Anime Review: Space Brothers

Well this review is a long time coming, the Space Brothers anime originally ran from April 2012 to March 2014 and I did keep up with it for the first year or so but I slacked off in my senior year of college and only checked in sporadically on reviews after that. I did like it while I was watching, it was just long, slow at times, and when I fell off it was in an especially slow period and followed by a little, for-kids cartoon segment each week other folks dubbed "racist cartoon theater" which really didn't spark my interest again immediately.

But I did really like the show and that's why I always planned on coming back, since it has been three years and some change since the show aired. In the end, part of the fun for me was to see how far Mutta had come in the show and also how different my own life was since I started it. I went from being a college junior to an adult who actually has friends who work at NASA! Heck, I can say it now but my first, long-term job after college was working in the museum store at the National Air and Space Museum (which is far less glamours than it sounds, running past rocket engines to get to the bathroom is hilarious however!) so I think I can say that watching this show in the staff cafeteria, with its great view of the capitol and surrounded by photos of people eating in the space station and on planes, is possibly the nerdiest place this show has ever been watched in. And I do like space, I like harder sci-fi, and while this isn't the usual kind of hard sci-fi it's certainly one of the more realistic series I've ever come across

Space Brothers

Anime Review: Yozakura Quartet: Hana no Uta

As a general explanation before I get into the reviews: Yozakura Quartet is based off of a manga by the same name and the manga is still on-going so this series does not have a hard and fast ending as I expected. The manga was adapted first into an anime in 2008 of the same name is apparently terrible and should be ignored, that one is the one that Sentai Filmworks has licensed in the US. Over the past few years Studio Tatsunoko has been making a few OVA series as well as another full anime series that adapts the story much more faithfully and is the one I'm talking about here, the main tv series Hana no Uta (Song of the Flowers), Hoshi no Umi (The Sea of Stars), and Tsuki ni Naku (Howling/Crying at the Moon). This is the order you should watch them in, I promise it's for the best but it can be a little hard to find Hoshi no Umi online these days since it's been a few years and none of these series were even licensed for streaming. Since there is no official license, I'm going to try and use the actual Japanese terms for the various supernatural aspects of the works instead of English terms the way I usually would for consistency. The subs I saw used "dæmon" instead of yokai and "Sakura Newtown" instead of "Sakurashin" but since everyone will at least hear those same words this seems to be the best way to avoid confusion!

Yozakura Quartet: Hana no Uta

Anime Review: Tokyo Ravens

Given how far behind I fell with my reviews, I've opted to just start over this week following my regular schedule and not exhaust myself trying to catch back up (since the spring anime season just ended I didn't have any reviews I could pop up instead last week but I think I'm set for now!)

As I've said about half my reviews lately, this one must seem like it's coming out of left field to people who read my season round-UP posts, spring was  an odd season for me in more ways than one. I actually did completely drop this show last winter but was a bit bored and checked back in on a discussion thread got it every now and then (since no blog I followed had kept up with it, the problem with only following people with the same tastes) when I noticed a friend with similar tastes to mine was still watching and once it was done asked if it had been worth it. They said that they had been meh on the show when they started but it had ended up being one if their favorites and that's exactly what I needed to hear and then jumped back in right where I left off. 

Tokyo Ravens

Anime Review: Gundam Build Fighters

If some shows I've reviewed lately are a bit surprising but not wholly so since I've mentioned them before this has to be the oddest of the bunch. Considering that last fall people had next to no hopes for this show, that I remember seeing, there's no reason I would see the latest sort-of installment in a franchise I don't have any experience with (other than that one time my anime club watched a few episodes of Gundam Wing and I was deeply bored) and it seemed like a pretty blatant grab to get kids to buy toys, nope I have better things to spend my time on! But after the new year I was seeing more and more chatter about the show online and it seemed like people were really enjoying it and I actually had a number of friends who were also becoming interested in the show for the same reasons. Considering that Sunrise had done the rather unprecedented move of putting the show legally on youtube subbed in at least a half a dozen different languages I didn't have any reason to not try the show out when I found myself with some free time during my lunch and I was pretty quickly able to see why so many people were enjoying it.

Gundam Build Fighters

Anime Review: Nagi-Asu: A Lull in the Sea

My past experiences with PA works have been mixed which seems to be the case for a lot of people and makes me feel better. And despite that, if you sit me down and tell me there's a semi-fantasy anime airing with some pretty visuals of course I'm going to try it out. Which is more or less why I'm interested in PA Work's latest show, Glasslip, although after this one I'm not sure what my expectations for it are....

Nagi-Asu: A Lull in the Sea (Nagi no Asuka)

Anime Review: Samurai Flamenco

The winter season was an odd one for the noimainA timeslot, it had Silver Spoon returning for the second of it's split seasons and then this show continuing on from the fall as well. Like many noitaminA shows, there wasn't a lot of information available about Samurai Flamenco before it started airing beyond a few posters and a weird motto about how a hero never gives up and I remember that I didn't think highly of the first episode. But after a few episodes it grew on me and then a few more after that it had the biggest genre shift I can ever remember seeing which left my social media feeds swearing for a solid two days.....

Samurai Flamenco

Anime Review: Kill la Kill

Last year when I went to my first Otakon I decided to try and hit up all the industry panels I could since I'd never been to a con large enough to host industry panels at before (well, Funimation had one at Animazement my last year there which was actually talking about how the company worked and was actually rather cool!). In the end I decided it was a worthy experiment but there wasn't much of a difference between reading the news online in a few minutes and sitting for an hour in a room while they slowly dole it out to you. "Much" anyway, it was rather fantastic being in the room when Funimation started playing the Cowboy Bebop theme and when I was in the Aniplex panel my jaw actually dropped when they said "oh and we've got one more title for the fall, it's a new show" and started playing Kill la Kill's trailer. By that point the internet was practically in raptures about how great Studio Trigger's new show would look ("sasuga sakuga!") and while I wasn't so sure about the show based on the premise it was still more than enough to get me to try it out!

