Author: psgels

Full Metal Alchemist – Brotherhood – 28

by psgels, posted in Full Metal Alchemist - Brotherhood



Any attention-paying viewer will probably have caught this episode’s major plot twist unsubtly foreshadowed in the OP. I did not.

Seriously, I thought that that pony-tailed guy was that bomb dude, the one who kept blowing up his comrades in the first season. Don’t as me why, but I never expected this episode to turn LIN into the new Greed, but it really came as a surprise to me when Father popped up a Philosophers’ Stone and used it on the guy. Now this explains a lot about why Ishbal needed to be sacrificed: they were intended to be the bait for the next Greed, since the previous one ran off. Now apparently, you need to get rid of first Greed’s body first, before you can create a new one.

Also: Father. How completely different from an evil overlord he started out, personality-wise. He’s actually behaving like a nice grandfather, until Ed and Al make clear that they have no intention to cooperate with him. What’s even more peculiar is that while he knows Hohenheim, this guy seems more like some sort of distant relative to him, even though Hohenheim’s dream hinted that the two hate each other.

That room had even more unexplained things: for some reason, Ed and Al’s alchemy didn’t work, and for that matter no alchemy was supposed to work, and yet Scar wasn’t bothered by it at all. Then there’s also Father’s Philosopher’s Stone-like alchemy, but my theory of that is that he’s got a whole bunch of Philosopher’s stones living inside of him, which also keep him immortal.

What’s also interesting: this episode introduced a second door-thing. Lin’s case isn’t just a matter of simple brain-washing, and something tells me that like with the Heaven-like door in which Al is still waiting for Ed, Lin is also still somewhere inside that Hell-like door. If that’s true, then what about the first Greed? And Wrath?

Also, in this episode I discovered that this show has been showing plot twists after the ED. And it’s a good thing I did this time, because Gluttony died inside of it. Agh, I hate it when series pull these things, because I always skip next-episode previews. Did this series do this more often, or was this the first?
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Cross Game – 29

by psgels, posted in Cross Game



Well, for a moment it might have seemed that the excessive hinting from the creators would ruin the surprise. I’ve said this many times before, but the baseball matches of Cross Game just don’t match up to those of Touch, in which you hardly ever knew how a match was going to end. Cross-Game instead just kept hinting at how this match was going to end throughout the first half of this episode, but nevertheless the eventual result hit hard.

So yes, Kou eventually suffered in his left arm, causing him to miss the crucial pitch that gave away the game. With this, he finally became a mortal again. Granted, that new pitcher was entirely fresh, and had only been playing for two rounds, but it’s nevertheless a mistake that could have happened with any other batter. And there’s the strength of the team they had to face: they didn’t just have good batter and pitcher, they had two of each. Individually, these people don’t match up to either Kou or Azuma, but when their strength is divided over half a game, they become a very formidable opponent to beat.

The aftermath was well delivered. You can see that the creators really took some time to let this sink in, and show Kou’s disappointment in his loss, even though nobody really blames him for it (after all, he did nearly win from the top-rated team in the area). It was also hilarious to see Senda, having been abandoned by the bus. ^^;

And at the end of this episode, we finally see Wakaba 2.0, and with that we move to the second half of this series, if I’m not mistaken. The characters really have been fleshed out enough by now. It’s time to develop them!
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Aoi Bungaku – 02

by psgels, posted in Aoi Bungaku



Yes, with this episode I’m sure of my Top 3 of the autumn season: 1) Aoi Bungaku, 2) Armed Librarians and 3) Darker than Black. Kuchuu Buranko is indeed awesome, but it’s only awesome for its style, not its substance. Aoi Bunagku is awesome for both its style AND substance. This episode really was the best I have seen during this season so far.

The previous episode was meant to be confusing, it seems. This seems to be a pretty big story in this series, and this episode really started to explore his youth. My assumption is that the childhood friend of his later grew up to be that cartoonist, with whom he remained friends. We still don’t know exactly what drove him to commit suicide in the first place, though. That’s probably going to be saved for the next episode. All we just know is that he was bullied a lot during his youth, and something has been bugging him, ever since he survived that suicide attempt.

With a title as “no longer human”, I thought that this was going to be a supernatural horror story. Instead, it seems to be a story about a man losing his humanity. The way in which he survived the suicide attempt seems to have just been the final straw. After that, he starts to have visions of some sort of drawing he made when he was a kid (that was that strange black figure that showed up in the previous episode, signifying that it’s been there, even before the suicide attempt).

This episode introduces a woman who I think works at the local newspaper, however the way she collects bread crusts for her only daughter (her husband seems to have died) seems to show that she’s not paid well. On top of that, what was she thinking, trying to commit suicide? In the next episode, we’ll probably see how she’s going to fit inside the story. That cliff-hanger didn’t promise anything good: the lead character has accepted his hallucinations for what they are, and stopped paying attention to them, and yet he walked towards this woman in the end.

