Category: Some Quick First Impressions

Some quick first Impressions: Hayate no Gotoku 2nd Season, Examurai Sengoku and Slap Up Party ~Arad Senki~

by psgels, posted in Some Quick First Impressions

Hayate no Gotoku – 2nd Season

Short Synopsis: Our lead character still is the butler of a rich but athletically hopeless girl.
Chance of me Blogging: 0% (Haven’t seen the first season…)
I remember how when the first season aired, I wrote a rather *ahem*biased first impression of it. Because of this, I figured that it would be a good opportunity to give this show a second chance with the airing of a second season, and I have to say that this episode was pretty enjoyable. It wasn’t anythings special, but it got a bunch of good snickers out of me, and didn’t feel boring at all. It really makes me wonder why the heck I hated the first season with a fiery passion…

Examurai Sengoku

Short Synopsis: Our lead character still is your average tough samurai with a thirst for sake
Chance of me Blogging: 0% (Obviously not)
Here’s one I missed during the past winter-Season (or rather: couldn’t find anywhere), but it finally has received some subs. Right from the bat, it’s obvious why this series hasn’t received any attention whatsoever: all it does is look pretty. The utter amounts of cheese in this first episode were almost unbelievable, the voice-acting is terrible and the editing is way too sloppy. I did get a good laugh out of it, though. The dialogue is so utterly ridiculous and cheesy that it becomes funny. Especially that lead character is hilarious: he tries so hard to look like your average cool and bad-ass protagonist-samurai, but he fails in this completely.

Slap Up Party ~Arad Senki~

Short Synopsis: Our lead character has demon powers and travels across the land
Chance of me Blogging: 10% (If he rest of the season is really bad…)
Um… yeah. The start of this episode really was too painful to watch, and really typical of Bad Gonzo. The biggest thing was all of the hopelessly overacting characters and uninspired scripts of these people. Oh, this was even beyond cheese, this was utterly terrible. Having said that, though: the comedy does work, surprisingly enough. This show is so incredibly stupid, but it is hilarious in the process. And it’s true that Gonzo has always had a knack for combining fantasy with comedy, and this is just a case where they take this to the extreme: the fantasy is incredibly bad, though the comedy is surprisingly good.

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.

Some quick first Impressions: Infinite Space, K-On and Basquash!

by psgels, posted in Basquash!, Some Quick First Impressions

Infinite Space

Short Synopsis: Our lead character gets a space-ship from a mysterious lady
Chance of me Blogging: 10% (Again, only if the rest of the season is bad)
Well what do you know? Yet another show with episodes of only five minutes. This one seems to go for a fully fledged storyline, though. That makes me wonder a bit whether it’s trying to bite off more than it can chew, but the potential is there at least. What it really needs to do now is make optimal use of the fact that it only has a very limited airtime, and seriously improve on the bad GC here. There’s actually quite a bit of potential in the story, but after only five minutes there’s hardly a lot to say about it. I do hope, though, that it’s going to last longer than simply 13 episodes that really is going to be the recipe for disaster.
EDIT: oh crap, it’s just a generic promotion for a video game of only 4 episodes long. Scratch all that I said above. This thing sucks.

K-On

Short Synopsis: Our lead character joins the light music club at her high school.
Chance of me Blogging: 0% (Waah waah I hate mainstream anime waah waah)
Well, there you have it: this series yet again has the typical flaws of a Kyoani-show: it just consists out of a rip-off of some of their other franchises, most notably Lucky Star and the concert episode of Haruhi. The personality of the four main characters in this series can quite effectively be mapped to the personalities of the four lead characters of Lucky Star, and it’s a series about a school band. Granted, the one thing that was new here is a much more messy style of animation: at least that’s something new from them. The show could grow into an enjoyable slice of life series, but my big problem with it so far (aside from the lack of originality) is the female lead character. There’s actually lots of potential in a school band, but instead of choosing a lead character with a passion for music, the creators here went for a clueless and clumsy ditz without any musical talents whatsoever. I foresee some forced developments here.

Basquash!

