Category: Anime Reviews

Let me start this review by stating the following: I did manage to finish watching Neon Genesis Evangelion a couple of years ago, before starting this blog. I ended up really liking the second half, though the first half of the series was a pain to get through. So yeah, after watching a movie that does nothing other than recapping episodes 1 to 5 (or 6), of course I’m in a bad mood. I want those 90 minutes of my life back!

Really, I fail to see the point behind this movie. All it does is follow the exact same storyline as the series did, with perhaps better graphics. To make matters worse, the only scene I was looking forward to (Unit 01’s little “itadakimasu!”-moment) ended up being cut out, for goodness’ sake! At least Death and Rebirth had a clear purpose: to silence the angry fanboys who were upset with the ending of the original series.

If you were planning to watch this movie, and you already saw both Neon Genesis Evangelion and Death and Rebirth, then don’t. In that case, this movie is just the same as a recap-episode. In fact, it’s even worse, because it’s freaking five times longer than your regular recap-episode, making you sit through scenes you’ve already seen for an eternity. I guess that if you’re one of the few who hasn’t seen the original Evangelion, you might give this movie a try, but I don’t see why you should pick this movie above the original series, apart from flashier graphics and a slightly shorter length. Gainax: stop trying to milk your dead cow!

The individual ingredients of Asagiri no Miko (or Shrine of the Morning Mist) are not that impressive: a sentai-team of priestesses takes on the role of main characters, and they’re the only ones who can stop an evil demon from breaking its seal and destroying the world. At first sight, it seems like a yawnfest, and yet somehow, it works.

Thankfully, despite the boring premise, this series knows how to build up, and it pretty nicely alters between comedy-episodes and serious ones, rather than save the serious parts only for the final episodes. Both the comedy and drama gets better as the series progresses and the episode length of 12 minutes helps keeping things fresh and avoid dragging on. I was pleasantly surprised when I found out that this series actually knows how to tell a story.

Unfortunately, Asagiri no Miko does have its bad points. The main lead is horribly ignored in terms of fleshing out when compared to the other ones. That’s fine by me, and it actually helped to prevent this series from getting dragged into pointless romance. The major problem with this guy is however, that in the final two episodes he suddenly becomes the most important character; a role he just couldn’t live up to, considering his huge lack of development. The result is that the final two episodes descend into a boring cheese-fest that end the series with a fizz, rather than a bang.

Still, despite this the first 24 episodes are a nice example of an enjoyable series that never really hits any highs nor lows. Asagiri no Miko is just one of these series that’s great for just a light watch, and in the meantime you also get to enjoy a healthy share of Japanese culture. Obviously, you’ll never see this series on any top-10 list whatsoever, but the average rating that the users of AniDB gave it (a 5.90; amongst the worst ratings on that site) is just way too low in my opinion.

Series that promise to be better in their second half are always tricky. You never know whether they can actually live up to their claims or not; it went well for series as El Cazador, Chevalier, NHK ni Youkoso and Full Moon wo Sagashite, but on the other hand, things went disastrously wrong for series as Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS, Utawarerumono, Mai Otome and Romeo x Juliet. Thankfully, D.N.Angel lies on the good side of this spectrum.

It starts out as a very strange series: a boy with a very bad haircut suddenly finds out that on his 14th birthday that he can change into a winged phantom-thief bishie called “Dark”. Not that promising, though thankfully this series turned out to have a similar story flow as El Cazador and Suteki Tantei Labyrinth: entertain your viewers with random cases (in this case random artworks that have to be stolen, or background on various main- and side-characters), and abandon these cases as soon as the second half hits, so that the characters can develop themselves.

Such a formula works surprisingly well, and indeed: once this series passes its halfway-mark the characters really start shining. Especially the teenagers turn into well-rounded characters that will make the journey through the first 13 episodes a rewarding one. Unfortunately, the other characters do feel a bit incomplete. Especially the major bad guys could have gotten more attention, there’s one particular side-character who feels out of place and doesn’t seem to serve any purpose whatsoever and Dark himself too feels like he could have been more if given more screen-time.

