Anime Review: Erased

Now it's time to really get going on the Winter 2016 anime season with noitaminA's third mystery show in as many seasons. For newcomers to the blog, I tried Ranpo Kitan (loosely based on the works of Edogawa Ranpo) but didn't like the first episode at all and watched The Perfect Insider (based on either a novel or a light novel from the 90s) until the end but got frustrated with both it's philosophy and it's "solution" to the murder mystery (I'm honestly surprised that more people weren't even harsher on that detail). Each of these shows has had greater credentials than the last and so we come to this show, based off of a manga with an excellent reputation and with a strong staff (I enjoyed the director's previous work on Silver Spoon quite a bit) and news that the anime would end concurrently with the manga and have the same ending. That's a promising start!

Erased (Boku Dake ga Inai Machi The Town Where Only I am Missing)

Anime Review: The Perfect Insider

I find it funny that even though the noitaminA timeslot has returned to just one show a season that the past three have all been mysteries, it's just such an odd coincidence! So I tried out this one to see if it was any better than Ranpo Kitan and the answer is yes but not as good as I had first hoped.

The Perfect Insider (Subete ga F ni Naru or Everything Becomes F)

Anime Review: Terror in Resonance

Sorry for the delay here, I seem to write two kinds of reviews: quick ones where I can get one done in half an hour and then monstrous ones that take two hours to do a rough draft and usually I need to sleep on it to edit, guess which one this ended up being? So with that, no introduction this time around and let's just get down to Watanabe's latest series that's not Space Dandy, streaming on Funimations's website and hulu.

Terror in Resonance (Zankyou no Terror)

Anime Review: Nanana's Buried Treasure

This was a disappointing noitaminA season for me, I ended up not finishing Ping Pong since nothing about it grabbed me enough and then this other show has nothing in common with other noitaminA shows. Sure plenty of shows have deviated from it's themes before (which I recognize as either "artsy-ier than normal" or "specifically aimed at the josei demographic with some crossover appeal") but this one defied than grouping even more than other shows as of late.

Nanana's Buried Treasure

Anime Review: Thermae Romae

Last week was a bit of a rough week for me and unfortunately I fell into a bad habit of mine which is to stress over things so much I get nothing done and leave myself no time to actually watch anything (which would be a stress reliever making this doubly a bad thing). I was already scrambling to try and pull together a show for this week so I had to dig into my "reserve list" of shows I know are even less than 10 episodes that I can watch quickly if I really need to. And lucky for me this show is also a noitaminA one which means I needed to watch it sooner or later anyway so in a way this all still worked out!

Thermae Romae

Anime Review: Mononoke

As noted back in my Library War review, despite the fact that I'm a big fan of the noitaminA timeslot there are quite a few shows from it that I've never seen and I really hope to change that this year by giving those shows a bit of priority on my to-watch list. So I went for a title that is both well-known and not; well-known amongst some circles of fans for being one of Kanji Nakamura's shows (Gatchaman Crowds was actually his first show to not air in the timeslot) and a pretty interesting one just to look at, and yet not that well-known at all since the series has never been licensed or even streamed legally in the US, bother!

Mononoke

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: Library War

I noticed recently that there are quite a few noitaminA titles I haven't seen yet so I'm going through and rewatching a few which I haven't seen in years and trying out the rest and this title was first up on my list since it's been at least five years since I saw it. In fact I remember watching it pretty clearly just for the fact that I somehow managed to marathon it in two days even though this was back when I had only an hour and a half of computer time each day (I have an idea of how I pulled it off but I'm still rather impressed at my high schooler self). Also, there was a movie for the series that came out in 2012 and fansubs hit the internet earlier this year and I'm going to be reviewing that along with the tv series here since it's a clear continuation of the story and, unless I miss my mark, is also where the original novel series ended. It certainly feels like a good, solid ending, the tv series one wasn't bad at all but where that felt more like the story had been thematically concluded the movie gave the actual story/plot an ending as well.

Library War (Toshokan Sensou)

Summary: The year is 2019 and Kasahara is the latest recruit in the Kanto Library Defense Force which is exactly what it sounds like, a military force created by the libraries to fight against the censorship happy Media Betterment Committee who aren't afraid to use guns and underhanded tactics to scare the public and the libraries into giving up their rights to freedom of expression. Kasahara was inspired by a member of the Library Corps who helped her out in high school and hopes to meet him again someday, but for the moment she first has to improve her own performance so she doesn't get kicked out! 

The Good: I had forgotten just how much I like Kasahara and Shibusaki (her roommate whose in the information division) because they are really awesome characters. Kasahara starts out as the typical rookie, a bit cocky, doesn't quite understand everything they've gotten into, prone to punching bears in the face (wait what) but she really grows over the course of the story and matures into a much more level-headed young woman. She never loses some of her rash thinking but you can really tell that she's grown up with her quick thinking and how she disobeys her orders far less. Shibusaki is also a really interesting character, she deals with information and plays a role that's rarely on the side of good and when it is, is usually done by a male character. She's not a spy or femme fatale or a seductress, just someone who is very good at manipulating people (even when they're well-aware of her intentions) and putting together the pieces she gets, all of which is also done without the "oh but are they really good or are they actually evil???" tropes that seem to get attached to characters who usually deal in information. In this story there are clear good and bad guys, something I would complain about until I look at recent US politics* and while there area some characters that toe the line I never felt like it was for shock or drama and that it really fit with the story.

The Bad: Oddly enough out of the five main cast members it's Dojo, whose arguably the second most important character in the series, who gets the least amount of character development. Kasahara and her fellow new trainee Tezuka both grow and deal with their own problems, Shibusaki and Komaki are more established but do change some (although Komaki has arguably the least amount of screen time) but Dojo just doesn't really change and he really needs to. I think the idea was "the growth Kasahara is going through is the growth Dojo already had (therefore he doesn't need to keep growing)" but considering how often he loses his cool around her and such, yeah I'm to disagree there. I'm sure that some people will make the argument that those moments are meant to be more comedic and not a reflection of his character as a whole, I'm going to again disagree and say that it felt like lazy writing.