Short Synopsis: Our lead character has spiky hairs and plays basketball in a huge car-like mecha.
Chance of me Blogging: 25% (Depends on what the heck it’s going to focus on)
Well, so this is incredibly stupid: here we have a spunky spiky-haired teenager… who is playing terrorist with a basketball of all things as a weapon. Seriously, he takes out an army of police officers with that thing. But hey: at least it’s fun! This was at least the best episode I’ve seen in this so far lackluster season, so at least that’s something. Even though there are huge amounts of bad logic and questionable plot twists (kids being able to control mechas better than trained adults? of course!), there are actually huge amounts of ideas in this series. The lead character may very well be your typical lead, but what I liked about him was his fiery passion for basketball. And I also loved the random ducks that showed up every once in a while. The visuals also looked totally sweet, but then again the question remains whether the creators can keep this up. My question for this series is the following: is the rest of the series just going to be a string of random basketball matches (very likely, considering his rival that got introduced in this episode), or is the basketball just going to be a vehicle to the real meat of the plot? Is this going to be a Buzzer Beater or a Gad Guard?

Some quick first impressions: Queen’s Blade, Sengoku Basara and Asura Cryin’

by psgels, posted in Some Quick First Impressions

Queen’s Blade

Short Synopsis: Our lead character has boobs.
Chance of me Blogging: 0% (No)
Seriously, what the heck happened to the clothes of those women? Even the characters of Ikkitousen wore more than these… things. Every single thing in this show is simply to generate as much fanservice as possible. Evil demons don’t specialize in easy and efficient ways to kill, but instead on ways to dissolve clothing while preventing any flesh wounds from forming. Characters’ bodies are apparently very oily (courtesy of very bad shading), but I guess that the weather must be very hot around these parts. That makes me feel sorry for those fully dressed male guards, though. Obviously, this show is going to be bad, and I have no intention to wait to see how badly the plot falls apart in the end.

Sengoku Basara

Short Synopsis: Our lead character is young, has lots of powers and leads an army.
Chance of me Blogging: 10% (The rest of the season has to be really bad for that to happen)
Okay, while this is at least a bit more like it, the only thing about Sengoku Basara that didn’t feel utterly generic was the bit with the CG dancing samurai in the OP, and that isn’t exactly something to be proud of. Here we yet again have an extremely powerful teenager who can take on armies at a time, and the gimmick of this show seems to be lots of exciting medieval warfare. Unfortunately there’s nothing that really catches your attention. The characters were just way too busy trying to look cool, instead of trying to go somewhere. In fact, I really wonder why everyone walks around accompanied by half an army in these series. I mean, the main characters can each wipe out half a city in an instant if they wanted to. What kind of difference did they really think that those puny men without any powers could make on the opponent? In fact, since this is a show about medieval warfare… how come those characters aren’t massively wiping out cities in the first place?

Asura Cryin’

Short Synopsis: Our lead character meets lots of cure girls including a ghost one.
Chance of me Blogging: 10% (Only if the rest of the season is really bad)
Oh, the incredibly generic character-designs! Throughout the entire episode I was facepalming at all of the incredibly bad and overdone clichés that appeared throughout this episode. To just name a few: the house with romantic cherry blossoms growing next to it, an OP with the lead female naked for no reason whatsoever, an OP that actually tries to rip off the ALI-project of all things, the generic male lead surrounded by lots of cute girls, the big breasted classmate who gets admired by every single guy in school APART from the male lead, the very annoying male classmate who never stops whining, et cetera. But, the good news is that there’s potential! There’s a huge back-story behind everything, which actually sounds mysterious enough to work. Let’s hope that the future episodes will cut down on the stereotypes, but there’s a chance that this could turn into something worthwhile.

Some quick first Impressions: Charady no Joke na Mainichi, Cookin’Idol Ai! Mai! Main! and Mainichi Kaasan

by psgels, posted in Some Quick First Impressions

Charady no Joke na Mainichi

Short Synopsis: Our lead character tells jokes.
Chance of me Blogging: 0% (Um… yeah)
What is it with this season and series with five-minute episodes? This is the third one already, and to my surprise, all three of them have been strangely enjoyable so far. Charady no Joke na Mainichi looks very childish at first sight, with very bad animation, CG and characters, but then it really surprised me when it turned out to be surprisingly witty. The show’s only purpose is to tell jokes, and in that part it succeeded somehow.

Cookin’ Idol Ai! Mai! Main!

