Ack, sorry this wasn't up last night, a combination of a sudden cold (with no real meds to speak of) and midterm paper/test/project stress kept me from finishing this review. Although, now that I have finished it, this is going to be a bit of a short review regardless since I don't need to get into much detail for why I liked and disliked it.
Accel World
Summary: The year is 2046 and virtual reality is now everywhere in Tokyo and the technology has become so advanced that people can interact with it thanks to little computers worn around the neck. These neurolinkers have another use not intended by the manufactures however, if you've had one since birth and have a high reaction speed then it's possible to download Brain Burst, an illegal fighting game program where if you lose all your points then the game permantely uninstalls and you lose all memory of the game as well. Haruyuki is a bullied middle schooler who when given the chance by his upperclassman Kuroyukihime (no seriously, apparently no one knows her real name) to install Brain Burst takes it and finds his life changing for the better (even if it's gotten a bit more complicated in the process).
The Good: The premise here is a bit of a fun one, even if it's more than a tad unbelievable, and honestly if we did have super-advanced technology like a neurolinker today I would completely expect illegal games/hacks for it. And, even though Brain Burst flies in the face of a lot of science, that part about the show never bothered me and I think it's because the show presented it like magic (ie, "it exists, we're not going to tell you the reasons why but as you and the characters can see it clearly exists and works so let's get on with the story"), although some parts of the story later on required a bit more suspension of disbelief.
The Bad: The second half of the show was centered around one arc with one villain which makes sense when you consider that that particular arc took up two light novel volumes. So my problem lies more with the source material, there's no reason that arc should have been that long. The villain wasn't a good villain at all, their only motivation was "for teh evluz!", was it was implied that there was something bigger going on behind the scenes it wasn't explained, and that arc simply took too long. I have issues with Haruyuki as well, namely that his character seems to be written to act like however the arc requires him to act, not based on what character development he's had. Since he really regressed at the beginning of that arc, got a bit better, regressed again, and seems to be back to where he was before by the end of it which was really quite frustrating.
The Audio: Both opening and closing themes were fun and I have no complaints about either the background music or the voice acting, although I think it's sad yet amusing that the original author voiced one of the burst linker avatars (one based on how he appears in the back of his books) and fans complained that they didn't like how he sounded so he was replaced in the DVD version by a real actor.
The Visuals: This was a fun, colorful show to look at and I'm told that it had pretty good animation underneath all the special effects used in the fight scenes (seriously, pause during a random moment during some of the later fight scenes and see if you can even tell what you're looking at). One of the earlier fight scenes however (I think around episode 11) isn't buried under special effects and I remember thinking that it was pretty great looking, even compared to all the fights in Fate/Zero and The Legend of Korra which were airing at the same time. I also really liked the designs of the avatars, looking at the designs in the original novels I think that they've improved on the designs quite nicely.
All in all Accel World and Sword Art Online are rather alike in the respect that, while the settings are cool and the concept is interesting enough, I just don't find any of the characters likable/sympathetic enough to root for them and the storylines just aren't always that interesting. So I'm torn, do I want to buy this show? I'm not sure, although if there was a second season I'd watch it (partially because I read some spoilers for it and holy, now THAT'S got some interesting bits, although I bet that it's probably not as well executed as I'd hope). And just to weigh in on the "are SAO and AW connected?" debate, I'm not sure. I'm VERY sure that the main couple of SAO aren't KYH's parents despite physical similarties (KYH seems to have rather distant parents, plus there are some spoilers I've read that indicate that she has really terrible parents), although I'm not ruling it out that they could be the parents of another character (who hasn't exactly appeared in the books except in flashbacks? Slightly confused about that part). Funny enough while the books seem to be more ambiguous about the subject (there was even a crossover short story which implies that they're alternate universes) the anime seems to be saying that yes, these two are in the same world which has left me more confused than ever.
For those who do wish to check out the show however it is being streamed on hulu by Viz Media (so only Americans and people with proxies can view this one legally, sorry).
