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I was pretty excited when I first saw Koukaku no Regios, or Chrome-Shelled Regios as it’s called in English. It promised a grand setting with many different sides to it, a large cast of different characters and a really interesting sense of mystery that all seemed to lie behind it. That’s why it’s such a shame to see what kind of an utterly mismanaged mess it turned into.

Take the following analogy: suppose you have a beautiful multi-layered birthday cake. Koukaku no Regios, instead of focusing on this entire cake just keeps staring at one of the candles, while hardly having any attention for the delicious rest of it. It presents a post-apocalyptic world, in which people can only live withing walking cities. It’s full of strange creatures like glowing goats, mutant bugs, who all have their own role and purpose, and behind the world seems a grand complot by people with dog-faces. And what does this series decide focus on? An inconsequential harem that never really gets anywhere! Talk about a let-down.

If the love polygon was good, it would have been able to excuse at least something, but unfortunately it even screws up there. Basically we have our lead character Layfon, and a bunch of girls who are in love with him. Layfon has a ton of girls swarming over him, but in the end none of these relationships get any substantial development, with perhaps the exception of Nina, who only gets blander as the show goes on.

This blandness syndrome by the way can be found in more characters in this series. Felli starts out as a nice wise-cracking and witty girl, but only gets more and more generic as the series goes on. Dalsiena turns from a past-driven character into a generic side-kick, Naruki gets turned from a headstrong policewoman in useless harem-bait, Salinvan turns from a skilled mercenary into an emo kid who can’t forget the past, Harley Sutton turns from an interesting side-character into an incredibly generic one devoid of any personality, and DO NOT get me started on Savaris.

So yeah, because the main storyline pops up so late in this series, the finale simply becomes a disaster. The creators start pulling random powers out of their asses, characters who were in one episode very badly wounded are completely fine in the next one, the plot twists really come from absolutely nowhere and because the main storyline received so little attention, none of it really makes an impact and therre are SO MAY questions that are left unresolved after that final episode.

The salvation for this series that I can see is if a second season got announced. Regios has potential, and I still remain convinced of that. If a second season would come, and make optimal use of the building up that this series has provided, then it’s going to rock beyond belief. The characters who didn’t turn into paper bags were interesting enough to watch and there were definitely good parts in this series. It’s just that there was too much crap that overshadowed it. The creators never knew how to properly pace and outline their series and in a way, the one behind the series composition seems to be the one to blame for this. Yes Mamiko Ikeda, shame on you.

When judging first episodes, I always try to look at the potential for the rest of the series. Kurokami had a fairly generic beginning, but I saw potential for the rest of this series. I believed that the Dopple-liner system, in which every person has two clones living somewhere, with these clones destined to die when they get too close to their “Root”, definitely had the potential to become interesting later on. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

As a typical Sunrise-series, Kurokami is all about action: every single episode is really written for the battles, which use the aforementioned Dopple-liner system as a shounen-esque base to explain the various superpowers that appear through the series, but it’s all fairly generic: the side-characters all have interesting powers, but the lead characters and villains don’t have any fighting style other than “lots and lots of power”. Still, the battles are what made me keep watching this series: they’ve got this sense of despair when Kuro (the lead character gets beaten over and over again. It’s fairly formulaic, but especially in the beginning it’s strangely watchable.

But all goes down the drains in the second half. Up until the halfway point, despite the formulaic battles the series had actually done a fairly well job in letting us get to know the main characters. The story was finally coming together… until the writers completely jumped the shark with a string of the most blatantly obvious Deus ex Machina. The storyline that was up to that point at least fairly layered turns into a dumb “beat the bad guy”-storyline and turns completely ridiculous. My biggest gripe was with the episode that revealed why the major villain of this series became the bad guy. I won’t spoil it, but let me just say that those plot twists feel so incredibly contrived that they really destroyed any suspense of disbelief I still had for this series.

The characters are mostly just okay, but the male lead character is such an annoying character. He only has two personalities: an emo one (“leave me alone! I don’t want to fight!”) and a fearless one (“Let’s beat them, Kuro!”). I was hoping that he would change over the course of the series, but unfortunately he only got more and more generic as the show went on. So in the end, the only thing that this series did well is its pretty pictures. Sunrise is behind the animation, so at least the action looks solid and consistent, and the background art is very stylish.

