Category: Anime Reviews

I wanted to get this review out as soon as possible because… I have to apologize. I’m sorry. I endorsed this series when it first came out. I just didn’t know. I had no clue what kind of a trainwreck this would be. honestly!

Okay, so to start at the beginning: I actually liked Amnesia when it first started. It had a concept that really piqued my interest: the lead female wakes up not knowing anything, and suddenly she is dating this random guy with a weird fashion sense and she has no idea what’s going on. Over the course of the series she experiences this multiple times, each time dating a different guy. That had the potential to be a very interesting mystery-series with the right execution. It’s just… the execution was not right. Not right at all.

And yeah, the storytelling may be awkward and the animation may not be special and all, but those are just mere details. I called this a trainwreck, and I mean it. By far the biggest cause for that is the cast of characters.

Usually I try to avoid spoilers, but to get a good grasp of what went wrong I need to give some vague hints of what happens in the story. You see, this series at heart is a harem: over its course it shows the lead female together with a number of potential partners that it thinks appeal to its audience. Or at least, that’s supposed to be it. Regular harems work that way in any case. If Amnesia was based on the same principle then the creators have got a really low image of their target audience because, bar one, every single character in this show is a total prick.

Seriously, there are not many series that have so many unlikable characters in them. There is a murder suspect, a guy with bipolar disorder, an obsessive stalker, an incredibly whiny ladies’ man. The worst is the obsessive stalker. When I watched his episode, I had to do a double-take before I realized what the creators just pulled. I really have to restrain myself from just typing that out loud here. Let’s just say that every sane human being would just give him a kick in the groin at what he did there. The lead female just doesn’t do anything. Everything in this series gets done for her. And she doesn’t even realize it, just walking away happily as if she was the one who did all the work.

Oh, and as for the mystery part of the story… yeah. The final episode features an info-dump that has a good story buried somewhere underneath. But yeah, the final episode rushes through everything in order to stuff in all of the required exposition, which only ends up forced as hell.
One-Sentence Review: A series with interesting potential to finally be a good Otome Game adaptation… only to fail horribly with some of the worst characters imaginable.
Suggestions:
– Matantei Loki Ragnarok
– Saiunkoku Monogatari
– Ashita no Nadja
Note: with suggestions I mean series that worth watching if you liked Amnesia. NOT the other way around…

I have been putting this one off for way too long, but that’s not because I was looking up to reviewing it. Rather there was so much coming out that I instead wanted to cover, but I guess that I’d just wrap up this sequel that really improved a lot over its original series. The key for that was its plot, for once.

The first Jormungand series really was a build-up series: it’s there to introduce the characters, get the viewers a bit used to the world and concepts of this series. It could have done this better though, because it was too monotone, both in terms of stories and characters. Perfect Order drops the random stories, and instead is much more coherent, not to mention varied in both terms of content and characters.

The improvements first become visible with the characters. The first season was flawed because it had too many characters who were trying too hard to be snarky. The second season then commences to both introduce characters with significantly different personalities, as well as develop the current cast to go beyond their snarky self. Suddenly, a cast that was once bland sparkles with personality, just as I hoped.

The plot takes a while longer to show its trumps, but in the end, it actually does pay off with a number of really good plot twists. Not going to say when they show up, but let’s just say that the characters were preparing for a certain events for a very long while. It really impressed me in any case.

This is not one of those cases in which all of the build-up comes together, though: the plot twists themselves are really good, but the first season’s random stories remain rather… random, and just could have been done better. It’s really the writing that improved so much, but Jormungand as a whole is not a series that is perfectly paced or told, not to mention that even though the setting for this series is very original (taking place over the whole world and not just Japan, America and Europe), it just doesn’t feel real or relatable. There remain a few too many one-dimensional characters in this series, despite the added variety. Nevertheless though: very solid show. Including an awesome soundtrack.