The Production Values: I was a little sad when I realized that the character designs had changed very very slightly for the movie since one thing I really liked about the anime designs was how Kasahara looks like a sturdy, somewhere between stocky and built, tall young woman but in the movie it looked like she had lost some muscle in an attempt by the animators to look prettier. However, considering I watched both versions practically back to back I imagine that most people won't notice, or care, about such little differences. Other than those little nitpicky details there isn't much to say about how the series looks and sounds, the ending song is really catchy however and I was surprised to find that I still remembered some of the lyrics after so many years.



I'm giving this whole series a 3.5 out of 5 for being something that I really did enjoy, not quite as much as when I first saw it although I expected that, and something i would totally buy if I could in the US. However it's not licensed (bootleg version of the series at my local second-hand store notwithstanding) and given how many years it's been since the series was created I don't ever see it getting licensed. Same for the original novels, I seem to recall hearing that they were rather technical as well (explaining why I could never find that much translated or summarized online), and considering that the series and movie covered all four volumes there's no real need either. There is also a manga adaptation of the books (well two, we never got the one volume shonen adaptation) which is being released by Viz. I've noticed that my local library has some of the volumes so I plan to check it out soon, however I noticed on Viz's website that volume 10 (the latest one out here) seems to cover the material episode 10 does so while I probably will buy the manga someday (since that's the only way I can support the series) it looks like this might end up being a rather long series.




*the whole story makes more sense when you realize it's a metaphor for federal vs state rights, the national government putting out new censorship laws for the "betterment" of the people and the local governments/library branches going "hell no". This section of the wikipedia article shows the real-life inspiration for the story and anime/manga fans who follow the news will probably remember hearing about the Youth Ordinance Bill a few years back.

Fall 2013 Anime Round-up

And it’s time to start another season of anime and the one that is usually the strongest for me, autumn! As was the case last season I don’t exactly have any continuing shows, I’m starting to get back into Space Brothers but it sounds like that show is past it’s prime and Doki Doki Precure was always up and down in terms of enjoyment so I’ve semi-dropped that one as well (although I’ve thought about picking it back up to watch raw so I can practice my Japanese, after all if it’s aimed at four year old little girls then the vocabulary shouldn’t be completely and utterly outside my range of knowledge right?). In any case, I’m also moving through as much of my backlog as I can while juggling new American fall tv shows as well and there are one or two series which I don’t mention here since I didn’t finish an entire episode (Coppelion is one since I tried the manga which didn’t grab me so I just gave up a few minutes into the first episode). But for those I did get through an entire episode or more let’s talk about those!

Beyond the Boundary (Kyoukai no Kanata)

Character stabs monsters with blood sword

I was pretty excited for this show, with the budget Kyoto Animation always seems to have I thought it would be awesome to see them do a full on fantasy show but the first episode was a bit of a let down. It was slow, felt like it had been adapted from a light novel in a bad way (just a lot of the same tropes character and plot wise, boring!) but once the action picks up in the second episode it seems to flow much better. The action scenes looked as amazing as I had hoped, the character interactions went smoother, and I already had a lot of the exposition out of the way which always helps. I was a bit unsure after the first episode but having seen the second episode I’m in for the long haul here and hope it gets even better.

Beyond the Boundary is on crunchyroll

Galilei Donna

Sisters suffer attempted kidnappings simultaneously

One of the two new noitaminA shows and the one I was more excited for going in and I liked it! It was a little bit of a rough start (that cold opening was not a good idea) but I liked all the design work and, aside from that opening, the action sequences flowed well too. It's the next few episodes that will make or break this show though, the premise has been mostly established so it's time to start fleshing out our lovely leading ladies and hopefully they'll be more nuanced than they were here (and explain the setting, I know a bit about it from outside material but that's it).

Galilei can be watched on crunchyroll

Gingitsune: Messenger Fox of the Gods

Girl is an oracle in training

The commercials for this series didn’t really grab me but since I tend to like slice of life style supernatural shows I thought I would give this one a shot anyway. However I’m going to have to go with my first instinct and drop this after all since the first episode was just a bit too clumsy. Things move too fast, the characters feel too flat with their constantly changing emotions, I just didn’t like it and I’ll just go find something in my backlog if I really want to watch soft, slice of life supernatural shows anytime soon.

Gingitsune is streaming on crunchyroll.com

Kill la Kill

Students fight with power of uniforms

One of the most hyped shows to premier this season and I have mixed feelings on it. On the one hand, a lot of the time it's overly the top in an amusing fashion and it's fun to watch and the limited art (yes I'm saying it, it does have moments with wonderful animation but it's always made itself highly stylized so it can get away with tons of still frames and cheap effects that would make a 1970s show proud) looks cool. On the other hand it has our lead Ryouko in an incredibly revealing outfit (I can't think of many cons where that outfit would pass muster) and seems to take some pleasure in putting her (and one or two other female characters so far) in really sexualized positions with a ton of male gaze camera angles and I find it creepy, plain and simple. I want to like the show and I'm sticking with it for now but while I spend half the time enjoying it I'm spending the other half of my time completely skeeved out which isn't a fun combination.

KLK is an Aniplex title and can be found streaming on crunchyroll, hulu, and daisuki, although it doesn't start at the exact same time on each site and each site has it's own restrictions.

Kyousogiga

More adventures in mirror Kyoto

First off, I’m going to refer to this as the tv series, the original short that started it all as the OVA, and the mini-series from last fall as the ONA, got it? If not please refer back to these sentences as often as needed.

