Blaugust #5: Anime Roulette – Nero Villagallos O'Reilly Art Blog

(Image from irasutoya.)

It is time to teach the world about my favorite game. Anime Roulette. This is a game for geniuses and wizards. There have been no formal posts about it written… until now.

You Will Need…

An app, platform, or website for watching anime on that allows you to scroll infinitely, ideally alphabetically. Crunchyroll, Plex, Jellyfin, etc all let you do this. It shouldn’t be separated by season- it should be everything.
The ability to hold or tap a button down to continue scrolling.
A friend! 🙂

Rules

#1. You or your pal closes your/their eyes. You can flip a coin on this if you want.

#2. The person with their eyes open handles the remote. Count down from 3, and begin scrolling.

#3. The person with their eyes closed waits until the time feels right to say stop. As all of these platforms display in rows, the choosing player in this game will need to pick a number (usually 1-4 or 1-5).

#4. Whatever you land on, you watch at least one full episode of. Do not read the description. You have to finish it. No escaping to the bathroom or playing Balatro on your phone for 22 minutes.

#5. Once complete, you switch roles and the game continues.

Simple, right? This is where house rules come into play- you can do a full chaos mode and just use the rules above, or you can modify things in a way that more suits your watching style. Not too much though. My own personal house rules are:

You get one singular do-over if the series looks particularly heinous. Still can’t read the description though- this is vibes based. Sometimes this backfires and we skip something that we find out is great later on though! So we don’t invoke this often. And if we do… We are trapped with whatever comes next.
My partner and I don’t like isekai or magical girls. If we land on one, we skip, but we can only skip once. We’re also not into idols, but we can be convinced occasionally. It’s not like we’re morally superior though, given the sheer amount of sports anime we inhale. We gotta get our senpai to the inter-high…!
If we’ve seen it before, re-roll. This doesn’t count if only one of us has seen it though.

And that’s about it! I’ll add more house rules if we think of them later on.

Some gems we’ve found through this game:

Red Garden. Four teen girls go to school on Roosevelt island… and then they die! After being revived through mysterious ways they are conscripted into a battle where they are forced to murder adults who transform into monsters. Most notable to me for how funky it looks and for its musical element. Yeah buddy. It’s got songs.
Fairy Ranmaru, the most incredible anime I have seen in my life. We literally invented an award for it called The Fairy Ranmaru Award where each season we talk with friends about the most baffling nonsense anime we’ve seen. It has to be 1) not an adaptation, 2) horny, and 3) batshit like nothing else to qualify. I’m not even going to describe Fairy Ranmaru. I’m not even going to link the wikipedia page!! Just go watch it and experience it raw. Not with kids, though.
Astro Note. This one was actually cuter than we thought it’d be? Something about the thumbnail made it look like an ecchi anime but it’s mostly a chill and cute series about a chef working at a boarding house run by an alien girl. Probably an anime you can show to your mom. Mmmaybe.

Some notable dogshit we’ve found:

Grandpa and Grandma Turn Young Again. This fucking… series. What if grandma and grandpa ate a yummy fruit that made them hot and sexy and young again. And all their kids and grandkids wanted to fuck them?? I don’t. I don’t know with this one. It also has the most grating ending I’ve experienced in a long time. It’s such an unloved series that I can’t even find the ending on youtube to link. Thank god.
PuraOre! Pride of Orange. Okay so: look at this cover. Seems like a perfectly normal anime about girls playing ice hockey right? There’s almost no good sports anime with girls in them. It feels obvious. But no! It’s a trick!! It’s a fucking idol anime! And both my partner and I forget about this series every time, get excited, and then get bait and switched without fail. It’s comical at this point.
Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks?, a series about a guy who hates his stupid big breasted mother and then they get sucked into a videogame world where the game is specifically meant to get them to bond. It’s so fucking bad. It hurt to watch.