Mento's Month: April '26
by mento
It's another round-up of games, anime, and at least one anime-adjacent game. Probably should expand my number of interests, but that's a problem for Future Mento to figure out.
Game of the Month: AI: The Somnium Files—nirvanA Initiative (Spike Chunsoft, 2022)
Hope April found you all well, folks, as we glide into the hotter and less pleasant months though hopefully no less productive for getting through backlogs and the like (real tenuous definition of "productive" there). Speaking of which, a few years after buying it in a Steam sale I finally got around to Kotaro Uchikoshi/Spike Chunsoft's AI: The Somnium Files—nirvanA Initiative, the follow-up to their 2019 psychological detective game AI: The Somnium Files. Uchikoshi is best known for his Zero Escape series, which included 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors and Virtue's Last Reward, and once again utilizes his expertise crafting twisty murder mysteries with a whole lot of pseudoscience on top in another adventure. The first game's protagonist, Kaname Date, is sidelined here for the sake of two new sleuths: the tormented rich kid hotshot Kuruto Ryuki and Date's own adopted daughter and superhuman brawler Kaname Mizuki, along with the "AI-ball" assistants Tama and Aiba whom live in their respective left eye sockets. Nirvana Initiative, which very loosely references the first game and shares most of the ancillary cast but is otherwise narratively unrelated, sees the two chase after a serial killer known as the Tearer: a murderer that severs his victims in two on a molecular level, leaving only half their bodies in public places and then displaying what seem to be their other halves years later.
The game uses the same format as the previous, where you'll alternate between an investigation/interrogation phase where you observe crime scenes (your AI companion can also render the vicinity through X-ray and thermo filters for additional clues) and speak to witnesses and other people of interest, then switches to its "somnium" phase. These somnium stages are where you psychologically sync (or psync, as the game calls it) with a suspect via their unconscious dreams for any information they may be concealing from you, or possibly even themselves through traumatic mental blocks. These play somewhat similarly to the escape room games Uchikoshi was previously known for, giving you a strict limit to interact with the environment in a logical fashion to reach the answers you need before you're forced to bail out after exactly six minutes. Since every action in a somnium has its own time cost in seconds you'll find yourself quickly running out of time if you try to experiment with everything, and therein lies my main issue with this set-up. These games thrive on hidden details and jokes, yet the somnia stages require you to make a beeline to the correct solution or else you'll fail and be forced to repeat all the puzzles: let me tell ya, adventure game puzzles don't get any more fun once you know how to solve them. Rather than let the player poke around the environment and enjoy themselves with the incidental silliness, helped in a large part by its solid localization and voice acting and something you can absolutely do to your heart's content during the investigations in the waking world, the somnium sections always feel punitively restrictive in comparison. The game tries to mitigate this by giving you the option to turn down the somnium difficulty (which greatly reduces how much time each action costs) without sacrificing the puzzle difficulty (what you're there for) and you can replay any somnium with unlimited time later, though that all still feels like putting a band-aid on a problem you created.
Hell of a thing to hear ProZD/SungWon Cho's matter-of-fact delivery of this line.
Like many of this game's ancillary ideas, having a Tamagotchi that evolved depending on answers to personal questions is fine in theory until you get to prompts like this. If I'm trying to focus on "Impish", which choice do I even make here?
The whole game is kinda terrible for those of us afflicted with video game OCD. There's only a handful of environments but the hotspots reset on every visit (sometimes in the same visit) and given they still hide jokes and details in those minor prompts you're compelled to check them all each time. Interrogations can just end early if you ask the right prompt, denying you the extra input from the other dialogue choices unless you reload and ask your questions "in the right order". When this is compounded with the issues I have from the somnium sections, well, for as much as I like the rest of the game it feels like its interface and design choices are trying to give me an aneurysm at every turn. This was the case with the first game too and a big part of why i was initially a little reluctant to jump into this sequel, though some small part of me had hoped they'd take the opportunity to fix all these annoyances in the user experience. I suppose when you reach auteur level though, it's no longer required to fix your own mistakes; they become your "style" instead, warts and all, and players can either like it or lump it. (Major reason why I've never felt compelled to play the Death Stranding games either, truth be told.)