While I can’t say that D.N.Angel is a must-watch, I am at least glad that it managed to make use of its potential, and didn’t get itself caught in endless fillers. Even the random cases serve to flesh out and provide background for the different characters. If I recall correctly, then the creators completely rewrote the original manga for this anime, and I must say that they did a pretty decent job on it. Do note that the graphics can be a bit of a turn-off. Don’t get me wrong, they look great at times, but there are also quite a few lower-quality shots and the characters do take a bit of getting used to if you’re not a fan of bishies.

It’s not often when an anime is made about a manga that went down after only one volume. Apparently, the original mangaka ran into trouble with the magazine that Bus Gamer was published in, and only one volume ended up published before it was cancelled. Still, the premise had potential, which is probably why three anime-episodes were made out of it. Obviously, the budget was short, so don’t expect an epic storyline, high-quality graphics, deep characters or an ending that wraps everything up.

What you can expect from this series, however, is a well-developed cast of down-to-earth characters, interesting fights and three episodes that become increasingly more interesting as they go along. It’s especially the down-to-earth-part that makes this series worth watching, as it provides an interesting look at the concepts that were explored by Gambling Apocalypse Kaiji. Kaiji was basically about the scum of society, and made it very apparent that these guys were at the end of their line, piled up in debts and used the sick games as a last resort to get some money.

Bus Gamer is different: it just features three guys who just need some money, are willing to risk their lives to get it and are well aware of all the involved risks. There’s no attempt at all made to make any of them look pitiful, and instead it focuses more on the relationship between these three guys who are so different, and how they grow to get used to each other. The different teams also have no overmoralized respect to the other teams (“thou shalt not kill”, “thou shalt save thy enemy when he’s in trouble”) that is overplayed in so many other anime.

This is really one of these series that you want to watch on a rainy day when you’re bored. It’s nothing special by far, but it’s one of these series that is perfect for entertainment. Bus Gamer could have gone much worse: there’s zero filler, the characters are actually developed a bit (which is the reason why the best episode by far was the final one, rather than the opposite), it’s got a small police-subplot, explaining why the police isn’t doing anything about a bunch of punks, killing off each other.

Sword of the Stranger is Bones’ first attempt at an original movie (as in not based on an already existing series). Masahiro Ando, who had no prior experience with directing an entire anime and instead seems to specialize in animation and character-designs, was given the director’s seat and the screenplay was done by the director of the third Patlabor Movie. That’s not really the best cast you’d expect from Bones’ repertoire, but still, Sword of the Stranger is a worthy movie.

Don’t expect too much from the story, though. It features an uberpowerful ex-samurai with a sad past who got tired of killing who meets up with a young boy with an equally sad past. The main villain is another uberpowerful guy who’s looking for a challenge that only this ex-samurai can give him. Yawn, yawn, nothing we haven’t seen before. The reasons why you want to watch this movie is because of the animation, the cultural reference, and most importantly the bond that develops between said ex-samurai and boy.

Most of the time in this movie is not actually spent on the fights, but on showing how these two, with totally different personalities come to understand each other amidst their arguing. The two of them are dynamic and a joy to watch throughout the movie. The plot basically only serves to get and keep the two of them together, and even though it’s nothing special, it knows how to not get in the way of the development of these two for a large part of the movie.

I think that the big problem with this movie is that it would have made a great family-movie if it wasn’t for the huge amounts of gore in it. Gore can be a tricky thing. It’s great to intensify your scenes (Shigurui, anyone?), but at the same time you do alienate those who can’t stand it. I can really imagine that kids would have loved the innocent moments of this series, if it weren’t for the umpth guy who got an arrow blown through his entire face, with all the graphic details of a movie-budget.

Still, if you don’t mind the gore, I can’t really think of a reason not to watch this movie. It’s the genuine moments that really were the most enjoyable, plus some pretty impressive sword-fights. Bones could have done a lot worse (just take a look at Gonzo’s first attempt at a movie). The music is also really solid. You wouldn’t guess that it comes from the same composer who did Eureka7 and Heroic Age, and yet it complements the movie perfectly.

