Myriad Colors: Phantom World - A Phantom of a Show

Myriad Colors: Phantom World is an anime by acclaimed studio Kyoto Animation, aired in the Winter 2016 season. It came out to mixed reception, with many praising it for its beautiful visuals and interesting premise, whilst a large amount of detractors point to its archetypal characters and meandering storytelling. It's currently sitting at a 7.00 average score on MyAnimeList, with 107,953 users listing it as seen.

Myriad Colors: Phantom World follows Haruhiko, a student in a high school where the students can do what essentially amounts to magic due to an incident at a research facility which caused humans to become able to perceive supernatural entities known as phantoms. He's part of the phantom hunting club, where students are rewarded in coupons and goods for tracking down and dealing with phantoms that inconvenience or endanger people. He works as a team with fellow student and local hotblooded tsundere Mai. Unfortunately, their team has the worst performance record in the school. Yep, Myriad Colors: Phantom World is a magic battle high school show, which anyone who's as much as glanced in the direction of a seasonal anime chart in the past five years will tell you is not exactly an original idea. 

As you'd expect from this kind of show, we need to populate the protagonists' team with a variety of girls, so that there's at least one girl that every weeb might want to buy a figurine or body-pillow of. Because their team is bad, Haruhiko and Mai set out to recruit new members. These include airheaded ojou Reina (who is fascinated with food, because Tsumugi from K-On! was popular and she was an ojou who was fascinated with food), ice queen-type tsundere Koito (who looks like Rei Ayanami of Evangelion fame got a dye-job), loli Kurumi (of the shy, teddy-bear wielding variety, not the sassy precocious child variety), and cancer on wings Ruru (an annoyingly cheerful genki-girl of a fairy who doubles as the show's mascot). I'd usually go into more detail about these characters, but anyone familiar with these tropes can probably write these characters exactly as they're portrayed in the show just based on the above.

I want to make clear that whilst all my problems with Myriad Colors: Phantom World stem from the fact that it makes use of overworn tropes and cliches, that sole fact is not the problem. Plenty of anime I really like is also very unimaginative and uncreative in its premise and characters. My favorite pure shonen action series, even after several re-watches, is A Certain Scientific Railgun, and it's full to the brim of stuff you'll find in a million other shows. In fact, the cast of the two shows is not at all incomparable, with several of the archetypes maping straight onto each other. My problem with Myriad Colors: Phantom World is that it does nothing interesting with the very basic magic battle high school framework it sets up. It's even more frustrating because Myriad Colors: Phantom World actually has a host of opportunities to do something like that, but never actually goes ahead and makes the jump.

The thing that should have made Phantom World special is evident from the very first minute of its first episode, which actually has a massive amount of promise. The episode opens with Haruhiko and Ruru explaining a series of optical illusions, and for the first quarter of its runtime plays with its characters' perception of the environment around them. The first scene involves Haruhiko talking to the camera about all the ways the human brain is unreliable in processing information, and how easily we can be tricked. This, combined with the premise of phantoms - supernatural beings that humanity only became aware of due to a virus leak from a major corporation  affecting everyone's brains - should have made for a fascinating ride. After all, phantoms are constantly shown to be affecting the environment around them in ways that you'd perceive even if you couldn't see the phantom. An action scene in the first episode involves a phantom destroying school property, which becomes something of a minor plot point - how come they didn't do this stuff before humanity became conscious of them? Perhaps humanity's awareness of phantoms is the only reason they exist at all, reality itself buckling in order to accomodate the complexity of the human brain, or maybe phantoms are being disturbed by humanity's awareness of them somehow. Perhaps being supernatural beings, they're distorted to fit human perception, and become violent and destructive as a result.

These are only a few of the directions that the show could've taken its premise. Note that you absolutely don't need to make this show a heavy and deep exploration of this stuff for it to be satisfying. I'm not asking for the show to abandon it's nature as a light-hearted action series and become a deep think-piece. A Certain Scientific Railgun questions its premise - the development of supernatural abilities in children through scientific means - simply by having its villains be people who either believe in the purposes of Academy City too much or too little, as well as including characters struggle with the fact that they're unable to become superpowered. It makes for a satisfying enough exploration of its theme - whether science can or should go too far - whilst keeping the focus of the show squarely on fun action scenes involving creative, vaguely scientific, powers. There's a common and highly harmful misconception out there that making a story be "about" something means the story has to be intelligent and fully dedicated to that something, abandoning fun and action. There's nothing farther from the truth. Railgun is "about" where, if anywhere, the limits of science should be, yet it's still a decidedly dumb show that's mainly there to provide explosions for you to stare at.

However, Phantom World completely ignores any of the interesting ideas inherent to its central conceit. Every couple of episodes there'll be a throwaway line that hints at something interesting about some of the series' supernatural concepts, like the drama club phantom in episode 9, who is said to start living as a regular human after the episode is done despite everyone's memories of her being implanted fakes, a throwaway that gestures in an interesting direction and is completely discarded. Instead, it chooses to be more of an episodic series, starting off with a character spotlight episode for each of its main cast and then doing a few one-off stories. There's nothing inherently wrong with this approach either, but remember my complaint from earlier: None of the characters are anything beyond the most basic version of that character archetype. This may be a bit unfair, as every character spotlight episode does have at least something interesting to say about their focus. Namely, every single one of them has one factoid about their history that you wouldn't expect - like Mai thinking of herself as a lonely and shy kid as a child - that has no bearing on the character in the modern day whatsoever, and seems to be there entirely so the author can point at it and say "See, I subverted the trope!". There's nothing really wrong about these episodes, but they all go pretty much the exact way you'd expect them to. In most instances, as soon as the phantom of the week showed up and it became clear what they represent in terms of the characters' past, I was able to guess almost exactly how the story was going to play out. I will give props to one of the character spotlight episodes though - Ruru's. Despite the character being the biggest waste of airtime and one of the biggest annoyances I've had to suffer through in recent history, her episode was actually fairly nice and had a few heartwarming moments. Part of it is that stories where people are honest about how much their friends mean to them when they think they're not around always get me, but it's still got a fairly clever and unique setup to it. I still hate Ruru, but she's responsible for the only episode in the show that I never paused to check the remaining runtime.

The series then moves on to just sort of general episodic stories. A hilarious aside I want to point out here is the evolution of Koito's power level throughout the show. Presented at first as an overpowered loner who can easily solo phantoms so powerful that the rest of the core cast combined couldn't deal with them, the show spends a few minutes an episode finding a way to nerf her (usually by contriving a reason for her to lose her voice, since her power requires her to sing), before going "fuck it" and just retconning her power into being a fire attack that's only highly effective against grass monsters as soon as the character spotlights are over and it's no longer OK for her to not be part of the plot halfway through every single episode.

