Manga Monday: Drug and Drop

If the name of this series sounds a little familiar it should, it's Clamp's long awaited sequel to Legal Drug (which went on hiatus after three volumes because all of the magazines it was running in kept getting canceled, seriously it went through two or three different magazines) although while it's been running for about a year at this point I don't know if there's been enough material for one full tankubon of this yet (currently it and Gate 7 aren't running in their respective magazines since one of Clamp's members has either an illness or an injury, not surprising considering how much they've been churning out for the last few years). Despite that there has been enough of it for me to get a feel for it and talk about the series, it does seem a little weird that I'm talking about two light BL series in a row though.....


Drug and Drop by Clamp

A year has passed since Kazehaya and Rikuo came to live above and work for the Green Drugstore. They both continue to take odd job, side jobs for it both for the money and hoping that these jobs will help them find the people that they're looking for.

A year has passed in series since the beginning of Legal Drug (and, according to people who have somehow been able to keep track of this, proves that Clamp can't keep track of their own timelines since the series crosses over with xxxHolic Rou when it should've been closer to ten years later from that cast's perspective) and not a lot has changed from the last volume. Same characters, same kinds of stories, same pacing, what is different is that the story has stopped dropping mere hints about Kazehaya and Rikuo's pasts and has started exploring them. Some of Kazehaya's past and why he ran away from home has been explained (his sister is, ahem, unstable it seems) and more details about Rikuo's life are emerging. For a series that barely has enough material for a printed volume and considering how long some Clamp series take to get going that's fantastic! The individual stories have ranged from being "meh" to alright which is what I expected but right now I think this story plays to Clamp's strengths, they can have a lot of mostly unconnected stories to set things up and I think those were the strongest parts of Holic/TRC and a lot of Kobato/Cardcaptor Sakura/Angelic Layer were that way as well. So for now I'm crossing my fingers that it stays strong and that someone in the US license rescues Legal Drug and releases Drug and Drop (IMO Dark Horse is the most likely candidate, considering how many other Clamp works they currently have, and hopefully Clamp's penchant for crossovers won't create confusing legal issues over here).  

Anime Review: Tokyo Babylon OVAs

While I was watching X TV it occurred to me that I should check these two little OVAs out since, as I'm not reading the Tokyo Babylon scans since it is licensed in the US (Dark Horse, are these omnibus editions coming out anytime soon?) and I've started following a few people on tumblr who lately have been talking about the series an awful lot. I'm a little curious about the live action movie made based off of TB (which I only found out even existed this past summer, I've almost never seen people talk about it) but for the moment my curiosity has been satiated.

Tokyo Babylon

Summary: Subaru Sumeragi is an omyonji in Tokyo who spends his days dealing with spirits and other magical things as well as spending time with the only two people he's close to, his twin sister Hokuto and their friend Seishiro (a local veterinarian). Subaru cares a lot about his job and tries to help people no matter what, often putting his own safely on the line. 

The Good: I'm not sure if the two stories were based on stories from the manga but considering how well they were paced I'm inclined to think they were original stories. Both stories were rather different from each other, interesting, and in an odd way it reminded me of why I liked xxxHolic, Clamp just seems to be better at writing more episodic series than plot-central ones. I did enjoy these two shorts, even if I was wincing at some of the weird 1980s styles that had crept in, and wish it had been a full series, partially because of a problem I'm about to bring up below.  

The Bad: If you don't know anything about TB this is not the series for you, while it briefly touches on Subaru and Seishiro's connection (which ends up being a huge deal later in the story) it's still rather vague. The stories here don't require you to know much about the characters but when they don't explain anything at all it's clear who the show is aimed at. As I mentioned last week with X, that show works a bit better if you know more of Subaru's backstory and, since that is explained there, I could see these OVAs working if someone was to watch them and immediately follow them up with X to get a better grasp on how Subaru has changed in the 7+ years that separate the two. Other than that I really can't recommend this to anyone who hasn't already seen it, it just doesn't have that wide an appeal when it's almost completely lacking in backstory/explanations.   

The Audio: I about started snickering when the first OVA had a classic, let's-play-music-over-unrelated-images moment, such an 80s thing to do (heck, even the way a lot of shots are framed in the series feel not exactly dated but old school). I was a bit surprised that Subaru was actually voiced by a male voice actor (I've just gotten so used to hearing female VAs do male roles) but it really worked well. Hokuto was rather screechy early on but thankfully mellowed down by the end of the first OVA and the rest of the (Japanese, I don't think there's a dub) was fine. 

The Visuals: Please note the above image has nothing to do with the actual OVAs, it was the best thing I could find on google that wasn't a screenshot (or involve some of the story's more, interesting, outfits). In any case,  I watched this on an incredibly crappy stream (which occasionally had subs when people weren't talking/saying something different than what the characters actually were saying) so I don't really know what to say about how the OVAs looked. They're from 1992 and I'd imagine that they'd look fine if they were remastered although I did see some weird looking animation in places. Aside from that, and I've already established that these OVAs were channeling the 80s like it was going out of style (wait), the only thing I have left to say is that yes, Subaru is pretty damn adorable and one I would actually call moe (and I'm nigh-positive I'm not the only person who would say that).

