12 Days of Anime: Battle of the Space Operas

Okay, so to recap once again, I've been watching more Gundam this year. And, if one, massively long-running franchise wasn't enough to keep me occupied (well two, I am still futilely attempting to catch up with Precure) then Amazon suggested I start another this past summer. Since it had been a few years since my last free Prime trial Amazon offered me another one and I thought "great, I can get free shipping on cosplay things, some audible credits, and check out SDF Macross!" which was streaming for free on Prime. I actually  got into anime right around when Macross Frontier was coming out but much like Gundam I was never quite sure which series I should even try out and the series has resisted legal streaming attempts even more than Gundam has (due to possibly the worst licensing contract ever that someone REALLY needs to challenge in court someday).

Unfortunately I wasn't able to finish SDF Macross before my subscription expired but I got quite far and I did enjoy it! I can tell that the series is riffing off of some other stories that I'm not familiar with (possibly Yamamoto, dangit another long space opera franchise that's hard to get!) but it's quite a bit sillier than "war is hell" Gundam and it's other major differences (spending arguably more time in space, aliens, wait yes I know that sounds familiar too) made it a fun change of pace. I'm still not sure if I want to watch every single iteration of Macross but, much like Gundam and Precure, I'm now expecting to embark on a multi-year journey to watch at least a good chunk of it!

Book Review: Aurora

I haven't had much luck over the years with young adult science fiction in general so the obvious solution to this is to try more adult sci-fi titles. I still haven't read that many, I keep meaning to fix it but my to-read list is to long that it'll take a while for that to take effect, but with my new goal of staying more caught up with current titles I'm hoping that sci-fi won't be such a rare occurrence here!

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

TV Series Review: Voltron: Legendary Defender

As long time readers know, I like my giant robot shows and I haven't had any to watch the past spring season. Sure Kumukuro is airing, but since Netflix licensed the show I couldn't legally watch it week to week. Likewise, Macross Delta is airing this season but since the entire Macross franchise is tied up (I could've sworn I saw an excerpt from the contact on ANN and, as someone who has actually worked with licensing materials etc, holy cow what I thought I saw was baaaaaad) that's also off the table.

Enter the remake of a show I thought I was too young for (I have since been corrected, apparently the original Voltron reruns were showing in the US up to 1997 at least). Everyone else was hyped so I expected to try out an episode and go eh, not for me. Unfortunately if you put an entire season of a show in front of me at once I will binge (now that half of Kumukuro is out I've had to hold back from binging on that as well) and, whelp, I'm a fan now guys!

Voltron: Legendary Defender

Anime Review: Knights of Sidonia: Battle for Planet Nine

At some point I will get back on track with this blog, I've just been distracted and tired a lot lately. So let me keep this short and get to the meat of the post, Knights of Sidonia is back and I couldn't be more thrilled about it.

Knights of Sidonia: Battle for Planet Nine

Webcomic Review: Galaxion

This has not been a good week for my review writing but the delay on this post does mean that I heard a very apt quote for it. I was listening to NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast (one of their more recent episodes, a short take on the Scott McCloud Sculptor book and other comics they currently recommend) and they had a great line "but this isn't a place where we dump on things, this is where we recommend things that we like". I've been getting a lot of webcomic review requests lately and haven't taken any of them up yet since that's exactly what it would be, me dumping on an amateur's comic when I'd rather just recommend stuff I like!

Galaxion by Tara Tallan

Manga Review: Gundam: The Origin (volumes one through six)

I remember when this title was announced by Vertical a few years ago (it was actually a license rescue from Viz from ages ago) and it was something that sounded cool and exciting but not only were the books completely out of my price range at nearly $30 a book, the print runs were going to be tiny, 2-5,000 books (I want to say closer to 2.5k than 5) so there was no chance I could ever own the series, even once I had a chance to save up some day in the future. Well, thankfully the series did much better than expected so the print runs are larger and it's gone to re-printings (especially since my paychecks still aren't big enough to cover these books!) and this past summer I found volumes 3-5 at my local library. I got a librarian to show me how to use the book request system to ask them to buy the first two volumes and they obliged and even tossed in volume 6 as well. While I was waiting for my holds I discovered that the website Comic-Walker was also posting the chapters, completely independent from Vertical so their translations may be different but it's still a chance for more people to check out this series since it really is one of the best manga series I read in 2014.

