Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai!

Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai!:  S*

This is a series for anyone who's ever done anything for absolutely no reason other than because it was cool.

This is a series for anyone who's ever tried to get away from reality by inventing a fantasy to replace it.

This is a series for anyone who's ever felt out of place, like they didn't belong among the rest of the world.

This is a series for pretty much everybody.

* While Chuu2Koi gets the S rank for being extremely thought-provoking, very intelligent, heartstoppingly gorgeous and a genuinely deep story about being human, the final episode falls short of the series' potential.  It resolves the story itself, but fails to come to any true conclusion regarding the questions it raises, probably because they are extremely personal to everyone who engages with them.  The ending's weakness reduces the final impact of the series, but doesn't prevent it from still being eye-opening on a level few anime series manage, so it still gets the S rank from me despite being considerably less perfect than most series I rank as S.

Oda Nobuna no Yabou

Oda Nobuna no Yabou:  B

"Oda Nobuna's Ambition."  An obvious reference/play on "Nobunaga's Ambition," a long line of strategy games where the player plays through the story of one of the Sengoku Jidai's most famous and successful warlords.  (The girl above is actually Niwa Nagahide, one of Oda Nobuna/ga's retainers.  And 'Nagahide' is Nah-gah-hee-day, not Naw-guh-hide.)

ONY follows the story of Sagara Yoshiharu, a big fan of the Nobunaga's Ambition series who is somehow thrown into an alternate version of medieval japan which is dramatically less sexist, possesses a number of modern fashion trends, and has a large number of famous historical figures who were born female rather than male, despite holding their same positions.  I have to say, the pitch is pretty bad, in particular I was disappointed at the very thought of a Normal High School Student protagonist.  "Historical figures only female" worked pretty well in Koihime Musou, so I was open to that being pretty good.  Indeed, comparing ONY to Koihime Musou seemed obvious, until I actually got into the series.

ONY, instead of being comedy, is an actual deliberate alternate history, told with a number of modern anime tropes thrown in, including a harem element and a fair amount of fan service.  However, while the majority of the cast is female, there is a substantial male cast and once Yoshiharu (who is kind of being a kharmic replacement for Toyotomi Hideyoshi) influences Nobuna to behave differently from the historical Nobunaga, the series lets events begin to unfold differently.

The series actually holds together remarkably well, making itself worth watching for more than just fan service and giggles, though if you're not at least appreciative of fan service and giggles you probably won't enjoy it, likewise if you're not at least passingly familiar with the Japanese Warring States era you won't have quite enough grounding to enjoy the twists, which, like Sengoku Basara, portray the characters as slight twists of their original selves (closer to their originals here than Basara, which isn't hard).

Oda Nobuna no Yabou has action, pretty girls, and interesting plot, humor and at least a bit of heart.  If you can appreciate those, you'll like it, but if you're hoping for true brilliance, ONY will leave you disappointed.

Chu2Koi: Episode 11 Update

Damn this series is good.

It's like, this year's Madoka.  If the ending brings itself together like episode 11 makes it look like it's going to, it may earn an S rating for being an intelligent discussion of a deep and pervasive stage of psychological development that is nevertheless very difficult to take seriously.  I have high hopes for the last 20 minutes.

Short update today.  I've gotta review Oda Nobuna no Yabou, then after that... I'm not sure.  Maybe the second season of Sengoku Basara, but I'm not expecting it to be really different from the first.  Maybe I'll get into Clannad and Clannad After Story?  We'll see.

Sengoku Basara (Season 1)

Sengoku Basara:  C

Sengoku Basara is not good, but it is awesome.

The famous generals of Japan's Warring States era are souped up and made five times more awesome than their original incarnations, whether this means making them into actual demons rather than just possessing legendary ruthlessness or giving them ridiculous fighting styles and absurd levels of shonen anime 'combat power' such as wielding six katana at once and causing lightning dragons to erupt from the ground where they strike.

Sengoku Basara's plot is fairly simple: Oda Nobunaga is evil, good guys all team up and beat him up.  There are some interesting nods and interpretations going on regarding the actual historical figures, but any real connection to the actual historical events is distant at the very best.

Also, Date Masamune's horse has handlebars and exhaust pipes, like a motorcycle.  Yeah.

Sengoku Basara is a thoughtless semi-historical parade of boyish fantasy violence spiced with childish humor.  It's quite entertaining if you're looking for something full of shouting men, swords and explosions.  If you're expecting realism, historical accuracy, or strong female characters, you'll really regret watching Sengoku Basara.

Kanon (2006)

Kanon (2006): A

It takes a lot for me to give a Visual Novel adaptation an A.  Kanon earns it.  The name comes from the Katakana reading of 'Canon,' the name for a piece of music which takes a central theme and repeats it with slight changes, an idea which the anime explores, once you look between the lines.  Just one example of the way in which Kanon is a very intelligent series, hiding behind its girl-game exterior.

Kanon is a story about love, memory and miracles.  It is a story about loss, fear and depression.  It is a story with a lot of drama and a lot of suffering.  The thing I love most about it is its humor: Yuuichi (on the right, above) voiced by Tomokazu Sugita (best known as Kyon from Haruhi Suzumiya) being snarky and teasingly friendly with the girls of the cast.  Yuuichi also stands out for me as being a very characterful protagonist, he gets awkward around the girl he likes, forgets his promises and makes fun of his friends even as he struggles to do the right thing, rather than providing the weird sense of 'boys must protect girls to get laid' that so many harem series do.

Kanon's adaptation from a Visual Novel is one of the best I've seen, though it also is very clear how they chose to handle the multi-arc presentation: after the cast is introduced, a 3-5 episode arc is dedicated to each of the Visual novel's original storylines, and Kanon manages to thread them all together quite nicely, far better than Air, Utawarerumono or Fate Stay Night; Kanon's overall story is coherent and builds on itself nicely.

Kanon is, like most Key adaptations, quite sad.  I cried.  Not as much as I cried at Ano Hana, but I did cry.  It's genuinely heartwrenching in places, but somehow manages to have an uplifting ending, and not one of those endings that's actually depressing but I personally find uplifting, either.

I hesitate to call it a 'harem' series, because while there are are a high number of female characters, and even female characters with crushes on the protagonist, the crushes are not the focuses of the story and are treated with a certain amount of gravity.  Which isn't to say that I couldn't criticize the series at all, but I find myself not needing to because it handles itself with such grace.

If you want to watch a gorgeously animated series with plenty of sorrow, growth and heartstring-tugging, Kanon is a lovely tale of hope in the middle of winter.  If you're looking for something funny... Kanon delivers there too.  If you need action... actually Kanon has a bit of that, but not a lot.  Really what I'm saying is that Kanon is very, very good.

Air

Air:  C

Air was originally a visual novel by Key Visual Arts, a hentai game in probably the least pure sense of the word, a 20+ hour story in which there are a handful of sex scenes that don't contribute much to the story.  The anime adaptation was made by Kyoto Animation, and so, since I've decided to watch everything KyoAni has ever done, Air was early on my list (since I don't want to watch all of Full Metal Panic right now, with some of it being done by not-KyoAni).

While I hadn't seen it before, I had heard of Key's work being heartbreakingly depressing, and it does hold up on that score, if you can follow the story well enough to understand why it's so depressing.  Of the original three female protagonists, two of them get rather short-changed in the story, with one having her arc resolved and one having her arc partially resolved, and both vanishing from the story after their stories are complete; yet another example of what I am now thinking of as "Fate Stay Night Syndrome" where a Visual Novel has too much material to make it into an anime.

To add to the confusion, we flash back to 10th-century Japan for a couple episodes for reasons which make sense only if you're willing to read between the lines and have been paying attention to the characters' occasional ramblings about their dreams, before returning to the present day at the beginning of the story, throwing another 'character' into the mix and going through one girl, the 'main' girl's arc again, very quickly with some minor changes and a conclusion that is somewhere between bittersweet and just plain sad.

A couple of extra episodes, "Air in Summer," are part of the flashback to ancient Japan, but while they expand on the characters from that story, they don't add much to the coherence of it.

Air is very pretty, but it comes up very short of a good story due, I assume to the translation from Visual Novel to Anime, which, in a story with multiple arcs which are theoretically based on the main character's actions and choices, are not usually well suited to transformation into a single linear story.  If you're interested in a lovingly animated, rather sad story about reincarnation, cyclical suffering and thousand-year-old curses, Air is worth a watch, but if you're hoping for a solid storyline or any sort of happy resolution, I'd recommend Kanon (see my next review) instead.

Acchi Kocchi

Acchi Kocchi:  C+

Oh hey, it's another C+.  I haven't given one of those out in a while.

Acchi Kocchi (Alternately translated as 'all over the place' or 'place to place', literally 'here there') is a cute, slice of life romantic comedy based off a 4koma comic.  These are all traits which cause it to be fairly insubstantial, which isn't necessarily a problem, but it does leave me with very little to say about it.

The main character (above) is described as a tsundere, but she's more just very easily embarrassed about her crush and amusingly intolerant of her friends' pranks.  The male characters are a fairly traditional pair, one being the cool guy and the other being the goofball, though the cool guy is the focus, because he is the target of our main character's crush.