So, hasn't aged that well in terms of looks (although if it was remastered that would help) and has a narrow appeal, come to think of it you can probably apply those statements to a lot of Clamp shows (or will be able to in another decade or so). I had fun with this but hopefully next week I'll finally be back to shows where I can whole-heartedly recommend them to people.

Anime Review: X TV

Moving right along with the Year of Clamp livestream we've gotten to X TV, the animated version of one of Clamp's more infamous works which I had been curious about for a while but hadn't tried out either version since I hadn't read all of Tokyo Babylon (to which it's sorta-kinda a sequel, more a spinoff but knowing what I did of Subaru's story made the parallels between him and Kamui much more obvious and tragic). But that sounds like something I should put into the actual review so onto the review!

X TV

Summary: The year is 1999 and with the new millennium upon them the world has come to a crossroads, unbeknownst to all except for a few magic users in Tokyo. They are the Dragons of Heaven and the Dragons of Earth, those who wish the save humanity (and bet the eventual fate of the world on the belief that the humans won't destroy it) and those who wish to end humanity so the world can be born anew. At the heart of this conflict is Kamui, an angsty teen whose presence causes fate to shift who doesn't seem to care much about the conflict one way or another but both sides are determined to bring him around.

The Good: I know the anime ending is radically different from the manga's cliffhanger (I've actually seen that bit) but you know what, I liked how it ended. It made sense logically and thematically and I was satisfied with it, although I think I can hear manga-readers disavowing me now. While I do wish that Fuuma had been explored more (especially after the mid-point of the series) I was surprised at how much screen time nearly every other side character got and was pleased to see that many of the Dragons of the Earth had a reason that they were on that side, even if I didn't agree and I felt like overall what side they were on had almost nothing to do with free will and was all predestined instead (which did bother me). If you're already a fan of Clamp's work and want to see more of their series I recommend this one over a few others I've seen this year although I know in my case if it wasn't for that I probably would have dropped it after four or five episodes. 

The Bad: I should probably note that I didn't see Episode 0 but I have heard that it spoils a lot of the anime if you're a new viewer so people should choose carefully if they're thinking about watching that first (also, I had no trouble understanding the show without seeing it so clearly it's not crucial viewing material). As for the show itself, it took me a while to get into the show and I only really started enjoying it once Kamui stopped being so much of an ass. While I certainly liked most of the side characters long before that point they just weren't enough to keep me interested in the story for whatever reason. And speaking of the side characters, I feel like at some point the production team said "oh right a lot of people are supposed to die, let's kill off these characters and we don't care how" because that would explain a lot. I'm tempted to look up what has happened to the characters by the end of the manga (given the sheer number of Clamp fans out there someone must have a comparison chart or something) and I really hope the deaths felt less random than the ones here.

The Audio: Well I hope you like the track "Sandame" (which I believe means destiny) because you're going to be hearing it at least once an episode if not more. It's actually such a distinctive piece that after hearing it just a couple of times and then watching the trailers for the anime Blood-C I was immediately able to tell that it was the same composer, although I'm not so sure that's a good thing. I didn't really care for either the opening or the ending themes (possibly because I kept going "KAMUI, WHY ARE YOU A VAMPIRE, THIS IS NOT TSUBASA" at the opening sequence....) so I skipped them almost every time and I watched the show in Japanese and I thought the voices worked well there (and I'm a bit curious, and a bit worried, about how some of the accents must have translated, even though I don't know much Japanese I could tell that Sora had a really thick dialect). 

The Visuals: While the show was made in the early 2001s the original manga was started back in the 1990s so it looks more than a bit like 90s shojo (is it just me or did eye size for shojo seem to peak in the 90s and go down since?) which I was cool with. I don't recall any usage of CGI in the show, it was produced by Studio Madhouse (who also did Cardcaptor Sakura amusingly enough) and they don't seem to use a lot of CGI in most of their shows, even the ones they produce today.

So, now all I need to see is Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles and xxxHolic and I will have seen every full length tv anime based on a Clamp work, wohoo! Except that's still around 70+ episodes all total, I don't really like the art of the Holic anime and I'm told that TRC can get dull in places, hoo boy. For those who want to see X it can be viewed on Hulu, although they are missing Episode 0 and I don't know if there's a legal place to watch that online, weird.  

Anime Review: Cardcaptor Sakura (re-watch)

And this is the last week of double anime updates, just wanted to get these two Clamp series before school started (and, just to give you guys an idea of how delayed that Clamp School Detectives review was, since then the Year of Clamp stream has watched all of CCS, Angelic Layer, and X, they're starting Chobits this week, that's a lot of Clamp). This is my second time watching the series all the way through and the anime has a bit of a special place in my heart since the first time I watched it, I think the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school, I realized that without effort I had picked up some Japanese vocabulary and figured out that I was more of an audio learner than I thought (instead of all visual) and that's why I was having such a hard time learning Latin, no one spoke it! I've heard plenty of people say over the years that the best stories are the ones that teach you something about yourself, not sure if they meant the saying quite like that though. 

