Author: psgels

Natsume Yuujin-Chou – 19

by psgels, posted in Natsume Yuujin-Chou



Short Synopsis: Natsume finds out that there’s a strange girl who doesn’t speak in his school.
Episode Rating: 7,5/10 (Good)
Oh, how rare: this arc is going to take two episodes. It sure is a haunting one: we have this girl who experimented with the occult, and in return once encountered an evil youkai. It wanted to play a little game with her: within the next 360 days, if she could catch it, it’d be her win, though if she’d fail to catch it, the youkai would not just eat her, but also everyone whose name she called. This forced her to spend the next year without talking to anyone, out of the fear that she’d accidentally call their names. That must be hell!

And it again shows how important names are for these youkai, and how screwed Natsume must have been if he didn’t meet Nyanko-sensei: what would he have done if he met that evil youkai instead? It would probably have eaten him immediately (speaking of which: nasty cliffhanger at the end. We know that Natsume isn’t exactly “eaten”, but I have really no idea what that youkai is planning to do with him).

An annoyance in this episode came from Natsume’s friends… I really expected better of these guys, but in one episode they were simply degraded into the stereotypical paper bags of the best friends of the lead character that you see in every anime. It’s all there: trying to hit on a random cute girl, and successively getting sad and angry when the lead character walks away with her. That’s really one trope that needs to stop.

Casshern Sins – 19

by psgels, posted in Casshern Sins





Short Synopsis: Casshern and Lyuze get attacked by a mysterious robot-duo.
Episode Rating: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
ZOMG, two full episodes, dedicated on nothing but Lyuze! Oh, how well this series makes use of it. This episode was simply awesome. There was surprisingly little dialogue between Casshen and Lyuze, but that’s also what made this episode so beautiful: the two of them didn’t need a lot of dialogue in order to develop the bond between them.

Speaking of beautiful, I think that the screenshots already gave some indication, but I absolutely LOVED the visuals in this episode. It felt like every single shot oozed with style, and there wasn’t even a single frame that didn’t impress me. Madhouse truly did a terrific job on animating this episode.

Anyway, about Lyuze: it turns out that my theory of love bringing immortality is wrong: Lyuze still rusts in this episode, though what’s interesting is that even though Casshen bleeds again in this episode, we never see him regenerate himself like he did a number of episodes ago, so the source of his immortality is still pretty much unknown. However, Casshern and Lyuze officially became a couple in this episode. It turns out that the entire previous episode was building up to that moment.

Then there are the two guest-characters who appeared in this episode: the female robot and her friend. It’s strange: I loved the two of them, even though we learn hardly anything about them. Their development really is minimal: they come from out of nowhere, attack, and disappear again. They only appear for what… three minutes? And yet they’re fully fleshed out for them to work. We know that they’re strong, care about each other and are obsessed with not dying.

Prime Rose Review – 75/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews


While Nagagutsu Sanjuushi was a bad example of a nonsensical anime, Prime Rose – A Time Slip of 10000 years is a good example of such a series. The result of combining Osamu Tezuka and Osamu Dezaki in a movie from the eighties is pretty weird. There are many times at which the movie simply didn’t make any sense at all, but it definitely was entertaining.

This movie too has some plot twists that simply lack build-up. We see the story about a time patrol unit who travels 10000 years into the future to save two entire cities. Why the time patrol only can send a young male and a ten-year-old brat is never answered, we’re just left to assume that things happen the way they do, and there are a few more plot twists like these.

But unlike Nagagutsu Sanjuushi, this movie has plenty of things to make up for it. The amount of imagination that went into this work is really Tezuka-worthy. The monster-designs in particular look really sweet, and you can see that a lot of creativity went into the making of this movie. That’s something I can really appreciate.

The characters are also interesting enough to keep the movie fresh, and especially Prime Rose surprised me: at the start of the movie we’re led to believe that she’s a simple damsel in distress, while she grows into a feisty warrior and the heroine of the movie. In fact, all of the major characters get enough screentime and development for the timespan of a one-hour movie. Oh, and I just have to mention the soundtrack, which is an excellent one: very varied with catchy tunes that never get in the way of the important scenes.

While nothing extremely special, this movie is a recommendation for any Tezuka-fan out there, it’s really typical of his works: not the most solid or realistic, but a whole lot of fun to watch with young-looking characters who somehow don’t end up annoying. There are a few cameos out there from his other works and Osamu Dezaki did a good job of making his manga come to life.

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

Nagagutsu Sanjuushi Review – 45/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews


Nagagutsu Sanjuushi is the second movie that Saiei released recently. It too dates from the time when there was no Studio Ghibli yet, and anime still tried to be like Disney. So, what does that mean? Talking animals, of course! Nagagutsu Sanjuushi is a western with a cat as main character. Unfortunately, it’s a lot less fun than Andersen Monogatari.