In any case, it’s baaaaaack, finally! I’ve been hoping for almost two years now that we’d get a full show based off of the OVA and it’s happening! Well sort of, last week was episode 0 which was just the OVA with an opening song and the show is scheduled to have 10 episodes, 2 recaps, and one special which I guess is what last week was. I’m a bit confused about the recaps though, originally I thought that was how they were going to work in materials from the ONA but since a good chunk of this week’s episode came from the ONAs I’m not sure anymore. In any case, that’s not actually a bad thing since this episode took the premise of the last ONA, added some scenes and voices to make what was going on clearer, and then expanded on it so newcomers and old fans alike are on more or less the same page for how Mirror Kyoto got started. The show also added in some interesting bits, when I think about it it didn’t actually add in a lot of new footage but by re-using the old footage and then having the characters actually confirm what fans had been speculating about (with dialogue) it feels like there was more added than there actually was yet I wasn’t bored at all. Basically what I’m saying is, you can be a complete newcomer to the story or already familiar with it and you’ll do fine, just watch episode 0 if your new and then hang on for the ride with the rest of it.

For some reason no one has licensed this show and I’m incredibly sad about it. However, I feel like it stands a good chance at being licensed eventually, much better than it’s chances of being licensed as a collection of OVAs/ONAs was just a year ago.

Log Horizon

Gamers trapped in game

This is not a new genre in anime and manga, although oddly enough it appears way more here than any other medium of fiction I can think of, and truth be told it’s not exactly like either of the two main things people are comparing it to (Sword ArtOnline or the .hack franchise in general) but rather a pretty even mixture of both of those. Heck, I’d argue it’s one third each of those and then the last third is where it becomes rather evident that the light novel’s original author was the same guy who wrote Maoyuu and I suspect that’s what the show will feel most like in the end, a show more about the mechanics about people being trapped in a game rather than trying to beat a quest or, erm, whatever .hack//SIGN was trying to do. I was okay with Maoyuu at points but honestly I still prefer the manga adaptation I read of it first (the lone time I have preferred the version of something with more boobs in it) and I just don’t think Log Horizon is going to keep my interest from what I’ve seen so far. The setting will probably be fairly standard for a game, the plot probably won’t have an overarching story like I prefer, and I didn’t really connect with any of the characters in the first episode, at this point there’s just no reason for me to come back for another episode unless I hear other people talking down the line and saying that it got really good.

Log Horizon can be viewed on crunchyroll.com

Nagi no Asukara (no idea what a good translation is)

Underwater kids attend school on land

I’m on the fence with this one, on the one hand so far it’s a story about a bunch of middle schoolers going through some major changes in life and being awkward about it and I'm not sure I want to see a show about middle schoolers falling in love with a bit of raunchiness in it  but on the other hand that’s a lot like what middle school is like so I can't exactly fault it for that. On someone else’s hand though, there are so many other good shows this season that I'm not sure I want to watch something that doesn't completely have my attention. So far I’m staying with the show because of it’s fantastical setting and because I’ve heard it’s going to be two-cour and I’ve love to see what PA Works turns the show into then, it does sound like it's building up to a larger story or at least into having some interesting overarching themes. And in a season of good looking shows it’s also quite pretty, I guess at this point I’ll keep watching and if I do lose interest I’ll be sure to check in on what other reviewers are saying at the end of it’s run to see if it’s worth picking back up.

Nagi no Asukara is being streamed on crunchyroll.

Samurai Flamenco

A "realistic" superhero

This show has big shoes to fill for me because it happens to be in the same genre as my favorite show of the year (so far, Gatchaman Crowds) but that show I think was even one of the best takes on the superhero genre in recent years and I even wrote a nearly 3000 word post comparing it to Agents of SHIELD yesterday so you can bet it's quite prominent in my mind right now. And does it work? Weeelllll, not really, no, not yet for me anyway. As summarized, the basis of this show is a "'realistic' superhero" in the completely opposite way that Tiger and Bunny did realism (there, I've named dropped all the important shows) with an ordinary guy dressing up as a superhero and trying to get people to do the right thing. My problem with the show is that I don't agree with it's philosophy at all, yes it is a problem that people jaywalk and smoke but the way you handled it wasn't right either buddy, you got into a fight with a drunk over that (and lost. And had your outfit set on fire, clearly you did this wrong). It's just, how am I supposed to take these characters seriously (or at least seriously enough to not feel secondhand embarrassment when one starts yelling at middle schoolers in a park to shape up) if it's trying to make a story based on such basic values? And speaking of values, I noticed this after I saw some other people commenting on it but compared to Galilei the coloring of this show is super basic, it's like someone chose a color, chose other colors that were all the same tonally and used them and made the show look really flat. That could be deliberate, some contrast between the real world and the colorful world of cartoon justice, and the basic values could be on purpose as well and the show intends to build them up later, it's got 22 episodes after all. But, going after just this first episode, I'm not impressed nor am I super excited by the show and that makes me rather sad.

Much like  KLK, Samumenco is licensed by Aniplex and streaming in their usual places.

Tokyo Ravens

Kid doesn’t want to become an onmyouji

In the effort of full disclosure, I’ve read some of the manga that was based on the same light novels that this anime was so I can’t really say too much about the story since I know how it’s going to go. I will say that I thought it was paced well, like most urban fantasy shows this one has a lot of general background to set up first to explain why the characters are in the positions they are (and there are a couple of key details coming next week) and I’ve heard rumors that this one will be two cour which is great since I really can’t figure out how it could end well after just 13 episodes. And as for the actual story, I get the same feeling from it that I get from Blue Exorcist actually. Not because of any particular details, they’re actually rather dissimilar in that regard and in the general premise, but they’re both supernatural shonen shows with a lot of action and a similar sized cast which has been done over and over yet they both just have a spark to them, in the setting and the visuals, that makes them interesting. Everyone is going to see a show or two at some point in their anime watching lives, it just happens, and if this show continues to be a solid show I’ll happily recommend both of them as less generic than usual supernatural shows that are fun watches (well, with the cavet that Blue Exorcists’ ending gets a bit weird, I’ve seen even non-manga readers comment on that).