Gundam: The Origin (volumes one through six) by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko

Anime Review: Knights of Sidonia

And so it's time for my first Summer 2014 anime review although I feel like I'm a bit behind the curve since nearly everyone else already has their review of this show up! Which probably made a few people double-take and look at the calendar, Knights of Sidonia is a unique show since instead of being licensed by a traditional licensor it was actually picked up by Netflix who, instead of releasing it as a simulcast in the spring, released the entire show subbed and dubbed back in July which certainly got the attention of more mainstream nerd sites. And it sounds like the show has done well thus far, I had been worried when I heard that Netflix was using this show to test their new idea since I didn't think it would be a hit but it seems like if you put anything on Netflix then tons of people will watch it anyway (plus, given it's status on the "Recently Popular" when I was watching it, that sounds like people are watching it because they like it, not just the first episode out of curiosity and then not following it up).

Knights of Sidonia

Book Review: Earth Girl

Curse summer colds, I never caught colds this much when I was in college, must be the general public making me sick. Regardless, one other big change from my college town is that apparently the District of Columbia has a law about being in the teenager section of a library if you aren't a teen or accompanying one. So far I haven't seen it enforced yet, and I can still pass for 19 if I try, but it is making me a little more hesitant to go in and browse around and instead I'm getting more and more of my books off of my never-ending "to read" list. Which is probably a good thing for me in the long run but I feel oddly out of touch without that chance to just see what's new on the shelves or simply has an interesting cover.

Earth Girl by Janet Edwards

Movie Review: Star Trek: Into Darkness

Last week with Sherlock I commented that it had been years since I started the series and as I was watching this movie I realized that there was an even bigger gap between when I watched the first movie and this one. I remember it clearly since it was the first film I saw in college, especially because I was meeting up with a few people I half knew or didn't know at all and was praying it wouldn't be a terrible mistake (it wasn't, still good friends with some of them), and by now I'm out of college, that's over four years! I'm half surprised they even made a second film with that large a gap, normally I'd say that there's no way you could get such a large audience with that gap but clearly Hollywood works in mysterious ways.....

Star Trek: Into Darkness

Book Review: A Confusion of Princes

Like a lot of people I'm most familiar with Garth Nix's Abhorsen series than any of his other works (think necromancers fighting zombies with bells, which works a lot better than it sounds) even though he's actually written quite a few books. I don't keep up with what he does as much as I do for some other authors so I was pleasantly surprised to find a newer work by him in the local library and surprised that it seemed to also be a stand-alone story. The premise didn't quite make sense to me (and my history with choosing YA sci-fi has been, colorful at least) but I was willing to at least give it a shot and hope that it was only suffering from the "overly complicated back blurb" and that the actual story wasn't too clever for it's own good.

A Confusion of Princes by Garth Nix

Summary: Khemri is a prince of the Galactic Empire and has grown up dreaming of when he becomes an adult and will be able to go on swashbuckling adventures and win the fame and adoration of people worlds over. The actual truth is far from that, while he is technically immortal and gifted with powers that normal people don't have he's in constant danger of being assassinated by other princes and is quickly on the run for safety. But yet it seems to him that even among princes he is special, perhaps he will have a shot of becoming emperor one day and standing above them all after all.

