TWELVE DAYS OF ANIME 2015 Anime Review: Castle Town Dandelion

Yep, still using this as an excuse to catch up on reviews, I only wish that I was using this time to talk review some of the best shows of the year instead of my least favorite summer shows!

Castle Town Dandelion (Jokamachi no Dandelion)

Anime Review: Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE!

Once again, sorry for the delay in this review, writing through a headache after a six day work week is never tempting enough for me to want to do it. Plus, I've reached the stretch of shows which I did enjoy enough to finish watching them but don't actually have a lot to say on them and as a reviewer that's a little stressful. How do I manage to convey why I thought that they were worth finishing if I have such a flat opinion at the end of the show? Middle of the show reviews really are the toughest ones to do, thank goodness every year I get pickier and pickier about what I continue so I watch fewer of them. 

Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE! (Binan Koukou Chikyu Boei-bu LOVE!)

Webcomic Review: Cucumber Quest

While Cucumber Quest has a fairly large following I'd imagine that Gigi D.G's first comic, the Hiimdaisy (her old pen name) Persona 4 fancomic probably has an even wider name recognition and that's how I first found her work. I really liked that series of comics and was sad that it's unfinished (for the uninitiated, I really like this fandub of the comics) and I'm still surprised by the notoriety of it, I believe that the English dub for the Persona 4 The Arena game even had a reference to one of her jokes in there. So it wasn't a surprise to me that this work is also influenced by classic RPGs, although it might be an even stronger connection than I first thought.

Cucumber Quest by Gigi D.G.

Manga Review: Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches

Sorry for the lateness here again, as I said in my round-up post yesterday I actually did finish writing this on Monday but my late work shift left me too drained to do all of the copy editing. And this is going to be the last of my manga Mondays, the winter anime season ends this week so next Monday I'm diving back into the anime reviews with new shows and comics every other week (well, and manga reviews every week on OASG, at this rate I'm set to review about 70 different comic and manga series this year which is a bit of a terrifying number).

Yamda-kun and the Seven Witches by Miki Yoshikawa

Manga Review: My Little Monster (volume 4)

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I think my branch library has gotten a new employee lately who is fairly manga-savy, not just because of the "sad Naruto is over? Read these manga instead!" display but because I've seen more recent manga releases popping up in our small section recently. Obviously this was one of them, I hadn't gotten around to buying the latest volume of My Little Monster yet for, well, actually that's part of the review!

My Little Monster (volume 4) by Robico

Anime Review: Tonari no Seki-kun and Magica Wars

This is why I usually take November off, I simply run out of things to review and have to scramble a bit, especially when it comes to anime. Thankfully after doing this for so long I've started to anticipate this so I'm going to do something I haven't done in a little while, I'm going to talk about two series of shorts that came out in this past year. Since two mini-reviews is totally the same as one full length review, right?

Anime Review: Monthly Girl's Nozaki-kun

These days I get most of my manga recommendations from tumblr, although "recommendation" makes it sound as if people are specifically telling me to read them. This time around I was following a blog for another series altogether, saw them posting a group of strips from this series and fell head over heels for it, I had to make sure I didn't just reblog every single one I came across! I immediately started hoping for an anime since I knew it would be a tough sell to convince my friends to read scanlated 4koma and thankfully one was announced quite soon after I first discovered it and I then proceeded to hope that I wasn't hyping up the series too much. Fortunately it seems like my friends have all fallen harder for this show than I did and I'm still seeing new people every week, people who don't even watch a lot of anime, picking up the show and falling in love.

Monthly Girls Nozaki-kun (Gekkan Shojo Nozaki-kun)

Manga Review: My Little Monster (volume 3)

Man it's getting tough to do reviews of each volume in a manga series, I think part of my problem with this series is that 1. I remember a lot of the anime so I've got a few volumes to go before anything makes a real impact on me and 2. There's just not a lot changing in these books volume-to-volume since it's a rom-com, not a plot-heavy story. So bear with me with these shorter reviews, I am still enjoying the series for sure but there's just not as much to say unless I go page by page!