And once you know the formula of the cast, there isn't really a story or any sort of progress or change in the status quo, just a series of vaguely connected episodes of high school silliness.

It's certainly not a bad series, and it's regularly funny, but it lacks the brilliance and audacity of Potemayo or KoreZombie of the Dead.  I'd certainly watch more of it if there was more of it to watch, but I really do find it difficult to praise.

If you want to watch high school kids being cute and silly for 13 episodes, you could spend your time a lot worse than watching Acchi Kocchi.  If you're looking for any sort of depth or meaning, look elsewhere.

Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun Episodes 1-8

Another series airing EVEN NOW in Japan.  The title translates to "The Monster Next to Me," but Crunchyroll has given it the name "My Little Monster."  I don't really like either of those translations, so I'll just call it 'Kaibutsu' for the time being.

It's shojo romance/comedy and does not actually involve any real monsters, to my moderate disappointment.  However, the cast are all outstandingly lovable in their varying methods of being socially inept, and the story so far as me curious when these two kids will finally start going out.  I'm betting around episode 12.

I guess I haven't really said very much about it.  Main character Mizutani Shizuku is a quiet, diligent girl who considers her studies and her future the most important thing in her life.  She is, at one point, assigned to deliver handouts to the truant who is supposed to occupy the seat next to her, Yoshida Haru, who was suspended for fighting, and who hasn't come back since the suspension was lifted.  Due to a chain of circumstances which mostly revolve around Shizuku pointing out that Haru's 'friends' are being jerks, he realizes that she's being nice to him, and that he likes that, and he likes her.  So begins the rolling ball of awkwardness that is their relationship.

Haru is both very intelligent and very stupid, and is, in himself, a fascinating character, both respectable and easy to look down on.  Shizuku, by contrast, plays a very natural, human protagonist, who is nonetheless antisocial and logical to the point of weirdness.

Eight episodes in, it's come a long way, but is remaining fun and interesting.  Definitely a series to watch, if you're looking for some fresh romance/comedy.

Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai

Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai:  B+

I'm not sure if I'm just being really generous with series lately, or if I'm just on a long run of series that are actually quite good.

"Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai" means "I Don't Have Many Friends," and it is abbreviated "Haganai." (After the -wa, -ga and -nai endings of the nouns and verb.  You write Wa with a Ha when you're using it as a particle in Japanese.)

And really, it's a show about two girls (the two in the front) being totally unbelievable bitches to each other.

The premise is that our main character (Kodaka, the boy wrangling lolis in the above image) has naturally part-blonde hair which looks like a bit of a bad dye job.  In Japan, this is a sure sign of a delinquent, and due to a bit of bad luck, he acquires and maintains this reputation after transferring to a new school, and remains friendless for over a month.  Things change when he encounters a girl talking to her invisible friend, and they manage a conversation about how difficult it is to make friends, and how there's no easy way to do so.  The girl, Yozora (the front left in the above image), founds her own club and has Kodaka join, the Neighbors club, dedicated to making friends.

Needless to say, the kind of people who would want to join a club for making friends are the kind of people who have no friends.  And there's universally a reason they don't have friends.  Reasons vary.  Sena, (front right), is too popular, rich and attractive enough to be treated as anything but an object of jealousy by girls and of lust by guys.  Yukimura (in the maid outfit in the back, male) is a weenie little trap of a boy (maybe?), and is constantly bullied and mocked, and joins to become more manly like the presumably violent and delinquent  (he's not) Kodaka.  Add in genius pervert Rika (front center), Kodaka's little sister (the goth loli) and their 10-year-old nun teacher advisor (the nun in the back) and you have the Neighbors club, a bunch of failures at life and making friends.

In the end, it's Kodaka and a bunch of girls (and Yukimura, who, on Yozora's orders, dresses like a girl so that he can learn to express his masculinity properly... or probably just because Yozora is a bully) wind up hanging out and doing whatever it is they feel like, which mostly involves them being a petty bunch of anti-social bullies.

The series runs with a fair amount of fan service, mostly involving bathing suits rather than underwear, and usually deliberately shown.

And yet, despite being a fan servicey harem series about a bunch of characters who are terrible people to each other, I find myself really having enjoyed watching it.  I laughed, chuckling to myself and saying "oh my god, Yozora you're such a bitch," "... and now Sena is petty," or "Rika, you are the most amazing pervert ever."

There is an overarching plot beyond Yozora and Sena constantly trying to one-up the other, and the series does discuss friendship, (Yozora and Sena, despite being truly outstandingly rude and even cruel to each other, are clearly friends) but you have to read fairly closely between the lines if you want to try to gather any significant meaning or story.

But you know what?  Haganai isn't trying to be deep, it's trying to be funny.  And if you want to watch some cute girls be kind of pervy and extremely bitchy to each other, you'll get a set of great laughs out of Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai.  And if you're interested in deep and meaningful stories... well, there's a little bit there for you to.  But if you like seeing more than one guy in your anime, or actually expect anything like sanity or realism in the depiction of characters, this is a show that will disappoint.

Edit 7/13:  So, I'd like to note that I was wrong about sane depictions of characters in this series.  Once you've seen the second season and have figured out the characters' motivations, everything they ever do makes perfect sense, and once you think about their situations, even the extremeness of Yozora's bitchery and Sena's gullibility do not seem  unreasonable.

Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai! Episodes 1-7

So, I've added Kyoto Animation to my list of studios (after Shaft and Gaianx) that I will just watch everything they produce because it's gold.  Their current project is an adaptation of a two-volume Light Novel series of the title seen above.

(Man, I'm watching a lot of series these days that are just long strings of words in Japanese.  "Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai!" is usually translated "In spite of my adolescent delusions of grandeur, I want a date!")

It's about a boy (Togashi Yuuta) who, before entering high school, was a delusional sort who wore a long jacket, carried a oversized fantasy resin sword, spoke in an incredibly melodramatic fashion and called himself (in Engrish) "Dark Flame Master."  However, at some point he realized how incredibly embarrassing this is and stopped doing it, trying to forget everything about it and move on, making a fresh start in high school.

Unfortunately, a girl (Takanashi Rikka) moves into the apartment above the one where he lives, and she still does stuff like that, wearing a medical eyepatch (to seal her 'Wicked Eye') and a bandage on her left arm (covering a seal on the power of the harbinger of darkness), making combat poses at everyone she meets and talking a lot about her  mana, chimera familiar (a stray cat she put wings on), the evil Priestess who shares the apartment she lives in (her big sister) and how she must be ready for battle at all times.  Due to a momentary indiscretion when Yuuta is attempting to cleanse himself of his past forever, his neighbor (also his classmate) overhears of him being Dark Flame Master, and attempts to befriend him as a dark sorcerer who is also facing the threats that she faces.

... And we've all been there?  Right?  ...Right?

Anyway, as someone who is only about 90-95% over his own adolescent delusions of grandeur (Chuunibyou literally translates as 'Eighth-grader disease'), I find the premise to be nostalgic and amusing (and that's without mentioning Kyoto Animation's eye-melting artwork), and the execution to be effective and interesting.  Rikka and Yuuta are hardly the only characters who have ever suffered from chuunibyou, and it's not portrayed as a life-destroying disease as much as a phase that may or may not have deeper roots.

A part of me wants to write an entire essay on the idea of adolescent delusions of grandeur and how they figure into society, grow and evolve and how accepted they are even in adults, but this is an anime blog.

So, instead, I'll say that Chuu2Koi (that's the official abbreviation, apparently) is pretty good, so far, and is likely to be high on my list of recommendations to my more grown-up nerd friends.  Since we all were like that, once upon a time.

Ore no Imouto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga nai

Ore no Imouto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga nai:  B+

So, yeah, it's pretty good.  Way, way better than I expected it to be.  It doesn't actually have any creepy brother/sister romance (though it mentions it a lot, both Kirino and Kyousuke think it's gross).

Oreimo is mostly about otaku, and otaku girls especially.  It's a little bit about ostracism and coming out.  It's also a little bit about hentai games and the people who play them, who really aren't bad people.  It's also a little bit about family, and about the strangest things bringing siblings together.

It's... kind of hard to recommend, for all that, though.  Overall it's completely competent, good even, but the story doesn't really resolve anything, though progress is made; we get to know a lot of characters and they're fun to watch.  Mostly it's a story about some things happening and some lessons being learned.  It's an anime that talks a lot about anime, dojinshi and Japanese games, so you've gotta be pretty into those if you want to be able to really get behind it.

If any sort of discussion of brother/sister romance (whether it occurs or not) utterly grosses you out, or if you're hoping to see fan service or action, go ahead and walk on by.  If you're interested in a slightly off-color look at how otaku are perceived, you could do a lot worse than Oreimo.