The Good: Yup, while it's a lot of terminology and ideas to take in at first the story really does work. It's a bit of an odd story, it's hard to tell where it's going to go from the first few chapters, and certainly doesn't get there in the way I expected, but despite the oddness in style I thought it worked out well. In fact it might be for the best that it's hard to tell where the story is going since when it deviates a bit for character development doesn't feel like padding out the story or like the pacing is off, it just seems to fit in well. It's a bit hard to describe Khemri's character development, on the one hand a lot of the story is breaking him down so that he's not an asshat but on the other hand he's still not terribly mature when the story ends. I suppose I could sum it up by saying "he starts off as a bratty teen and is still a teen by the end but more like an 18 year old than a 14 year old" but that doesn't really sound like anything happened does it? 

The Bad: As I just discussed, Khemri is a bit of a brat which I'm sure is a turn-off for some but I think it actually works. Not because he was a prince raised in luxury but because his worldview makes him a potentially unreliable narrator so I was always questioning if he was truly special or just stuck up. Normally I don't like unreliable narrators but here I did like that unpredictability so I'll take a main character who in some ways doesn't actually grow up a lot by the end of the story. There were a few details that stretched my suspension of disbelief in the story (namely the sheer number of princes, given that they're not biologically related and who knows how large this empire is one could say that the story has explained that detail well enough but it still just felt weird to me, I just couldn't "turn off" the part of my mind that kept going "but wait, all the resources!"



I know this review isn't one of my best but hopefully I've been able to get across the point that yes I did like this book. In some ways it felt more like fantasy than science-fiction (not in terms of plot or setting but just the general term) and it's easily better than a lot of the YA science fiction I've read in the past few years (occasionally I get hits on those posts so they pop u on my dashboard and I can't help but wonder what poor sap is about to be disappointed) and I'm going to give it a 3.5 out of 5. It is a standalone novel so there aren't any sequels for me to keep an eye out for and I'm already a fan of Nix's work, just can't wait until that Abhorsen side story/prequel comes out!

Anime Review: Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet

Just chugging along with my spring anime reviews, this one is the only one out of the three mecha shows that I watched to completion (although I might pick up Valvrave again and then review the whole thing in one fell swoop in December, maybe) which did surprise me a bit. I was expecting that I wouldn't like all three mecha shows and would probably drop one of them but I was expecting to be so disappointed by all three, although I was the least disappointed with Gargantia in the end, I feel more ambivalent on it than anything else.

Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet (Suisei no Gargantia)

Summary: Ensign Ledo lives in the far future where humanity is engaged in perpetual battle against space-squids who want to destroy humanity and while returning from a skirmish he is accidentally wormhole-d across space to Earth, the homeland that humanity had long forgotten the location of. People still live on this water covered world however yet it's going to take some time for Ledo to adjust to this new culture with morals and values the complete opposite of those he was taught.

The Good: I'm a fan of both slice of life and space opera settings (which isn't the best description of Gargantia's settings but it gets the point across) so I didn't mind the shifts back and forth and thought that they actually worked well together and Ledo's character development (which I think is at the heart of this show) wouldn't have worked if he had experienced that shift. I do like how Ledo eventually ended up developing, although I had some problems with it as well so more on that later. Finally, I was a bit worried when I saw Amy since Cute Genki Girl who is the side character in a story with a Male (Straight) Brooding Main Character often involves some tropes I'm not fond of. But thankfully Amy's character is written more smartly than this character normally is, she's perceptive enough to realize that many of Ledo's actions are out of ignorance rather than meanness (so we're spared of any tsundere scenes between the two of them) and has her own troubles and joys in life as well. Finally, early on in the show the people on the ship Gargantia have to explain to Ledo pacifism, how it works and why they do it and while a lot of viewers seemed to take issue with it I totally understood their philosophy and loved that it was included. This post on tumblr (both the initial link at the top and an author's reply in the linked page) help spell it out, I am of the belief that most of the people in the world, except in the more dire of circumstances (which the people on Garganita were not yet at) would have trouble killing people. It's just too emotionally difficult to acknowledge other humans as people and then be fine with taking away their lives and the philosophy of the people on Gargantia matches with this perfectly so it would have been more jarring if they hadn't been at least semi-pacifistic. Yet a lot of writers would prefer to take the simpler way out and have them simply kill the characters instead of wrestle with that choice and then find a way to live with it and I do really respect any of the writers involved with that decision to make that call and then make it work. 