At any rate, this stretch is the worst part of the show, as even the vague feeling that we were getting to know the characters disappears, and the show loses any sense of purpose. Instead, every episode involves the characters fighting a usually uninteresting monster of the week. Due to the show's light-hearted tone (read: the fact that the show refuses to have anything of consequence happen), these episodes are devoid of any sense of stakes or danger. In theory this'd mean that we should be free to just enjoy watching the characters beat up the enemy, but a baffling amount of the episodes actually don't center around a big superpowered showdown, instead having the characters being forced to solve some sort of problem -get out of this magic house, undo this mysterious curse, etc. Because pretty much the only trait that all the characters actually have in common is that they're dumb as bricks, the solution is usually reached by accident (and often is made clear to the viewer way before the characters realize it). So this part of the show is pretty much just watching a bunch of morons you don't really care about fail to solve a puzzle you know for sure they'll solve after banging their head against it for about fifteen minutes - anyone who's watched gaming videos on youtube will know how frustrating an experience this is.

So up to this point, Phantom World is a series of nothing. It squanders an interesting premise, and instead chooses to explore characters that it refuses to flesh out and spend its time spinning its wheels without anything of consequence happening. It tries to go for something interesting in its final two episodes, which are the only two to really connect and form a two-part story, which involve a particularly powerful phantom posing as Haruhiko's mother. The problem is all the development we've had for Haruhiko's mother is that in Episode 3 he mentions that she left his father years ago, and a slight implication of him being hurt by her absence in the episode where he turns into a child. Episode 12 has her show up out of nowhere, and expects us to just be fully invested in their relationship, and it just doesn't work in the slightest. I'd dare say that if I'd been primed to care about Haruhiko's mother at all, I would've loved (or at least liked) the final two parter. The villain is legitimately threatening, the scenes of Haruhiko's communal life with his mother are pleasant, and I'm a sucker for stories about the power of friendship making people band together against impossible odds. Unfortunately, after 11 episodes of nothing happening, I was mostly keen to see the show end, and my reaction to the cliffhanger ending of Episode 12 wasn't excitement, it was annoyance that the show was an episode longer than I thought it was. 

Here's the disappointing truth about Phantom World: My standards for this type of show aren't exactly high. My favorite entry in the genre is A Certain Scientific Railgun, a show that barely makes MyAnimeList's top 1000, and I've greatly enjoyed shows similar to Phantom World despite large flaws, stuff like Keijo!!!!!!!! or MM!. Perhaps most tellingly, I have a soft spot for Dog Days, a show that's similarly populated with cardboard cutout characters and with a story that (in season 2, which is the best season of Dog Days and I will fight anyone who thinks otherwise) has literally zero stakes. I'm more than willing to consume some shonen garbage every now and again and have it pass through my brain without much impact. Even as that type of show, Phantom World fails me, because even motherfucking Dog Days , the epitome of bland and generic shonen, has something to distinguish itself from the crowd: It's set in a world where wars are big Wipeout type competitions where no one gets seriously injured. It briefly looks at what a world like that would look like, and even considers the impact that someone trying to have an actual violent war would make. It's the most cursory of glances, and the answers it comes up with are super uninteresting (and just plain wrong when it comes to the violent war one), but that stuff is legitimately there. Add to that the fact that the absolute lack of stakes makes the action scenes able to put characters out of comission at a whim, making them surprisingly unpredictable, and you've actually got a disposable little action romp with a pinch of heart. Myriad Colors: Phantom World really just has nothing. There's not a character that can't be entirely and accurately described using TV Tropes articles, there isn't a single episode that's interesting and innovative, there's nothing challenging. 

I watched all 13 episodes of Phantom World over the course of two days. Part of it was that both days I had 5 hour gaps in my schedule with nothing to do, but even on days like that I don't typically get through as much of a show. Even when I'm marathoning a show with the intention of finishing it off quickly, I'll often pause for two to five minutes between episodes to consider what I just saw, or to just let my brain cool down. After particularly big moments I'll sometimes stop watching for an hour or two, just to process the new information and let it sink in. I never stopped between episodes of Phantom World unless I had to do something, since at no point was there anything about the show I needed to process. This show is completely disposable. It doesn't challenge the mind in any way. In that way, it's a complete failure in the artistic sense. Art has to be challenging in some way, it's got to change your brain somehow, be it provoking thought or some kind of emotion. Not everything has to be 2001: A Space Odyssey, but even stuff like MM!, which I'd argue is actively meant to be consumed in a few minutes and forgotten, has some interesting energy to it that makes you feel something as you're watching it. The only thing I can say about any given episode Phantom World is that it's a better way to spend 23 minutes than not doing anything. 

It's sad, really, because it would have been so simple to make Phantom World worthwhile. This is Kyoto Animation, after all, and as such this show is genuinely absolutely gorgeous. But it doesn't mean anything when it doesn't have anything going on. Just anything, any sort of nudge in any direction other than bland, generic mediocrity would likely have elevated Phantom World to something that I'd have left feeling pretty content. The way it is right now, I finished Phantom World but two days ago, and already I'm struggling to remember anything that happened in it. I'm about as able to remember things that happened in Phantom World as I am things that happened in Dog Days, a light and fluffy show I watched three years ago now. Phantom World is disposable mush, and many of its defenders say that's all it needs to be. That's fair, but check this out. Here's a list of feel-good disposable mush shonen anime that actually have something worthwhile about them, and this is just from the limited number of shows I've watched:

Dog Days

Keijo!!!!!!!!

Little Witch Academia

MM!

Space Patrol Luluco

This is excluding anything that has any significant dark moments to it, such as No Game No Life, or moments that I could see making someone sad even for a little bit, like lost matches in sports anime like Baby Steps. It also excludes stuff with bigger ideas, even if they're pushed far into the background, like Kill la Kill and Tengen Tonpa Gurren Lagann, or shows where the action is visceral and/or stressful, like the A Certain franchise and Attack on Titan. I'm also excluding shows where there's legitimate bad blood between certain characters, like Haikyuu!!. It's the incredibly specific genre of feel-good, non-threatening, non-stressful, purely dumb shonen anime. Even if you absolutely need dumb feel-good action to put in your brain, I've come up with five shows from the limited selection of shows that I've watched to completion that manage to be that and still have some substance, some interesting characters, or just something that makes them worth your time. Even slightly expand that very narrow definition, and I can double or triple the amount of shows I can list. Give me full knowledge of every anime in existence and I absolutely guarantee I can make the length of that narrow list reach triple digits with no problem.

