Category: Finished Series: Action

Birdy the Mighty Decode – 07

by psgels, posted in Birdy the Mighty Decode



Short Synopsis: A certain someone with long dark blue hair starts killing people.
Highlights: Whoa, is this really the same Birdy the Mighty?
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
Really, this series is looking ten times better after that second season announcement. Everything finally makes sense. By far my biggest problem with this series wasn’t that it was bad, but rather its questionable use of its limited time of only 13 episodes. Five consecutive episodes did nothing but take their time to build up, and it often got distracted on things that didn’t really matter for such a short series. With 26 episodes, it makes perfect sense, though. With that kind of format, it makes perfect sense that the first episodes would focus more on building up.

Something tells me that that second season is going to rock. The director really has a knack for memorable character-development (ever since finding out that this series would only have 13 episodes, I kept wondering how he’d pull this off with such a small time-frame): both Noein and Escaflowne really began to shine once they hit their second halves. And now I finally realize the parallel of Birdy’s outer-space arc with Noein: that too showed La’Cryma surprisingly early in the series.

Incidentally, this episode also rocked. It’s the best episode of Birdy yet – at least since episode one – as it tells about a serial-killing android who bears surprising resemblance to Nakasugi. It turns out to have been infected by a bug that went wrong, that caused her to hug her victims too strongly, strangling them. Ever since, she’s been “hugging” everyone who looked like her original creator. Birdy’s rival ends up bringing it to the Indian-ish guy (I need to learn these people’s names) and the two seem to have made some sort of alliance.

Macross Frontier – 19

by psgels, posted in Macross Frontier



Short Synopsis: Ranka’s popularity has skyrocketed as she gives a concert at Alto’s school.
Highlights: Back to the love triangle again, animation was a bit off at times.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
In this episode, the plot took a step back (all we saw of it is build-up for the next episode, in which we’ll see whether Leon’s coup will succeed and the mysteries behind Ranka’s fluffy partner will be revealed) and instead this was all about developing the love-triangle between Ranka, Sheryl and Alto. A good love-triangle should be like a good tennis-match, and not with one of the players grabbing the ball and running off with it, and the creators have done an admirable job to keep it a bit ambiguous about who Alto will end up with.

This episode ended with Sheryl in favour, but the question of course remains whether Ranka will give up or not, after having seen the two together. I hope she doesn’t spend the next few episodes angsting over what to do, though. This episode kept hinting at how Alto is the big reason for Ranka to keep singing, and Ranka has never had the courage to take Alto away from Sheryl in front of her.

There were unfortunately a few scenes where the key animation frames and especially the characters looked off again. Like, Ranka’s face was too stretched out, etc. Normally I don’t have a problem with that, but this is Macross Frontier, with its huge animation budget. Most series don’t have an unlimited budget, so it’s only natural for the animation to be rather inconsistent, but Macross Frontier doesn’t have this excuse.

Bonen no Xamdou – 05

by psgels, posted in Bonen no Xamdou



Short Synopsis: Ignoring her orders, Nakiami pays a visit to her former comrades.
Highlights: Mostly building-up again, but that’s exactly what this series is good at.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
This episode continues to shed new lights on the world of Bonen no Xamdou. It seems that Nakiami joined the Zanbani when she was just young. If her country (I think it was called Tessik) wasn’t attacked for whatever reason that’s still undisclosed, she would be its leader, or at least the princess, since we don’t yet know what happened to her parents. I guess that when they lost their country, she and her comrades went their own ways, where she joined the Zanbani and the others went into the black market. I wonder, by the way. Could Tessik Village be the place where that old woman who is behind all of the Xam’d lives?

This episode yet again showed how much damage the attack of episodes 1 and 2 caused. The death toll is already at 1300 and still rising. It also confirmed that humanforms were originally just humans, as this episode shows how the scientist of the OP transforms the girl who lost her family in the previous episode into some kind of mismatched humanform. The interesting thing was that Haru stood right next to her. This might be a reason for her to become more involved with the war, now that she’s seen one of her friends as such a humanform.

This episode also featured some strange props that Nakiami’s former comrades had with them. A strange ghost-like thingy that’s supposed to protect an airship and some kind of thirty-year-old seed. Now let’s see what it’s purpose turns out to be.

Oh, and for some strange reason, I really liked Akushiba in this episode. He may be cold at times, but I don’t think that he just went to deliver Haru’s letter, just to defend his nickname. ^^;

Birdy the Mighty Decode – 06

by psgels, posted in Birdy the Mighty Decode



Short Synopsis: Nakasugi invites Senkawa and his classmates over to her house, but Birdy has other plans.
Highlights: Finally this series gains a bit of depth.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10
Now this is more like it. Birdy the Mighty Decode still is my least favourite series of the shows I’m blogging, but at least this episode was a major improvement on the outer-space arc. It’s main purpose was fleshing out Senkawa’s classmates, and it did this well. I feel a lot more familiar with these guys now, and it’s interesting to see that Nakasugi didn’t just recover from her accident that easily, as she seems to have been revived by an alien as well.

