Author: psgels

xxxHolic – 39

by psgels, posted in xxxHolic, xxxHolic Shunmuki



Well, in case you haven’t heard yet: they’re planning to make the next xxxHolic OAD, to air in 2010. Aand I guess that this episode is the point where xxxHolic stops being xxxHolic, and starts becoming Tsubasa Chronicle’s back-up show (which I assume to have its next OVA announced soon as well). I expected this episode to deal too much with TC, but in the end there was only a small bit about Sakura, and thank goodness there was still lots of WatanukixDomekixHimawari.

The way in which Domeki kept waiting for Watanuki for about six hours was a bit repetitive, but on the other side we can finally see Himawari’s development kicking off. There is this unique triangle between the three of them, in which Himawari is finally ready to crawl out of her shell. The scene with Sakura was also surprisingly solidly done, and neatly answered some questions that Tsubasa Shunraiki left hanging.

But yeah, there were continuity issues as well. Was I the only one surprised at the Rain Sprite’s sudden change of hair-color, and nobody noticing it? That’s really the big problem with the xxxHolic and Tsubasa anime series: the really bad management. When the decision was made to animate these two series, nobody really bothered to look at the big picture. There was nobody who took charge and thought about how they could make this work best. Instead there were too many parties that took too much assumptions: Bee-Train assumed that CLAMP wouldn’t mind it if they went with their own story since the manga hadn’t finished yet, CLAMP assumed that Bee-Train would simply follow the manga’s storyline for three seasons, Production IG assumed that there were not going to be any Tsubasa Chronicle references, so they left all of those out. And so the continuity became a complete mess when they tried to recover these mistakes. For people who haven’t read the manga like myself, anyway.

In any case, I’m not in the mood of writing a review for all of these different series, OVAs, et cetera, but I will provide this list of my opinion on the various adaptations of the franchise:
– Tsubasa Series 1: solid manga-adaptation with strong characters, although it moved really slooow.
– Tsubasa Series 2: lots of fillers that were really fun to watch at times (my favourite being the chibi-episode), and just okay at others, but really ruined the continuity of the series, up to the point at which Clamp made Bee-Train return to one of the previous worlds to show that dead people can’t be brought back to life.
– Tsubasa Movie: for some reason I rated it really highly, but thinking back it was just a boring filler that really wasn’t anything special.
– Tsubasa Tokyo Revelations: Awesome visuals, though tried to cram a bit too much story in too little time.
– Tsubasa Shunraiki: blatantly skips two very important manga-arcs, making it impossible to follow for non-manga readers like myself, and the chapters that were animated were rather boring and hardly anything developed.
– xxxHolic Movie: awesome mystery-movie that even though it has nothing to do with the continuity, stands out with really imaginative visuals and very naturally evolves and lets the viewer guess what the heck is going on.
– xxxHolic Series 1: excellent series about modern folklore, discussing a wide range of thought-provoking topics.
– xxxHolic Kei: while still about modern folklore, the characters become much more central and this series was an awesome character-study of the three main leads.
– xxxHolic Shunmuki: the weakest part of xxxHolic to be honest, but that’s mostly because the others were simply that good. Mostly building up for future OVAs.

Rating: * (Good)
The plot didn’t really interest me, though I really liked Himawari’s growth.

07-Ghost – 12

by psgels, posted in 07-Ghost



I really don’t get it. I’m really starting to agree with the criticisms against this show: for the past twelve episodes, Ayanami an his henchmen hardly did anything other than turning people into ghouls and having Frau kill them. Teito turns out to be the key to either saving the world or destroying it, and because of that he’s exceptionally talented when handling magic. Been there, done that.

An yet every single time I’m ready to dismiss this show, I watch another episode and it violently drags me back into its fanbase. 07-Ghost sucks and rocks at the same time. This episode again wasn’t that special on the plot development: we see a new woman who also turns people into ghouls, Ayanami in his turn also starts killing more people with ghouls. Teito develops his power even more, like he did in the past episodes and his new roommate obviously turns out to be his the guy from the previous episode and they spend the episode bickering.

So why the heck did I like this episode so much if it was so formulaic? I’m still not sure myself, but I do have to say that the art in this episode really looked awesome at the times when the bad guys did their stuff. While the animation of this series has never really stood out, the art really has been consistently solid, with a number of greatly drawn money shots. I looked up who the animation director of this series, and I finally understand why the art in this series looks so good: the animation is done by the same guy who did directed the animation of Amatsuki. That too was a powerhouse of great shots and camera-angles. While his work here on 07-Ghost is admittedly much less impressive than what we saw on Amatsuki, you can definitely see the similarities. It’s also interesting how this guy’s works didn’t really stand out before he dealt with Amatsuki, but it’s very interesting to see that from that point on, his works became significantly better (also note that he was the one who animated parts of the Blade of the Immortal OP).