I also love the use of background music in this episode. It’s really simple, but compared with the awesome visuals it really manages to create one of the best atmospheres this season.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Letter Bee – 03

by psgels, posted in Letter Bee



As your typical shounen-series, we’ve now gotten to the point in which Lag is going to have to take the examinations of the Letter Bees. This isn’t bad at all. Although overused, even the best shounens as Hunter x Hunter used it, with a number of great results. As long as Lag grows beyond the crybaby that he currently is, there shouldn’t be that much of a problem.

In the meantime, we learn what’s going to set Lag apart from all of the other Letter Bees: he’s going to have a human Dingo. The creators just keep hinting at this, so something really weird is going to happen if this isn’t going to be the case. It’s really standard shounen stuff again: the lead character comes across a cute girl, he helps her and somehow she’s thankful enough to become his companion. Again, while this is definitely annoying, as long as the rest of the series makes up for it, I guess it’s a good enough for setting up the story. And really, I’ve seen many, many series who did this premise worse than what we saw in this episode.

What I found interesting in this episode was how we basically glaze over the past five years, and yet we know that Lag hasn’t been sitting still. While the camera was off,he studied hard to be accepted as a letter bee, and he even met a bunch of them, including the one who likes to eat, whose name turns out to be Connor. I like how the creators made it seem like Connor was going to be a dumb stereotype through the OP, yet he had an actual personality when he shows up.

Also, what is up with the names in this series? “Lag Seeing”? “Niche”? “Love Someone Down”? Ah well, I can imagine how this could be a stylistic choice. The only real complaint I have about this series is the following: based on the architecture, while people don’t live in luxury, they don’t seem to be that poor. Is Lag really the only one who felt sorry for her? Were there really no passers-by who felt sorry for her as well, and tried to help her out?
Rating: (Enjoyable)

White Album – 16

by psgels, posted in White Album



Surprisingly… I found very little to rage about in this episode… Instead of that, I should congratulate Touya for finally getting himself an answering machine. Damn, if he had that thing, how different would the first season have looked?

However, the cast of characters still are a miserable bunch. The premise of it was about a new performance for Yuki, while Touya’s father collapsed again. To start with the first, Yayoi makes a bold move: for once, she invites Touya without the intention to kiss or screw him, but rather outright tells him to stop seeing Yuki for her own good. This seems to contradict her behavior up till now, in which she kept calling Touya more and more often…

Later, Eiji indeed reveals that he’s planning to star Yuki in some big event. However, the rule is that each production can only be allowed to submit one idol, so yeah: he pushes Rina aside for Yuki. In response to this, Rina declares that she’s going to start her own production, and move away from her brother. Rina indeed seems like the most stable member of the cast (okay, that’s not saying anything, really), but that also may have been because she’s the most mysterious at this point. We hardly ever know what she’s thinking, are we? Did she work with her brother for so long because it were his connections that allowed her to grow big in the first place, or is there something more to it? I mean, there has to be a reason why she’s the focus of the OP, hasn’t there?

Then there’s the matter of Touya’s father collapsed again. He seems to be fine according to Touya, but it’s gotten much harder on Misaki, who somehow ends up staying longer with him than Touya while Akira leaves prematurely. On top of that, Misaki later discovers that Touya was outright lying to her, and he’s in much worse shape than he said, even needing a pacemaker.

But yeah, one of the big complaints about the first season was simply the following: ANSWERING MACHINE! As it turns out, the creators didn’t forget this at all, Touya just didn’t have one. I wasn’t of course born in those days, but in a way I can imagine a poor student in those days, not being able to afford one. If I recall correctly, the first answering machine was marketed 3 years before. I don’t think that at that point, they were as common yet as ten years later.

And yet, even with the answering machine ready, the problems still aren’t as easily solved, like the end of this episode showed. That yelp of attention of his in the final scene can have a lot of different meanings: is he afraid that he’s going to lose Yuki? Does he finally feel remorse for his father? Or is he just lonely because he can’t see Yuki? Anyway, considering the things he’s done so far…
Rating: (Enjoyable)

Armed Librarians – The Book of Bantorra – 03

by psgels, posted in Armed Librarians - The Book of Bantorra



The more I watch this series, the more I’m convinced that it’s one of the big powerhouses this season. Even taking Darker than Black and Aoi Bungaku into account, I still keep edging to this series as my current favourite of the Autumn season, and this episode only made this show even more intriguing. It’s going to be awesome if the creators can keep this up.

This episode provided a lot of answers. We learn who the mysterious woman that appeared in the visions is: Shiron Byacornise, a girl who could foresee the future. She predicted the arrival of a major disease, however she was used by some sort of group of evil people. The reason she got hung is that she finally retaliated, and got herself hung as a sign of repent.

