Category: AKB0048

AKB0048 this week was all about challenging the suspense of disbelief. I mean, the show makes no sense, but that is no reason why it doesn’t have to worry about it. The thing with this episode wasn’t its realism, but rather how ridiculously incompetent it made the people from Des look, which is a pretty major issue for this series. They just barge in with tanks and fail to hit anything, they get outsmarted by a bunch of kids like it’s nothing. The kids who spoke two languages were a nice touch by the way.

Also, the difference between this series and Eureka Seven is HUGE. This stands out, because the two series do sortof touch upon the same themes. However, where Eureka Seven is all about protecting children while using them as a necessary evil, AKB0048 is completely reckless. They send out out girls who are barely able to stand and the competitive atmosphere is so bad that this seems to be the norm, because nobody finds this strange or peculiar.
Rating: * (Good)

So Mari Okada has been known for her completely screwed up endings and dark themes; just look at Lupin and AKB this season. Shoji Kawamori meanwhile loves trolling romance endings. But yeah, Aquarion Evol just had to end with a happy ending. This series is all about letting love sparkle. Any other type of ending would have made no sense. And indeed we here have an action-packed final episode that resolves the main romance, introduces a new one (Kagura and Zessica), resolves an eon-old romance. Oh, and Mix got her boobs back… why?

The two planets moving together was definitely reminiscent of Basquash and its huge moon. Beyond that this ending was fairly standard: definitely fun from start to finish, but the only special part was the music. That godly music definitely didn’t disappoint here. I do want to yell at Mikono, though. In the end, she really was a typical Kawamori female lead: never really doing anything and only being important by being the male lead’s crush and having mystical powers that happen to be central to the plot. This episode sealed the deal: she finally tried to actually use her powers (like what she should have done ages ago), and here Amata comes and ruins everything by going “you can’t change him by yourself! Let me help and protect you!”
Rating: *+ (Great)

AKB0048‘s episode this week caught me off-guard with how good it was. I thought that the building up could continue for a while longer, but this episode very harshly returned to the theme of how competitive the idol business is, especially when the girls involved are still so young and pushed to practice almost non-stop.

What I especially liked is how this episode was about the relationships between the ones who made it and the ones who are still struggling to get a place as a successor. The main cast isn’t bothered by this yet because they are relatively new, but seeing the older generations being broken up like that due to the system of AKB really makes me wonder what the creators have in store for them later on in the series. The battle at the end of the episode worked really well because of that and I hope that that was a great hint for things to come.
Rating: *+ (Great)

Aquarion meanwhile had this one scene in which Amata had some flashbacks of Mikono. And Okada, Kawamori… who of you got the idea to make one of the first scenes for him to remember that one time in which he landed with his face in her crotch? The first half was incredibly sexually charged by the way, thanks to Andy and Mix having their own over the top finale.

The second half of the episode was standard penultimate episode build-up, although Mikage was nice enough to fill me in about what all happened in the first season of Aquarion. Things were pretty crazy, and seriously: I did not expect Fudo to be the reincarnation of Apollo, though that does make perfect sense on how he managed to stay alive for so long. The creators in any case made things very epic by moving an entire freaking planet for Mikage’s plans. So yes, he’s going to kill off everyone. At least this is a series where that completely fits, with the rebirth themes and all.
Rating: *+ (Great)

One thing that I’ve noticed about a lot of Mari Okada’s anime original scripts: the one thing she has trouble with is being interesting while building up. Especially in the first halves of her longer series have these flashes of brilliance intermixed with dull slice of life. Take Hana-Saku Iroha’s long wring of random episodes, Aquarion’s boring romantic set-up in its first half, or even Kuroshitsuji II’s first four episodes that were nothing but random hi-jinks. We too are now on that point for AKB0048 unfortunately, but the end of this episode did remember to actually deliver.