Short Synopsis: Our lead character is an incompetent idol.
Chance of me Blogging: -10% (No way)
Continuing the string of series with only five-minute episodes is a silly show about an idol who ends up presenting a cooking-show, but unfortunately unlike the others, this one is just baaad. And okay, I admit that I’m not exactly the target audience for his show, but that didn’t stop Chi, Marie and Charady from charming me. While I admit I liked the Cabbage-song, the acting here feels absolutely horrible, especially in the live-action bits are a pain to watch.

Mainichi Kaasan

Short Synopsis: Our lead character is in her mid-life crisis.
Chance of me Blogging: -20% (Absolutely not)
Oh my god… I thought it’d never stop! Mainichi Kaasan basically tells the story of an overstressed mother of two children and her every day life, but it just goes on and on for too damn long. The season started off with so many surprisingly good series of only 5 minutes per episode, and this series would have been much better if they compacted everything in bite-size chunks of these five minutes. Right now, the show repeats itself way too often, jokes often don’t fall or are badly timed and it goes on way too long. Never have I been this glad for an episode to end because it’s such an incredible chore to get through it. That’s not what a slice of life is supposed to be!

Some quick first Impressions: La Corda d’Oro ~Secondo Passo~, Chi’s New Address and Marie & Gali

by psgels, posted in Some Quick First Impressions

La Corda d’Oro ~Secondo Passo~

Short Synopsis: Our lead character seems to have abandoned her magical violin.
Chance of me Blogging: 0% (It just feels too much like an inferior shoujo Nodame Cantabile)
I remember how the first season was pretty much an insult to classical music, in which a ditz without any musical background acquires a magical violin and cheats herself into a competition among the top students of the school she’s in. Thankfully, the second season seems to have improved a lot on it, and the lead characters seems to have realized that it’s much more fun to be playing by herself. There’s quite a bit of potential in her growth. She now seems to be incredibly talented because she can play with lots of emotions in her violin, but I guess that that’s much better than the magical violin. I’m still not sold on the ridiculously looking bishies, though. Especially that blonde guy was horrible. He reminds me of Fuwa Shou from Skip Beat! In fact, I could swear that the two of them share the same voice actor, and I can’t believe that he’s being forced to play his character straight this time. Talk about overacting here…

Chi’s New Address

Short Synopsis: Our lead character wants to go outside.
Chance of me Blogging: 0% (It’s a fun show and all, but I’d go crazy trying to blog it)
Awesome to see this series back. Chi is just as fun to watch as ever, and I’m surprised that the creators are actually continuing with the whole plotline of trying to find a new home for Chi. This is going to mean that dad, mom and Youhei are going to make way for a new family, and I wonder whether this new family has the charms of the original. Ah well, at least Chi will be the same. ^^;

Marie & Gali

Short Synopsis: Our lead character finds herself into some weird Italian-ish island.
Chance of me Blogging: 10% (Italy suddenly became a popular country to make fun of, hasn’t it?)
So… yeah. If you’re wondering what the “Gali”-part of the title means: it’s short for Galileo Galilei. What we have here is a bizarre fantasy setting in which a teenaged girl meets a very weird version of Galileo inside the tower of Pisa. I’m really not sure who thought of it, but for some reason it was kind of charming. It makes excellent use of its time of only 5 minutes to be either slapstick, make random historical references and be cute, and the combination works surprisingly well. It’s obviously never going to be amazing, but I have to admit that it was pretty amusing. Not to mention that Marie’s character-designs look very stylish.

Some quick first impressions: Nyoron Churuya-san, Suzumiya Haruhi-chan no Yuutsu and Kodomo no Jikan Ni Gakki

by psgels, posted in Some Quick First Impressions

Nyoron Churuya-san

Short Synopsis: Our lead character is a silly spin-off of a character from a certain Kyoani show.
Chance of me Blogging: -20% (Uh… yeah)
I seriously don’t know what to write here. What was the point of this thing? Why was it made? I obviously didn’t get it because I’m not a fan of Haruhi, but do even its fans consider this something worthwhile? This whole episode was just a string of very, very, very dry jokes, that will probably work when you’re watching them with a bunch of very drunk friends (being drunk yourself helps too), but apart from that… yeah.