Oh, one last note: If you watch it, note that there are two Episode 12s, the 'Good End' and the 'True End'.  This is a reference to visual novel scenarios which have multiple endings, often which you'll need to complete the game multiple times to see.  Anyway, in terms of the 'should watch' order, the Good End comes before the True End... even though they're kind of alternate universe versions of each other.  It's only weird because the series is 15 episodes (16 if you count the two episode 12s) long, and the plot continues as if the True Ending happened, not the Good Ending, but if you watch only one you'll miss out on a little bit?  Just watch them both in that order and trust me.

Ore No Imouto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga nai - Episodes 1-4

The title translates to "My Little Sister Can't Be This Cute."  It's usually abbreviated to "Oreimo," and it's been out for about 2 years now.

I didn't pick this series up for a long time because the pitch for it sounded extremely creepy: Boy finds out his perfectionist model little sister is a closet otaku because he discovers a little-sister hentai game hidden in an anime DVD box.

It sounds like a setup for a kind of gross brother/sister love story.  But I'm 4 episodes in and while there are occasional points in that direction, it doesn't look like it's going to be a main plot element, and I honestly hope it stays that way.

Instead, so far it's been a thorough examination of being closeted about something.  While it takes the context of being a closet otaku (Otaku being a much worse word in Japan than America), with Kirino (the eponymous little sister) dealing with a father who does not approve of this sort of thing and friends who she can't reveal it to for fear of ostracism finally talking to her brother about it after her cover is blown.

Her brother, not being an otaku himself (and being a little creeped out by it) nonetheless says he'll do whatever he has to to help his sister, and so gets dragged into meeting with her new otaku friends and doing his best to help her live her life the way she wants to.

So, in short, it's going up pretty high on my list of "Series that are way better than I thought they were going to be."

Shoujo Kakumei Utena

Shoujo Kakumei Utena:  A

Revolutionary Girl Utena is something of a famous anime, if you grew up on anime from the late 90s and early 2000s, because you couldn't get it all legally, the license was bought and then sat on, so the only way to watch the series was on bootlegs, which circulated around my high school during my junior and senior years, so I've got a long history with this show.

I was not expecting to give it an A this watch-through.  I was thinking "eh, I think it'll only make B+ this time," and "I bet it won't hold up against its younger brother Star Driver."  But, to my modest frustration, it does, and I end my watching going "Well dammit, I guess I'm giving it an A."

Utena is a lot of things, as a show, but the number one thing that it is is open to interpretation.  More than almost any other show I've ever seen, everyone who sees Utena walks away with a different idea of what happened and what meant what.  I only watch the series every five years or so, and I've come up with different interpretations each time.  And each time, those interpretations have involved me so much that I can't put the series down, especially toward the end.

Utena may also be the single most twisted show toward its characters I am aware of; there are shows that are dirtier, bleaker, more depressing, have a higher body count and a greater degree of active sadism, but I can think of no other anime series that is so personally and deliberately hurtful to its characters.  It's one of the things I love.

My criticisms of Utena mostly come in the early series, and a few stick throughout.  Utena is fairly heavy on clip shows and filler, and while these are both done in ways which are entertaining, in a series that is so heavily built on mystery and symbolism, you get episodes where you just go 'gaaah, give me some goddamn plot!'  Secondly, Utena feels like it leaves too much to the imagination, I've often said in describing the series that the series is definitely 30% symbolism and 30% absurdity, but I have no idea where the other 40% falls on that scale.  There is no way to create a theory to correlate with everything that occurs, and the series does not bother explaining itself.  Finally, and this is a minor thing, Utena doesn't reverse telegraph its secrets.  Watching the series when you know what's going on doesn't cause you to go 'Hey, there's the abusive relationship that I know about that but haven't seen much of.'  Utena doesn't tip its hand, so you only learn secrets as they are revealed.  It's a minor thing, but I like the other way.

All that said, Utena is a fantastic story about friendship, lust, growing up, idealism, wishes, truth, hatred, dependence and defiance of self, of society and of rejection.  Don't let its stylized art and shoujo nature fool you, this is a story that has plenty to offer the grown-up audience... if you have the patience to unravel it.

Hyouka

Hyouka:  A+

"Hyouka" means "Frozen Treats," when translated literally.  "Ice Cream" would probably be a better way of saying it.

If you want to know why this series is called that, you'll have to watch the first five or six episodes.  That's one of the first mysteries the Classics Club solves.

Hyouka is a calm, slow-paced and dialogue-heavy high school mystery series that follows the Classics club at Kamiyama High School, four students who gain a reputation in the school for solving real, little mysteries: the first episode's first mystery is why the club room door was unlocked when one member arrived, but locked, requiring a key, when the second arrived.

The series is noteworthy for Kyoto Animation's heartbreakingly beautiful animation, complex, deep and thoughtful characterization of a very small cast who we have plenty of time to get to know and come to befriend, its relative lack of common anime tropes and the cultural depth of the 'old family' characters.

If you want to watch a series that is beautiful, intelligent, thoughtful and patient, Hyouka is a wonderful, gentle ride through the kind of mysteries that puzzle people.  If you're interested in action, comedy or even anything particularly magical beyond maybe the birth of love, Hyouka will probably leave you a little bit bored.

Denpa Onna to Seishun Otoko

Denpa Onna to Seishun Otoko:  A

The title translates to "The Radio Wave Girl and the Adolescent Boy."  There are a number of other ways to translate "Radio Wave" and "Adolescent," as both are used as kind of symbolic terms, but this way makes as much sense as any.

Yet another show directed by Akiyuki Shinbo, but lacking a lot of his trademark audiovisual weirdness.  And yet, I find, it's still breathtaking to watch and its animation is of the highest caliber.

Dotso (as it abbreviates to) starts out slowly, with our Adolescent Boy, obsessed with cataloging how successfully he is living his young life to the fullest, moving to the city to live with his aunt while his parents work abroad.  From there, he meets our Radio Wave girl, his cousin, an extreme hikkikomori (one who hides from society) who claims to be an alien and wanders around with a futon wrapped around her.

What begins looking like it might be a Haruhi Suzumiya-esque manic pixie dream girl scenario evolves into a story about perseverance, recovering from one's mistakes and the self-imposed hurdle of impossibility, put non-invasively into the context of a fairly non-invasive harem.  The cast remains very small (the main cast is only 6 characters), and while a lot of threads (the romantic aspect and Erio's re-integration into society) are left dangling at the end of the series, the story nevertheless has an ending.

Also, contrary to a lot of other series that I've found myself really liking, Dotso isn't nearly as mean to its characters: the trauma is fairly minor and doesn't happen on screen, no cathartic scenes of screaming or crying or rage.  Which isn't to say that the characters aren't realistic (Ryuushi's jealousy is some of the most honest jealousy I've ever seen), just that the situation doesn't warrant quite the same level of suffering as say, Madoka, Evangelion or Ano Hana.

Don't watch this show if you don't want to have to remember long titles in Japanese, or if you're more interested in action and physical conflict.  But if you like stories about people growing, pushing forward and being rewarded for trying to do something they thought they couldn't do, you'll find Denpa Onna to Seishun Otoko to be quietly inspiring.

Macross Plus

Macross Plus:  B

So I'll admit that my grade on Macross Plus is pretty strongly influenced by having watched Macross II only an hour or so earlier, and that Plus blows II out of the water in terms of animation and originality of story, as well as overall being a much more mature piece.  Macross original was a fairly complex and mature story for its time, but Macross Plus really tries to explore some interesting themes.

Macross Plus' story discusses AI, memory, rivalry which turns sour, repentance and, of course, love in all its obsessive, unhealthy emotional force.  The characters have a significant background together that they don't bother explaining to us (and several of them don't remember it) and they manage to make that work out as a storytelling element.

While a couple of faces look particularly weird (especially noses), the animation is overall stunning, decades ahead of its time, and the occasional CG moments are amazingly not particularly invasive; the series was a pioneer of CG animation in anime and one of the first successful uses, far more successful than many later series.

Macross Plus isn't perfect.  Like the others of the franchise, the plot is a little impenetrable in places, and a couple important plot points aren't well explained, but overall Macross Plus is a good and interesting short mecha series that reminds me of both "The Right Stuff" and, "Perfect Blue".  If you're looking for a series with some badass mecha but plenty else besides that, you could spend 3 hours a lot worse than watching Macross Plus.

Macross II: Lovers Again

Macross II: Lovers Again:  D

So, most of a year ago I reviewed the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross, which wasn't terrible, but hadn't held up well over the intervening 30 years (as well as having 10 episodes more than it needed).  Due to running across a couple images from it on my favorite image board, I decided to download the rest of the Macross saga and watch as many of them as I could stand, starting with Macross II, the first true sequel ("Do You Remember Love?" is a movie retelling of the original series minus the extra 10 episodes).

I have a bit of a historical attachment to Macross II: when I was in my early teens and a budding role-playing game enthusiast, I found a copy of the Macross II role-playing game by Kevin Siembieda in a used bookstore and fell in love with the mecha designs and the scantily clad alien chicks.  Surely nobody would make an RPG out of a bad series, right?  Apparently Kevin Siembieda would.  12-year-old me managed to find the two things about Macross II that are actually worthwhile.

