Author: psgels

Phi Brain – 10

by psgels, posted in Phi Brain



This episode was very bizarre for its romantic subtext. Episodes about idols are nothing new in anime, and most of them are pretty terrible. And here comes Phi Brain who comes with an idol who hosts and creates puzzles of doom.

Most of the times these idols are used to make the protagonist feel special. The latest persona episode was a good example of how dull that can be. Here though… Daimon Kaito is instead a rabid fanboy of her puzzles. Instead, Gammon is being set up as her equal in terms of solving puzzles, with a ton of romantic hints between the lines. It’s like, the roles were reversed in this episode if it wasn’t for the fact that Kaito still had to solve the puzzle. He acted pretty much like a side-character in this episode.

And then there was the ending of this episode. What idiot forgets about winning ten million yen? And I accidentally watched next week’s preview. Next week will be crazy….
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Nurarihyon no Mago – Sennen Makyou – 22

by psgels, posted in Nurarihyon no Mago




Seriously, this is the best I’ve seen Studio Deen in since Giant Killing ended. For the first time in one year and two months (which is a really long time for a studio that releases so many series), I’ve been impressed by these guys again on a series. It is about bloody time.

Obviously Hunter X Hunter is the best shounen at the moment, but still: after being disappointed by Ao no Exorcist, the first Nurarihyon no Mago series, Sket Dance, Toriko, Bakuman’s first season, Sacred Seven and Tegami Bachi Reverse, it feels very good to see a shounen actually end well. This conclusion was what a conclusion should be. Not just “let’s just kick the bad guy’s ass and get things over with”. Have things happen at the same time. Put things at stake. Nue’s resurrection worked really well for that. It’s just such a damn shame that we had to wait forty bloody five episodes for that to happen.

I can see the intentions of Nurarihyon no Mago: a shounen series about leading an army. Most shounen leads really are a hundred years too early to be leading an actual army, so it definitely has potential. But then make it about actually leading an army. This show dabbled way too often in things that just did not batter in the long run. The anime is at fault, but the story of the manga also did not help: the introduction still was way too long. Because of that, there is no way that I’m going to recommend this series. But now that I’ve gotten so far, it’s at least very gratifying that my patience is finally being rewarded.

Nue’s resurrection in particular was a great way to spice this arc up. As the red thread connecting everything for the villains: there are a lot of different parties, but it’s this desire for Nue (or Abe no Seimei that connects all of them together, with his mother, Hagoromo Gitsune at the center). Her end here was pretty good with the revelation of how the body that she used to inhabit was pretty much used. The constant flashbacks to the part where Rikuo’s father was killed also paid off here, with the revelation of how things really went. A surprisingly good example of the use of repetition.

Also, the animation at the part where the Skull died. Good stuff there.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Hunter X Hunter – 10

by psgels, posted in Hunter X Hunter



What also sets Hunter X Hunter apart from all other shounen series: the slow pacing means something. One of the big problems with shounen is the “I’m about to kill you… but first let me explain in the fullest detail how I’m going to it, and then explain some more about it in case you didn’t get it the first time”. Hunter X Hunter meanwhile is meant to be an endurance test. Battles in this series aren’t a matter of whacking each other until one side goes down. Furthermore, this exam is all meant to draw time. Finally there are some explanations about why things have to take a long time. And that makes up for a lot here.

Last episode I was confused because the bit about the disfigured guy pretending to be unconscious, because it was introduced by someone else. In the first series, it was the bald guy who did all the talking for the prisoners here. It’s a matter of characterization, really. In the first series, this turned the bald guy into a leader figure, while he was an idiot in this episode. Instead it made the female prisoner much more ominous, which is why I’m really looking forward to next week, knowing what she has in store for Leorio and instead she was a bit of a one trick pony in the first series.

Bizarrely enough this show does include more explanation than the first. That was my one complaint about this episode: the explanations feel a bit out of place in tone with the cartoonish distorted faces, and how the explanations feel too much like a lecture for a young audience. It’s again about the delivery and the voice acting here. And really, if the voice acting of the first series wasn’t so damn good I probably would never whined about it. To try and explain it, the voice acting there had more depth to it, if that makes any sense.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Ben-To – 09

by psgels, posted in Ben-To



You know, I really want to hate this episode for having so much episode and main character abuse. But it was done so well. It’s been a while since I laughed at an episode as much as with this one. laughed, and the direction was amongst the best of the series so far.

And don’t get me wrong: if the creators would have just regularly animated this episode like how most moe shows do it, it would have been absolutely horrible. The direction really made this episode. This ranges from interesting camera angles, the way in which the first half show the same events at different angles, and the incredible force with which they showed Ume here. Both as this obsessive stalker as tour de force.

