I had a good time with this Monster Strike Christmas special. It was a departure from a lot of the original anime content their channel had produced in the past, a completely new story with new characters set in New York City of all places. I always love seeing anime depictions of American culture. I love that their idea of a stereotypical New York cop is a large, sassy, donut-loving black woman. Very progressive. Likely unbeknownst to the citizens of New York, there's been a bit of a world changing phenomenon over in Japan where one of their mobile games has come to life and startedopening portals to another world unleashing real ass monsters everywhere. You know, Japan stuff. One of these monsters decides to play an epic prank, bro on the people of New York by making all the Christmas toys and decorations come to life. Our protagonist, new to the NYPD, has to deal with rounding up giant frosty the snowman and nutcracker displays that are rampaging through town spreading Christmas cheer. Then her childhood teddy bear with huge sentimental value comes to life and turns into a magical girl.

It's a really wacky plot already, but the best part is that all of this magic stuff is happening over what would have been a typical buddy cop story, where the new by-the-book recruit has to learn to work with the older jaded mentor and they eventually overcome their differences and learn to work together to save the day. All of those elements sound like they should be really stupid together but it's actually pretty fun. Almost as good a Christmas movie as Die Hard. Overall I'd say 8/10