Tokyo Ravens has been licensed by Funimation and is streaming on their new site (which be forewarned seems to still have some bugs, I haven’t been able to get a video to load in Chrome yet).

Unbreakable Machine Doll (Machine-doll wa Kizutsukanai)

Puppeter and raunchy doll start school

Every season there is a show I start against my better judgement, this the show this time around where despite the ecchi tag attached to it I was curious. However, while I didn't like those moments what really made me regret it was the CGI and oh ye gods, everything else this season looks perfectly, completely fine by comparison. Holy cow you’re supposed to bring your A-game the first episode and then have the budget vanish, I don’t want to know what this show is going to look like by the end. And the large amounts of exposition were handled almost as clumsily as the show tries to introduce you to a lot of background all at once yet everything still feels rather flat (the characters) and generic (the setting) so in the end I just couldn’t care more than one iota about the show and have dropped it.

Machine Doll is streaming on Funimation’s website who has also licensed it.

Valvrave the Liberator (part two)

We still have vampires piloting mechs

So, not much to say about this show so far since it picks up exactly where the previous season leftoff and doesn’t look to be deviating from the tone and characterization at all. So, if you liked the first season go ahead and keep watching this, alternatively if you watched the first season for it’s WTF value keep watching as well, that’s more or less why I’m here. As usual with sequels this is a terrible place to jump in so if you’re curious I recommend you check out my earlier review (especially since this show crosses the line at least once in a major fashion) and if that doesn’t have you running away as quickly as you can then you might enjoy the show. Also, while a lot of shows look great this season I swear that with the amount of action sequences in Valvrave (the first five minutes are almost solid action IIRC) I think this first episode had the equivalent budget of three Machine Dolls.

Just like last time, Aniplex is distributing the show in the US/Canada and has it streaming on multiple outlets, the same as Samumenco and KLK.

Yozakura Quartet: Hana no Uta

Humans and yokai live in a town

So I’ve never seen the original anime for this show or read much of the manga (I started reading some and then felt guilty when I realized it had been licensed at one point in the US, given that I never see people talking about a license rescue for it here I guess that means it has next to no fans) but this reboot of sorts is supposed to be newcomer friendly so I decided to give it a shot. From what I can gather though, this show isn’t going to just retell the early part of the story and then follow the manga after the original anime diverged (a la Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood) but is somehow doing side stories to sort of introduce new fans before joining up with the manga material that wasn't previously cover, is that right? I know that it’s connected to a series of OVAs that came out recently, (those two have similar art styles which are also closer to the look of the original manga than the first series, no idea if any of the voice actors have changed) although those are set farther down the line, regardless of all of that this first episode was just plain fun. It has some whackiness to it that I adore in supernatural series and after the way it gleefully barreled through the first episode I felt like I was starting to get a grasp on the characters and the basic politics of the town they lived in (although remembering everyone’s names might be beyond me at this point), loved the music during the more action-y scenes, and I’m certainly interested in what it’s going to do next!

While the first anime was licensed by Sentai no one has picked up this iteration for legal streaming, however I’m hoping we’ll have an announcement from them before the season is done.

So it's a bit of an odd season, it's jam packed with good shows but just about everything airs on Thursday for some bizarre reason. I also have a problem that I haven't had since the summer of 2011, fansubs. I have a one-or-none rule for fansubs (which I sometimes toe the line with Precure/older shows which I know will never be licensed at this point) yet there are two shows I really liked but are both fansubbed, Kyousogiga and Quartet. As it stands however, Kyousogiga is my baby practically with how I've dreamed of this full show for two years and it's even better than I could have hoped so far which means that, unless one of those two gets licensed, Quartet is going to have to go onto the back burner (at least that way I'll be able to hear from other fans how accessible it really is and what, if any, episodes I need to see from the original show to get my bearing). Otherwise this is what my schedule looks like:

Tuesday: Tokyo Ravens

Wednesday: BtB, Kyousogiga (which since it's fansubbed will probably be out Thursday instead)

Thursday: KLK, Galilei, Samumenco, Nagi, Valvrave

8 shows and a completely unbalanced week especially since my American tv shows also air on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Well, at least at this rate I'll have plenty of time to catch up with older shows as well! What's everyone else watching? Also, is it just me or does Nagi remind everyone a little bit of From the New World and KLK a tiny bit of Utena? Could just be the character designs for both of them but I know i'm not the only person for Nagi in any case....

Anime Review: Tokyo Magnitude 8.0

To recap for people who haven't read anything on my blog, during the summer I usually take advantage of the DVD collection at the university where my mother works but for some bizarre reason they only let you check out two DVDs at a time and often times someone else in my family wants to check out DVDs as well. Far enough and earlier this summer I spent a lot of time checking out the DVDs for the final season of Veronica Mars and some classic Doctor Who and didn't give the animation section even a glance. I did check around the end of July and realized my mistake since there were actually a few things I wanted to watch a little time to achieve it so I buckled down and got to work, first with a noitaminA series I hadn't seen before and one which I feel like is a little less known.

Tokyo Magnitude 8.0

Summary: Unlike her name, Mirari has no idea what she wants to do in her future and no interest in seriously thinking about it beyond what she wants to do for vacation this summer. What she doesn't want to do is take her little brother Yuki to a robot exhibit across Tokyo but soon Tokyo rumbles and everything in her life seems trivial compared to it. Now the two of them, plus a motorcycle courtier they had met earlier in the day, Mari, must trek the miles back across Tokyo to get home and find out what, if anything, and who (if anyone they fear) still awaits them.