Kill la Kill

Anime Review: Sunday Without God

This past year (so, 2013) I made a real effort to listen to the anime-bloggersphere and see what series that I didn't try in a given season (usually because I was too busy or just too cynical to give another show a shot) were worth picking up later and I did a pretty good job at getting them them sooner rather than later. There are still a few shows I didn't get to, I'm waiting until all of the OVAs for Yozakura Quartet are out before I tackle that, might get around to trying stuff like Majestic Prince and Attack on Titan if they ever announce second seasons, twitter is convincing me to try out a few things like Meganebu but that's mostly it, it just wasn't that big a year for me. And it's funny, I finished the summer out with just four shows and given that I could have easily made room for this one but when I tried out the manga adaptation (the series was originally a light novel I later learned) I was turned off by it. The pacing felt a bit weird and the character designs didn't quite work for me either. Funny enough I could say the same thing about this anime version but in a different sort of way. 

Sunday Without God (Kamisama no Inai Nichiyobi)

Anime Review: Valvrave the Liberator Season Two

To refresh everyone's memory, I started the first season of this back in the spring, dropped it a few episodes in (since I dropped shows left and right last year), was really glad I dropped it when I heard about the rape scene, and then got kind of curious about it again. I dropped it four or five episodes in the first time which is rather late for me and, well, sometimes I want to watch shows with amazing world-building with deep characters and other times I want to watch flashy, fluffy mecha shows. So I finished it and decided that since it was one of the few shows I wouldn't have to wait a week to watch each time, well, why not?

Valvrave the Liberator: Season Two

Anime Review: Galilei Donna

This has been a bit of an odd year for the noitaminA timeslot. In the winter we had two continuing shows, Psycho-Pass and Robotics;Notes and in the spring the entire timeslot was taken up by a rerun of Katanagatari (which baffles me since the only thing new were the credits and I don't believe it was getting a rerelease). The summer had another rerun, AnoHana (which did originally air in the timeslot and was promoting it's new movie, it still felt like a bit of a slap to have reruns two seasons in a row however) which was accompanied by Silver Spoon (which will be back in just a couple of weeks) and then the fall had two anime original stories, Samurai Flamenco (which is also continuing on in the winter) and this entry. I was fairly excited about it since the art looked nice and the summary made it sound like a family coming back together to go on a quest (which means adult characters, wohoo!), sadly only one of those things turned out to be true.

Galilei Donna

Anime Review: Kyousougiga

I might be jumping the gun here a little bit since technically the last episode, 10.5 which is supposed to be a commentary, hasn't aired yet but if anything really major happens in that episode I'll be sure to add it in (at this point I'm just so excited to talk about this show that I want to do it NOW). 

So, two years ago I watched the original Kyousougiga OVA and was totally charmed by it's insane, fast-paced antics. I had to watch it twice to figure out what happened, and realized that almost nothing in the preview (PV) had actually made it to the OVA but I loved it anyway and wanted more. About a year later a series of short ONAs came out, five new ones, all under 10 minutes long which served as prequels, fleshing out different aspects of the setting and characters and while I enjoyed it I was a bit sad since I wanted to see where the story went next, not how it got there. So when a full tv series was announced this year I was happy and excited but not overly excited, although that was partially because of the format. The show has one special (which I suppose is 5.5), two recaps (0 and 10.5) and then 10 regular episodes which were all split into three parts which I took to mean it would be in the same vein as the ONAs, short, semi-interconnected stories (and probably reworking those original ONAs into it) but no real connecting plot.

And it turned out that the first episode was the first recap of sorts, that original OVA being aired as episode 0 so I skipped it, I've seen it enough times that I was able to help establish the tvtropes page for the show and just didn't need to see it again. At the time the summer shows had just finished and I was coming off my Gatchaman Crowds high and was thinking that was going to be my favorite show of the year for show, nothing could even challenge it (well, in the back of my mind I admitted that if anything did it would be my love of this franchise). Yet when I sat down to watch the first full episode of this show I was blown away and realized that a challenger for that crown had arrived and started to realize just how carefully planned out those earlier incarnations of the story had been.

Kyousougiga

Anime Review: Servant x Service

This summer I ended up watching a record number of shows for me, a record low that is since I finished with just four shows left. I've been cutting more and more shows this year so that I can try and make time to get through my backlog faster (although funny enough I ran the numbers and I believe I actually tried out the exact same number of shows as I did in 2012) but I am trying to keep an eye on a few of the shows and come back to them later if it seems like other reviewers ended up liking them. When I originally watched this show I got a few minutes into the third episode and then dropped it, of course, as I later worked out, it seemed like the "three episode rule" was in full effect for this show since it seemed to even out and figure out what it wanted to do later in the episode.

Servant x Service

Summary: Lucy (abbr) is a new clerk in the Health and Welfare Department and while she's an efficient civil servant she's joined for one reason, to find the clerk who approved her birth certificate and give them a piece of her mind. At least her workplace is filled with nutty characters to keep things interesting, although interesting usually means "causes even more problems for her."

The Good: No, the show is far less dirty than that title makes it sound (also not related to Inu x Boku Secret Service although that might be a good or bad thing depending on your point of view), I'm honestly not quite sure what it's supposed to mean but it does work, kind of. Once the show gets going it is a fairly funny comedy which makes an effort to follow around all of the characters and the core cast (the three newcomers Lucy, Miyoshi, and Hasebe plus Chihaya, Ichimiya not so much) and once the show evens out I really did enjoy watching them get through their lives and everyone's interactions (heck, even Hasebe's romantic pursuit of Lucy turned out much better than I expected from the first few episodes). Some of the jokes really outstayed their welcome (like the Tanaka grandson, it's weird that I like how half the cast is written and find the other half to be practically two-dimensional) and in some ways it's not that different from high school comedy-with-a-romantic-subplot story, aside from the setting, but even those little differences made it more enjoyable for someone whose long out of high school.