Geeze, is it just me or are they making anime shorter these days? ....wait this is a regular tv show not anime, whaddya mean they're making these seasons shorter too? It feels like season seven had barely began before it was over and there's a two month gap until the Christmas special and I don't know when the second half of the season starts after that. So after two years of this kind of pacing I can say quite certainly, no I don't like this half season nonsense and sadly there was a bunch of other stuff in this season I didn't like either.
Doctor Who
Summary: The Doctor continues to travel around all of time and space in his little blue box and companions Amy and Rory return. As the years go on however they're starting to get a little tired of being thrown into adventures at the drop of a hat with no prior warning. But they don't want to completely cut the Doctor out of their lives and finding a balance between these two lives is proving hard.
The Good: My favorite parts of this season (and the parts I thought were the best) were the ones that really looked at the relationship Amy/Rory/the Doctor have now since, someone correct me if I'm wrong, this is the first time the series has had companions to the Doctor who don't always travel around with him and I loved how they explored that (yes there have been reoccurring characters like that, such as the Brigadier, but that's slightly different). There was also a particular line of the Doctor's from the fourth episode that I liked, where he says that he's tired of giving people second chances, they take advantage of it, and then he has to go and lay down the smack anyway. His change in attitude, from being a "coward" who gives people second chances to someone who is becoming much harder is something that's been happening since the series restarted with the ninth doctor and, given what the 12th Doctor is supposed to be like (as was established in the original series) I think this is on purpose and I really like where it's going. Given how this half season ended I foresee this trend continuing and I really do want to see how the Doctor changes next.
The Bad: For me there was something off in nearly every episode and, well, they bugged me. In the first episode sure it's a cool idea to see all the damaged daleks from wars and such, there's just the teensy-weeny problem that Skaro is supposed to be time locked so that episode shouldn't have happened at all (plus Amy's line, I've known some people with a similar problem say it killed a relationship but Amy just wasn't in a relationship where that should've mattered). The second episode was tons of fun and, while I can see the Doctor galloping through the universe with Nekfertiti as a companion, why grab everyone else as well? (Hell, why did the daleks grab Amy and Rory before that? This all feels much too convenient) I didn't like the third episode at all, aside from the Doctor's aforementioned lines, it felt like someone said "hey you know what's cool? WESTERNS" "yeah let's do one!" , they tried too hard to play with gray and grey mortality (I was feeling pretty unsympathetic to both sides by the end) and I also felt like the framing was pointless. While I had no problems with the fourth episode (which shared a writer with the second episode funny enough) the fifth episode, ehhhhhhh. Doctor Who is not a serious science fiction show but it uses time-travel a lot anyway, that's okay. But it's not okay when it says "okay, here are the mechanics the show operates by" (in this specific instance, time paradoxes) and then disregards them when the plot calls for it, it really felt like Moffat was fighting the plot to get the story to go where he wanted it and that's not very encouraging.
The Audio: While there must have been some new pieces of background music in this season it was music from previous seasons that I noticed the most (also, I hadn't realized it before but a lot of the character's themes are rather similar to each other which I like, it helps give the music some continuity). Honestly I didn't notice the music most of the time, only when things were quite for a moment and then the music picked up as if to say "nope, the worst is yet to come!" but I think during the break I'll make an effort to look up the soundtrack since I do like what I remember.
The Visuals: While various bits of CGI weren't movie quality, nothing this season looked terrible. The dinosaurs on the spaceship looked fine, I've heard that they used a lot of real daleks from collections and such for some of the scenes in Asylum of the Daleks yet I couldn't tell the real daleks apart from the CGI ones. I feel like Doctor Who is becoming a bit smarter with their budget, or maybe the second half of the show is going to look absolutely terrible in comparison.
So in short, this season had a lot of weak spots and some good spots and I'm very confused about how I feel about it. By now I would like someone else to replace Moffat as the showrunner, the way he writes just feels a bit awkward and yes, I'm one of those people who isn't too impressed by how he writes women (I wanted to say some stuff about River Song here but I was afraid that might make the review too long, I'll probably put something on my tumblr in the next month or so when I have a chance). But I'll be back for the second half, fingers crossed that it has more strong episodes than this part did however.