Yes, you’ve read that rating right. I didn’t expect this series to be this good when I started watching it, nearly two years ago now, but Power Puff Girls Z has been a large source of laughs for me whenever it appeared. There’s a good reason why the original length was increased from 39 to 52 episodes, because this series that basically awaited scepsis from nearly everyone turned out to be quite addictive.

If you’ve seen the original Power Puff Girls, then there are a few things you should know: Power Puff Girls Z completely went with its own style. This is a good thing, as in this way it fixed a lot of the mistakes that the original series made. On the bad side, because of these changes it’ll be really easy to see this as a series that only little kids can enjoy.

One of the biggest problems with this series is that it takes a really long time to get used to the bizarre sense of humour that this series has. If there’s any point in the series where you find yourself thinking: “oh god, they can’t go for something that stupid”, it will. This leads to an angry sushi-monster that assaults people who don’t eat the sushi he likes, and monsters in the form of a pen and an eraser who have trouble to understand each other’s feelings.

Fear not, though. Those were just some of the worst examples, and this series especially starts shining once it hits its second half. You just have to love the disco-fever-episode, or the manga-artist one. This series is so incredibly silly at times, but that’s what makes it so much fun. It really doesn’t care about being liked by everyone, and because of that it’s able to come up with these extreme cases.

That, however, isn’t the only reason why I’ve been looking forward for every new episode for the past year. In the original Power Puff Girls, we never really knew where the monsters that were terrorizing Townsville came from and why they wanted to destroy that particular town in the first place, or in what kind of trouble that town must have been before Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup arrived. But Power Puff Girls Z is different. Everything is really explained here. It may seem a bit far-fetched at times, especially at the beginning, but because the first episodes put so much effort into a conclusion, this series actually managed to close off with a pretty good finale, whereas most other comedies are just way too lazy to try and come up with a good ending.

This is also one series that knows how to deliver a good fight. The minor ones aren’t that special, but especially the fights against the big enemies are really fun to watch. You’d think that whenever you’d stand against a very strong enemy, the drama may take over a bit too much, but especially the fights against Him (the major bad guy of this series) are epic, yet hilarious to watch.

I used to watch the original Power Puff Girls a lot, but looking back, it made the mistake of taking itself way too seriously at times. An angry Buttercup or an angsty Blossom can only remain interesting for a very short while, and the original series went way too far in that. Power Puff Girls Z therefore was really refreshing in its light-hearted nature (do not miss the few times at which this series gets to poke fun at its predecessor). It may be a bit childish at times (okay, make that REALLY childish at times), but when it shines, this series really shines like no other comedy. Added to that comes what’s probably the best cheesy J-Pop soundtrack I’ve heard in an anime, the fact that this really is a series that didn’t play all its trumps in the beginning, and you’ve got a very enjoyable comedy-series.

Adapting a manga. From the outside, it looks so simple: you just have to take a page and animate it accordingly. Yet practice has shown that a lot of series have trouble with this. Sometimes entire pages are omitted completely, or the writers think they’re talented and insert some boring inconsequential fillers. A great example of this is Hatenkou Yuugi. Oh, how I wanted to praise this series, but it’s an extreme example of how you can screw up manga-adaptations.

The manga had huge potential, but in the end the only thing that didn’t end up completely botched was the dialogue. It’s deep and detailed, but you can’t really praise the anime staff for it. They only literally copied the dialogue from the manga and inserted it. It’s just a matter of simple copying and pasting, and letting your voice-actors do the rest.

And really, it feels like the creators all went through a major divorce at the same time when making this series, because all other aspects are downright lazy. This series is a string of badly explained plot-twists. Heck, we never know why the third main character ends up travelling with the other two characters in the first place, characters like to god-mode themselves out of any problems and any substance outside of the dialogue has been completely removed.

To top that, the creators apparently found out very late that they only had 10 episodes to work with. The result is a very amusing but downright disastrous final episode that thunders through revelations at a speed of Mach 5 in order to be able to finish on time, and it still remains an ending that leaves a bad taste in your mouth. I hope that future directors will use this series as an example of how not to adapt a manga, because it’s such a shame that another story with potential had to be ruined. This series remained enjoyable because of its short length and dialogue, but it could have become so much more.