The Bad: Two things drove me away from the show to start with, one was the side character Touko (who is a annoying, tsundere younger sister who appeared far too many times for an unfunny character in the first few episodes) and the other was that Chihaya's really air-headed tendencies when it came to cosplay just rubbed me the wrong way. Thankfully both of those do get balanced out later (Touko doesn't pop up every five minutes and Chihaya gains some other character traits) but that doesn't change the fact that they both bothered me enough to initially drop the show. And as I noted above some of the characters really do feel more like one joke characters than something fleshed out (Touko gets a bit better but the Tanaka grandson and the section manager really never do, plus it is a bit hard to take Lucy's unhappiness at her name 100% seriously all the time, but at least the other characters agree with me there).

The Production Values: The opening song is ridiculously catchy and the ending theme rather grew on me as well (I didn't even notice that they switched singers for the ED, oops) but I doubt I'll remember either of them a few seasons from now. I will probably remember how the opening looked with it's weird choice to portray the characters in their workspaces with everything flying apart while they stand still but other than that the series didn't look very special either. 


While I don't plan on buying the series, I just don't see myself rewatching it and given that it's an Aniplex title it'll probably be more expensive than I'd like, I did end up enjoying the series enough to give it a good 3 or 3.5 out of 5. And it's made me even more curious about the original author's other work, Working!!/Wagnaria!! and I'll probably bump that up my to-watch list now that I'm done. Both shows are streaming on crunchyroll for those interested in checking them out. 

Anime Review: Hakkenden: Eight Dogs of the East

Last week I said The Eccentric Family was my last summer anime show to review and in a way I was right, I had originally picked this show up way in January, dropped it even though I liked it since I wasn't sure enough was going to happen, and then picked it up again starting in that weird week in-between seasons for something to watch. So it is technically a summer show, it was a split cour, it doesn't feel that way to me, although now I regret not watching it as it came out because of just how much fun I had. And just as a quick note, this story seems to follow a bit of a different interpretation of the Hakkenden than other stories seem to, I do recommend skimming the wikipedia page for it first and then the characters in show tell you what other stories are going to be plot relevant later on.

Hakkenden: Eight Dogs of the East

Summary: Five years ago the village where Shino, Sosuke, and their friend Hamaji lived was burned to the ground and they were it's only survivors, abet with some odd side effects. Hamaji is normal but Shino hasn't aged in those five years and Sosuke is able to transform into their old dog, this is in addition to the fact that the two of them already had the same birthmark and were both born clutching mysterious gems. They're living happy, content lives far from prying eyes but when they're summoned by the church all of their lives are about to get quite a bit more exciting and complicated.

The Good: The way I've been describing this show is that it feels a bit like a throw-back to a late 90s/early 00s show in a good way, like manga-group CLAMP's works before Tsubasa Reseviror Chronicles and xxxHolic. It's centered more around a theme than plot (friendship and camaraderie in this case*), although the plot will pop up when needed, it gets a little goofy and self-aware at times, but never in such a way that it seems to be winking at the camera, and I just had fun watching the characters interact and react with each other. Oh and it has long lost siblings, dark dramatic pasts, memory loss, a character outside the group who seems to be the most blase about everything going on, twins/clones/shadow-thing, and people losing eyes, it's practically a homecoming for CLAMP fans!** But I think that anime fans who just want a silly fantasy story, not something too dark or complicated to keep track of but something a little more than a monster-of-the-week series will enjoy this and despite the almost complete lack of romance (aside from two side characters and it was actually rather adorable to watch them realize they had fallen for each other at the same time I did) I'm rather surprised that the BL fans aren't all over this show with its 90% male cast. 

The Bad: As predicted earlier, no the story doesn't reach it's final conclusion in the series, something even the characters riff on, and given how tidy the last arc was in some ways I suspect that was an anime original way to tie the show up in case they couldn't get another season (having seen the DVD/BR numbers I don't believe one is coming). I will say it ties up the show well enough, it's the end of a larger arc, the characters have grown some, mysteries have been revealed (well, to the viewers anyway but again the characters in the show do pick up on when things don't quite seem right like suspiciously similar details in their lives), it's just a clear "and a few days later the story goes on" ending. I'll also note that I rewatched the first few episodes after I finished the show, since I had last seen them seven months earlier, and it does seem like the show needed it's first arc to really get a feel for the characters and the setting. At the time it didn't seem very rough, just fast paced as they tried to get all the introductions out of the way, but viewers who watch all 26 episodes in a shorter time frame might notice some oddly quick character development.

The Production Values: I will admit I was crushed when I checked out Section 23's stream of the show on hulu to see if they had translations of the OP/EDs and realized that the Engrish in the first opening was pretty terrible. I had been able to make out a few words and felt like it was walking that line between cheesy and cool enough to work for the show, nope not actually. Aside from that, I could never tell if one or two of the VAs were just plain bored or if their characters were supposed to sound this blase (I can imagine that a lot of gigs are probably "well, it's an okay show and it's a paycheck", not every show will be awesome after all) but all of the main characters sounded fine and the first ED really grew on me, especially with it's visuals. I do with the show had actually chosen a color scheme, it's the opposite of Samurai Flamenco because a lot of things seem overly bright and cheerful and just not tied together enough, but I'll take overly fun colors over too-subdued colors any day of the week.


In the end I give this highly fun and enjoyable show either a 3.5 or 4 out of 5 (I feel like it's not "good enough" for a four but I really enjoyed it!) and plan on picking it up at some point since Section 23/Sentai has licensed it. You can check out the show on either Crunchryoll or Hulu but only the Hulu stream has the translation of the afore-mentioned terrible Engrish (and weirdly enough Sentai hasn't translated the OP/ED for the second season, guess they'll do that later and maybe amend the streams?).


*the show really has a thing for pairing characters up, completely non-romantically, and I haven't seen a show set up so many parallel relationships since Star Driver and it's obsession with trios.
**no lie, some areas of the Clamp fandom have adopted the phrase "it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye" considering just how damned often they started using that trope.

