Well this is quite a bit later than I expected, I had originally hoped to have this review done months ago but I got delayed purchasing the second book and then I just had so much to read that it got pushed to near the bottom of the stack. But we're getting close to the end folks, the last two books come out this year in English and hopefully I'll have a chance (ie, the money) to pick them up at some point from a TRSI sale.
Kieli volumes 5 and 6, The Sunlight Garden Where It All Began Written by Yukako Kabie
Summary: Kieli and Harvey, still searching for Beatrice, end up in a town that has a lot of memories for Harvey and Kieli learns more about his past than even Harvey can remember.
The Good: Well the story has finally shed some light on Harvey's past and while it didn't do anything I didn't expect it was still solid and brought up one or two interesting ideas (like the fact that the Undying literally are different people than they were in life, so different that you can have a ghost of their past selves that's not just an impression left on a place). The colonel also got a bit more backstory, really by now the story has explain all the main players pasts so I'm curious what it's going to spend the last three volumes doing.
The Bad: While I was really optomistic that a two book story would really work here it just felt like Kabie was puttering around a lot of the time, trying to fill space with a story that was a bit more than one novel but not big enough for two. There are a surprising number of side stories in here and, even though they all feature characters who become important later on, most of the time they felt like fluff and I was annoyed. I really do think there was a better way to structure this story, even if I'm not sure how to do it myself. Also, we seem to have hit a bit of a dead end for Kiele's story (which was to find out more about her mother and, to a smaller extent, the Undying she had been traveling with) and it's going to take an extremely contrived coincidence to get that subplot moving again which is already bugging me.
So, certainly not one of the series stronger entries but a very necessary one. I think I can see what's turning in the background that will become important in the later books, now to hope that those books meander a bit less than this one. But first, I think I need to catch up with Book Girl (which also ends soon-ish, next January I think) and Spice & Wolf, curse you Yen Press for putting out so many series when I don't have the time or money for all of them!
So, year ago I found scans of this manga (not scanlations but outright scans of the TokyoPop translation), liked it, and then heard it was based off a series of light novels that Tokyopop was also translating and decided to hold off reading the manga to see if I could read those instead (plus reading scans just feels dirty to me). Like most (all?) of TokyoPop's light novel translations they never finished (I think two out of eight were finished) and TokyoPop didn't finish the manga before they went under as well. However, JManga picked it up and if I'm reading the Japanese wikipedia page correctly translated the entire series (seven volumes plus one side story volume) and since I had some points I decided to give the series a whirl again and see if it still interested me or if I should save my points for other series instead.
The Good Witch of the West Written by Noriko Ogiwara, Art by Haruhiko Momokawa
Summary: Firiel Dee has been raised more by a kind couple than her scholarly father and while she does resent how he has a closer relationship with his assistant, a boy her age named Rune, than her she's a cheerful girl none the less. But she discovers that her father has been keeping even larger secrets from her than she could have guessed when she learns that her dead mother was in fact a princess and that she is now a candidate to be the next queen whether she wants to be or not.
The Good: Perhaps it's just me but I could tell that this story was from either the early 2000s or the 1990s, although the art did help clue me into that. There's just a particular style to fantasy (and sometimes science fiction) works from that time in anime and manga that I've noticed over the years and this story fits into that style well, with characters mumbling about the end of the world while the main character is swept up into intrigue (and some magic it looks like) which is practically a world away from her previous life. While I do tend to get cynical about stories like this if I read too much of them it was hard to be with Firiel as our spunky lead character (another thing a lot of those stories have in common). Plus the story was paced well, it didn't linger on anything too long and flowed well from one scene to the next.
The Bad: Most of the complaints I have have to do with the art more than the story itself, it was a bit unclear what was going on in some scenes (which also struck me as a bit overly dramatic) but I was still able to follow what was happening more or less. I'm a little cautious about how just seven volumes of manga will cover eight light novel volumes (I know there was a 13 episode anime adaptation as well but that must have covered even less), I'm afraid that I'll be left hanging at the end with no way to read the rest, but unless I can find someone who's familiar with both mediums then it's just a risk I'll have to take.
The Art: As a quick aside, I do wish that JManga had chosen a different typeface for some of the dialogue, the more "mystical" (song, prophecies, etc) bits have a hard to read type and I just skimmed over it hoping that if it was really important that the other characters will repeat it later. Other than that, you can also tell that the manga is a bit dated (it started in 2004) since some of the designs have a bit of an oddness to them that I've seen in a lot of 1990s/early 2000s sci-fi and fantasy anime and it's also completely lacking in more, how to say this, moe style art. The layout of some of the pages was also a bit hard to follow but I'm hooping that it becomes a little smoother in later volumes.