The Good: Few shows make me cry since, while I do cry more than I like in real life I just find it hard to get emotionally invested enough in characters to find something worth crying over. But this series did it, I think it was because it tried so hard to be faithful to what would really happen in Tokyo, how people would die, how buildings would keep crashing down in the aftershocks, and the kindness and joy that you can still find despite it, that it just did it. So, if you plan to watch make sure to either keep tissues around (this show made me tear up about once every two episodes which is a record) or prepare yourself emotionally for a lot of very nature feeling tugging on your emotions*. Except in one instance, which I'll be addressing below, very little felt melodramatic as well, the story let it's events speak for itself without having the characters add on commentary about how it's A Very Sad Thing and I think that really helped the story to work (not to mention it would have felt completely out of place for any of the characters to say that, while it's sad all three of them would rather spend their time moving forward instead of staying trapped in the present).

The Bad: There is An Event which happens in the show which is rather important, in some ways even more important than the earthquake itself, and the show takes entirely too long to fully address it. Think of a romantic shojo story where two characters clearly have crushes on each other yet take forever to confess and apply that pacing to a non-romantic setting. After double checking the episode numbers I've realized that this felt like it took even longer than it had and, since I had heard something about it (but I half-dismissed since it was so, odd, sounding) that my have contributed but I felt like in a show which succeeded in evoking real human drama and development yet felt like it needed this element that maybe it shouldn't have been a tv series after all, maybe it should have just been a movie and slimmed down the story just a bit to fit.

The Production Values: There really wasn't anything about the art, the music, or even the voice acting that really stood out to me. The character designs remind me a tiny bit of Eden of the East (which is ironic since that was the show right before this one so the two were most likely designed without ever having seen what the other looked like) and neither the opening or ending songs grabbed me which in a way sums up the entire show, it was perfectly fine but didn't grab me the way I had hoped, perhaps this is why I rarely see people talk about it.


So for having its heart in the right place but not quite succedding in execution (first I don't like Mirai and then I have issues with that Event) I'm giving this one three out of five stars and I don't see myself buying it anytime soon. As far as I know Sentai hasn't put this up for streaming outside of their own site (which is all dubbed and you have to be a paying subscriber to see past the first episode) so if anyone does want to check this out they'll either have to do that, get a hold of the DVD, or just sit tight for a bit. Lately Sentai has been adding more of their catalog onto hulu where it's free for all to watch (so expect more of their titles soon), although a lot of those have been recently aired shows and so far I haven't noticed a pattern to figure out when shows will go up. But I think there's a decent chance this one will pop up on hulu by the end of the year and if not I'm sure Netflix will have the DVDs by that point if they don't already.


*and keep tissues nearby anyway

Summer 2013 Anime Round-Up

First things first, Gatchaman Crowds doesn't air until tomorrow so I'll be updating this post for that tomorrow, heck I would have had this up earlier except apparently crunchyroll doesn't let you use multiple guest passes in a one week period which threw a wrench into my plans. Second, normally I talk about the shows that carried over for me from last season but I actually wrote a rather rambly write-up of the spring season over on my tumblr which covered those shows. TL;DR, still following Space Bros and Doki Doki Precure but other than that I'm starting with a clean slate, let's get started then! oh one more thing, each of these impression is made after seeing just one episode of the show, some of these shows do have a second episode out by now but I just didn't have time to get to them.

Blood Lad
Vampire boy is obsessed with Japanese stuff.
This is an aggressively shonen show from the way the visuals are designed (lots of sound effects on screen, word bubbles at times, things you usually see only in either a 4-koma or shonen based adaptation, I'm trying to figure out why Brains Base has pushed this show back by an entire year since it certainly wasn't because of the art!) to the humor (look at this girl! she has boobs! and not much else on!). Heck even the character designs are a bit more shonen-y than usual now that I think about it and it's been so long since I've watched a show like this I had forgotten, this isn't really my type of show (and yes, this is technically based off of a senien manga, knowing that doesn't make it feel any less shonen plus sometimes you do get weird overlaps with those categories). I'm going to give it a couple more episodes to see if I warm up to it, the entire Manga Bookshelf seems to really like the manga and their tastes often line up with mine and it's certainly a a different take on vampires (but let's face it, by now almost every story with vampires is "a different take!") but at this point I don't see myself following it's entire 10 episode run.

Blood Lad has been licensed by Viz Media and is streaming on their site and on hulu so Canadian viewers are sadly out of luck this time.


Danganronpa the Animation
Super highschoolers trapped in murderous school.
Initially I thought "oh I'll give this a shot since I'd rather watch this than read the summaries/translations and don't have a PSP to download the game/patch (plus, these games never get licensed in the US)" and then NISA licensed the game (and someone else got Steins;Gate in the same day which had previously been my basis for "these games that super popular anime are based on don't get licensed"). Well then, don't have much reason to check out the show then (even if I don't have a PSP Vita to play the actual game on) and I'm a bit relieved, this just didn't flow well for me. It's odd but I dislike books and tv shows with this kind of setting, murder-mystery with the player character having warped morals by the end, but I do like games with it (I adored 9 hours 9 persons 9 doors which is a bit similar, I joked to friends that the setting and some of the characters kept giving me flashbacks). There it's fun to play as an asshole-ish character and see how much you can screw everything up, it's less fun to watch other people do it (although I know that mountains of Let's Play videos out there contradict me on this point). So with all of that in mind, I wasn't able to take anything seriously enough to enjoy it, and you're clearly not supposed to take a lot of this story seriously to start with, and hopefully someday I'll be able to give the game a try and enjoy it much more.