Myriad Colors: Phantom World is not the worst show I've ever seen. I've watched true garbage like Garzey's Wing, The Asterisk War and Say "I Love You". It is, however, the last show I'd recommend to anyone. I'd legitimately recomend someone watch something irredemeably awful like The Asterisk War over Phantom World. There's nothing to be gained from it. Myriad Colors: Phantom World is the truest time-waster I've ever seen, a piece of nothing that shows up, eats up to 13 23-minute chunks of your limited time on Earth, and disappears, leaving nothing behind. Bad shows leave you angry or bored, they leave an impression and maybe teach you something about what makes art not work. Phantom World can't do that, there's nothing really wrong with it. The thing is, there's nothing right with it either, nothing to justify spending any time on it at all. I keep saying that nothing that Phantom World does is really the problem with it, but it fails to do anything to make those not-problems be not-problematic. Railgun's generic characters were OK because it put them in interesting situations. Kill la Kill's nonsensical plot was OK because it turned the intensity up to 11. Hell, K-On!, a show by the same student as Phantom World also had a yawn-worthy premise and completely archetypal characters, but it's my favorite anime because of the completely perfect character writing it displays, turning its archetypes into fully fleshed out and believable teenage girls.  Myriad Colors: Phantom World is worthless in the best way possible, a blob of grey flavorless odorless goop that just hangs out and exists. It's sort of scary, to be honest, how a show with such high production values, colorful artwork and interesting core conceit can be lacking any sort of personality like this, despite the fact that the crew that worked on it is massively talented.

Final Rating: 4/10

A 5/10 may seem more appropriate given its near perfect mediocrity, but to me a 5/10 implies a lack of recommendation either way, and I strongly suggest avoiding Phantom World. In a bizarre way, Phantom World is such a perfect example of a 5/10 that it actually backslides into a lower rating.

A Tour of Sunnydale - Prophecy Girl

Sometimes tour guides just mysteriously disappear for a few months for no adequately explained reason. That's a thing that just happens as you take A Tour of Sunnydale.

Prophecy Girl is the twelfth and final episode of the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was both written and directed by showrunner Joss Whedon, in his first directorial credit on the show and third writing credit. His other writing credits came in the opening two parter, a solid pair of episodes. Prophecy Girl is ranked 13th on The Phi Phenomenon, making it the most popular episode we've seen, beating out the previous top dog Angel at number 24.

Prophecy Girl is the first instance of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I truly love. This is the first story in Buffy that's completely impossible to pull off if you think of the show episodically. In a lot of ways, Prophecy Girl is the culmination of all the disparate things that Season 1 had going for it. Though it's a markedly darker and more mature take on the series, Prophecy Girl still sits comfortably alongside things like Nightmares or Witch, due to its unrelenting, unflinching focus on its characters above everything else.

Unlike some of the weaker episodes of Season 1, like I Robot, You Jane, Prophecy Girl never lets itself just become the story it's telling. Every single beat of the episode is there in service of the exploration of Buffy, Giles, Xander and Willow. From the surprisingly comfortable and homey beginning to the tense end battle, Prophecy Girl is concerned first and foremost with ensuring its characters both are consistent with who they were before and keep moving forward and evolving. Our main four all go through transformative and character-defining moments here.

Buffy's arc is by far the most simple to see, as she goes from the girl she's been throughout most of the first season to the slayer she'll be throughout the rest of the show. Whilst her dual identity as both regular girl and super-powered slayer will never stop being a core part of both her and the show's identity, it's here that the two parts of her stop being in conflict. The moment in the library, where she overhears Giles and Angel talking about how she's destined to fight the Master and loose, is tremendously emotionally affecting -largely due to some possibly career-best acting from Sarah Michelle Gellar-  but it's also the last big conflict between Buffy the girl and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Once she sees Willow's distress at what happens in the AV room, Buffy the girl never acts up throughout the rest of the show. From now on, it's Buffy the Vampire Slayer who truly is the main character of the show, and the girl in her only comes out in moments when she doesn't need to be the Slayer any more. It's a tremendously powerful portrayal of both the end of Buffy's childhood and the start of her adulthood. Metaphorically, one could say that the Master did kill Buffy - but just the part of her that wasn't willing to accept the responsibility of her duty as a Slayer.

Buffy is obviously central to this episode, but that doesn't mean the rest of the cast is static. Giles has a beautiful arc where he quietly accepts that Buffy is more than just his Slayer - she's someone he loves and is willing to die to protect. It's not a showy arc, and it's played in the background to Buffy's evolution through the episode, as Giles' realization is completely motivated by her actions, but it's touching nonetheless. This is some of the tenderness that I felt was missing from the character through most of the season. Xander, similarly, accepts Buffy as a friend, and gives up on any pretentions that she'll have romantic interest in him, realizing just how much their friendship truly means to him. I mean, that does happen in this episode, but it's cut short by the fact that he'll be back to being creepy and annoying over his crush on her in the next season. For now, though, I'm surprised at how final Xander accepting Buffy as dear a friend, nothing more and nothing less, felt in Prophecy Girl, an effective and very clear finalization of his arc throughout the season.

Willow's arc through the episode is by far the quietest and such hardest to see, but it's there. For the first half, we're shown her as frail and lacking confidence, but as truly kind-hearted, to the point where she kind of lets her feelings be trampled over. When Xander is rejected by Buffy and invites Willow to the prom as his backup, however, her frailty disappears, she rejects him, respecting herself enough to not allow herself to be used this way. From here, she gains confidence, and manages to keep up - and even get along - with Cordelia until the two find the remains of the massacre in the AV room. At this point, Willow's self-control and newly gained is dashed, and the state of utter dread and despair that Buffy finds her in is what motivates Buffy to sacrifice herself in order to try to stop the Master.  But Willow comes back to help and fight alongside the others, finally reafirmed in her own worth as she proves invaluable in the ensuing battle. Prophecy Girl is the origin story of the quiet self-confidence that will lead Willow to evolve from here all the way to the end of the show, and that makes her my favorite character in the show.