My Little Monster (volume 3) by Robico

Manga Review: My Little Monster (volume two)

After simply not having a chance to buy manga on a regular basis for so many years it still feels rather odd to get back into the swing of things and pick up a volume every other month, even back in high school when I was somehow able to buy manga I wasn't buying series as they came out, I was always trying to catch up with a million different series whenever I had a coupon! Of course, even back then in 2007-2009 there weren't many series coming out bi-monthly, I think Viz may have "sped up" some of it's big three shonen series and I would have gladly devoured more Fruits Basket if it came out six times a year instead of three but oh well. It's interesting that there's been such a bit shift towards these quicker releases, especially since Kodansha isn't trying to "catch up" with this series, it's already finished in Japan, but at least this way I won't suddenly have to start waiting four or more months for a new volume!

My Little Monster (volume two) by Robico

Manga Review: My Little Monster (volume one)

Back in the fall of 2012 I was pleasantly surprised to see that a new anime with a very bland sounding premise (girl is badgered by boy and a romance somehow develops) ended up becoming one of my favorite shows of the season and was then saddened when manga readers noted that due to how the series ended it was unlikely to get a second season. Well, that and the DVD sales, although I was a little surprised that this was the only one of the three shojo shows that season (the other two being Kamisama Kiss and Say I Love You) to not get licensed in the US since I thought it was by far the strongest. So I was quite excited that Kodansha USA announced that they were going to be putting it out and, like a good little manga fan, I went to my local independent book store, ordered it, and then actually got my book before anyone else did it seems, hurray for being a trendsetter!

My Little Monster (Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun, volume one) by Robico

Movie Review: Hot Fuzz

Back during the summer I became a bit curious about seeing the film The World's End and realized that while I'd seen Shaun of the Dead I hadn't actually seen Hot Fuzz, writer-director Edgar Wright's other really well known film (my mother has no idea how she let that happen). To be clear, yes I know that these films have nothing to do with each other and you can enjoy one without having seen the others, however I knew it was going to be a while before I had a chance to see The World's End so why not watch this one first? I know this would all make a lot more sense if I had gotten to it a few months earlier but I honestly did forget until I caught sight of the DVD at one of the local libraries, probably why I hadn't thought to watch it earlier in the first place.

Hot Fuzz

Anime Review: The Daily Lives of High School Boys

This is actually a show I've meant to get around to watching for a while now since I heard a lot of good buzz about it but it actually hasn't been on the internet legally streaming until just recently. With the way my anime watching schedule is these days (one show on Tuesday, four on Thursday, and one on Friday) I'm finding myself with a lot of time early on in the week to catch up on older shows and since this was a short one I decided to see if I could just knock it out before NISA put out their box set.

The Daily Lives of High School Boys

Summary: Tadikuni, Yoshitake, and Hidenoir are three classmates who are more or less friends and do what high schoolers do everywhere, really strange hijinks that don't make a lot of sense in retrospect.

The Good: For people who have seen one too many "cute girls doing cute things" shows and are feeling jaded check out at least the first episode of this show, you'll feel much more balanced afterwards. I've often felt like those cute girl shows were a bit odd since they were nothing like the high school life I had (or that any one I knew had) but this show feels a lot closer for capturing the just plain weirdness of high schoolers, heck some of my friends probably could have one-upped the characters from here at times (although the reoccuring after the credits bit, high school girls are funky, felt too strange to me a lot of the time, too chunni). And that's where the fun of the series comes in, the sheer absurdity of the skits and gags, and a lot of them are connected as well so the show has a pretty good sized cast by the end, for some people this will be just the kind of series they need to see.

The Bad: Humor is hit or miss for everyone and sadly this show was largely a miss for me. I did like one or two skits in each episode but simply didn't find most of them funny. It wasn't that they were too weird or random (well, a few were but that wasn't the reason for the majority of them), I just found that I didn't really care about the characters and when you don't care it's hard to care about what they do. Also, I know that there are times when repeating a joke to death becomes a gag itself but it's not one that I found funny and sadly the show did, we just had very different ideas of humor and I even contemplated dropping the show a few times since I was getting too bored by it.

The Production Values: I will probably annoy a number of fans out there but I didn't really like the voice acting in this series. Why? Because it's a series about high schoolers yet nobody sounds a day under 22 and that's being generous, it just got really disconcerting and some of the characters were taking me out of the story every time they talked. I imagine you could write that off as a gag in and of itself but it just didn't work for me in the end.