The Bad: This is a 13 episode show and for short shows your pacing and timing has to be nearly perfect to make the show amazing, there just isn't the time for filler the way that longer shows have. Sadly Gargantia flounders in some of it's middle episodes, instead of using them as a way to show how Ledo's character is developing from point A to point B we instead get a little bit of that and then more fanservice than the show has time for (and I'm still a little creeped out by the dancing scene when I remember that the characters involved  are just 14 or 16). And then as if to make up for that the show races off in a bit of a different direction and focuses on different side characters around Ledo so in the end while he develops we neither get to see all of the steps of his development (which leads to some rather abrupt changes of heart) nor do any of the side characters develop as fully as they should and it makes this show come off flatter than I think the staff hoped it would be.

The Production Values: Holy smokes that was a stunning looking series, the backgrounds were rich and detailed and you can tell that some of the staff put some serious thought into both the lighting and color schemes for this show. Heck, the lighting alone on the very last mecha fight looked downright cinematic and then it was followed up with great animation and wonderful usage of the fact that you can put the "camera" for animation where ever you want. I will admit that that last fight was so great looking that it did help make me think more highly of the show overall, it was that awesome and I really did like a lot of the other designs throughout the show (although I also questioned some of them, not entirely sure why the ladies always seemed to be running higher body temperatures and therefore always needed a tad bit less clothing than the guys). The voice acting seemed fine, apparently this is one of the first big roles for Ledo's seiyu and I thought he did just fine along with everyone else. Although, while I don't think that either the OP or ED were bad I just never got into them and felt like they didn't fit the series as well as I wish they had.



In the end, I give this series three starts out of five (3.5 if I'm still feeling hyped up about that fight) and I'm not sure if I want to buy it. I saw the series streaming on crunchyroll but it has since been licensed by Viz and they plan to bring it and the OVAs over (according to some Anime Expo sources they may even stream the OVAs which would be great), dub it and release it which doesn't help me decide. On the one hand, they've making a concerted effort to actually interact with anime fans instead of chasing after a more "mainstream" audience that doesn't seem like it'll ever materialize and even put out a survey asking about LE sets (I'll admit I'm quite jealous of the fans who can afford the Japanese BR set with the art book, I'd love to see scans of that). But on the other hand they don't do combo packs and by the time this is out I won't have a BR player (and there's no reason for me to buy something this pretty on DVD) and I tend to not like their dubs very much either. So for now I'm on the fence, also on the fence about recommending it since I feel like the middle brings down the series that much but it's certainly not terrible and at this point I do recommend it more than Majestic Prince and Valvrave. 

Spring 2013 Anime Round-up

And the spring shows have started folks! Trying to get this out a bit earlier than usual so for all of the shows here I’ve seen just one episode and I’m cramming everything into one post, should be fun to check back in three or six months to see what I actually kept/dropped. And as a quick note, I’m still following three shows from the winter season, Chihayafuru 2, Doki Doki Precure, and Space Bros. So far Chihayafuru feels a little weaker pacing wise than the first season (they only spent a few episodes at Omi Jingui and had completely wrapped that arc up by episode 15 but here we’re at 13 and still in the team matches, I’m wondering if the rest of the season will be spent at Omi Jingui and I really hope not) but it still has my attention and it’s managed to flesh out the two new club members better than I had hoped and the rest of the gang continues to grow (even if Arata still isn’t showing up on screen much, I finally found a word to describe him though guys, he’s a tritagonist!). Doki Doki Precure isn’t as good as Heartcatch so far but it’s self aware enough to make me laugh along with it and have fun casually watching it each week, although I’m having real trouble with the villains each time (instead of focusing on the monster/victim of the week like Heartcatch did we see a quick shot of them thinking a selfish thought, being mature and saying “naaaaah” and then they turn into a monster anyway, this idea is as awkward as it sounds in writing). However, unlike most of the shows I watch I don't feel super motivated to find fansubs for it each week and if this season gets busy I'll probably drop it and check back on it later to see if it's worth picking back up. And finally it looks like Space Bros is in for the long haul, it sounds like the anime is somewhere around volume 10 out of 20 volumes so far and I want to say I heard that the manga-ka is predicting it to go on for around 30 volumes. I’m really curious how much longer this one is going to be sticking around, it would be hugely impressive if it went all the way to the end, at the current pace they have about a year’s worth of material to animate still and in the past the manga-ka churned out an impressive four volumes a year but last year only produced two. I guess in theory the manga could stay far enough ahead (and it seems like the anime pads a bit with recap bits to help with this) and the show just got placed in a new timeslot which is right before Detective Conan on Saturday afternoon/evenings which is apparently a really really good sign. Regardless I still enjoy it’s humor, all the space stuff, and all the stuff involving it’s multiple sets of siblings now which makes me reflect on my own relationship with my siblings, although I do feel like a mediocre big sister when compared to Mutta.

