Mercilessly killing innocent young boys is nice and all, but the Kayneth gore scene in this episode was by far the most effective gore scene in this episode so far. Gore isn’t just abut blood, but also about making it look very painful. Breaking a finger may not be as bad as stabbing someone in the heart, or hinting at a bloody corpse off-screen, but the way it was portrayed in this torture-like way definitely paid off.
In fact the entire part around Lancer, Kayneth and that wife of his was one of the best parts of this series so far, because of how much change there was compared to the previous episodes. Seeing a suddenly helpless Kayneth with his wife now taking over worked as a really good development. Lancer’s pas was also excellent. We didn’t really get to see exactly what happened to him, but the hints were plenty to give him some new depth, and add that to his strong convictions of not betraying Kayneth, and yes: these are three characters who improved a lot in this episode.
The development of Rider and Waver is more slow and gradual. These two have banter, and over the episodes they grow closer together. It’s the standard stuff, but it works. Rider in particular still has some great lines, and he’s really well acted.
Also, I keep praising series for picking settings that aren’t overused. So of course I really like how Lancer dates back from the Celtic legends. In fact, nearly all the servants come from interesting times in history. There is a lot of interesting stuff in history, so it’s great that there are series like this that aren’t just “let’s glorify our history”. While interesting, I want to see them glorify the history of other areas in the world as well.
Oh, and what I also liked was how this episode turned magic into a science.It was a clever little trick to set up a systematic map of the town’s river and its magic use. But are sewers in Japan really big enough to fit in Rider’s entire carriage?
Rating: ** (Excellent)]]>
Author: psgels
Last Exile – 07
And then there are these kinds of episodes, which are completely awesome, go against the childish nature of this series, are full of eye candy and are the full proof that Gonzo haven’t lost their touch. I mean like whoa, Gonzo. How much eye candy can you put into one episode anyway?
I know that I said at the beginning of this season that there would be no other series that would beat Guilty Crown in terms of graphics, but I’m going to have to retract that. The only thing at which Guilty crown is clearly superior is its character animation. Last Exile however just completely blew it out of the water in terms of background art and CG. Where Guilty Crown can’t get further than a bunch of sparkles here and there and futuristic backgrounds that all look like each other, the creators here stuffed a ton of different designs together. The vanship animation was just utterly gorgeous as well.
Also, Giselda. I’m not sure what it is about her, but she is wonderful in her role as supporting character, and this episode made her even better. She makes mistakes, but that’s the great thing about her: she’s not perfect, but the way in which she’s trying her best is just wonderful. With Fam being who she is, she needs someone grounded in reality. She actually realizes very much that Fam is very childish, but she accepts it and does the best she can to support her.
Rating: *** (Awesome)]]>
Nurarihyon no Mago – Sennen Makyou – 20
Oh heck, Persona is dropped. I know that everyone keeps going on about being faithful and all, but this should not be taken to the extreme, where a show is trying to be so faithful and sacrifices being enjoyable and interesting for it in the process.
The next question was though: what series should I replace this with? Kimi to Boku? Nah, that series is 50% good drama and 50% pure annoyance. Bakuman? No, that one has turned into a cheesy soap opera lately. Squid Girl? Again no, because it’s clear that it has run out of jokes. Guilty Crown? Hell no, because of how abysmal the male lead is. That only left two other options, but after watching this episode I figured to choose this one above Horizon.
Hell, Nurarihyon no Mago is a very flawed series. Its pacing is way too damn slow, but now that it has finally gotten to the point where everything’s coming together, I might as well follow it till the end. I mean, it’s about bloody time.
And don’t get me wrong, the new director for the second season fits this series much, much better. Junji Nishimura needs to be put on original series. That’s where this guy really shines. The new guy meanwhile has done a really good job on directing this thing, but with the source material being like it is, there is very little you can do about it. This is the problem with just about any shounen jump series: they all take bloody ages to get to where they want to be. Who the hell found it a good idea to include two whole training arcs in the same arc? These two arcs were by far the biggest flaw of this second season. They completely broke up the flow and took bloody ages to actually finish.
However, now that that’s all done, we can finally get to what we’ve been looking forward to for nearly five months now: Nura and his army taking on Hagoromo Gitsune and her army. And now that we finally got to this point, this episode did deliver here. This episode in particular had some great youkai design, and actually moved quickly, as what you’d expect from an all out war.
The atmosphere also really worked here, plus the art direction has improved massively in this new season. I mean, this series had Mariko Oka (the character designer of Jigoku Shoujo and Ghost Hound), and yet the first season made the character designs all look bland. This season is different: Mariko Oka took the greatly diverse designs from the manga, turned all of them into very vastly different anime character designs, and finally the animators with their crispness managed to show how much care went into all of these designs.