I liked this, more than I expected, and I'll have to add the rest of my volumes of my quickly growing to-read list over on JManga. Like I said earlier, books from particular times have a different feeling to them and I like the strange vibe from a lot of 90s anime/manga series and I haven't read/watched anything like that in a while so this also makes a nice change of pace, now to get the rest!
Good lord, how did I fall so hard for such a silly show? I only tried out K since it was a streaming title and I wanted to give it a shot. After the first episode I wasn't going to continue but a lot of people on my twitter seemed to enjoy it so I decided alright, I can give it another episode, it's giving me plenty to snark about anyway. And then I realized by the end of the second episode that I really liked the chemistry between the main trio and I was sorta-kinda hooked. So you can imagine how this show, which I saw someone else compare to a deep fried Snickers bar, surprised me when I realized it was plotted just a bit better than I was expecting.....
K
Summary: One night in December Tatara Totsuka went up on the roof to film a video and was shot dead by a crazed young man who declares himself to the seventh, the colorless, king. Tatara was a member of a the street gang Homra which was under the third king (who like the seventh king is all part of a larger system of kings and clansmen all with supernatural powers) whom are all rather pissed off about this and out for the blood of the guy who did it. And this is all rather unfortunate for Yashiro Isana, a regular high school student who has a striking resemblance to the guy in the video but no memory of murdering someone and has to go on the run when even more groups of people (all also related to the various kings) pop up and are after him as well.
The Good: As I said earlier, this show turned out to be much better plotted than I expected, especially for a show that spends it's first episode being style over substance and it's second episode having a catgirl run around naked for most of it. The trick is that while the show does heavily foreshadow it's biggest twist it's mostly visual foreshadowing (some of which might have been coincidence on the animators parts but other parts were certainly deliberate) which, judging from the reactions I saw online, a lot of people missed (I wouldn't have caught the foreshadowing myself but did pick up on the other clues). And as I also said earlier, some of the characters, especially the main trio, have really great chemistry together and I liked seeing them just interact together on screen (especially since all of them got a bit of character development, the other characters in the show not so much). I'll be rather sad if they aren't part of the main cast for the sequel since for me anyway they were what made the show fun.
The Bad: There are two basic camps in the fandom for this, either you liked the characters Yata and Fushimi (in the red and blue clans respectively who have backstory) or you think they had too much screentime. I'm in the latter group although I was fine until they had a really out of place flashback in the last episode (which I wish had been instead used for one of the more important characters, like on the past of the red and blue kings who are important to the story unlike those two). The whole story is a bit unbalanced, the red clan gets way more screentime than the blue clan (even though both are about equally important than the end) and sometimes the story forgets that there are seven kings, not four, two kings (/their followers) never even appear and I wish they had gotten more than a passing mention since it doesn't make sense that they are completely absent from the situation at hand.
The Audio: By the end of the show the opening song had grown on me (and when I finally looked up the lyrics they fit the show a bit more than I expected, I love when that happens, although the biggest "clue" from that is actually in Engrish so I really should've caught it) and the ending song wasn't that bad either (just beware of naked catgirl, the show is a bit NSFW but if you're an anime fan you've almost assuredly seen worse). The cast worked fine for me, everyone seemed to be acted well enough, I didn't dislike any of the voices/voice actors, although I was sad to learn that apparently one of the voice actors is a native German speaker and the story had a legitimate reason for him to use that talent and they never took advantage of it (and even I, who speaks no German, could tell that the brief snippets in there were as terrible as the Engrish in the very first episode). Oh and I was frustrated that it took Viz Media until almost the last episode to subtitle the little bit of German that was in the show, thank goodness for fans and google translate for the rest of it!
The Visuals: Alright GoHands, you really need to learn how to spread out your budget earlier. Yes I know it's important to have a flashy first episode to draw people in, but there are "good looking (but the quality will probably drop a little by the end)" and "hey let's have a RANDOM really high budget scene that contributes nothing to the plot that couldn't been accomplished more cheaply otherwise!". You might think I'm being a bit hard but if you pause and look at later episodes everything just looks cheaper and more rushed, hopefully the DVD releases will look a bit better. But what everyone really notices about K are it's omnipresent filters, mostly of the blue variety for some unknown reason*.
