Three Months of Crunchyroll: Part 1

21 Jun, 2026

You'd be forgiven for thinking otherwise, given the corpus of games that I generally play, but I am very much NOT an anime person. A lot of stuff inspired by anime, yes, but broadly speaking, my position has always been that if I'm going to experience this kind of stuff, I would rather play it than watch it. However, youtube decided to throw me a curveball this year: Three months of Crunchyroll for $2 a piece. Even if YT doesn't host their entire catalog, surely I can extract $6 of entertainment out of this over the next three months, right? Let's find out together.

Now, it should be said that I have absolutely no idea what is or is not a "good" show - outside of a couple recommendations to get me started, I picked almost all these shows based entirely on some combination of vibes and "oh I remember hearing about this [at some point], this was supposed to be pretty good, I think?" Sometimes it was! Sometimes I watched two episodes of it and was like "yeah, I'm good boss."

Daemons of the Shadow Realm

A rural village atop a mountain in Japan is attacked by unknown forces - a magical barrier is destroyed, revealing that it's actually in modern Japan, a girl with demons slaughters (almost) everyone in the village, and Yoru (the main character) is spirited away before he can be captured by them, but not before awakening a pair of his own demons, which he uses to fend off the attackers.

I'm gonna be honest, this whole setup really didn't do much of anything for me. My understanding is that it's made by a lot of the same people who made Full Metal Alchemist (a series I know of but have never watched), and maybe that means something to you, but it sure doesn't to me. It's biggest thing for me was that there wasn't really a strong hook - admittedly, I only watched two episodes (of the available seven), and it DOES seem like Ep 3 would have gone into more of the what and why's that are sorely lacking, but man, there was NOTHING to latch on to there. I don't have a problem with a slow burn! I really enjoy the Trails games for god's sake, and they somehow managed to stretch that out to 13 games and counting. But nothing about Daemons made me sit up and be like "I have to see what happens next," so on to the next show.

Progress: S1E2, don't plan to continue

Dan da Dan

Momo, the granddaughter of a spirit medium, doesn't believe in aliens. Okarun, a nerdy otaku kid who is way too into UFOs, thinks ghosts are bullshit. After a brief argument at school one day, each is dared to investigate an area by the thing they don't believe, and it turns out that uh, they're both true? Everything's real, and the two will have to work together to fend off spirits, aliens, and everything in-between.

I enjoyed what I've seen of it so far - the character interactions are great and Momo is a fantastic lead, particularly when she bounces off her nonchalant grandmother and the far more reserved Okarun. It's a little unfortunate that they immediately lean into the "lol the aliens are gonna rape her" trope, especially since she's otherwise shown to be extremely physically capable (the literal first scene she's in has her roundhouse kicking her shitty boyfriend), but it's a small blemish on what's otherwise a very cool intro. Thankfully, she gets far more opportunities to show off against the next few foes - Turbo Granny and Silky are both fantastic fights that give both Momo and Okarun a chance to show their stuff and how they work together. Also, Momo is just Yukari (Persona 3). Like, I'm sure that's not that unique of a visual design, but it's really hard to see anything else.

Progress: S1E6, will probably wrap up Season 1 next

Psycho-Pass

In the near(?) future, humanity has invented an AI that measures your stress levels, tendencies, and determines whether or not you'll commit a crime. Should the system flag your "psycho pass," you can either come quietly with the cops for some "mandatory therapy," or you can struggle and make things uh...much worse. A young police cadet, Akane, is thrust into the enforcement department, putting her in charge of a squad responsible for hunting down latent criminals - they themselves being latent criminals, so she can discipline them as she sees fit should the need arise.

And like, look. It's Minority Report. This is just anime Minority Report. It's not subtle about what it's doing and whether or not it's good (spoilers: it isn't), and I do appreciate that at least initially, our heroine's reaction to the reality of how the system works is basically "what the FUCK, this isn't how the academy described any of this." I don't know how long it ends up maintaining this mood, it pretty quickly seems to dive into a larger mystery revolving around one specific criminal who pushes people to act out against the system and is probably responsible for killing Kogami's old partner. Standard police procedural stuff, I suppose. Also, weirdly? I really like the 45 minute episodes. This is definitely the kind of story that appreciates the chance to breathe a bit.