While it originally has the potential to become a good family movie, but it’s bad writing that got in the way here. This movie hardly takes any time to explain what the heck is going on. Often, characters do completely random things that make no sense at all, just to keep the story going. There’s hardly any time spent on explaining the how and why of things. In fact, this goes on so badly that NONE of the characters received any important background whatsoever. We never get to know who these people are, or why they’re doing the things they do. Especially in the case of the main character this is jarring: he’s just… there, without any possible explanation what he’s doing here or why he involves himself with the plot.

So overall, we’ve got a movie that’s a lot of bark and no bite. It’s badly written and the creators don’t care at all about continuity, and the endless stupidity of the characters doesn’t help either. Sure, I know that it’s a children’s movie, but even then you shouldn’t have characters with the intelligence of a baboon’s backside running across the screen. The only merit this movie has is one fun, but completely non-sensical chase scenes.

Storytelling: 4/10
Characters: 3/10
Production-Values: 7/10
Setting: 4/10

Mobile Suit Gundam 00 – 43

by psgels, posted in Mobile Suit Gundam 00



Short Synopsis: A building-up episode before the next big clash between A-Laws and Celestial Beings.
Episode Rating: 7,5/10 (Good)
At first I wasn’t that positive about this episode, as hardly anything seemed to happen at all. What I’m especially bugged about is how the Coup d’Etat really didn’t accomplish anything: the rebels are gone, A-Laws is back to being A-Laws. What the heck was the point of it besides killing off Sergei? I think that’s the biggest problem with the second season of Gundam 00: it’s just too damn one-sided. In the first episodes, we see the Celestial Beings fighting against A-Laws. Eighteen episodes later, and we still have the Celestial Beings fighting against A-Laws. It really hasn’t evolved that much at all.

Nevertheless, near the end of the episode I suddenly realized how good this episode was. There was hardly any fighting, but instead it focused on developing all of the major couples in this episode: Setsuna and Saji, Soma and Allelujah, Marina and the kids, Lyle and Anew (!?), Louise and Andrei, Claus and Shirin, Saji and Louise, Wang and Ribbons, Regene and Ribbons, et cetera. I especially liked how when everyone sortied, they said the names for the ones most important to them. For Setsuna this was his Gundam, and Tieria had Veda. Now that’s the reason why these two are some of my favourite characters of this series. ^^;

So yeah, while the plot really hasn’t been moving anywhere, the characters thankfully are making lots of progress, and especially Saji and Louise feel a lot less annoying compared to their stupidity in the first three quarters of the series. They’re actually preparing themselves to kill each other in the battlefield, and I like how Louise finally has a new boyfriend. It’s just a shame that she chose the third most annoying character of the cast…

White Album – 06

by psgels, posted in White Album



Short Synopsis: Touya helps Misaki with her story, while Yuki records her new song.
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
I really have hardly anything to say about this episode. It was over before I knew it, and mostly spent its time building up for the future episodes. My brain feels kind-of empty after watching this episode, which quite possibly is a good thing.

This episode was all about Tooya, spending time with Misaki, while trying to keep this a secret from Yuki. The only real cheating that Touya has done so far is with Yuki’s manager, though at the same time, I think that Yuki isn’t going to be happy when she finds out about how Touya has been spending his time with all these girls. Oh, and the creators did give Hirano Aya a small chance to sing in this episode. She did it quite well, and remained within her subtle voice. I also liked how the producers made Yuki do the song over and over. Most of the times in these idol-anime, the lead characters get these songs immediately right after one or two takes, while in reality it probably takes much longer to get a satisfying result.

Jigoku Shoujo – 70

by psgels, posted in Jigoku Shoujo



Short Synopsis: A girl who likes to send her stories to a well-known radio-host calls Jigoku Tsuushin.
Episode Rating: 7,5/10 (Good)
I really wonder what Ai is doing behind that computer of hers. “Ippen Shinde Miru… wait, let me check my e-mail first”.

In any case, we have another standard episode again, this time about teenaged girls and their idols, where we have a young teenaged girl whose hopes are crushed when she finds out that her idol simply reads a pre-written script. Well, that’s multimedia. Even “reality”-shows are written by professional scriptwriters nowadays, but it must have been quite a shock for the poor girl to find out about this.

Okay, and so I was wrong: Yuzuki most definitely isn’t going to be the next Tsugumi, this series is simply using her to build u for this series’ finale. She hasn’t done anything to stop the revenges at this point. All she’s done so far is failing. You’d think that at episode 18 she’d at least book some sort of progress, but now I’m sure that the creators are really saving the best of her for the show’s finale.