Still, I really don’t recommend this series for anything. There really is much better stuff out there, and this series fails to stand out in any way aside from its Dopple-liner system, which it never really goes in-depth with anyway. The story is full of holes and power-level inconsistencies, battles are written so that Kuro wins them at the last possible moment and overall, it just smells of mediocrity.

Game adaptations are of course notorious in how they tend to fail more often than not, but Sengoku Basara at first sight looked like it was going to be among the good ones. It was full of manliness and great fights, but along the way it didn’t really manage to fully live up to its expectations. Sure, there still is potential for that second season in January, but when taken a look at this series individually, it isn’t really worth the time you invest on it.

So yeah, Sengoku Basara is based on a game which is very, very loosely based on the Sengoku Era of Japan, when the country still was populated by a number of smaller countries, all looking to become the sole ruler of the island Honshuu. Its trademark is manliness: lots and lots of it. The dialogue is extremely exaggerated and passionate, full of righteousness, justice and inner conflicts. This isn’t a show about a bunch of teenagers; this is a show about true men.

Unfortunately, the rest of the execution falls short a bit. The characters… really are nothing to write home about. There is some small development in a select few of them, but none of them really make an impact. Also, for a show that aims for entertainment, this series tends to get side-tracked into angst too often. It feels that it’s in its own identity crisis at times, not knowing what it really wants to focus at.

In the end, there’s just one reason to watch this series: the battles. This series is animated by Production IG, who really are the masters of realistic animation and character-designs, and here they use them really well in combination with the incredibly unrealistic nature of this series. There are two fights that really were worth the watch: the ones from episode 2 and episode 12. These battles really kick ass and are really fun to watch. Aside from that though, this series simply remained overshadowed by better productions: in terms of entertainment and manliness, the new Mazinger this season is doing a much better job at it, and for manly historical supernatural swordplay there are shows like Bakumatsu Kikansetsu Irohanihoheto which really surpass this show in nearly every single way.

Anime, just like any other medium, does suffer from the fact that as time goes on, it gets harder and harder to be original. In the past decade, nearly all of the genres we know today were already invented, and during the past few years, it has become near-impossible to create any new genres it seems. If I’m not mistaken, the last time a new genre was created was with the horeca-series: short series in which the main characters run a restaurant/food-shop/bar/etc. After shows as Ristorante Paradiso, the genre is quietly picking up in recognition and popularity, but the anime who pioneered it, Bartender, is even more notable.

Likewise, today it’s very hard to be original anymore. Just try to think of something that absolutely has never been done before; only a select amount of series can truly do such a thing with confidence. Still, I really have to say that Bartender is THE most original anime series to have aired in the past five years. It’s really one of those series of which you can’t think that anything good can come out of it… and yet it’s great. From the outside, it’s simply a series in which characters drop by the bar of the lead character, drink a bit, talk about their problems and “see the light”. This series however doesn’t only make this work, it also throws in lots of unique stuff that really makes optimal use from the fact that this is a show about liquor.

So yeah, the generic formula for this series is that a customer comes into the bar called Eden Hall, hosted by the bartender who can serve the Glass of the Gods, and talks about his problems. In cases like this, it’s of course very tempting for a show to simply cheese up his story and shallowly deus ex machina all of the customer’s problems away simply after drinking a bit, yet somehow Bartender manages to avoid this pitfall. It doesn’t just view cocktails as just mixes of random drinks, but it looks at where these drinks came from: why were these drinks created? How did they get their names? Why do people drink them? Throughout each episode it provides all kinds of real-life anecdotes, both well-known and obscure, and relates these to the customer’s problems. By cleverly combining all of this, the customer comes to an understanding of his problems that actually doesn’t feel forced or obvious, and yet makes a lot of sense. And THAT’s the strength of Bartender: it intelligently looks at its customer’s problems and analyzes them; all in a way I have never seen done before.

You can really see that this is a series that’s written by someone who has a passion for liquor. I’m a liquor noob myself, but even I could tell that this series has an incredible amount of knowledge about all sorts of drinks, cocktails and also the detailed history behind them. It’s just like Osamu Tezuka, who as a Medicine graduate made optimal use of his knowledge when he wrote Black Jack, or take Shion no Ou, whose manga was written by a former professional shougi-player, who completely understood all of the principles of the game.

The third point at which Bartender shines with originality is the way it handles its narration, which again is something I have never seen done before in anime. Customers simply don’t disappear when their story is over, but they instead turn into narrators: they occasionally return to help out the main narrator to tell his story, and share their views of the new customers, while at the same time they never try to butt in with other people’s problems. Especially the final two episodes shine in this, and the entire series closes off with a really rounded final episode, in the way that Seraphim Call’s final episode was originally meant to end.