So while it's not a bad show, tedious at times but not bad, this just wasn't my thing in the end so I'm giving it a 3 out of 5. For those who want to check it out it's streaming on hulu currently (which means US only sadly) and the US anime licensor NIS America has picked it up and will be releasing a box set sometime in 2014. 

Manga Review: Assassination Classroom

These days most of the manga I try out I find out first from tumblr. It doesn't have a really unified manga community per-say but there are always a lot of people squeeing over series they love, posting screencaps, sending in license requests to various publishers, or in this series case making those odd powerpoints about why something is awesome. And that's what eventually convinced me to try out this series, a powerpoint that is, since I had heard about it a bit before (from what I can tell this became a hit almost immediately in Japan) and, well, the premise was just crazy enough to be interesting!


Assassination Classroom (Ansatsu Kyoushisu) by Yusei Matsui

One day part of the moon vanished. To be precise, some sort of strange creature, that looks like a giant, walking, yellow, octopus, appeared on Earth and blew it up. Whatever the thing actually is it possesses inhuman abilities such as supersonic speed and a resistantance to all known weapons, every nation in the world has tried to kill it and no one has come even close to succeeding. Which is why they have to accept his compromise, he will teach Class 3-E at Kunugigaoka Junior High, in Japan, for one year and if he isn't killed by the end of that year he will destroy the world. Since he has promised to not harm his students, but they can try to kill him themselves, they're the best chance anyone has, too bad that students there have already been through the ringer. As students of the best school in the country they're all exceptionally bright in some areas but all of them are weak in others and have been placed in Class E (as in "end") to serve as an example to the rest of the school with crappy teachers and equipment. But despite all of that the students are surprisingly resilient and it seems like their strange new teacher actually cares about giving them a proper, well-rounded education even when they're trying to kill him.

As I said earlier, it's a premise strange enough to actually be interesting and I can now see why it's already such a hit, it's a surprisingly fun series despite it's semi-dark premise. Make no mistake, these kids are trying really hard to actually kill their teacher (whom they've nicknamed Koro-sensei, he also has a huge bounty on his head) and he really truly doesn't want to be killed (after seeing all the crazy, insanely plotted out attempts the kids have made so far I wonder how they're going to actually, finally succeed) yet it rarely gets "dark". Let me rephrase that, the fact that the students are trying to kill their teacher isn't what makes the story dark at times, the fact that a lot of them have been bullied and by students and administration alike for being in Class E is what makes the story more sober at times but even then everyone manages to plow through their troubles and come out better for them on the other side.

Another reason why this story seems to work so well is because it's rather well structured. The cast is a tad over 30 characters (the students plus teachers) yet Matsui knows to focus on a core set of students (all centered around a boy whose more or less the point of view character, Nagisa) so that the reader's don't get lost and to give the other students "a day in the limelight" every now and then to flesh everyone out. While I can't remember every character's name I can at least recognize them every time they appear and usually their personality and skills as well, that's really impressive considering not only how many characters there are but how comparatively few chapters there are out there. Which is another great thing, in story four or five months have already passed and the story is only six volumes long, no super long drawn out shonen arcs here! I have no doubt that it'll suffer from arc creep later on but even if it does it seems likely that the story will end in less than 20 volumes and I honestly can't think of anyone who would be unhappy about that (well, except for Jump of course). And finally, since I don't feel like I've stressed this enough, this is a pretty funny series in it's own way. It helps that the series doesn't start at the beginning of the school year but a little after by which the students have adjusted to the fact that they have a nigh-unkillable yellow blob for a teacher and have just become rather snarky about everything. The story is big on puns, weird situations and reactions to strange events which is exactly my kind of humor. Tvtropes has a really good example of it on one of their pages, when one character comes crashing through a wall (not the teacher), no one stops to wonder how he was able to do that but instead the entire class rather grumpily thinks in unison "You couldn't use the door instead?" I find characters dealing with the strange in a deadpan manner more hilarious than overreactions and every chapter is good for at least one or two laughs.