Suzumiya Haruhi-chan no Yuutsu

Short Synopsis: Our lead character is a silly spin-off of another character from a certain Kyoani show.
Chance of me Blogging: -40% (Uh… yeah)
Well, I’d like to thank this series from giving me a headache that’s probably going to last for a few more hours or so… At least Nyoro had some entertainment value because of the deadpan humour, but this thing was just terrible. The comedic timing was way off, the voice acting was terrible and the CG was horrible, aside from perhaps the giant electric monster. I can understand how you’d want to give a series a little extra, but DOESN’T THIS SERIES ALREADY HAVE ENOUGH OF THAT!?

Kodomo no Jikan Ni-Gakki

Short Synopsis: Our lead character continues to harass her teacher.
Chance of me Blogging: 0% (Nice show, but no)
Okay, so the pointless fanservice is really getting more extreme now that this series has taken up the OVA format. While some of the fanservice was there to make a point, some other scenes were just… pointlessly disturbing to say the least. Still, I’m glad to see that this series hasn’t forgotten yet what made the first season enjoyable, and it continues with the Teacher vs. Student themes and does a pretty good job at it. Rin as the class president has potential, and some of the jokes worked pretty well. Especially that very strange ED was kindof interesting. 😛

Some quick first Impressions: Hetalia: Axis Powers, Fresh Precure and Denpateki Kanojo

by psgels, posted in Hetalia: Axis Powers, Some Quick First Impressions

Hetalia: Axis Powers

Short Synopsis: Our lead characters… are a bunch of countries.
Chance of me Blogging: 100% (yeah, because I’m already blogging it)
I’m still a bit bitter that Holland wasn’t made fun of in this series so far (especially when even Estonia has its own character), but sarcasm aside, I really liked this series. You can trust Studio Deen to come up with the more crazy mangas to adapt, and the huge amount of country references was hilarious to watch. It’s going to be interesting if this series can keep this up. As for the ones who got offended by this series: you should start poking fun at other countries yourself.

Fresh Precure!

Short Synopsis: Our lead character receives the power to become a magical girl.
Chance of me Blogging: 0% (Obviously not)
So yeah, I checked this out in the hope that it might actually be something worthwhile, but in the end I couldn’t really find anything to really make me keep watching it, although it did turn out a bit better than your generic mahou shoujo series. I particularly liked how one of the bad guys put too much sugar in his tea because he had never seen it before, and the costume design is nice enough, but overall it really doesn’t try much to set itself apart in the mahou shoujo genre. Especially the lead character just tries too hard to be funny, the mascot character too. Not to mention the abysmally animated concert scene, the the downright painful ED and how everyone conveniently disappears when a monster shows up. I could also whine about the very bad physics in this series, but hey, this is a mahou shoujo series for kids. What else could you expect?

Denpateki na Kanojo

Short Synopsis: Our lead character is a legendary king who happens to be stuck in the body of a random high school boy.
Chance of me Blogging: 40% (Perhaps)
Yeah, the way this one started definitely got me worried. Here we have a legendary demon king inside a high school boy, and guess what: a cute girl arrives from out of nowhere to protect him. Still, this OVA is good stuff. The episode was well told and pretty nicely built up with some pretty good suspense parts. The lead characters slowly grew likable, and the action doesn’t aim to be as over the top as possible, but kept all the fight subtle but believable (I love it when a character actually gets disabled when hit by a very hard and solid object). Some parts were a bit too emo for my liking, but this is going to be a pretty good OVA if the rest of the episodes can keep up this pace.

Some quick first Impressions: Sora wo Miageru Shoujo no Hitomi ni Utsuru Sekai, Catman and Genji Monogatari Sennenki

by psgels, posted in Genji Monogatari Sennenki, Some Quick First Impressions, Sora wo Miageru Shoujo no Hitomi ni Utsuru Sekai

Sora wo Miageru Shoujo no Hitomi ni Utsuru Sekai

Short Synopsis: Our lead character has the power to save a strange country of elf-people.
Chance of me Blogging: 50% (If the shows I’m planning to blog turn out bad, I’m going for this one)
Ooh, very nice! Kyoani is finally getting a bit out of its comfort zone. Sure, this series is just a rehash of one of their earliest franchises, but it’s at least a step along the way to get them to adapt something actually other than high school series (with the first step obviously being Clannad’s After Story). Overall I’d love to have seen the studio going for something completely new, but there’s no doubt about the potential of the Munto remake. This episode set the foundations of an epic storyline in a pretty interesting parallel world, with pretty nice animated effects that know when to be subtle and when to be over the top. What this series needs to do now is make its cast of characters a bit more interesting. All I saw in this episode was a bunch of people that are fighting a bunch of other people, and those other people are about to find a girl who can help them fight against those people. They lack an identity so far, despite their distinctive character-designs: give them more sides, life goals, motivations, weaknesses, whatever. Make them interesting!