Macross II suffers from a lot of early-90s OVA problems: wildly variable animation quality and style, disjointed plot and characterization and a conclusion which not only stands dramatically at odds with what's actually being said by the characters, but also feels pointless and hollow.  It clearly is attempting to pay homage to the original Macross with its awkward love triangle, transforming mecha, weaponized pop idols, and cultural warfare, but it all winds up seeming hollow and constructed, and so many things go undemonstrated and must be assumed from context.  Also, the animation sucks, even by early 90s standards.

Given that Macross II has been officially removed from the Macross canon, I would say that it's more than safe to skip it unless you're a die-hard fan who absolutely must see everything Macross ever.

Ghost Stories

Ghost Stories:  NA

So, I'm a sub guy.  I've spent about twelve years studying Japanese.  Watching anime with English coming out of the speakers feels fundamentally wrong to me, almost painful.

So, understand how weird it is that I'm recommending a dub.  Don't expect this to ever happen again.

Let me provide some background.  Ghost Stories is an early-2000s anime about a group of late elementary schoolers who go to a school right next door to a haunted school.  Naturally, they are constantly attacked, bothered, assaulted and troubled by ghosts.  The original Japanese is something like anime Goosebumps (whoops, I just dated myself, didn't I?).  It manages to be genuinely creepy at a number of points, but overall  is fairly tepid in its content.  It's also very Japanese, a number of the ghosts are traditional Japanese school ghosts (yes, there are traditional Japanese school ghosts).  It was also cut short at 20 episodes, fairly clearly due to waning ideas and weak plotting.

So, when ADV (one of the leading distributors of anime in America in the early 2000s) picked up the rights to it, they looked at it and said "Nobody in America would be interested in this series as written.  Let's mess with it."  The voice actors were given free rein to ad-lib so long as the story remained more or less coherent, and the result was a reference-laden comedy which strongly resembled Abridged series, though it preceded their development by more than a year.

The dub is both humorous and clever, though as the series goes on it becomes more and more obscene, crude, and fourth-wall-busting, even as the series itself declines in quality and the characters/voice actors openly admit they can't figure out what's going on in the final episodes.  Overall, the result is hilarious but somewhat slow, an excellent thing to have on in the background while you're doing something else.

If you want the opportunity to watch 11-year-olds spouting obscenities, references and other such silliness in the context of an anime (which still manages to maintain a coherent story), the ADV Ghost Stories dub is worth a watch.  If you want series that you'll take seriously and enjoy for their story rather than their clever alteration of the original situations, ignore this post.

Neon Genesis Evangelion

Neon Genesis Evangelion:  S

So, Evangelion was for me what Harry Potter was for a lot of kids who are slightly younger than me.  It was formative.  I saw it when I was 14, in 1998, and it was one of the first anime series I ever saw.  I was at a point in my life where I was searching for meaning, for motivation, for purpose, and I found it through the suffering and growth of another 14-year old, the boy named Shinji Ikari.

I could give a summary of Eva, or reasons to watch it, but everything I could say on those topics has already been said elsewhere on the internet.  It's too popular, too embedded in the anime-viewers' collective consciousness, even the ones who have never seen it, because of the effect it had on anime as a medium: Evangelion is almost certainly the single most influential series of all time.

For me, the thing I want to talk about is how difficult it seems to be for viewers to allow themselves to be affected by the emotional content of the story.  Eva is a series where practically all of the characters are varying degrees of unlikeable: Shinji is a passive, self-denying doormat, Rei is incapable of coherent self-expression, Asuka is an egocentric showboat, Misato is self-deceptive hypocrite, Ritsuko is a liar of outstanding proportions and Gendo is utterly lacking in compassion.  However, the power of the series comes from the viewer's ability to sympathize with these characters despite their flaws, indeed, to recognize these flaws as being human and reflected in themselves:  These people are like you, and who they are brings them pain, just like you.

I cannot count the number of times I have heard the series referred to or discussed in terms which ignore its emotional content, instead making jokes about the screen going red and Shinji screaming, dialogueless scenes, frame saving, incomprehensible philosophical pontification, or sexual subtext (or just plain text, in a few cases).  Joking about it allows the viewer to evade sympathy by treating the content as absurd or engaging in schadenfreude at the characters' expense, and that denies the emotional impact which is the core of the series' purpose.

Much like it's younger, more upbeat cousin Gurren Lagann, if Eva doesn't affect you emotionally, you're missing what the series is about.  Not everyone is interested in being affected in the violently cathartic way that Eva attempts to affect you, though, and this is probably the real reason that there are so many jokes at the series' expense: when you're watchin' anime with your friends, you don't want to have your emotional walls torn down and your mortality and purpose in life brought into question, you just want to watch the explosions and the boobs.

This is a reason why I have strongly recommended that the series be watched alone, because when viewed in a group, people are far more likely to try to appear knowledgeable, clever, or funny at the cost of sympathy and connection, without which, Eva becomes what it is most often described as: weirdly-used christian iconography peppered with sparse dialogue, technobabble and scenes of crying, screaming and giant robots fighting giant monsters (often at the same time).

But for me, and many others, that was not what Neon Genesis Evangelion was about, that was simply the context in which an empowering story about personal responsibility, identity, choice and love could occur.

Yuru Yuri

Yuru Yuri:  B+

Yuru:  A term or sound implying laziness or an easygoing manner.  Yuri:  Girls love, romance or sexuality between women.   So, Yuru Yuri is easygoing girlish romance.  It's a slice of life show about a relatively small (a main cast of 8) group of middle school girls who form an awkward web of romantic entanglements, many of which are obvious and many of which are vehemently denied by those involved in them.  Nearly all of them are one-sided or are in that odd stage where neither one has recognized the relationship as being affection yet.

It's difficult to describe what makes me enjoy it as a series so much.  One thing is the relative awareness of the girls of each others' feelings: with only a handful of exceptions, all the girls are pretty much aware of the various crushes that are going on, even the ones who are the targets of those crushes.  Another is the series' mix of schadenfreude (a staple of any comedy) with sweetness, as much as the series is mean to its characters, we have long moments of getting to see them being nice to each other, we get to see why they're friends in the first place.

If you're into girls being awkward and silly and also sometimes just being children, Yuru Yuri will give you plenty to laugh at.  If you need men in your stories to enjoy them, or if you expect fan service or resolution to extended romantic silliness, move on.

Rozen Maiden

Rozen Maiden:  B

I've been referring to this show to my friends as "Gothloli Highlander," because that is the main thrust of the plot.  There are magical, animate dolls (the eponymous Rozen Maidens) who were created to play the "Alice Game," a battle where each of the seven sister-dolls fights to take each others "Rosa Mystica," which is their animating magical soul, and after having taken all of them, the winner will become Alice, the ultimate girl, beloved by their Father and their creator.

The series actually focuses more on the relationships between the Rozen Maiden dolls, who are, despite their centuries-old existences, still children, and each has a different outlook on their creation, their sisters, and the Alice Game.  The series attempts to reasonably discuss the effects of this particular goal of existence on a group, especially a group that has become familiar with one another over an extended period of centuries.

I enjoyed the series for its emotional content and the weird childishness of the dolls, even the more mature ones have a number of childish quirks that stand out as making them interesting characters, more than just a collection of well-written traits.  If I were to criticize the series, I would say that the characters' elaborate costumes draw too much of the animation budget, the combat scenes are distinctly lacking in dynamism or animation quality.

The series is two seasons and an OVA, but the series, both in its manga and anime forms, has suffered from executive changes and sudden cancellations, the second season of the anime is a divergent plot from the manga, and the original manga cut off after a sudden deus ex machina before beginning again in an alternate universe.  Overall, the anime manages to be a coherent story that is functional, though unresolved.

If the idea of watching dolls that might as well be human bicker, laugh, love, fight and learn appeals to you, you'll probably enjoy Rozen Maiden.  If you need action or find emotional subplots tiring, you probably won't.

Ao no Exorcist

Ao no Exorcist:  C

The antichrist reaches puberty and joins a school which trains exorcists for the Catholic church so that he can kick Satan's ass.

Ao no Exorcist (The Blue Exorcist) is a shonen series that has a similar concept to many other series like it, and that makes it difficult to criticize or praise.  I was fairly certain of what I was getting into with the first episode (Naruto with Christian demonology instead of ninjas) and I was neither impressed nor disappointed. It's competently written, the characters are effective and the series overall holds itself together, but it doesn't really do any more than that.

I feel a little bad for being completely unsurprised by this series.  I said after the third episode, "Huh, I think this is getting a C," and my opinion of it didn't change for twenty-two more episodes.  I don't think I gave it that grade because I want to be right, despite the fact that there were good, even awesome moments in the series, it just wasn't as brilliantly crafted or well-written as I've come to expect from my grading system, and the awesome moments were far outnumbered by predictable (but not bad) story and action.  But I feel kind of bad about it.

If you're into shonen and like to see the Japanese perspective on the 'fun' parts of Christian mythology and demonology, you can have some fun with Ao no Exorcist.  I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone who hadn't expressed a vested interest in either shonen anime as a genre or silly Japanese takes on Christianity as a theme.