As for licensing, I feel like it could be picked up since crazier things have been released in the US, however apparently the American editors of Weekly Shonen Jump (which I think is referring to the people at Viz, the only ones who could publish it) say that they doubt it could ever get printed over here due to the subject matter which I do understand. I wonder if that would ever affect a potential anime release as well, I'm almost certain it will have one in the next few years, it's already popular enough that an OVA is coming out sometime next year. I'll cross my fingers and hope for the best since, as odd as it sounds, of all the series I'm talking about this month this one seems to have the most widespread appeal and I really don't want to have to import the Japanese volumes and have to translate the many many puns in the series by myself.

Anime Review: GA Gejitsuka Art Design Class

Wohoo, I finally managed to post an anime review on a Monday again! Then again I really want to tell people about this under-appreciated series whose title might look a little familiar since I actually reviewed the first two volumes of the manga back in the fall. For the manga I felt like it was pretty cute but just couldn't quite get into it and I wasn't sure if that's because I was reading it in really odd, brief snatches of time thanks to my schedule or because the material just didn't quite click. I'd known the anime was on Crunchyroll and decided one night to start going through all the stuff I had queued and this looked like as good a place to start as any (also because I'm not currently watching comedies so I didn't have to worry about confusing it with anything). After the first episode I wasn't quite sure if I wanted to continue so I watched a second, wasn't still sure but as I found myself reaching for the third I realized that I must be at least a little hooked by it.

GA Gejitsuka Art Design Class

Summary: Kisaragi, Miyabi, Namiko, Tomokane, and Nodamiki are all first year students in the GA Art Design course and like many art students are quite strange. They agonize over homework, come up with strange hotpot things to eat, get lost in the school buildings, and generally just have fun while working hard.

The Good: For me the humor clicked more here than it did in the manga and I really adored this show. The episodes managed to string together a bunch of little plots (my biggest concern since it's based on a 4koma manga) rather well, with some being a little more coherent than others, and it even covered beyond what I had read before, another concern of mine. They even gave the "second group" (how I referred to the Fine Art Club in my mind while watching it) screen time which made me happy since they had really grown on me in the manga, I was delighted when they popped up since I had completely forgotten about them. But I think the show's best strength, to both new fans and fans of the manga, is the humor, it fits, it flows, sometimes they drag out skits a bit too long but more often than not the writers really understood comedic timing and I would spend the entire episode giggling madly.

The Bad: I would have liked a little bit of character development even if it had been just for some of the characters like Kisaragi (who is more or less the main character). The characters did change a bit, and since this is based off of a gag 4koma manga to start with I can't say I was surprised by this (lack of) development but it reminded me that even though I really didn't like Azumanga Diaoh it did have a bit more character development and did better in that respect. I also wish the show had managed to give itself a slightly more concrete ending (in either the 12 episode or the OVA, which Crunchryoll has listed as episode 13) or at least a sense of wrap-up, both ended just a bit too suddenly for me. But, given that there is more manga out there to read I'm not terribly heartbroken over this.

The Audio/Visuals: On an odd note, I saw Star Cross Anime Blog praise the art but for some reason crunchyroll was streaming all except two or three of the episodes in only 480 so I can't really speak to how crisp the lines or colors were. To me a lot of the show looked simple and like it had a relatively modest budget, nothing looked off and it illustrated all the art concepts that came up perfectly but this wasn't a show that showed off any technical or artistic prowess. I don't think that hurt the show but it's not one I would recommend if you wanted just eye candy. It did however have a rather additively cute opening song so if you want ear candy you might want to give that one a listen.


So I'm giving this 4 out of 5 stars and a hearty recommendation to get your butt over to crunchyroll and try it out. It never got picked up for a physical release in the US (although I just noticed that it's listed on AnimeSols' survey for "what titles would you pledge at least $40 for a physical release" question, the only one I answered yes for actually) so if you like it, and can access AnimeSols, then make sure to go over there and vote for it too! And if anyone is interested in the manga then go hit up your local retailer of choice, Yen Press has the R1 license for it and judging by the release dates there should be stuff in some of the later volumes that the anime never covered!

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.

Webcomic Review Month 2013: Witch's Quarry, Worsted for Wear

And the month is starting to wrap up, I'll have one more post on Sunday (a bit of a rant about how to properly set up a webpage, spoilers most people are doing it right to start with) and then I'm going to take the rest of the week off (mostly to write-up reviews for all the currently ending anime, some of them had some really interesting endings) and start back up April 7th (and until further notice anime reviews are moving to Tuesday night because I just can't find the energy to write them up Monday nights after the rest of the day). In any case, let's talk about these final two webcomics and why I think they're worth reading!