Catman

Short Synopsis: Our lead character is a solitary humanoid cat.
Chance of me Blogging: 0% (But an interesting short nonetheless)
So, inspired by Touhou’s animation project (and trying to find something to cover so that I wouldn’t have to wait until the 24th before being able to post this entry…) I started looking for other short and experimental animation works. Eventually I fond this nice series of flash animations, called Catman. They’re basically a series of short videos without spoken dialogue, about a city of cat-people, following the titular Catman as he lives his life and gets himself into trouble. It’s nice and down to earth, but what especially caught my attention was the soundtrack that fully consists out of catchy ska-songs, which really works and creates a very nice mood for this series. Apparently, it also won some awards, so if you ever have the chance to watch something of this, then it’s a nice way to spend 3 minutes.

Genji Monogatari Sennenki

Short Synopsis: Our lead character grows up as the daughter of a prestigious household.
Chance of me Blogging: 100% (Noitamina + Feudal Japan + Osamu Dezaki? Hell yeah!)
Oh boy, this one’s going to get popular. When Ultraviolet already received so much hate, I don’t want to know how badly the character-designs of Genji Monogatari will be received. Still, I don’t care! This episode had by far the best visuals of the Winter season. Uniting Noitamina with Osamu Dezaki was a large gamble, but it really worked out so far. The pacing in this episode is slow, and yet lots of stuff has already happened and already two characters have received quite a bit of depth. With only 11 episodes, this series really wasts no scene, and I’m predicting lots of great stuff for the rest of this series.

Some quick first Impressions: Koukaku no Regios, Slayers Evolution-R and Ride Back

by psgels, posted in Some Quick First Impressions

Koukaku no Regios

Short Synopsis: Our lead character enters a school in a world where people have strange powers.
Chance of me Blogging: 50% (Might be interesting)
You know, this may not be the best series, but this was exactly what I’ve been looking for this season: originality. Sure, this episode was full of clichés, but for every bad idea, the creators seem to have included a good idea, and I’m interested to see where the creators can take this. This episode took place on two different places: a desert city that’s attacked by a huge monster and a strange kind of high school, and I especially liked the former, and I wonder how it’s going to tie in with the high school setting. The high school itself had all the necessary archetypes present, but that female lead felt refreshing and much less one-sided than I suspected. It’s also a nice touch: if you live in a world where everyone has powers, then there are of course people going to abuse them, especially if they’re bratty high school kids, and you need a bit of extra effort to keep these guys in check. So overall, I like this: there are lots of different characters despite the clichés and a lot of potential. The soundtrack is pumping, though the OP is going to suck.

Slayers Evolution-R

Short Synopsis: Our lead characters meet a strange talking armour.
Chance of me Blogging: 0% (Not after that first season)
I really wasn’t looking forward to watching this series. I planned to just watch it and drop it to get it over with. And then this series came and delivered the best episode of the new Slayers so far. Okay, so that may not say much, but for once I wasn’t bored out of my skull, the talking armour was actually quite funny and I laughed more in this episode than during the entire first season. I really don’t want to go through the same pain as the first season, but if it’s true that all Slayers get better in their second halves, it might be interesting to stick with it.

Ride Back

Short Synopsis: Our lead character accidentally gets to try a motorbike-mecha-thingie.
Chance of me Blogging: 90% (Madhouse Rocks!)
Well, that’s Madhouse: here it comes and delivered the without a doubt best first episode of all the new shows this season. Sure, the lead character is yet another one of those teenagers who accidentally gets to possess a super-weapon, but apart from that everything about this episode was superbly done. The art looks excellent and yet down to earth, the soundtrack fits the series exactly and the series has a number of very likable lead characters. I was immediately a fan of the female lead character, but the rest of the support cast are also defined and varied. This is promising to be one of the highlights of the Winter-season if the creators can keep this up.