Even removing all this context, however, Prophecy Girl is a solid piece of writing, a compelling story with a supremely engaging third act and a satisfying climax. Prophecy Girl is funny and moving in the way that only Buffy is. This is the first true triumph for the series, a phenomenal piece of work. It's got so many fantastic little moments, too - how cute Willow is at the start as she listens to Xander prepare his confession to Buffy and she pretends it's to her, the fantastic way Giles is disheveled and nervous throughout the episode, the fantastic moment when Joyce gives Buffy the dress, the Master's ham, Xander saying he's going to lie down and listen to country music and then actually doing it, the amazing imagery of Buffy in the leather jacket and white dress with a crossbow...

Here's ranking and rating: The ranking is of all episodes of Buffy and Angel I've watched so far, with 1 being the best one, and the rating is out of ten in context of the quality of the show: I'm essentially trying to decide what 10% of quality of that particular show the episode belongs in. Because both shows are so good, this means negative ratings are not neccesarily a diss on the episode -  I just think it's one of the show's weaker ones.

This goes at the top of the list, no contest.

Ranked List

Rating: 9/10
Among the best of Buffy, but this show is so fantastic that even this level of quality is not near the top. I expect this to come in at around number 20 by the end of the show's run. 

New Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony Review - Simply Brilliant

It's impossible to properly discuss New Danganronpa V3 without massively spoiling it. Even that right there consitutes a minor spoiler, but it's one I can't not have. As such, I'll divide this review into two sections: A general overview of why the game is good, and deeper discussion of its intricacies. I'll do my best to keep the first section spoiler-free, but I implore you, if you have even the slighest interest in this game, go play it, even before reading the first section, as even there I'll have to spoil some bare minimum things. Even if you don't, even if you haven't played the first two Danganronpa games, go do it. This might be the finest series in all of gaming, and I can't recommend them enough. Now, without further ado:

Section 1 - General Overview

New Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony is, as the title would suggest, the third installment in the Danganronpa series. As with the previous two, it follows a group of sixteen students who are trapped together - this time in a school again, back to series origins after Danganronpa 2's tropical island setting - and forced to participate in a killing game. If you kill someone, you're allowed to leave. The catch is, if you're caught, you're killed too. If you're not caught, everyone else gets killed instead. The player controls one of the students, who is forced to investigate the murders and become a prominent figure in the so-called Class Trials - group discussions where everyone puts their head together to try and figure out who the murderer is. Like previously, the students are all the best at some particular (and usually pretty obscure and specific) field, being called the "Ultimate" at that field. Talents in this game range from Ultimate Pianist, through Ultimate Entomologist to Ultimate Robot.

The gameplay loop is largely unchanged from the previous two games. The game is divided into chapters, with each chapter having three distinct parts - "Daily Life", where the story unfolds in typical visual novel style and the group learns more about the mysteries of the school, then "Deadly Life", where the player must roam the school investigating the murder and collecting clues, and finally the Class Trial itself, which resemble the trial sequences from the Ace Attorney games with an added element of action as you must point out contradictions in other people's reasoning, all while dealing with the changing mood in the room and navigating the situation accordingly.

Both Daily Life and Deadly Life contain walking about sections, where you navigate the school in first person. Much like the previous two games, they're both pretty scripted. Whilst there's often additional dialogue to be found if you roam about a little, there's only ever one place to move the story forward, and it's pretty obvious where. Following the formula for the hybrid detective/lawyer game that Ace Attorney proved works bizarrely well, there's no possibility of missing clues during the investigation sections either, which drains some of the charm away.

Still, the real trick here - as Ace Attorney proved - is that the writing has to be strong enough to make you forget this. The murders need to be set up in such a way that you constantly feel like you're discovering something significant as you're investigating, but there still need to be enough bizarre small clues that seem insignifcant but make no sense at the moment to make the big moments of realization in the trials work well. Danganronpa V3 mostly suceeds at this, though a couple cases (3 and 5 for me) become a little too obvious a little too fast, and it takes the characters a while to catch up.

The meat of the game as a game comes in the Class Trials though, and these are also pretty much unchanged from the previous two games. Most of your time will be step in what the game calls Nonstop Debate, where the characters talk at each other, presenting what they think happened in the murder. You've got a few pieces of evidence out of the ones you collected to choose from, and you must match them with highlighted statements in order to either contradict them or agree with them. This section is basically a much easier version of the cross-investigation sections of Ace Attorney - it works basically the same way, but you're only allowed to present a small portion of your evidence, and only at a few of the statements. The catch is people talk fast, and you have to respond quickly at the right statement (Otherwise you must wait for the whole conversation to loop again) as opposed to having unlimited time in Ace Attorney. It's overall considerably easier than Ace Attorney, but it makes the Trials feel much more fast paced and fluid, and puts more emphasis on the unfolding story.

This is backed up by a suite of minigames, which represent different occurences in the Trial. Someone takes particular offense at your line of reasoning? You enter a small minigame where you have to cut down their arguments with the correct piece of evidence like it's a sword duel. Hysteria overtakes the room? You have to listen to several people talk at once, and figure out who to focus on to find the statement you must contradict in order to calm everyone down. The room is split in half over a particularly contentious point of the murder? There's a minigame where you have to figure out how to best organize your side of the room to convince the others by matching the key words of their arguments to those of the opposition. Someone's out of arguments and they're just trying to shout you down? You play a rhythm game where you shoot down all their yelling. You have to think particularly hard about something? You either play a game where you're mining for the answer in your mind, one where you're creating a key word from scrambled letters, or one where you're driving a taxi through Vegas and picking up hookers with the right answers floating over their heads. That last one may be a bit weird.

These minigames have differing levels of effectiveness, but you'll rarely be playing any of them more than twice in the same trial, so even the worst ones (like the rhythm game) are pretty painless, whilst the best ones (like the newly introduced Debate Scrum, the one where the room is split in half) are really fun. In general, they help keep variety up in Trials, and do a good job of making you feel like you're using a big skillset in order to overcome more obstacles than just having to figure out who the murderer is. It really does lend a dynamic feel to the trial, and help give the other characters in the room personality as they feel their involvement in the trail is as important as yours. In a way, it's more of a lawyer game than Ace Attorney, as pure hard logic won't get you to the end of the trial - you've also got to be able to manage the people in the room with you. Like the two previous games, class trials are a joy to play, with the mysteries being cleverly written and full of twists, and fairly hard to guess before you get at least partially into the corresponding trial.

