Category: Series which were Dropped

Uchuu Kyoudai – 18

by psgels, posted in Uchuu Kyoudai

Well, it was a long wait, but it has finally happened: an episode dedicated to Makabe. And it worked wonderfully: not just he himself emerged as a better character from this episode, but the rest of Team B did as well, especially the fidgety guy and the bossy guy (whose names I can’t remember at the moment, unfortunately) got more depth as this episode finally focused a bit more on their personalities.

Makabe though, he really is aware of how direct he is. I love how he’s been trying, yet failing to keep the team together. It’s great for introducing a bunch of flaws for him: he is brilliant, definitely, but he also can be quite self-centered, also shown by how he replies to those women selling magic space stones. The end of this episode was really charming with the way the creators used his daughter to cheer him up again. This episode really brought balance into his character.

And in the meantime, this episode had a hell of a lot of fun, fleshing out the people from Team A. Mutta in particular was as hilarious as ever, but the rest of the cast also had their wonderful moments because of how analytic he can be. I especially liked how he was forced to scream out twice every day, and how Nitta responded after breaking the toilet. This show, just is brilliant.I thought that last year we got lucky with Kotetsu from Tiger & Bunny, but to be honest: the series is nowhere near over yet, but at this point Mutta has completely surpassed him.
Rating: 5.5/8

Sword Art Online – 04

by psgels, posted in Sword Art Online

Before I got into anime blogging, I was a member of an RPG community, focused on RPG creation. Back then I spent a lot of time fiddling with stories, level designs and gameplay (in fact, this blog started out as an experiment during that time), and during that time I also played my share of MMORPGs, so I know what it’s like to play one. And I also know that SOA brings in one major difference that makes the mindset of its players completely different: the fact that you die once your HP reaches zero.

Generally when I played, I’d run around in areas that would give me the fastest experience with the least amount of hassle. I would then turn on the auto pilot until my SP (or skill points or however it was called) run out, after which I’d probably die from a lack of healing items or efficient ways to kill monsters. Now, would I have done the same if my life depended on it? Hell no. I’d stock up on healing items and focus on running away from monsters.

In fact, it surprises me that Kirito still is alive: his playing style is incredibly risky. Apparently he was this awesome player during the beta test, but back then dying still was a momentary annoyance. I’m surprised that he managed to turn off his automatic pilot that is so prevalent in MMORPGs due to all the repetition. Someone said that in the first month, more beta testers lost their lives than new players, and I can very well believe that: these were already used to the rules of the beta, while the new players were probably extra careful.

So yeah, I’m digging this concept, I’d just wish that the plot of these past two episodes made better use of this. The concept of this episode for example was good, as it showed how the jail system evolved and how this game’s moral system is. But the characters were just boring. This yet again was Kirito interacting with the cutest girl around. Have some variety. What I find particularly annoying is how this series looks down upon the rest of the people in this MMORPG. The girl actually had friends, but she decided to ditch them and go with Kirito. The evil players? We never knew what goes on inside their heads: I see no difference between them and NPCs.

Also, why were all the monsters suddenly equipped with tentacles?
Rating: (Good)

Sword Art Online – 03

by psgels, posted in Sword Art Online

Okay, a comparison between Total Eclipse and Sword-Art Online. I waited until I had watched the third episode of SOA because Total Eclipse did only show its uglier side there. And yes, with Sword Art Online, its third installment also was the weakest so far. So, how do they compare:

Length: Sword Art Online is confirmed for 2 cours. Total Eclipse hasn’t had its length confirmed yet, but I’m going to give it the benefit of the doubt. Winner: tie.

Setting: Sword Art Online’s setting is a bit of a cross between .Hack and the Tower of Druaga, but less creative than both. It really feels like a MMORPG where the main goal is to fight monsters, but it does portray that very well. Total Eclipse meanwhile is in a setting that is somewhat like the prequel to Blue Gender, in which giant bugs come and invade the earth and entire continents have already been annihilated. SOA wins in terms of potential and detail.

Production-values: Sword Art Online is produced by A-1 and looks gorgeous during its action scenes. Yuki Kajiura made the soundtrack, and even though it’s not among her best work, it still delivers. Total Eclipse on the other hand looks ugly, sounds ugly, and the director broke down due to work overload. Winner: SOA.

Pacing: Total Eclipse took its precious first two episode to go into anime original territory in order to flesh out the lead female more. Sword Art Online… I can’t put my finger on this because I’m unfamiliar with the source material, but it feels like a lot of scenes are skipped here. This third episode was particularly bad with that, but I also disliked how they decided to skip through the first month of content of total chaos, in which everyone has to figure out for themselves how to survive in this game. Winner: Total Eclipse.