I found myself in an awkward position this summer, I had checked out so many books that I had used up all my renewals for three of them which were due back in a week and I really wanted to read all of them. And that is why I plowed through 1100 pages in just under seven days, which is more than I ever had to do in a week in any of my English classes (I have a flatemate who is an English major who sometimes has 100 pages of reading a night but even that would be a few hundred less than what I did, although I had more hours in the day to pull this off) and I am never going to try and pull that stunt again. It did have one good side effect though, I went through the biggest book first (which was IIRC 500-600 pages) and if it wasn't for that time limit I don't think I would have picked up another book so soon afterwards.
Death Watch by Ari Berk
Summary: Growing up Silas Umber always thought his father was a mortician, someone who prepared the dead for burial, not someone who dealt with the dead who were a bit restless. He only finds out this fact after his father doesn't come back one night and learns that he now has to take up his father's job and move back to the families ancestral home in the city of Lichport where the dead are as big a part of the town as the living.
The Good: I don't come across many stories in young adult literature that could be labeled as gothic (stories with gothic and supernatural elements? Sure, but those are usually mixed genre books and gothic is the secondary genre) so it was a change of pace from what I usually read (sadly though I don't really like gothic stories and this one reminded me why, mostly because of the tropes used which I just don't care for). The story also had a lot of details and, while it wraps up quite nicely and could work as a stand alone, I can see where they left room for future stories, although right now I don't see what new element they could introduce that could span another 1000 pages.
The Bad: For a book that was over 500 pages long, not much really happened and it could have been paced much more briskly and been at least 50 pages shorter for it. While most of the little details and subplots it introduced were used by the end there was one glaring omission, Silas' sorta-kinda love interest Beau doesn't do anything the entire book and then leaves the story quite abruptly. Given that this is a trilogy I suspect she'll be back later but it all felt rather awkward. Awkward is also a good word to describe Silas' characterization, at times he seems like your average, college-aged guy and at other times he came off rather robotic. I think that shift was intentional to show Silas transitioning from being a kid to taking up the mantle of the Undertaker but it was done in a really jerky manner.
So nope, not the book for me, will not be tracking down it's sequels whenever they come out and I'm reminded of why I don't normally like gothic genre stories. Then again, I read another book lately which could be called a gothic and I liked it much better, maybe because the plot moved faster in that one....
It took about a month but I finally found time to swing by the library near my school (it's my senior year and it seems determined to break me, hence the really late updates) and they had a few new offerings in the kids comic section, one being last week's Shay's Story and the other is this title which TokyoPop published two or three volumes of before they went out of business. Despite the fact that it seemed like a lot of people online liked the story it just didn't seem like my kind of story so I didn't put any effort into tracking it down and trying it out, until I had a copy staring me in the face and practically nothing else to read that is.
The Secret Notes of Lady Kanoko by Ririko Tsujita (volume one)
Summary: For some unknown reason, Kanoko has to change school quiet often but that's fine by her since she doesn't like interacting with her classmates as she does observing them and this helps keep her more detached from them. Although, even though she claims to have no interest in making friends and doesn't view her classmates as anything more than subjects she often gets involved in their lives anyway....
The Good: This was actually a lot more fun than I expected, Kanoko is a very sarcastic narrator and after all of the blah shojo manga I've read over the years (especially those in a school setting) it's quite nice to see a story that mocks a lot of the character types and situations. That's not to say that it doesn't use shojo tropes as well, but the ones it uses without irony and sarcasm certainly feel less tired that the ones Kanoko mocks.
The Bad: Despite the fact that this was fun, like I initially suspected I don't think I could read an entire series where in every chapter Kanoko goes to a new school, observes and eventually ends up involved with her classmate and then moves on. Funny enough this volume works pretty well as a standalone since the first and last chapters involve the same cast so I actually feel pretty satisfied reading just one volume.
The Art: If someone was to pick up this book and flip through the pages they would think it was probably a regular shojo series since that's what it looks like, a regular shojo series. It's nicely drawn, despite the fact that there were tons of characters in this volume alone I didn't have any trouble telling them apart (even if there were too many at times to keep straight), and this story just wouldn't have worked as well if it didn't look like a shojo series.
