Category: Finished Series: Adventure/Fantasy/Science Fiction

Some quick first Impressions: Hanasakeru Seishonen, Guin Saga and Kigurumikku

by psgels, posted in Guin Saga, Some Quick First Impressions

Hanasakeru Seishonen

Short Synopsis: Our lead character can choose between three bishies to marry.
Chance of me Blogging: 5% (Something really weird has to happen in order for me to blog this thing)
Ah, this season’s obligatory shoujo series. I was already wondering when it was going to pop up. Still, this one unfortunately promises to be even worse than average. The thing with most of the shoujo-romances I’ve watched so far is that while they start out promising, they usually fall apart somewhere after around eight episodes (with some very notable exceptions, of course). This show already seems to be falling apart with the first episode, which… really isn’t promising a lot. The creators tried to insert way too much nonsensical drama, resulting from one cheesy scene to the other, with nearly all of them bordering on the ridiculous. It’s a shame, this show really seems to be trying, but so far it has really no idea on how to tell a good story. Having said that though; the music was pretty nice. Especially that ED was really well sung and perfect for such a series. Ah, if only the rest wasn’t so hopeless.

Guin Saga

Short Synopsis: Our lead characters are the prince and princess of a country that gets attacked by some sort of evil empire.
Chance of me Blogging: 60% (If the second episode is as impressive as this one)
With a title as “Guin Saga”, I expected yet another one of those fantasy series that are already so prevalent this season, but oh my god, this episode really left me impressed. While not a lot of things happened and the pacing was really slow, this episode also was really solid, both in terms of storytelling and production values. Seriously, the animation in this episode looked really sweet, and you can see that Satelight is in its elements this season. While the whole thing of a destroyed country that needs to be rescued by the prince and princess because they miraculously escape is nothing new, I see lots of potential in the character development, with this solid of a first episode. Let’s hope it can keep this up.

Kigurumikku

Short Synopsis: Our lead characters are a bunch of magical girls who save the world from evil.
Chance of me Blogging: 20% (Not sure what could be blogged about a series like this, but what the heck)
Okay, I think that with this series, I’ve found the most hilarious first episode of the season. I’m a huge fan of parodies, but I hate it when a show just sticks in random references to other shows without making fun of them. Kigurumikku completely slaughters the credibility of mahou shoujo–series in the shounen-genre and has lots of fun in the process. I really laughed a lot during this episode, and there were many hilarious points. What I liked most was the huge wit of the scriptwriters. Now, my message to the creators is simple: please keep this up, and don’t start milking out your own jokes or get boring!

Some quick first Impressions: Saki, Tayutama ~Kiss on my Deity~ and Shangri-La

by psgels, posted in Shangri-La, Some Quick First Impressions

Saki

Short Synopsis: Our lead character is very good at Mah Jong.
Chance of me Blogging: 20% (Really not sure about this one)
At this point, I don’t know what to think about this series, and whether it’s going to be Good Gonzo or Bad Gonzo. There is some definite potential, but at the same time there are so many things that got on my nerves. The lead character is charming, but some of the other members of the cast were beyond obnoxious (especially that overly squeaky little girl). The fanservice-parts felt really weird and forced (Gonzo is a bit too fond of its fanservice at times, and it really shows in this show). The ED is a very annoying J-Pop song which SO doesn’t fit my tastes and the small bit of drama between “boob”-san and Saki in the middle bit felt forced and not really that genuine. Having said that, though, the Mah-jong parts do feel interesting, the student council president was nice to watch, and overall there is potential, both for the show to become something nice or fall apart completely.

Tayutama ~Kiss on my Deity~

Short Synopsis: Our lead character gets to marry a cute fox girl.
Chance of me Blogging: 0% (No)
Hehe… oh boy. Well, what we have here is another one of those romantic comedies that try to find the most ridiculous ways to get a male and female to live together with each other. This time, it’s an ancient fox deity who gets transported to modern days, turns into a little girl, and then turns back into a teenager again when the male lead promises her that he’s going to marry her when she’s grown up. Yeah, you have to love the depth of this show, but what stands out the most in this episode were the utterly, utterly horrible character-designs. THAT HAIR! Aren’t these girls ashamed or something? The editing also feels unprofessional at times, and there are certain transitions from one scene to another that are so obviously flawed that I suspect that this episode was produced in a very big hurry. In any case, this definitely is another one of those series for the people who are into cheesy romantic comedies. If you’re not, then stay faaaaaaaaaaar away from this one.

