Category: Some Quick First Impressions

Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D’s

Masochists of the world, unite! Seriously, this was without a doubt the worst show of the new season. And without a surprise either. It’s one of these shows that are so bad that it becomes good again. And really, it was a very smart decision from the creators to make all the duels take place on motorbikes now. Everyone’s now wearing helmets, so they won’t burn your eyes with their outrageous hair-styles! If only the same could be said for the monster-design and motorbike-designs. Still, the cream of the crop in terms of badness was without a doubt the fight. It’s so badly written that it’d even give Zaizen Jotaro a run for its money.

Net Ghost Pipopa

While I most definitely won’t watch another episode of this, I can imagine how kids would love it. It’s great to see another kiddie-series that intends to do more than just get kids to buy overpriced toys. Net Ghost Pipopa basically tries to get the young ones a bit familiarized with the internet, by portraying it as a brightly coloured world that some lucky kids can enter. It’s nowhere explained why our male main character is one of those lucky ones, but series of this particular genre could have been much worse (look above). I wouldn’t recommend anyone above 15 to watch it, but if you’ve got a little sibling (and this thing ever gets subbed), you might want to consider showing this to the.

Monochrome Factor

This series has genre-issues! One moment it features a spunky girl confessing over the girl of her love, and yet all the male characters are bishies and two of them even end up kissing each other. In any case, this series isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just boring. It failed to catch my attention at all, and it’s given me no real interest to keep watching it. The fights are dull (monsters just get slashed and that’s it). I also feel that the only female voice-actress was trying way too hard. It’s still better than Hirano Aya’s performance in Zettai Karen Children, but I can’t seem to remember any line in which she didn’t scream.

Wagaya no Oinarisama

The best thing about this series? The soundtrack. It surprises me as well, but Wagaya no Oinarisama has been the first series this season where the background music has stood out for me. All other series up till now featured either some cheesy J-Pop (not really my taste to say the least) or obligatory dark tunes that do their job. In this series, however, the music is subtle, yet very varied. One moment you hear a violin, then comes a flute, and then it’s the turn for the piano. Also, any soundtrack that has a choir is automatically win in my opinion. About the rest of the series: it’s solid so far. The characters are likable, and there’s some good chemistry between them. The story is nothing special, but this series seems to go for the slice-of-life route anyway. For now, it’s looking interesting enough.

Neo Angelique Abyss

Okay, let me correct that statement a bit: nearly every soundtrack that has a choir is automatically win in my opinion. You can of course always take it too far. I’ve found that obscure series are always either incredibly good or incredibly bad, and this one’s obviously of the bad kind. Really, it’s hilarious to see all the clichés present: a huge cast of bishies, all great fighters, a pretty female lead who has huge powers that enable her to stand in the centre of all these bishies, lots of angelic themes, and as a bonus, the evil power of the bad guy’s monsters turns out to give everyone it touches (except for the bishies for some strange reason) wrinkles. Of course, the worst fear for any young girl! I’ve ranted a lot about bad shounen-series, but that doesn’t mean that the shoujo-series don’t have their disasters as well. 😛

Da Capo II Second Season

Err… don’t ask me why I found it a good idea to check out the fourth instalment of Da Capo. It was worth a good laugh at the predictable plot here (and of course the waking-up scene couldn’t be missing), but I admit that there have been far worse series this season than this one. This is really another one of those “rainy-day anime”, which you can watch on a rainy day if you need to spend time other than taking for example your dog out to walk. However, that takes me to the huge size of this franchise. Including this series, there’ll be 78 freaking episodes. I acknowledge that this is a nice series to relax and all, but I really can’t imagine myself sitting through 10 episodes of virtually the same over and over again, let alone eighty-seven.

Zettai Karen Children

Well, here’s a surprise. I was about to condemn this series to the depths of hell, but it actually turned out quite entertaining for a light watch. It’s definitely not meant to be taken seriously, but series like that are nice once in a while as well. It really reminded me of a raunchy version of Power Puff Girls Z, and that definitely has potential for the future. There’s just one thing: I still don’t understand what people find so good about Hirano Aya. Her voice is annoying and way too exaggerated, and probably the most annoying thing of this first episode. What this series needs to do now is introduce interesting side-characters, and keep itself fresh throughout its entire run. I also hope that the big bad guy isn’t entirely serious and has a humorous side as well. A lot of good comedies have been ruined before because the major villain took himself too seriously.

Code Geass – Lelouch of the Revellion R2

No, that’s not a typo. Apparently, it’s the official spelling of this series according to this episode. In any case, this episode had a few too many things in common with a bad soap. Amnesia? Suzaku who has become even more stereotypical than he already was? The military knew about Lelouch, and yet they didn’t kill him as soon as they got the chance? This series is becoming harder and harder to take seriously. Ah well, at least it’ll be good for some brainless action, and with a bit of luck the upcoming episodes will become so over-the-top that they’ll be worth a good laugh.

Nabari no Ou

That main character sounds way too much like a girl! Whenever he talks, I keep seeing a strange Shana/Nagi/Louise clone acting tsundere. In any case, Nabari no Ou has solid production-values, but I’m not that excited about this series. Perhaps its the fairly generic premise so far, perhaps it’s the fact that the main cast all consists out of bishies while all the bad guys are ugly, or perhaps it’s because none of the characters has been particularly interesting so far. It’s not like I expected anything from this series, but it’s still a shame that it turned out so generic so far.