That aside though, the meat of the game is still some enjoyably goofy and twisty storytelling and inventive puzzles, including the usual meta messing around with the player which I always love to see in my games, and the characters are an appealing mix of oddballs both visually and personality-wise. The somnium sections are always alarmingly strange at first until you find the right wavelength, and then it's a matter of following a sort of dream logic that sometimes only makes sense in retrospect. It also gives the game plenty of room for some surreal scenarios, given anything can happen in a dream, from over-the-top cooking shows to quiz contests to a Pokémon riff. Though the game has branching paths typical to the visual novel format—while this game emphatically not a visual novel but a mostly traditional Japanese adventure game in the Portopia/Ace Attorney mold, it does have a few of VN embellishments—the actual freedom offered by these alternative paths is really an illusion: you need to exhaust them all before you can move on with the main story, and that goes for the split between Ryuki and Mizuki's two routes—the latter is only possible to unlock once you've completed the former. If you've been following Uchikoshi's work since the Zero Escape days (or even before then, with VNs like Never7: The End of Infinity which recently got localized for the first time) you're probably well enough aware of the AI: The Somnium Files games already but for as much as I consider the gameplay and format to be inferior, he's continued to grow in confidence as a storyteller, even if he does tend to overindulge in ecchi jokes and silly action choreography. When their useability as games aren't getting in the way, they're a frequent delight and I'm still just enough on board to check out the third (and so far final) Somnium game No Sleep for Kaname Date—From AI: The Somnium Files. (And, it probably goes without saying given how critically praised it was, his new one The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy.)
Where my brain was at during most of the game.
Other Gaming Tomfoolery
We had a very special episode of RetroPiece Theater this month to celebrate the regular return of Ape-ril, covering three games that heavily feature apes or monkeys. The first of these was the original Ape Escape, Sony's homegrown mascot platformer pretender to the Marios and Sonics found on other systems which set itself apart with its sapient collectathon aspect (those monkeys will try to elude getting snagged as best they can) and a twin-stick control system that handily helped the PlayStation creators ship more DualShocks. It still holds up, as you might expect, even if it graphically struggles to get everything on screen without some N64-level draw distance obfuscation; I intend for it to be a launching point for getting several of the other Ape Escape games in my RA mastery list, including those like Piposaru 2001 that never saw US/EU releases (though do have fan translations). The second game of Ape-ril is the superlative Donkey Kong '94 for Game Boy, which through its control scheme created a sort of missing link—if you excuse the simian humor—between 2D Mario and the upcoming advent of 3D Mario, as well as recontextualizing the original Donkey Kong as something more akin to a dextrous puzzle-platformer which the various portable Mario vs. Donkey Kong successors would then take even further. Last, but certainly not least (OK, it sorta is the least), we have the logic-based puzzle advergame Bazaru de Gozaru no Game de Gozaru for PC Engine CD-ROM, which stands out for a number of reasons not least of which is that it was the first thing released by Game Freak after they debuted the original Pokémon Red/Green duo for Game Boy. It's a definite curio and honestly not at all bad (if a little short) given how little everyone must've been invested in making a game based on a series of monkey-centric commercials for an electronics store. As always, I try to strike a balance of personal nostalgic favorites and new (to me) discoveries with this feature and, like Giant Bomb itself has also discovered of late, there is definitely something rewarding about putting together a theme week (or month, in this case).
I'm supposed to be a middle-schooler just catching monkeys with a net to help out my professor friend, I probably shouldn't be somewhere where the Earth looks like that.