Storytelling:	8.5/10 – Big improvement: things feel much more solid and coherent and it finally starts building up to something, with a great payoff.
Characters:	8.5/10 – A varied cast, that really shines in comparison to the bland cast of the first season.
Production-Values:	8.5/10 – Solid animation, but what really stands out here is the soundtrack. Again a big improvement in how it’s used.
Setting:	8/10 – Nice choice of locations, but it doesn’t make enough of an impact for a higher rating.

Suggestions:
– Black Lagoon
– Irresponsible Captain Tylor
– Seikai no Senki

One very annoying aspect of romance shows is what I’d like to call the “soap opera effect”: some drama happens, and instead of the characters voicing their problems to others, they remain silent, only inflating this drama. Characters taking forever to confess to each other also are among this. Sukitte Ii na Yo plays with this, and is also part of the excellent line-up of romance shows of the past season.

This is pretty much what Kimi ni Todoke should have been: the main couple talks to each other, despite the anxieties of the shy female lead. In thirteen episodes, we see her crawl out of her shell and gain more confidence, and grow as a character. She starts with nothing but insecurities, and grows significantly and yet believably as she confides in others. Not just her boyfriend, but also her other friends.

The other friends who actually are also very interesting characters. This show takes care in giving many of them their own story and even growth. And the thing is that when their stories are over, they don’t just disappear or just stand in the background, but form active members of the cast and show off their character development. There is a lot of drama in this series, but you don’t get the feeling like it’s trying to be as dramatic as possible, or letting things escalate for the sake of creating extra drama. I really like how this show restrained itself from going too far. There is one group of characters that this series ignores though: the villains. The girls whose only job it is to make nasty comments. They… stood out at times as annoying, one-sided and clichéd.

Zecxs is a strange animation studio: most of the shows they produce all look the same and generic, and then once in a while that really has its own style. Sukitte Ii na Yo is one such series. The animation may not be anything to write home about, but it does its job well in bringing out the emotions of the different characters. Combined that with the believable acting and good character-development for a 13-episode series, then I’d recommend this for those looking for a shoujo romance. And yeah, it has a manga that’s still going on so the story isn’t complete, and yet I actually liked the life-goes on ending a lot.

Storytelling:	8/10 – Very solid romance, puts a lot of thought into the pacing and plot progression.
Characters:	9/10 – Characters actually do something rather than remain quiet for way too long. Great character-development for just 13 episodes.
Production-Values:	8/10 – Simple but effective animation.
Setting:	8/10 – Standard school setting. Nothing special.

Suggestions:
– His and Her Circumstances
– Hitohira
– Whisper of the Heart

Poor Medaka Box. Its second season had the worst timing imaginable. Here’s the thing: for the past few years, me and Shounen Jump Adaptations didn’t have the best relationship. Sure, there was the occasional gem with Level E, but most series got on my nerves like no other by taking so many ages to actually get somewhere. There are so many of these adaptation that are paced out too long in order to keep the story going in their constant fear of getting cancelled. The first season of Medaka Box actually took advantage of that by actually doing something interesting within the first 13 episodes. It didn’t take ages to change and move somewhere. There was variety.

And then the past autumn season happened. And the juggernauts of Hunter x Hunter and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure came and challenged just about every boundary of the shounen genre, showing among the best of what Shounen Jump has to offer. And Medaka Box tried to air is second season alongside those two. Yeah, it paled in comparison, unfortunately.

The first season of Medaka Box was a generic school series that at a certain point goes over 9000. The second season is different, though: it consists out of a collection of fights between people with all sorts of powers. You can see that a lot of thought was put into these powers, how they work and how they can be beaten. It goes further than most shounen fighting series do, and you can see that the series has quite a bit of fun in analyzing all of these powers along with their stories. And that’s about all this series does.

The problem with this series, like most other nisiOisin’s works, is that the balance is lost. The problem is that this series spends so much time and focus at talking and explaining how all these powers work, that it forgets to put focus on the rest. This show aims to break some traditions of the shounen jump genre with how elaborate these powers, but at the same time it also falls in the same pitfalls by having way too many characters pointlessly talking and analyzing the fight.