Arata the Legend (Arata Kangatari)
Arata (no not that one) switches places with Arata (again, not that one) from another world.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I’m pretty sure this is Yuu Watase’s only non-shojo work and it’s always interesting to see when an author (of any medium) who is very heavily associated with one genre (in her case shojo) switch to a different one (shonen) and seeing just what tropes carry over. You could actually make this into a shojo very easily so I'm wondering what this genre switch will bring besides male main characters (which she's had before, Alice 19th had them for sure and a lot of her earlier works have a good amount of action as well). Also, I noticed on a scanlation site the other day that in Japan that the story is over 150 chapters yet the show is only going to be one cour, how the heck is that a good idea? With a story that long I can almost guarantee that individual arcs in the story are going to be longer than 13 chapters and, even if the pick up the pace and put multiple chapters into one episode (like they did here) they’ll still have a freakisly hard time making that work. Really at this point that’s what’s keeping me from getting really excited about this series, while it has potential I just don’t know if it has the time to make it work.

Arata the Legend is streaming on crunchyroll but only for United States and Canadian viewers and it might be for subscribers only. If it is subscribers only, the wording is a bit strange, I 'll have to drop it since I'm using a free subscription now to save money and won't be continuing with it.  

The Devil is a Part-timer (Hataraku Maou-sama!)
Satan escapes a crusading Hero and flips burgers.
Someone pointed out this one to me a few months back when they noted that a voice actor I had heard and liked had landed the leading role here so I checked out the manga (adaptation of the light novels this is based on that is) and found that the humor worked surprisingly well there. And here the humor continues to work, the first episode starts off a bit slow as it gets through the backstory of “how the hell a conquering demon lord is now trying to become a full time McRonald’s employee” but once it hits the second half it pulls off the situational humor pretty well. So I have high hopes that the entire show manages to stay funny and keep my interest, if that manga adaptation is any indication then it should fulfill those expectations very nicely.

Funimation has picked up the show for streaming and can be viewed either on their website or on hulu.



Devil Survivor 2 the Animation
Kids summon demon’s with their cell phones.
Initially this wasn’t on my to-watch list since I’ve never played any of the Shin Megami Tensei games of any franchise but, since I saw a number of good reviews for it and that reasoning hardly stopped me from watching Persona 4 the Animation, I gave it a shot and yeah, that was pretty solid. Thankfully here they’ve chosen to give the main character, in the game the player avatar, a real personality instead of trying to develop him as the show went on a la P4tA and the story gets to the action pretty quickly. I can still see that this was adapted from a game (“oh here is the exposition, this one is probably the tutorial fight” etc) but it doesn’t feel like I’m just watching a Let’s Play of the game so for the moment I’m sticking with it.

DS2tA (DeSu2A?) is streaming on crunchyroll for people in : USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Netherlands, and Scandinavia..

