Samurai Flamenco – 11

by psgels, posted in Samurai Flamenco

I think my brains just exploded…

I knew that this series would spiral out of control. Just not in this way. In one episode, the creators YET AGAIN completely changed the genre of the entire series, along with the feel, mood, themes and everything. At this point the only similarity between episode 1 and 11 is the way in which Samurai Flamenco appears in it. Even the mood-swings of Guilty Crown and Code Geass weren’t this big!

Seriously, from out of nowhere Jouji Kaname reveals that he has been preparing to fight the invasion by aliens for over a decade and to do that he created unbeknownst to anyone an incredibly stereotypical power rangers base, complete with power rangers, basically revealing that the first seven episodes were pretty much one really big lie and that they weren’t set in modern-day Tokyo in the slightest. What follows is a really weird discussion on who should be the leader, followed by a staged death scene, and a freaking giant robot! I mean, is this really real?

I have to say: this show is unique. It’s currently trying to do something that no other show has. Whether it’ll work is an entirely different matter though, and I do believe that it’s too early for that, so for now I’ll withhold judgement on the big picture. However, I will say this: I hated Code Geass and Guilty Crown because it really felt like it they were written as the creators went along. Especially in Guilty Crown’s case. In Samurai Flamenco though, this isn’t the case. It’s got a lot of Deus ex Machina, however the creators very clearly had the intention right from the beginning to escalate things into the ridiculous proportions that we saw in this episode. It’s episode 11, and only now we’ve been introduced to everyone on the promo art. Sure, it could have been less sloppy, but right from the start it wanted to transition from the ordinary to the absurd.

Now let me stress Robotics;Notes here. A series that wasn’t as extreme as this one, but still is one that this series needs to learn from: you can have a really good build-up, but that isn’t worth anything if the second half is crap, like what happened with that series. Writers, you need to stay and don’t you dare to just get lazy next year.

Also, it’s nearly the end of the year. 2-cour Noitamina-series always have a few weeks of hiatus. I assume that the next episode will air in a few weeks, though no concrete date seems to be known yet.

Kyousogiga – 08

by psgels, posted in Kyousogiga

The big strength of Kyousogiga has always been its characterization, and with a lot of series that have that, they make the mistake to just not focus on that for their finale. I mean, finales need to escalate. Most shows do that by turning on the epic-button. Kyousogiga did that as well, but it still kept its focus at the characters. Mostly thanks to how all of the characters with powers to actually destroy dimensions are intertwined together.

Because of this the animators could really bring an action-packed finale, while at the same time the focus remained on Koto. Revealing that she was the whole reason everything started due to how incredibly weird her family is really helped with that. She still has her flaws, she’s not just blindly running around as well. Plus, the chemistry between the characters was still awesome. I especially loved that punch near the end of the episode.

Two episodes left, so let’s see whether the creators can keep this up until the ending. I’m especially curious for the actual finale, because there have been plenty of good series that somehow had uninspired ending. This series is the perfect opportunity to to do something differnt though. Lots of thought has already been put into these episodes, so I really hope that the creators also have something really inspired in store for the actual climax.

Kill la Kill – 11

by psgels, posted in Kill La Kill

So finally, we’ve got the first big hint at what the second half of this series will be about. In this case, it’s in the form of a bunch of characters who just showed up from out of nowhere. Okay, that can work. It’s typical that everything about them screams fashion, and this indeed is a show in which clothing plays a very important symbolical role. The way in which that girl claied to just be Ryuko’s father’s killer is probably some sort of lie (otherwise I have no idea how they’re going to explain the killer’s silhouette that Ryuko saw), but i’s a good start for a solid second half that will indeed move things beyond the school and let things escalate.

It’s also good that they didn’t go the formulaic route and they just skipped the last fight against the student council, however these two episodes did have a bit of an unfortunate effect on the four of them, in the way that at this point it stopped taking them seriously. They’re in danger of becoming like Krillin from Dragonball Z: characters who are just there for comic relief and can’t keep up with the incredible rate at which the main character powers up. That’s the downside of not killing off your enemies: you’ve already put a lot of development into them, so itd be a shame to not use that later on.