Anime News

The two series I'm really enjoying watching (Dog Days' and Yuru Yuri ♪♪) are both mid-season, so giving a report on them would be inappropriate.  Instead I figured I'd just talk about what Japan's coming out with in the next few months.

First of all, disappointing to me personally is the news that Kizumonogatari (the prequel movie to Bakemonogatari) has been delayed by Shaft.  However, instead, over the course of October we're going to be treated to a couple of Madoka Magica movies, so I guess it's okay in the end.   Of course, there's the problem that we won't actually be able to WATCH those except as illegal and poor-quality camrips until around spring or summer next year, but that's how movies go.

Rebuild of Evangelion 3.0 is coming out soon too, but has the exact same problem as the new Madoka movies; we won't actually be able to watch it for quite a while.  I'm looking forward to it, though.

I have confirmed that a second season of Medaka Box will be airing.  So that's great.

Shaft, in addition to the Madoka Movies (which are probably in post by now) is also working on a new season of Hidamari Sketch.

It seems as though we'll be getting YET ANOTHER season of  Hayate no Gotoku, which I can't deny a bit of childish glee for.

There's a Toaru Majutsu no Index movie coming up late in the year (maybe early next year).

News I didn't expect to hear: Production IG is making a Mass Effect anime movie slated for Winter 2012 with the subtitle "Paragon Lost. "  I suspect that'll make the jump to the US fairly quickly, since the franchise is quite popular over here.

There are a lot of other series coming out that I haven't done the research on to know if they're worth watching, and I'm sure some of them will be showing up on THIS VERY BLOG in the future.

Utawarerumono

Utawarerumono:  D+

I first heard of this series when I was shown the DVD special... it must have been 4 years ago.  It was amusing and kind of silly, but given that the title (which translates to "The One Being Sung") is a rather complex mishmash of japanese syllables, it didn't stick in my head and I lost it until a friend reminded me of the name a few weeks ago.  So I decided I'd watch it.

And I really really wanted to like it.  The characters held my attention and the fantasy world felt fantastic and mysterious.  The protagonist clearly had some powerful magical dark secret (and amnesia, which worked out well, actually) and I was looking forward to learning more about it.

One of my first complaints were the pointlessly evil villains.  These guys were moustache-twirling, dog-kicking, incredibly-skilled-but-good-hearted-subordinate-who-refused-to-massacre-a-village-full-of-innocent-people-firing idiot villains.  And they don't stop showing up, either.  Maybe I've just been spoiled by other anime that have provided justifications for why people are bastards, but that was my first disappointment.  But whatever, right?  We beat up some bad guys and save the world.  It's cool.

More characters keep getting rolled as the series progresses on, especially female characters.  This isn't really surprising, originally, Utawarerumono was a turn-based strategy hentai game, but very few elements of the original fan service or naughty bits are left over (in TVTropes terms, the underwear has been very well bleached).  I think we don't even see cleavage until episode 3?  Anyway, that combined with the fact that the girls' reasons for being attracted to the protagonist are either well-justified or just left out led me to enjoy the first half of the series.

Now, I'm going to spoil the ending, because it's the part of the series that ruins it.

Then, around episode 18 or so, things just start going downhill, and they start going downhill fast.  A character who was made sympathetic begins making outstandingly bad decisions.  We suddenly have invincible mecha in our fantasy setting (which isn't that bad, it's anime, right?).  And then the invincible mecha aren't invincible any more, and our protagonist can turn into a kaiju.  That's his dark secret.  He turns into godzilla.  And then evil godzilla shows up and they fight.  And the protagonist has to be sealed beneath the earth for the safety of the world.  The end.

Even that could have been made a credible story except for the fact that so many of the characters wind up not mattering at all to the ongoing story, they were only put in there because they were in the original game and taking them out would have displeased their fans.

It reminded me more than anything of the Fate Stay Night anime: they clearly have way more story and characterization and plot than they can ever fit into 26 episodes, so they tried to make a cohesive and expansive story out of everything, but they wind up not giving enough focus to the things that would have made that story make sense because they're trying to give screen time to everything else in it.  Which is really too bad, because there are some nice ideas and some genuinely lovable characters in this series, and it's really disappointing that they series they're in sucks so bad.

I should mention in regard to Fate Stay Night's anime: I also played/read the Visual Novel, and it was mind-blowingly good, a truly brilliant example of what can be done with a voiced and partially animated choose-your-own-adventure story that takes full advantage of its multiple endings and branching plot trees to deepen characterization and plot.  So I think it's very likely that the Utawarerumono GAME is actually really good, worth making into an anime, certainly.

But unless you have a disturbing fetish for animal ears, tails and disappointment, I recommend against watching the series.

Medaka Box

Medaka Box:  B

Written by Nisio Isin of Bakemonogatari and Katanagatari and animated by Gainax, there's pretty much no way I could give it a BAD rating, is there?

Medaka Box is about an invincible genius superwoman who happens to be 16, hot, and impossibly optimistic and nice.  She becomes student council president in her first year of high school with 98% of the vote.  Actually, it's about her childhood friend who looks out for her and helps her get through her life, because despite being an invincible genius superwoman, she's still also a 16 year old girl with emotions who overlooks things and fails to understand how people work sometimes.

Nisio Isin likes writing with pre-set relationships and history and letting you get to know the characters as well as they know each other.  Medaka Box also avoids any sort of traditional harem-ery and much in the way of ship tease.  The series is very episodic, with several episodes containing two short stories within them, but, true to Nisio Isin's writing, every character who we meet has a personality, goals and position in the setting.  Episodes also tend to be dialogue-heavy (though not as much as Bakemonogatari or Katanagatari), though there is a fair amount of action.

Medaka Box basically asks "What if Superman were a 16 year old girl and the student council president?" and runs with it, more or less honestly.  If that sounds like fun, check out Medaka Box.

Dog Days', first half

Been a while since I did a part-way review, hasn't it?

So, Dog Days season two (written Dog Days') continues in the first season's tradition of utter adorability and fan service, and somehow turns both up a little bit.

For the people who are two lazy to read my Dog Days review, the series takes place in an alternate world populated by dog-, cat-, bunny- and, newly appearing in season two, squirrel-people, who summon humans from the real world to be 'heroes' in their wars.  However, the wars in question are more like friendly mass athletic competitions than anything like involving death or really serious injury, instead, you're beaten when your armor (or clothing) is blasted off (thus providing one of the primary forms of fan service).

This time, Shinku (which is being spelled Cinque by the sub group I'm watching, which is as good as anything) has brought two of his friends from the real world to serve as Heroes for two other countries.  Like many second seasons I'm seeing lately, they seem to have the advantage of getting straight to the point and right to the adorability and fan service.

There's just this sense of childish glee and FUN that the show maintains that makes it a joy to watch, if you can watch this show and not grin at it then some part of your soul has died.  Either that or you're too distracted by the jiggling (Yukikaze is made of jello with springs in it, I swear) or the fan service.

Gintama

Gintama:  B

Jeez, it took me more than a year to finish that 252-episode-and-a-movie monster of a series.  But you know what?  I enjoyed it.  All 86 hours of it.  That, alone, is a pretty impressive thing.  Let me try to explain what it is about this series that makes it good despite its length.

Gintama, unlike most other long-running shows, occurs in short arcs, 1-5 episodes long, with the very longest being about 8 episodes.  The vast majority of them fall between silly and absurd, with the longer arcs being much more likely to resemble the standard shonen fare of fights for honor, swordsmanship, badassery and saving the world, but usually with humorous interludes (such as a long-winded duel of out-witting each other about in a public restroom with no toilet paper), and, most importantly, endings.  The short-arc format is one of the things that keeps Gintama fresh, especially combined with the show's intent of changing genre every arc (much like Excel Saga, a series which it definitely took several tips from).

Unlike most long-running shows, where the filler stabs you in the eye with its low quality and out-of-placeness, Gintama has no filler because it's all filler, but the filler is usually just as good as the actual show, or only a little bit worse.  Gintama is also extremely off-color, making fun of the anime industry, other shonen shows, and generally breaking rules about what it should and shouldn't show.  Kagura (the girl with the red hair and red chinese-style shirt in the picture above) is renowned for being the first heroine in a Shonen Jump series to vomit on-screen for instance, and she's hardly the only character to do supremely inappropriate things.

Gintama is a silly show with a lot of meta-humor, childish humor, toilet humor and absurdity punctuated with  drama, heroism and good advice.  If you can enjoy these things, you'll still probably dislike about one in five episodes of Gintama, but fortunately, there's so many episodes and they're so episodic that skipping a couple won't ruin anything for you.

Kore wa Zombie Desu Ka of the Dead

Kore wa Zombie Desu Ka Of the Dead:  C

There really is no other picture that gets this series across.

It's kind of a relief when a series is painful enough that I can't give it anything other than a C, but that I can praise for being exactly what it is and absolutely nothing more.  More so than its first season, KoreZombie Of The Dead (as the Second Season is titled) is a shameless parade of fan service, schadenfreude, embarrassing situations and dirty jokes.  Maybe it's because I came into the second season with that expectation that I find myself appreciating it more than the first season.

