Author: psgels

All right, one more moe-series before I’m going to dive into some of the more obscure stuff again. When Air starts, it’s typical Kyoani: there’s the sarcastic male lead without any responsibilities, there’s the shy girl without any friends, the sick girl, the smart girl, the spunky parent, lots of physical comedy is used during the lighter conversations, the females have overly large eyes, strange magical things happen, etc, etc. But damn; it’s such a sweet story.

Like Clannad, Air starts out predictably: there are three main girls, and the lead guy hops from one girl to the other and watches her story unfold, only to become something completely different with the second half. Clannad decided to drop the supernatural stuff and focus on its characters and slice of life instead, and as it turns out, Air did the complete opposite: the side-characters get dropped completely, and instead it develops into tear-jerking mystery-series. There’s one particular plot-twist that really sets this series apart from every other dating-sim adaptation, though. It involves the lead guy, but I’ll refrain from mentioning it for the sake of spoilers.

Let me just say that Air is the perfect choice if you’re looking for a sappy drama as well. I personally couldn’t stop crying in the final two episodes, even though a similar set-up in Kanon left me completely bored. Simply said: Air has been the best eroge adaptation and Kyoani-series I’ve seen, and successfully removed some of the bias I had towards both the genre and the animation studio.

Peculiar in this series is the magic system. Like Clannad, it’s never really explained properly. Things just happen and get blamed on the magic that happens to be there, and the creators just leave it to the imagination of the viewer to try and make sense of it. Somehow, it works: the things that aren’t explained aren’t of the kind that really needs to be explained, but if you like your anime to be complete, then you will end up disappointed.

Overall, I think that Air is a series that you’ll either love or hate. The final episode is also a recap, which in a way is the best place for such a thing: you can just skip it, without needing to worry about that possible two minutes at the end of it that might or might not contain new important footage, since the story already finished anyway. My only real problem lies within the first episode, I guess. The male lead sure happens to walk into and befriend the right people, but there have been so many series that made the same mistake that I’m not going to hold this against this series.

I think that my biggest beef with Kyoto Animation was that when I was seriously trying to give them a chance, despite their huge hype, it rewarded my patience with Kanon’s Makoto-arc and Lucky Star, which both bored me to tears. As it turns out, those were just the worst works of the studio (in my opinion, at least), just how every animation company has its good and bad series.

Overall, Air is more than just a story and characters. It’s got something surreal added to it that makes it special, along with a terrific cast of characters for a 12-episode series. It’s got the best male lead of any harem I’ve seen thus far, and despite the number of plot-holes, I loved watching it. It’s series like this one that show the power that 12-episoded series can have, and thinks beyond the box. The first half keeps the viewer nicely busy with random stories, only for the second half of the series to develop into something really special.

Whoa, I might as well start this review in the same way as I did with my Rocket Girls Review: I really need to be more careful on choosing which series I want to drop. When sola originally aired, I basically dumped the series after episode one, without giving much thought to it. If I recall correctly, I dropped it because the characters looked too moe. Little did I know that I was ignoring a great mystery-series.

Sola indeed starts off slow, but it’s a series that carefully builds up its storyline until its own climax. Every episode, a little bit of what’s going on is revealed to the viewers, while the rest of the airtime is filled with how the different characters live their daily lives, and are affected by this storyline. There is a lot of symbolism at the sky, and even though the graphics may not look like anything special, the soundtrack has a sort-of soothing feeling.

The end result is excellent. In the final third of this series, the whole story comes together like a charm, with a number of excellent plot-twists and a surprisingly great ending for such a series. The characters have done a pretty good job of bringing this series alive, and it’s partly thanks to them that the finale turned out so well.

There are a few problems in this series, though. When you start looking at the details, a number of small plot-holes appear that could easily have been answered. Things like, where did Mr. Goatee get such a fancy sword? How did he learn about Matsuri, and other things I can’t reveal due to spoilers. This series, however, is at its worst when it tries to be funny, because quite frankly, nine out of ten cases, it isn’t. This becomes especially apparent in one of the DVD-specials, which degenerates into a boring pool episode.

Overall, Sola is another reason why Spring 2007 was an awesome season for me. From the outside, it looked like your regular dull harem series, so I never suspected there to be anything deeper beneath it. This is just one of these reasons why I need to give everything a chance, no matter how dull the premise looks. The mystery in sola was excellent, and despite a few flaws here and there, I’m happy to have watched this series.

Vampire Knight is probably the closest you can get to a gothic anime. It’s dark-themed, lots of black, there are vampires, et cetera, et cetera. If you like your main dish to consist of angst and bishies, then look no further, because Vampire Knight has lots of it. Unfortunately, that’s also where its problems lie…

Angst can be beautiful if used well, but it can be disastrous if abused. It works best as support, or a stepping stone towards something bigger. Vampire Knight doesn’t seem to realize this, and delivers its angst with buckets at a time. The result is that nearly every episode can easily be summarized by “angst, angst, angst, bishies, angst, angst, angst, angst, et cetera”. There’s hardly anything else!

Because of this, it was indeed only a matter of time before Vampire Knights would enter the realms of cheese. It started out solid enough, but eventually, once Ichiru arrived the sinking ship was beyond rescue. Cheese can also come in good (Suteki Tantei Labyrinth, for example) and bad (the latest episodes of Code Geass come to mind as well), and the cheese here unfortunately kept edging for that nasty bad side.

I wish that there was at least something I could praise this series for, but I can’t get much further than to say that it’s been a very consistent series. For each episode, you know that there’s going to be angst and bishies, and thankfully the plot is interesting enough to have some potential for that second season that’ll arrive in October, but if you’re looking for quality entertainment, you’d better look somewhere else.

I really need to be more careful on choosing which series I want to drop. When Rocket Girls first aired, I lasted four episodes until I gave up. I mean, it was about a space-agency that plucks a random girl off the streets in order to make her an astronaut; I was sceptical from the start. I tried to give it a few chances, but the first four episodes were mostly about the female lead Yukari being the teenager that she is, and disagreeing with everything. I predicted that these training missions would take until episode 10 or something, so that the final two episodes could launch her off into space, and that didn’t seem like worth the effort to me.

Well, that’ll teach me to make baseless predictions… as it turns out, those first four episodes were just proper build-up and Yukari ended up in space in already the fifth episode. The whimsical nature of the first few episodes is only because a major theme in this series is the contrast between responsibility and irresponsibility. I’m glad I went back to this series, as it turned out to be pretty enjoyable.

With the biggest strength of course being the characters: they’re pretty nicely developed for a 12 episodes series. Yukari may be a hard character to warm up to, but once she gets past her moments of teenage angst, she really starts shining. There’s an overall good chemistry between the different members of the cast, the side-characters also have defined personalities that make them come alive.

There’s one little issue with the voice-acting, though. After the first half of this series, a third main character shows up, and her voice is way too high-pitched for her own good, which tends to break the flow of this series a bit. The rest of her character is fine, but her overly squeaky voice made her my least favourite character in this series.

The creators obviously simplified the setting a lot, when compared to real-life rocketry, in order to make it not get in the way of what’s really important in this series: the characters. It was also a solid way to not get lost in its own techno-babble. Still, they overall did a pretty good job in coming across believable. This series has a lot of similarities with Sky Girls, and if you liked one, you’ll probably like the other.