Category: Armed Librarians – The Book of Bantorra

During the last episode, I saw people commenting on how the series lacked focus. Now guess what? Everything in the past arc is really starting to come together wonderfully. This episode connected all of the seemingly random stories with each other, and it’s not even got to the meat of this arc! What an incredibly well written series!

You’ve also got to love the attention that this series puts in its concept of magic. This season is a true gem for well-developed magic systems, with this series, Full Metal Alchemist and Darker than Black II: all of them have their own concepts and don’t take anything for granted. And most importantly: people really do die when they’re hit by a fireball.

There are more similarities though: all of them have characters with very strong beliefs against killing, while not overdoing this theme at the same time by featuring enough characters who don’t think anything of deaths, which provide a great contrast. All three have gorgeous production-values and a truly excellent soundtrack.

And yet, while all of them belong around the top of the current season, I really like the Armed Librarians best, even though we’re only seven episodes in. The show just hardly has any moment of weakness, or in which it’s dull, compared to Full Metal Alchemist, which does need to take a step back once in a while for aftermaths and building up.

at this point, I’m really curious to see how the next episode is going to tie everything together. Why did Zatoh kill that meat, and why was this book so important? Volken will probably not be involved in this arc, but there is plenty of other stuff going on. Noloty’s wishes to refrain from killing were anything but cheesy, and rather they were detailed and contrasted well with the rest of this setting.

It’s at times hard to explain why I like this series so much, but for me this series has what I’d like to call the “X-Factor”. There’s one other series this season which has that one as well for me (Aoi Bungaku, of course). What’s also interesting is that the past Spring and Summer Season, while featuring a lot of truly excellent series, none of these series really had this “X-Factor”, not even my favourites, surprisingly enough. That really makes me look at those series in a different way, especially because I still have no idea why some shows do have the X-factor for me, while others don’t.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

This sereis just continues to defy my expectations. It’s so incredibly fresh and imaginative; it takes nothing for granted and really goes with its own direction, rather than relying on a bunch of clichés. Of ocurse, I’m not sure how the rest of this sereis will turn out, but out of all the shows that aired this year that are longer than 13 episodes, these first six episodes stand amongst my top 3 favourites, along with Phantom and Konnichiwa Anne. I’m not going to say that this is one of the best shows of the year: first I need to have seen the second half of this show for that, not to mention that shows as Phantom really began to pick up after this point, while Konnichiwa Anne went south so anything can still happen. But oh, I love this show so far.

And guess which characters were fleshed out with this episode? Norotei is the focus of the second half of the episode, which does make sense. It’s great to see her with a bit more detail, since she wasn’t really in the spotlight before. The first half however, focused on the background of that other Meat-guy that Colio was with. Holy hell!? I thought he was only a minor cardboard character?! These creators really want to give everyone the chance to tell their story, don’t they?

What I loved about this episode were the differences in everyone’s beliefs: the gap between young and old. There were the leader of the church and Segal with their twisted mind of killing, versus Colio’s friend, who has nothing to live for and hasn’t experienced anything. Then there’s the naive Norotei versus the battle-hardened Hamyuts. It’s a very nice view on experience versus rookies without copying what any other show has done before. Excellent.

However, as much as I love this series, I am going to have to be a bit critical here. With as much details that this series puts to its fights and battles, I was a bit disappointed at how weak that bad guy’s powers of electicity are. With shocks that bad, it’s a miracle that Minth survived. That thunder felt more like media thunder than real thunder. A chance missed.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Okay, so this episode was meant to be a step back: an intermezzo to flesh out the characters between the action. And even here this series sets itself apart by avoiding and subverting so many tropes that it almost gets scary.

I’m pleasantly surprised to see that this series can be really funny when it wants to be. That book joke in which Mirapoc was sent to look at a seemingly important book, which turned out to be a cheesy romance novel was absolutely hilarious, not to mention the big advantage of having a show that only is about adults: alcohol.

And yeah, it was also really nice to see a bit of what the characters were like when they were younger. I didn’t expect that to show up this early in the series. But yeah, the thing that stood out the most was this: Volken has run off and betrayed the Armed Librarians. In your average anime, you’d see his childhood sweetheart angsting, and then finding some deus ex machina to turn everything back so that they can be together again. So what does Mirepoc do? She erases her ownmemories and rids herself of any memories she has of Volken. Talk about subverting to the extreme!

Also, is it me or does the main character of this series change with every episode? First we had Volken, then Hamyuts, then Colio and now Mirepoc, and yet I have still no idea who is supposed to be the real main character of this series…

…and in a way, I like that. It really makes this show unpredictable.

Also, new animation for the OP. If the visuals are any indication to future action scenes, I’m really going to have to take back my statement of this series having unimpressive animation.

And on another side-note: someone gets smashed into a wall and stands up with dust all over her clothes. Finally a show that realizes that walls aren’t made of cardboard!
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Every single episode, this series continues to remind me why I consider it among the top of this season along Darker than Black and Aoi Bungaku. Unlike those two however, it looks like Armed Librarians is going to cover up 26 episodes. And it’s already this good. The question of course is going to be whether the creators can keep this up. I’ve seen a lot of series that started out awesome but disappointed near the end, but oh, if the creators can keep this kind of quality up for the rest of the season we could be dealing with a potential classic here.