In any case, I’m also surprised that I’m still laughing at the characters’ quirks in this series. Usually at this point of a comedy, when the characters haven’t been developed properly the series in question just stops being funny, and yet I’m still enjoying this series immensely.
Rating: * (Good)
Very nice visuals and a yet again a really enjoyable building-up episode.

Shangri-La – 12

by psgels, posted in Shangri-La



I really must say, that despite the rocky start Shangri-La is quite possibly turning into one of my favourite series this season. If it wasn’t for the likes of Phantom and Konnichiwa Anne, I’d be sure of it. As messy as the beginning episodes were, as solidly everything is coming together at the moment. It just shows how series can completely change for the better as they go on.

I think what sets this show apart is that for this season, it has managed to find the best combination between a complex multi-layered and epic plot, great aesthetics and audio and a very varied and coloured cast of characters, and yet it doesn’t drag or go too fast. I really hope that this can continue on in its second half. It relies a bit too much on coincidences at times, but it’s really nothing serious to get in the way of what’s really important. It’s not necessarily the best at one front, it may have some rough edges, but when combining everything together the picture really makes for a top-notch series.

This episode again had lots of revelations. Indeed, Mikuni is not unique: Kunihito and Kuniko posses the same power that she does. This is why Ryouko was so interested in her, and why she had Kunihito’s personal data blocked (it’s also a nice touch that all three of them have “Kuni” in their names). I’m really going to wonder what kind of impact that’s going to have on Mikuni: she obviously of the three of them is the easiest to manipulate, but there has to be another reason as to why Ryouko is so interested in Kuniko: if she can already read Atlas through Mikuni, then why does she need all three of them?

This episode also marks the end of Sayoko, as she gets arrested from trying to hack in the Atlas server in order to try and find out this information. This means that Miiko is going to have to take care of Mikuni. And speaking of Miiko, it’s great to see how far she’s already developed: now that she doesn’t have Momoko anymore and instead is going to be the one who needs to protect, she’s proven to be a really strong and dependant character, and ended up saving Momoko that way.

For Kuniko, it’s also good to see that she didn’t choose to become the leader of the Metal-age just to save Momoko, but instead because she really doesn’t agree with Atlas’ principles. She even says in this episode that the mission that they’re going to undertake has the priority above saving Momoko (but of course, it never gets to the point for them to save her because she already escaped on her own).

Oh, and Karin was downright adorable in this episode. Especially when she ran into Kuniko, who recognized her from the time she accidentally hacked into Karin’s server. Seeing her shopping and walking around in a bear-suit was just awesome.

And on a side-note: it’s interesting how the names of Atlas are all related to Greek mythology: we have Atlas as the main organization, Zeus as their main server, then there’s Medusa as their oracle. The names don’t really relate to the stories that their mythological figures had, but then again, I don’t think that such an obvious level of symbolism is needed anyway.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
Lots of stuff happened again in this building-up episode.

Natsu no Arashi – 12

by psgels, posted in Natsu no Arashi



If you consider this episode as a regular episode, it rocked. It closed off the Yayoi and Kanako arc really nicely: in the end all the conflict came from a simple misunderstanding: the two of them simply didn’t know that they can remain in existence as long as they remain close to a person from the current age, and so they decided to steal Arashi’s existence as a means to keep existing. It then proceeds with a little more Jun-jokes when one of her friends protects her secret by claiming to be her girlfriend, and the rest of the episode develops HajimeXArashi by bringing a bit of tension in their relationship by introducing a guy who turns out to have been saved by a future Arashi in the past. All in all, a pretty good episode.

However, this was supposed to be the semi-final episode, and there was no hint of a conclusion in it, or even a build-up for that conclusion, meaning that either the creators are going to stuff the entire conclusion into just one episode, or simply going to end the show by ending with just another manga-chapter without concluding anything. It’s such a shame, really. This would have been a perfect opportunity for the creators to go with an anime-original ending. I know that Shinbo can do it if he wants to, but to do it all in just one episode is really going to push it.

But ah well, who knows whether or not it’s going to turn out awesome or not. Who knows, Shinbo is so unpredictable that he might actually pull it off. In any case, this episode was heaps of fun as usual, and that ending is going to have to be really bad if it wants to completely ruin this series.