Bit short but since there isn't an overarching plot to speak of and I didn't want to talk in depth about each story there isn't much more to say. So in short, it's a fun series but not one I think I would enjoy in the long run, although I'm sure plenty of other people will. Oh and I would like more snarky narrators in all kinds of fiction please!
The other noitaminA show and a returning one at that, although Moyashimon had a really long hiatus and I'm baffled how it came back in the first place. Picking up right where the first season left off, so this is not the kind of sequel where you can jump right in if you haven't seen the first part, the story continues to follow the strange students in the Itsuki Seminar and their even weirder adventures with microbes.
Moyashimon Returns
Summary: Sawaki, a first year student at the University of Agriculture, has the odd ability to see microbes which, given that he's the son of a sake brewer and has fallen in with a group of people clustered around a microbes professor, comes up in his day to day life than one would expect. Especially now as the group gets ready for the school's fall harvest festival and plans to sell alcohol as a way to generate funds, but given that one of their number vanishes shortly beforehand that might be the least of their worries.
The Good: The first half of the series with the fall festival was rather fun, even though I wish it hadn't happened so soon after the spring festival (which was my favorite of the two for sheer whackiness). It was nice to see Kei again (I was worried that they wouldn't appear at all in this season since they still seemed to be sorting their own life out), really all the characters since this show's strongest point is its weird cast of characters and the hijinks they get themselves into.
The Bad: Moyashimon works best when it has it's entire cast to work with and just lets them all bounce off of each other. Given that the cast was split up for over half the season the jokes it can make gets really limited and I just got bored of the characters after a bit. On a related note, Hasegawa has always been one of the more fleshed out characters in the series but it still felt odd for her to have an entire character development arc while no one else had one. Also, she didn't really get any development here, she barely changed in the end (her motivation for staying in school may have changed but the end result, that she's staying in school to study microbes, didn't) and in such a short series it felt a bit out of place. I didn't like any of the new characters in the show either, Marie felt like the author combined Sawaki and Kei into one character and Hasegawa's fiancee felt flat the entire time (it felt like he had issues but I wasn't really sure what, inadequacy?).
The Audio: The ending does follow in the noitaminA tradition of having at least one song with odd images to accompany it (although I didn't pay much attention to the ED since I didn't like the song, it was quite catchy however, and it was done in some unattractive looking CGI) but the opening song looked and sounded so generic it was rather sad. Other than that, obviously most of the cast is the same as the first season and everyone was fine, I was more focused on how the show looked than how it sounded.
The Visuals: As this image sums up, the character designs changed a LOT for this season (poor Sawaki also looks more like a high school student than a college one now) which I have to admit frustrates me. Actually, why does a company need brand new designs for a new season, is there a technical reason they can't simply use the old designs for the reoccuring characters? Regardless, this whole season looks like it had a bit of a lower budget than before, I was unnerved when I realized that the mouths on Those Two Guys (Misato and Kawahama) only moved sometimes, I couldn't figure out if there was any rhyme or reason to it or if the animators only did it when they had the time. It's a bit of a let down from the previous season, and it's not like the first season had mind-blowingly good art either, and certainly doesn't help it out.
So another miss for me and I'm really not sure what to say. I was hoping that this season would have a more solid ending so I could say "Yes, watch Moyashimon and Moyashimon Returns!" but now I feel like adding onto that "but there's not really an ending, the manga hasn't been published in the US for years, probably will never be published again, and I'm pretty sure it's still running in Japan but I think I've also heard it's been on hiatus numerous times, yeaaaaaaah." If you still want to watch it, and it is a fun show a lot of the time, crunchyroll is now streaming both seasons (which I take to mean that probably no one is ever going to license it now which is also sad). Finally, I'm probably alone in this but, can we make the segments with microbes talking about how stuff works a bit shorter? By the end of the series they were just getting on my nerves and I just couldn't care about how microbes play an integral role in the formation of yet another food.
