Nanoha The Movie 2nd A's

Nanoha the Movie 2nd A's: A

So I wrote in my original Nanoha A's review that A's is an extremely well-told story with excellent pacing, characterization and a well-crafty story about good people.  The Movie version of the same is also excellent, though, frankly, weaker for the exclusion of certain elements in the interest of cutting down on the time.

Since the original series was so excellently paced, the exclusion of anything takes away from the story, but only slightly, the newly redesigned story is still completely functional, better animated, and expands on a few confusing issues from the original story, expanding on the role of a very minor character and giving a name to a character that previously had simply been a plot device of unclear nature and relationship to others.  A few moments, however, had their emotional impact dulled slightly by a few choices made differently in the movie. Not enough to make it bad, but enough for me to say 'no, you really want to see the series first, because it handles the surprise reveals better'.

For people who want to get into Nanoha as a series, I recommend watching the first movie, then series version of A's, then the A's movie to understand the full interwoven canon (since things make the most sense if you take both of them and kinda interweave them together).  Then watch StrikerS, if you absolutely have to, which you probably will after the A's movie.

Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai NEXT

Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai NEXT: A

Yeah, I thought it was about that good too.

So we've had a lot of sequels lately, and some have been good and some have been not so good.  Haganai season 2 falls into the 'really excellent' category, the kind of sequel that improves its parent series through its existence.

Season 1 of Haganai introduced us to the characters as their roles in the neighbors club: Yozora was the clever, possessive but shy and maladjusted leader, Sena was her rival/sidekick who usually got the short end of the stick, Kobato and Maria were also engaged in a rather brutal hate/rivalry relationship, Rika is a lascivious genius pervert constantly trying to get Kodaka to have sex with her and being rebuffed, and Yukimura is a boy being made to dress like a girl both to make him 'more manly' and because Yozora is a bully.  Of course, Kodaka is our straight man in this crowd, the guy who actually just wants to make friends and winds up at the center of a complex romantic web which he appears to be ignorant of.

Season 2 of Haganai takes every single one of these roles and turns them on their respective ears: situations change, we learn new things about each of the characters and they learn new things about each other, we explore what makes each of them do what they do, their motivations and what the Neighbor's club in general and its members in particular mean to them, developing their relationships and injecting the stress that comes of deepening relationships.  The series manages to take its original concept and grow it into an intelligent commentary on friendship, progress in relationships and fear of commitment.

Even more amazing is that it manages to do it while remaining humorous, silly and full of fan service.

Haganai's second season makes the series as a whole, pretty much the best series with harem elements I've ever seen, mostly because it becomes a meta-commentary on the idea of having a bunch of girls in love with one guy, and also because it avoids the pitfall of story stasis.  While the second season does not wrap things up, it ends in such a way that the situation has not only irrevocably changed, but that change has been accepted by the cast as a whole, and THAT is what makes it unique.

This series really cements my general theory that the less new characters are introduced in a sequel, the better the sequel will be.  We have 3 new named characters this time around; all of them have minor roles and one of them doesn't even have dialogue until the very last episode.

If you liked Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai Season 1, Season 2 is a blast.  If you want to see a winkingly naughty exploration of romance, friendship and difficulties of finding your place while remaining yourself, Haganai is both funny and moving.  Pretty much the only people who won't like Haganai are those who can't stand people being creepy, awkward, rude or cruel (though almost universally played for laughs) to people who are (though they might not admit it) their friends.

Tamako Market

Tamako Market: C

Kyoto Animation's offering for this season.  The story of a girl whose family runs a mochi shop in a small-town shopping arcade, and her visitation by a talking bird from a foreign land, searching for his prince's bride.

It continues KyoAni's standards of amazing animation, but also, unfortunately, their traditions of harmlessness and being non-threatening.  Tamako Market is a rather extreme example in this, and is probably the most harmless and least risky series they've ever done.  It's absolutely adorable and very sweet, but, like cotton candy, it lacks substance and is, perhaps too sweet at times.

Every episode has a pithy moral to it, but they are not particularly well-executed or demonstrated, though they are quite heartful.  Overall the series simply lacks punch.

If you need a calm, pretty, sweet little story to cleanse your brain of anything but cuteness, Tamako Market has you covered.  If you're looking for substance, action, drama, emotion or even conflict, there really isn't any here.

Macross 7

Macross 7:  C

Man, Macross as a franchise just keeps making me do this: it's classic and did a lot for the industry but the truth is that the majority of its constituent series have been kinda meh.  I want to like Macross 7 for a number of reasons, and it's OKAY, it's just not GOOD.