Cardcaptor Sakura 

Summary: One day 10 year old Sakura Kinomoto hears a strange noise coming from the basement of her house and, when she goes to investigate, tracks down the sound to one of her father's old books, opens it, and accidentally releases a deck of magical cards which had been sealed for decades. After that the guardian of the book, who had been sleeping on the job, bestows upon her the title of "cardcaptor" and tasks her with recapturing all of the cards while they cause mischief in her small town. It's a big job but she has friends, and rivals, who'll help out and all the while she also begins to learn about the history behind the cards and their creator and how that "accident" might not have been one after all. 

The Good: This is one of the lightest magical girl shows out there and I remember seeing some trailers for it on tv when I was around nine or ten and wanting to try out the show, it vanished right after I became aware of it, and I think I would have enjoyed it immensely at that age for the same reasons I do now. Sakura really grows as a character, from a likable, and understandable, bit of a scaredy-cat to a confident girl who can handle any problem she has to face and between the mixture of fun and fantasy I would have really enjoyed it. It certainly helps that Shaoran also grows a lot through the series (Tomoyo doesn't really but her own feelings and convictions are explained as the series goes along and shows that she really was mature from the outset), actually a lot of the side characters seem to either grow or are explained as the show goes on, and even with all the filler there never seems to be a dull moment. It's cute and even though it does have some darker moments they're age appropriate so I wouldn't worry showing a nine year old this show for them. 

The Bad: While I didn't mind it the first time I saw the show, the filler did begin to bother me a little bit towards the middle of the show (it is a twelve volume series stretched to 70 episodes after all). Once the show gets past it's first arc it gets better however, I thought that a lot of the later filler episodes were fairly adorable actually, but after seeing the show in it's entirety once I didn't feel the need to see all of those parts again. And, even though the show is a very faithful adaptation overall, they did cut out one subplot which leads to the most heartwarming moments of the manga which always leaves me rather sad*. Also, some of the relationships are definitely kind of iffy in this one, I'm looking at that Rika and Terada one the most (there are two other student-teacher relationships but both of those are a bit different and the manga gave me the impression that the age gap in the last one isn't quite what it seems). I have no idea how I would have viewed any of these relationships as a kid, well I probably would have started picking up on Tomoyo's crush but not fully realized it, but I think even all of that is far enough into the background that it shouldn't be a concern for showing to appropriately aged children.  

The Audio: The show has three lovely opening (although I'll admit I'm biased towards the third one because of the lyrics) and two endings, neither of which I liked as well as the openings, and all of them are quite catchy. The show also has a number of insert songs (which I believe were actually insert songs, songs sung by the voice actors as the characters) throughout which are also quite cute and the lyrics usually made sense as well. Since the English dub of the show is terrible I watched the Japanese version and by now it's gotten to be fun to spot some of the same voice actors in the various Clamp shows (Megumi Ogata has made a few, wildly different, appearances so far) and all of the various kid characters manage to sound young and not in a "this is an adult voice actress doing a cute voice" kind of way^.

The Visuals: This is another show which was made in the 90s and later got remastered and looks absolutely fantastic. The colors pop, the lines are crisp, from the comparison screenshots I saw it looks like a lot of small lines (which pop up when you view a video but weren't drawn onto the actual cell, anyone know the technical term for them?) are gone and I'm sure that if those Japanese BRs had English subtitles on them that a number of hardcore fans would have imported them. It's always fantastic to find that a show has actually aged well and makes me rather jealous that the US doesn't get all of these great looking remasters.


It's no secret that the anime has been out of print in the US for years but, what some people don't know yet, is that it recently got relicensed in Australia (to be released in two sets) and sometime down the road I'll be sure to pick up a copy of that. I have no idea if the DVDs will be made using the remastered material, I certainly hope so, but it doesn't really matter since I love this show so much that I'll certainly take advantage of acquiring it cheaply and legally (even if I have to import it from another hemisphere).


*for those who wish to know, spoilers for the end of both versions, the anime hints at it but the manga confirms that Clow Reed never died, in the manga he instead spilt himself in two with the intention of halving his burdening magical powers that way but failed. One half was Eriol, with all the magic and all the memories, and the other half was a young Fujitaka, Sakura's father (thus technically making her an even closer blood relative to Clow Reed, Kero even comments at one point, I think in the manga only, previous to this revelation that she and her brother have a much closer magical signature to Clow's than even Shaoran's which he thought was strange). So Clow's wish is actually for Sakura to also split his magic in two, which she is able to successfully do since she is now stronger than he was, and her father gets some magic and is able to see Nadeshiko floating around and has a very touching reunion with her, all of which was completely cut from the anime and makes me sad (and wordy apparently).
^Although the first time I realized that the major love triangle in the series, Sakura-Shaoran-Yuki involved three female actresses I did have a bit of a giggle fit.

