oratoria side story as well as the current third (main) series. The former reminds me a bit of the A Certain… series, with fanservice derailing too many parts of the series. On the other hand, the writing of the latter has really dissolved into incomprehensibility, while this is still pretty good. The main story was a bit better (writing and fanservice), and definitely moves forward some interesting bits of just what’s going on in this world.

Brand New Animal — Dave actually saw this first, so for once the flow of recommendations is going the other way. Personally, I’ve been finding it okay. It is getting better as it goes (haven’t finished yet). It’s been a little all-over writing-wise, which is weakened the show for me, but the overall arc has been coming a lot clearer in the last third, so my enthusiasm is picking up.

Black Clover — The plot is in the periodic ‘power up’ stage that shonen fight anime goes to too often. Outside of that, there’s been some good things, with a look at some of the under-served portions of the kingdom, which had a fairly good climax (I would like to believe that there’s a coherent in-world reason for the strong mana zone in the middle of everything, but so far it seems like it’s just a convenient way to keep the countries separated from each other). More surprisingly, we’ve actually caught up to the current episodes.