Macross 7 is a mid-90s sequel to the early-80s original series that maintains a number of aspects of the original series: a definite sense of space opera rather than science fiction, transforming mecha, a love (sort of) triangle among the central characters, music being used as a weapon in self-defense and the singers doubting the purity of the military's intentions.  Macross 7 changes the formula in a number of places, though, our love triangle has a girl as the central point, and she ultimately comes across as our main character, the story very much revolves around her growth and growing up (She begins the series at 14, which you need to constantly remind yourself of, since she's not in school, drives a sports car, plays in a popular rock band and her two romantic options are both clearly in their late teens or early twenties).  Also, the series turns up the 'magic' quotient considerably, with the villains draining human life force and weaponized music being able to turn into energy beams.

Very underaged heroine and ridiculous laser rock music are forgivable, though, but what I couldn't stand was the male protagonist, the front man of the rock band our heroine plays in.  Here, I have to admit that my prized reviewer neutrality breaks down, because he slides into Mary Sue territory for me: people almost universally like him and those that don't tolerate him despite him being moody, self-centered and self-righteous.  He never suffers any serious setbacks, is never given cause to doubt himself or his choices, and is essentially an invincible, unstoppable ace pilot rock star in a super-mecha who is so awesome he doesn't even need to fight to win.  As the series progresses he becomes slightly more tolerable, but not due to changes in him, mostly due to his superpowers becoming recognized and useful, therefore justifying his attitude better.  Through 49 episodes and 8 bonus episodes, Basara receives absolutely no character development.

I like most of the rest of the cast, and while the story (humans fight demonic life-force eating god-aliens with giant robots and the power of rock) isn't as interesting as the original series' (humans fight giant battlesuit-wearing aliens with giant robots, love and pretty girls), it holds together well enough and maintains a 90s JRock-ish charm.  I can't honestly call it BAD, but when one of (if not THE) main character consistently aggravates you, it's difficult to recommend a series.

If you're curious about Macross and like early 90s JPop and transforming robots and have an extreme amount of patience for lack of character development, Macross will give you quite a few scenes to make you smile and plenty of characters to love.  If you're looking for anime that gets to its point quickly, has an intelligent, deeper meaning, or if you just want a series that comes close to comparing to Macross Plus, Macross 7 will leave you frustrated, bored and possibly hating the whole franchise.

Spice and Wolf

Spice and Wolf (Both Seasons): B

Since we're nearing the end of the Winter 2013 season a bunch of series I've been following are about to get their final episodes, so I'll have like 4 reviews to do over the course of the next two weeks (Haganai Season 2, Tamako Market, Love Live and Maoyuu).  In the mean time, though, I'll review a series I first watched like a year and a half ago but didn't review due to Circumstances.

Spice and Wolf is a thoughtful, dialogue-heavy series primarily about economics.  While I wouldn't exactly call it action-packed, its fairly small cast (two main characters and only a handful of recurring supporters) receive a remarkable amount of depth due to the continued interactions and the length of time we spend with them (the series runs 2 13-episode seasons).

The series is technically fantasy, but stays very grounded in the simplicity of trading, emotions, and the slightly different perspective of a centuries-old wolf spirit.

It is, however rather slow-paced.  This is not to say it is never exciting, but it is certainly not action-packed.  The series relies on the audience developing an understanding of the characters, but if they do so the story payoff is actually quite good.  It only gets a B and not higher because of the relative dryness of it, and because the lengthy dialogues will put anyone with a shorter attention span asleep.

If you like pensive, intelligently-written stories with a solid grounding in reality (despite being fantasy) and are interested in the idea of making the life of a merchant somewhat thrilling and interesting, Spice and Wolf provides a mature and clever look at the more interesting side of a trade economy.  If any of this sounds boring, it probably will be (for you) and you should probably skip it.

Clannad & Clannad After Story

Clannad: A
Clannad After Story: B+

The third of Key Visual Arts's Visual-Novels-Turned-Anime made by Kyoto Animation, Clannad has the distinction of being the only one to have never been an eroge (hentai game).

Having watched it, I can see the pattern of what Key is doing with their stories emerging more clearly.  Each time they pick a theme and create a number of stories within it, using each of the character paths to explore this theme in various ways.  Air explored suffering, Kanon explored memory.  Clannad explores family; After Story continues this exploration from 'finding a family' to 'building a family'.

This series is heartwrenching and emotional in a way that's difficult to convey in words: the exploration of the characters as a family results in extremely deep and powerful relationships and watching those relationships grow and change is extremely moving.  After Story follows characters considerably further than most romances, we see our characters not only finally get together, but also grow into adults, get married and even have children, accompanied by challenges, hauntings from the past and normal, human tribulations.