Rating: * (Good)
Not the most perfect semi-final episode, but standalone it rocked.

Konnichiwa Anne – 12

by psgels, posted in Konnichiwa Anne



Well, there you have it: Anne’s first day at school, or 20 minutes of Anne making a fool of herself in front of her classmates. While in the original series, she was quiet in classes, she obviously didn’t have those restraints as a six-year-old. This episode was really embarrassing to watch at times, but really: it’s typical of Anne to do such a thing.

As this is one of these episodes in which Anne rambles on and on, I’m not going to translate every sentence she says, but I’m just going to summarize the main points, in an attempt to retain my sanity. The episode starts with Anne’s first day at school. She gets ready for school while at the same time trying to take care of the kids, but she’s too excited to really care about it. Horace and Edward don’t seem to be going to school as well, on a side-note.

Johanna gives Anne her lunch (an apple and two cookies). A walk to school takes about one hours, but Anne doesn’t seem to mind. When she arrives at the school, she immediately starts comparing the most popular girl to a pretty doll (yeah), after which she gets called by Henderson, her teacher, who is all excited to see her. When it’s time for Anne to introduce herself, her classmates obviously make fun of her because of her incredibly long-winded introduction-speech, and how she’s never been to school before that point (and her red hair, of course). The first class is spelling, and Anne shows that she already knows how to write down the alphabet (courtesy of Elisa).

The popular girl’s name turns out to be Mildred, whose father seems to be the mayor of Marysville. They try to annoy Anne during the break, but Anne is too busy with the new things she learned. They then try to give her a bit of a tip of how she could use Randolf(another kid in the class)’s dictionary if she ran into a word that she doesn’t know. So obviously, they pick up Randolf’s dictionary and Anne gets blamed in the end for taking it.

At the end of the lessons, it turns out that the next day history is going to be the subject (unfortunately, Anne can’t come to school that day), and the day after that is going to be a test. Because it’s Anne’s first day at school, she doesn’t have to take it, but she still takes the test seriously. Especially when Mildred pops up and tells her that the test is going to be about India’s history (instead of a simple spelling test). She gives Anne an incredibly complex book to study (which Anne obviously can’t understand).

So Anne ends up asking Eggman’s help with India’s history, and she spends the next few days trying to understand it. Unfortunately, in the meantime Noah gets sick and so Anne alternates between studying and trying to take care of Noah. So at the day of the test, she of course gets really surprised when she prepared for something completely different. Anne’s classmates are doing so-so (especially Randolf screws up), and when Anne gets her turn to try she also fails to spell “chocolate”. Mildred of course jumps in to correctly spell it, and Anne feels pretty down.

The next test is calculating, and like expected Anne has a lot of trouble with the answers (just like the majority of her class aside from Mildred, by the way). Mildred gets asked to write down the answers on the blackboard, though Anne then notices that she made a mistake (100 x 0 = 1000). Everyone in class was so convinced that Mildred could never make a mistake like that, so they didn’t even notice the mistake she made. Anne in the meantime comes with an anecdote she picked up from Eggman when she was studying India to explain why Mildred’s answer was wrong.

Because of that, Anne gets to tell the class a bit about the things she learned about India and the episode ends.

Well, that’s the World Masterpiece Theatre for you. I remember how Anne of Green Gables devoted an entire episode of Anne and her best friend, playing mother and father in the woods. It’s obviously that those things are nowhere near my interests… but it’s so incredibly charming.

And yet it’s episodes like this that really remind me why the World Masterpiece Theatre series is so awesome. There are so few series that have as detailed and colorful characters as they show here. They may be boring at times, but these anime really showed me what a wonderful genre slice of life can be.

I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t miss Porfy or Les Miserables: both two brilliant series with some incredibly well fleshed out and developed characters, and both really were unique anime. Konnichiwa Anne in return doesn’t have that overarching plot that these two had: it simply tells the story of an overly energetic and talkative girl called Anne. And yet it shows that even with that, the WMT-series can be awesome.

I’m really curious what the creators have in store for episode 13. In Porfy and Les Miserables, it both was the episode that really set the bigger plot in motion: Porfy had its earthquake, while in Les Miserables it was the point in which Jean picked up Cosette. Obviously such a thing isn’t going to happen here, but I still wonder whether the creators here have some sort of climax planned. If they have, then this episode showed no signs of it.

One issue I did have with this episode was that the animation looked off at times. Faces were more distorted than usual, it seemed. I also believe that Anne suddenly learning a lot about India was a bit overplayed, but it definitely remained charming in the end.
Rating: * (Good)
A rather uncomfortable episode about Anne making a fool of herself in her first day at school, but that’s what storytelling is: evoking emotions from the viewer.