And the fights themselves… it’s not like they are of the kind that remain interesting for 12 episodes. The first season had novelty: the characters did other things than just fighting. Here, they don’t and it becomes obvious that Gainax didn’t put their top people on this series: for their standards, the animation is rather bland, and feels too much like they directly copied and pasted manga panels and moved a few things here and there, that ends up looking a bit bland.

Then here is another thing: the characters of this series have their wrong priorities.I mean, this series understands that characters need to have back-stories, and those stories are indeed often insightful and all. The show is not good at all at fleshing out its characters, though: most characters jus have one or two sides to them. They’re not fun to watch because all of them are defined by their powers and backstories, instead of their actions, if that makes any sense.

I am indeed a tsundere for nisiOisin: up till now despite my annoyances of him, I have watched every adaptation of his that came out so far, because I do think that he is a talented writer. The tsun in me though is starting to win terrain because of how unbalanced all of his stories are. I really care about the big picture how all the small pieces are used together. I’m missing that a lot with his series due to the obsessive focus he puts on his dialogue and Medaka Box is the same: it had some very interesting ideas. But did I enjoy myself for the most part with this series? Well, only the final two episodes really ended up catching my attention to be honest, but they did not succeed in making up for the rest of the episodes, especially because this season was supposed to be the part where the story really started, and to be honest I prefer the variety of the first season over the second.

Storytelling:	7.5/10 – Lots of dialogue that is well-written, but also gets in the way of the rest of the show.
Characters:	7/10 – They’re not interesting, they have backgrounds, but aren’t fleshed out enough.
Production-Values:	8/10 – Gainax does a decent job. Nothing outstanding, but nothing bad either.
Setting:	8/10 – Lots of interesting ideas being explored. Not interesting enough to really lift the series to a higher level, though.

Suggestions:
– Law of Ueki << This show is pretty much Medaka Box if it did focus on actually being fun. Yes, this my favorite comedy ever. That's a big difference there... - Hunter X Hunter
– Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure

Okay, so I crowned Poyopoyo as my favourite comedy of 2012. Here I have some more room to explain that. First of all, this series did not make me laugh the hardest out of the comedies of 2012. It did, however, make me laugh the most and it was the most consistently funny series of the year. I can perhaps recall three or four of its 2-minute episodes that did not make me chuckle out loud.

That’s the beauty of this series: it’s short, yet has a ton of content. Every episode is divided into four to eight sketches that describe the daily lives of the main cast, and hardly any of them feel like they have been put in there just to fill time. They all have a point or a joke to make, and really few of them feel flat. When it’s able to do that for 52 consecutive weeks, it really manages to be something special.

And what makes this show funny? Well, most importantly its cast of characters. The show follows a farming family and the people around it. They don’t exactly develop much, but this series is masterful at fleshing them out: showing their different sides in different situations, showing how they typically and un-typically act. And all of this with a good dose of humour. They become really fun and enjoyable to watch, already quite quickly into the series.

About the animation… yeah don’t expect too much of it. It is solid for what it does though: you don’t need to expect crappy flash animation, and the camera angles are consistently sharp for its designs. Voice acting is really good though: the voice actors really manage to bring their characters alive. In terms of background music, there is not much variety: one track is just constantly being played, but it is a very good track nonetheless.

Poyopoyo as a series is more than just funny. It’s also very relatable. It contains tons of scenes that hit home. Sometimes for just pet owners, but also for everyone. Beyond that, if you’re interested you can just give it a try. It’s a really accessible series that you can just jump into whenever you feel like.

Storytelling:	9/10 – Very consistent comedy that is hilarious.
Characters:	9/10 – Down to earth and character who feel real, and remain funny and charming.
Production-Values:	7.5/10 – Simple animation, but quite effective nonetheless.
Setting:	8/10 – Believable and realistic.