Also back is Free Time - the small choice you do have during Daily Life, where you're allowed to choose who to spend time with when the plot's not advancing, which has been slightly improved but is still as flawed as ever. The problems with it in previous games were twofold. First off, there were barely any instances of it, which cut players from seeing many of the various stories told by hanging out with a character several times. Also, certain characters wouldn't give you scenes for hanging out with them until a certain point in the story, but would let you try, which not only would waste a valuable Free Time chance with no warning, but would also be spoilerific, as not being able to hang out with a character yet was a sure indication that they were neither the victim nor the killer of that trial. The first of these two is alleviated - you now get five Free Times per chapter, up from the three from the previous games, which means you can exactly complete one characters' little story in a chapter by only spending time with them, without being interrupted by a massively long Trial and all the story that comes with that. The second is super not, and I managed to massively spoil one of the Trials for myself that way, as well as wasting several Free Time slots. I don't understand why that feature is still there, it seems like putting in added work just to make the game worse. Surely it'd be easier to just allow all Free Time to happen at once, unless there's a plot reason for it not to (like a character isn't talking to you, for instance). Still, Free Time is a welcome addition to the game, letting you learn a bit more about the characters you like the most, and helping mix in a bit of interacitivity to the largely uniteractive Daily Life sections, where all you do otherwise is walk to the next plot-relevant location.

Now for the part that those spoilers will force me to drastically cut down: The story is good. Once again, the sixteen students have wildly different personalities, full of cartoonish quirks, and there's plenty of goofing around to be done with them. Everyone gets a fully fleshed out and unique personality and look, even the people who die early on, which in addition to making the world feel more vibrant prevents one from metatextually figuring out who stays around for long. Danganronpa carries on its trademark combination of wacky humor with genuinely gruesome, disturbing and touching scenes, which only makes the mood feel that much more bizarre and unique. Once more, the game largely consists of a drip-feed of information about the larger plot which the characters slowly figure out whilst dealing with interpersonal drama and the constant string of murders, which are often tragically motivated.

This isn't the stuff that makes Danganronpa V3 truly precious (that I need to give myself the freedom of spoilers to discuss), but it is an integral part of making it a great experience. Everything works here. The gameplay, whilst simplistic, works fantastically in conjuction with the plot. Mysteries that you want to solve abound, both in the short scale in the form of the murders, and in the long scale in the form of what exactly is going on and why this death game is happening. Characters evolve and grow, jokes become crucial and sometimes legitimately disturbing plot points. Danganronpa V3, even without the stuff that truly makes it tick is an incredibly good game, with pretty fine-tuned gameplay and a hell of a fun story. I'd be recommending it even without the stuff that I'm going to explore in...

Section 2 - Spoilers

Last chance to leave! I mean it! Full on spoilers! You're robbing yourself of a great experience by reading this! If you want to play the game, go do it now. You should, by the way.



The original Danganronpa was, all in all, a fairly straightforward little story: A death game happened for mysterious reasons, you got information about why along the way, and at the very end it all clicked together in a satisfying way. On the way there it played with your expectations a little bit (especially in the victim of the first case, who was set up to be a major character), but it was largely exactly the type of thing you'd expect from a death game story. Then Super Danganronpa 2 came along, which was set up to be the same thing, except it played off your expectations from the first game, mysteriously mirroring certain parts of it to an uncanny extent, but pulling off curveballs at the last moment. The reveal at the end was all the more satisfying for it, because not only did it explain the mysterious events happening in Super Danganronpa 2, but it also worked on the level of a metatextual commentary on the first game. Super Danganronpa 2 had followed just enough of the plot beats from the first game to make you feel like you knew what was going on, only to pull the rug out from under you consistently.

New Danganronpa V3 does a similar thing, with the direct one-to-one comparisons to the first game gone, and a whole new level of meta insanity pushed on top. In the very first case it blows your expectations coming in from the first two games straight out of the water: The Ultimate ???, a talent that always represented a major character up until this point, is the very first to be killed, and your bloody player character is the one who did it. The entire game is built around subverting your expectations this way: Characters trick you into thinking they're going to be important only to suddenly die, all whilst seemingly side gag-characters survive till late in the game. Murders seem incredibly simple and with obvious solutions, only to have been much more complex.

The entire game is just a constant, unending subversion of your expectations in every single regard. Seemingly important clues to the nature of the story turn out to mean nothing, whilst off-handed comments made an hour into the game unravel the plot over thirty hours later.

But, most of all , Danganronpa V3 is beautiful because of its ending, a metatextual clusterfuck where the characters appear to become aware that they're fictional only for you to realize that they're not fictional in our universe, they're fictional within a fictional universe in which the events of the first two Danganronpa games may or may not also be fictional. As such, all the mysteries of the school that have been carefully and precisely built up over the last thirty hours are thrown out of the window. There's no solution, the mastermind was sowing the clues as they went along in order to create an intriguing story. Really, none of the clues were actually real. It's all fiction. The last couple hours of the game are spent investigating why people enjoy Danganronpa the way we do. Is it out of some sadistic wish to see innocent characters die? Is it out of a desire to watch people overcome overwhelming odds? Maybe a combination of the two? What's true is that it's a massive mindfuck, and a joy to read through as more and more insane levels of meta get added on top of each other, creating a joyful and fascinating little tangle. There's a lot here, from the aforementioned self-reflection to an ode to the power of fiction and even a notice that the series is, at the very least, going to take an extended break.

There's also the cockblock aspect. The characters get actively angry at the audience and refuse to give them a satisfying ending, just choosing to allow themselves to be killed to spite us. Between this and the mysteries of the school not being satisfied, the entire ending is designed to feel unfullfilling, and it does its job fantastically. Fortunately, the metatextual mindfuck of the entire thing does make it incredibly satisfying, but not in the way the large majority of the game made you expect it to be. Once again, a fantastic reversal of expectations.

Danganronpa V3 is many things. It's a fantastic death game story. It's a commentary on its own series, and on the risk of a series running its course without ending. It's a meditation on the difference between art and artist. It's a critcism of people's taste in art, and an ode to the power of that exact same art to make the world a better place. Most of all, it's an absolutely phenomenal game that works near perfectly from beginning to end: Great murder mysteries to solve, a phenomenal plotline, and the best character work in the entire Danganronpa series, along with possibly the greatest ending in all of gaming. Fucking play this thing. Please.

10/10, among the greatest games of all time.

A Tour of Sunnydale - Out Of Mind, Out Of Sight

Eerie flute music is a Sunnydale staple, so it'd be a crime not to listen to some as we take A Tour of Sunnydale.