Clannad is much more coherent than Air, and has many of the things I liked about Kanon, though I consider Kanon to be better overall, and a far better Visual Novel adaptation than Clannad, due to the ending of the final episodes of After Story.  After Story, as a Visual Novel (and like many Visual Novels) has both a "Standard End" and a "True End."  After Story's Standard End is actually quite heartbreaking, and so the anime also provides the True End, but since they are separate timelines, they had to find a way to make both somehow happen, and the way they do so (not that I can come up with a better one) makes the emotional consequence of the Standard End (which I personally found to be some of the most moving and deep in the entire series) feel cheapened.  This, plus the thinning of the cast as most of the high school gang goes out to live their own lives, leads to After Story's lower rating, despite the fact that I will also say that After Story's high points are higher than the first series', and its emotional payoff is bigger.

Clannad is, in the end: cute, funny, sweet, thought-provoking and extraordinarily emotional.  Anyone who can stand a calmly-paced but heavy story that explores a theme of 'family,' in all its varying definitions will probably like Clannad.  If you need action, suspense, violence or anything more unbelievable than a few small miracles, the series will put you to sleep.

Senki Zesshou Symphogear

Senki Zesshou Symphogear:  B+

So, another series I picked up because a sub group I frequent had done it.  It had pretty girls in bodysuits and they sang, so I figured what's the worst that could happen.  I got what I was expecting, but what I wasn't expecting was an actually pretty good story, combining fragments of mythology from around the world, culminating in Babylon and Mesopotamia.

The overall concept works: a secret organization to fight demons called 'Noise' has developed a technology to synchronize humans with ancient sacred relics through the use of music.  The story starts off on a dark note, and has a quiet underlying theme of sacrifice, in addition to a discussion of survivor's guilt, and, in the end, a discussion of music as a language and a universal part of human society.

The quite harsh start, plus the relative brutality and occasional horror of the more deleterious effects of the Symphogear system and the 'Zesshou' ("Superlative Songs," translated as "Swan Songs" in the version I saw) makes it a series a cut above what I was expecting, though the ultimate villain is fairly easily foreseen, the final showdown is appropriately epic.  The series is also short and, like most shorter series, doesn't have time to faff about much, so the story keeps moving and is to-the-point.

If you're interested in watching a show that reaches about .4 of a Gurren Lagann in terms of epic awesome and is both lovely to watch and listen to, you could do a lot worse than Symphogear.  The only real things I could see putting someone off are the modest predictability of the story and the occasional oddness of pacing, this series is something of a diamond in the rough.

Idolmaster: Xenoglossia

Idolmaster: Xenoglossia: C

Probably not the most appropriate picture I could find.

Uh, it's like Eva if Shinji were a cute girl and Unit 01 were his boyfriend.  No, really, it's a series about sentient alien robots and the girls who love them.

A bit more background, the Idolmaster series is a video game idol management simulator that's been around in Japan for quite a while and is pretty popular.  Xenoglossia is a redesign done by Sunrise (who do all the mecha anime ever) to make the series... uh... have giant robots, and considerably different character designs.  I chose to watch it because  the word 'Xenoglossia' is badass, so why not.

The plot holds together okay, but the mecha designs are kind of weird and it borrows pretty heavily from what I'm now seeing are time-honored tropes that Evangelion was probably not the originator of, but certainly was my first experience of, and its strange language of symbolism lacks the depth and meaning of other series like it, not to mention the ending is pretty meh.  Good voice acting with some big names, though notably different from who the characters are voiced by in alternate continuums.

If you like a bit of friendly fan service, odd robot design, a mostly female-cast and not a whole lot of explanation of what is going on or why, Xenoglossia fits.  But if you're hoping for some intelligently-crafted story or symbolism that isn't basically just made up to go with your girls and their kind of dickish robot boyfriends, then you're probably not the sort of person who would enjoy Idolmaster Xenoglossia.

Nekogami Yaoyorozu

Nekogami Yaoyorozu:  C

So, I needed something to wash the toxic out of my brain after Mirai Nikki, and I found this show because the fansub group I frequent had done it.  I'm not really sure why they subbed it, but I suspect it's because one of them has a creepy otaku crush on Tomatsu Haruka, in a similar way to how I have a creepy otaku crush on Ueda Kana.  *ahem*  ANYWAY.

Nekogami Yaoyorozu (Which, like most titles, doesn't translate well: Nekogami refers to the divine cats, Yaoyorozu is a poetic term referring to 'myriads', in the context of gods, the countless native gods of Japan) is a light-hearted high-cuteness show about a Guardian Cat, Mayu, who is expelled from heaven for being a slacker, gambling, and generally being a disappointment to her parents, and, through a series of circumstances that aren't explained until late in the series, she begins living with a human girl who runs an antiques shop.  Mayu has a number of... let's call them acquaintances, who are also gods of varying motivations and levels of competence.  Hijinks ensue.