Gargantia on the Verduous Planet (Suisei no Gargantia)
Mech pilot accidentally space-warps to backwater Earth
This was one of the shows I was most excited for going into the spring season. Scratch that, I was curious about a number of shows but only really excited for this one, it's a low-key season for me this time around, and I had such a hard time waiting for the second episode that I eventually found a fansub of the second episode (ripped from a DVD given out a few weeks earlier) with subpar subtitles and still enjoyed the heck out of it. Somehow this one just worked for me, I've seen a lot of people say that the first half moved a little too slow for them but I like space battles and space operas so I was just fine with epic-scale outer space fighting (and no the CGI does not look bad, it's not quite as nice and neat as Majestic Prince's was but it's perfectly fine guys, the show in general looks fantastic) and I was also okay when the story did a pretty large genre shift for the second half of the episode/for the rest of the series it seems. I’m okay with how they’re handling the shift to a quieter, not exactly slice of life but certainly smaller in scale story following the remnants of humanity on Earth living on boats and endlessly moving on the all-encircling ocean.

Gargantia is steaming on Crunchyroll for United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands, Spain, South Africa, Turkey, Brazil, and Portugal. 


Karneval
Two boys get entangled in secret, colorful, organization.
I’ve been a bit worried about Karneval for a while now since I’ve read the manga and I can say first hand that this series has it’s strong points and it’s weak ones and the beginning is most certainly one of the later. The anime works with the source material as best as it can, namely by compressing the first three chapters into one episode which does cut out some problems (I don't think the manga-ka even knew what they wanted Circus to be in the very beginning) but the pacing as a result just does not work. I’m tempted to say that the staff spent more time trying to figure out how to make the story look cool than how it was going to make sense and I’m really hoping that it gets smoother as the series goes on but that’s another thing I’m worried about, the length. This has been confirmed to be a one cour series and based on what characters have been posted on the website I can guess at least how far they’ll go and frankly I don’t think there is a really good stopping point after just thirteen episodes. All all I'm nervous about this series, I've seen manga fans say "yep that made about as much sense as the manga did at this point" and non-manga fans optimistically say that they think they like where it's going but yeah, I'm going to hold off recommending this show until it ends and I can say whether or not it worked.

For those willing to risk dazzlement and confusion, Karneval is being streamed by Funimation for Region 1 viewers.

Majestic Prince (Ginga Kikōtai Majestic Prince)
Five failing teens are flung into mecha fights.
Another of the mecha shows this season and one where I really wasn’t sure what to expect when I went into it. The good news is that the snark I saw in the trailers was present in the actual show, but a bit of snarking alone isn’t enough to make me keep watching a show especially when it’s got weird character designs (seriously, here are the original designs, here’s some promo material, and here’s an actual screenshot, I think a side character in the first few minutes stole everyone else’s noses in order to have a large schnoz, this is even worse than the Moyashimon Returns character design changes) and nothing new about the premise in general. Heck, while it is also fast paced and has some nice fight scenes it’s seriously lacking in the explanation department (or perhaps the common sense department, I want at least a line about why they took the worst teen mecha pilots and gave them the best robots they had AND someone at least noting that they seem to be working much better as a team than they were just a few hours earlier) and sure that can be remedied in further episodes but with so much other stuff coming out this season I’m not going to stick around to find out.

Majestic Prince is streaming on crunchyroll for USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand and has been licensed by Sentai Filmworks.


My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU (Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Come wa Machigatteiru or literally My Youth Romantic Comedy is as Wrong as I Expected)
Teacher forces student to join service club.
Intially this wasn't on my to watch list since, well, the premise on the lists and charts of the upcoming spring season didn't interest me and it sounded like Brain's Base was just redoing a less interesting version of My Little Monster (Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun) half a year later. But after seeing a couple of good reviews, plus the fact that I wasn't interested in that show before trying it either, I gave it a shot and nope, my instincts were spot on. The show actually reminded me more of Bakemonogatari in how it sets up two of it's lead characters, the guy's appearance to a small extent, how it tries to be artsy with flashbacks and such, and guys, if you're going to be similar to another show you had better be better than them and that's not what happened here. I'd like to say that I'm not saying that one light novel series copied the other here but this one is certainly the weaker of the two and I'm not a huge fan of the -monogatari series to start with. Also, as I was watching this I thought "the author here feels young" and yep, the original author is only 27 and since this series is now on it's fifth or seventh book he must've started when he was even younger and it shows. Neither he (I believe it's a man) nor the director/writers of the show were able to make the characters believable or even interesting and the idea of a group/school club that helps people is a pretty tired premise yet they didn't do anything to spice that up either. 