Witch's Quarry by Jen Lee Quick

Sir Veolynn Moreshire wasn't expecting to go to her brother's wedding only to find that he's swapped places with a body double and run off with his lover. And she certainly had no way of knowing that her brother's fiancee to be a selkoi who picked him out soley for his genetics and isn't above turning his sister into a man so she can still obtain it. Thus Veolen, her brother's double, his fiancee and her sisters have set out on a journey to find her, now his, brother while tensions between various factions and countries begin to rise in the background.

When I first stumbled across this comic I was a bit surprised I hadn't heard of it earlier, it has pretty solid art and plotting and updates rather frequently so it has a more than a few chapters under it's belt too. But, assuming it's been hosted on smackjeeves from the beginning, the comic is just over a year old so I'm even more impressed, over 300 fully colored pages in not even a year and a month is nothing to sniff at! The story feels a little less strong currently that it did in previous chapters since it's focusing a lot on the magic of the world and we (the readers and in some cases the readers and Veolen) are still in the dark on a lot of the ins and outs of magic. Hopefully there will be an infodump or such soon  or maybe I just need to go back and reread part of the story, even when a story updates this fast it's still really easy to forget details if you only read it a page at a time.

Witch's Quarry can be read on it's Smackjeeves site or the MangaMagazine site (which has nothing to do with manga, they're all English webcomics, nor is it presented in a magazine format so I'll admit the name irks me) but you have to be a subscriber to get the updates as quickly or something strange like that. No print version as of writing.
Worsted for Wear by Rachael and Joshua Anderson

Knitters, speaking from my own personal experience, tend to be odd ducks to start with and Camden is a bit weirder than most. Thankfully she has plenty of friends who are also into various fiber arts to try and keep her in check or to even encourage her more insane ideas.

This isn't the first knitting webcomic I've read before, I know I talked about Knit Princess a few years back, but I think that this one is the much stronger comic. The larger cast of characters helps (I'm of the opinion that there is a limit to how strange even a fictional character can be so having multiple characters to focus on in the story really helps), since it talks about more than just knitting it has a wider range of gags available to it, and recently they did a flash-forward comic which makes me excited since it seems like the characters will develop in the next few years (of comic time). Even if it's a gag a day comic I still like to see character development, my favorite comics in that genre do that, so now I'm more excited about the comic than I used to be and should probably recommend it to more of my knitting friends now that I think about it.

Worsted for Wear can be read online and they are also currently holding a kickstarter which should be winding down in just a few days and has already met it's goal. 

Anime Review: My Little Monster

As a reminder, after this and my 2012 in Review post I'm taking a break for the rest of the week (both because I need to prep for an upcoming con and I have a headcold which makes writing cohesive and interesting reviews trickier than normal). In any case, when I first saw this one appear on the fall season chart I wasn't that interested in it, both it and Say "I Love You" seemed to have very similar and, well, bland premises and not even the lure of Brain's Base was enough to make me interested in it. I don't remember why I did check it out, probably due to good reviews or the fact that I had nothing else to watch on Mondays) but I will quite happily admit that I was wrong and that there is nothing bland about this series at all. Oh and on a random note, the title better translates to something like My Neighbor the Monster, I have no idea why the Japanese licensors thought this one was a good title nor to I know why I haven't seen any crossover My Little Pony fanart yet.


My Little Monster (Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun)

Summary: Shizuka is an isolated studybug who doesn't care about friendship or anything like that, all she wants are the best grades. So it doesn't make a lot of sense when her homeroom teacher sends her off with the classwork for an absent (and, according to all the rumors, violent) classmate but with promises of bribes she does so anyway. Her classmate Haru turns out to be rather different than she was expecting, he's just as isolated as her but he relishes hanging out with people and turns out to be quite social if given a chance. Of course, since Shizuka was the first person who "reached out" to him he's quite drawn to her now..... 