And it did so with some very weird succession rules that showed even more what a strange organization this AKB0048 is. So everyone is set to become a succeeding member of one of the founding members of the AKB, and who gets to succeeds is decided by strange flying blobs based on very vague criteria, they are ruled by a strange shadowy figure who writes unnerving lyrics. And also: we’ve seen people talk plenty of times in this series about “graduating”, however nobody has actually explained what that entails to.
Rating: * (Good)

There was so much trolling going on in this episode of Aquarion. Where to start: Amata was consciously abandoned by his parents, causing him to have a bad childhood, Ah, and you finally see them again? Too bad! Seriously, can’t we ever make these people survive and have them take responsibility for what they did? Shoji Kawamori was all over this episode, but the most apparent really was the ending, in which the main source of the conflict turns out to e environmental destruction. I already found it strange that there was so little of that in this series.

It made for a very fun episode though, and I definitely enjoyed it. It’s definitely nice to have such over the top plot twists combined with interesting characters here. They’re not all interesting of course: Mikono YET AGAIN did absolutely nothing, but Zessica and Mikage have really grown on me, Kagura really got his time to shine here, and even Amata has gotten interesting to watch now that we’ve delved into his back-story.

Also, now that we’re near the end of the first half of 2012, I think I can say this confidently: Aquarion has the best soundtrack of the year so far. Yeah okay it was copied from the first Aquarion and all, but still: it blows all of the other soundtracks this year simply out of the water due to its massive size, sheer versatility and consistent epic tone.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Aaand Mikono, you fail at being a romantic love interest for Aquarion Evol. This was supposed to be your chance: this episode delivered all of the background for this series. This was your chance to be relevant. But no, you’re just mentioned once in the entire story as a sort-of afterthought. Your role as a damsel in distress got upstaged by Zessica at the end of the episode, and beyond that the only thing you did was… feel sorry for Kagura.

Apart from that though: this was solid back-story. And to imagine that the big twist of the original Aquarion… was a dog. That was just as crazy. The commander really stole the show in this episode with his trolling, and Shrade also shined here. It’s completely camp and over the top, but good entertainment.

I do wonder, though: if the world split in two, and only men can survive in Vega… then what are they doing on Altair? Based on that same logic we should have an entire female cast.
Rating: *+ (Great)

AKB0048 was about that really strange phenomenon known as “hand shake events”, together with unreasonable fans. I again like the focus on the darker sides of being an idol (having young girls like that listen to death threats like that), but the creators did miss a few opportunities. I mean, this episode did focus on the good fans, but we saw little of the really creepy fans; there was only one scene of that: the obsessed grown man who kept clinging. That could be a hint for things to come though. What probably won’t be treated is the whole commercial farce that idols can be, since with this series, the characters actually have a justifiable reason to get as much exposure as possible.

Also those battles still make no sense!
Rating: * (Good)

Next week’s episode of Aquarion Evol: that will be the time for you to show yourself, Mikono. That will be the time where you need to show that you’re more than a damsel in distress. You have been guided, you have been trained, but so far… you haven’t really done anything. You are very close to stepping in the pit of the generic Kawamori female love interests, and that will be your time to either jump over it or go into a completely different direction. Zessica is about to do it, so you can do that too.

For the rest of this episode: this really was action-packed. Nice action, amazing soundtrack, it all was very entertaining, with the spotlights reserved for Shrade. The tension around this guy is actually much more interesting: he and Amata both have huge powers, but the difference between them is that he actually uses it well. Amata doesn’t know how to use his.
Rating: *+ (Great)

AKB and pandering. Of course you can have a cast with females. When it becomes a problem is when the creators start using moe and fanservice as an excuse for not trying, which unfortunately still happens way too often. AKB0048 doesn’t have that… or didn’t at least. I really began to fear that right the first episode after I decided to blog this show, the characters suddenly got a day off, we got a bath scene, a bunch of very stupid antics and this disturbing focus on pheromones.

So yeah, weakest episode of AKB0048 so far. But as it went on, I did notice something: the sheer amount of characters that the creators managed to stuff into just this episode. Heck, I believe that they actually succeeded in fleshing out the entire cast of named characters, giving everyone a bit of a moment or scene to show more about herself. That’s actually pretty impressive to balance well.