And I must say… the plan of the “bad guys” to get rid of Hamyuts Meseta is actually quite ingenious: they’d predict whenever she’d get near her weakness (typhoons), poison her with a deadly disease and then try to attack her. Finally we have these bad guys who don’t come up with these wimpy plans that involve sending a bunch of weak goons!

It’s also interesting: the previous episode had been setting her up as a villain, while this episode did the entire opposite: in a strange act of mercy she let a surprisingly self-conscious Meat live, and turned him back into a human. That Meat of course was Colio. She’s also a completely different character when she discovers that she becomes the hunted instead of the hunter, and starts becoming entirely nonchalant as to what’s going to happen to her.

Then there is that mysterious book guy, who still is pretty much of a mystery at this point. He just keeps handing out fragments of Shiron’s book to random people, but for what point and purpose? My guess would be that foresight comes into play again: we’ve already confirmed two people who have somehow the power to look into the future (Shiron and the mysterious guy who predicted the way the storm would travel), so why wouldn’t there be more? It looks to me like this guy is trying to change the future, and Shiron’s memories somehow are the key to it.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Summer Wars Review – 80/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews



Summer Wars is the latest highly anticipated movie from Mamoru Hosoda, the director of Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo. As expected, the movie comes with a lot of ideas, attention to detail and really attempts to innovate. It’s a very nice movie, however I didn’t like it as much as The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.

The movie basically focuses on two things: slice of life around a really big family who has come together for the birthday of its oldest member who owns a huge mansion. The other focus of the movie is some sort of science-fiction story in which the Internet has evolved into some bizarre world called “OZ”. This eventually gets hacked, and it’s up to our teen-aged lead to save the world from this threat.

And I’m sorry, but as a student computer science I just could not buy this premise. It’s utterly ridiculous and makes no sense whatsoever. While I agree that it achieves new heights in the fantasy-ish portrayal of hacking software, and I know that there’s something as artistic freedom, but this movie went completely beyond my suspense of disbelief as it turned the teen-aged leads in this movie into somehow the only ones who were able to save the world. Especially the finale hung together in a string of Deus ex Machinas.

I know I’m harsh, but this is a big-budgeted movie. Take Real Drive, released last year. It’s vision of the future of the Internet was much more creative, realistic, believable and explained, even though it also used a bit of fantasy in its premise. I appreciate the attempts of the director, you can see that he really tried, but he was too torn between creating a good story and appealing to the mainstream in this part.

Okay, so that was the bad part, now the good stuff: the slice of life. What I absolutely loved about this movie was the way the family was portrayed. Every single character was behaving realistically, even taking the ridiculous setting into account. The cast is incredibly large, especially for a movie, and the creators actually developed all the characters a bit throughout the movie. I especially liked the chaos in which a lot of things happened at the same time and everyone was doing something at the same time.

You’re definitely going to recognize the art style from Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo, and Madhouse really made sure to breathe life into every single character with some incredibly good and realistic animation. This slice of life makes this series really fun to watch. But yeah, compared to Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo, it just isn’t as powerful. The soundtrack is less impressive, and it really gets hampered by that ridiculous setting and superficial climax.

Storytelling: 7/10
Characters: 9/10
Production-Values: 9/10
Setting: 7/10

Darker than Black – Ryuusei no Gemini – 02

by psgels, posted in Darker than Black - Ryuusei no Gemini



As for the shows I’m not going to blog:
– Sasameki Koto has some interesting points, but after two episodes it looks too much like it’s going to turn into an endless “will they won’t they” storyline.

Anyway, the reason why I didn’t blog the first season was simply because it aired in what I consider the best season ever: Spring and Summer 2007; it was simply overshadowed. For some reason, I also didn’t like it when it first started out, but reading back some of my past comments, I have no idea what the heck I was thinking back then.

I watched this episode with AoShen’s subs, but I wouldn’t exactly recommend them. Their translations are way off at times and in one scene they make Hei look like a rapist. They’re really those obnoxious people who think they’re funny, but ultimately aren’t.

In any case, I really like the second season so far. Darker than Black’s premise is so rich that it can create a ton of different and interesting storylines, and that’s exactly what they did here: instead of continuing with the tried and true formula of the first season, you can see that the creators are currently exploring new territory, and yet they don’t forsake the things that made the first season so enjoyable.

The most controversial difference is of course that there are now teen-agers present, but Suou is pretty likable. She is impulsive, but this episode showed that she is in a good way: she’s willing to take action to get herself out of problems, instead of continuously getting saved like a damsel in distress. Especially in a setting in which she’s surrounded by contractors, she’s a very brave kid.

The fights in this episode were again well done, and I still love the concept in this series in which the smartest are the ones who usually win their fights, and the penalties are a very nice touch to balance these powers out, like in this episode, in which that woman needed to kiss men (yes, KISS, not “sexually interact”) in order to use her powers.