Progress: S1E4, but they are double-sized episodes

Fate/Strange Fake

FSF is a strange one, for sure. The United States Government is pushing for a Holy Grail War for unknown reasons, so mages of all stripes descend upon Snowfield in a bid to make their mark on history. But there's a twist! Within the first (admittedly, hour-long special) episode, it's revealed that this is a FAKE HGW, with no Saber being summoned...and if you know anything about Fate, you know that it only ever introduces rules when it plans to break them, so by the second episode, we have a Saber summoned. This (and indeed, the entire fake HGW conceit) turns out to be the pretense to a REAL HGW, giving us a main cast with 13 pairs of masters and servants, which proves to be...ill-advised from a production standpoint, let's say.

And look, I love the concept, but the character choices themselves are just weird in a lot of cases, pulling from all over the franchise. You've got a Dead Apostle master, multiple servants that are more "conceptual" than actual characters, capital-G Gods, and major roles go to background characters from stuff like Fate/Zero and Case Files¹. But the show is just not capable of handling this many characters at once. True Rider is by far the most egregious example, whose master is never once mentioned and she herself shows up for a single scene in which she interrupts a fight between two other servants, but even the pairs who DO get regular screen time are rarely together - True Archer's master might as well not exist, True Assassin is a no-show, and both Fake Rider and their master don't make an appearance until what, episode 12 of 13?

But like a child that doesn't want to put away any of their toys, Ryohgo Narita (the FSF author) refuses to let any of them go and clean up the screentime logjam: by the end of Season 1, only a single master has been eliminated, with a second servant incapacitated (but not actually killed and sent back to the grail). This is obviously less of a big deal given the confirmation of a Season 2, but frankly, I don't think they can actually wrap this up in a second season. The pacing is so slow that three seems far more likely, and given that about half of the 13 pairs are apparently still active as of the final novel (which is due to be published very soon, I hear?), I expect to be vindicated pretty quickly. Say what you will about the "route" method employed by stuff like Fate/Stay Night, but at least that let them zero in on just a couple important characters, while the others can be quickly killed off with minimal consequences. It's okay! They'll get to be the star in another route instead.

Despite all of this, I should say that I still liked it...for what it is, at least. In discussion with some friends after finishing S1, it became clear that part of the appeal of FSF (depending on how charitable one wants to be) was the idea of "continuity porn" - how those same weird servant and master ideas that FSF uses actually validate the older fans and the theorycrafting they were doing 20 years ago when no one had ever heard of FSN and Tsukihime. This, to be clear, is not me. I am a (comparatively) newer Fate fan, and had never played anything other than FGO prior to the Tsukihime Remake and FSN/FHA remasters. From my perspective, it looks a lot more like it's in danger of tipping over into Ready Player One: Fate Edition territory, depending on whether or not it manages to stick the landing. I suppose we'll find out soon enough.

Ghost in the Shell

Yeah, the 1996 one. We live in a future world where brains can be scanned and digitized to be put into cybernetic bodies - which in turn means those brains (and bodies) can be hacked, leading all kinds of bad news. This is further complicated by an artificial intelligence that claims to be sentient, leading to the usual collection of questions about whether or not a machine can truly become sentient, or what even separates AI from humans when most of them are (at least partially, some entirely) just brains in a robot body. I'd be lying if I said I didn't find it at least a little trite, but such is the fate of a foundational story in any medium - there's been 30 years of cyberpunk stories that have come since, and it's not hard to see where they could go with this (and probably do) in the subsequent movies and shows.

The animation quality definitely shows its age a little (most notably in the audio, where I had to crank my soundbar up from 20% to almost 50% to hear fucking anything), but pretty much everything that isn't a technical flaw still holds up 30 years later. The "turn of the century" computer graphics and animation are quaint in a way that makes me smile, and I admit, I will be a little sad when they are inevitably updated for later adaptations and releases. The music wasn't anything to write home about, but I did dig the chanting themes, and the movie as a whole still has the juice. It's a hell of a vibe and I will definitely watch at least the second movie, though we'll see where we go from there.

