Star Crossed Anime

Hyperdimension Neptunia

Short Synopsis: Our lead character is a goddess who needs to govern over the people who worship her and has to contend with other goddesses who try to do the same.
Well, it had to happen at some point: the first genuinely bad series from David Production. I mean, look at the premise: that sounds like it has potential, right? A number of characters are references to the current generation consoles, but it doesn’t beat you over the head with it, so in theory, this could have been good. Alas, in practice the creators royally screwed this up by making every single character insanely stupid, incredibly annoying and one-dimensional, throw pointless fanservice and heaps of superficial drama in way too fast and the the tasks of the goddesses ended up including getting rid of sexually assaulting tanuki slimes. I mean, you can see that at least the animation was good, and the backgrounds are of David Production’s usually high quality and all…. but this was bad. Really bad…
OP: Good visuals, terrible song.
ED: Terrible song as well.
Potential: 0%

Gatchaman Crowds

Short Synopsis: Our lead character gets a notebook and catches aliens.
So, now that we’ve gotten nearly all of the series this season, I feel confident to say that Gatchaman Crowds has the best action, soundtrack and eye candy of the bunch. It’s something that Kenji Nakamura is really good at, so this was to be expected, but this all combined made for a really fun episode. But let me get to the main factor that will either make or break this series: the female lead. She is annoyikng, but that doesn’t even begin to describe her character. You know these types of characters who are so outrageously over the top in their actions? That’s her. She brings ditziness to a new level, and seems to live in to her entire own world. She made me laugh in this episode with how far she went, but the creators need to keep that up, otherwise she’ll make this series unbearable to watch on her own. I mean, the premise is very solid, the action is amazing, it’s fun, fresh and kept my attention from beginning to end, and I also trust the creators enough to know that they know how to write a 12-episode series and make it conclude properly. It’s definitely one of the most interesting shows on the series, so female lead: you’ve got your task set out for you.
OP: Pretty much the best OP of the season. Great visuals.
ED: One of the exceptions that makes me appreciate good J-Pop.
Potential: 90%

Silver Spoon

Short Synopsis: Our lead character enters a farming school
There are lots of really good slice of life series this series! Tamayura, Uchoten Kazoku, Servant X Service and Watamote were already there, and now we also have Silver Spoon to join their ranks. Perhaps it’s not the best of the season, but the creators brought a lot of life to a bunch of agricultural students. Within the first episode they already showed lots of different sides to what life is like as such a student, from following classes to having dinner, and the cast of characters is also very diverse and likable (not to mention big). The main character for once also isn’t bland: the only thing bland about him is that he doesn’t have any goals, but he has an actual back-story and personality, and works well as this posh cityboy in the middle of a bunch of farmers. This is a series that also toys a bit with your expectations, and I also like how well it managed to portray the lead character’s fear of germs. Also you can see that this comes from Hiromu Arakawa, with a cameo from Armstrong’s long lost brother.
OP: This opening is actually very bad because it reduces some of the characters to annoying stereotypes
ED: Nice use of instruments. Really fits the setting.
Potential: 85%

Watamote

Short Synopsis: Our lead character is not popular.
Here is a pleasant surprise: this show is exaggerated, but it actually nailed what it’s like to be socially awkward in this first episode. I could actually relate to quite a few things that the female lead went through in some way. The way she keeps forming theories in her head, pointlessly avoiding people she knows, and being unable to utter words: that was really well done. Now, I do have one big fear with these kinds of series: the solution is always portrayed to be so simple and easy. Social anxiety is far from easy to get out of, and it takes years of dedicated work to improve, if you can even do it in the first place. I hope that this series also acknowledges this, rather than going the “she’s actually a perfect girlfriend once she puts on some makeup”-route.
OP: The OP here is a surprise: didn’t expect metal to pop its head here.
ED: The trailer for this show was actually terrible. As it turns out they used the ED for this. Really, that was a wrong choice.
Potential: 75%