So, K gets a three out of five for being just that damn entertaining (who would have thought that having seven different light novel authors writing a story would work out so well?) and heck yeah I'm looking forward to a second season, more to snark at while being amused! No idea if I would buy this if Viz was to ever release it on DVD, while I might want to rewatch it with friends I can always use the Hulu stream for that, guess I'll just cross that bridge when it comes. Until then I will continue tracking down the copious amount of side materials (two spin off manga, K: Memory of Red [focusing on Homra shortly before the anime starts], Stray Dog Story [focusing on Kuro between the last colorless king's death and Shiro's rise to notoriety], two light novels, K: Side Blue [which I believe is how the current blue king became king and focuses on characters not in the anime] and K: Side Red [set a bit earlier and explains how Anna came to be with Homra, provides more information than the anime did on the gold clan, and generally explains more about Strains], the upcoming light novel focusing on what the trio was doing when they were hiding from everyone [answer, hiding out in a love hotel], and various other short stories explaining character's backstories that are floating around) which yeah, is enough to keep me going for a quite a while.
*there was a theory that they reflected which king's territory they were in but as of now that doesn't seem to have been the case, shame because that would have made for some more great visual foreshadowing AND given the show an actual reason to abuse them as much as they did.
As I mentioned in my 2012 in Review post, I saw The Hobbit over the holidays (which I'm sure everyone is so surprised about after I re-read all the books first) but I didn't see it in 3D HFR like I hoped (I had a chance for 3D but I had no idea if any of the theaters near me were playing it in the HFR so I decided to see it in 2D). Oh well, I've got two more chances to do that and I can now say that this review is completely free of talking about that stuff since apparently the rest of the internet is sick of it by now (psssh, non-technology-geeks).
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Summary: Before the one ring of power went on it's final journey with Frodo it belonged to his uncle Bilbo Baggins for a time. How he got the ring is a story but how he ended up under a mountain far from the Shire is an even more interesting story.
The Good: I was really surprised by some of the new stuff in this film, I've never read the appendixes (to Lord of the Rings) or The Simarilion so I didn't know the specifics of what Gandalf was doing when he was separated from the group and from the little bits shown in this movie I'm really excited to see what happened. All of the acting seemed spot on (and the extra material really helped me understand why Thorin acted the way he did, I remember being confused by his actions especially near the end of the original book so this is a really great thing) and all of the dwarves seemed to have a good amount of screen time. Not equal amounts of screen time of course but by the end I felt like I knew what at least half of the dwarves were like, in the book they really weren't that distinguished from each other so again, this was a really great thing.
The Bad: Good god, did I accidentally watch the director's cut instead of the theatrical one? I did like some of the stuff that wasn't in the book The Hobbit but was in other material* but some of the stuff that was completely original (I have a friend who thinks tha the pale orc was in LotR but this subplot was completely new) was unnecessary filler and there was plenty of other stuff can could've been trimmed down (like the dwarves at Bilbo's house or the parts with Radagast the Brown). Honestly it's enough stuff that I almost want to recommend people to wait for the DVD to come out (and given that the film came out almost a month ago it might be out of theaters soon anyway) but even then there probably won't be a shorter cut of it on the disc. I can't remember being this frustrated at a movie for this problem (tv show or anime? Sure, but even then few I've enjoyed have had THIS much filler) and I'm convinced you could make this a two hour film without losing anything, this is a huge problem.
The Audio: I, like everyone else it seems, really love that Misty Mountain song (in all of it's different incarnations, from the dwarf song to the credit song to the fan version which takes 15 minutes to go through all of Tolkien's verses, plus all the other fan recreations of the song) and need to go buy it off of itunes. All of the other pieces of background music also worked very well but let's face it, the Misty Mountains is the piece that everyone is going to remember by the time the next film is out.
The Visuals: There was one weird thing in the visuals for me, in the first five minutes there's a panning shot around/through the dwarf kingdom which is entirely CGI and everything actually looked blurry to me. I asked the other people I saw it with and they said it looked blurry as well, I'm confused if they made the shot blurry on purpose (to hide unfinished CGI) or what, it really stood out to me. Otherwise, no complaints, the movie did a very good job advertising how gorgeous New Zealand is and how everyone should visit (what do you mean that wasn't the purpose of this?) and all of the sets and costumes looked great, can't wait to see more of that!