Okay, so what the hell happened here in this episode? On the foreground, it mainly told about the battle between Hamyuts Meseta and Segal. Segal prepared well: with divination he predicted when the next typhoon would hit. He’d then poison Hamyuts with a deadly disease, and got his hands on Shlamuffen, a sword that automatically parries all attacks thrown at it. To make matters worse, Hamyuts eventually disarms Segal, but Schlamuffen then takes on a mind of its own as if it really wants to kill Hamyuts. Eventually, she gets saved by Colio who was warned by Shiron that this was going to happen because it was the very first divination she had. So in the end, Hamyuts is saved… and Colio dies anyway?

That’s something that wasn’t expected, and it also gave a bit of an extra dimension to the books when you combine them with Shiron’s divination: at the end of her life, she knew that Colio would read her books, and therefore warned him about what he needed to do through divination, in order to recreate the vision she had. Now, the question remains why it was so important for Colio to do this, or was this just a symbolic event? And are we ever going to see both of them back? I mean, their books still exist, but what? They were really built up to be the main characters for the past four episodes…

Also, David Production may not be the best at eye-candy, but these people sure know how to choreograph a good action-scene. The fight scenes in this episode really rocked, and really weren’t what you’d expect after the mediocre animation quality of the first episode.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

The more I watch this series, the more I’m convinced that it’s one of the big powerhouses this season. Even taking Darker than Black and Aoi Bungaku into account, I still keep edging to this series as my current favourite of the Autumn season, and this episode only made this show even more intriguing. It’s going to be awesome if the creators can keep this up.

This episode provided a lot of answers. We learn who the mysterious woman that appeared in the visions is: Shiron Byacornise, a girl who could foresee the future. She predicted the arrival of a major disease, however she was used by some sort of group of evil people. The reason she got hung is that she finally retaliated, and got herself hung as a sign of repent.

And I must say… the plan of the “bad guys” to get rid of Hamyuts Meseta is actually quite ingenious: they’d predict whenever she’d get near her weakness (typhoons), poison her with a deadly disease and then try to attack her. Finally we have these bad guys who don’t come up with these wimpy plans that involve sending a bunch of weak goons!

It’s also interesting: the previous episode had been setting her up as a villain, while this episode did the entire opposite: in a strange act of mercy she let a surprisingly self-conscious Meat live, and turned him back into a human. That Meat of course was Colio. She’s also a completely different character when she discovers that she becomes the hunted instead of the hunter, and starts becoming entirely nonchalant as to what’s going to happen to her.

Then there is that mysterious book guy, who still is pretty much of a mystery at this point. He just keeps handing out fragments of Shiron’s book to random people, but for what point and purpose? My guess would be that foresight comes into play again: we’ve already confirmed two people who have somehow the power to look into the future (Shiron and the mysterious guy who predicted the way the storm would travel), so why wouldn’t there be more? It looks to me like this guy is trying to change the future, and Shiron’s memories somehow are the key to it.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

As for the series I’m not blogging:
– Kämpfer is just yet another stereotypical fighting show with no depth whatsoever.
– Nyan Koi had a really disappointing and shallow second episode. Plus, it’s obvious that the creators have never owned cats.

As for the Book of Bantorra, I think it was pretty obvious that I was going to blog this. Barring the sequels, it featured for me the best first episode of the new season so far and it looks to be another hit for newcomer David Production. This time, they might not have such a powerhouse behind the direction, but the premise has quite a few nice ideas thrown into it, there are lots of characters, all with different morals and values, and this episode showed yet again that it can deliver very nice action-scenes, even with its clearly limited budget. All in all, a very intriguing series.

The director didn’t handle any series I know, but this guy seems very experienced, with a lot of different series under his belt. I’m also very happy with the one who’s behind the series composition: Mari Okada. She wrote the script for a lot of the episodes of Simoun, and did the series composition for a lot of different series, including True Tears, Sasami Mahou Shoujo Club, Canaan and Vampire Knight (which may have sucked, but I heard that it was the best possible adaptation that the really mediocre manga could have gotten). That’s definitely a plus when animating a series of light novels with such a big setting.

The art director is also an interesting one, because Shigemi Ikeda is an artist with a huge amount of experience: the list of series he did the art direction for just goes on and on, and the result show in this episode in the architecture. You really need a lot of creativity to come up with these complex structures. A job well done, if I say so. The soundtrack also is done by the Death Note soundtrack guy, who also composed the scores for Himitsu and Real Drive, which means an excellent soundtrack as well.

But yeah, the weakest point in this series really is the direction, in the way that the quality control tends to be a bit off at times. This episode most notably showed that in the sudden increase of the already huge cleavage of the director, or how the widow of the guy who was killed by Coolio’s friend suddenly chose Colio of all people to talk to was also a bit too coincidental. Nevertheless, when compared to Shangri-la last season there are far less assaults to my suspense of disbelief, so there shouldn’t be any major problems there as long as the creators continue to keep the rest of this series interesting.

Volken also seems like an interesting male lead: he’s an adult for one, and he’s an interesting combination of an capable commander with strong morals, and a naive subordinate with a lot of potential for growth inside of him. He’s able to stand out as the lead character, and yet he doesn’t hog all the screen-time for himself (in fact, that meat guy has gotten more screen-time than he did in this episode). Hamyuts also has the potential to become a very interesting villain, the way she has been portrayed in the past two episodes: as long as she isn’t going to end up as a static character, the creators can do a lot of great things with her. I especially like how she likes to do things herself, instead of sitting in her chair, looking evil.
Rating: ** (Excellent)