Author: psgels

Bonen no Xamdou – 25

by psgels, posted in Bonen no Xamdou



Short Synopsis: Akiyuki vs. the Hiruken Emperor
Episode Rating (that “overall entertainment value” was beginning to sound cheesy…): 8/10 (Excellent)
So far, an excellent finale, if only because the animation surpassed itself this episode yet again. That fight scene between Akiyuki and the Hiruken Emperor was downright beautiful. This episode also worked really well on the emotional level. The big question is obviously going to be: can everything in this series come together in that final episode? We’ve already seen that this series is great at building up, but is it also good at a conclusion?

Now that the series has reached nearly its ending, it’s time to start looking at the overall picture. I think that the big flaw of this series is that there wasn’t enough time put into all the different kinds of ideas that the creators put into the setting. While the creators focused a lot on the setting in terms of the effects that war can have, even the battles that look small on a large scale will have people losing their lives. Though the whole deal with the Xam’d and Hiruken Emperor could have been more fleshed out. Ideally, this should have been a series with 39 episodes. Because of that, this episode had quite a few random powers being pulled out of thin air, most notably Sannova’s plans to solve everything. In the end, this isn’t the next Seirei no Moribito, though it’s one of the closest I’ve seen to it.

And yeah, it seems that Furuichi is really dead now, otherwise the creators would have at least shown some hints that the guy is still alive. I personally love it when creators pull these random deaths were it only becomes clear that the person in question is dead afterwards. Seriously, more people should play with the Golden Rule of Anime like that. Still, talking about deaths. I do hope that the creators aren’t killing just for the sake of it. This episode, yet another one goes down, but the meanings of each of those deaths are getting more and more insignificant. Especially since all the cute girls seem to be the ones who are going to survive in the end while most of the adults are getting killed off like flies.

Casshern Sins – 17

by psgels, posted in Casshern Sins



Short Synopsis: Our cast arrives at the place where Luna supposedly was born.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
Nothing short of an awesome episode. Not only does Leda finally get her development, turning her from a dull character into a great one, it also pushes the plot also gets pushed into an entirely new direction.

So, let me get this straight: Leda once was pregnant!? So Ouji’s research did succeed, apparently. If I understood things correctly, she entrusted her child to Luna, who would grow it in some sort of artificial womb (probably to guarantee the survival of the infant), but along the way something went wrong and her child died. It turns out that she was after some sort of secret that Luna left behind. I’m not yet sure for what kind of motive, but in this episode when she’s this close to attaining it, she simply loses control of herself. I’m beginning to think that Casshern and Leda’s emotional stability are inversely proportionate to each other: Casshern has calmed down a lot since the first few episodes (as noted by Luna and Ouji in this episode), while the only emotional support Leda received was from a power-hungry Dio.

In the end, this “secret” was hidden inside three child robots, that Luna left behind at her birthplace. At this point, we’re not sure what its purpose is, but Ouji is going to find out. For that, however, he was forced to break up with Ringo, which made for a really emotional break-up scene between the two. I also wonder: those children referred to Luna as their mother, but also talked about a father, who has long since died. I can’t imagine anyone who fits that bill, other than that the children somehow misheard about either Dune’s or Braiking Boss’ death or something. Also, that one comparison they made with Leda and Luna is also very interesting, hinting that there’s much more to Leda still.

Also, this part is what I’m a bit unsure about, but if I’m not mistaken those children also revealed something about the concept of immortality in this series: if you want to be immortal, you’ve got to know the meaning of “love”. If this is true, then it does explain a few things: Leda herself can’t understand that concept, so despite her wishes to be immortal that became apparent in this episode, she’s never going to attain her goal. Dio himself is stuck with such a woman, so the concept of love also shouldn’t occur with him. And now that I think about it, all of the robots feelings we’ve seen so far in the random stories were despair, admiration, obsession and fascination, but no romantic feelings. Luna herself somehow did understand the concept, and when Casshern “killed” Luna, he somehow understood this as well, fell in love with her and lost his memories because of it, or something similar.

Also, bad things are going to happen to Ringo, with this episode I’m sure, due to one particularly nasty case of foreshadowing where Ringo’s legs stopped working (does that mean that she really is a robot?). When this is going to happen again, Ouji won’t be there to cover up and fix it. At first sight, it’s a bit irresponsible of him to just leave her like that, but I think that the reason why he’s decided to say goodbye to her is to be able to find the solution to the destruction as soon as possible, because he knows that she’s about to suffer from it.