So, there was good stuff in here but it was buried under a lot of, well, superfluous stuff (and I'm kind of wondering how many deleted scenes there will be on the DVDs at this rate, how much stuff is there left?). So, only three out of five stars, please oh please let the next film have better editing.
*Bilbo narrating how the dwarf kingdom fell? Excellent, don't think there would have been a good chance to work that in later. Adding in the stuff with the council about the Necromancer? Also great, it even helps set The Lord of the Rings in context by showing just how long it had been since Sauron was a threat and how, by coincidence or fate, he began to rise again when the ring began it's journey for the first time in at least a century.
So happy 2013 everyone! Meant to have this up slightly earlier in the day but oh well, it's not like my posts don't usually go up at this time. Obviously this is where I talk about 2012 stuff so before that two notes. One, I managed to semi-burn out on, well, everything sometime last spring/summer and while I managed to deal with it and keep moving through everything that has certainly colored my opinion on stuff and I doubt that I'll ever try and consume as much media at once that I did before my burnout. And I think a lot of my burnout came from extra stress from school and such and since I'm in my final semester of my senior year of college I'm going to have to deal with it a bit more. On a more personal note, I finally figured out that I'm asexual this year (and aromantic to boot, apparently I have no interest in personal relationships beyond friendship) which on the one hand I'd like to think doesn't matter that much when it comes to reviews. On the other hand, it certainly explains why I'm not that fond of romances and seem to be harsher on them than most people I know so I think I should just toss this out there and not have to mention it every time. So yes, I am going to be harsher on romances than most and that is simply going to be a bias of mine, although I certainly can enjoy them sometimes as I believe this list should show.
Anime
Lots of good stuff this year but not a lot of great stuff for me. I've calculated that I at the very least tried out 53 shows this year, 17 of which I dropped and 6 that are still ongoing. Of those 36 I didn't drop there are 12 titles I would buy for sure (three of which are unlicensed and all made my top five, I feel so hipster) and probably a dozen more I would buy given the right price and excess money on my part. Despite all of that, unlike last year where I could easily pick my top five it was hard to choose my top five which I think was because most of the shows I liked were more character driven, not the plot driven ones that grab my heart and run away with it, so I am hoping for some more plot driven shows in the upcoming year. So, in a rough order, my top five.
Hyouka Yep, the show I almost didn't watch ended up being one of my "will buy in a heartbeat, someone license this thing already" titles. I was hesistant about the idea of everyday mysteries but that turned out to be the perfect way to have mysteries that were believable in their setting and gave all the characters a chance to slowly grow and understand themselves more. Plus, dat artwork, I'm actually sad whenever I look at the ads for Tamako Market (Kyoto Animation's winter show) because it's so simple compared to what they did here. So yes, fingers crossed that this thing of beauty gets licensed and that the writer writes enough more for another season or two.
Chihayafuru In retrospect I wish this had been on my 2011 list instead of Last Exile Fam (and is also the reason for my "show must finish in 2012 rule") but where Fam was stronger in the first half it was the second half of Chihayafuru that the character development really got going and it was another series that was just amazing in that department. I still have my quibbles with it, Chihaya took longer than I liked to start developing but I still adored the show in the end, is it time for the second season yet? (Also another entry into the "dammit people license this!" category)
tsuritama I was really worried going into this show, the only other series by this director I had seen was [C] which, to put it politely, did not quite fit. But lo and behold not only did this show work but they also pulled off the tricky pacing of "first half episodic/unconnected, second half plot heavy/connected" trick and in 11 episodes too! True Un-Go did it last year but plenty of people can't get that balance between developing the characters and then easing into the plot to work in a 26 episode series, they had some series constraints here. And honestly, this series made me care about a group of guys who had to go fishing for an alien to save that world, that by itself is a pretty big accomplishment, Sentai you're putting this one out soon right?
Natsume Yuujinchou Shi I almost forgot this season even aired this year (I'm sorry, yes I'm a bad fan) and I'm not sure how since not did this season adapt some of my favorite arcs of the manga but it also finally (finally!) delved more into Natsume's past and his family which is what we've all been waiting for. At this point the writing has become a lot more comfortable with itself and is willing to have multiple episode (/chapter) arcs and it feels so much stronger for it. And the show got licensed at the end of last year and started coming out this year too, huzzah! Now I just need to save up for the releases this year, NISA you are amazing (and should probably license all the unlicensed stuff on my list, just saying).