Guin Saga – 12

by psgels, posted in Guin Saga



For a moment there, I thought that this was going to be a relatively uneventful build-up episode, but boy, was i wrong. This episode may have lacked a bit of fighting, but instead it was all about the characters. And now that a new arc has started, it’s great to see that some of them are getting some quality development. It’s even better to see that the ones with the most development are the ones who were the most useless and incompetent in the Nosferas arc. Yes, I’m talking about Amnelis and Remus.

It’s awesome to see that Remus is finally starting to realize that he’s been bloody useless throughout the entire series, and I love how the creators were specifically using the Nosferas arc to show what a weakling he was. It seems that his character will be much more important in the upcoming arc, and I’m interested to see how his character is going to develop.

Amnelis on the other hand develops in a completely different way, when she falls in love with… Ardnaris, whom she was supposed to be engaged with. I’m not exactly sure how he managed to pull that off by getting on the Mongol’s good side, but he seems to be enjoying it. Amnelis on the other hand is in for some interesting development that really is going to change her majorly. I’m still not sure whether this is going to be for the better or worse, but I’d love to find out.

This episode also introduces the three mystery characters that suddenly popped up in last week’s OP. They turn to be related to Ardnaris, it seems. The bond-haired guy seems to be his brother, while the black-haired couple also seem among his allies.

Rating: ** (Excellent)
Remus and Amnelis’s character-development? Count me in!

Cross Game – 12

by psgels, posted in Cross Game



Ah, the match is over, and Cross Game is back to what it’s best at: Slice of Life. After sitting through an entire baseball match that lasted for three full episodes, even though it was just a practice match, showed me that that was the flaw of this series: during these matches, there simply is no room for this series to show what it’s really good at, and when this continues for three episodes in a row, it does get annoying. And I think that that was the main difference with Touch: Touch excelled in its matches, while its slice of life moments are vastly inferior to Cross Game’s.

And that’s why I’m really glad to see the slice of life back, because it really is as witty as ever. We get introduced to a new character, one of Senda’s childhood friends. It’s good to have this guy growing into something more than a comic relief character, and this episode definitely portrayed him as a real person. Definitely a plus. Anyway, that friend of his keeps bugging Aoba for a match, even though Aoba really doesn’t care. It’s also interesting that Aoba has no intentions of joining a high school with a girl’s baseball team. I really wonder what’s behind that, if she’s so much into the sport.

Another running thread through this episode was Wakaba’s birthday, and Kou and Aoba are the ones who still remember it, both in their own ways. Aoba has bought some flowers to put on her grave, while Kou seems be completing a list of birthday gifts that Wakaba compiled when she was still alive, apparently. The problem however is that he doesn’t have enough money, and so we see him throughout the episode accompanying the baseball manager and her friends in order to get his hands on the item Wakaba wanted.

What this episode also did was make the town this series plays in feel alive. They’re these nice touches, like when Daiki came out of Wac Donalds and saw Kou as a passer-by, or how there are at least two high schools in the area. Alone they may seem pretty insignificant, but when all combined together, they give a pretty good feel of the place that Kou and the others live in, and you can see that when characters aren’t the main focus of the screenwriters, they still are doing things on their own, instead of waiting for the camera to focus back onto them.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
Thankfully the baseball match is over and this show has returned to where it’s best at.

Full Metal Alchemist – Brotherhood – 12

by psgels, posted in Full Metal Alchemist - Brotherhood



I’m noticing something pretty weird with this series. Scenes that were nearly the same as in the first season suddenly turn out to have much more impact when compared to when I watched them for the first time. I should be getting bored right now, for having to rewatch the same thing all over again, and yet I’m not…

So yeah, this episode tells the Izumi arc. It’s pretty similar to the original series one, with again some notable differences: Ed and Al never went back to the island they were dropped off at (I’m not really sure why they wanted to go back there so badly… probably nostalgia), and so they never met Wrath. We also learn that in Brotherhood, Ed hates his father even more than he did in the original series, and Hohenheim in his turn looked nothing like the caring yet stupid father who simply was too long away from home for some reason.

But the scene that hit me the most was where Izumi discovered that Ed and Al had tried to revive their mother, and the way she related their hardships to her own loss of her dead-born child. She didn’t bash them into the ground, like I remember her doing in the original series, but instead she immediately recognized that she should have told the two of them about how one should never attempt to revive the dead.