Dark Cloud 2 check in! I'm knee-deep in the penultimate chapter of the game, which moves the action to an enormous palace full of some attractive imagery, like glass floors through which you can see constellations, though with a certain air of melancholy befitting a final dungeon (albeit, only final as far as the main plot is concerned). The straightforward architecture of these palace dungeon floors has also made the spheda/golf far easier, so I've been making faster progress through that subset as I continue to delve deeper through the halls of these aristocratic accommodations. Downside is that this dungeon is by far the largest of the game (until the final chapter, of course) with 24 floors so I don't imagine I'll be done here any time soon even with the faster pace. Due to the odd way the game is structured, I also can't finish this chapter until I'm certain I've done everything related to either it or the future areas elsewhere because they'll all become inaccessible once I enter the eighth and final chapter of the game: that also means being deprived of many vendors and other benefits, so I want to be sure to have everything squared away before tackling the gauntlet of bosses here. Man, though, has it been a tonic to move from the horrible golf courses in the Mt. Gundor volcano to these simple corridors and parlors: I can actually ricochet shots and use slices/hooks without worrying about constant lava hazards eating up my shot count. The enemies might be harder to deal with but it really feels like I'm skating along at a decent clip now. Still, with around 150 achievements remaining in the core set (and another hundred for the golf) I've plenty of work left to do. Honestly, this is the only game I can imagine wanting to spend this amount of time with; it's so damn good that I'm still nowhere close to burning out.
My Ridepod has a jet thruster now so it's pretty quick getting around dungeons. It's also getting outclassed defense-wise by my other characters, so it's less the "instant win this floor since I ain't feeling it" button it was in the past.
I've also been keeping up with a Super Mario 64 mod called "Lazy Lakitu". The comatose cloud-rider in question is the cameraman, a construct the game produced to help players make sense of the 3D camera controls (specifically why the camera pans to the right whenever you press left and vice versa), who here won't automatically follow Mario but stays perfectly stationary wherever he happened to spawn into a course. As you could probably ascertain this makes plenty of Stars far harder to collect than they otherwise would be. I talked a bit about this mod back in February's rundown but I've kept at it intermittently and have made it as far as Tall, Tall Mountain, the twelfth of fifteen courses. Some Stars have been absolutely out of the question—the Vanish Cap is damn near unnavigable without some very intricate sound-activated platforming I am absolutely certain I don't have the patience for, depriving me of a few Vanish Cap Stars in other courses—and it's really changed the challenge dynamic of the game as a whole. Big Boo's Haunt is barely affected by this frozen camera because it'll still reorient itself every time you pass through a door, while navigating an underwater level like Jolly Roger Bay is damn near inscrutable. Tiny-Huge Island, despite once being one of the most notoriously rough courses, gets to evade any extra wrinkles because the camera resets whenever you dip into a pipe that switches between the islands. Something like Tick-Tock Clock, however, lacks any such transitions and thus will be an absolute nightmare once I eventually get there. Even the relatively benign Tall, Tall Mountain has been an irritating thing to climb given its spiral construction keeps altering the directions for the controls and it has one of the hardest 100-Coin Stars now due to its slide area, descending which without a camera is going to be purely vibes-based (and, much like the coding behind BlueSky, pretty much therefore has "doomed" written all over it). Due to constant frustrations I've only made slow and incremental progress but it's also been an oddly rewarding enterprise overall, finding those small islands of success in an ocean of failure; akin to a Bennett Foddy joint if I had to draw any parallels. I certainly won't be getting the full set but I did at least pass the milestone needed to complete the game (70 Stars) so I'll endeavor to at least pass that finish line once I've run out of accessible Stars.
This was a fun one. Even if I can't always see the lava, Mario can certainly feel it.
The "Indie Game of the Week" of the Month: Haiku, the Robot (Mister Morris Games, 2022)
Surprise, surprise, my pick of the month is an exploraction game. You know what they say, keep 'em guessing. Haiku, the Robot (#465) is delightful: it's a bit derivative in some obvious and less obvious ways but it has a firm grasp on the style it's going for, that sort of grim tragicute you also see from its inspo source Hollow Knight, and it plays pretty well for an exploraction game of the type where the movement just feels better and better the more you play and the more traversal abilities you require. Unlike the others this month, I don't really have anything to say against it.