The Good: I ended up identifying with Shizuka and one of the other female leads (Natsume) more than I expected and just really ended up liking them. Honestly I liked almost the entire cast and since this is a show that's built around it's character interactions that's a great thing, it was a fun show to watch. Also, I'm not a huge fan of the romance genre but I liked how it was handled between Shizuka and Haru. Well, not some of Haru's stranger out bursts but how the two of them are both in love for the first time and just trying to find their feet but definitely getting more comfortable with each other and even a bit jealous (which normally would bother me but here both of them realize what they're doing and use it to figure out how they feel, which is also so ridiculously characteristic for them). It's a character driven show with a lot of romance but also a lot of time spent on it's side characters and some humor, it strikes a good balance and I'm sad that Brains Base doesn't make many sequels these days.

The Bad: I have seen a lot of people, quite rightly, call out Haru's stranger behavior (which runs the gamut from "he doesn't understand society so it's quirky!" to "NO DON'T DO THAT, NO") especially in regard to some, odd (to put it mildly), turns of phase he uses to talk about his relationship with Shizuka. In the end though I am okay with their budding relationship for one reason, the manga (and the characters) never imply or so that this is a normal relationship and Shizuka is quick to call out Haru when he does something wrong. There are many (too many in my opinion) shojo manga where the male lead isn't quite as bad as Haru but it's portrayed as completely normal and romantic, at least here the story shows that it's off and it's honestly about it. I can still understand why some people might be put off the story for this reason and it does really make me wish that whatever character development Haru is going to get that it came more quickly. I was also okay with the anime-original ending, partially because I had heard that there wasn't a really good place in the manga to end a 13 episode series, and also because it gathered all the characters together one last time to interact and that's as much as I was hoping from it.

The Audio: I honestly wasn't overly fond of the opening or ending songs for the show, although their tone matched well with the perky tone of the show (also, no translations from CR to help me see if the songs actually made sense in context). I really liked all of the acting however, some of the actors were actually pretty new (this is the second role that Natsume's actress had) and for the others their voices weren't as recognizable and I kind of liked that (since I wasn't associating the voice with another character the whole time that is). The character's had a roughness to their voices which made them sound more like high school students than characters in a lot of anime do (plus it looks like a number of the actors aren't even that old) so everything acting wise sounded perfect to me. 

The Visuals: The art was, in a word, fun. It used simplified/chibi versions of the character just often enough to make it amusing (and not so often it felt like the art budget was being stretched) and was plenty colorful as well. I also swear that the school uniforms don't look as ugly as they do in that promo image, somehow the show makes them work.


So, I give this show four out of five stars and sadly of the three shojo series in the fall this was the one that didn't get licensed, even though it's the one I would snatch up in a heartbeat. Sure it's streaming over at Crunchyroll but you hear me NISA? I'd buy this, please license it please! (Or Sentai or Funimation, honestly I'm not that picky about where I get it from) 

Comic Review: Aki Alliance

Bit of a weird title here, I think it's actually a print book but well over a year ago I was linked to where you could read the whole thing online, read a bit, did some other things, and never read the rest. Lately I've been trying to clean up my "webcomic to read" folder so I tried downloading the book to see if that made it a bit easier to read (it didn't, you have to continuously scroll down, I was hoping it would be in separate pages for ease of reading). And then I decided to just get through it in one go since with as many things as I have going on these days I'd probably just forget about it for months again otherwise, the problem with having a large backlog.


Aki Alliance by Ryan Estrada

Summary: Aki has a problem, well, two actually. The first problem is that she has tried out and quit just about every club in school. The second problem, spawning from the first, is that she has no friends from alienating every girl at school by doing this and she wants to make friends. So one of the girls in her class proposes a challenge, make friends with every girl in the class before they graduate and Aki accepts.

The Good: When all is said and done the story has a pretty good sized side cast and despite the fact that most of them only appear a few times they all felt distinct and individual. Rounded? Ehhh, that varies but it certainly didn't feel like Aki was running into the same few stereotypes over and over and these character interactions literally carry the story. The other bit that carries the story, in my opinion, is the humor and it's present in spades throughout the entire story. It's zany, only sometimes grounded in logic, and certainly makes the story more entertaining, although I'm not sure I would actually label this story a comedy so that fact that the humor helped carry the story for me isn't a good sign.