Another dropped show for me but those interested in checking it out can go over to crunchyroll, provided you live in United States, Canada, South Africa, Finland, Norway, Sweden, or Denmark. 

Red Data Girl
Girl breaks computers and boy is broken.
So I caught one of the rips of the niconico stream a week or so back and man, maybe the fact that I was watching the worst quality video I’ve ever seen that wasn’t a copy of a copy (etc) of a VHS tape but this first episode just didn’t grab me. Looking at other’s screenshots I can say now that yes the art looks fine, lesson learned there, but the first episode just felt a bit awkward. We can see the characters acting but we don’t know why, why is cutting Izumiko’s hair so important (it’s not like this is Crime Edge, heck that makes this the third anime this year to place a focus on hair so I'm declaring 2013 "year of hair" at this rate) and why is Miyuki’s dad so insistent that he’s going to help her? Since there are a few more episodes out I’ve seen some people say it gets stronger I am going to give it a few more episodes (especially sine Funimation is streaming it) but there's another problem, the legal streams (and the tv broadcast) are a full three weeks behind, almost a month in Funi's case, the internet streams which is going to make avoiding spoilers for the series nigh impossible. I have absolutely no idea why there's such a huge delay, it was weird enough last season that there was a three day delay between when the first tv stations showed From the New World and when the main station/crunchyroll did and this is even stranger. Oh well, at least I'll have something to watch on Wednesdays.

As noted above, RDG is being streamed by Funimation, also make sure you use the hastag #rdg_anime on twitter or apparently you'll offend a small town in England.


Valvrave the Liberator (Kakumeiki Valvrave)
Average teen meets mech, gets messed up
And the award for the show which made me snark the most this season so far goes to Valvrave! Seriously folks, this show has some okay moments (when part of the what looks to be a good sized cast chilling in school), some bad moments (maybe I'm getting jaded but I couldn't take any of those military operations/people seriously), and then, well, one rather large WTFDIDIJUSTSMOKE moment at the veeeery end of the episode, make sure to watch past the credits guys. I seriously don't know how to feel here, the show looks great but the plot alternates between being generic and feeling like the creators are trying to hard to replicate their past successes, namely Code Geass. Here's the thing, I liked Code Geass (or at least the first season, the second season promised to reveal some things which it didn't and that annoyed me) and even Guilty Crown (which I believe also shares a lot of the same staff) didn't have me snark-raging as much as this did. Honestly in that respect the show reminds me a lot of K but with K I tried the second episode and went "you know, I think the writers are aware that what they're writing is kinda silly and they're just rolling with it, I can deal with this" and enjoyed the show, I don't think that's what Valvrave is doing. I'm going to give it another episode or two (mainly because of how pretty it is) but if this doesn't get at least more amusing then I'm going to find other shows to spend my Fridays watching.

Valvrave is streaming on crunchyroll for  US, Canada, United Kingdom, and Ireland. 


SO, now that I've finally gotten through everything, my final verdict? I am following Gargantia, Chihayafuru, Maou-sama, and Space Bros for sure (and most likely Doki  Doki) and I'm gonna be pumped for them each week. And I'm going to continue with Arata, Karneval, RDG, Devil Survivor, and Valvrave for now, if any of them fail to keep my interest for a few episodes I'll drop them with no hesitation. And dear lord, all of those shows except Precure and Space Bros (maybe Devil Survivor, Valvrave is apparently confirmed as split cour) are going to end this summer, I am going to be very busy come late June/early July with reviews.