Shangri-La

Short Synopsis: Our lead character has been in youth prison for two years, it seems.
Chance of me Blogging: 60% (I’m intrigued)
Ooh, nice. Shangri-la has great ambitions, and I really liked all of the different kinds of ideas that were put into the setting; definitely creative. I liked all the potentially interesting characters, the detailed character-designs, the culture that these people live in; all in all it’s good stuff. But then again, with huge ambitions also come huge potential pitfalls: is this show going to be able to put everything it wants to show in its limited time frame, or are things just going to fall apart in a rushed and incomplete conclusion? This show especially has to deal with explaining how a teenaged girl seems to be so incredibly good at fighting with such a strange weapon, and the strange instances of fanservice were typical Gonzo. Still, the potential’s definitely there.

Some quick first Impressions: Phantom ~Requiem of the Phantom~, Pandora Hearts and Higepiyo

by psgels, posted in Pandora Hearts, Phantom, Some Quick First Impressions

Phantom ~Requiem of the Phantom~

Short Synopsis: Our lead character wakes up with amnesia and becomes an assassin.
Chance of me Blogging: 100% (BEE-TRAIN ROCKS)
Okay, so I said before that this season was disappointing so far. After Phantom, though, I’m going to take that statement back: this season rocks, if only because this show’s in it. I’ve SO been dying to see another Bee-Train series, and this series was everything I could have hoped for: a fantastic soundtrack, very addictive and slow storytelling, lots and lots of mystery and two already likable lead characters. This quite possibly was one of the best first episodes I’ve seen this year. The entire episode just screamed style. And even though the graphics look simple and down to earth, what I liked about the action was that everything is so much down to earth: sure, the main characters so have strange powers, but still you can see that without them pulling ludicrous powers or regeneration out of thin air: the battles here are realistic: a gunshot kills people; knives make wounds. Now that’s my kind of action!

Pandora Hearts

Short Synopsis: Our lead character finds a strange watch.
Chance of me Blogging: 60% (Nice potential)
Ooh, nice. Pandora Hearts is promising to be quite the interesting anime. This first episode had a very nice combination between quiet slice-of-life scenes and tenseful drama. This episode was very nicely told with charming characters and a pacing that didn’t drag at all. There’s a nice soundtrack, solid animation and even though the character-designs look a bit childish, they do the job they’re supposed to do. It’s also good to hear Yuki Kajiura again, although this show isn’t her best work by far. My only worry so far is how the creators are going to use the fact that the main characters are a bunch of teenagers: it’s clear that they know hardly anything about fighting, so please don’t make them grow into battle experts by the end of the series.

Higepiyo

Short Synopsis: Our lead character is supposed to be a cute chick (as in bird, not girl)
Chance of me Blogging: 0% (Uh… yeah)
As if this season didn’t already have enough series of five-minute episodes, there’s more! Higepiyo is… some sort of bizarre bastardization of Chi’s Sweet Home, in which an average family takes in a chick. The twist? The chick has the mentality of your average middle aged guy in his midlife crisis. With such a ridiculous concept, I do have to agree that out of all the five-minute episodes this season, this one made me laugh hardest. The hilarious thing about this show is the incredibly deadpan sense of humour that the titular Higepiyo has. He never changes expressions, and that makes the contrast to the things he does (reading the newspaper, eating curry, etc) hilarious. The reactions of the family he’s adopted might be a bit exaggerated, but it’s going to be a fun show if the creators manage to keep the rest of the series fresh.

Tytania Review – 82,5/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews, Tytania



Tytania had some massive expectations working against it when it first aired. It’s supposed to be the spiritual successor to the Legend of Galactic Heroes, one of the rumoured best anime ever made (yeah, yeah, I’m going to watch that one some day). These are expectations it obviously couldn’t live up to, but if you watch it as a regular series, then it’s got quite a few charms.

Tytania is a Space Opera, but instead of going for the flashy overpowered mecha action scenes, it’s got a completely different focus, and instead becomes some sort of political thriller. It’s basically a man vs. empire type story and most of the series is dedicated to making it seem plausible why such a huge empire is able to fail such a seemingly simple task of capturing rebels. Corruption and inner-coutry politics for a large part of this series’ themes, and those who are looking for action are going to be disappointed.

What’s interesting about this show’s characters is that nearly every member of the cast is flawed. There are no mister or miss perfect here, everyone hast at least something of a vice or so, ranging from lazyness to incompetence, a temper or just plain insanity. This is exactly what makes this series so interesting to watch, seeing all of these flawed characters grow and develop (or refusing to develop) but it also makes for a bunch of really boring opening episodes. Seriously, in the first ten or so episodes hardly anything happens, and the show is just establishing the setting that it takes place in.