In many ways it's more of the same that the first season brought, but, (to make a comparison), the first season is rock crack, season two is premium purified cocaine.  Neither of them is good for you, and they both leave you with self-loathing but the second season is at least classy.

If the above image offends you in any way, don't watch this series.  But if it still makes you giggle after reading all of this, you'd actually probably like KoreZombie of the Dead.  You sick bastard.

Haiyore! Nyaruko-san

Haiyore! Nyaruko-san:  C

So my first description of this series to my friends is as "The least dignified possible series about the Cthulhu mythos possible" and I still hold to that description.

In short, Nyarlothotep takes a form as an attractive silver-haired girl with an extreme ahoge (idiot hair) who (depending on how you interpret the series) either falls in love with a human boy or decides to screw with said boy in an extraordinarily invasive and creepy way.  But not creepy like Lovecraft creepy, creepy in that 'girl trying to get herself pregnant by you without your consent' sort of way.  Nyarlothotep is interfered with by Cthugha and Hastur (or possibly Hastur's son, it's not well explained), which could either be a good thing or a bad thing.

It's pretty funny, but it's not really good.  The series has a lot of references, to the Call of Cthulhu tabletop game, the Lovecraft mythos and anime of all flavors.  It's a High School Fantasy with all that implies, it just also has a lot of references to the Lovecraft Mythos and some moments of genuinely hilarious comedy.  Being a High School Fantasy isn't actually a bad thing, but it does establish a quality ceiling.  There's only so good one can be, and Haiyore! (which means, about "Creeping!") Nyaruko-san starts strong and trails off, like so many of its type do.

Give it a watch if you want to see a handful of awesome bits of animated Cthulhu mythos and get some laughs out of clever references, wordplay and Lovecraft-based humor, but don't go expecting anything brilliant or moving out of it.

Saki

Saki (Season 1):  C

So I think I saw "Saki" as a name that popped up on like every one of my favorite seiyuu's pages over the course of surfing to see what else they were in, but it wasn't til it became a popular tag on an image board that I frequent that I went "huh I suppose this is popular, I should watch it."

What I didn't realize is that the series is about Mahjong in a big way, and that following the series is reaaaally hard if you don't know anything about Mahjong.  So I watched the first nine episodes, stopped, got Diablo 3, played that for three weeks, learned about Mahjong, and then watched Saki.  There may have been a few unnecessary steps in there.

Saki is about the mahjong club at a high school and its attempts to get to the Mahjong nationals.  The series is up front with the fact that it's taking place in a different time/parallel universe where Mahjong is more popular than it is here.  The characters are alive and have personalities and hopes and dreams and getting to know them is entertaining.

What I can't shake is the sense that Saki targeted at older gentlemen who know their Mahjong and like watching a parade of girls blushing at each other and very pointedly not making out even though perhaps they should be for the sake of their own health and happiness.

Saki has some strong Yuri elements, is really what I'm saying.  They're not bad, but they're not explored in any way which would make them fascinating to the viewer.  The series' fan service quotient is fairly low, at least in the traditional sense of 'panties, huge breasts and lots of skin,' but fairly high in the moe category (they even hit one of my personal moes, heterochromia).  Aside from that sense and the fact that every so often Mahjong is such SERIOUS BUSINESS that I burst out laughing, Saki is actually pretty good entertainment.

If you're interested in what amounts to a sports anime about Mahjong (which will help you learn about it, if you get yourself a bit of a basis) and either enjoy or will tolerate the lesbian schoolgirl aspects and moe aspects, I recommend Saki.  If any of that sounds like you'd be either bored, confused or creeped out, this is not for you.

Bakemonogatari and Nisemonogatari

Bakemonogatari:  AA++
Nisemonogatari:  A

So first let me say that Bakemonogatari is pretty much my favorite series of all time, right now.  Nisemonogatari is the 'sequel' series, and aired earlier this year.  There's going to be a prequel, a movie, called Kizumonogatari released later this year.

The titles are all portmanteaus of the world 'monogatari' which means 'story.'  'Bakemono' means ghost or monster, Nisemono means a fake or an imposter, and Kizumono means 'damaged goods'.  If I had to anglicize them, "GhoStory" and "ImpoStory" come fairly easily, though I don't know what to do with Kizumonogatari.

Like most series which I recommend highly, my primary way of recommending Bakemonogatari is to just say "Watch it."

However, Bakemonogatari isn't an S rank, for very specific reasons: it's extraordinarily dialogue-heavy, it's rather perverted, it revolves deeply around japanese mythology, language and symbolism, it's much darker than it looks on the surface and to really get everything out of it it requires a thorough analysis of actions vs words: most of the characters lie or are mistaken, and it is only occasionally pointed out directly that they were lying or wrong in retrospect, it is simply shown that they were wrong or inaccurate.

This makes it the kind of series that you have to let yourself get involved in to fully appreciate.  However, the characters are flavorful, the art is absolutely stunning and the writing is clever, it's not difficult to get yourself wrapped up in it.

In short, if you're like me, you'll absolutely adore this series.

Nisemonogatari is overall weaker than the original series, I feel, but is still very good, as it expands inter-character relationships as well as providing substantial character development and further explaining certain characters' history and even more quiet, disturbing implications.

Gokusen

Gokusen: B

Another bit of josei anime, Gokusen is a short series about a yakuza princess who is inheriting her grandfather's position but also has aspirations of becoming a high school teacher.  The title comes from a portmanteau of "Gokudou" and "Sensei," and pretty well sums up that basic concept in one go.

The story is mostly humorous, with just enough of a serious story to drive the plot.  Being based on an ongoing manga, the story loses points in my book for not reaching any sort of completion.  The other primary criticism I have of it is that I much more enjoy the yakuza side of the story than I do the high school side of the story, and it is the latter that the story spends more of its time on.

These criticisms are small next to the execution and characterization present in the series, as well as its fun and positive outlook.  It seems like a strange thing to praise a show for less words than you criticize it for, but the truth is that the good qualities of it are in its purity and relative simplicity.  It's just good.

If you're looking for a show that's genuinely about people and story and emotion and growth without anything like fan service or supernatural events getting in the way, you'll really enjoy Gokusen.  If you're looking for something a bit less realistic, or you like your girls drawn the way we picture 'anime girls,' these days, you'll be disappointed.

Toaru Majutsu no Index

Toaru Majutsu no Index (Both Seasons):  C+

I give out a lot of C+s, because I feel a lot of shows are slightly better than 'just okay.'

A Certain Magical Index (to use its English title) is a mishmash of a whole lot of Anime tropes put into a blender and served with a hefty spritz of fan service (which I mostly don't mind, aside from the cloth-physics defying properties that breasts of a certain size and above seem to display).

The story takes place in Academy City, a center of research into psychic ability (which in this setting is commonplace and understood enough to justify an entire city devoted to its research).  "Ability-users" to awkwardly translate the japanese word, are classified from the powerless or extremely weak "Level 0s" to the obscenely potent Level 5s.  Our hero is a very unfortunate man named Kamijou Touma, a Level 0, who does have a power, a power that anyone with an ounce of sense would call a high level five power (don't worry, this is hardly most nonsensical thing that happens in this series, it's just the most consistently repeated): Touma's right hand has the ability to nullify and cancel any other supernatural ability it comes into contact with completely.

Touma meets the eponymous Index, a young Anglican nun when she is hanging off his balcony being 'pursued by magicians,' of which Touma is initially skeptical, but he accepts quickly when he meets a gentleman who summons a fire elemental outside his home.  Touma, being the typical protagonist, isn't particularly smart but he's always willing to risk his neck to save someone, usually one or more young women, which he will do by punching the problem with his super anti-magic/psi/divinity/whatever right hand.

The cast very quickly gets absolutely massive, but the characters are alive and interesting, if predictable.  The stories begin differently and take place in different locales with different focuses, but tend to follow a certain pattern, established early on.  The second season escalates to the point where Academy City is badly damaged, the entire Roman Catholic Church (who have a lot of mages, Magic and Religion are mostly inextricable in this series) has declared war on Science and the shadowy figures controlling the Scientific Conspiracy are beginning to come out.

I can say a lot of negative things about it (and I already have) but I should also note that I wouldn't have given it a C+ if it weren't fun.  The character designs and implementations are good, the magical system retains a solid feeling of mysticism and strangeness despite being commonplace, and the plot holds together, despite several places where you simply need to take the story's word for it, and accept that Scientists in this setting really want to be performing unethical experiments.  This is the kind of series that, if you are able to go "Okay, watching two girls who can both teleport fighting is totally awesome," you will appreciate, but if you start going, "Wait, why do Science and Magic need some sort of 'balance' in order to make the world better?  And if they need that, why does everyone seem so intent on destroying it?" the flaws in the series show up fairly readily.

There's a spinoff series, Toaru Kagaku no Railgun (A Certain Scientific Railgun) which follows one of the main protagonists and is mostly more of the same, though is less world-wrecking, a bit more personal and slightly more slice-of-life rather than Index' consistent if progressively apocalyptic plot.