My Little Monster And that's why I made sure to get that review up tonight, because I realized that this one was going to slide in and make it to the fifth spot on my list. I just enjoyed the hell out of this show, it made me laugh and sympathize with the characters more than I expected and yes, it was another title I didn't expect to like and didn't even plan on trying when the season started. I'm quite happy to be wrong here and wish desperately that it would get a second season (and licensed but I'm starting to sound like a broken record here).
Books
I actually read more books published in 2012 than I initially thought (around a good dozen) yet despite that, much like my trouble with anime, I'm having a hard time making a list of five titles that I adored beyond belief, partially because I'd like to have read a larger group of titles. But, of the ones I read, I found myself liking the YA more than the adult fiction and I was surprised just how much I liked most of the books. So special mentions to Unspoken (which I swear is half mystery and half snark, it's like Veronica Mars' British cousin), Team Human (which was also half snark and half a really smart take on some tired vampire tropes) Raven Boys (which I remain a little on the fence about and have decided the best way to figure out where I stand is to read the next book, now), The Book of Blood and Shadow (which took a lot of problems I had with the author's previous books and fixed them, also taking two genres I don't really like, the thriller and the "guys what if historical event was actually like this?!?" genre and made them work very well), and Seraphina (guys it's dragons and politics, that's pretty much made for me). Very happy I got a chance to read all of those this year, although I am at a bit of a loss since I got to everything I wanted to this year I have no idea what to start my new year off with!
Manga
Alright confession time, I'm not 100% sure what came out this year. I mean sure I can think of things that came out this year that I want to read but the ones that I can think of off the bat either ended this year or are rereleases of older titles which almost don't feel like they count. Heck, with the gap between publishing in Japan and the US I can never tell what counts anyway, even the series that were scanlated that I read this year generally started years ago. But I have noticed that over the past year that more and more of my budget has gone towards anime and away from manga and I'd like to spread it out a little more evenly and try to catch up with my manga buying this year. Also, I recommend this 2012 list of manga since it matches up rather well with my own tastes (I haven't read We Were There or 13th Boy but I plan on trying them out after seeing all the praise for them over the past year).
Movies
This just wasn't a good year for movies for me, I saw only five movies that came out in 2012 (although there are one or two more I wouldn't mind seeing like Argo) and I still liked Hugo more than any of them. Of course, Hugo seems to be that rare movie that I absolutely, whole-heartedly adore which only comes out once every few years but that aside, there just wasn't much that interested me this year. I was frustrated by both Brave and Rise of the Guardians for their overly simple plots and characterization (sure they're "for kids" but that should never be an excuse for a subpar story which I felt was the case here), The Hobbit had serious pacing issues, Wreck-It-Ralph was rather fun, and, as a non-comic book fan, I found The Avengers to be a lot of fun (even if it did everything I expected it to without any twists). So far the new year already looks better for me movie wise, I can at least think of a few titles that I really want to see which I couldn't do at this point last year, and hopefully I'll also come across some gems from years past in all of my Netflix surfing.
TV Shows
This year marks an interesting point for me since I am now actively following multiple tv shows and I'm getting more and more interested in plenty of shows I haven't gotten a chance to try yet. Despite that, I don't have a top five here either since I didn't have five tv shows from 2012 that I whole-heartedly enjoyed (also, like in the movies bit, I saw an older show this year, Veronica Mars, which blew everything out of the water by comparison). I am really enjoying both Elementary and Once Upon A Time and looking forward to more Downton Abbey this Sunday (although I do worry that this show is going to go on and on without a really good stopping point, I like my shows to have stopping points) and I suppose I'm looking forward to more of both Sherlock and Doctor Who, although I have issues with both of those shows lately so my enjoyment is always tempered by a voice in my mind going "but it could've been even better if they'd done this differently!" I did decide not to follow the second season of Grimm since I was frustrated at the ending of the first season but even that show wasn't bad, just, frustrating there. I'm not sure how many older shows I'll be able to try out in 2013 (since 22 45 minute long episodes takes a significant chunk of time to get through) but fingers crossed that I'll be able to try even more great series from years past.
Finally, if anyone has any suggestions for webcomics I should review when I do my month of reviews in March, send them to me now (here in the comments, twitter, doesn't really matter) so I have a chance to go through them. Right now I've more or less exhausted my to-read folder so I actually have a lot of time to look at new stuff and I always want recommendations for new stuff.