But what a fascinating setting it turns into. Series about politics always need a while to warm up a while, but when they do you, they create deep and multi-layered countries full of inner struggles where mots people care more about their own agenda than anything else, and in this series a lot of detail went into explaining how exactly the almighty Tytania Empire is going to fall apart.

The show does have its issues, though: the big focus is really the setting and characters, but the storyline is a bit buggy here and there, and one of the most grating flaws is tha the creators like to insert plotholes here and there to keep the story going. The animation is also… unorthodox to say the least. The CG spaceships really don’t look well, and characters are very often deformed when they speak. In exchange though: there is lots of movement in this series: characters’ chins move when they talk, and the show isn’t a collection of still frames, so the creators definitely get credits for trying. And either way, you have to admit that the characters look very stylish and charismatic.

It’s not the most solid season, let alone is it a question whether a second season is going to come along in order to animate the rest of the novels that this series is based on, but nevertheless it’s a fun watch for those who want something different from hand to hand (or mecha to mecha) combat. You should often take this show with a grain of sand, but it raises many good points and the characters are definitely fun to watch.

Storytelling: 7/10
Characters: 9/10
Production-Values: 8/10
Setting: 9/10

Tytania – 26

by psgels, posted in Tytania



Short Synopsis: We all know what’s going to happen: the end of Zalish.
Episode Rating: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
Call me crazy, but this was actually the best ending I’ve seen this season. Okay, sure it cheated a bit with a second season still somewhere unannounced, but it did exactly what it has been building up to. It’s an awesome ending that really made me hungry for that second season. Hurry up and announce it!

And sure, Zalish may not have been the brightest one around, but he did die like a real man. I mean, come on: it took a small army just to take this monster of a guy down: he was drugged, confused, lost his guns and yet he kept fighting like some sort of angry bear or something. It’s a shame to see one of the most GAR characters in this series die like that, but it was an excellent death.

And ZOMG, Ajman actually did something. We finally get to look a bit into his head, and learn how the guy is incredibly afraid to lose Tytania. That’s going to work well with Idris, isn’t it? In any case, I’m not going to hype myself too much for that second season since it hasn’t been announced yet, and there’s no certainty that it’s even going to come, so I’m just going to enjoy it if it airs.

And really… why the heck is the narrator one of Ajman’s maids?

Tytania – 25

by psgels, posted in Tytania



Short Synopsis: Zalish gets into trouble.
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Zalish = GAR)
Ah, who am I kidding? This show rocks. Just ignore my whining for the past few episodes: if it’s indeed true that we’ve only reached the halfway point of the original novels, then there’s plenty of chance that the creators are willing to animate the second half into some sort of second season. Especially after they went through the trouble of getting the director of LOGH back to the director’s seat.

And seriously, this episode rocked. This show really is at its best when two prominent characters face off against each other. The prison escape was nice and all, but it just didn’t have the flair of Alsas’ big scenes, and this episode reminded me why this series is so awesome. A lot of build-up went into this, but it was a lot of fun to see Fan take care of the very badly prepared Zalish, and seeing Zalish in his turn pwn everyone with his monstrous strength.

But yeah, this is really the fun of tactical warfare: being able to think outside of the box, and make excellent use of your surroundings and abilities in order to take care of your enemies. It’s really episodes like this one that make all the build-up worth it, and it shows so much promise for the second season, in which the amount of battles only is going to increase.

My only complaint here is the use of guns there… while I admit that it’s pretty impressive for Zalish to scare his enemies so much that they become too afraid to use their guns, it still feels a bit unrealistic there…

Tytania – 24

by psgels, posted in Tytania



Short Synopsis: Zalish moves in to destroy Fan and his allies.
Episode Rating: 7/10 (Enjoyable)
While I want to call this series a flop, I just have to admit that I was touched by the ship crashing down. That mechanic has been a very strange character, but seeing all of his work and pride destroyed like that definitely made impact.

But yeah, there is no way that the creators are going to come up with a satisfying conclusion. As things are looking now, the finale is only going to focus on Zalisch vs. Fan, but there are so many other threads that are still hanging open. what’s the whole point of having Ajman, Ariabart and Lydia in the series? Is Jouslain’s plan going to work? How about Idris and his scheming? There’s no bloody way that you can fit all of that into just two episodes.