The Bad: I was rather frustrated with the ending, it ended up being what I would point to as an example of "telling not showing" which isn't a good thing to be. Aside from that, I was disappointed by Aki in the end. No I didn't expect her to grow and change that much in the story, that's not her character, and she did change a bit but only the smallest iota (that ending more of less proved it). So, what was the point of this story then? It's not heavily plot driven, it's character driven with characters who don't change much, whom I also didn't find entertaining, am I missing something here?

The Art: Half of the chapters are done in what I'd call the stories "normal" art style and the other half are done in wildly varying styles which sometimes match up with the chapter at hand and other times don't. I think I would have been a bit more forgiving of these shifts if they had been more evenly spread out, the other styles appeared more and more as the story was going on and to me it felt like Estrada was growing tired of his story and was having to spice it up any way he could (which I'm sure wasn't the case but the thought did cross my mind). Again, this is just personal preference on my part, and some of the art styles really did match the chapters at hand really well, but I wish they had been more evenly spread out.


In the end I give this just 2.5 stars out of 5. Should you read it? Weeeeell it's free, but then again you can find free anime streaming and free books on Amazon and I wouldn't recommend you consume all of those, there's some real tripe out there! In the end this just wasn't a story for me and I can see it appealing to more of a middle grade audience but even then this wouldn't be the first thing I'd think of if asked to recommend titles for middle schoolers. 

Movie Review: Wreck-It-Ralph

First off really fast, my blogging schedule. I'm going to try and get a review up every day this week with the Tuesday and Thursday reviews being the books I should've covered last week. After that I'll go back to the special five-a-week schedule (regular four posts+an extra book one on Wednesday so I can cover everything I've seen/read this year before midnight, January 1st), now to see if I can actually pull that off with exam week....

Got a chance to see this over the Thanksgiving break with some friends and I went in cautiously optimistic that I would like it. I was amused at how Disney was making a more Pixar-esque film (in terms of plot and art) and how Pixar had made what was literally a Disney Princess movie this year, an interesting switch but after seeing Brave I was already convinced that Disney got the better end of this deal.


Wreck-It-Ralph

Summary: Ralph is the villain of the video game Wreck-It-Ralph where he destroys an apartment building until the games hero, Fix-It-Felix Jr swoops in to save the day and Ralph is thrown off the building. After 30 years of this he's rather tired with his position and wants to be accepted (not feared) by the other characters in the game and when one casually says that if Ralph had a medal they'd accept him he's off playing through other games for a medal. But of course it's not that simple, crossing games is allowed but frowned upon and if he's gone for too long his own game might get canned and then everything will be ruined for good!

The Good: Wow, there were more references and puns in here than you could shake two sticks at, I'm sure once the movie comes out on DVD/BR that plenty of people are going to be going frame through frame in some scenes to see all the easter eggs. The story wasn't especially inventive but it worked fine, Ralph was sympathetic enough to be likable and the humor worked well, from the self-referential bits to the situational humor I enjoyed it a lot. Also, I'm getting dangerously close to a spoiler so that's all I'll say, I'll admit I didn't watch a lot of trailers so I might have just missed this but the PR people did a really good job keeping a bit detail from the climax from leaking out and (while it was foreshadowed well enough that I wasn't surprised, the way a good story should be) it's been a while since I didn't have a really good guess how the movie would go when I started watching it and I enjoyed that.  

The Bad: I was a bit unhappy with the climax since I thought I knew what was going to happen and then the movie did something different which I thought was much more predictable and boring*. I found it a little odd that the theme of the movie seemed to be "accept yourself and you'll be happier" (considering that Ralph had a good reason to be unhappy in the beginning) but I guess I'll give Disney the benefit of the doubt there?

The Audio: Not much to say music wise here, I had heard Owl City's credit theme before the movie but thought it worked a lot better with the movie than on it's own oddly enough and didn't really pay attention to the rest of the soundtrack. As for the acting, I feel like I'm going to get in trouble for this but I didn't like Vanellope's voice. It wasn't badly acted, the opposite actually, but her tone was really grating for me and I wish it had been just a bit different so it was more bearable. Didn't have any real opinions on anyone else, all of the acting was just fine, I simply have a lower tolerance for high pitched, squeaky female characters than most cartoon fans it seems.