Anime Review: Clamp School Detectives

I'm quite behind on getting this review up, I finished the series right before all the spring shows finished airing so it got pushed back quite a bit) but considering this is a more obscure work of Clamp's I don't think anyone minded too much. Actually, not only is the manga a more obscure work of theirs (although it was published by TokyoPop), it was only two or three volumes long yet this series is two cour, much longer and I'd say it has a lot of filler in it except, well, there aren't many episodes that wouldn't be called filler here. 

Clamp School Detectives

Summary: The Elementary School Student Council at the Clamp School wields an enormous amount of power, although generally it’s three members (the ultra rich Nokoru, ninja-like Suoh, and cheerful gentleman thief Akira) don’t let that go to their heads.

The Good: The show is at it’s best when it’s doing something silly and it knows it’s silly (such as the play episode) and, odd as it sounds, once the love interests for Suoh and Akira show up (Nagisa and Utako respectively) the show gets better and is at it’s most entertaining. The girls are interesting, and once you get over the age difference* they make pretty cute couples as well. For people who are already avid fans of CLAMP’s other work it’s fun to spot crossovers and references within the show (mostly from Miyuki-chan in Wonderland and Dukylon School Defenders, although the setting here would later cross over with X/1999) but they never become so important that it would distract a newcomer to the 'verse.

The Bad: This show has some incredibly uneven pacing, possibly as a result of the show being a 26 episode adaptation of a three volume manga (the crossovers from Dukylon and Man of Many Faces don't add that much material in). The first eight episodes are the weakest and the last arc isn’t much better; funny enough it’s when the girls appear that the series seems to pick up and when they have a smaller role in the last arc (really the only true arc of the series, there are one or two two-parters but nearly everything else is a stand-alone episode) that the show slows down again. It's odd considering they’re supporting characters at best, not show-driving characters, but I guess for a character driven show you really need all the characters you can get so that there are simply more to interact with each other.

The Audio: The show got a dub only a few years ago from a small studio called Costal Carolina (who hasn’t done much work over the years, I think this is their most recent work and it’s from 2008) and it’s surprisingly solid for a show that features three young boys as the main characters (not to dismiss US of the voice actors, but I very rarely find the “young boy voice” convincingly done in English). It’s certainly listenable and I liked it just a bit more than the Japanese, I saw about half the show in English and half in Japanese so for once I can make that comparison! Other than that, the opening theme rather infectious but the rest of the music didn’t leave a strong impression on me.  

The Visuals: Like many shows from the 90s, I wasn’t too crazy on the visuals when I first saw the show but once I saw the re-mastered version I was impressed (sadly I could only find a crappy, not-remastered image that worked for this review). The lines were crisp, there was no glow (before it was impossible to make out half of the opening because of the glow), and the colors were amazingly bright, I’m always amazed when I see just how bright the show actually was. So, once I saw the good version of the show, everything looked pretty nice from the backgrounds to the character designs (I’m more fond of Clamp’s uber-shojo style than their noodle-people style) and, while the character designs do date the show I don’t see that as problem when recommending it to people.

In the end, I think I would have liked this show much more if it had been 13 episodes long and simply cut out a lot of stuff. There's no real plot to the show, and when it gets the closest to that it drags and has a facepalm worthy resolution, so it wouldn't be hard to cut a lot of stuff and still leave the episodes where the characters get some development and the funniest episodes (like that play one) still in. And if you want to watch it yourself, it's not streaming legally anywhere online that I could find but the DVD collection is easily available online.   

*I just tried to pretend it wasn’t so big and, considering how mature Nagisa and Utako were that was easy to do, plus compared to Cardcaptor Sakura this is nothing....

Manga Review: Gate 7 (volume 2)

Well, I'm still not convinced that Clamp is 100% sure where they're going with this story (partially because in some of the more recent chapters of Gate 7 and Drug and Drop Clamp has started to crossover even more stories and have screwed up their own timeline so much it is impossible to construct one, believe me the fans on tumblr have TRIED) it's still a pretty looking story and Barnes and Noble was having a big "buy two manga from this list and get a third from said list free" so technically this volume didn't cost me anything. So, is this story starting to get more interesting as it gets off the ground or is it still on the dull, and confusing, side?

Gate 7 (volume 2) by CLAMP

Summary: Chikahito is starting to get used to the strange new world he's found himself in, a Kyoto with mysteries and magic hiding seemingly behind every temple, and his knowledge of Japanese history is finally coming in handy, but even he can guess by the way his companions are acting that things are beginning to change. The hunt for the strongest oni begins in earnest and he's gonna meet even more people all the while trying to figure out where he fits into all of this.

The Good: Once again, thank any and all creators of the world for the translation notes in the back, without them I would be forced to read this book with wikipedia nearby in order to figure out whose who and who their allies were in real life. As it stands I might still end up making my own chart to keep things straight but these notes go a long way towards helping explain what's going on. There is more stuff going on here than there was in the first volume as the story begins to pick up and the story seems to be hinting at what Chikahito's role in all of this is (or at the least the characters are suspicious that everything starts changing once he arrives which is a good thing). 

