Previously!

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...What do you even want from me at this point? Why am I still doing this?

This is the fourth Yami Shibai review I've done. This is... the seventh ICLA show I've reviewed. All ~~but one~~ of them being horror. At this point, this is simply a futile exercise of masochism and persistence on my part.

~~It actually just dawned on me that I've been reviewing this series for four goddamned years. Holy FUCK.~~

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Yami Shibai 8!

Eight seasons!

And at the time of writing this review, the ninth season has already pretty much finished airing! ~~So I’m actually a season behind now! Thanks Ninja Collection!~~ To very briefly recap the recent trajectory of ICLA...

I found Yami Shibai 5 pretty bad, but it had pretty humorously bad episodes. Yami Shibai 6 was actually pretty okay for Yami Shibai standards. Yami Shibai 7 sucked and really the only funny episode was one about a refrigerator. Then for some reason, they did this weird Yami Shibai season that was basically just Yami Shibai but it was ninja themed meaning the anticlimatic ending of the usual Yami Shibai episode was instead a ninja showing up and defeating the ghost and/or demon.

~~It fucking sucked.~~

Say what you will, Yami Shibai 8 is a… return to form. Quality wise, there weren’t any episodes that were offensive. Like they didn’t do the thing where most of the episode was just them zooming in and out on just a single drawing… and there weren’t really any enormous shifts in the art. Both Yami Shibai 5 and 6 had some episodes that were just like a smack in the face, the drawings looked so fucking different. They also didn’t really do anything massively stupid this season like a man eating mantis disguising themselves as a person or a conscious thinking refrigerator.

Although, they did do an episode about a weird Japanese legend about a tiny person or… fairy?

Like a guy steps on him and I guess the tiny person goes into his body through his shoe (???) and started bouncing around in his skull?

I laughed pretty hard.

As always, this is obviously not the reaction you should be going for from your viewers when GHOST STORIES is in the title of your show.

But I digress, I still have to give credit where credit is due, there were actually almost four episodes of this season that I actually kind of liked. ~~But I've already forgotten which ones they were.~~

Yet more than ever I feel like they’d upped their tendency of doing that annoying ass thing where they end the episode before anything happens. Like come on guys. I never reviewed like the first three seasons or so, but if I did, I probably would have went

“Eh, it’s just jumpscares!” the whole goddamned reviews

but fuck that, give me some jumpscares! Show me a creepy creature or a creepy face, give me something! Don’t just build up to a scare that you’re not going to bother giving us! I’m not saying I need to see ghosts outright murder people but like some bland line of dialogue immediately followed by OSHIMAI... ugh…

An unseen ghost says "you're it", the girl runs away off screen, and a handkerchief turns red. That's it. Scare accomplished!

Over the span of eight seasons there’s been so many episodes like that, but I feel like it was really constant this season. Because again, they somehow managed to refrain from doing some of the more stupid stuff they’ve done in the last couple of seasons. But the thing is those stupider episodes at least gave me a laugh between the “fucking nothing happens” episodes.

There was also this episode where a fisherman caught like a weird slime fish/creature and ate it and it probably turned him into a monster, but guess what. His wife reaches to pull the blanket off of the writhing mass beneath it, and bam, that's the end of the episode.

Why even bother to give us a peek at the monstrosity he's chopping at when you're not gonna show us the end result?

Why bother building it up when you're not gonna deliver? Why even do a picture-story horror anthology TV short series in the first place? There were creatures and scares in the first three Yami Shibai seasons, god damn it. I know I didn't think much of them at the time but I appreciated the attempt at horror. Rather than... oh, something... spooky happened probably. Here's the credits.

WHERE IS THE HORROR

#Conclusion#

...Do I even need to do a conclusion for these reviews anymore? It just all feels so overwhelmingly futile. Both you and I know that next year, I’m going to be here, reviewing another season of Yami Shibai and like two more will have already been announced. And besides, what could I possibly say to dissuade anyone who’s still genuinely watching Yami Shibai in 2021? ~~When I myself am still here?~~

Until Yami Shibai either finally stops or isn’t one of the three or four horror anime of the year, I’m just going to keep staring into this abyss.

Yami Shibai 8 is a 4 out of 10. Certainly not the worst Yami Shibai season, but it's already fading from my memory as I type this.

...Oh. I almost forgot. Oshim--