Danganronpa the Animation has been licensed for streaming by Funimation but the first episode won't be up until this Friday the 12th.


Eccentric Family (Uchoten Kazoku)
Humans, Tanuki, and Tengu live in Kyoto.
Based on a novel written by the same man who wrote the original The Tatami Galaxy novel this first episode didn't grab me as much as it seemed to grab some other people which was actually what I expected, Tatami didn't grab me until I tried watching it again about two years later after all. Although I suspect it won't take me nearly as long to get around to the second episode, while this first episode might not have grabbed me and taken me for a ride like other shows have done it was still interesting enough to make me curious about the rest of it. This was an introductory episode, we see a lot of the main cast, get a sense of the different factions in Kyoto, possible conflicts and mysteries are mentioned but nothing super exciting has happened yet, it's all set-up. But I am curious what this show is setting up and I like Kyoto quite a bit so I'm not going to turn down a chance to see it as a setting. So, unless the next few episodes are deadly boring I'm going to stick with this one and see just what it develops into.

Eccentric Family is streaming on crunchyroll.


Gatchaman Crowds
Super-powered humans fight rubix cube aliens.
While it didn't start out that way this ended up being my most anticipated summer show and it's not perfect but so far it's pretty fun. Well, fun if you consider being on a rainbow colored roller coaster for 30 minute fun (although strangely enough the episode was just 22 minutes long, not 25) and it's already clear that this series is a shorter one since the pacing is frenzied and feels even faster with how bouncy lead character Hajime is. I really do hope the next few episodes slow down a bit since there was a lot to take in here, it's the complete opposite of tsuritama (which shares a good chunk of it's important staff) and I can easily see how the fast pace and Hajime are putting people off, although it seems to have no connection to the original Gatchaman so newcomers like myself don't have that to worry about. Regardless, I'm in this one for the long run since I'm just in the mood for a super-colorful, fighting aliens show with a female lead, fingers crossed that it ends well!

Crowds is streaming on crunchyroll and currently unlicensed, however considering that Sentai recently licensed the original series many suspect they'll license this series as well. 


Kinmoza! (Kin-iro Mozaic)
Cute girls have intercontinental friendship
Not initially on my to watch list but after hearing so many people call it adorable I had to check it out and yep, that was a pretty adorable show. I liked it so far, this first episode is a flashback to how the main characters (a Japanese girl and a British one) met and became friends (in a rather romanticized Great Britain) and yep, not much happened but it was adorable none the less. I want to give the second episode a try but I have to ask, what is it going to do now? Are these girls with their friends going to form a club about Great Britain things? (since forming a club is all the rage now in anime-schools) Just do slice of life daily cute things with some culture shock? I'm okay with either of them but would like to know what they're going to do since I am worried about getting bored quickly, this isn't my normal type of show for a reason after all.

Kinmoza! has been licensed by Sentai and is streaming on Crunchyroll.


Free! Iwatobi Swim Club
Boys strip and swim.
I almost feel like this series needs no introduction considering how much the PV for it was being bandied about across the internet with various cries of "YES!" and "OMG IT'S OBJECTIFYING US [men]!" being thrown around. So to make things clear, no this anime was NOT made because tumblr wanted it (guys just look at it, you think that you can animate something with that much detail in the amount of time that passed between tumblr flipping out and the premiere? Hell no) and it doesn't really objectify men either, Zac of ANN articulates quite well why not so I'm just going to link to his review (it was his first so scroll of the bottom if you don't see it immediately). So, my thoughts? Well, fanservice in general isn't my thing (neither is swimming, I like the gymnastics part of the summer olympics much better) but I'm glad that they made the show so campy since that made it pretty fun to watch regardless. I doubt I'll continue it since there's so much else out there I want to watch right now but if I want to watch a mindless, well-animated show with a sense of humor then this one is at the top of my list.

Free! has not been licensed yet however it is streaming on Crunchyroll.


Makai Ouji: Devils and Realist
William doesn't believe in demons, oh-well.
So a few months back when this anime was announced I went off, read the manga, and started worrying. I've seen a lot of people compare this one to Black Butler and Pandora Hearts for thematic reasons (they both have the Victorian England inspired setting with gothic elements) but structurally they're the similar as well, they're all shows whose manga took a heck of a time to get to the meat of the plot (I gave up on Black Butler before finding out if it ever got there actually). So, judging from what I know, the pacing of this episode, and what was shown in the OP and ED (which by the way has a heck of a spoiler for one of the characters) this one is probably going to have a fast pace and either an original ending or an inconclusive one (which I think is more likely) since I can't really think of a place to end it as the manga currently stands AND the story is bland enough that I doubt it's going to sell well enough for a sequel. Which is rather sad since I tried out since I liked the premise, demons trying to become the new king of hell by bothering a British kid, and while the manga did grow on me it really wasn't because the characters or the plot turned out to be super interesting, the style just got a bit better and I liked the eye-candy. At this point I'm willing to give the show another episode or two for the eye candy reason (even though I'm not that happy with some of the voices in here, it's been a while since the voices have been the complete opposite of what I've imagined), the character designs really do look great in full color I'm most likely going to end up dropping it by the end of July.

Devils and Realist is unlicensed but streaming on crunchyroll. Seven Seas manga also picked up the manga recently and plans to release the first volume in early 2014.


Servant x Service
Civil workers work.
Hmm, this series didn't grab me as much as I had hoped a series about working adults would which makes me a little sad. Of course, one of the most common comments I've seen on this show is "Working!! but less zany" so perhaps that's what I should be watching instead, heck I have much more experience with weird food-industry work than weird office/government work (the libraries I've worked at have been fairly tame comparatively speaking). In any case, this looks to be a straight-forward, slice of life (in the really literal sense) story of a few different civil workers and for the moment I'm going to give it a few more episodes to see if the characters click with me but I feel that if the characters don't click with me then there's going to be no point in watching the show.