Sora wo Miageru Shoujo no Hitomi ni Utsuru Sekai – 03

by psgels, posted in Sora wo Miageru Shoujo no Hitomi ni Utsuru Sekai



Short Synopsis: Yumemi’s friend and her new boyfriend try to cross a river.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10 (Good)
How awesome: the animation quality hasn’t decreased at all since the first episode: it’s still as solid as ever. This promises lots of nice things for the future of this series. Anyway, this episode finishes the introduction of this series, where Yumemi decides to help Munto. It seems that she just needed a bit of time to sort out her thoughts, and the creators made use of this time by showing why she ended up deciding to help an unknown elf-guy in a weird outfit in the first place. After all, it would have been weird if she immediately decided to help this guy without ever questioning where he came from.

This episode really succeeded in portraying the strong sense of community in Yumemi and the town in which she lives. It showed that the world in which she lives isn’t some empty cardboard world that’s only good as a plot-hole, but instead it’s about people who care about each other. Yumemi doesn’t want to lose this community, and this episode did well in convincing the viewer (well, me at least) how and why she feels that way.

I wonder about the length that this series is going to get. I think that the 24-episode format would really be best for this series, so that it can fully develop its setting, and there’s actually a pretty good chance that this is going to be the case. Anime News Network lists 13 episodes already, with the thirteenth episode airing at April 7th, which is quite a strange date to end your series.

So the story isn’t anything special yet, but the potential is definitely there. I also really like the show’s style of graphics: they’re a great combination of ten-year-old-styled character-designs and creative use of modern CG. The character-designs are also among the best I’ve seen from Kyoani: sure, the outfits are a bit silly at times, but especially the characters from Yumemi’s world are simplistic yet expressive, and for once they don’t try to be overly moe, like nearly every other Kyoani series (or at least: not as much).

Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam Review – 77,5/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews



Whoa. I really thought that I’d be handing a higher rating for this series when I first started watching it. I really liked the original Mobile Suit Gundam, and this one promised to be even better. With much more solid production-values, an epic plot and all the elements that the modern Gundam series have as well, I really thought that I’d love this series, but in the end I enjoyed this series a lot less than I thought I would.

But first things first: every Gundam-series I’ve seen so far has its own parts where it’s excellent at. For Zeta Gundam, it’s its sense of location. It takes place in a setting where vehicles have yet to be able to breach the speed of light, and so it takes a while for people to get from A to B. Battles are also highly dependant of their environment, and so battles in the middle of a bunch of mountains are going to be completely different from those that take place at sea, inside a city, in outer space, etcetera. Especially the first half of this series has many varied battles, that make you want to keep watching because of this.

The problems with this series stem from the fact that it too suffers from the flaws that plague every Gundam Series, only here they’re much, much worse and much, much more stubborn. The adult side characters of this series are pretty interesting, but the teenaged male lead Kamille just keeps on whining over and over: he keeps poking his nose in other people’s business, hardly ever stops preaching his cheesy ideals and yet he’s an awesome pilot and mecha designer due to the simple excuse of being a genius Newtype.

And even when the guy does shut up, the creators make sure to replace him with yet another impulsive teenager who ignores orders and refuses to listen to others. In the second half, this becomes so bad that the teenagers literally take over the show, and the plot nearly stops moving because too much airtime is focused on all the different teenagers in this series (what happened to the adults anyways?) getting angsty and emo over each other.

This series really doesn’t have much to offer otherwise, unlike other Gundam series. The politics are pretty basic. We’ve got a bunch of sides who oppose each other, but hardly any time is spent on fleshing out the different sides. The character Quattro, for example. He’s a pretty important character in this series (the most important non-teenager one, in fact), and his political views basically are that he wants to get people into outer space. After fifty episodes, however, I’m still not sure why the guy feels that way, and what made him support these views. We are hardly given any insight into his motivations, nor the situation of the people on earth.

As usual, the anti-war themes are also prevalent in this series, but unfortunately in the end, the message simply turns into “THOU SHALT NOT KILL”, without the creativity and complexity that I’ve been used from other Tomino works. The major themes in this series were already overdone at the time when the series aired, let alone right now.

I’m not really sure what happened here. While this series must have been “the bomb” when it first aired, I think it didn’t age too well, or I simply didn’t like it as much as other series. And this isn’t coming from someone who only likes anime from after 1995: I personally loved the original Mobile Suit Gundam, which looked much older than this one, and now that I’m looking back at it, the flaws I mentioned here when I reviewed it seem pretty insignificant right now, and it’s a great example of how a great mecha series should be done. It really captured the essence of the despair that you can feel on the battlefield, while Zeta Gundam… just features a bunch of people fighting for fifty episodes. It’s a good show; some of the adult characters are really nice to watch, but the series isn’t that good.

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

Natsume Yuujin-Chou – 17

by psgels, posted in Natsume Yuujin-Chou



Short Synopsis: Natsume takes care of a strange kind of egg he finds in his garden.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
just when I thought that this series couldn’t get any more adorable after the fox-kid. This episode showed me that the creators have not lost their touch, like I originally feared, and they could actually surpass the first season one of these days.