Also, this show doesn’t actively criticize, but some of the ideas in this show nearly seem like they were put in to subtly provoke this. I’m mostly referring to the pheromones talk, but especially that bizarre family that breeds idols to look like each other…
Rating: * (Good)

AKB0048… I…. give up…

I want to hate this show. I want to rant about what an incredibly stupid and pandering premise they settled with. But I can’t. I have no clue why, but this show has this amazing energy and charm. The idol shows did it again, even though I hate idols and J-pop. This is the umpth show that went “So you hate idols? Well, here is a really good anime about them, so there!” Some other examples of this are the current Natsuiro Kiseki and its use of idols to bind the cast together, but the past also was full of them: White Album? Unique romance with balls. Fancy Lala? Incredibly genuine character-study with an amazing ending. Full Moon wo Sagashite? It had heart-wrenching second half. And then there was Skip Beat which was hilarious, Key the Metal Idol was really well made, Symphony in August was really well done for one of the few non-fiction anime out there and Perfect Blue was just the perfect gritty look at the business. Sure there have been plenty of duds, but I’m still amazed at how much good and daring stuff the genre brought forth.

The only problem: how on earth am I going to blog this in this already incredibly busy season? the only thing I can come up with is blog it together with Aquarion Evol, since they have so much staff in common, being both helmed by two of the big trolls of anime out there: Shoji Kawamori and Mari Okada. The thing is: in these first four episodes went along as well as Aquarion Evol, if not better, and Aquarion did develop a few issues along the way which I don’t see coming as easily with AKB0048. It’s just unfair to prefer one over the other at one point. The individual entries will probably get a bit shorter than usual, but I do want to highlight both, because I’m enjoying them a lot.

AKB0048 is very genuine and despite its huge cast it actually keeps track of everyone. It’s very charming, but what surprised me also were some of the production issues so far: here is the thing: most of the main voice actresses in this series are members of the real AKB48 group (or whatever it’s called) and have very little experience, if any at all. And yet they are all doing a really good job at bringing their characters to life! They aren’t trying to stuff themselves into stereotypes either. That was one of my biggest beefs against that Idolm@ster show (or at least the first three episodes that I managed to last) and what prevented me from enjoying it unlike a lot of other people: everyone felt like a stereotype. Here instead the characters have a much better defined backstory, motivations and personalities that don’t need to be shoehorned into archetypes. And thank god there is no Kugimiya Rie either.

Also, I’m not sure because of who this was, but one of my beefs with Macross Frontier was that as soon as someone started singing outside a concert, it still felt like everything was taking place in a recording studio, with random instruments appearing from out of nowhere and all. Here though, when characters are singing for leisure, it really feels that way.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Now, as for this week’s episode of Aquarion Evol: bloody Nora, what a plot twist. I should have known from the couple of Mari Okada and Shouji Kawamori in a series that tries to be as over the top as possible: to think that there were points at which I actually tried to take the love triangle between Amata, Kagera and Mikono seriously. They’re the same person. Of course. With that, all makes sense. I like that though: it’s a satisfying twist after all that bloody build-up and this episode lead into it pretty well. That dream sequence in particular was awesome, and actually among my highlights of this series.

And Shoji Kawamori, did you again just pull the “it really looks like one of the main cast members died but h/she turns out to be fine in the end?” I’ve seen too many of your series to know where this is going, unfortunately. It would be an awesome twist if I were wrong, though, but the dead sign that Zessica is fine is that bit at the start of the episode where she talks to Mikage: whatever that was leading up to hasn’t happened yet.

Why I really liked this episode by the way also had to do with that this episode went back to the city of the first episode, and showed in a completely different light now that it’s destroyed and evacuated. Earlier I complained that this show didn’t do anything about continuity. I really have to take that back now. At this point, there are tons of scars in the landscape of events that happened in the past, from this destroyed cities to Andy’s filled up holes. One notable exception is that we still don’t know who the heck does the maintenance on the mechas in this series.
Rating: ** (Excellent)