The Bad: Even for Clamp this isn't new territory, there's nothing about this work so far that I haven't seen before (well, except for the combination of Japanese generals with the  demons but that's just a detail at this point) and between that and the confusion I'm having a bit of a hard time staying interested. In a way this series represents what I consider some of the worst of Clamp's traits, characters being overly vague (and not that fleshed out at this point), a plot we've seen before, and sadly not a lot of potential. At this point there aren't many people I would recommend this series to and it really makes me wonder just how well the series is doing sales wise. 

The Art: It's interesting to compare this work to Clamp's other ongoing work, Drug and Drop, since originally I loved Clamp's more detailed and intricate works but now I prefer their stories which use simpler designs, especially since I sometimes have trouble following the flow of panels in this story. There are a lot of complicated things in this story and the art is probably the least complicated of them but occasionally it feels like too much, especially when I noticed that quite a few of their backgrounds of Kyoto are merely photographs with a filter placed over them, something I don't think they've done in any other work.


As I was writing I was thinking about just how many hurdles this series has to jump to capture a non-Japanese fan (or non-Japanese-history-buff)'s interest and I find that fascinating since Gate 7 was originally going to be part of a new project which would be released simultaneously around the world and (logically) was probably planned with a broader interest in mind (and the original pitch was quite different in fact, it's like they kept parts of it for this and other parts got hijacked by Blood-C and the rest wandered into xxxHolic somehow). At the pace this series is coming out I can afford to keep up with it but again, I still don't know how long I'll continue to do so.  

Anime Review: Magic Knight Rayearth (both seasons)

Not a recent anime (unless you're definition of recent is "younger than Helen is") but I wanted to mention this title soon before it got lost in the onslaught of winter shows. Reason I wanted to bring it up is that I've started getting back into watching livestreams and one I've been watching recently is the Year of Clamp stream by CinWicked where the goal is to watch every anime based on a title by the manga group CLAMP in one year. I won't be watching all of them but I at least wanted to spread the word, we'll be starting Cardcaptor Sakura this week and you can find more information about that over here.

Back on topic about this specific show, I've read most of Clamp's manga but I haven't actually seen the anime adaptions of most of the stories including this one. No particular reason I hadn't seen this one yet, well only the dub and only the first half of the show is on Hulu which was part of the reason, but I think I'll end up sticking to the manga for this one.

Magic Knight Rayearth (both seasons):

Summary: Three ordinary, unconnected girls from Tokyo, Hikaru, Umi, and Fuu, are all on field trips to Tokyo Tower one day when they are summoned by a princess from another world to save that world by becoming the legendary Magic Knights. The girls bond with each other, learn magic, and fight their hardest to make sure this story has a happy ending.

The Good: The manga for this series was rather short so it’s nice to see some side characters get more much fleshed out than they were previously. Ferio and Fuu’s relationship benefits from this the most (I always found it odd that they were established as a couple so quickly in the manga despite having barely met), here the girl’s run into him multiple times instead of the single time in the manga and something similar happens with Ascot and which helps out him as well since it’s easier to see where he got his crush on Umi (again, in the manga they meet maybe three times and that makes it a little harder to take the relationships seriously). In the second season this also helps Eagle since in the manga he and Hikaru didn’t meet in person until the final fight, here they meet rather early on (although giving him extra screen time means that he comes off much more manipulative than he does in the manga which is neither good nor bad but just plain odd). However, while the extra run-time (49 episodes vs 6 manga volumes) helped with the character development it did not help with the already present plot problems.

The Bad: This series has two major problems, foreshadowing and pacing. The first is a carry over from the manga, the first arc doesn’t have nearly enough (even though I knew what was to come and was actively looking for hints of it) and the second half had entirely too much, enough that it was hard to believe that the characters were taken by surprise by the turn of events. The pacing however is a problem from taking a six volume manga series and stretching it out to 49 episodes, 39 episodes should have been enough and they might have even been able to tell the story in 26. The second half is where the story really plods along and, since Hikaru is the true main character of the show, there are periods when nothing happens because she’s out of the picture. I have to admit that I prefer elements of the manga’s overall ending to the one here and was a bit surprised at the changes since I thought that one of the members of Clamp helped to write the anime*.

The Audio: It appears that this show had three openings and three endings total but I’m a bit confused by exactly when they all were shown. There’s one opening and ending for the first twenty episodes, ie the first season, and when I was watching the streams there were two openings, I preferred the one that started close to the end,  "Still embracing light and darkness" (Hikari to Kage o Dakishimeta mama), which also had more spoilery imagery. However I had missed a few episodes and had to find fansubs, since hulu only has up to episode 20, and those early episodes were also playing that song instead of what I thought was the second opening, "I can't hate you" (Kirai ni narenai). I don’t know if "I can't hate you" had been created for the re-mastered tapes or if for some reason it just wasn’t released in the US originally, it’s all a bit odd. I also watched the show in a mixture of English and Japanese and thought that the Japanese dub was the stronger of the two (which isn’t surprising since the dub is a bit older), even though I was unnerved to realize that Eagle Vision’s Japanese VA was the same as Yuki’s from Cardcaptor Sakura (Megumi Ogata). The English dub actually isn’t terrible, there are some voices which are equally annoying in both languages and I felt like Ferio sounded too old in both languages (I had always thought he was mid to late teens, here he sounded more like he was in his 20s), Umi’s voice was one of the most drastic changes (in Japanese she sounds like a rich girl with a soft voice, not as soft as Fuu’s but still soft, and in English she comes off as a lot louder and more screechy, which matched up with her character better I thought) and I’d still recommend the Japanese dub over the English one but it’s certainly listenable.