The part before the OP was also utterly hilarious. Finally! A version of the “terrible cook”-trope that isn’t derived! Instead of just having a character screw up majorly when scrambling an egg, or just throwing in random stuff that makes no sense, this dish here was so bizarre with its flavors that it finally brought some new life in a horse that I once thought was dead.

Seriously though, with Basquash, I already noticed that Shin Itagaki was a special kind of director, who really had a knack for making things unbelievably fun, despite seeming juvenile at first. With Basquash, he lost his touch after about 6 episodes, until being fired from the show completely, but here we’re at episode 9 and you can still see his influence on making the scenes have impact and doing the manga source material really justice. He’s still rather inconsistent, as evidenced by last week, but still: I notice a definite improvement and maturation in his style, and I look forward to seeing more of him.

My one complaint is that we haven’t seen food battles in two episodes now. What the hell?
Rating: *** (Awesome)

Fate/Zero – 10

by psgels, posted in Fate/Zero



I am of the opinion that having an episode with a completely different mood or theme once in a while is a good thing for a series, provided that the episode in question isn’t bad, and that the show doesn’t stay in it. It’s a good chance to show a different side of the series, rather than just staying with episodes of the same mood over and over again.

Now, this episode was about a character whose grown up version in the five episodes of Fate/Stay Night was a very annoying character, and traits of that tsundere definitely showed in this episode. Still, this had its merits. I complained about how the deaths of the kids in this series lacked impact because they were just random kids that died. This episode actually showed a bit of the perspective of those kids, and didn’t make them random anymore.

On top of that, this episode finally showed a bit more about two characters who mostly remained in the shadows: that bug guy and Rin’s father (whose names I unfortunately can’t recall at the moment). Especially the former was something I really liked.

As for Rin: well, she’s an impulsive kid and this episode undoubtedly had its annoying moments. The first half of this episode wasn’t exactly exciting, but it did build up to a very good second half here. It’s a bit questionable that Rin already has a huge sense of responsibility despite being what? Nine years old? She was lucky here that Caster’s master sees children as random tools, and therefore in no way expects them to be able to threaten him.

Oh, and Ufo-Table’s CG artists were very good in this episode. That locket or those crystals for example looked really good and refined. The backgrounds when Rin was in the city were also very detailed with a lot of random garbage in the backgrounds.
Rating: * (Good)

Some Quick First Impressions: High Score

by psgels, posted in Some Quick First Impressions

High Score

Short Synopsis: Our lead character is a very bratty high school girl.
I’m getting very tired of having to review these utterly horrid flash shows that pop up more and more often. Is there really a market for these things? I mean, if they were good and all I’d still understand it, but this was the umpteenth flash show with terrible jokes. This time it’s about this incredibly bratty high school girl who abuses everyone around her. And it basically is nothing other than hi-jinks around how she abuses everyone but her boyfriend. While it’s good to actually see a couple here, the jokes all are just terrible moe jokes. At the very least things move around more than your average flash show, but that’s not really a compliment either due to how low the standards in this genre are. I remember the first attempt at a flash series: Hanoka. There the creators actually tried to make an action show based on Flash’s very limited animation. That was good! That was ambitious. This is just nothing.
OP: That table fly was probably the most noteworthy of this thing.
ED: Even those clay figures look better than the rest of the graphics of this show…
Potential: 0%

Last Exile – Ginyoku no Fam – 08

by psgels, posted in Last Exile - Ginyoku no Fam



Whoa. they actually gave the people from Gracies the Russian language. And while I know nothing about that language, it actually sounded pretty authentic
there. This episode once again rocked, with some very solid dogfights and tactics. This episode did both justice to the Sylvius who had to escape against overwhelming odds, and Fam, who actually felt very responsible for guiding the enemy last week.

I’m still a big bugged about this whole “skyfish hunting”, though. This episode explained perfectly fine how this is done: destroying the Claudia tank of this huge warship eliminates the thing that keeps it afloat. It does leave me to wonder though: if it really is so easy, then why aren’t more people following Fam’s tactic? Or are Vanships really so hard to control that only the top pilots can really get a good shot before being shot down? That’s the thing that’s really bothering me about this series: why are there so little precautions made against Vanship attacks, even though it has been shown quite a few times that they can give the large warships quite a difficult time? Or did the enemies blow their entire budget on the huge imposing warships, hoping to win by intimidation?

So, eight episodes in and about a third of the way through, the execution has been a bit wonky, but the pacing has been surprisingly solid, albeit slow. This show was a bit clunky on the character introductions, but the past episodes have allowed us to get a good feel of the characters, and they’re beginning to stand out more. By far the best part though, is how much colour it brought into its world. This is the part at which I actually believe it’s getting better than the first Last Exile. The first Last Exile still stands miles above this one in terms of characters, though.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Hyouge Mono – 33

by psgels, posted in Hyouge Mono



The characters really were on fire for this episode. Sasuke made more bizarre faces than ever, but especially Sennou: how much can you develop this guy anyway? In any case, the acting here was absolutely wonderful and really brought some excellent stuff out of the characters.