Anime Review: Crest of the Stars

Oh geeze, I bought the first volume of this when I came across it at my library's bookstore two summers ago since I had heard good things and then grabbed the completely collection during a big Bandai sale after they announced that they were closing their doors and just haven't had the time to watch it since. But, since I crunched the numbers and realized I was going to need a few more series to tide my blog over until March I decided it was high time I watched the rest of this series, especially if it turned out I liked it and I wanted to get the sequels (Banner of the Stars I & II) before they went horribly out of print. So, better late than never!


Crest of the Stars

Summary: In the far off future mankind has spread all amongst the stars and, like the rest of human history, there continues to be tension and violence between various groups. One group has been steadily rising in power for centuries, the Ahb Empire whose citizens aren't exactly human after genetic modifications to make them better suited to live in space and they have been conquering as many places as they can in order to seize control of vital travel points. Jinto's planet was one conquered by them and, thanks to negotiations by his father, he's now an Abh nobleman on his way to military school when the slow rumblings of discontentment throughout the galaxy reach a boiling point.

The Good: I wasn't expecting the series to be as heavily character driven as it was but Jinto and Lafiel (an Abh who initially was there to escort Jinto to school but then the two of them end up stuck together even longer) really bounce off of each other nicely and the show balances out it's more dialogue heavy early episodes with quite a bit of action later (which still has a lot of talking in it admittedly, just more phasers as well). I feel like the 90s/early 2000s were the golden age of space opera anime (that is, science fiction set in the sprawling stage of space) and while there have been shows like Bodacious Space Pirates in the past few years they're all just lacking something, epic that these shows from that time period had. I'm curious how this story continues in the sequels, clearly this was one, big introduction arc to get the viewers familiar with the characters and the setting and I wonder how exactly this story is going to end which is enough motivation for me to keep watching.

The Bad: So a lot of people have been complaining about adapations of light novels lately, because people love to complain, and I'm not surprised to see that this anime was based on a series of what I believe to be light novels for two reasons, the amount of technical detail (not a bad thing) and a really random middle of the story arc (a bad thing) which I've seen come up in a number of other long running series. I kinda see what they were trying to do with the, erm, let's just call it the middle of the season, introduce more conflicts and ideas that will shape the characters later as well as set up the third part of this season, but it was just odd enough that I just wanted to finish it and I just feel like they could have written this much better. 

The Audio: I watched the Japanese sub (since I don't even want to think about the quality of dub, it might not be terrible but it must have been made before they started getting consistently good) and that was perfectly good. Actually I was rather surprised to see that Jinto and Lafiel were voiced by women in their 30s/20s respectively, they both sounded really realistic to me (they had a lower pitch to their voices that I normally associate with a real child/teen doing voice work) and, this might sound a bit silly since I've never read the original novels, but their voices sounded like they were perfect for the characters to me. They were able to give the characters extra dimension, emotions, suggest things through the voice acting alone that I wouldn't have picked up just for the animation, I feel like I'm stating the obvious here but there was real acting involved here and I'm more impressed here than I am with most anime I see for that reason. Aside from that, I found the intro music terribly boring, skipped the ending most of the time so I'd have more time to watch another episode and thought it was cool how the opening narrations were in a completely made up language (which I think was based on French but don't quote me there, I still thought it was cool regardless).

The Visuals: As far as I can tell this show hasn't received a remaster (it's from 1999 or 2000 if I recall correctly) and obviously the DVDs I have aren't which is sad since while the art isn't terrible it is rather dated and some clean-up would make it look nicer for sure. The art style itself is dated but I didn't see anything wrong with the animation itself and it's not like people won't watch a show more than 10 years old (especially if you're a sci-fi anime, American, fan) although I do think that this art style probably helps turn some people off of the show.


So a solid 3 out of 5 stars for this show, now for me to figure out how I'll watch the rest of it (buying it is the obvious option but my budget for entertainment is now non-existent so this is going to take longer than I'd like).