The Visuals: At first I wasn’t sure if I was watching the remasters or not but now I can say that I’m pretty sure the streams on hulu are in fact the remasters. Not everything is fixed in the hulu stream, there are still some scenes where something or other is glowing too brightly (bloom) and some of the details are lost, but the colors have been restored and most of the scenes have very sharp, crisp lines. It’s clear that the show is a bit dated, and I’m not even talking about Clamp’s love of giving their characters enormous shoulder pads here, but it doesn’t look bad. Back to the shoulder pads however, I’ve thought that a lot of the character designs here look ridiculous (somehow they are just pulled off better in the manga) but you do get used to them somewhat after a bit.

In the end I would rather recommend the manga over the anime but I wouldn't have any qualms about giving the anime to kids in the right age group, especially girls. The show has three strong female leads (both physically and emotionally and they all have to grow to reach that point) and manages to do so without dumbing down the other characters, male and female (well, except for when the anime turns into "The Hikaru Show"). It is a show for kids but it's not one that is too stupid for adults to stand even though it certainly has it faults.

*The changes are as follows (and mostly appear in the last volume): in the anime it was the girls who warned the three worlds about the duties of the pillar, here Eagle already knew and tried to use the information to bully the other two nations into leaving (not a bit changes and the anime change makes sense but it's still significant). As mentioned earlier, in the manga Hikaru and Eagle never met in person until the fight for the pillar, which makes their romance make more sense in the anime, and the determining of the pillar is VERY different. In the manga it’s an actual fight between Hikaru and Eagle (in Tokyo which is probably where the Rayearth OVAs got the idea, which I plan to get around to sooner or later BTW) and it’s not an object that symbolizes the pillar, it’s a road that only they can enter. One thing that caught me off guard in the anime however is that Eagle in fact dies, when re-checking the manga I figured out why, he lives there! Funny enough, Eagle is supposed to die in the manga as well (from the battle for the pillar) but he actually makes it out alive, honestly his death was one of the things in the anime that bothered me the most, although the one that makes the most curious is how Umi and Ascot seem even closer by the end of the manga yet Umi basically confesses to Cleft in the anime, an odd change (shipping battling between writers I guess???).

 

Manga Review: Gate 7 (volume 1)

As I believe I've said before, I'm a pretty big fan of CLAMP's works but recently I haven't been loving them as much as I used to. Gate 7 was giving me particular trouble since CLAMP decided to start referencing a lot of Japanese history that is a bit obscure for someone who hasn't studied it in depth and I eventually stopped trying to follow it and said "fine, this is licensed and will probably have tons and tons of translator notes so I'd rather read the story that way then being confused all the time." That said I was still hesitant to actually go and pick up the first volume, at this point the story could be alright or really terrible, but thankfully tons and tons of people were holding contests for it and I eventually won a copy from Dark Horse themselves via twitter, good enough for me!

Gate 7 by CLAMP

Summary: Takamoto was an ordinary high school student who loved Kyoto but his first trip there wasn't what he expected, with all the mysterious people jumping in and out of a dream like setting and using magic. But he's even more unnerved when strange circumstances force him to transfer to Kyoto three months later and he's once again mixed up with these sorcerers.

The Good: There are six pages of translator notes in the back of this first volume and they are invaluable in understanding all the names being thrown around or what the many kinds of noodles mentioned are. The story was also easier to follow a second time around, now that I knew what was going to happen and using the translator notes to fill in the blanks but I think that with those notes to start with most people won't need a re-read. The basic plot premise is fairly simple and has promise to be interesting so hopefully Clamp will try for a simpler approach than with their more recent works.

The Bad: I remember reading the original premise for the series (part of which I think got incorperated in Clamp's other recent work, Blood-C) and I'm sad the series changed so drastically since I really liked their original idea. Right now the series has a lot of potential to go bad, there are so many characters and none have been fleshed out, Hana seems more like a plot device than a character and Takamoto is just very dull right now, although the setting is being used nicely. At this point I just don't have a reason to care for any of the characters or their motivations and I really should be able to after reading a few chapters.

The Art: The people are slightly less noodle-y than the character designs in Tsubasa: Resevior Chronicles and xxxHolic which I like and the rest of the art is as intricate as anything they've ever done, honestly I was looking more forward to seeing the art up close than rereading the story when I won my copy. Lots of double page spreads, intricate detailing, and lush backgrounds, the characters also manage to look fairly distinct from each other but some of them already are starting to look like some of Clamp's other characters.