Elsewhere we have The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark (#462), another cop procedural graphic adventure game that finds an odd but effective tonal balance with its silly LucasArts metahumor and chilling supernatural horror, like an X-Files if they were cracking jokes every thirty seconds (so, maybe more like the X-Files cameos on The Simpsons?), but the puzzles were solidly made and it was a smart choice to break up the game's content into multiple "episodes" (which they did with the first game as well) as it meant exploring plenty of comedic scenarios as well as keeping the number of inventory items and real estate to gumshoe all over at a manageable level. Those same devs went on to make Séance at Blake Manor last year, so if you happened to fall in love with that recently it might be worth checking out their older stuff (keeping in mind the tone is quite different).
Hylics 2 (#463) doesn't go quite as horror focused but it does take some getting used to its eccentric world and its various stop-motion/rotoscoped sculpture people and all its bizarre lore, as another RPG akin to OFF and Virgo versus the Zodiac that uses its obtuse presentation to conceal a fairly straightforward retro turn-based RPG in the Japanese style. I thought the ambition and look of the game were highly commendable but the gameplay core wasn't all that compelling in comparison. Still, though, as someone who's played way too many RPGs in that mold I can always appreciate something quite different.
Last, Blossom Tales 2: The Minotaur Prince (#464) is a workmanlike Zeldersatz that emphasizes the overworlds a bit more, giving you plenty to do by way of side-quests and exploration and little side areas to discover, though it's let down in part by its fine but perfunctory combat and some very familiar puzzle set-ups (Zeldersatzes really love their Sokoban, but the real Zeldas barely have any of that). The meta aspect of it being a story read to children meant that said children would often interject with their own script changes, which was a cute running gag. Thoroughly pleasant but not something that's going to make you think "huh, I've never seen the Zelda blueprint used like this before".
Look, do you want this horse out of the mud or don't you?
The Weeb Weeview
I'm a few episodes into these, not quite but close to reaching the point where I might have to jettison a few (or binge them later) given there's so many, that I've assembled some quick early impressions for each. To help things along a little further, I've also included a tier system of sorts for recommendations: it goes Strong, Medium, Light, and Trash (but just imagine there's a transparent "(positive)" after that last one—I wouldn't be watching it otherwise). This will still go pretty long and test the character limit for articles but, well, y'all probably figured out by now I'm the loquacious sort.
Here we go, in an order that started as alphabetical but then I kinda ended up freestyling it:
An Observation Log of My Fiancée Who Calls Herself a Villainess: I've seen a whole bunch of these villainess things now—where some well-meaning otome game fan winds up reincarnating as that game's bad girl—but the idea behind this one is pretty funny. It's from the perspective of the overachieving prince romantic interest character, typically the most difficult target to woo in any otome (i.e. the Shiori Fujisaki, for those in the know), who tries to make sense of the artifice behind his betrothed's explanation of the "rules" of his "video game" world and ends up fixing most of its illogical plot holes and upcoming twists just as a matter of course. I kinda love the trope of a character smarter than the virtual world they inhabit (I usually refer to these characters as "TNG Moriarties", or perhaps "Monikas" if we're sticking to anime dating sims) and it's reliably amusing how all these big dramatic revelations of the future turn so anticlimactic after the prince quietly sorts them out for the sake of a woman adamant she is not his soulmate (she's planning on setting him up with the game's heroine) yet is so fascinating to him he can't imagine being with anyone else. As far as otome game parodies go, it's right up there with last-season-but-one's May I Ask for One Final Thing?, From Bureaucrat to Villainess, My Next Life as a Villainess, and Trapped in a Dating Sim. (Wow, I really do watch a lot of these...) [Medium]