This episode shows how Natsume takes care of an egg he finds in a nest in his garden, after the mother abandoned it. It probably was because the mother couldn’t see the egg, and therefore Natsume decides to take care of it, and eventually it hatches the cutest little youkai you could imagine. this episode was really good in displaying the strange mother-child relationship (and in Nyanko-sensei’s case it would probably be something like an uncle-child relationship) with this youkai, which they later name Tama.

And since this is a show about Youkai, the ending is a bit different from what happens in nature. When the time comes from Tama (a bird Youkai, after all) to spread his (her? After the fox-kid I’m not sure anymore) wings, s/he simply refuses to eat in order to avoid saying goodbye to Natsume, who did so many kind things to her.

One thing where the first and two seasons sort-of differ from each other is Nyanko-sensei: his banter is much more extreme than what it was in the first season, and he wasn’t exactly tight-lipped in the first season either. I guess it’s his way of warming up to living with Natsume (either that, or the writers are getting more confident and creative :P).

Mobile Suit Gundam 00 – 41

by psgels, posted in Mobile Suit Gundam 00



Short Synopsis: A-Laws launches its counterattack after last episode’s coup.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10 (Good)
The more I watch this series, the more insignificant Gundam Wing becomes. It really was one of the first series I watched, before I discovered fansubs, so its always going to remain something special for me, but the more I watch this series, the more I’m reminded at the huge obvious flaws of this series. Take the coup for example: it was there, it came from out of nowhere and the Rockefeller Foundation vanished completely into thin air when it was done: we never saw any of is characters back. No retaliation whatsoever.

This episode however showed that A-Laws isn’t giving up so easily, and even Pang Hercule’s fraction isn’t on the good side of the moral scale either: he simply wants to get rid of A-Laws, but does reckon that sacrifices have to be made. This episode overall was a unique one for this series in the way that it didn’t focus on close combat, but instead of high-scale political warfare between the two parties. A-Laws for example sends in a squad of robots that kill civilians, and then edit the image footage of this battle, to make it look like Hercule’s forces are the bastards. And at the end of the episode, they reveal yet another Memento Mori, about to wipe out the enemy forces.

It’s going to be interesting once the Innovators start involving themselves with this political polygon, but unfortunately it seems that they’re just going to sit by and watch everyone kill each other.

Jigoku Shoujo – 68

by psgels, posted in Jigoku Shoujo



Short Synopsis: Yuzuki continues to try and prevent people from pulling the string… without much success.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10 (Excellent)
Haha! Another excellent episode this time. This series’ finale promises to become better than the two previous seasons, if it’s already this busy with building up. It’s great to see Ai as the bad guy again, rather than the protagonist as the second season portrayed her. In this episode, Yuzuki really was just caught up in her own paranoia when she saw people fiddling with their mobile phones. She actually could have done something if it wasn’t for Ai who got in her way, which pretty much is a first in this season: normally she’d just use her dolls in order to get rid of any annoying people (i.e. Hajime in the first season and Kikuri in the second).

The story this episode was also quite interesting. A guy who genuinely likes a little girl sent a possible potential paedophile to hell: the guy hadn’t done anything yet, and if he wasn’t sent to hell, there’s no telling as to whether he would or would not have done something to that girl. I also have to admit: I didn’t see the ending coming until the lead character of this episode knocked over the picture frame: the potential paedophile had a girlfriend, and this girlfriend is now taking revenge on the one who sent her boyfriend to hell. Not only was it a great plot twist, but it also showed Yuzuki that preventing revenges really isn’t going to be that easy.

Now that this series is about to enter its final third, I’m really curious to see what the creators have planned for it. The first season featured some really creative cases that tested the differences between Hajime and Tsugumi to the limits, the second season revealed the background of the dolls, and in the same pattern, the third season should be about the war between Ai and Yuzuki. The question is of course going to be how far the creators are going to carry this: with already such an extreme first half of this season, what exactly are the creators planning? The past few episodes have been much more focused than the first ten episodes, but it has already focused at building up Ai vs. Yuzuki, so at this point there’s no telling what the creators are up to.

White Album – 04

by psgels, posted in White Album



Short Synopsis: Rina arranges a date for Touya and Yuki but the two keep running past each other.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10 (Good)
Well, this series continues on the same thread that it’s been setting for the past few episodes: very unpredictable, complex, hard to understand and full of subtle emotions. I’ve seen this series compared to School Days a few times, and I guess that the two are similar at their basic premises, though the big difference was that School Days was really badly written: characters went out of character just as the plot saw fit, there was hardly any attention to detail or attempt to flesh out the characters beyond their basic stereotypes.