The Visuals: I liked how they translated Ralph's 8-bit world into a more fleshed out 3D world yet still gave it a similar visual style (like the characters' jerky ways of moving around). Everything in this movie looked great actually, I already talked about the truckloads of easter eggs that were dumped in which I think helps sum up how this movie looked, it was super detailed and well thought out design-wise (at the very least) and I would catch this movie again with friends just for a chance to see what I missed the first time around.


Oh and some quick thoughts on the Paperman short before the movie (since I saw a lot of people saying they liked it more than the movie itself): eeeeeeeh. It's a romance and a romance in less than 10 minutes, there's a limit to what you can do there and (as an un-romantic person, comparatively speaking) that means there's a limit to how much I'll be amused by it. I do really like the art style they used, it was a combination of 2D and 3D which looked a bit rough in places but overall was rathe nice and I wouldn't mind seeing more shorts (or a feature film) in that style, just not a romance please.

In any case, as I said, I'd see the movie again to look at it but otherwise I think I'm good. Don't have a burning desire to rewatch it/buy it, although I will recommend it to people who haven't seen it yet and like animated movies, I'm just not as passionate over it as I am over other things. Hmm, now that I think about it, I wonder what movies Disney is putting out next year, the Monster's Inc prequel (which good lord came out when I was in elementary school) and I wonder if there's anything else....


*since this involves the climax of the movie, SPOILERS. Basically I thought the way they would clear out all the bugs would be to have Vanellope cross the finish line which would reset the game, fix everyone's memories, and kill all the bug easily. I can understand why they instead made Ralph have an (almost)heroic sacrifice, he's the hero of the movie after all, but instead of having a girl save her own world they had an outside guy come in and do it, hopefully that phrasing explains why I was miffed that the movie took a much more boring way out. 

Anime Review: Humanity Has Declined

The final summer (for now anyway) show and one of the weirder entries in the season, although thinking back on it the summer season was a filled with strange shows. Not much else I can say about the show without getting into the actual review so let's get going!


Humanity Has Declined (Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita)

Summary: Based on a series of novels, humanity is in it's twilight years and the new, widely spread form of intelligent beings are tiny faeries. Mediator is well, a mediator between the humans and the faeries and tries to facilitate communication and cooperation between them, even though the world she lives in is quite weird.

The Good: Often when watching anime (or reading a book, seeing a movie, etc) I'll see something strange on screen and make a sarcastic comment to myself or my friends. Here there was no need to do it, Mediator was making all of those comments for me which was rather fun. I often feel like stories aren't self-aware enough (as in "why don't these characters realize what they're doing is dumb? Haven't they seen enough other media to go 'wait a minute...'?") and this story had enough of that self-awareness for at least one other show.

The Bad: While I'll admit that ending the story with the earliest (chronologically) part of it was probably a better ending than whatever arc was actually last, I just can't see the point in telling these stories out of order. You can work it out if you're paying enough attention, and each arc is so separate that it doesn't matter in the end, but I'm of the opinion that non-linear storytelling should only be used when it serves a purpose. Other than that nitpick, this show just dragged for me by the end. I mentioned to friends that I couldn't tell if the writing was supposed to be brilliant or if a really cynical 13 year old was trying to write a "deep" story for homework (my friends proposed it was both) and while the cynical humor worked sometimes there were other times when it just got too strange or it took itself too seriously for it to work and in the end I was glad that the series was over. 

The Audio: I looked up the opening and closing lyrics and they were both, strange, and didn't add anything to the show (I've known enough shows where the lyrics actually relate to the show to make an effort to look them up, although sometimes they can be quite spoilerly). The voice acting worked, Mediator sounded young and a bit cute (not the overly, moe-moe cute but just cute) and did sarcasm quite well and everyone else sounded just fine as well.

The Visuals: The art in the series is very soft and pastel (rather watercolor like but without the texture that comes with it) which was of course the perfect choice for a show that's slyly cynical about how corrupted the world really is. I have no idea if there were any illustrations in the original novels or if all of the anime designs are completely original but I think they fit rather well. However, I am of the opinion that the faeries are creepy looking and not cute-creepy, Japan once again your definition of cute has confused me.

So another anime where I would give it 2.5 or 3 stars out of 5 since it had some good parts but I lost my interest before the end. It has been licensed by Section 23 in the US and can be viewed either on their website or on Crunchyroll.