Still, this was a really fun episode. I think it helps to have this battle split up in two episodes with other stuff around it, rather than just dedicate one episode to it. It helps keeping things fresh and also prevents formula.

Probably not going to do ratings again, because they became pointless at this point. They were useful when I blogged like, 12 series at the same time, but now they’re just redundant. They only had one purpose left, which is something I do want to stress: the amount of criticism I have for a series does not equate how much I disliked it. It’s a very common misconception I see, but some series just aim really high, resulting in lots of flaws, while the worst series are the ones so unremarkable that there’s hardly anything to say about them.

Samurai Flamenco – 10

by psgels, posted in Samurai Flamenco

Usually I blame writers lately. This time however, the writing was fine. I see what this episode was trying to do, and it had me at the edge of my seat. Perhaps a bit fast-paced, but I see what the writers were trying to do. This really could have been an amazing episode. But god, the delivery.

Okay. Whoever is in charge of the suspense of disbelief: for the love of god, try a little harder here. You already have a series in which this is very important, and this episode in particular depended on it with all of the gore. You could have really helped that with some actual good animation, but what stood out for me the most is how characters kept teleporting all over the place in this episode. Characters take huge leaps from one place to the other without any build-up whatsoever, leading to a lot of Deus ex Machina. I can understand timeskips and all, but there is a limit. Not to mention that showing characters actually travelling from A to B adds a lot to immersion. You need to worry about that, as much as you’d like to focus on your characters!

I read somewhere once that Manglobe is the kind of studio that doesn’t have many in-house people: for all of their projects they look around the industry for the right people. They’re basically outsourcing a lot, or at least they were around the time of Ergo Proxy and Michiko to Hatchin, and back then they were really good at it. This episode though. It just screamed outsourcing problems. Otherwise it just would not have looked so rushed, especially for such an important episode in the plot. I mean, something really went wrong in the production schedule.

Anyway, about the plot: this was where the series went even more out of control, by showing elements that were even more obviously supernatural, yet at the same time they’re all human: King Torture is just a man who managed to get ahold of strange powers that allowed him to create all those monsters. He too basically is just another person obsessed with superheroes and fiction, but he spiraled into the other side of the spectrum.

For the rest of the cast, I really liked how they used the build-up: people started to realize how they underestimated what it really means to be a superhero. That it’s not just about kicking ass and looking good. They started to look beyond the glory.

But damn, you’d better make up for this episode with the second half. There’s still plenty of potential left and all, but this execution isn’t the kind that a story like this deserves!

However, someone singing really badly? Hell yeah! Finally. I mean, who is expected to sing well after such a trauma?
Rating: 4.5/8 (Good)

Ore no Nounai Sentakushi ga, Gakuen Lovecome o Zenryoku de Jama Shiteiru Review – 80/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews

Noucome! You do not want to know how long I have been waiting for a series like this. More than half a decade, at the very least. Finally a series comes along and puts the incredibly overused harem genre in its place. And it actually does it well. Thank you!

So to elaborate: the harem genre is one of the worst genres in anime, and it has been so for about a decade now. The worst part is the sheer amount of series that have been made of it. They give anime a bad name and the vast majority of them just completely sucks. Over the years of course, enough attempts at parodies have appeared.

The problem with these parodies was that they weren’t really parodies. They’re just harem shows with their tongue in their cheek. When you have this mentality though, you only make things worse: you’re not funny, and the tongue in the cheek is just an excuse to put in even less effort into your writing because any flaws can be overlooked this way. A lot of parodies make this mistake and just adhere to the things they’re trying to make fun of, and with the harem genre this resulted into one giant mess. The only successful series so far probably was Ben-To, but that was just a really well executed series first and foremost.

Noucome though, goes all the way. This series finally aims to highlight the stupidity in the harem genre, and it finally aims to really make everything about it look ridiculous to show what so many series nowadays are getting away with. It finally takes the usual tropes like the quiet girl, the ditzy girl, the energetic girl, the student council, and with some great jokes and its premise shows how bad these things are. The protagonist is wonderful in fully acknowledging what a horrible person he is while this show keeps finding ways for him to enact generic harem scenes, and take them to the ridiculous. For that effort alone, I applaud this series. Because it has a lot of flaws, unfortunately.