Overall, now that the finale is about to begin, it’s time to look back at the past season. Overall, the random stories in the third season have been the weakest of the three seasons of Jigoku Shoujo so far. The good thing about them is that they always picked out some extreme taboo and started playing with it. The bad thing is the lack of variety. Compared to the first season, the cases now all look like each other, while the first season had a number of very creative and surprising stories, despite the show’s formula. Nevertheless, this series never lost track of its atmosphere, and the stories never fail to entertain, so even though it’s not as good as the previous seasons, I’m not disappointed by this series at all and would love to see a fourth season. ^^;

Some quick first Impressions: Hetalia: Axis Powers, Fresh Precure and Denpateki Kanojo

by psgels, posted in Hetalia: Axis Powers, Some Quick First Impressions

Hetalia: Axis Powers

Short Synopsis: Our lead characters… are a bunch of countries.
Chance of me Blogging: 100% (yeah, because I’m already blogging it)
I’m still a bit bitter that Holland wasn’t made fun of in this series so far (especially when even Estonia has its own character), but sarcasm aside, I really liked this series. You can trust Studio Deen to come up with the more crazy mangas to adapt, and the huge amount of country references was hilarious to watch. It’s going to be interesting if this series can keep this up. As for the ones who got offended by this series: you should start poking fun at other countries yourself.

Fresh Precure!

Short Synopsis: Our lead character receives the power to become a magical girl.
Chance of me Blogging: 0% (Obviously not)
So yeah, I checked this out in the hope that it might actually be something worthwhile, but in the end I couldn’t really find anything to really make me keep watching it, although it did turn out a bit better than your generic mahou shoujo series. I particularly liked how one of the bad guys put too much sugar in his tea because he had never seen it before, and the costume design is nice enough, but overall it really doesn’t try much to set itself apart in the mahou shoujo genre. Especially the lead character just tries too hard to be funny, the mascot character too. Not to mention the abysmally animated concert scene, the the downright painful ED and how everyone conveniently disappears when a monster shows up. I could also whine about the very bad physics in this series, but hey, this is a mahou shoujo series for kids. What else could you expect?

Denpateki na Kanojo

Short Synopsis: Our lead character is a legendary king who happens to be stuck in the body of a random high school boy.
Chance of me Blogging: 40% (Perhaps)
Yeah, the way this one started definitely got me worried. Here we have a legendary demon king inside a high school boy, and guess what: a cute girl arrives from out of nowhere to protect him. Still, this OVA is good stuff. The episode was well told and pretty nicely built up with some pretty good suspense parts. The lead characters slowly grew likable, and the action doesn’t aim to be as over the top as possible, but kept all the fight subtle but believable (I love it when a character actually gets disabled when hit by a very hard and solid object). Some parts were a bit too emo for my liking, but this is going to be a pretty good OVA if the rest of the episodes can keep up this pace.

Birdy the Mighty Decode – 18

by psgels, posted in Birdy the Mighty Decode



Short Synopsis: Well… just watch the episode…
Episode Rating: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
Zomg…. what the heck happened here?! I was already expecting a lot of great stuff from the second season, but that Kazuki Akane would actually go this far… Oh my god, I still can’t believe the potential of it all. To those who were all whining about the predictability of the end of the first season, which stuffed Senkawa back in Birdy’s body. Well, let’s just say that IT WAS ALL DONE WITH A REASON!

Because of that, Senkawa has now been inside Birdy’s body for a bit too long, and the two of them have begun to merge with each other, effectively causing Senkaway’s consciousness to overwrite Birdy’s! This leads to a hilarious episode in which Senkawa has to take over Shion’s tasks, but he also lost his own real body, meaning that he’s not going to be able to show himself in front of his friends, and Birdy’s going to disappear as well.

Normally, this sort of issue will probably solve itself within the next episode or so with some quick Deus ex Machina, but this is KAZUKI AKANE we’re talking about! We’re only at the fifth episode at this point. Who knows what he’s going to pull in the rest of this series!? Something also tells me that we should be fearing for the girl in the wheelchair. She’s getting way too much along with Natoru. I just feel that something’s going to happen to her. After all, she’s the perfect bait for hostages.

And also, that was one awesomely animated fight scene!

Michiko e Hatchin – 15

by psgels, posted in Michiko e Hatchin



Short Synopsis: Hatchin meets a boy of her age at a local bookstore.
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
It’s the episodes like this one that make this series so deceptive. One episode tells a cute love story between a bunch of kids, and yet the next one can focus on the incredibly dark Michiko-storyline. This really is a very varied show. Perhaps not the most balanced one, but you’ll never know what you’re going to get with every episode.

This episode definitely focused on the cute side of this show. while Hatchin’s stories generally lack a part in the overall storyline of this series, her character more than makes up for it. In this episode she also for the first time gets to find out what it means to have a crush on someone, ,though she more shies away from it. Especially the final shot of this episode made some impact. You could see that Michiko felt Hatchin’s sadness because it didn’t work out with the boy, and yet it was done with some great subtlety so that it didn’t turn out into an endless angst-fest.

And some more random comments: nice Ergo Proxy-reference with Vincent Law the author (he seems to have written quite a few books, they were really all over the bookstore ^^;). This episode also showed that it’s got a very talented musical producer: the background music never really stood out, but it was very varied and subtle, and overall it added really well to the different scenes.

Oh, and in this episode something finally happened that made Michiko and Hatchin sound like mother and daughter: Michiko wanted to have something, (a book in this case), and asked Michiko for permission to get it. That was definitely the sign (even more than the hug at the end of this episode) that they’re growing closer together. Oh, and next week should prove to be fun: another double-episode. Woo!