Overall, if you can throw the horns and enjoy beating the tar out of over-the-top bad guys with your fists and pretty girls randomly being in various states of distress and undress, you'll love Index.  If you need a lot of internal consistency, deep emotions or any sense of restraint in your anime, Index isn't the right show for you.

At The Moment

Today I post to ease the agony of ordinary unemployed life.

So I've still got a bunch of series sitting in my Unfinished  folder, but none of them are reaching out and grabbing me right now.

I've been watching and rewatching the Touhou M-1 Grand Prix series, which is a series of manzai comedy sketches performed by the cast of the Touhou Project games.  Manzai is a particularly odd and unfamiliar form of comedy to most Americans, and the M-1 series is additionally extremely referential to the Touhou Project, so it's very much a niche market, though if you're into these things, it's pretty hilarious.  That said, I'm pretty sure I'm the only person I know who has a thorough enough grasp of Japanese and Touhou to fully appreciate them, so if you stumble on this and look them up and like them, fergodsake tell me so I don't feel like such a freak.

Other than that, I'm mostly watching Haiyore! Nyruko-san and Kore wa Zombie Desu Ka? Of The Dead, both of which are in the process of airing.

Nyaruko-san is best described as the least dignified of all possible stories that could ever be told about the Cthulhu mythos.

KoreZombie OTD is pretty much exactly like original edition KoreZombie, though with even less shame (if that was possible) and no real justification for the creation of absurd and fan servicey situations.

I'm enjoying both of them, but neither of them is good.  It's a guilty sort of enjoyment.

I'm also waiting for Dog Days season 2 to start, but that's not til July.  I should probably look more carefully at what aired in Q1, some of it might be good.

Natsu no Arashi!

Natsu no Arashi!:  A/B+

It gets two ratings, one for each season: Season 1 is an A, Season 2 is a B+.

Natsu no Arashi is a series directed by Akiyuki Shinbo which means I'm already mandated to think it's amazing, but when I first heard the title (which translates to "Summer Storm!") I was unimpressed, and was further unimpressed by the series' concept pitch: Outspoken, nerdy 13-year-old Yasaka Hajime meets a gorgeous 16 year old Arashiyama Sayoko ('Arashi'), who turns out to be a ghost, and falls into very boisterous, childish love with her, after which she begins drawing on his life energy to sustain herself.  The ghost girl has a number of friends from her time alive who died around the same time that she did who gather around the small cafe where Arashi and Hajime work over the summer, as well as several living employees and regular customers who get up to amusing antics.

The series has Shinbo's traditional excellent cinematography and adroit use of angles and visual suggestion, and makes clever references to other anime and overall is a silly light-hearted comedy.

Then Arashi reveals that she can use Hajime to go back in time, and we find out that Arashi died during the bombing of Yokohama in World War 2, as did the other three ghost girls, and much of the first season has a quiet undertone about the difference in attitudes of people of the war era compared to modern times.  Like most Japanese war stories, the war is a very personal experience, and used as a backdrop, it never plays a major part in the plot, but is unmistakable in its flavoring of the story, and for that, I find its use to be both appropriate and fascinating.

The second season loses some of that, and so is simply a delightful slice-of-life comedy with romantic elements, but is still enjoyable and worth your time.

Mononoke

Mononoke:  B+

Not Princess Mononoke, simply Mononoke.  The Mononoke is the same word, though, referring to a spirit or demon.

Mononoke is an exercise in surreal, deeply personal storytelling.  The mononoke which the Medicine Seller encounters and defeats are all bound to the world not out of simple malice or villainy, but due to the horrors of things done by humans to one another.

Mononoke is another horror anime, but openly supernatural and dramatically stylized, resulting in an extremely exotic, archaic feel which fits the stories well.  It is deeply rooted in Japanese mythology and spirituality, but with the liner notes provided by most subtitling groups sense can be made of it.

Mononoke does not go through the trouble of explaining itself: part of the horror is the familiarity of the mysterious and not entirely benevolent protagonist.  Endings are very open, explanation into what comes after is not forthcoming.

It's the kind of series that appeals to a particular kind of audience, who will adore it.  If you want to immerse yourself in Japanese ghost stories, watch Mononoke.

Melody of Oblivion

Melody of Oblivion:  N/A

Hoo, boy.  This series is really something.  One of these days I'll go back and review Revolutionary Girl Utena so I can finally have my opinions about Melody of Oblivion (Bokyaku no Senritsu, in Japanese), Star Driver and Utena all down in the same place, which is relevant, because they're all very similar series.

I want to give Melody of Oblivion a B and a C, and I kind of want to give it an A as well.  I really can't manage to pick between these three, so it gets an NA.  It gets a C because it's freaking bizarre and if you're not paying much attention to it and trying to reconstruct some kind of pattern out of the symbolism it will just drive you crazy.  It gets a B because it's fun to watch and conceptually very interesting.  It gets an A because the symbolism of it is fascinating and the story is ultimately good.

I'll spare you a short version of the plot, because you can just read my Star Driver 5-13 review (here).  Melody of Oblivion, even more so than Utena and Star Driver, has strong sexual overtones (which become rather hilariously no-longer-tones in the later parts of the series), and viewing it as an exercise in symbolic innuendo results in an intelligent story very much about some difficult-to-approach subjects.

This is also the series where I mention that there are dudes who are also motorcycles and also unicorns.  So it goes both ways.

Definitely a series for those of you who like weird stuff, I do consider Melody of Oblivion the weakest of the three series, but that is due more to Star Driver and Utena's excellence than Melody's lack.

Black Rock Shooter

Black Rock Shooter:  A

I've gotta admit I'm really surprised to be giving a series which began as a song on NicoNicoDouga which I didn't care for much an A rank.  Indeed, the very concept of the show doesn't sound particularly amazing: there is a secret, parallel and possibly imaginary world where avatars of girls from the real world do battle in order to relieve the suffering of their real-world counterparts.

And yet, the series (8 episodes) manages to take this concept and quite thoroughly explore the morality of this (Is it right to give your suffering to someone else?  Is it right to suffer in place of someone else?  What are the consequences of doing this for both the one whose suffering is taken away and the one who suffers instead?) and apply it both to relationships in the real world and the overall situation the series creates.  Due to the focus on pain and its cyclical nature (it's kind of Buddhist like that) it's a very emotional story, but it manages to do this without being totally depressing by having uplifting moments regularly.

If you're interested in a series that combines elegantly written school drama with stunningly dynamic duels between girls with superpowers on bizarre symbolic landscapes, your eyes will melt with joy at Black Rock Shooter.  If you need male characters in your series in order to appreciate them, or can't handle severe emotional damage being inflicted on characters who don't deserve it, you probably won't enjoy BRS.

As a final note, Black Rock Shooter was an OVA (hour-long) before it was an 8-episode anime.  I saw that first, and it wasn't bad, but only rated about a C+, maybe a B.  It establishes two of the central characters of the later series and tells a simpler version of the story surrounding them.

The Mystic Archive of Dantalian

The Mystic Archive of Dantalian:  B++

After I saw Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, I decided that Studio Gainax could do no wrong and resolved to watch everything they have ever produced.  This led me to watching some works of true brilliance (Gunbuster, Diebuster), some things which were truly bizzare (Melody of Oblivion, Oruchuban Ebichu, Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt), and a remarkable number of series which were about breasts, despite ostensibly having plots (Mahoromatic, He Is My Master).  I hadn't looked over what Gainax had done in over a year, and so I was pleased to find that they had completed a series in 2011 titled "The Mystic Archive of Dantalian," or "Dantalian no Shoka," in Japanese. So I downloaded it and watched it.

It did not take long to realize that it was going to fall closer to the 'true brilliance' category than any other, but I was delighted by both the immersive victorianesque atmosphere of the series and by the sense of myth and wonder the story brings.  Neil Gaiman, who I consider the master of the modern Fairy Tale, would probably like this series.

The eponymous Mystic Archive is a library of magical books, which do not truly belong in the world.  The protagonist, Hugh Anthony Disward, or 'Huey,' who had been a pilot in WWI (the story takes place in the early 1920s), inherits his grandfather's mansion, title and responsibility to a girl named Dalian who looks after these magic books, which cause dramatic and often tragic changes to the world they are released into.

It is not a story of deep passions or incredible depths, but it is lovely, clever and well-paced series with a strong sense of fantasy that I would recommend to anyone interested in such a fairy tale.

Sacred Seven

Sacred Seven:  B+

I found out about Sacred Seven because I saw it on the Shini-subs blog while I was waiting for Nisemonogatari to be available, and while the screencaps they used to title the images were full of ninja maids, I was kind of curious (maybe because of the ninja maids).  So I downloaded it and watched the opening and was like 'huh, that looks like it could be okay.'

A couple months later I actually got around to watching it, and the first episode I was like 'Huh, this could be neat, they had a couple neat mythology references, I'd be happy if that kept up.  Other than that, they're gonna fight some Darkstones every week and there'll be some romance and mostly it'll just be kinda okay.'