And that’s indeed why I’m liking this series so much. The basic premise is a pretty simple one of a boy who interacts with a bunch of cute girls, but the creators really made the cast come alive, and avoid lumping their characters along with all of the thousand stereotypes that are already there. Okay, so what if they don’t know how to spell “north”, the backgrounds overall are pretty basic in this series, but in order to make up for it the foreground animation is really well done.

So, if I understood it correctly, Rina arranges a date between Touya and Yuki. However, since she calls Touya at five am he’s half awake when he hears the appointment and fails to correctly remember the time and place of arrival. At first I found it a bit strange why the guy didn’t have her cell phone number, but then I remembered that this series is set in 1986… not 2009. ^^; In any case, at the station he accidentally bumps into a middle school girl who mistakes him as a molester, so he also wastes precious time trying to get that misunderstanding straight, and at the meantime she also helps his indecisiveness at the moment.

What made this episode so hard to understand was the huge amount of small flashbacks that the creators threw in. Especially when watching raw, it is a bit confusing when suddenly characters start looking back at past events. I like this however a lot. Those flashbacks really feel like memories: they’re there, and before you know it they’re gone again. This series isn’t of long ten-minute flashbacks, but instead it presents these flashbacks as how a person would remember them. Very nice touch.

Another complex part is Rina again: what the heck is she up to? Why couldn’t Yuki arrange the date herself, and why did Rina have to phone Touya about it, at such a nonsensical time of five o’clock in the morning? What was she planning to do at the beginning of the episode, disguised and all? And how about Yayoi? I originally thought that she was simply taking on the role of the very strict manager, but her mood was completely different this time.

Birdy the Mighty Decode – 16

by psgels, posted in Birdy the Mighty Decode



Short Synopsis: Senkawa&co visit a refugee camp for a school project.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
ZOMG, is this really the same Birdy the Mighty as the first season? That first season was a nice series and all, but the teen-aged romances got into the way, with especially Senkawa being annoying. And here the second season comes and it’s been consistently awesome so far, with still no signs that the series has hit its height!

This episode may not have been as dark as the previous one (there was quite a bit of comedy there), but nevertheless it was a very important one: it showed where the people who lost their homes thanks to Nakasugi ended up, and with such detail! It’s awesome to see that the creators take their time to show these things: it shows that this isn’t a show where buildings are simply made out of cardboard: if you destroy a building once, it’s simply happens to be a building where no people live and magically disappear by the next episode. It’s simple, but I see many series forgetting this. It really adds more believability to the setting.

And yet again, this episode featured some gorgeous animation. Especially the scene where Natoru got beaten up by those punks was downright brutal, but also the quiet scenes were full of life (and really reminded me of Noein’s animation, which is ALWAYS a good thing ^^;). It’s also amazing how much depth the relationship between Natoru and Birdy already has. As it turns out, Birdy always used to save him when they were kids, and it looks like this still hasn’t changed a bit now that they’ve grown up, even though Natoru changed so incredibly.

This really reminds me of Escaflowne (again directed by the same guy, and again one of my absolute favourites): the first half of the series was good, but didn’t exactly catch my attention, but the second half showed an incredible increase in quality. Here too: the first season was nice and all, but the second season seems to be improving on it significantly in every single way!

Tytania – 15

by psgels, posted in Tytania



Short Synopsis: Space battles? What space battles?
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10 (Good)
This series really is something different. Here we have Fan Hulic, he’s wanted by the entire country of Tytania, he’s just won a big battle against the empire, he’s seen as a hero now even more, so what does he do? He spends an entire episode staying at the house of a little girl and doing silly dances. Don’t get me wrong, this series is awesome, but SO NOT in the way I thought it’d be. XD

Because yeah, the fact remains that this would have been a pretty boring episode otherwise: Fan is depressed over the death of Lyra and sees the light at the end of this episode. It’s really one of these typical episodes that you see everywhere, just like the beach-episode or the “defeat the big bad guy”-finale-episode: they appear so often that they really get predictable and boring unless something special or extraordinary spices it up. In this episode this was Kallen and her strange yet energetic personality. And that mother of hers who doesn’t find it strange for her teenaged daughter to bring a strange man who’s about twice her age home of course. ^^;

And Bertrand! The poor bugger actually survived! The creators of this series really love to bring people back from the dead, only to let them struggle like a fish on dry land for an episode before fileting them for real. In this episode he’s given a final chance to find Fan Hulic, but instead of immediately arresting the guy, Idris commands him to wait things out for a bit longer. This allows Fan to escape before the forces to defeat him can even properly arrive. And that’s saying a lot, since Fan really wasn’t that focused on fleeing this episode.

Oh, and to close off. I don’t often praise this series for its gorgeous visuals, but I do have to say that this episode featured some pretty backgrounds. Could it actually be that the creators saved the biggest part of the budget for this series for the second half? Now that’s a new one.