Always a Catch!: And here's another one. No reincarnators this time at least, though it still shares a lot of DNA with May I Ask for One Final Thing?. It follows Mimi, a feisty tomboy visiting her foreign cousin after Mimi's suddenly dropped down the line of succession in her own family (due to a new baby brother) and has already lost her shot with most of the eligible bachelors at home due to her less than delicate nature, who ends up interjecting in the crown prince's engagement annulment with the supposed villainess (the cousin in question) after the two women are mistaken for one another. Two episodes later and the true culprit has been arrested, the cousin is free to pursue a romance with the second prince (whom she's always preferred), and the crown prince is head over heels with Mimi instead. Seems a bit perfect, but given there's most of the season left to go that unpredictability and wild turnaround is part of the fun with a romcom series like this. It's not quite as enjoyable or funny as Observation Log but the animation is certainly more eyecatching and I still have a fondness for a strong heroine that breaks the mold in these Regency-adjacent PG-rated bodice-rippers. [Medium]
Daemons of the Shadow Realm: Of all the new shows debuting this season, this looks to be the tentpole spectacular special effects shounen of the bunch, akin to last season's Sentenced to be a Hero. Maybe not quite as visually resplendent but certainly as showy and violent so far, as a pair of separated twins each capable of controlling daemons are suddenly brought back together in a daring (and surprisingly gory) raid. Yuru, the male half of the pair, has been kept in a secluded village all his life and has become a self-taught hunter, while sister Asa apparently works for some shady people for as-yet-unknown reasons. The reveal about Yuru's primitive mountain village is but one of many compelling narrative seeds planted by that first episode. Based on a manga by Hiromu Arakawa (the creator of Fullmetal Alchemist) and adapted by Bones Inc. it's fair to say that expectations are pretty darn high for this show. (It's also a two-cour season by the looks of things, so I'll no doubt talk about it again when summer rolls around.) [Strong]
Gals Can't Be Kind to Otaku!?: I adored the manga of this gentle romcom about a love triangle of two popular pretty girls and a nondescript nerd, all of whom are so darn nice that you can't help but read it (or watch it, as is now the case) with a big smile on your face. The otaku Seo Takuya (see what they did there?) is suddenly brought into the orbits of two gyaru from his class, one by desk proximity (the blonde and bubbly social butterfly Kotoko Ichiji) and the other through similar interests (stunning ice queen and secret anime otaku Kei Amane), and from there the three negotiate an easy friendship that slowly develops into a more complicated three-way romance though as I said last month one that they navigate with all the wholesome energy they can muster. It's mostly a fluffy gag piece that recalls the cuter moments of My Dress Up Darling, worth watching for its positive vibes and beautiful character designs and animations. [Medium]
Haibara's Teenage New Game+: At first blush this feels like basic wish fulfilment junk, following a lonely but multifaceted college graduate looking back on his unpopular period in highschool with some amount of bittersweetness who suddenly finds himself reliving that era of his life and is determined to make the best of it this go around, but it gradually develops into something a bit more layered than a simple HS redo fantasy. You do get that slight ickiness as he goes about romancing the school beauty that got away last time, given he's now mentally at least seven years older, but his efforts in transforming himself from the least popular to most popular is having some knock-on inferiority complex effects to others in his social circle, so I'm curious to see if this show has the emotional intelligence to be something a bit more substantial than the usual harems and protag-glazing you tend to see with set-ups like this. It has a hell of a lot of competition to overcome in this space though, looking at some of the other shows I'm watching or have been recommended. [Light]
The Klutzy Class Monitor and the Girl with the Short Skirt: Of all the HS romcoms this season this is the most outwardly comedic, with an exaggerated animation style packing the sort of energy that the goofy dynamic between its tsundere female lead and oblivious male lead demands. It's obviously going to test your patience for those hoary comedy tropes, especially with plenty of deeper and more empathetic competition this season, though maybe its relative lack of complications might fit whatever mood you're in. It's another of those shows where the title basically describes it all too—the class monitor is an insensitive buffoon while the sartorially-challenged girl gets easily flustered by attention—but that's all part and parcel of its far more direct approach. [Light]