Today, we're taking on Season 1 Episode 11 of Buffy, titled Out of Mind, Out of Sight. The second of the two Buffy scripts written by Ashley Gable & Thomas A. Swyden, Out of Mind, Out of Sight is directed by one-time Buffy director Reza Badiyi, and is ranked 97th on The Phi Phenomenon. The closest episode that's ranked above that we've seen so far is The Puppet Show at 94, and below is Never Kill A Boy On The First Date at 122. This is a marked improvement for Gable and Swyden, whose previous script, I Robot, You Jane, is the second lowest rated Buffy episode of all time, at number 143.

For once, I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with the way things pan out on the big Phi Phenomenon list. Out of Mind, Out of Sight is at the lower end of season 1, but decidedly above the crap episodes of the season. It's probably not going to be the lowest ranked episode that I like in the season, but it's close enough to be somewhat of a dividing line. Instead, this is (ironically enough) a forgettable but solid little episode of television.

I think the big problem with Out of Mind is precisely that. It's not got either any good or bad enough moments to be very entertaining. When watching these episodes I've been taking notes, just little thoughts that cross my mind as I go through. Some of them are realizations about what works or doesn't work in the episode at a larger scale, but most of them are just moments that do or do not work. These help me construct my review, as I'll usually stare at these notes for a couple minutes before starting to write, and look for patterns in them. An episode like The Pack had a lot of moments where I was amused, so that was a funny episode. The Puppet Show had notes on all sorts of things, most of them positive, and I had a lot of notes regarding clever manipulation of my expectation in the plot. Hell, even Never Kill A Boy had a bunch of notes about how nothing worked. All in all, it takes usually a side to a side and a half of paper per episode. Out of Mind took me a quarter of a side.

This doesn't mean that Out of Mind isn't good. It's competent in almost every respect. I stayed engaged the entire way through, and the few notes that I took are all positive. This is the episode that finally makes Cordelia make sense. We finally get to see her as more than the rich mean girl, and realize that she's also going through some stuff. Her bitchy facade is just that, and she's actually smart enough to understand how vapid she is and how unsubstantial her friendships are, but keeps being this way because of a crushing fear of loneliness. It's neat stuff, and it justifies Cordelia's presence in the show. Out of Mind is also kind of unique in how it just subtly puts out this feeling that Buffy is also lonely and kind of depressed, and doesn't neccesarily touch it, just getting it across through the cinematography and acting. It's also cool how the circumstances the characters find themselves in feel more deadly than ever before - particularly Willow, Xander and Giles in the boiler room being gassed.


There's legitimately great stuff in Out of Mind, Out of Sight, but there's just not enough of it. It has a strong central premise, and a fairly well constructed plot, a few decent character beats and that's really about it. In a way, Out of Mind, Out of Sight is a perfect representation of Season 1 as a whole. It's appropriate, with a few shining moments, but largely fairly disposable. When it does shine it's through unexpected character depth and a level of darkness that's surprising for network TV in the 90s.


Here's ranking and rating: The ranking is of all episodes of Buffy and Angel I've watched so far, with 1 being the best one, and the rating is out of ten in context of the quality of the show: I'm essentially trying to decide what 10% of quality of that particular show the episode belongs in. Because both shows are so good, this means negative ratings are not neccesarily a diss on the episode -  I just think it's one of the show's weaker ones.

I start at last week's episode, Nightmares as a comparison. I think this is definitely better, since I wasn't bored for most of the run. Unlike Nightmares, I don't think Out of Mind, Out of Sight is flawed. I look at Angel, and I'm a bit stuck. On the one hand, Angel is more memorable and is legitimately pretty good. On the other, Out of Mind doesn't have the crutch of being pivotal, and it is very similar in quality. It's forgettable, sure, but it's also pretty competent. I think they have a similar amount of high points, but Out of Mind's are higher. As such, I think Out of Mind just edges it out.

Ranked List

Rating: 4/10 this whole block of episodes is roughly at the 4/10 rank, so that's what Out of Mind gets. 

A Tour of Sunnydale - Nightmares

And to your left, Sunnydale's famed kiddy league team. Yes, kiddy league. We don't talk about the l-word league here. Prepare to learn about legal distinction as we take A Tour of Sunnydale.

Nightmares is the name of the tenth episode of Buffy's first season. It was written by David Greenwalt, who so far has written the bad but enjoyable Teacher's Pet and the mediocre but beloved and pivotal Angel, in the third of his eight writer's credits on Buffy. Directing is Bruce Seth Green, who we last saw directing The Pack, in the second of his eight directorial appearances on the show. The Phi Phenomenon ranks Nightmares as the 47th most popular episode of the show, making it the fourth best liked episode of the first season, only seven spots under Welcome to the Hellmouth at number 40.

Once upon a time, I would have roughly agreed with this. Since my very first watch-through of Buffy, I always thought of Nightmares as one of the most solid episodes of the first season. It doesn't feel very much like the thing the show would later become, but it's a good little story decently told. It's also got some depth, telling us more about these characters.

I think most of this is still true, but my God, did Nightmares need to be so goddamn boring? The episode is paced like a lazy turtle who's on a walk to the grocery store to buy milk for tomorrow's breakfast but has a couple hours to kill before it has to do anything anyway and also it's got a broken leg. Whilst the episode does have a few moments of legitimate thematic crunch, like Buffy and Giles' shared fear of her vampirification, and a host of moments that are fantastically emotionally affecting (The first Hank scene, Giles' constrained terror at losing the ability to read) or genuinely hilarious (Xander's nightmare, especially its culimination when he punches out the clown, accentuated by Nick Brendon being just on top of his game this episode), it just takes aaaaaages to get anywhere.

This isn't helped by the fact that, though most of the nightmare sequences are good (there's a few exceptions: Cordelia's one feels like a missed opportunity at some much needed depth, and Willow's one is too cliche to be amusing), the plot surrounding them is pretty thin at best. A spooky kid keeps appearing, and we need to figure out what's wrong. Oh, I guess he's in a comma and generic unspecified magic is happening because Hellmouth. Cool. It's not interesting, and my instinctive dislike for kids on screen makes me fairly annoyed at his "I'm so mystical" shtick: "we've got to hide, that's how it happens" x10. Urgh. The episode gestures at a sort of growth for him at the end: After watching Buffy defeat The Ugly Man in the dream, the kid wakes up, and scolds the coach who beat him into a comma for loosing at baseball, getting rid of his feelings of guilt about loosing a match. Feelings of guilt that we learn about one scene earlier, and which Buffy says a throwaway phrase at him to dispel, which he parots at the coach. There's no crunch there, the kid didn't arc, someone just told him it wasn't his fault and then he believed them.