I've held off so far from getting the second volume and I'll probably wait until I hear reviews of the third volume (which would be entirely new to me) before deciding whether or not to continue this series. Also sad that the original project this was going to be part of, the mangenettes, never worked out, I was more excited by the idea of simultaneous manga releases than the story itself and the plan was for that to come out in 2008 or so and by 2012 we have one, possibly four, manga that are being serialized on US sites simultaneously and legally with the Japanese releases (the only one I know of for sure is, of all things, Soul Eater Not). 

Anime Review: Blood-C

Back when the summer season was starting up this was one of my most anticipated series. I wanted to give Clamp another chance since this seemed like something they could do well, take an existing supernatural/horror/gore series, genres they're familiar with, and do a short series on it. The character designs looked nice, the trailers seemed interesting enough and I like a lot of series that Production IG has done. But, as a Clamp fun, well, this just didn't seem to work.

Blood-C

Summary: With no connection to Blood+ and only a possible tenuous connection to Blood: The Last Vampire, CLAMP takes a crack at Production IG’s franchise and turns vampire slayer Saya into an ordinary school girl who is the only one who can fight the Elder Bairns and try to keep the town safe. But the town is a strange, empty place and some of the people around Saya are stranger still, not that she has anytime to notice with the vauge flashbacks of strange memories she sometimes gets.

The Good: Once things are finally explained towards the end of the series Saya becomes an interesting character and I do wonder just what course of action she’s going to take in the upcoming movie (coming out June 2012 in Japan, it'll be a few months later still until fans in the rest of the world can see it however). The series also employs a trope that isn’t used too often and it takes a little while for the viewer to figure out what trope it is which is good, sometimes it feels like every big “plot twist” is too easy to spot these days so it’s nice to see some where it really is a twist.

The Bad: I never thought I would say this but 12 episodes was too many episodes for this series. The show tried to have nothing happen in the first three episodes to show how abnormal the town is but the fact is that almost all settings in anime, especially ones in fantasy, are strange so I didn’t even pick up on most of it until other people told me. I suspect that if the earlier episodes were really compressed, the pace of the later ones was sped up and the upcoming movie were combined into a 13 episode series it would have been much more tolerable and interesting. I only kept watching this show because NicoNico doesn’t offer it’s back catalog to nonsubscribers, if it wasn’t for that detail I would have dropped this show and waited for others to see if the characters got more likable or if the plot sped up/got interesting/actually showed up and said what was going on because that simply took way too long.

The Audio: Blood-C’s composer has worked on another CLAMP work before, X/1999 which was Naoki Sato’s first work actually. Anyone who has heard one of the X’x trademark themes (Sandame) will instantly recognize his hand in some of the more dramatic music during the fight scenes*. The BGM is solid, the OP is a mash-up of Japanese, Engrish and I believe French (and, if you can find translations, your first hint that things are not as happy as they appear), the ED is a ballad and Saya’s singing really does not work in this series.

The Visuals: The show certainly lives up to the blood part of it’s name, this is easily the goriest show I’ve seen the whole year and I saw Deadman Wonderland earlier in the year which had plenty of gory bits. Here not only is there tons of gore but it’s really well drawn gore, the artists don’t just splash red paint onto Saya, they make the blood run and clump the way real blood would if it was on skin or clothing, if it streaked or if someone tried to dry it off. Many of the monsters in this show also look quite disturbing one way or another (although some of them just look narm-ish) and I’m glad niconico was streaming the censored version, despite how bad the censoring actually was (black and white areas that would cover the entire screen without so much as a gradient). It’s easy to tell that CLAMP did the character designs since they all bear their (recent) trademark look of noodle people and as usual the men look more elongated and awkward than the female characters do. It’s clear from the visuals that this show had a high production quality level (screenshots of individual frames show that there was even some animation in the fights that was much to fast for most people to notice) and I wonder just how good the movie is going to look if this was just a tv show.

I was frustrated by this show, it had plenty of potential yet I didn't like the presentation at all. Still want to check out Blood+ sometime, the only reason I haven't is because it's rather long, but I really can't recommend this show to anyone since I disliked it so much. I do like slow paced stories when there is a good payoff and so far this story hasn't had a satisfactory ending.

*well let’s put it this way, this is the first time I’ve ever heard music by a composer, heard some other work by them and could tell it was by the same person. If someone as musically challenged as me can tell I think most other people probably can, it was actually a little freaky being able to tell.

Movie Review: Tsubasa RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE the Movie: The Princess in the Birdcage Kingdom

Dang that's a long title and all the weird capitalization is intentional although I have no idea what it's for (actually, I've never seen anyone guess what that was about). As a quick note, I've seen a little bit of the anime but I have read all the manga so I'm plenty familiar with the story of TRC and I have seen the accompanying xxxHolic movie, A Midsummer Night's Dream (my friend owns the set at showed the other movie at Halloween a couple of years back). You don't need to see the xxxHolic half of the story to get this movie but you really do need to be familar with either the TRC manga or the anime if you don't want to be lost (not all of it, just enough that you know the characters).