Rating: ** (Excellent)]]>
Mawaru Penguin Drum – 20
Yeah, this was the “calm before the storm”-episode of Mawaru Penguin-Drum. After this there are only four episodes left, resulting in God knows what kind of ending. This episode meanwhile was very different from the others: it was slow-paced, actually linear, and it was meant to flesh out the existing plot, rather than advance it.
Thankfully though, this avoided the common pitfalls of the usual calm before the storm episodes. Most of the times, these episodes are boring because they are just trying to delay the inevitable. This episode took its time to explain what happened between Shouma and Himari, it revealed why Shouma and Kanba’s parents did the things they did (that child broiler!), and this episode did actually have a solid build-up and a climax. The aftermath of this climax in its turn, built up this very effective atmosphere for the final four episodes.
Now, the big question will arise again: will this show have a great ending? It’s Kunihiko Ikura, so he’s bound to have something planned. In general, I don’t really care if the creators don’t answer every single question they ask explicitly. Not answering any question is of course also bad, but I disagree with people who dislike series, simply because they “don’t explain everything”. There are plenty of things in this series that can be better left off to the imagination.
Instead, what I want to see from this series is it using all of the build-up that the previous 20 episodes put into it. Take the current series, and push its story and characters to new levels. Pulling enough interesting twists without overdoing it and rushing through the final four episodes. This is a delicate balance that many shows fail to hit, but let’s wait and see whether this series knows what it’s doing.
Rating: ** (Excellent)]]>
Hyouge Mono – 32
One thing that did strike me about this show is how little I have to say about it on a weekly basis. I mean, at this point, everything that has been said about it has already been said. The pacing in this series is really slow, but not too slow: every episode features something interesting that happens, and every episode does something new with the characters. This time it was the turn for that pale guy.
And really, in the meantime I’m just enjoying this show for its excellent acting and atmosphere. I really can consistently count on this series to deliver with that.
And I mean, this is how a slow pacing should be done. My big issue with series with a slow pacing is that they’re unnecessarily padding out their precious airtime. This show actually uses its time to fully bring its characters to life. The things that this show does to fill up its time are interesting and filed with historical references to all sorts of things, ranging from art to construction. Not the umpth show about random teenaged antics.
Rating: ** (Excellent)]]>
Persona 4 The Animation – 08
… just get on with it already!
Seriously, the pacing of this series is terrible. We’re already struggling to put a 80-hour game into just 26 episodes, and here this episode decides to go and waste time on nothing but teenaged antics and even throws the girls into swimsuits. I mean heck: if you’re going to waste time, at least do it in an interesting way. Why does everything have to be teenaged antics that we’ve seen hundreds of times before? Seriously people, jokes about how girls are bad cooks have been done countless of times before. It’s not funny anymore.
One of the two sole salvations of this episode was that finally Seiji Kishi put his act together and at least delivered a bunch of jokes that actually made me laugh. About three times near the end of the episode. That in no way makes up for the obnoxious rest of this episode. So in the end, the only thing that I again can praise is the camera guy here. This show looks unique and the camera angles show it.
Look, for my preview of the upcoming winter season, I complained relatively little about how there’s nothing but teenagers there. This is because there have been plenty of series about teenagers that were really good. The thing however, is that these series are great for a reason. Just stuffing in random teenaged antics and just hoping that it’ll work somehow… that just doesn’t work.
Because this show won the contest, I’m stuck with it at least until the end of the year, but this has been the worst show that you ever forced me to blog. Even including Kimi ni Todoke. At least that show was well acted.
Rating: – (Disappointing)]]>
Un-Go – 07
Holy crap! This show just continues to get better and better. With this episode, it once again surpassed itself. This really was everything that an episodic series should be. And heck, this is why I’m a fan of the genre: because they’re able to put in episodes like this. What a trip.
To be fair though, the reason I’m a fan of this genre mostly stems from quite a few years ago. During the past few years the genre has dulled in a bit because it lost sight of what made it really special: the way in which it allows a much more diverse outlook on its story and setting compared to if it was just a continuous storyline. I’m not sure what caused the decline, but overall a big difference of episodic series of the last years is that nearly always, the episodic stories are kept similar to each other, with little chances to branch out, like what this episode of Un-Go did.
I’m not sure exactly why this happened. Heck, back in 2003 you’d even have series that were collections of short stories that are completely unrelated to each other (Human Crossing, Sentimental Journey, Rumic Theater). That’s something that’s completely unthinkable nowadays. Probably a factor was that around 5 years ago, fillers got really notorious. With the arrival of the internet, and how the number of anime each season exploded, audiences got less patient and random episodes that were meant to just fill time pretty much died out apart from kids’ series and popular shounen series. This lead to a huge decrease in filler episodes, but also episodes that want to try a different story for a change.