There's not a lot more to it than that.  It's fun and cute and silly and insubstantial.

There's not a whole lot of people I would or wouldn't recommend this series to.  If a light-hearted and silly show about nothing in particular is what you need, go ahead and give it a watch.

Mirai Nikki

Mirai Nikki:  B++

There is a category of story that I've seen in Japanese media that I haven't seen in American media.  I'm not sure that's because we don't make it, it's more likely that I simply don't consume enough American media to be aware of our version of it.  This is the kind of story wherein we see humanity at its worst.  We see senseless cruelty, we see betrayal from every angle, we see how a vicious world breeds vicious people (I think it might be exclusively japanese because it's so very Buddhist).  Bokurano is the series that, prior to Mirai Nikki really encapsulated the genre for me, but Higurashi no Naku Koro ni comes close (especially without its second season to explain everything).

Mirai Nikki means "The Future Diary," and it is about Amano Yukiteru, a boy who, under odd circumstances, suddenly finds his diary of everything he sees (which he keeps on his phone) writing itself, and ahead of time.  He quickly learns that he is not the only person with such a diary, and then is informed by the God of Spacetime (who he thought had been a figment of his imagination) that the twelve diary holders will be fighting to the death for the right to become the next God of Spacetime.

He also finds out about Yuno, a pretty, smart girl in his class who has been keeping an obsessive stalker's diary of everything Yukiteru does... which is now one of the Future Diaries.  She swears she will help, love and protect him, and her diary of everything that happens to him happening in advance makes that very easy... but it becomes immediately apparent that she is unhesitatingly violent, amoral and occasionally psychotic... and what will he do when, at the end of the game, one of them has to die?  Not to mention that he doesn't have any feelings for her at all.

The story revolves around the survival game (think "Battle Royale"), and Yukiteru and Yuno's relationship.  The body count is high, visible and brutal, and numerous other very bad things happen or are threatened to happen, but the characters are fascinating studies in psychology and emotion, and truly amazing to watch.

I really want to give it an A rating because I enjoyed it a lot (even the weirdness of the ending), but A's are reserved for shows I can recommend to anyone, and I definitely cannot recommend Mirai Nikki to anyone who has a trigger for rape, throat slitting, stabbings, children being killed, child abuse, dismemberment, eye torture, cold-blooded murder, murders of passion, deep betrayal by family or emotional abuse.  All these things are treated with gravity, but they all happen, to one extent or another, sometimes performed by the people whose side we are on.

If you're interested in a very dark story about, ultimately, love, Mirai Nikki is very, very good.  But if anything this dark or disturbing might bother you, you should probably skip it.

Medaka Box Abnormal

Medaka Box Abnormal: B

Medaka Box was always just very intelligent shonen, so it shouldn't really surprise me that the second season is basically a slightly differently organized fighting tournament arc that, in keeping with Nisio Isin's writing style, flows well and keeps the story moving much better than shonen series usually do.

I was disappointed because we didn't see much of my personal favorite character (Shiranui).

Overall it's an enjoyable watch, though a little absurd and with a plot that is fairly easy to see coming, except for the extreme weirdness of the final episode, which screams 'give us more' like nothing else and does an excellent job of setting up, or even demanding a third season.  I dunno if Gainax will come through with that, they're notorious trolls (see the last 2 minutes of Panty and Stocking).

If you liked Medaka Box and absolutely need more, the second season gives you more.  If you're hoping for closure or particularly extensive depth, you won't get it, but you'll get lots more of what the first season had.

Kill Me Baby

Kill Me Baby:  C

"Baby, please kill me."

Oribe Yasuna is a regular, spazzy, slightly stupid  high school girl.  Her best friend is Sonya, a professional killer, who is also a high school girl.  They form a fairly standard manzai (idiot/straight man) pair and do the normal stuff you would expect of such a pair.  There is also their friend Agiri, who is probably a ninja.  She says she's a ninja, and has lots of ninja-type things and occasionally does things which look like ninjutsu... but mostly she just sells things.  There's also an unused character who keeps trying to get into the series itself, but it never works.

And that's really all there is to this show.  Most of the jokes end in violence toward Yasuna due to her idiocy, though occasionally Sonya gets comeuppance for her violence.  It doesn't have any story or character development to speak of, and is fairly insubstantial.

I personally didn't find it riotously funny, but I giggled a couple times, so I guess it's not that bad a series to have on in the background while you're doing something else.  I wouldn't really 'recommend' it to anyone, though.