Anime Review: The Eccentric Family

And now for the last summer anime review (well, sort of, I'll explain next week) I tackle one of the blogosphere's darlings, an anime based on a book written by Tomihiko Morimi (the author of the The Tatami Galaxy as well) which gave it an odd sort of nerd-cred in the circles I run in. This was one of the shows I was most excited for when the summer started and even though it didn't end up being my absolute favorite show I was pretty happy with it by the end.

The Eccentric Family (Uchoten Kazoku)

Summary: In the city of Kyoto there are many different kinds of people who live there. Humans of course but the city has also been populated by tengu and tanuki since ancient times and the three of them maintain an odd balance, even if the humans are barely aware of it. Yasaburo is a young tanuki from a tanuki family with a foot in each world it seems, masquerading as a human for fun, his teacher is a tengu (and quite possibly his crush, his master's former student), and he has deep ties to his tanuki family. But as with all families there are stresses there are stresses and problems with it and it seems like some of their problems have their roots far outside his family in the rest of Kyoto.

The Good: I'm finding it a bit hard to articulate why I enjoyed this series since I didn't like it for the usual reasons. There's no grand sweeping plot, a setting that is a character in it's own right, or characters who undergo deep, transformative journeys, although I'm sure people will argue with me on the last two points, Eccentric Family is in some ways a simpler series than that but to call it simple would be a gross misrepresentation. Unsurprisingly it's largely centered around the theme of family, both within Yasaburo's immediate family and the feud with his uncle and cousins, and watching his family change and begin to grow again, frozen as they were after his father's tragic death, is where I feel the show's true strength and heart lies. It's true that I enjoyed a lot of the whimsy in the show as well but since nearly every example I can think of involves Yasaburo and other members of his family I think that only serves to reinforce just how central the family is and if you don't like those characters or their dynamics then you're not going to enjoy the show.

The Bad: My only real complaint about the series is that I wish it had explained a bit more just what Benten is. We know she was born human, stolen by a tengu and able to use tengu powers but it's never quite explained how and, since the characters are a tad confused by it as well (ie, this isn't something we're supposed to simply accept is part of their world and move on), I was a bit surprised that the story didn't have a small reveal about how this happened towards the end. My personal theory on all of this was that she stole the teacher's powers (making him a human and her a tengu instead) but that's a wild guess on my part, not backed up by anything and I haven't seen anyone else out there with the same theory. I was also a bit sad that the titular family wasn't more, eccentric and filled with whacky hi-jinks as I expected, although I'll note that regardless the title is perfect, I merely expected something a tad bit different.

The Production Values: It was rather amusing to watch this show right after PA Works' spring show Red Data Girl and right before their fall show Nagi no Asukara because the art style is so different from what they normally do. There are no big eyed moe characters here with stunning landscape shots that have the same liquid feeling as a Ghibli film, everything here feels much flatter with less detail but you know what that's not a bad thing at all. To make it clear, this does not feel like a cheap show nor does it feel like the studio was trying to conserve resources after working on several shows in a row, in fact I can't really imagine this show being done in their usual style. I'm sure it would have worked yet I feel like the fact that they weren't going for a semi-photo-realistic style made the all important supernatural elements (which were more central to the plot than even those in either RDG or NnA) fit in better with the story, there was no obvious break where the mundane ended and the fantastical began because it all looked a bit mundane yet oh so slightly strange. As for the audio, I really wish I could have found a good subbed version of the opening to check the lyrics (since the song either starts off with "the world is interesting" or "the world isn't interesting" which is a rather large difference) but I liked the opening and ending regardless. All the voice acting seemed spot on too, the actors hit just the right high and low points for the characters and even though some of the situations were a bit absurd if you were to step back and think about them it was never the voice acting that drew you out of the situations.


For this show I'm going to give it 3.5 out of 5 stars and I'm also going to say that even though I'm probably in the minority, when comparing the two I do think that The Tatami Galaxy was a bit stronger. Of course, TG takes a favorite trope of mine, following a pattern to the point where it becomes mundane and then breaking/elevating it to the point where it becomes symbolic of something greater, which also means it was a bit more heavily plot driven by the end (as weird as that sounds) so of course that's going to give it the edge for me. However, this was still a good show and by far a more accessible one too which is certainly a good thing. There hasn't been an official license announcement for the show here in the US but, considering all but one of the episodes suddenly popped up on hulu with NIS America's logo splashed quite prominently on the page, it seems there will be one soon. In the meantime however interested parties can check out the show both on hulu and crunchyroll (which does have all the episodes still).

Anime Review: Free! Iwatobi Swim Club

In case people didn't see the message yesterday, due to trying to get everything watched in time for the anime round-up (nearly 10 shows in three days wohoo) I got a bit off schedule and I'm switching around the anime and the tv series reviews for this week. Since I alternate between shorter tv shows and longer ones this shouldn't be a problem again, especially since Manga November is coming up.

So, this was the show that got everyone's preferred form of underwear in a bunch back in January when a PV was released incensed the dudebros of the internet when it was announced as a real show for the summer. I was amused by it for sure but didn't think that I'd stick around much beyond the first episode or two. But yet, I tried a lot of shows over the summer and very few held my interest yet this was one of the ones I ended up truly liking....

Free! Iwatobi Swim Club

Summary: When they were kids, Haruka, Makoto, Nagisa and Rin were members of their swim club's swimming relay team but went their seperate ways during middle school. Now they're all in high school and fate seems to be conspiring to bring them back to swimming again, but can things go back to the way things were back then?

The Good: Kyoto Animation took their standard "cute girls do cute things" show set-up, replaced it with a guy and it turns out that it worked pretty well, hurray! Well, by worked well I mean "these guys don't feel like real highschoolers half the time because of the tropes involved but it was still fun to watch, hurray!" but that's fine, it's a rare anime that has a realistic depiction of middle/high schoolers anyway. And it's a rare example of a show that has quite a bit of fanservice but it's never creepy. Yes this is a show aimed at people who like guys and has them running around shirtless in close fitting swim trunks a lot of the time. HOWEVER, with the exception of one or two weird cuts (that were close ups of one guys crotch that no one seemed to like) the guys were never put into any compromising positions or made to feel like they were stripping just because of the camera, they felt like characters, not cut-outs just for the audience to stare at. And that's an important distinction, if you can do fanservice without fetishizing the character involved then you actually know how to write and make something that appeals to a much larger audience. I really do think that's why this one has attracted as large an audience as it has (I believe the preorders for the first DVD/BR were between 25-29k), even if cute guys aren't your thing but sports anime is you can truly enjoy it and not feel skeeved out every other scene.