Characters: this is a big one, so I’m splitting it up in some side-categories.

Side Characters: This is where both series dropped a lot of points. It’s not like all side characters leave things to be desired: Total Eclipse had the lead female’s former classmates. They were pretty well portrayed. Sword Art Online meanwhile had that one guy of the first episode, along with the mysterious blue-haired guy. The bad stuff in Total Eclipse is its main side-cast: they are annoying, one-sided and stereotypical. In Sword Art Online, the side-cast also lacks life: it’s hard to tell who is an NPC and who is a real character. The minor ones indeed lack any personality (like the blind sheep of the second episode). Still, it does have more and diverse good ones. Winner SOA.

How on earth did these idiots manage to survive? Both series take place in a world in which it’s very, very easy to die. And yet both series have a side-cast of idiots. For Total Eclipse, the most plausible explanation would be that they all grew up in locations without war, and that they haven’t been to the front-lines like the main female character. For SOA though, I’m not sure whether I can answer that question. The party of this episode: how come they’re still alive after they blindly dive into a room they don’t know anything about? I mean, considering the setting, wouldn’t it be the most logical that the only ones to survive up to this point would be the people who are either smart or cowards? Which also makes me beg the question: why are some of these guys fighting as fast as possible? Can’t you just take your time and just raise your level on the lower floors? I mean, the first episode said that these resources are limited, but this episode’s party didn’t seem to have any trouble to find monsters to fight. Winner: Total Eclipse.

Main Character: Both main characters (for Total Eclipse I’m using the main female character, because she is the only one to have been featured in all three episodes) are angsty and gloomy, but only SOA’s main character is that to the point of being unlikable. This also can be blamed very much on the pacing: he’s there, then he joins a party, then he and a girl fall in love from out of nowhere, then she dies and he gets even more angsty. But what surprises me the most is how he had his entire party die in front of him, and yet when the chance to revive someone appears, he ONLY thinks about that one girl, and doesn’t bother to give a second thought to the other party members who died, effectively treating them as NPCs. In fact, this highlighted my biggest problem with Sword Art Online: it acts as if human life is precious, but that only goes for certain characters with important character-designs. Apart from that, it doesn’t seem to care. Total Eclipse does. Winner: Total Eclipse.

So, a mark of 3-3. Great. In the end, I’m going to blog Sword Art Online, because its flaws are less bad than with Total Eclipse, and they can be fixed with the right build-up. With Total Eclipse though, we’re going to wait for the director to have his breakdown around episode 9 or 10…
Rating: (Enjoyable)

Uchuu Kyoudai – 17

by psgels, posted in Uchuu Kyoudai

Ah, I finally got a new PC to replace my nearly broken old laptop. Finally I don’t have to worry about being unable to play files and lagging framerates (Seriously, there were times especially during flash mecha-series, in which its frame-rate just couldn’t keep up on files with normal resolution). Thankfully this is a thing of the past now.

Now, as for this episode: it finally confimed what has been clear for a while now: JAXA has sent instructions to some of the contestants to screw things up and create stress: the broken clock was meant to kill their sense of time, while the alarm at the middle of the night was meant to disturb their sleep (which WILL happen if you’re in a space shuttle). After everything was cleared up though, I was wondering how the creators would follow up with this. I mean, for Team A there is no reason for stress anymore thanks to a combination between Mutta’s luck and his observational habits (by the way, it’s interesting to have two members in the team who are bothered on the small things, yet in completely different ways).

And then the climax of this episode came, and it was glorious. I mentioned before that Space Brothers has some of the best romance of the season, and this episode only made this better. Before, the creators already nailed the way in which the two of them could be a couple: similar interestsspending time together, etc. This episode was wonderfully creative in how it used all of the build-up together.
Rating: (Awesome)

Uchuu Kyoudai – 16

by psgels, posted in Uchuu Kyoudai

The chemistry between the characters in this episode was just amazing. Even more than usual; the facial expressions said so much about the different cast members, and the stress amongst them was just wonderfully portrayed for every single character, aside from perhaps that woman in team B. I like it when a show withholds the state of mind of some of its characters, but I also just love how this series attempts to dive into the mindsets of multiple characters at the same time, to show how differently they all end up reacting to what’s going on.

As for the reason I dislike slow pacing: that can be attributed to Naruto and Bleach. What I really dislike is the kinds of series that pad out their time, for the sake of padding out time. A recent example of this was Kaiji’s second season, in which everyone started to repeat themselves over and over and over ad nauseum.