Even taking into consideration that the big climax of this show has yet to happen, the middle part of this series was so much more interesting. The best parts about this show definitely were seeing the Alsas storyline, and seeing what a big mess the Tytania family has turned into through the centuries. Fan pretty much stopped being interesting after Lyra died. I kept hoping that he’d become more interesting, but in the end he just hogged up too much of the airtime. I understand how he’s vital to the plot, but his development just came to a grinding halt after he got revenge on his girlfriend in the end. It’s definitely original, but also gets too much in the way of what’s really important in this series.

It’s a shame, but yeah, I think that Artlant overestimated themselves in the past season by producing too many shows. Both Earl and Fairy and Tytania had lots of potential, but both in the end just turned half-hearted. It’s a shame, because in earlier years Artland established itself as a company that really took its time to get the best out of its series: Legend of Galactic Heroes was released over the span of seven years, with Mushishi ad Bokura ga Ita you could also see that a lot of time went into producing it, and making them as good as possible (and especially the huge amount of different EDs, up to the point where every single episode seemed to have a different one). It seems like they want to do a bit too much at the moment, which is a pretty darn shame, because the production department has already shown that they like to take a risk to try out something new every once in a while. But yeah, this risk turned out to be not such a good one. My hope right now is that they can at least make something interesting out of that climax, and that their next experiment will fare better.

Tytania – 23

by psgels, posted in Tytania



Short Synopsis: Fan is nearly captured by Tytania again, and is helped by a few new allies.
Episode Rating: 7/10 (Enjoyable)
I’m not too sure about this series right now. Here it is about to hit it major climax, and it first wastes an episode on character background that could have been done ages ago, and right now yet another episode is completely wasted when Fan goes out to flirt with a character completely unrelated to the story.

I mean, at this point I have no idea what the major climax of this series is going to be about, but in this case it’s a bad thing, since there has hardly been any build-up for it, other than Fan being on the run completely. There wouldn’t be some sort of second season announcement or something that I missed, would there?

So yeah, at the moment I’m disappointed in this series. With all the build-up, it promised to be something epic for its finale, but so far it hasn’t surpassed itself at all. The episodes centred around the different members of Tytania have been good, but Fan is really getting more and more useless with every passing episode.

Tytania – 22

by psgels, posted in Tytania



Short Synopsis: Idris’ past
Episode Rating: 7,5/10 (Good)
Well, that’s a very strange place to start talking about people’s past. This episode really should have been shown much earlier in the series, and I can see really no reason to postpone it so long. This is supposed to be the start of the finale, the background should be done by now.

Still, it was a very welcome episode of course, that fully detailed Idris’ obsession with power, and where his ambitions come from: his dead father. I’m also surprised that Ajman only has been sitting on the throne for five years now. That just proves the point that the previous episode tried to make: Tytania is so caught up in inner struggles: everyone wants to be the one with the absolute power over such a large empire, and Idris as well. Jouslain is the only one who so far has managed to think beyond that.

And really, the mysteries around Lydia only continue to grow. The only thing she did in this episode was look sad because Balami (cursed Katakana that made me think that his name was spelled as BaRUami) would be away for a longer while due to Jouslain’s mission to clean up the mess that Zalish left.

Tytania – 21

by psgels, posted in Tytania



Short Synopsis: Now it’s Jouslain’s turn to go after Fan Hyulick (or however he wants us to spell his name).
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
While at first I thought that this was a relatively uneventful episode, but near the end, this series got a totally new dimension because of it. Tytania really has been a cat and mouse game with Zalish and Idris and their henchmen on one side and Fan Hyulick on the other. Jouslain? He’s just an observer. He doesn’t care at all about catching Hyulick, he only wants Tytania to thrive and takes the appropriate actions for it. He actually realizes that it’s not going to work to just kill off Hulick and get it over with. Eventually the empire will fall apart and Fan really is the perfect way to stabilize the empire by giving it a common enemy to fight at.

All his actions before probably were all done in order to get rid of the inner conflicts of the Tytania government, and something is telling me that his goal is to get rid of Zalish and Idris, in order to create a stable and unified Tytania, rather than one that’s ruled by a bunch of different people with all different ideas and ideals. that also explains why he hasn’t done anything against Ariabart: he has him on a leash right now. The guy is very weak and easy to manipulate, and for a Duke he hardly has any ideas or initiatives of his own.

Overall, the only real flaw of Tytania lies within the Fan Hyulick-storyline, in the way that the creators like to use Deus ex Machina in order to keep his plans smooth. Fortunately though, this flaw doesn’t get in the way of what makes this series good: the politics. It really has been awesome to see a series that’s fully dedicated to politics, and hardly anything else.

But seriously… there are only five episodes left… and still Lydia hasn’t done anything important.