Servant x Service is streaming on crunchyroll and unlicensed.


Silver Spoon (Gin no Saji)
Boy enrolls in agricultural school, hijinks.
The lone noitaminA show of the season (since now it's AnoHana's time to do reruns) and a bit more anticipated than most noitaminA shows since it's based off of a manga by the creator of FullMetal Alchemist. I read a bit of the manga a few years back and while it wasn't bad I just wasn't really grabbed by it either which was the same reaction I had here. We've only had one episode to meet the characters and see the setting so not much has actually happened, although the egg gag got old really fast (guys, I'm a girl, I know EXACTLY where eggs come from), although that did end in some really excellently animated food which really makes me wish there was a food anime with that kind of animation out there. However, since it's not bad by a long shot, noitaminA, and could certainly get more interesting once the characters start developing and such I plan on following this one for the long run (literally, it's split cour so 11 episodes now and another 11 next January) and I'm really hoping that the show ends up growing on me (it is set at a farming school after all....).

Silver Spoon remains unlicensed but it is streaming on crunchyroll.


Stella Women’s Academy, High School Division Class C3
Cute girls form war games club.
Wow I have seen mixed reactions on it, I honestly tried out the show because I at first saw some people saying it was fun and then others saying that, as a result of the gun culture in the US, it made them uncomfortable and I wanted to form an opinion on my own. And I have to say, even though I'm not a big fan of guns I can easily see the appeal of running around shooting each other with fake guns (probably because a lot of my friends in high school did just that) but this show still came off as a bit odd. It's trying too hard to emphasize the juxtaposition of  "they're cute girls! And they like imitating Rambo movies!", honestly it wouldn't have felt as weird if it hadn't done that. Which puts me in an odd position of being interested in watching another episode but probably not sticking with the show for the long run, this is just turning out to be an odd season for me.

C3 has been licensed by Sentai and is streaming on Crunchyroll.


Watamote
High school girl has delusions of popularity
Yet another show that wasn't initially on my to-watch list but decided to give it a shot after seeing a number of other people mention it. And, ehhhhh, I don't think I'll be continuing with it after all. As many other people have commented, so far this is a dark comedy with only one joke, oh look how Tomoke has no friends/no social skills/doesn't even know it! Sure I've seen people like that in my years of high school and college, although usually the painfully socially awkward nerds I saw instead of not talking at all had no idea when was a good time to talk or that they weren't actually funny (and most started getting better at it after a few years!) and I was never like that, so I'm not getting that much kick out of the "oh ha-ha, it's like someone you know!" humor which I think I should be feeling just a bit. However I did think it got one point especially spot on, when Tomoke is mocking all the girls in her class who hang out with guys and look cute, calling them bimbos and sluts, and yet you get the feeling that she really wants that in her own life. That I think a lot of people of all genders go through, I know that on some parts of the internet there's a lot of "oh I'm better than other girls because I am/do_____ instead!" (my first thought actually was of this meme but apparently this was actually a parody of the situation, still gets across what I meant however) which also feeds into a lot of other assumptions about what's feminine, what's not, stereotypes (both as a result of media and as a reaction to said media) and all kinds of nasty stuff. I have no doubt that giving Tomoke that viewpoint was quite deliberate but that's not enough to keep me interested in what happens next sadly.

Watamote has both it's anime and manga licensed in the US, by Sentai and Yen Press respectively, and the anime is currently streaming on crunchyroll.

Anime Review: Katanagatari

This is one of those titles which I heard about when it was coming out, thought "cool", saw it was licensed, thought "even cooler" and then waited for a legal stream to show up which never happened. So, since this technically is the spring noitaminA show (it's a rerun and, considering how odd the original airing was, one hour long episode each month for a year, I'm mostly okay with that, sad that it took up the entire timeslot though) I had to at the very least give it a shot and I was really hoping that I'd like it when I went into it.


Katanagatari (literally, Sword Story)

Summary: Several hundred years ago a legendary sword smith made a 1000 swords, most of which were preparation for his crowning works, the 12 shikizaki blades and it's said whoever possesses those 12 could rule Japan. Togame, a strategist for the emperor, is off on a quest to find and retrieve all 12 and after two failed attempts she's come up with an unusual plan to get the rest back, to team up with the son of the man who foiled the last rebellion, Shichika, and make him fall in love with her so that he won't be tempted by anything to steal the swords. Of course, since he's a practitioner of a martial art that uses no swords and can't seem to use one himself perhaps she didn't need to bother with that part....

The Good: I was rather surprised to notice at the end that the story took a completely blank, flat character and made them into more or less a rounded character by the end, which I'm sure was entirely the story's intention but it actually worked out better than I expected! Actually the whole story worked better than I expected, it is a bit predictable at parts (especially since I had heard one or two rumors about the ending) but it was fun, the character banter was a heck of a lot easier to follow than Bakemonogatari (probably because it didn't involve all those stills filled with words), and I really liked how the show looked. Fun isn't precisely the word I'd use to describe this show but it was more than enjoyable, I'd watch it again, and I'd recommend it to friends because of how well it all fits together in the end, even if no particular element especially stands out/is especially stunning.

The Bad: The series is formulaic, in each episode they end up fighting someone for a sword and winning one way or another which does take away a little bit of the tension (apparently the original novels that the story is based on were being turned out by Nisio Isin at a rate of one per month so I can see why the story went this way). The formula starts to get a bit varied in the second half but it never deviates that much. Also, you need to be able to have a rather large suspension of disbelief for this show, especially when things are "explained" in the last episode and things don't make quite as much sense as they could.