With this however, I really want to applaud Uchuu Kyoudai for showing how a slow pacing should be done: every scene adds something. Every characterization improves the characters and makes them more rounded. And the great thing about this is: this series managed to find a way to never be boring; it’s always interesting, due to the fantastic acting here. Because of this, the creators are able to create an engaging story with a lot of twists and turns and really well rounded characters to boot.

Of course, right now it’s pretty clear that Fukuda and that Rubix cube guy are people from JAXA sent in to stir up trouble, but what interests me much more than the mystery around them is the way they’re acting and how they managed to cause the tension around everyone to rise.
Rating: (Awesome)

Total Eclipse – 03

by psgels, posted in Total Eclipse

The big downside to having nearly every show air on the same day in a season like this is that if you’re away for the weekend you suddenly have an incredible backlog. It’s gonna take me a while to catch up to everything here.

In any case, Total Eclipse showed its true colours in this episode with what I presume to be the main cast. And if I have to be honest, I’m not that impressed by them. A lot of them feel flat and stereotypical, and in particular that Italian Playboy and that Nepalese tsundere are annoying to watch. Apart from that this episode was chock full of one-liners that had a similar problem as Jormungand, in that everyone was just trying to out-snark each other. . The chemistry between these people seems very forced.

On top of that, what makes me wonder is that all these people lost their homes and their country. How can all of them be so cheerful? How can the big angsty flashback be about something as simple as a minor pilot’s quarrel. I’m thinking about swapping this with Tari Tari or Moyashimon if this is what we’re going to get for the rest of this series.
Rating: (Disappointing)

Total Eclipse – 02

by psgels, posted in Total Eclipse

I think that the four other shows that I’m going to blog this season are pretty obvious now, but as for why I chose Total Eclipse over the others:

– Tari Tari will only be 1 cour long. there is no way it’s going to live up to Hana-Saku Iroha with that.
– Moyashimon is just a series that you should watch, instead of talk about. Short blurbs each week are enough for that.
– In the same vein, I don’t really feel like blogging a comedy a la Binbou-gami ga.
– Kyoukai Senjo no Horizon is very creative, but it’s also completely forced and nonsensical.
– This episode was just that good.

I mean, I don’t care that this show is based on one of the best visual novels out there. It has the director of Rosario to Vampire assigned. After Persona 4 I really wasn’t looking forward to another butchered work, especially since Rosario to Vampire had absolutely terrible pacings and camera work, that were bad, far beyond their premises.

This episode however, was really intense. I did spot hints of this in the first episode in how uneventful it was by allowing the female lead to play out her character, but with this, they followed that up wonderfully with one heck of a horror episode, and even before that, this series took its characters seriously. this episode showed that this series can deliver good horror, even when censored and that in this series, people die when they’re killed.

Some criticisms though: why do all these monsters look the same? With that, it’s hard to keep track of whether you’re actually making progress or not. Also, there is supposed to be a real lead character? I like how he didn’t appear so far: screw those conventions. However, do expect me to drop this show when he turns out to be a generic harem lead…

Also, if this is supposed to be the cutting edge of mecha that are being deployed, then why are they used in hand to hand combat? Wouldn’t long range weapons make more sense, since these monsters can only fire along a limited distance? Overall, this show reminds me the most of Blue Gender, but where that series took place at the stage where the earth has been completely conquered, this series looks more into the conquering process. The question is, will the creators be able to make the plot as interesting?
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Uchuu Kyoudai – 15

by psgels, posted in Uchuu Kyoudai

This is the episode in which the tensions really start erupting. In Camp B, this is the usual stuff, in which one of the members cracks and starts causing tensions deliberately amongst the rest of the team. The reasons for him cracking are vast: having to live together with one fidgety guy, one very quiet guy, and one overconfident guy, but the straw that broke the camel’s back was a timer that was set off in the middle of the night, which was probably initiated by the guys from JAXA in order to test them.

In Team A there also was tension. However, in the circumstances there are completely different: a clock broke, and it was Fukuda who broke it. Why on earth would he want to do that?! Why he of all people? After last episode, he was the last person I’d suspect to have done it. But that’s the great thing: if the creators can successfully back up the reason why he did it, things really will become amazing. At first I thought that he was some sort of agent from JAXA, meant to stir up some trouble here and there, but with the previous episode and his reaction while breaking that clock this seems highly unlikely.

Especially Mutta was amazing here, and very different from his usual self, especially after he again had the luck to witness what really was going on. I really liked how he, after witnessing that, decided to remain quiet about it. Seriously, this show has some very annoying cliff-hangers. Rating: ** (Excellent)

Uchuu Kyoudai – 14

by psgels, posted in Uchuu Kyoudai

OP change! And it’s a shame, because this one is far from as memorable as the first op. In fact, the vocalist is pretty cheesy. The only thing that makes this worthwhile is the weird danging. That was pretty funny, but in terms of music it completely failed to grab my attention. I really like the new ED though. he song is excellent, but the idea behind it is also just wonderful.