I Made Friends with the Second Prettiest Girl in My Class: I liked this manga because of how relatable it was, as one of the classroom's cutest girls happens to be a goblin at home—operating largely on a diet of junk food, video games, and trashy B-movies—and finds a kindred spirit in a lonely dork classmate who struggles to make new friends after a mildly traumatic family split and a subsequent move across town and school districts. Their friendship at first is simply that, borne from common interests, though it doesn't take long for something more intimate to develop between the two as they strive to keep their bond a secret from any outsiders (including the "first prettiest girl" best friend of the female lead). It's like the iced tea to Klutzy Class Monitor's energy drink: still as sweet and quenchable, though far more subdued and easygoing about it. [Medium]
MarriageToxin: You know that meme .gif of Keanu Reeves crying in the restaurant? It comes from a 2019 romcom called Always Be My Maybe but something about the sharp suit and his stern expression before the waterworks arrive always made me think I'm watching John Wick getting stood up for a date. That's sort of the vibe of this show too, in a microcosm. "Poison Master" and notorious assassin Hikaru Gero is given an ultimatum to get hitched and start producing heirs to ensure his clan's long-running dominance of Japan's underworld continues unabated, and rescues a seductive con-artist for the advice he needs to make that happen. The show's been balancing slightly cringeworthy romantic comedy with much more confident assassin battles—he just fought this cool water-bender type, I guess because every assassin art at a high enough level is basically indistinguishable from magic—and it's all been a great deal of fun, in addition to being very well animated. Along with Daemons of the Shadow Realm and a certain show about pointy headwear I've yet to get into, it's appointment viewing for this season. [Medium]
Mistress Kanan is Devilishly Easy: A succubus comedy where the female lead is surprisingly chaste isn't the most original concept but this show (based on a pretty entertaining manga) has some serious animation and writing chops alike. Kanan is the titular (in more ways than one) heroine and the daughter of Beelzebub, the Demon Lord of Gluttony, so popping over to the human world to gorge herself on pure human virgin souls is a typical gourmand outing for a demon of her lineage; however, as she has no romantic experience with boys it means she is quickly bowled over by the handsome and tall (if somewhat dim) freshman Youji Kyougi after her invitations to eat him sound a lot like invitations to do something else. From that point on she's constantly on her back foot, and it's not helped by a coterie of fellow demons (including a much more experienced gyaru maid and her somewhat intense family) interfering with her curiously (to them) pure relationship. There's also a poor guardian angel character who, well, goes through some shit to put it mildly. Rides the line of ecchi and cute as a matter of course and you can probably figure out the kind of humor it trades in, but for as knowingly trashy as it is there's a certain degree of craft involved. Witchcraft, potentially. [Trash]
Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon Season 3: The vending machine isekai has proven every bit as durable as the monolithic drink dispensers themselves, a MacGuyver for the isekai genre in which seemingly every problem from dragon attacks to pitfalls can be resolved by throwing specific vendor goods at it. The plotting and ancillary cast are decent enough and the idea of a vending machine skill tree has a certain compelling weirdness to seeing just where it might lead next, and this season's already been pretty dense with the plotting as the villains prove every bit as adaptable as ol' Boxxo (or Hakkun going by the original language, which pretty much means the same thing). Very much know what you're in for by this point and I wouldn't call this is a banger season that retroactively makes the first two must watches. Still, this genre often can and will be worse, and certainly far less inventive on the whole. [Trash+]
The Strongest Job is Apparently Not a Hero or a Sage, but an Appraiser (Provisional)!: I had zero expectations for this super generic looking isekai but it's actually low-key hilarious, if not quite to the same level as KonoSuba. It knows how stupid its premise is—and it's not even the first one of these to try to make the case that a standard appraisal skill is useful for anything besides learning information anyone native to this world would already know—so it's just having fun messing around. Like how everyone's a foot taller than the protagonist and assume he's a child, or how they made the requisite big-boobed elf so busty she bursts the top button on her blouse every five minutes (I swear it's occasionally more sophisticated than that). It's not the most clever humor but they lean into the chaos so much it's hard to dislike. [Trash]