Died Again, Mr. Detective?

Alright, I said I wasn't going to start anything until I knocked some other stuff off the list, but I do love a good mystery and the premise didn't immediately turn me away, so why not give it a quick vibe check? Our main character, Outsuki Sakuya, is a high-schooler and detective-in-training, taking on cases in lieu of his father (an actual, famous detective: Outsuki Tatsuya). He is joined (and kept in check) by his big titty assistant/girlfriend Lilithea, and together the two of them are worth at least one actual detective, right?

After a brief introduction to the pair, the show wastes little time in getting down to brass tacks: they're tasked with boarding a cruise ship and tailing a movie producer who's suspected of cheating on his wife. Along the way, Sakuya meets an up-and-coming actress who asks for his help in tracking down a lost cat, leading him to a cargo bay where he discovers a hanging corpse. After a brief look around, he finds what appears to be the victim's phone, but before he can turn it on, he finds himself being stabbed through the neck. But wait! Everything's okay, because it turns out that our boy is secretly immortal and will eventually come back to life, even if he's killed in the line of duty. This appears to be the show's big twist: he gets in over his head, gets killed, and then comes back with new information and is now able to solve the case.

Or at least, that's how it would go under any competent writer, but that's clearly not what we have here. The actual killer is someone that we saw for five seconds in episode 1 and spoke to once in episode 2 before the big reveal, and the motive has a absolutely nothing to do with anything that was going on with the cruise itself. I'll cut them a little slack on account of only having 45 minutes of runtime to work with, but crime procedurals can and regularly do much better with their material, so they don't even really have that excuse. Given that the rest of the season also seems to be divided into a series of two-episode mysteries, I don't think we need to look into this one much further.

Progress: S1E2 and no plans to continue

Akira

Another sci-fi classic movie that primarily operates on vibes, this one has aged much more poorly than GITS, I feel. Going in, I knew literally nothing about it aside from the Akira Slide - an iconic visual sequence that's been copied for the last 35 years (one of many from this movie, it turns out) - and even less about the graphic novel that the movie was adapted from. And if I'm being honest? About 45 minutes in, I texted my friend (who is much more versed in anime than I am) that the movie really wasn't doing anything for me. This isn't to disparage the movie's visual quality - the art style isn't really to my taste, but the actual animation is fantastic and there's a number of scenes where my "what the fuck" reaction was equal parts "What the hell is happening on screen" and "holy shit that was a slick animation of constructing an arm out of machine parts."

The actual story being told is kind of a mess though. It spends the first 15 or so minutes focusing on a biker gang lead by a kid named Kaneda who has this super-cool motorcycle and is a bit of a skirt chaser, only to throw most of that story in the garbage when one of the gang members, Tetsuo, has an accident when he nearly crashes into a small child with psychic powers. Both the child and Tetsuo are taken by the government for testing, Kaneda accidentally falls in with an anti-government group in his search for Tetsuo, and the Colonel (who is responsible for both public safety in Neo Tokyo and is the one behind the psychic child experiments) at one point initiates a coup-de-etat against the Executive Council because the people are slaves of capitalism and only he (with his strong soldier mindset) can properly keep the peace when Tetsuo escapes from the experimental facility.

From there, the movie just kinda devolves into Tetsuo fucking up the city in his search for Akira (the original(?) super-powered psychic child) as everyone from the Government to Kaneda attempts to stop him with minimal success. The orbital cannon scene is wild both for completely coming out of nowhere and being resolved just as quickly when Tetsuo just flies into space(????) and destroys the satellite. There's the aforementioned mechanical arm which is slick as fuck, and quickly pivots to the body horror stuff as Tetsuo undergoes some real T-Virus mutation shit. The individual pieces here are all really cool! I can see how, in 1989, someone whose frame of reference for animation was stuff like Don Bluth or The Little Mermaid would have their mind blown. I just...don't think the movie is very good? I'm glad I saw it for historical purposes, but I definitely would not be checking out any follow-ups, if they existed.