I really don't have much to say about Nightmares. It's far from a bad episode: It has some of the funnest and most moving moments yet... but it's got an extremely thin plot that 45 minutes is simply too long a time for. As such, nothing actually happens in it for long stretches of time, and we just kind of spin our wheels talking in circles about issues the audience has figured out long ago. Add to that an annoying and cliche take on the creepy kid scenario, and Nightmares is actually kind of a bore to watch.

Here's ranking and rating: The ranking is of all episodes of Buffy and Angel I've watched so far, with 1 being the best one, and the rating is out of ten in context of the quality of the show: I'm essentially trying to decide what 10% of quality of that particular show the episode belongs in. Because both shows are so good, this means negative ratings are not neccesarily a diss on the episode -  I just think it's one of the show's weaker ones.

The immediate comparison for ranking is Angel. It's another episode that I feel gets overrated. Unlike Angel, I originally also really liked Nightmares, and I think I can recognize why: The good bits really are very good. Unfortunately, the rest of it brings it down. I still think I enjoy Nightmares more overall, but it's a close shot. I'm forced to compare with The Harvest, which to me is the quintessential basic Buffy episode, and it's honestly just more tightly constructed and fun. The high points of The Harvest are lower than those of Nightmares, but the overall quality is higher. Nightmares slides into the list at number 5, right between The Harvest and Angel.

Ranked List

Rating: 4/10 just feels right. There's going to be a fairly significant number of worse episodes to come, but not anywhere near as many as I thought there was going to be.

A Tour of Sunnydale - The Puppet Show

Sometimes, even the guide is surprised in the course of taking A Tour of Sunnydale

The Puppet Show is the ninth episode of the first season of Buffy. It's written by Dean Batali & Rob Des Hotel, who we last saw in the truly awful Never Kill A Boy On The First Date, and directed by Buffy newcomer Ellen S. Pressman, who'll leave the show after directing her next episode, the second season's Inca Mummy Girl. It's ranked 94th on The Phi Phenomenon, making it the second highest episode written by Batali & Des Hotel, just two spots under their most popular, the 92nd ranked Phases.

The Puppet Show might be one of the goofiest episodes of Buffy. Whilst not quite as silly as The Pack or something like Bad Eggs or Go Fish, it's weird in a way that the show doesn't really often dable in: through the camp and silliness of its central supernatural conceit: the ever cliche creepy talking puppet. As such, it's kind of a black sheep, since the monster of the week is oddly un-Buffy, which I find makes the community treat it with something approaching resentment. The Puppet Show is stupid in a way that can be pointed at to give Buffy a bad name that the show not only doesn't deserve, but that's not really earned by basically the entire rest of the show.

I'll admit I was guilty of that as well. I'd always thought of The Puppet Show as a solid but supremely silly episode of Buffy. I was wrong. The Puppet Show is legitimately a fantastic episode of television. The cold open alone is brilliant: An extended 5 minute sequence where we get some of the first truly Buffy-ish interactions between the main cast. For the first time in the entire run of the show, the four characters at its heart feel like a group of friends who genuinely enjoy spending time together. Yes, Buffy and co. goof on Giles the entire time, but it's fond poking fun at, and as such it's an absolute joy to behold. There's also the fantastic introduction of Principal Snyder, who is immediately completely present as the over-the-top monster he is. He's mean, he's petty, and he's incredibly fun to be around (at least as a member of the audience). He also gives us the best line of the episode "Kids needs understanding, kids are human beings... that's the kind of wooly-headed liberal thinking that leads to being eaten"

This intro also does a great job of setting up the talent show. Morgan and Sid's act is immediately impressive, and though it's obvious to anyone with a brain that Sid is going to be a living creature, it's set up in such a way that you don't blame the Scoobies for not immediately catching on. There's also the bumbling magician, who is subtly the only new student really introduced, but who spends his time far in the background and doesn't draw atention to himself, making the reveal of his identity as the demon surprisng but not an ass-pull. Also, Cordelia's act. Hilarious.

While the cold open is the real highlight of the episode, the rest of it is no slouch either. There's plenty of hilarious little moments, like the Scooby's investigation montage, and the running gag of the "cut to another character in another location answering the question that just got asked" constantly being interrupted by Cordelia's self-obssesed rambling made me giggle. There's plenty of fantastic lines through the episode, with more of Whedon's signature dialogue style than any other episode so far (even the ones he actually wrote!). I think this might be the funniest episode of Buffy thus far.

The characters are also on top form: Buffy effectively and admirably takes the lead, with Giles and Willow doing their job as investigators in perfect synergy, and Xander has a couple brilliant moments of initiative. The side characters also shine in this episode: Morgan is a brilliantly awkward and creepy character who serves very well to cast suspicion on Sid. When their relationship is revealed this casts Morgan in a positive light just in time for his sudden death to be surprisingly effecting. Sid himself is a great red herring: Of course you expect the creepy puppet to be evil, but it turns out he's good, which only serves to make the episode more confusing and interesting. His constant horniness could have been an instant turn-off from the character for me, but it's actually suprisingly downbeat, and you get the feeling he's saying these things more as a joke than to actually let his feelings be known. Sid becomes very likeable very quickly and, like Morgan, his death is actually a pretty effective moment.

On top of that, The Puppet Show tells a tightly paced and competently constructed whodunnit story, with a couple twists and turns along the way. Every plot beat flows effectively from the last, and the pace is just brisk enough to keep the audience engaged and just slightly staggering behind the line of reveals. My one big gripe is the final action scene, which drags on a bit too long and hinges on Giles acting very stupid right after the literal line "Well, Giles is pretty smart" becomes a crucial plot point. It's also kind of confusing and overwrought, with worse stuntwork than I'm used to even by Buffy's relatively low standards, and some poor camerawork that makes it difficult to follow.

I was completely blown away by The Puppet Show. What I remembered as a somewhat below-average but still competent episode of Buffy was an absolutely fantastic time, with very few negatives. This episode works on almost every level. It's not even like The Pack, where a portion of my enjoyment came from how silly the episode is. Everything that I liked about The Puppet Show was intentional, and there was a lot to like in this episode.

Here's ranking and rating: The ranking is of all episodes of Buffy and Angel I've watched so far, with 1 being the best one, and the rating is out of ten in context of the quality of the show: I'm essentially trying to decide what 10% of quality of that particular show the episode belongs in. Because both shows are so good, this means negative ratings are not neccesarily a diss on the episode -  I just think it's one of the show's weaker ones.