Production Values: I'll admit it, one reason I wanted to try this show and like it was because of just how stylish it looked. It's hard to show exactly what I mean from just screenshots but they at least get across how distinctive the character designs are. There was one episode towards the middle where everything looked a bit off (the lines were all drawn differently and the animation didn't seem quite as smooth, it was especially obvious in a flashback which had scenes from every episode) but other than that, admittedly large, hiccup I liked how this looked. As for the music, I was watching fansubs from the original broadcast and I didn't care for either of the openings nor really any of the endings (there was a different one for every episode). Funny enough, I looked up the new opening and ending themes and liked those much better and I liked a lot of the background music as well (to the point where I got cross that about halfway through either the show or my fansubs stopped having the preview in them and since they always played my favorite track with the preview and dammit I wanted to hear more of it!).

So, giving this a 4 out of 5 for enjoying it quite a bit and I guess I need to plan on picking up NISA's very nice sets sometime in the future. It looks like it never sold well enough to get regular sets made, just the premium ones, and hopefully they'll stay in stock long enough for me pick some up, I think I even saw someone say that it seemed like they had stocked a few more at TRSI lately (if the company didn't look at this re-airing and expect to gain a few more fans like myself then they would be a bit silly).

Anime Review: Robotics;Notes

The other noitaminA show from last season which frankly was a bit of an odd fit. While noitaminA hasn't had it's own real, genre I suppose in recent years, R;N is the third series in video game publisher 5 pbs "sceince;adventure" visual novels, the first two of which were Chaos;Head and Steins;Gate all of which are set in the same worldline so there are small references to each other, a far cry from noitaminA's original line-up of josei titles. But hey, I liked S;G quite a bit and when I saw people saying they didn't like the game of R;N, no big deal, I figured that a lot of them simply had over inflated expectations and were disappointed, which happens all the time with sequels, so I went into this with positive hopes and came out feeling, well, much less positive.




Robotics;Notes

Summary: The year is now 2019 and while some technology has changed a lot, people seem to be using min-tablets as computers/cell-phones which have a virtual reality app built into them, but in other ways life is still rather normal. Kai is the put upon friend of Akiho who doesn't want to help her complete her sister's dream of making a life sized robot from their favorite show but he's not heartless enough to completely ignore her either. One thing leads to another and Kai slowly begins to realize that there is something strange going on both in the background with mysterious reports appearing on his tablet foretelling the end of the world and even things going strange in his favorite video games. The more things he discovers the more things he starts to uncover until he seems to have stumbled upon the greatest conspiracy of human history. 

The Good: The mecha genre (or the giant robot genre in general) like all others has gotten a bit stale and boring after decades of stories and it can be hard to make it interesting again. I'm not saying that R;N did quite that but I did like how they paired together the mecha genre with slice of life and I generally amused at how for once our heroes have to build their giant robot, there's no secret government organization that's already made it for them. As contradictory as this is about to sound, while R;N was originally a visual novel with dating sim aspects in it (there were about four girls, each with a different route and ending to the story and only one of them was the "true ending") and did focus on each route a bit none of those events took away from the rest of the story or felt like they were abandoning some of the mysteries in favor of romance. The romance isn't as well integrated as S;G's was (although that story had a bit of a cheat to make it work better) but I certainly think that this means it was easier to adapt than a lot of more traditional dating sims.

The Bad: As mentioned earlier, I already knew that a number of people either hadn't liked or had simply been underwhelmed by the original visiual novel, wrote that off, and expected a show that I wouldn't adore as much as S;G but that would still be rather solid. Sadly no, even knowing that this story just wasn’t anything above mediocre by the end and failed to make some of it’s plot threads come together in a cohesive and emotionally pay-off-y sort of manner (heck, there are some details that were either addressed so quickly I missed it or not at all, important ones) and by the end of the series I just didn’t care what was happening. I guess lighting doesn't strike twice since whatever that spark of specialness that made S;G come together and work, plot wise and character wise, for me just never happened here and I was frustrated that I never got the payoff that I had every logical reason to expect was coming.


The Audio: I liked the first opening and ending songs a bit better than the second set but none of them have really stuck with me the way some of the other OPs/EDs from the winter season did. The voice acting was all fine and a bit more memorable, there was only one crossover character from S;G and they actually had the same seiyuu (which rather surprised me given the 18 year gap between the shows) and I don't have much more to say here. The actors gave the characters the right emotions that matched up with what the characters were doing on screen so they did their job just fine, even if I thought what the characters were doing was dumb a lot of the time. 

The Visuals: Production IG actually worked on both noitaminA shows this season and thankfully R;N did not suffer the random decrease in quality that Psycho-Pass had once or twice. I actually really liked the design of the Gunvarrel (you can tell that the same designer also did some of the mechs in this season's Gargantia), although the CGI for some of the later scenes wasn't as well integrated as I would have liked. The character designs were likable, the scenery looked fine, honestly there was nothing spectacular here that I can talk about but the show didn't look bad by any means either.


I'm going to be a bit mean and give this a 2.5 out of 5 for just not explaining some important details in the end and being, well, boring. Don't feel the need to pick this one up for Funimation (they're streaming it and have the physical rights I believe) or even rewatch it, next show please!





*How Helen would have re-ordered the anime, the spoiler edition. Basically we discover what was going on with Misaki, Akiho’s sister, very close to the end and it seems like she had a very tense, interesting story to tell. So I would propose a rather radical re-writer where the first half of the story is half set in 2019 with Kai and the others meeting up and slowly learning about the reports and the other half (so alternating back and forth within an episode) with Misa’s story, slowly showing how everything started going wrong years ago to add more tension and to well, help pad out the story. I figure that by around the halfway point her story would be done and the story could then focus exclusively on the 2019 part with the current events, just given how this show meandered a lot I think this would have at least forced it to be tighter in plotting and execution and that Misa’s story was probably a heck of a lot more interesting than a lot of the stuff that actually transpired.