Like most series, this series does lack an editor. The writers have great ideas, but other ideas are just plain bad. For example, everything about the main female lead (the one who falls from the sky) just doesn’t work: where all other characters are meant to highlight the flaws of their stereotypes, she’s just the generic dog-like girl with no brains and a huge appetite that we’ve seen millions of times before. She gets old really fast.

Second, it’s unfortunate to see that the writers can’t keep up their wit for the entire run of the series. With only 10 episodes, this is delightfully short (a comedy really does not need to be long!), but even then the second half has a few bad episodes, and especially the last arc is a pool episode that, while still containing some good jokes, is also full of pointless repeated boob-jokes that don’t go anywhere and an incredibly rushed and hacked ending that doesn’t really resolve anything. It’s a really clear example of the creators not knowing whether there is going to be a sequel, and therefore they try to include a bit of both, resulting in a really big mess of a final episode. It’s a shame, because there really is comedic gold in good endings, yet the amount of comedies that actually go for this can be counted on two hands. Another problem this series has is that everyone and his dog conveniently gets anmnesia when the writers need it the most. It’s passable when done once, but the writers just keep relying on it.

Nevertheless, Noucome first looked to be a series with the worst premise you could imagine. It turned out to be the biggest surprise of the year for me, and especially the first half was pretty much the best way in which such a bad-sounding storyline could ever have been animated. Can we now kill the harem genre. Please?
One-Sentence Review: The first harem parody that actually is a parody. Terrible ending though.
Suggestions:
– Ben-To
– Touka Gettan (Also not really a parody, but another great example of how to spice up the harem genre)
– Aquarion Evol

Samurai Flamenco – 09

by psgels, posted in Samurai Flamenco

My reaction to this episode: okay, they are starting to stretch that annoying manager who keeps calling. I’ve seen enough anime to know where this is going: he keeps bothering her and she suddenly develops feelings for him and they become a couple and HOLY CRAP WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO HIM!

This really is a deconstruction of the Superhero genre, or should I say Supervillain-genre, because the premise of this series is: what if earth was attacked by stereotypical supervillains”? They just identify the most visible superhero at the time to be their main adversary. But the way in which this series does its things is particularly clever, and really plays with your expectations.

The generic goons were used quite interestingly. This series acknowledges that these monsters are just a dime a dozen, and that they’re easily beaten, luring us into a false sense of security that everything will be easy. And even the random monsters that explode have a tail left behind, in the form of the dust that their explosion covered.

And then it comes with these huge mood-whiplashes that are actually really effective. The question is whether this show will keep that up for the entirety of the airtime. Shock value needs to be balanced and can only get you so far.
Rating: 6/8 (Excellent)

Kill La Kill – 10

by psgels, posted in Kill La Kill

With this I understand the purpose of the previous episode more. It really was meant as a build-up episode for what was to follow. We needed a “normal” fight, from which things could escalate afterwards. It was built up to be this really big deal, but in the end its biggest purpose was to show Senketsu that he could change shape. This episode has him experimenting with that, on a far bigger scale than what I expected.

It helped for the first fight of this episode to take so slow: that really brought back the pacing in this episode, and it also showed that Senketsu is already becoming close to over 9000. It also was a pretty hilarious fight and I think necessary for the overall balance: you have so many over the top fights here, you need one that is a bit silly. And it’s good that the creators didn’t use the token silly character for this, but instead a guy who just wasn’t fighting serious (note how he didn’t appear to be BIG to Ryuko at all).

Then the fight with classical music was glorious, and really entertaining. The fights themselves in this episode are more what I expect from the creators. Standard fight scenes in which there are only people hitting each other don’t work anymore. You need to spice things up, and this episode did exactly that. It probably also helped that the banter between the characters was better than ever in this episode. The student council really works well together with the rest of the cast.

But yeah, it’s episode 10. The point where things will spiral out of control has started. Something will happen, and the second half of this series will be completely different. Let’s see if they can pull this off.
Rating: 5.5/8 (Excellent)

Samurai Flamenco – 08

by psgels, posted in Samurai Flamenco

So after the previous episode dropping that huge bomb, the question of course would be what would be this series’ idea of how to follow it up. This episode on itself gave us some interesting answers to that. I’m not entirely happy with this episode, but I’m most definitely intrigued.