Ranking is a lot easier than I thought it'd be, and puts the episode at a surprising spot. This is so far easily the best episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I enjoyed it even more than The Pack, but all my enjoyment was actually on purpose by the episode, which is something I can't be sure of for The Pack. The Puppet Show effortlessly slides in at number 1.

Ranked List

Rating: 6/10 Rating was kind of hell, though. I remember giving The Pack a 6/10. I did not look this up, as that's against the rules, but I'm pretty sure that was the rating. It feels like there's at least 14 episodes worth of quality differential between the two episodes, but giving The Puppet Show a 7/10 feels ridiculous. I ultimately decided to give it a 6/10, just in case I'm suffering from recency bias. Edited after checking: Yes, I did give The Pack a 6/10. I'm pretty sure I've at least been consistent thus far, which is good!

A Tour of Sunnydale - I Robot, You Jane

And to your left you'll see CDR, Sunnydale's number one... national-scale computer business? We have several of those? Just how much do we have in this small town? I guess even the guide learns something when you take A Tour of Sunnydale.

Today we're looking at I Robot, You Jane, the eighth episode of the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Penned by Ashley Gable & Thomas A. Swyden, the duo that will depart Buffy after providing us with the late season 1 episode Out of Mind, Out of Sight and directed by one-timer Stephen L. Posey, I Robot, You Jane comes in at number 143 according to The Phi Phenomenon, making it the all-time second lowest rated episode of Buffy. Ouch.

I have this trilogy of episodes I always dread re-visiting in season 1. They're composed of Teacher's Pet, Never Kill A Boy On The First Date, and I Robot, You Jane. I see them as a trio of episodes with very similar problems: Weak monsters of the week not backed by the solid character writing that makes equally goofy but much better episodes like The Pack and The Puppet Show worth watching. I typically see Never Kill A Boy as the worst of them, and Teacher's Pet as the best one. Seeing how bad those episodes were on this watch through, I really didn't look forward to revisiting I Robot, You Jane.

Now, yes. I Robot, You Jane is bad. It's goofy, it's dumb, it's badly plotted, it's often terribly written. The character of Fritz is completely unbelievable and ridiculous, the way the story works out is utterly predictable, it seems like the writers expect us to not figure out things they've previously essentially outright told us, there's many moments when the core cast are bent out of shape bordering on outright breaking character, a lot of directorial choices are baffling, and the whole thing is built on 90s hysteria surrounding the Internet to the point where it comes across like an anvilicious PSA. If you've watched Buffy before, or even just watched I Robot, You Jane, you can name the myriad ways that this episode goes wrong and falls flat on its face.

I think it's more interesting to point out the stuff that works in I Robot, You Jane, because I was surprised to note just how much of this episode I fully enjoyed. I mean, yes, part of it was ironic enjoyment at how silly large swathes of this episode are, but there was also some genuinely great moments that stand out like a sore thumb when compared to the general clumsiness with which I Robot, You Jane executes most of its story.

The positives in I Robot, You Jane can mostly be summarized with four words: Jenny Calendar and Giles. This episodes marks the introduction of Jenny Calendar (called only Ms Calendar for now), the first significant new character to be introduced since the pilot, and, like many of the characters in the pilot, she seems to plop out of thin air fully formed as the character I've formed an attachment to. There's a certain affable sharpness to her, a quick, sardonic wit that Robia LaMorte manages to portray brilliantly as lacking any malice at all despite the many barbs she often throws out. Right from her very first line, Ms Calendar managed to make me like her and want to see more of her.

The best moments in the episode come from her interactions with Giles, which are in this odd but absolutely perfect middle point between cool professionalism, instinctual rivalry, and what I can only interpret as an already burgeoning mutual attraction. They're fun to watch banter, and the way they just naturally click into working together at the end of the episode is both satisfying and speaks to the fact that they're just compatible. The scenes involving Jenny and Giles are the only ones with anything resembling a proper thematic throughline, with the two of them obviously representing a modern and an antiquated approach to technology. A surface level reading of their conflict simply involves a conflict between romanticism and utilatarianism, but the final speech by Giles speaks to something slightly more interesting: The idea that knowledge, and the power that comes with it, needs to be tangibly earned, needs to be, as he puts it, "smelly". It's just barely touched on, but it's an interesting couple of plot beats that give the episode more depth and substance than one might otherwise expect, fitting in nicely with the PSA awareness-raising about the Internet.

Aside from all of this, much like Teacher's Pet, I found I Robot, You Jane tonnes of watch to fun despite all of its flaws. This time I was laughing at it much more, since the entire episode is so decidedly 90s and so desperately goofy and over the top, especially whenever Fritz shows up. Whilst I can't really argue this makes the episode better, it most definitely made me like it a whole lot more, even more than Teacher's Pet. I Robot, You Jane embarasses itself enough that I had a fantastic time pointing and laughing at it the entire way through. It felt a bit like picking on the dumb kid at school, but it was still fun.

That is honestly everything I have to say. I could go on and on and list the myriad and one ways the episode falls down, makes no sense and doesn't work on an emotional level, but anyone with half a brain can pick up on most of these watching the episode through just once.

Here's ranking and rating: The ranking is of all episodes of Buffy and Angel I've watched so far, with 1 being the best one, and the rating is out of ten in context of the quality of the show: I'm essentially trying to decide what 10% of quality of that particular show the episode belongs in. Because both shows are so good, this means negative ratings are not neccesarily a diss on the episode -  I just think it's one of the show's weaker ones.

To my surprise, I think there's a very easy place for I Robot, You Jane on my list: Immediately above Teacher's Pet. Whilst I've usually considered Teacher's Pet the superior episode of the two, and it's possible it objectively is, the joy that Jenny Calendar brought me, combined with the sheer amount of stupid, dumb, so-bad-it's-good that I Robot, You Jane instilled in me means it easily beats out Teacher's Pet. Currently right above Teacher's Pet is Welcome to the Hellmouth, which is an actual good episode, so there's no way that I Robot, You Jane beats that out.

Rating: 2/10. This is surprising to me, but I Robot, You Jane was entirely too enjoyable for me to expect to not be able to find 14 episodes worse than it. There's a lot of Buffy to go, and a decent amount of it is pretty bad (thank you, season 4) in very bad, non-enjoyable ways. I Robot, You Jane manages to avoid the dreaded bottom rating by bashing its head against a wall enough to make me laugh.