Amidst the originality though, there is one flaw that really sticks out like sore thumb. While I’m often not bothered by animation, the animation in Bartender really is abysmal at times. A lot of the shots look like they were drawn in a rushed way, and the only thing that seems to save this show’s aesthetics is the atmosphere of a bar that this show manages to create. The distorted faces really get in the way when we see a customer have a moment of self-discovery and during these moments, the cheese also tends to take over. This series screams maturity, but at the same time it also becomes hard to take it seriously with some of these hideously drawn faces. Thankfully though, the production-values do get saved by an excellent and relaxing soundtrack that still manages to pack a punch.

In any case, this is probably the end of my little review spree for now, since the next show I’m planning to watch is another one of those 52-episoded ones, but the series that I’ve reviewed during the past week all have something in common: excellent narrative and a true passion and understanding for the subjects they were dealing with. This is another reason why I still am such a big fan of anime, because the series that are made with passion really are the most enjoyable to watch, and Bartender, just like Hunter X Hunter’s first OVA, Victorian Romance Emma’s first season and even Futakoi Alternative really show this.

There aren’t many OVAs that are based on TV-series that actually manage to contribute to their respective story. Most of the time, they’re just silly DVD-extras, or have side-stories that just aren’t as interesting as their TV-counterparts. But oh boy, when an OVA is made with a clear goal and purpose, it sure does become good. Take Rurouni Kenshin Tsuiokuhen and Higurashi no Naku Koro ni for example. The first OVA from Hunter X Hunter is also such a wonderful example of this.

Seriously, this is EVERYTHING a shounen series should be. Creative, intelligent, a plot that for once doesn’t try to prevent the destruction of the world, a huge emphasis on strategy, an awesome cast of villains, the main character doesn’t scream, yell or play the hero all the time, nothing drags on whatsoever, whenever the show threatens to catch up to the manga, it simply takes a hiatus rather than come up with a bunch of pointless fillers, it’s without a doubt one of the best shounen series ever. It’s an incredible shame that today so few anime take up the example that Hunter X Hunter provided.

So anyway, the OVA basically continues where the TV-series left, and it’s actually one big cat-and-mouse game between Kurapica and the Spiders. Because the TV-series already did all of the building up, it really can immediately dive into the action, and the result is a very tense and complex strategical battle, which for once has the biggest focus towards using one’s head; in fact, there’s actually hardly any fighting aside from a few key scenes here and there.

This OVA really opened my eyes on the use of intelligence in anime. Usually, if shows even bother to use their brains during a fight at all, there is one party who actively uses his head, while the other stupidly rushes in without much of a strategy. In this OVA, everyone thinks carefully about his/her actions. As a result, this show can get away with powers that would be entirely overkill in most other series: the ability to read minds, the ability to copy any technique you want, the power to create clones or simply pull out the heart from one’s chest. This OVA carefully examines the different advantages and disadvantages of all the different powers, and it doesn’t even try to make use of every single obscure loophole to create tension.

The cast of characters is also really good. Both main and side-characters, everyone is in this story for a reason; no matter how small, they contribute to the story. Out of the most important characters, especially Pakunoda leaves an impression. We hardly know anything about her, but the performance that she puts down is very convincing and gripping. The leader of the antagonists also is unlike any other of his counterparts: for once you have a leader of an evil organization who doesn’t spend his time sitting on a chair doing nothing: this guy isn’t afraid to get his own hands dirty, and yet at the same time you can clearly see why he’s the leader of the bunch. The protagonists Gon, Kurapica, Leorio and Killua also get their own share of development.

There is one point of criticism I have for this OVA: I feel that it’s already done a wonderful job in characterizing its villains, but this would have been even better if some of the history of these guys had been revealed. But then again, there have been hints that the next two OVAs are going to delve into that.

The Hunter X Hunter OVA is exactly why I love those short but very intelligent and well-crafted series, and why it’s also a shame that there are so few of them. This OVA is basically the best of the TV-series, stripped from all the long training arcs and any kind of other boring part, and showed us eight episodes of what this series is best at: characters and actually intelligent strategies. For me, the best shows of the shounen genre are the Law of Ueki for the humorous and fun side, and Hunter X Hunter for the serious side.