That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime Season 4: This is another show where you can't just jump into in at this point in the story, but anyone who has made it this far has been treated to a consistent level of quality in the animation and plotting alike. Rimuru's forested Tempest Kingdom continues to attract undermining schemers on all sides as it comes up in the world, between the Eastern Merchant council seeking to undermine its status as a burgeoning trade hub to the old grudges felt by the Moderate Harlequin Alliance after they lost one of their own in a bid for dominance over Rimuru and his monster followers. If none that made any sense, well, it probably wouldn't without witnessing everything leading up to where we are now. We're also getting the usual dose of levity to go with the twisty narratives and statecraft meetings, as a few of the usual Tempest idiots have decided to rig their own mega-fun tourist attraction dungeon by adding themselves as ringers in order to stop a different adventuring team from using cheese tactics to complete it too fast (as that would mean a big payout from the Tempest Kingdom's coffers), so... Tensura just kinda keeps on doing what Tensura does. [Strong]
Yowayowa Teacher: I kinda predicted this show would mostly be boob jokes (and by predicted, I meant that I'd already read ahead in the manga) and, suffice it to say, it's pretty much been exactly that. The scary new homeroom teacher is a physically and mentally weak pushover too shy and inaudible to correct the urban legends springing up about her, save one normal male student and eventually a few female students with severe personality quirks of their own. It's a sorta harem comedy with one prominent female lead, albeit the one that presents the most problematic romantic possibility, and is the sort to regularly play off sexual harassment for comedy. Despite that, it doesn't feel too mean-spirited given how it centers around everyone's mission to help their teacher with her chronic timidity. Still, cav-teat emptor. [Trash]
The Warrior Princess and the Barbaric King: Moving from sexual harassment to full on sexual as- OK, it's not actually that but after reading the synopsis you'd be forgiven for thinking otherwise. It's about a knight duchess who gets kidnapped by barbarians during a skirmish on their shared border, taken to be the chieftain's bride, and she slowly either develops Stockholm syndrome or genuinely falls for the boorish yet gentle and goodnatured brute along with realizing how much more appreciated she is in this vaguely Norse society that treasures strong women compared to the vaguely Saxon/Norman medieval society she hails from which looks down on same as being frightfully masculine. The worldbuilding's not bad either, if a far cry from something like Vinland Saga, but it has been hard to get past that initial icky spin on a meetcute (more like a meatcut with how they were going at with that swordplay). [Trash-ish]
Wistoria: Wand and Sword Season 2: I'm not sure if it was a timing thing or what with how they ended the first season because this second one has been incredibly eventful right off the bat, not to mention brutal and bleak. The same villains from the final arc of season 1 have now put their plans into higher gear, leaving the fates of much of the ancillary cast in question as they fight a beleaguered battle. It's looking like our hero Will is here to save the day due to... well, I've probably said too much. I mentioned before that there's few of the new shows that season that strongly give you cause to catch up on their potentially weaker prior seasons (either because they're more of the same or those earlier seasons were better) but this might be the exception if the rest of this cour is this impressive. [Strong]
Last, here's a few more recommendations I've put on my slate but have not yet checked out. Schedule's kinda full, not gonna lie, but these all sound very much like my shit: the beautifully animated fantasy Witch Hat Atelier, the bizarro isekai parody My Ribdiculous Reincarnation with its varied art styles, the sloshed yuri hang-out show Botan Kamiina Fully Blossoms When Drunk, and the tragicomic post-apoc mecha show (with some remarkable visuals) Snowball Earth.
(And I'm absolutely going to catch up with Re:Zero eventually, I swear.)