This episode makes Sennou’s story even darker. There first was him, coming clean about helping out in the assassination of Oda Nobunaga. Only for the second half of this episode focusing on the ever growing tensions between him and Hashiba Hideyoshi. Note how Hideyoshi always takes someone with him to check it for poison. And then the episode ended with him demanding Sennou’s daughter.

Also, this show makes a terrific use of how it has a very limited budget. It has showed for a while now, but this episode really stood out in it: this series is going back to this intricate shading technique that was often used around fifteen years ago. I have no idea why it ran out of fashion, but using multiple colours of shading is something I really haven’t seen in a while, other than CG gradient lighting. This episode in particular had some very detailed shading on Sennou.
Rating: *** (Awesome)

Mawaru Penguin Drum – 21

by psgels, posted in Mawaru Penguin Drum



Omg plot twists!

I mean, where to start? I thought that the house was just a colorful whim of the designers. In this episode, the creators suddenly explained how the house looked so unique. We’ve now seen Himari’s childhood in about five different stages (the time with her biological parents, the point where Shouma saved her, the point where Kanba’s father died, the point where she was getting into fights with Shouma’s mother, and the point after which shouma’s parents left). All of them showed a different stage of how she changed as a kid, and that isn’t even with the regular character development added. She is by far the most developed character of the entire series.

Then, Natsume. Finally her actions make perfect sense. by going after Kanba’s former girlfriends, she was reminding him of his responsibility towards Mario. By getting him away from Himari she was trying to save her brother from getting further involved in the shady business of Shouma’s parents. (Who died in this episode?! What the hell?). Also, I can’t believe that it only took me until last week to realize that the creators are trying to turn “Oh no, I must crush them soon” into a catch phrase.

Ringo turned into an excellent support character, now that her main arc is over. She’s still great to watch, and yet she knows how to remain in the shadows. The pink haired guy? Excellent villain now that it’s been revealed that he was the mastermind behind the gas attacks. He’s like this omnipotent being in this series and makes great use of it. That also gives yet another meaning to the diary: it’s the thing that he has no influence over. The question now is: is that diary’s power really as vague as the past episodes have been hinting? Or was there a more concrete reason for its effect?

And christ, there are just three episodes left now. I can only hope that this was the incentive to get the shoujo genre out of its rut that it’s been in for the past years. I don’t include the Josei genre in this; that has been fine, with series like No.6 and Chihayafuru. But how many good shoujo that didn’t rely on just random bishies (like Hakuouki for example) have debuted since the start of 2009? I’d say around five, over three whole years (Penguin Drum, Heartcatch Precure, Uragiri, Kimi ni Todoke and Yumeiro Patissiere), and only two of them were really ground breaking (Heartcatch and Penguin Drum). And this used to be one of my favorite genres that had so many gems in it. To come with a frame of reference, that’s about the same amount of series that debuted in those days that had no way of making any profit whatsoever, like Hyouge Mono, Sarai-ya Goyou, Aoi Bungaku, Showa Monogatari. Yes, for some bizarre reason producers nowadays are less inclined in investing in an ambitious shoujo series than on shows that are bound to not make them any money. There is a market for this, people. The first Blu-Ray version of Penguin Drum has actually sold nearly 6000 copies. That’s about 1000 volumes above the break even point for your average series.
Rating: *** (Awesome)

Un-Go – 08

by psgels, posted in Un-Go



Yet another amazing episode. Last week gave us one heck of a mystery, and this week did a terrific job of playing with it. From the start it was clear that this was some sort of illusion, but the how and why were what made it interesting. I love how the start of this episode showed what happened to the rest of the cast during the previous episode (especially Izumi was hilarious).

After that they found a very neat way to bring back Shinjuurou back to his senses and have him solve the murder. Or have him use Kaishou’s deduction in this case. What makes this interesting is that the novelist probably would have gotten away with things if it wasn’t for the people around Shinjuurou helping him, in particular Kaishou and Kazamori. The murder mystery was also very neatly wrapped up, and it indeed made great use of the previous episode’s build up in which the three actresses had no idea what to make of the script.

What’s also interesting is that Shinjuurou doesn’t care about retribution. So far in these past eight episodes, there has been no showing of victims getting punished or arrested: that all happens off screen. This may seem rushed, but remember why Shinjuurou is solving mysteries in the first place: it’s not because he wants to fight crime. Instead, he’s doing all this because he happened to be unfortunate enough to meet Inga, and he happened to be very good at solving mysteries. In order to keep Inga from running rampant, he continuously has to solve mysteries. What goes beyond that simply doesn’t involve him anymore.
Rating: *** (Awesome)