Bocchi the Rock Review and Travel Anecdote
I recently watched 'Bochi the Rock', and had a vaguely interesting experience with it, so I thought I'd drop a brief review. Overall, the show was very fun, and I think it sits at a high 7, low 8. The OP and ED were fairly decent, but slightly disappointing for a show with music at its focus. Also disappointing was the amount of times that instead of showing a scene of them actually playing and practicing music, it hard cut to them sustaining the last note of the song. I understand that having realistic looking playing sequences every episode would likely be a lot of work, so I didn't ding them too hard for that. Last criticism is their use of a Japanese voice actor trying to sound like an American speaking Japanese. I guess this is something that I have somehow not been exposed to until now, because this is the second show in a very short span I've watched with that.
The show's good points are its comedy, its accuracy, and cast. Its comedy was consistently landing with me personally, they had a good balance with their recurring gags, they did the random 4-koma manga bits with no logical connection to the story well, and overall I stayed laughing. Its music scenes were accurate to my perception, not to say I couldn't have missed something (though that at least says it overcame my willing suspension of disbelief). The voice actors and main characters were all pleasant and had a good blend. I quite liked nearly every character that appeared on screen much more than once.
It is certainly no K-On, but I don't think that should be held against a show. It's shorter, so of course there was less emotional build, and not everyone should be expected to make a masterpiece.
Finally, with that out of the way, we can get to why I wanted to write about this show. They had a scene in which Bocchi wanted to buy a new guitar, and logically went to Ochanomizu. Now, I was immediately fully engaged at that point, having been there before on a trip. I was visiting the Orthodox cathedral in the area, and happened to meander around until I hit a street that was covered with music shops. Looking for souvenirs, I went into every store looking for the most anime guitar strap I could find. Unfortunately, I didn't find a satisfactorily anime guitar strap, and ended up settling on a very Japanese guitar strap (a cartoon dog saying random things about exercise). It was a very cool shop, making up for its lack of 2D floorspace with lots of different levels.
All that to say, this means I was screaming the entire time when Bocchi and friends entered a guitar shop and it was not just an accurate (as in it was probably just a photo with a drawn effect on it, so minor ding there) rendering of not just any guitar shop, but the very shop I actually bought the guitar strap from.
As far as blog updates, I'm cooking up a 'Do It Yourself!' review in which I'm gonna play around with some HTML (I want to try to make a box with tabs). It seems that writing anime reviews is actually harder than I thought, so I likely won't do many of these, but I'm trying to keep my mind engaged with both writing and web design. I will likely keep putting out random things like this.
Last promo, make sure you check out my single, PUT A LINK HERE. It's a nice lo-fi bop, hope you enjoy.