The Bad: I found a lot of the elements of the last episode to be overly melodramatic. Yes this is a goofy, silly, campy-dramatic show, all sport shows are to a degree, but I felt like they started exaggerating one character's traits to an extreme to create more tension when none was needed. And then the other characters rewarded that drama-llama-ing, I felt like they could have reached the same conclusion without having to mess with the tone of the story so much and it did mean that I was grumpy at the finale which is the exact opposite of how you should feel about the end of a show. Other than that, I felt like there were one or two things the show didn't fully address but, since they've practically promised another season next summer, for the moment I won't be as harsh on it and just hope the next installment changes that.

The Production Values: I'm not sure I want to know how many hours of swimming footage the animators must have watched to make this show, I've seen a couple of blogs out there with actual swimmers (or friends of actuals swimmers who showed them the footage) who said it all looked rather spot on too which was pretty crazy. Yes some episodes look better than others, it's clear that they did spread the budget around a bit so that the big events got more money but through and through the show looks pretty great (there's also a lot of visual continuity in the details that I liked, like the character's shirts and setting changing in unison). Both the opening and ending songs grew on me (even the endings ridiculous graphics), although the voice actors for the boys did sound a little too old at times which was a bit jarring.

So for being fun I give this show 3 out of 5 stars and a recommendation if you like sports anime or if you just like staring at well-drawn men in anime, I'm not going to judge. The show is streaming on crunchyroll but somehow has not yet been picked up for a North American release, I'm betting there's an intense battle going on behind the scenes between the remaining American anime companies since, even though I doubt it'll be a huge huge hit (unlike Attack on Titan), I do think it will do well and it would be strange if none of those companies were even interested. 

Anime Review: Gatchaman Crowds

For confused readers, no there isn't a tv series/movie review this week since I just plain ran out of things to review, hopefully this won't be the case next week. And I had hoped with that I'd be able to get back on schedule but yesterday was my fourth day in a row of on and off headaches and I just wasn't able to finish this review in time, when you see the length of it you'll see why.

When the information about this show first started coming out earlier in the year I was uninterested, it was a spin-off of an older franchise (Science Ninja Team Gatchaman or Battle of the Planets) which I was wholly unfamiliar with (considering it's older than me by almost two decades) and that's fine. But then some information began to trickle down, it sounded as if this would be a completely unrelated show that a newcomer could watch and it was a sentai show with a female lead. Now, girl leading characters aren't uncommon in anime, they probably make up about a third to a half of all main characters, but outside of magical girl shows with heavy sentai influences (like Sailor Moon) I couldn't think of any with a female lead and that got me interested, even excited. And then I saw a bit more about what the show was like and went "yeah, this is going to end up being one of my favorite shows of the year isn't it?"

Gatchaman Crowds  

Summary: Hajime is a happy go lucky high school girl who doesn't even bat at eye at the fact that she was just chosen to protect the world from alien threats and given the power to transform into a Gatchaman. And it seems like she was chosen at just the right time, an old foe of the Gatchaman has reappeared, determined to make humanity self-destruct and Hajime has just the right outlook on life to deal with it.

The Good: Man oh man, where do we start. Well, as mentioned above, we have a female lead in a genre that usually doesn't, huzzah! There are a few problems with Hajime, noted below, but that's with Hajime herself, not because she's female* and in fact originally Sugane, a male character a year older but whose been a Gatchaman for five years, was supposed to be the lead which makes me curious what kind of show it originally was since without her it would have never done what it did. And what it did was pretty slick, I'm sure by now many nerds have seen a superhero show or movie where towards the end the main character goes "what's the point, why do we do this, why are we superheroes?" and if done early that because the raison d'etra of the story and if done late usually causes a breakdown (or breakup of a team) but then they rally again behind the motives they started with to save the day. Hajime questions this at the very beginning of the second episode, getting it out of the way earlier to focus on the show's real theme (communication) and the show comes to some interesting conclusions on the topic by the very end. Related to all of this is Hajime's foil, a young man named Rui who created a super intelligent artificial intelligence which he uses to run a social media site where users get points for doing good deeds in the real world (so Klout with real world clout). He was also given alien powers, the ability to make someone's soul manifest in the real world and can give the power to others but only does for a select few since, in contrast to Hajime's optimism and understanding, he fears what people do when left to their own devices. Oddly enough he's even the more idealistic of the two, hoping to "update" the world so that these carrots and rewards are no longer needed, and guess what, these two guys aren't ever enemies! Sure they do debate a bit but again, the main theme of this show is communication and you can't communicate if you're enemies. The show also proves that it understands social media better than any other thing I've seen in the media for years, it both acknowledges trolls and the power they have yet has unwavering faith that the majority of humanity is good that that is where we should place our trust (which is especially interesting given how most American superhero films as of late have focused on shielding people from themselves in a dark world, some have even pointed out that by comparison this makes American movies oddly Confucian and Crowds more idealistic and populist).