The suspense in this episode was really great. It was a very interesting idea to just stuff the male lead into this position where nothing makes sense, and it’s up to him to figure out not just what’s going on (this probably is an illusion), but also why everything is happening. It was delightfully paranoid, and the pacing of this episode was completely different from the rest of the series. I also liked how the actresses were used in this episode: on one hand their characterization was very good as they tried to relate to the plot in their own ways, but on the other hands this was about a movie that has girls running around in their underwear as some sort of criticism of modern entertainment. Un-Go may technically not be episodic because of how some of its episodes flow into each other, but it has the same air, in which it tries to flesh its setting and themes out through vastly different cases, and individual episodes that could very well be all perfectly fine standalone stories.
Rating: *** (Awesome)]]>
Looking for a new host
We regret to inform you that Blogsome is going to be closing down permanently. We’ve enjoyed hosting your blogs, but all good things must come to an end. After the 7th December the admin interface of your blog may no longer be accessible and the blog content may be removed. If you would like to backup your content you can do so by logging into your blog. After this choose the Manage >> Backup tabs. Here you will find three backup options. We have recently added a WXR file option, which will allow you to import your content back into the popular WordPress.com blogging site. In order to keep your images you should select a backup of the database which includes images. We are sorry about the inconvenience and wish you good luck in your future blogging endevours. So it looks like after six years of faithful service, Blogsome is shutting down. It has been a great host so far, but unfortunately I’m going to have to look for a new one. While I think of what to do next, I also turn to my readership: does anyone have any good tips on where to move to?]]>
OVA Impressions: Yozakura Quartet – Hoshi no Umi – 03
I have no idea who found it a good idea to give Ryousuke Sawa an opportunity as a main director. But what an awesome idea it turned out to be. This guy is absolutely brilliant, and this was one of the most entertaining action episodes that I’ve seen in a long, long while.
I mean, hell. This was the climax of the arc that the previous two episodes had been building up for. Arguably it was even better than the previous two episodes because of how it constantly kept going. The previous episode may have been much more epic, with the barrage of planes that were thrown at the enemy monsters, but this episode kept things much more personal. But that caused the characters to stand out even more. Just about every scene was animated with such a force that not even a second was wasted here.
It may not be the deepest story or anything, but this still is animation at its finest with a simple, yet very engagingly told storyline. This show doesn’t just have great animation, it also uses this brilliantly. Even if other series may have a bigger budget, few actually manage to bring so much life into their characters. Last time I complained that the dialogue was perhaps a bit uninspired, but this simplicity also has its charms. And simple as the dialogue was, it definitely wasn’t uninspired, and got some good stuff out of the characters.
Unfortunately, this looks like it’ll be the end of this little OVA. In a way it is a bloody shame that this OVA can’t be a full fledged TV-series with more time, but this shortness also has its charm: this way you have about 70 minutes of awesomeness. And that’s the thing with these OVAs: they can take more risks than regular TV-series, and I’d wish that more producers would realize this. And in the meantime, I’m just hoping that with this, Ryousuke Sawa will get even more opportunities to direct.
OVA Episode Rating: 9/10]]>
Towa no Quon – 03 Review – 82,5/100
To the people who sat through the first two movies of Towa no Quon feeling rather underwhelmed: this third movie will reward your patience. It’s a massive improvement. While during the first two movies I wasn’t really sure whether the creators knew what they were doing. The third one however, showed that it knew.
For starters, the extra focus on the characters’ backgrounds really helps. This episode is specifically meant to get various characters with bad pasts relate to each other, including the main character Quon. The cast of this series goes through a massive improvement here, and finally they step away from the rather generic bunch they used to be in the first two movies.
But that’s not all that happens here. In terms of storytelling this movie also did something interesting. It plays around much more with its screenplay. The first two movies were rather mediocre at building up, but this movie contains some really good suspense that actually doesn’t leave. The build-up actually comes together really well at the end of the movie.
The director really put in some thought here in how to make this episode work, considering the very limited budget he has to work with. This leads to a movie that downplays action in favor of suspense, and that really works here. The creators really found something that they’re good at.
| Storytelling: | 9/10 – Suddenly becomes a movie that puts suspense over action, and it works. |
| Characters: | 9/10 – Has a much better feel over its characters, and how to use the drama around them correctly. |
| Production-Values: | 7/10 – For a movie’s standards, the animation here is nothing to write home about. Although that one experimental scene worked pretty nicely. |
| Setting: | 8/10 – Still not particularly creative, but it works well for what this movie was trying to do. |