Kanokon

Xebec has really fallen. Once they were a studio that brought quality-series like The Third and Hitohira, though this season their only focus seems to be fanservice. Really, I don’t know what’s left to say about these series in which the male main character suddenly gets loved by a bunch of beautiful girls for no reason. They’re bad, and just depend on their fanservice to make as many otaku buy their DVDs as possible. At least, I have to give this series credit that the dialogue seems a bit more inspired than usual series of this kind, but that’s to be expected with this being based on a light novel.

Blassreiter

To be honest, this episode didn’t give me any reason to condemn this series as an utter failure. There were a few problems here and there, where the animation looked rather unnatural, but overall this turned into a very capable action-series. And therein lies the problem, though. It’s been a really long time since I watched a “good” action series, and something really has to be wrong when the most satisfying action scenes I’ve seen for the past year came from Power Puff Girls Z. Action-series like Devil May Cry, who had great first episodes also turned out to consist of nothing but fillers, and while Gurren Lagann was entertaining, it still wasn’t really what I was looking for. Blassreiter definitely has the potential, but I first want to see whether it won’t screw up its future episodes before I get my hopes up too high.

Kamen no Maid Guy

Well, it’s a good thing that this seems to be a season of shoujo anyway, so I didn’t have any big expectations for this series. I maybe chuckled trice during this episode, which is way too little for a good comedy. This series really seems to try too hard, but all it does is waste a lot of energy on fanservice jokes that get boring really fast. I don’t even mind the bad animation, but there’s so much you can do with a concept of a GAR maid with a mask, and this series seems to choose the most predictable route through lots and lots of fanservice. I’m going to give this series one more chance, to see whether it’s perhaps like Muteki Kanbanmusume, though for now I won’t recommend this one.

Chi’s Sweet Home

Ever since I first saw the promo, this series intrigued me. It was a show about a lost kitty, and yet it was labelled as a seinen-show and animated by Madhouse and the episode director of Death Note and the assistant director of Shigurui. Well, it turns out that the guy was just looking for something completely different to work on, and rather took this to the extreme. Chi’s Sweet Home is a really cute series, though with just ninety seconds for each episode, it’s way too short. Heck, even Hanoka was longer. How many episodes will there be anyway?

Kyou Kara Maou, Third Season

A few years ago, I watched the first few episodes of this series, though I dropped it when the sexual innuendo became a bit too much to take seriously. I became intrigued again, however, when I found out that the director of Simoun and True Tears was behind it, so I decided to give this series one more shot, just in case this turned out to be more than fangirl bait. It didn’t start off too well, when the very first scene features a bunch of unicorns, though thankfully there were one or two scenes that at least hinted at potential. Overall, though, I feel that this series really needs to take itself more seriously. The main character is a king, yet he seems to know nothing about how to properly run a country. What bugs me the most, however, is that it’s been seventy freaking episodes and the characters hardly feel different. A 13-episode series is excused to have minimal character-development, but 70 episodes are plenty of time for the characters to go through changes. Really, what the heck have these characters been doing in the first two seasons?

To Love-Ru

Well, so this one turned out exactly like expected, and that’s a bad thing because I was expecting this to suck. There’s nothing much to say, actually. The only reason why you’d want to check this out is because of the fanservice, nothing else has any value. Things are badly explained, the main character is just another “typical high-school boy”, who turns out to have the mysterious power of attracting cute girls. It’s just the same we’ve seen over and over again. In any case, after watching this series, I was edging for another episode of Kyou Kara Maou, and that’s not a good sign.

Mnemosyne Musume-Tachi

Mnemosyne’s strategy is basically to attempt to capture its audience with lots of gore and nudity. Like I said before, I haven’t bought the formula yet. The characters do have potential, but it seems to me that they’re trying a bit too hard to be sympathetic, so early on. Especially the case for the first episode was a bit too extreme, and to me it seemed that it was more keen on to shock its viewer than to come up with a cohesive story. Who knows, this is one series that can go both ways: it can get lost in its endless fanservice, or it can turn out to be quite an interesting character-study. One thing that I do want to say is that the OP is pretty amazing. Especially the track that the creators found for it.

Mai Otome S.ifr.

Well, at least this one looks to actually contribute to the Mai Otome-universe, rather than the abomination of Mai Otome Zwei. Still, the new characters are just as annoying as all the other series. Thankfully, the main character is less annoying than Arika was, but that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t get on my nerves every time she appears. Overall, I doubt that something good can come out of this OVA, but at least it seems to be trying. It’s going to have to try really hard to fit in all the development for the huge load of new characters, though. Hardly anything was explained in this episode (heck, we still don’t know why Sifr was kidnapped in the first place), and it’s going to take a lot of time for just three episodes to explain everything.

Bus Gamer

Well, this didn’t turn out as interesting as I hoped. Bus (as in BUSiness, not an actual bus) Gamer obviously didn’t receive that big of a budget to work with. The crows that appear once in a while look really bad, and one particular character has his hair conveniently over his eyes so that the animators wouldn’t have to draw them. The OP sung by a boy band and the bishounen character-designs quickly show that this is a series, aimed to cater the fangirls. The bad guys don’t help much either, because they’re just a bunch of paper bags that need to be defeated by the good guys. But that’s where the three-episode format for this series comes into play. This isn’t your top-quality series, but the episode was fun to watch. The creators managed to keep this episode interesting, despite the faulty ingredients. The music is also very decent, and as it look like, this series won’t have any time to get boring. This really is one of these series that’s for those rainy days when you’re bored and need half an hour to burn.