The Bad: I mentioned earlier there is a bit of trouble with Hajime the character, the problem is that she's less of a character and more a force of nature. She doesn't really undergo character development, is rarely wrong, without her the plot would have never moved the way it did, and you know what I'm okay with that. Part of it is that the show took a sterotype (the ditzy seeming female character, complete with a verbal tic) and made her both exactly what she seemed to be (a bit off the walls) yet also a deep thinker and it takes a while for both the audience and the characters to catch on not because she hides it but because she can be subtle when needed (plus we were both thinking of that old stereotype). And some people just won't like her because of the stereotype, I won't deny that she's a bit much at times but I have a tolerance for those things after trying out many moe shows over the years (heck at least she doesn't trip over invisible objects all the time). There is a problem with the last few episodes however; to remain spoiler free, the first half of episode 11 is a recap with the side characters all articulating how Hajime has helped them to grow and change, the second half is new material as is all of episode 12 and then the story seems to end without having tied up one major plot point and one more minor one. And after the credits scene seems to partially resolve one of those but yet, especially since the director did a huge public apology recently, the show has been rushed from the start, and there's a special event later in the month a number of fans are wondering if we didn't actually see the entire show. The show oddly enough had only 22 minute long episodes instead of 25 to start with, there were a couple of episodes earlier on where I felt like a scene was missing, and it was such an odd place for a recap I really do wonder if they scrambled to tell the best story they could in the time they had and then use that to delay to finish it up. If anything ever comes of this I'll edit this post, or I'll at least note if nothing else does happen, but the fact remains that one large thing gets tied up off-screen and a Chekov's gun appears to have never been fired, leading me to wonder if they were one and the same.   

The Production Values: As noted it appears this show was a bit rushed and there were parts where the art looked a bit sloppy (heck, I think there was an element missing from the first episode since it seems like the characters were looking at something which wasn't on my screen!), I expect it'll be a bit touched up for the BR/DVDs. I liked how the show used bright colors, like last year's tsuritama, and while I didn't notice it on my own I've seen a number of people blog about the composition and lighting of certain scenes and the inclusion of some modern art in the background as well (which, given that the title of each episode referred to a style of art, must be deliberate). As for the audio, I still adore the opening theme but was rather confused by the lyrics and made more confused after I found a fan translation, thought it worked very well, and then found out the lyrics were actually nonsense**. I also fell in love with the soundtrack, I went through it on youtube one day and loved how upbeat and fun the techno was, it perfectly matched the series and made me even more pumped to watch the next episode. But what I suspect most fans will remember even more is Mamoru Miyano's performance as the series villain Berg-Katze because of how over the top and hammy Katze usually was but also for how many other voices he had to do when Katze impersonates others. It certainly sounds like he had a rollicking time doing it, if Sentai Filmworks chooses to dub this show they'll have their work cut out for them to have someone be able to match the intensity and wildness of Miyano.

And so I quite happily give Crowds a 4 out of 5 for being wonderful fun yet showing that it both understands how the world works in many ways as is cheerfully optimistic that everything will work out if everyone pitches in by the end. It's wild, fun, tackles quite a few issues better than most shows do, and unfortunately for me has raised the bar on what I expect out of superhero shows now. Crowds, along with the original Gatchaman, has been licensed by Sentai Filmworks/Section 23 and is available for streaming on their website and on Crunchyroll.

*fun thing other fans noticed, the show also has a couple of characters who are the "contact characters" with the police, fire department, mayor, self-defense force, and civil servants. A lot of these are traditionally male roles but the SDF and police have female contacts and you could argue either way that the civil servants contact was Joe (a gatchman so he almost doesn't count) or his two female co-workers. While the show does still have more male characters than female in both main and supporting roles I get the impression that they did go out of their way to include female characters and the arguably flattest character in the entire show is male as well, that's all amazingly awesome.
** this is one of the many times I wish I was musical since I'd love to hear an English fan cover of the fan lyrics given how well they seem to fit the show, I can't remember the last time I heard an OP/ED that really was just nonsensical.

Anime Review: Silver Spoon

The summer anime season is done and almost miraculously none of the shows I followed dropped the ball with their endings which is wonderful. True I only followed four shows all the way (and there are a few more I want to pick back up, ServantxService, Hakkenden, and Sunday Without A God) but I'm still thrilled. This was never one of the shows I expected to do poorly however, Hiromu Arakawa has written a few different manga by now and was previously a dairy farmer so I had every faith that she'd be able to write a story about farming that captured everyone's attention in a way no one else could. 

Silver Spoon (Gin no Saji)

Summary: Hachiken is an odd duck and Enzoo, a high school devoted to agriculture with a 5am wake-up call and he's the only person in his class who didn't come from a farming family. But even though he's a bit out of place his classmates are certainly friendly enough and slowly he starts to find his place in the school and maybe his place in life as well.

The Good: Not everything about Hachiken's past and family has been explained so far in the story but I thought the story did a good job at hinting at what happened and I really emphasized with parts of it (the part in the last episode where the principal talks about running made me tear up since that hit a bit too close to home and was in some ways what I wanted, needed to hear). I was actually surprised at how much of Hachiken's past resonated with me, I was fairly different in high school (not thinking overly much about what I wanted to do in college, being in America I knew I'd get into several easily and would have options) but he's written as such a round character that I bet everyone can find one or two things in his life and go "yeah, I feel that way too." The side characters aren't as round but no one feels super flat, even the more comic relief characters have their strengths and passions and that really helps the show since it's just fun to watch everyone bounce off of each other (I was cracking up during the entire Area 51 episode partially because of how over the top it got). I hope some of the side characters get more time in the next part, like the friend who wants to become a vet but is struggling with the part where you have to be able to put animals down and deal with some very gory situations in the process, and while I'm sure that does happen in the story eventually I'm just worried that the anime won't get to cover it.

The Bad: It is a bit hard to say anything bad about this show considering that in some ways it's only half done, and I strongly suspect that the manga will cover all three years of high school. So of course not all of Hachiken's circumstances have been explained, but if by the end of the second half they haven't been explained enough then I'll be frustrated. Honestly the only part of the show that felt off was when the characters were discussing factory farming (where animals like chickens are kept in cages the entire time to simplify the process) and it felt like the show was endorsing it, clearly factory farming in Japan is much more humane than factory farming in the US (and slaughtering, if the characters had seen the pig butchering video my brother had to see in high school I can guaranteed they would not be eating bacon after it). I could say it was just culture differences and move on but, much like C3bu from the round-up at the beginning of the season, its something that means something so completely different in the US that it's nearly impossible to just not think about it during the show and be turned off by it.