It’s interesting how the homunculi have played such a small role so far. At this point in the original series, we had Wrath wreaking havoc, there was Greed (who also didn’t show up yet), and they were much more involved with the storyline. Here, all they did was preventing people from getting too close to the philosopher’s stone. At the same time I’m also wondering whether Izumi’s teacher still is the same person, and whether she still also is the one behind the homunculi like she was in the first series (if you’ve read the manga, please don’t spoil, because I’d like to find that one out through watching the series ;)).

Rating: ** (Excellent)
Izumi’s proper introduction, and despite the lack of action a great addition to this series.

Koukaku no Regios Review – 70/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews



I was pretty excited when I first saw Koukaku no Regios, or Chrome-Shelled Regios as it’s called in English. It promised a grand setting with many different sides to it, a large cast of different characters and a really interesting sense of mystery that all seemed to lie behind it. That’s why it’s such a shame to see what kind of an utterly mismanaged mess it turned into.

Take the following analogy: suppose you have a beautiful multi-layered birthday cake. Koukaku no Regios, instead of focusing on this entire cake just keeps staring at one of the candles, while hardly having any attention for the delicious rest of it. It presents a post-apocalyptic world, in which people can only live withing walking cities. It’s full of strange creatures like glowing goats, mutant bugs, who all have their own role and purpose, and behind the world seems a grand complot by people with dog-faces. And what does this series decide focus on? An inconsequential harem that never really gets anywhere! Talk about a let-down.

If the love polygon was good, it would have been able to excuse at least something, but unfortunately it even screws up there. Basically we have our lead character Layfon, and a bunch of girls who are in love with him. Layfon has a ton of girls swarming over him, but in the end none of these relationships get any substantial development, with perhaps the exception of Nina, who only gets blander as the show goes on.

This blandness syndrome by the way can be found in more characters in this series. Felli starts out as a nice wise-cracking and witty girl, but only gets more and more generic as the series goes on. Dalsiena turns from a past-driven character into a generic side-kick, Naruki gets turned from a headstrong policewoman in useless harem-bait, Salinvan turns from a skilled mercenary into an emo kid who can’t forget the past, Harley Sutton turns from an interesting side-character into an incredibly generic one devoid of any personality, and DO NOT get me started on Savaris.

So yeah, because the main storyline pops up so late in this series, the finale simply becomes a disaster. The creators start pulling random powers out of their asses, characters who were in one episode very badly wounded are completely fine in the next one, the plot twists really come from absolutely nowhere and because the main storyline received so little attention, none of it really makes an impact and therre are SO MAY questions that are left unresolved after that final episode.

The salvation for this series that I can see is if a second season got announced. Regios has potential, and I still remain convinced of that. If a second season would come, and make optimal use of the building up that this series has provided, then it’s going to rock beyond belief. The characters who didn’t turn into paper bags were interesting enough to watch and there were definitely good parts in this series. It’s just that there was too much crap that overshadowed it. The creators never knew how to properly pace and outline their series and in a way, the one behind the series composition seems to be the one to blame for this. Yes Mamiko Ikeda, shame on you.

Storytelling: 6/10
Characters: 7/10
Production-Values: 8/10
Setting: 7/10

Phantom – 12

by psgels, posted in Phantom



Well, since I have been careful not to look at any of the promotion material for this series, I had no idea who Drei was or what she looked like. Now that we finally got to meet her, I have to say that that I really didn’t expect her to be such a little girl. Still, I like her. She’s got lots of potential for this series, and I can’t wait until the creators go in-depth with her.

The rest of this episode was pretty much the introduction of the second major arc of this series, and had Reiji walking around with a pimpin’ background tune. Really, this demonstrates how influential background music can be for a series. The background music for the first arc was very melancholic, but the hiphop soundtrack that this episode used was completely different, and it gave a totally different feel and atmosphere to this series. And that’s really typical of Bee-Train: for them, a soundtrack isn’t simply a soundtrack, but it’s very essential in telling the story.

So this obviously wasn’t meant to be an episode to stand out. The animation was really basic and simple, and in the meantime there was lots of fanservice. That sex-scene in particular was rather weird, but at least I’m glad that this series has a mature outlook on sex, rather than the juvenile and teenaged way.

And on a side-note: you don’t see that often in anime: people using the box (or however that’s called in English) instead of shaking hands. While it’s definitely inaccurate at times, you can see that the creators did spend some effort in giving the setting some subtle American influences.

Rating: * (Good)
Carol’s introduction, plus a pimpin’ build-up for the upcoming arc.