My biggest problem with this series is that the episode length of only 13 episodes seems way too short for its own good, and instead of keeping a fast and focused pacing to make the best out of such a short time, it continues to goof off and gets distracted on unimportant side-plots. This episode too: it was enjoyable and all, but there are so many side-characters and side-plots left. How the heck are the creators going to stuff those in just seven episodes with this slow of a pacing? If this was a 26-episode series, I could understand this decision, but 13 episodes is just way too short.

Macross Frontier – 18

by psgels, posted in Macross Frontier



Short Synopsis: Sheryl finds out that her sickness… isn’t as innocent as we originally believed.
Highlights: Sheryl finally gets some good development.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
Throughout the entire first half, I kept wondering why I kept watching this strange overbudgetted series. The characters were okay, but nothing really was remarkable outside of the sky-high production-values. Still, with this episode, I’m really glad that I kept watching and blogging this series. This episode was downright awesome, it first comes with an OP that’s ten times better than the original one (in my opinion, at least), then Sheryl’s character gets more development than the previous 17 episodes combined, and then the episode closes with an epic battle, where the soundtrack seems to surpass itself yet again.

Ah, to think that Sheryl was just a poor sick girl, plucked from the streets. It makes perfect sense now: it’s the same way that Ranka rose to her fame, although a bit more extreme, I guess. Now that it’s apparent that Sheryl’s singing abilities hardly have any effect when compared to Ranka, Grace has no reason anymore to take care of her, and basically just kills her off by letting the disease that got hold of her when she was young spread again. She’s really meant to be hated, having taken her business-like nature way too far out of control.

And I still remain convinced that Bobby should have gotten an episode of his own in the first half. His few scenes of manliness in this episode were awesome, and I feel that the creators could have done so much more with him if they spent a bit more attention to fleshing the guy out.

The thing I’m scared off the most right now is what Sheryl and Ranka will turn into. Sheryl will probably be fine once (or if) she recovers from her illness, but Ranka seems to be heading right down to the path of the damsel in distress, waiting to be rescued by the prince(ss) on the white horse (or mecha in this case). It’s not the cliché that gets me, but I want these characters to stand up on their own, and don’t sit around and wait for the inevitable like a bunch of potatoes.

Bonen no Xamdou – 04

by psgels, posted in Bonen no Xamdou



Short Synopsis: Akiyuki gets used to living on the airship.
Highlights: Mostly build-up, but good build-up.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
I liked this episode a lot. Don’t expect much action, since most of it was just building up, but the cast did get a lot of depth this time. It’s very good to see that Akiyuki moved out of the rebellious phase so quickly, and that he’s willing to adapt so quickly. It’s much like Jomy of Towards the Terra. At the same time, the people on Sentan Island are still mourning about the large amount of people who lost their lives. It’s good to see that the creators decided to put a lot of emphasis on this part. Too often we just buildings getting destroyed and people getting killed who never appear again.

At the same time, the mysteries surrounding Nakiami continue to grow. We still don’t know why she ended up on the postal ship. It seems that she doesn’t want to have anything to do with her own kind of people (war refugees without any place to return to and who ended up as pirates), and at the same time the postal ship isn’t exactly the best place to carry out her wishes of finding out more about the Northern Government. The ship also turns out to have its own priest on board: Tenshin. We also see that Nakiami collects the same strange packages of liquid that we saw in the first episode with the white-haired people.

This episode also convinced me that the creators are building up for some sort of romantic relationship between Akiyuki and Nakiami. Well, it was obvious right from the start, I guess. It’s a rather large cliché, but let’s hope that the creators manage to keep the romance away from what’s really important in this series. Note the picture that Raigyo left behind: the kids and the captain (whose names I’ve forgotten at the moment)’s faces were all crossed out for some reason, while Nakiami’s face was just fine, hinting that the two used to have romantic feelings for each other at one point.

Macross Frontier – 17

by psgels, posted in Macross Frontier



Short Synopsis: The plot thickens as Ranka’s ability to calm down the Vajra gets more and more important.
Highlights: Ozma gained a lot of depth in this episode.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
Satelight, you disappoint me. With the huge budget of this series, you couldn’t even find a good voice-actress for the seven-year-old Ranka? Joking aside, this episode might very well be my favourite of the entire series. It’s really one of these episodes in which nothing much happens, and yet the plot is pushed forward a lot. It’s very much different from the intermezzos we saw in the first half of this series, which mostly goofed off. The selection of insert songs was also pretty nice to listen at, and complemented their scenes well.

Especially Ozma was awesome, with his brotherly worries about Ranka. Macross Frontier isn’t exactly your manly mecha-series, but this guy provides an appreciated exception to this rule. We now also learn (that, or I noticed this a bit late) that he’s been having an affair with Catherine. Strangely enough, it was also interesting to see Alto act more as a side-character. Interesting how some main characters make great side-characters, and side-characters make great main characters.