The Production Values: This is as close as we're going to get to a "food porn" series for a while it seems and after seeing this show I really want someone to find a foodie manga and toss it at A-1 to animate after seeing how they did this show. Joking aside, I really did like the shots of the food more than anything else in the show with how lovingly detailed they were and how even a simple meal of egg over rice looked amazing. The rest of the show looked fine too, a few of the characters looked like they might be siblings to those found in Arakawa's other works but by and large everyone has rather different faces (the general shape, proportions, etc) and the animators replicated those quite faithfully. Sound wise nothing really caught my attention, none of the voice acting sounded off and the opening ended up being more catchy than I first expected but nothing was especially note-worthy.

In the end I give this show 3.5 out of 5 stars for being enjoyable, well-written, and for choosing a good place for the mid-season stop. The show will be back in the winter in the noitaminA slot again and for those who want to catch it now it's streaming on crunchyroll and a few other places, courtesy of it's licensor Aniplex (yep guys, prepare to pay higher than usual prices whenever the DVD and BRs come out).

Anime Review: Valvrave the Liberator

I saw a few episodes of this back in the spring when it was first airing, I believe four, and then had to give up since I just couldn't get through the rest of the episodes without the intense urge to snark commentary at whoever was online with me at the time. And some of the things I had heard about the show were far from great as well so I wasn't in any hurry to finish it up. But as fall starts to roll around, the second half of the show hits the internet in just a couple of weeks, I started to get curious about it again and, well, since I only had 8 episodes left and I already knew all the headdesk worthy plot twists what did I have to lose except about four hours of my free time, right?

Valvrave the Liberator

Summary: In the future humanity has enclosed the Sun in a dyson sphere where they live and there are three main factions, ARUS (which seems suspiciously like a militarized United States), Drossia (who pretends they're not actually space nazis), and innocent little Jior who of course wants nothing to do with the growing hostilities between the two. But as Haruto and his classmates discover when their school's module is attacked and they discover power mechs lying hidden beneath it, powerful enough to change the course of the entire war, something doesn't add up here.....

The Good: The last time I talked about a show which seemed like it was trying too hard to be the next Code Geass I was discussing Guilty Crown and man was it terrible. Valvrave as well isn't quite CG but thankfully it's better than GC by a long shot and actually an okay show by the end. In the last third the show starts to find it's feet and the characters become a tad less ridiculous and more competent which greatly helps and it starts explaining some of it's absolutely nuts backstory (I have to admit, I did not expect the show to turn out to be NEARLY this crazy when I started it and I do have to give it some credit for that). Finally, one large thing this, GC, and CG have in common is that at the heart of it there are two characters who stand larger than the rest and each of them does it a bit differently. In CG we have Lelouche and Suzaku who are formiddable enemies to each other, in GC we have Shu the unwilling protagonist and Gai the leader whose mantle Shu takes up. Valvrave has Haruto, again a bit of an unwilling protagonist and L-Elf, a strategist whose been waiting for a moment like this to launch some plan of his and it actually pulls off that balance much better than I would have expected, they come to depend on each other, plan on each other, and yet don't still fully trust each other (nor should they) and that was an interesting character dynamic to watch unfold and something I had been looking for in anime was curious why no one had done it yet.

The Bad: To be blunt, there is a rape in the show, I don't want anyone to go in not knowing that since it's not anything you could have guessed after just the first couple of episodes. I am frustrated and confused for why the writer decided that the violence against a female character HAD to be rape instead of just, violence (even if it was creepily hinted at a bit earlier on, gaaaaaah). Other than that elephant in the room, the show's main problem is that it thinks it's a serious show with meaningful themes and quite frankly it's not. It's a bit of a mess, makes quite a few things unintentionally hilarious (you know it's a bad sign when everyone tells you you HAVE to stick around after the credits of the first episode), and a number of plot events are just so illogical that it's simply impossible to take the show as seriously as it wants you to. And for some people they might be okay with that, if I had been with friends I would have enjoyed this quite a bit just for all the snark potential it had but if you don't want that then avoid it, there are far better mecha shows out there.

The Production Values: I'm rather curious why the show changed it's ending song halfway through the season since I loved the first ending song, it worked nicely and even though the second song did grow on me I simply liked the first better. And I also loved the opening song, it was catchy, bouncy, upbeat, everything I want in an action OP and I feel like it reflected the show well also since it wasn't serious, just fast paced and a bit crazy. As for the visuals, I'll admit the main reason I watched the show (both times) was because I wanted to see some eye candy mech fights and everything did look pretty good. It was rather colorful, I didn't see too much CGI although it must have been there with all the mechs, and I liked all the designs so all in all this was the part of the show I had the least problems with, hurray!


In the end I can only give this show 2.5 out of 5 stars for the unnecessary rape scene and for just completely missing how silly it is and how that doesn't fit at all with the tone it was going for. Do I plan to watch the second season? Maybe??? There are so many shows coming out this fall that I certainly won't be twiddling my thumbs like I was this season so I'm not sure I'll have time, although I'll likely make time for it at some point and finish it up then and see just how crazy it decides to go (I'm betting on pretty far).

Anime Review: Problem Children are Coming from Another World aren't they?

First as a head's up, given that Otakon is this weekend I'm not even going to try and get reviews up so the next review after this will be a comic review on 16th, just going to go ahead and take a whole turn off (also to give me a little more time to prep for my upcoming move, expect a post on that in the next couple of weeks).

Some people might remember, if they read the footnotes, that a friend and I tried out quite a few currently airing/from the past winter season shows and after this we agreed that this was better than expected which was what I had heard from other places as well. So when I needed something quick to watch, and after trying a few things I thought I would like and didn't, well, why not?

Problem Children are Coming from Another World aren't they? (Mondaiji taichi ga Isekai kara Kuru soudesuyo?)

Summary: In the world of the Little Garden those with special gifts (magic) compete in games for glory, fun, and for the sake of their community. One little community is failing badly and summons three children, each from a different world, who are bored of their lives to come play and fight for them and that plan ends up working much better than you'd expect.