In any case, this episode turned Fukuda awesome. It’s unusual for this series to devote an entire episode to a character other than Mutta, but Fukuda turned out to be a brilliant choice for this. His back-story could have been cliched with the wrong developments: workaholic parents are definitely nothing new and I’m still hoping for series as Zone of the Enders and Supernatural in which both parent and kid are adults.

Here the creators used this cliche in order to give Fukuda an exceptional amount of will-power. His trait isn’t that he’s a workaholic, but rather that as a workaholic, he failed to accomplish anything he dreamt of in his life. Using that as a background, becoming an astronaut is something like his last chance, and he’s willing to go for it even for the sake of his daughter, or perhaps he’s trying to do this in order to be able to face his daughter, after lying to her so many times. this show loves not showing crucial bits, and I’m very curious indeed how his daughter thinks of him right now.

His glasses breaking were brilliant for this, because the drama that this created was excellent, seeing him push himself way too hard.
Rating: **+ (Excellent+)

Lupin III – Mine Fujiko to Iu Onna Review – 86/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews, Lupin III - Mine Fujiko to Iu Onna



As the spring season approached, it seemed clear what would be the series with the most interesting staff working behind it: Sakamichi no Apollon, the director of Cowboy Bebop coming back after many years of absence to work with some of Madhouse’s top animators and the always lovely music from Yoko Kanno. And then a new Lupin series got announced.

Seriously, the people involved in this project: it’s directed by Sayo Yamamoto, who directed Michiko e Hatchin, the scriptwriting powerhouse of the recent years Mari Okada wrote the series composition, Shinichiro Watanabe (the same director of Cowboy Bebop) did the music production, Takeshi Koike is behind the character-designs, and on top of them there are some episodes written by Dai Sato (the guy who wrote Ergo Proxy and Eureka Seven) and Junji Nishimura, the director of Simoun. All of these people are responsible for masterpieces, and here they were stuffed into one single project. The result is a breath of fresh air.

Now, I do have to admit one thing:: the influence of all of them is clearly visible, but don’t expect any of them to surpass themselves here. Mine Fujiko to Iu Onna is far from as good as the series that these people became known for. When you set the standard lower and compare it to the series that have come out in the recent years though, it really stands out as something unique that anime definitely needed.

This series just oozes style from beginning to end. The character-designs are just gorgeous and every episode is just chock full of inspired images and artwork that go completely against the trend of current anime. There is a TON of nudity in this series, but the fanservice is completely different from the juvenile fanservice you see in all the other shows these days.

This series is really focused on adventures, just like the Lupin series it’s based on. This time though, the one who stands in the center is Mine Fujiko. The episodes are all varied and very different from each other, and they all are chock full of references and homages to other works of fiction that use often-used female character tropes, which it then proceeds to subvert completely. Seriously, the huge amounts of boob in this series may not make it so apparent, but Mine Fujiko is a very strong and independent character.

Beyond this, this series is also a whole lot of fun to watch: there are some episodes that have great chase scenes, others have great action scenes, yet others are much more focused on well written dialogues and yet again others thrive on using weird plot twists. It’s a really well made series.

There are a few things that do hold this series back though. First of all there are the character-designs in this series: they look gorgeous and really detailed. But they also are really hard to animate consistently, and yet, the creators definitely try to animate as much as they can. The result is unfortunately a lot of jerky movements and facial movements that just look off or strange.

The second is that this series has little character-development, but that’s just a minor issue. The creativity that went into the characters and their re-imaginations, complete with how they play off each other more than makes up for this. This is why I love remakes for anime: a lot of them are really made by fans of the franchise who don’t care about trying to recreate them as accurately as possible, but want to give their own spin to them, and Mine Fujiko to u Onna is no different. the more I write about this series, the more complete it starts to feel, and that’s a sign of a really good series.

Storytelling: 8.5/10 – Loads of variety and a bunch of great scripts that come together really well.
Characters: 8.5/10 – The characters are used really well and play off each other wonderfully. This excuses the sometimes jerky acting more than enough.
Production-Values: 9/10 – Very artistic and unique. The art is where this series set itself apart among the many shows with gorgeous graphics this season.
Setting: 8.5/10 – Where this series rocks is how there is so much to be read in between the lines. It’s a homage and a parody at the same time, and it references a wide variety of different works and uses this really well.

Suggestions:
– Michiko e Hatchin
– Seikimatsu Occult Gakuin
– Ultraviolet: Code 044