Tsubasa RESEVoir CHRoNiCLE the Movie: The Princess in the Birdcage Kingdom

Summary: As the group continues their quest to find the feathers that make up Sakura's lost memories they arrive in a strange kingdom that is enclosed inside a birdcage. The current king, who may or may not be possessed by one of Sakura's feather's seeks to enshroud the entire kingdom in eternal darkness and it's up to the gang to save them all!

The Good: I probably made my opinion on TRC clear from the xxHolic review (that ending, what) but this movie did make me want to go back to the beginning of the series and re-read all the pre Acid Tokyo arcs or even just check out the anime for that part. I don't want to watch all of the anime (since a friend was doing live commentary on it the other day and it didn't sound much more comprehensible than the manga) but this movie reminded me of just how much I enjoyed the early part of the story and I'll check around to see if I can find the earlier episodes streaming.

The Bad: Dear god, the pacing here was hideous! The whole movie is only about 30 minutes long and tries to accomplish what would have taken the tv series about three episodes to do in one. It whips by at a breakneck pace, not giving the characters time to explain their actions (yes I know they're good guys but why are they so determined to help the people here?) and Fai and Kurogane don't get that much screen time at all. If you aren't familiar with the series you'll be lost and if you are, well, it just doesn't feel like that satisfying a story arc, just go watch the OVAs instead.


The Art: While I'm still puzzled how the gang changed their clothes before they entered this new deminsion (and why Shaoran's hair was the wrong color, it was just different enough to annoy me) this movie looks good. As the poster shows, it's pretty colorful throughout and the fights also looked good. The characters are still a bit too enlongated and unless you're familiar with the style they're going to look a bit weird (heck, there were parts when they looked weird to me and I've seen the style for years!). So, not exactly eye candy then but it's certainly better than the pacing here.


The Music: The movie used a lot of tracks from the tv series that I immediately recognized (this was one of them but I'm not sure of the name for the other) and they are certainly dramatic, yet not over-dramatic, pieces of music. They certainly add a feeling of grandeur to the movie and get stuck in your head so I suppose I did enjoy the music here.

In case you guys didn't see it yesterday, I'm going to do something a little different in March and review webcomics all month instead (check the post below this one for more details) so tomorrow is my last regular review for a month! And, following my pattern, it's going to be a manga, I wonder what it could be....

Manga Review: xxxHolic

Initially, and this was years ago (geeze, probably about four years ago now) I started reading Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicles but didn't start reading xxxHolic until things started getting confusing in TRC. I ended up enjoying Holic more, probably because it had a less confusing plot line, but now that the series is done I'm really not sure what to think about it. Sure I enjoyed a lot of the series but at the same time it had quite a few issues as well.

xxxHolic by CLAMP


Summary: Watanuki not only has the ability to see ghosts, spirits, and other things that regular humans cannot but they are also attracted to his blood and try to eat him a regular basis. He impulsively wishes once that this would stop happening and happens to say this in front of Yuuko, a shopkeeper whose store grants wishes. Ever since he's been doing errands and chores for her to work off his debt and meeting a truly wide variety of humans and yokai.

The Good: Despite what I say below, xxxHolic did have a stronger ending than TRC did (that's a pretty low bar though). I loved the series when it was either standalone chapters or short arcs that showed strange situations and the characters growing up. Plus, I love stories containing spirits and other beasties (as long it doesn't involve a lot of romance mind you) and xxxHolic kept me perfectly satisfied in that respect. Some of the smaller crossovers with TRC did work well (I loved the crossovers in the early days where you would just see items passed between the worlds) and I really want to see someone else pull off the crossover series trick, just with a bit more planning please.

The Bad: I'm reviewing xxxHolic and xxxHolic Rou here and I don't think that Rou was even needed. If the story had actually done something with the plot that wouldn't be the case but there is no change in Watanuki between the end of Rou and the regular series. I'm still annoyed that CLAMP wasted a good opportunity to tie up some of TRC's plot threads* and really, only one of the characters got a good wrap up. xxxHolic was at it's strongest when it only had minimal crossover with TRC because once that series got crazy xxxHolic stopped making a lot of sense as well.

The Art: The art doesn't translate well to animation but as stills it's gorgeous art. This was during CLAMP's streched out people period and their art looks way better than that style should. Each chapter page and cover illustration is meticulously detailed and the artbook spreads will cause enterprising cosplayers to tear their hair out for generations to come. Again, the art didn't translate so well to the anime (hence why I haven't seen much of it) but in still form, once you get used to it, the art fits the series perfectly.




This is a story I want to own someday, and in print too, but I might just hold off buying the Rou part for a long time. Now, I wonder if there are any artbooks for this released stateside....


*Apparently both stories got away from them and ran for much longer than they planned, I know a few members of the group said they needed to re-read Holic to get the ending, never a good sign if you're the co-creator.