The whole mystery behind this series seems pretty interesting at this point. Shion should not have been able to walk if he indeed was a contractor, and yet he walked. My guess would be that his penalty as a contractor was just something else, and he pretended to have lost his legs in order to fool people, but the why and how is still a bit of a mystery.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Yobi – The Five-Tailed Fox Review – 82,5/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews



Well, so I finally managed to find this Korean animated movie: Yobi – The Five-Tailed Fox, otherwise known as the impossibly named “Chonnyonyeouu Yeouub”. At first sight, it’s yet another children’s adventure: mystical girl (in this case, a fox spirit) meets regular boy, the two fall in love, the two fight some sort of evil, ended with a Deus ex Machina. However, this movie makes up for the bland premise through its execution, and not just because of its nice graphics.

First and foremost, it’s a really enjoyable movie to watch. The cast of characters is full of quirky characters that at the same time don’t exaggerate their quirks, yet deliver them with subtlety. A lot of the movie is spent on diverse characters, just having fun, and the movie-budget animation did wonders in making them come alive. While it’s not the best animation you’re going to see in a movie, it definitely does the job in portraying lots of non-verbal communication between the different characters through their gestures and way of moving, and that was for me without a doubt the most enjoyable part in this movie.

Also the premise is also about the only thing generic about this movie. It’s a shame that all family-movies seem to need to follow these same rules (especially that deus ex machina ending remains annoying), but outside of that you can see a lot of creativity in the storytelling: the situations the characters are put in are very imaginative, the locations have a lot of ideas put into them, and the background art is absolutely gorgeous in their portrayal.

There are problems with the animation at times though: the characters’ expressions sometimes look a bit too much like clay figures at times, and you can see a bunch of lazy frames in which the characters are drawn cell-shaded in CG. And granted, at times some events are introduced a bit too sudden, and we still don’t know why Yobi finds humans silly, yet she walks around in a human form most of the time. Overall, it’s perhaps not the best movie to come out of Korea; they’ve done a story better with Oseam, and better-looking graphics in Wonderful Days, but nevertheless Yobi is a very enjoyable family movie with an excellent characterization.

Storytelling: 8/10
Characters: 9/10
Production-Values: 8/10
Setting: 8/10

Umineko no Naku Koro ni – 16

by psgels, posted in Umineko no Naku Koro ni



A very solid episode this time, and instead of the chaos of the past few episodes, it was surprisingly slow-paced as it showed the aftermath of what happened in the previous episode, as well as develop the current storyline even further.

The past few episodes also completely changed how you should look at this game that Battler and Beatrice have been playing. Looking back, Beatrice’s plan right now is indeed pretty clear: she had the scenario of this mysterious person killing everyone but five (including him/herself) of the Ushinomiya Family + Staff, and she twisted those events around to make them seem like magic with some sort of illusion. Apparently she thought that as long as she did this for long enough, the ingenuity of this mysterious killer would go unnoticed and Battler would be forced to accept that witches are real. It indeed seemed like a nice, though one-sided plan at first, but like the past episodes showed: there’s no way you can get a raging bull to shut up, just by yelling at it.

However, with the new Beatrice, this is completely different: why would the new Beatrice want to bother faking the deaths when she can just as easily kill people herself? Is this world perhaps a copy of the original world where Meta-battler came from, or something similar, and the witches have the power to play with the rules just as long as they match what really happened? We now know that Beatrice did everything in order to be accepted in the outside world as a witch, which indeed seems to signify that she had no powers in the world Meta-battler came from but instead of the worlds she created herself, and of which Eva-Beatrice is now a part of.

However, at the same time I wonder: remember how in the first episode, Battler’s father said that he was probably going to get killed the next day. Back there, he knew that something fishy was going on, and he was going to die, however there’s no sign of that here, even though this arc is supposed to focus on the adults. That means that not just the order of victims is different for each arc, but even before that they differ slightly… In any case, I also liked the extra bit of info on Battler’s parents: this episode really gave a bit more character to them, since they’ve stayed pretty much in the background until now, being immediately killed off and all.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Oh and regarding spoilers, my patience has run out right about now. DO NOT TALK ABOUT THE EVENTS THAT HAPPEN AFTER THIS EPISODE. From now on, if I even suspect an Umineko-related comment to have spoilers of the visual novel I will mercilessly delete it. This of course doesn’t go for most people, but every week there seem to be one or two people who can’t resist to ruin the fun for those who haven’t played the games yet. Even when properly marked, it’s really hard not to look at them, and I unfortunately don’t have the software here for proper spoiler-codes.

If you want to talk about the Visual Novel, doesn’t it make sense to look for a forum or blog that discusses the Visual Novel instead of the anime?