The Good: There are a lot of different subgenres underneath the fantasy flag these days; high fantasy, low fantasy, urban fantasy, dungeons and dragons-eque fantasy, that odd blend of science fiction and fantasy you sometimes find and so on. This show fits into an odd subgenre that I usually only find in anime/manga/light novels, it’s like dungeons and dragons-esque fantasy with it’s approach to monsters and how the world is structure (ie, it feels a bit flat, cardboard like as if the characters are just players in a tabletop game) yet it’s a little different in it’s approach, even for the characters this is literally just a game. I’ve seen some shows like this or ones that seem to stand on the line before and it’s not my favorite approach to fantasy, I feel like a lot of times they use it as an excuse for lazy setting building and easy comedy but this show actually manages to pull it off much better than usual and made me smile. The characters aren't very well fleshed out but some of them develop a little bit and even though the three leads each fall into a standard archtype, the quite one, the rich girl, the punk boy, they do defy their stereotypes more than you'd think. That's what made the series work for me, it's quite generic in some ways but different enough that I didn't feel bored by it.

The Bad: I shall be blunt, while part of the last arc made sense the game the characters had to solve made not much sense at all (heck, for people who don't often read translations of light novels, that kind of plotting and logic is what you find in a lot of them, guessing I can't just blame that stuff on the fan-translators anymore). I'm positive there was a better way to set up that story without having it contradict itself, that was just incredibly frustrating. And even though I said I liked the story enough for being rather generic, yes I would have loved it if the story had been less so, if the characters had been fleshed out into having real backstories, not just a collection of tropes thrown together.

The Production Values: Can someone please explain to me why when an anime has a lot of special effects on screen the entire picture seems to dim? I've seen it in other shows but not as often as this show, it got rather distracting after a bit. Other than that, the show really doesn't do anything different artistically or musically wise (although the opening did grow on me more than I expected and the I laughed the first time I saw the ending), same as the rest of the story.

So, for being the best generic fantasy show that doesn't take itself seriously that I've seen I'll give it 3.5 out of 5 stars, might watch a second season (although looking at it's first volume sales that looks pretty unlikey) but wouldn't really recommend it or plan on buying it. For those who want to see it crunchyroll is streaming it. 

Anime Review: Chihayafuru 2

After the first Chihayafuru anime series ended I held off a bit on reading the manga since I had a feeling, no real reason but a feeling, that if we were going to get a second anime series that it would happen soon and I didn't want to spoil it if that was the case. And I turned out to be right and went in totally blind for this new season, although the fact that the manga still isn't fully translated means that there are less spoilers to try and avoid to start with.

Chihayafuru 2

Summary: Chihaya and the rest of the Misuzawa karuta team are back and another school year has begun which means it's time to recruit new members and to train up everyone for the upcoming high school championships. And this year Chihaya is greedy, she wants the team to win both the team tournament and each of the class tournaments as well, is that even possible with such strong players challenging them at every turn?!

The Good: I was a bit hesitant about the two new characters (actually they're the reason why I thought we might get a second season, they were pictured on the box set of the first season's DVDs) but they actually worked rather well. Tsukuba already liked karuta so it was easy to integrate him and the story went out of their way to build up Sumire and make her into a more likable character (and oddly enough into a bit of an audience surrogate at times), although then the story didn't end up using them as much as I expected for their character development. This is also one of the few sports shows where even the viewers can see how much better the characters have gotten at the game. I feel like it’s sometimes hard to convey that easily through story-telling, in real life the actors obviously just act and special effects may help (like the Doctor from Doctor Who playing soccer a few seasons back and they simply added in the ball later with CGI) and for sports shows, well, it’s hard to animate anything to look perfectly the way it does in real life especially with less than awesome players. But here we can see how the characters remain calmer, how Chihaya is taking more multi-syalbell cards, how the characters begin to move faster, and for once I can really believe that they’ve all improved.

The Bad: In the first season the show had a really fantastic pace, nicely balancing the matches and the character development outside of them but here that pace slowed to a crawl. From what I can tell this is the result of the manga slowing it's pacing, not from the new series composition staff, and having seen where the manga ended and knowing how little there is left beyond it I'm not sure what the staff should have done instead. It would have been great if the individual matches themselves had been sped up so the story could focus on more people. Chihaya and Taichi obviously got a lot of screen time and Arata got much more this season, Nishida and Tsutomu got some time devoted to their feelings but not much, those two, Kana, and the newbies seemed to vanish at times during the Omi Jingui matches and that did make me a bit sad. 

The Production Values: I don't know if they started doing this this season or just did it more frequently than in the first season but I loved how they would often have a small line of words, a character's aside or inner thoughts, alongside them, unvoiced in a lot of scenes. It reminded me a bit of Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood actually and the trouble that series had in adapting the humor and snarking that often came in the middle of serious scenes that worked perfectly well in print but not so well in anime. Here it worked well, breaking the tension or providing a tiny insight but without completely breaking the flow or the mood of the scene. Aside from that, I liked the new additions to the soundtrack (need to track that down soon actually) and again I adore that soundtrack, it knows how to use it's uplifting, dramatic, and inspirational tracks so well that I find it impossible to not get excited whenever it plays. I did feel like the art looked a little cheaper this time around though, I know it's common practice on the internet to take screenshots of far off background characters, blow them up, and laugh at how silly and crappily drawn then look but some of the foreground characters here looked a bit off as well which was more than a bit frustrating.  


I'm still frustrated by that slow pacing but in the end this season covered just as much as the previous one did, another 45-ish chapters which means the story ended at chapter 92 or 93 out of about 119 chapters. Clearly this means it'll be a long time before we get more anime, if ever, so once those manga scanlations get up to date (yup, still not there even with two teams working from different places!) I'll probably start following it. In the meantime however I give this season a 3 out of 5 and even with these problems I'm still crossing my fingers for an American home release (if not, well, there's always Australia to import from!).