What I didn’t like about this episode is how it ditched some of the realism here, most notably one event: the one where Samurai Flamenco kicked that giant crocodile with metal armor outside of the bus. I mean, this series has always stressed that Masayuki has no superpowers: all of his powers come from gadgets. That is one part that they need to keep in this series, otherwise that will pretty much go against a lot of the build-up of the first seven episode. And that was some really great build-up!

However, what surprised me was how fast this episode went. You’d think that the creators would want to let things sink in and take their time for this, but instead this episode really developed Masayuki and having him change. At the end of the episode he already was consumed by his own fame and had sold out. He had already beaten like… four more goons from King Torture?

What most struck me about this episode was what it was building up for. The way with which most people have already forgotten about all of the policemen that died (and this show actually acknowledges it, rather than making it a writing flaw). Something is going to happen, and knowing episode seven, it’ll again be big. It’s now up to the creators though, to actually use this build-up. You can have such good build-up, but if the actual delivery in the end disappoints then you’re either way stuck with a nasty aftertaste.
Rating: 5.5/8 (Excellent)

Kill La Kill – 09

by psgels, posted in Kill La Kill

This will be the big test for this series: can it keep this tournament arc interesting? Previously the episodes were interesting with their variety: it presented itself differently every episode. With this, Ryuko seems to be fighting a different student council member every episode, all probably with their own power and personality. This is one part that made Gurren Lagann rather boring to me, so let’s see whether these guys can do better. What really helps is that this time, these characters don’t seem to be just killed off, because there are obvious hints that this won’t be the end of them. A thing it probably took over from Utena.

The symbolism behind this series was also really obvious in this episode: Kill La Kill really is a series about the teenaged struggles against what is expected of them. Gamagori trying to forcefully shove Ryuko in a literal mold speaks enough. What more: this series really likes to use heights: everything facing Ryuko is really big, and a lot of Ryuko’s struggles aside from kicking ass are focused on climbing. Satsuki meanwhile did everything that Ryuko is trying to do, but without the struggle and the effort. She’s the privileged and the immediately talented.

The fight itself was over the top and entertaining, but I’m also currently at the point where I’ve seen this already many times before. That wasn’t the interesting part of this episode, especially with the prospect of three more fights like this. In these cases the backstory really needs to make impact, but instead this unexpectedly turned into a building-up episode that sets up Gamagori’s character development for later. Surprisingly I found the previous episode more effective.
Rating: 5/8 (Great)

Kyousogiga – 07

by psgels, posted in Kyousogiga

Uh.. okay.

How on earth did this show manage to become even better than what it already was? Seriously, how?

Once in a while I run into an episode that really gets me incredibly emotional, that has me just bawling my eyes out. I can’t recally having done that for the past half year. Or at least not since the end of From the New World. While this episode may not have been as good, it comes close in its entire own way. Seriously, this episode was astonishing in how much emotion the creators managed to put into it.

Highlight was Koto, who really was portrayed as a child wonderfully. Every single side of her worked here: her active side, her playful side, her helpful side. Plus is was just so adorable when she got to see her mother and father again.

And the rest of this episode was amazing at providing backup for her: the animation was as expressive as ever, and the side-characters all managed to spice things up without taking on the foreground. I mean, everyone had been waiting for Lady Koto to come back again: everyone was delighted and everyone changed here.

And yeah, father. His shadow has been hanging over the entire series with the first two episodes focusing on him. He fits perfectly as the antagonist for the final episodes to get a really big climax out of it. And he’s also miles away from your typical villain. i mean, it’s still a mystery what kind of threat he actually is, but he did basically abandon his children without much thought for it.

I may post less often, but don’t get me wrong: I still love anime. Episodes and series like this are the reason why. 2013 has been a strange year: I’m not sure whether the amount of good series went down or whether I just got more picky, but at the very least I’m glad that every season so far has had its standout series.
Rating: 7/8 (Fantastic)