Speaking of side-characters, I do have one complaint. In this episode, we learn that Kuran has a crush on Saotome, but it felt really abrupt, which got me thinking about how little airtime she’s actually had in this series. I mean, she’s been really overshadowed by the rest of the cast of Macross Frontier, even though she’s got a pretty interesting character, and there are more people like that on this series. I also feel that Catherine needs more time to be fleshed out, and especially people like Bobby, Lam, Mena and Jeffrey Wilder have been horribly ignored so far.

Birdy the Mighty Decode – 05

by psgels, posted in Birdy the Mighty Decode



Short Synopsis: Birdy goes after the terrorists that were behind the explosion of the previous episode.
Highlights: Pretty much pointless story, but very nice art.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10
Well, this episode seems to conclude the outer space-arc of Birdy. The villains in this episode weren’t much special, and seemed a bit hastily thrown together. They hardly had any background and just weren’t interesting at all, but for now I’ll just see this arc as a means of giving Birdy her background, and showing a bit of the world where she came from. If that were the case, then the rest of the series had better be significantly better than what was shown here.

One thing that did impress me in this episode was the excellent art. The budget is still nowhere the high levels of the first episode, but I like the amount of imagination that was put into the character-designs and especially the background art. The creators made great use of the fact that the episode was set in an unknown alien environment to make a number of pretty unique art setting.

I think the only really interesting thing about the story in this episode was that it showed how the police-system on Birdy’s planet is pretty much one big mess, where multiple divisions are working on the same case without cooperating with each other. In this episode, Birdy ended up tailing someone who was already been tailed by another guy.

But please, can we finally move to villains who don’t look like some sort of street-punks? The villains in this episode who looked at least a bit attractive turned out to be either spies or betraying their boss. I mean, it’s getting pretty predictable if you can just recognize the real villain, just by the way they’re drawn…

Bonen no Xamdou – 03

by psgels, posted in Bonen no Xamdou



Short Synopsis: Obligatory “I’m not going to cooperate with you”-episode.
Highlights: This was an obvious building-up episode, so nothing much stood out.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10
Well, it had to happen sometimes. You can see this type of episode in many different series, where the main character, as stubborn as he is, yells at everyone in his new environment and wants to go home. It’s not the most exciting episode, but it is essential for proper build-up and character-building, which is why it’s used so often.

This episode did make use of its 20 minutes by giving a proper introduction to the crew of the postal service ship. It still remains a mystery why Nakiami is on board, or why they involve themselves with these huge battles, but at least the most important crewmembers were fleshed out. Meanwhile, at the camp of the antagonists, the major villain (or at least someone who looks like one) turns out to be some kind of war hero, who survived a huge war, 17 years ago. Their role in this story still seems a mystery, though.

What intrigues me is the high amount of attention to Akiyuki’s friends, who he left behind. If Akiyuki really is going to work for a postal ship, then that means that he’s not going to see them again, and yet they’re really well-fleshed out characters. What could the creators have in mind for them? Don’t tell me that that girl is going to follow the airship when she receives the letter that’s about to be sent to Akiyuki’s parents?

Birdy the Mighty Decode – 04

by psgels, posted in Birdy the Mighty Decode



Short Synopsis: More characters than ever get introduced as Birdy goes back to her home-planet.
Highlights: Completely different from the first three episodes, in a good way, though Senkawa is getting a bit annoying.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7/10
Okay, I’m not sure what happened here… This episode introduced the real meat of this series, but it’s not something to expect, with the stellar staff behind this series. I liked all the different characters that got introduced, but there were parts in this episode that made me question whether the creators really knew what they were doing…

The biggest culprit obviously being Senkawa’s overly moralistic speech towards that judge. I can understand his whimsical banter with Birdy (which was actually quite fun to watch), and his surprise at all the new things that he’s saw in this episode, but that tribunal-scene made no sense whatsoever. I liked how it gave Birdy a bit of background, but that’s about the only thing that was good about that scene.

Then there’s also that random bombing at the end of the episode that Birdy just “happened to be at”. It’s not the most solid plot-twist, and I’m not sure what its purpose really is going to be. I think that this series needs to be a bit more focus, and I hope that the next episode can establish a clear goal for this series to work to. At the same time, I also hope that the creators will remember to flesh out all of the different important characters that were left on earth.

In a way, this episode was necessary to give Birdy her background and wrap up the Giga-arc, but it could have been done a bit better. One real disappointment about this episode was the huge downgrade in the animation. It’s nowhere near the huge quality of the first episode. To be honest, I’m disappointed with this series so far, but I’m partly to blame myself for getting my expectations up too high. I’m not going to expect anything grand from this series anymore, then perhaps it’ll surprise me in the next few episodes.