Well, I wasn't entirely wrong in my analysis, but what surprised me was how well-orchestrated what I was right about was.  The romance doesn't feel forced and doesn't overwhelm the main story, the drama is reasonable (if a little horrific) and while the villain does prove to be fairly predictable in his goals he isn't really given the chance to pontificate on it, so it doesn't have time to get old.

It wasn't a show that could have ever been an A for me, but for what it is, it's very good.  Sacred Seven is a show about getting a badass magic battlesuit and fighting evil statues.  If you can get into that, you'll have a lot of fun with it, but don't ask too much of it, or it'll start to let you down.

RahXephon

RahXephon:  B

"A story taking place in a world that has already been devastated in the past by poorly understood monstrous forces which appear alien but possess qualities which link them to human religion, in which a teenage boy meets a flirtatious woman and a mysterious girl, and shortly thereafter finds himself piloting a monstrous humanoid robot that only he can pilot to fight these monstrous enemies.  The boy finds himself living with the members of the secret organization to fight the monstrous enemies, which includes the flirtatious woman and a red-headed girl who is strongly in denial about her feelings for the boy.  The cast also includes a quiet, ill girl who may or may not be involved in an illicit relationship with someone in a position of authority and a female scientist who has feelings for that same authority figure.  The boy must conquer his own doubts and demons, and he will also learn about those which surround the other members of the secret organization.  In the end, the boy must choose to destroy or rebuild the world with the divine power he now possesses, which is the final result of an ancient mystical conspiracy."

If this sounds familiar, it's probably because you've seen or heard about Neon Genesis Evangelion, which is why it's surprising that that's not what I'm talking about.  This is a series called RahXephon, which came about several years after Evangelion.

Now, as much as I would feel totally in my rights to say that RahXephon is ripping Eva right the heck off, I won't say that, because while it may not be precisely original, that doesn't prevent it from being good.

Both series explore similar themes of self, redefinition, apocalypse, divinity, love, hate, loss and finding a place.  I personally liked Eva more but I saw Eva at the tender age of fourteen and was very deeply affected by it, so I have a tough time admitting that anything is better than Evangelion.  It also makes it very difficult for me to talk about RahXephon on its own merits, because the similarities are so strong.

I enjoyed it.  It has less of what might be accused of being 'dithering,' RahXephon moves more quickly and feels less episodic even in the early stages, which might appeal to some more.  It also explains its weirdness even less than Evangelion does, which might annoy some people even more, and I found RahXephon to be less elegant in its design.

Overall, if you're interested in a semi-surreal series about supernatural giant robots and all of the secret organization politics, self-loathing and emotional trauma that entails with a strong South/Central American mythology (as seen through the lens of Japan) bent, you'll probably enjoy RahXephon.

Ika Musume Season 2

It really is more of the same with a bit more fan service.

In this particular case, I don't think that's a bad thing, it didn't need anything more, it can just be Ika-chan embarrassing herself and wondering what the heck is wrong with humanity.

If you liked Season 1, you'll like Season 2, simple as that.

Tiding You Over

So, I'm currently watching Ika Musume Season 2, and I just rewatched Dog Days.

Both of 'em are pretty good.  Dog Days, still good.  Apparently there's a second season airing starting in July.  I'm psyched.

Ika Musume 2 is more fan servicey (which is to say, still about 1/8th as fan servicey as Dog Days), but still generally entertaining.  The reason I haven't finished it yet is that the power supply in my computer is dying and I need to replace it, but this month is a bit tight on cash for me.  So I need to make ends meet a bit more so than usual.

I'll get to it later this week, though, probably.

Shakugan no Shana (All 3 Seasons)

Shakugan no Shana:  B
Shakugan no Shana II:  B+
Shakugan no Shana III:  B

Shakugan no Shana III (also called Shakugan no Shana Final) just finished last Friday, so this is a very timely review, however, as I am reveiwing the series in its entirety, this is a very different review than if I were reviewing the three series separately.

Shakugan no Shana, at first glance, could be a High School Fantasy: a normal High School boy is suddenly killed and finds what remains after his death thrust into an invisible world of bizarre monsters who devour human existences and those who fight them, "Flame Hazes," long-lived humans empowered by entities not unlike the ones they fight.

Shana, however, despite the entire first season feeling like it could fall off balance and descend into becoming a shonen fighting anime, instead spends the first two seasons establishing and developing the relationships surrounding the high school boy and the Flame Hazes that come to be his friends, both to learn of and teach them how to live and how to love.

The third season builds up to a massive, world-shaking conclusion which is nevertheless both satisfying and personal, though many and more supporting characters on both sides of the conflict are introduced throughout the series, which can make following the action somewhat odd.  In the end, focus remains primarily on the main characters, and the ending is satisfying, the final confrontation well-executed, though many beloved supporting characters do not get their fair shake in the final season, a chief reason for why I have rated the second season highest of the three.

The design of Shana's cast is overall excellent, the humans are believable and the monsters are eerily inhuman, while often appearing as delightfully creepy semi-humans.  The extended romance plot and love triangle is well-orchestrated and ends well, the supporting relationships are emotional and fascinating and the story as a whole continues to call back to events of the past, giving a great feeling of cohesion and rewarding the observant viewer.

Shana has a lot of elements of interest: magical battles, emotional development, clever plans, a sense of wonder and mystery.  If I had to criticize it, it does tend to jump between these, and while the series is well-executed it is not mind-shatteringly brilliant.  However, if you're interested in a long-haul series that does not fall into the traps of filler or unnecessary extension and has an interesting and thorough resolution, Shakugan no Shana is quite a beautiful ride.

Slayers NEXT

Slayers Next:  A

Where Slayers' original season suffers from poor pacing and some slow moments, Slayers Next has precisely one section (episodes 14-17) which is four non-plot filler episodes in a row (and all of them are memorable), and is otherwise perfectly-paced, with excellent characterization, superior animation, and, to its benefit, the party staying together, allowing us to watch their interactions and co-evolution.

Slayers Next is colorful, funny, dramatic, adorable and intelligent in its plot and execution, with an excellent musical score.  It strikes a perfect balance between humor and drama and stands out as one of the best fantasy series of all time.

Slayers (Original Series)

Slayers:  C

It's really hard to give a rating to a series like Slayers, which was another anime that I watched very early in my life watching anime, and even harder to admit that, by my modern standards, it isn't the stunning and beautiful jewel I treat it like it is.

The truth is that Slayers was very good when it first came out in 1995.  It was an original, slapstick high fantasy story that didn't take itself seriously but was still capable of some genuinely moving drama when things got serious, with an interesting and delightful cast of characters.

However, seventeen(!) years later, the animation, while not horrible, looks poor next to modern works, and, most damningly for the rating I gave it, the pacing of the original series is shakey: an epic confrontation deciding the fate of the world takes place before the halfway mark, and then the series falls back to hijinks for another ten or so episodes before getting into the meat of the final arc, which runs a little slowly at times despite the sense of urgency and threat that the story maintains.

The other reason I give the original series a poor grade is because of how much it pales next to its successor, Slayers Next, which is funnier, more dramatic, better paced and more coherent, plotwise, even though both seasons have about the same number of episodes dedicated to fillery hijinks.

Ultimately, the first season of Slayers is fun and entertaining, but takes a while to watch, and the story that it manages to tell with its time isn't particularly amazing.  If you want to get familiar with the Slayers as a team before watching them in their later adventures, you probably won't regret time invested in Slayers.  If you saw the series when you were younger and want to nostalgia, it certainly isn't bad.  If you're just curious and want to know what all the fuss about Slayers is, you're probably better off starting on the superior seasons (in my opinion, Next and Revolution/Evolution-R).

Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt

Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt:  N/A

Okay, I promise I won't make a habit of failing to rate shows, but this one stands out as existing outside of my letter grading system.

Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is a series made in late 2010 by Studio Gainax (of Evangelion and Gurren Lagann fame) which I can only begin to describe as "A x-rated love letter to Jhonen Vasquez by way of the Powerpuff Girls."

The series notably is very western in its sensibilities: its heavily episodic nature, animation style and being set in something which resembles America more than Japan.  The series also uses an inordinate amount of Engrish obscenity, in fact, obscenity, innuendo and toilet humor are the order of the day for this highly toxic 13-episode joyride through a series of themed episodes, some referential, some bizarre and some downright gross.

It is not for everyone, but if you are the sort of person with a truly depraved sense of humor who appreciates the humor for the sake of crossing lines that maybe shouldn't be crossed, such as a magical girl transformation sequence which is a pole-dancing striptease, a character who has sex almost every episode, usually loudly just offscreen and a mascot sidekick who is brutally murdered by his masters on a regular basis and spends much of his 'idle' time apparently masturbating a zipper.

PSG is genuinely funny in its dirty, going-too-far sort of way, but the fact is that it is SO much not for everyone that saying it's good or it's bad is very difficult.  I loved it, but felt the need to inflict it (not share, inflict) on my friends.  Some of my friends I knew would like it, because it's their kind of messed up.  Some of my friends I don't mention it to, because it's really not.