Kiniro Mosaic

Short Synopsis: Our lead character moves to England which has in the past been conquered by subsequently the Vikings and the Japanese.
If the synopsis didn’t give it away already: Kiniro Mosaic commits the two big faux pas when it comes to depicting the English: they’re all blond and speak with heavy Japanese accents! (Oh wait, there are some random people in the background who aren’t blond!) What also was quite hilarious was that the two lead heroines sometimes started with these long monologues to each other despite being unable to understand each other’s language. In any case, Kiniro Mosaic aims to be cute. And yeah, I guess it succeeds at that with its portrayal of a bunch of random kids. As for the question whether it has enough to make it worth watching though… I guess only if you like cute stuff. If not, then this was just pretty much outclassed by Tamayura. The characters had less life to them, and it tries way too hard to be cute and consequently forsakes some other important characterization.
ED: They tried to hide it, but the song is actually pretty bad.
Potential: 40%

Gen’Ei wo Kakeru Taiyou

Short Synopsis: Our lead character gets to command a bunch of dolls who fight for her.
Gen’Ei wo Kakeru Taiyo and Fantasista Doll are actually two very similar series: bot series feature this high school girl who suddenly has the command of five mahou shoujo who show up from out of nowhere. The big difference is that one show is good at what the other is bad at, and vice versa. Gen’Ei has the production values: it looks great, and it’s also much darker than I expected (really, if you were expecting a frilyl mahou shoujo, then don’t bother). It feels consistent, which is something you can’t say for Fantasista Doll. On the other hand though, the characters are just shallow. The acting feels wooden in comparison, and it also probably abused its own shock value a bit too much (oh my god such a cute girl! let’s throw as much bad stuff at her in one episode without really focusing on the consequences!) So yeah: the gist: Fantasista Doll is clunky, Gen’Ei wo Kakeru Taiyou is shallow. Take your pick!
OP: Nice art, but a copy-paste song
ED: Tarot cards fail to make this one impressive.
Potential: 70%

Uchoten Kazoku

Short Synopsis: Our lead character is a tanuki.
Without a doubt the best non-sequel of the new season so far. The characters here just blew all of the competition out of the water. Unlike all the others, the characters here have actual lives when they’re not on the screen. The anime here just follows mere glimpes in their eventful daily lives. You’d be surprised at how many characters just do absolutely nothing when the camera doesn’t focus on them. And even beyond that, the characterization here is just really good. Characters feel real, dialogue is natural and really manages to flesh out the characters. Every character is really well acted as well, no exceptions. And to top things off: this episode had the right combination between slice of life and drama: we got to follow the daily lives of the main characters, and especially near the end of the episoe it became apparent what kind of tension there is between the characters. The characters behaving like adults also really helps. Great to see lots of shows like that this season.
OP: Love the visuals, and the song as well.
ED: I love how this ED fills in some of the parts that were left open to interpretation by the episode
Potential: 95%

Makai OUji – Devils and Realist

Short Synopsis: Our lead character has demons fighting over him.
There’s a really strange trend this season: it has Seiji Kishi’s second adaptation with a bear. Now this series has Chiaki Kon’s second adaptation with a guy with the head of a goat. I hope that this is just a coincidence. Anyway, Devils and Realist had decent action and all, but it makes one really big mistake: throughout the entire episode it tries to make its male lead look like this super elite student. And yet from his actions in this episode, he seems like an idiot. Okay, idiot is a bit too much, but he hardly asks any questions beyond the most obvious ones. It’s because of this that the characters also try to stay too much to their own caricatures, which really limits them here and the atmosphere is also pretty dull. Basically, this show has already been done but better: Uragiri wa Boku no Namae wo Shitteiru.
OP: Bad J-Rock
ED: Again bad J-Rock
Potential: 40%

Blood Lad

Short Synopsis: Our lead character is a vampire who doesn’t sparkle.
The colour design for this series is really good. It actually looks unique, yet consistent with its use of bright colours that just contrast with each other realyl well in every shot. You have series that look really saturated, and you have this: the complete opposite. Blood Lad is a shounen with lots of meta-humour. I wouldn’t say that it’s a parody, but its entire premise is based on breaking the fourth wall. What stands out the most is a cast of quirky characters: the male lead is not your typical underdog, and the show uses creative plot devices to get some good interaction out of them. As for the series’ flaws… yeah. Let’s just say that in general, I prefer strong female characters. The lead female here is a walking fanservice trophy for the male lead. I’m not sure what the creators wanted to do with her, really: if she’s meant to be a parody of the female lead than she failed completely because she really didn’t do anything in this episode aside from make a few comments that any idiot could have made.
OP: Again great use of colours, but a rather generic shounen opening.
ED: Great looking, but I’m not really feeling the song.
Potential: 75%

Stella Jogakuin Koutouka C3-Bu

Short Synopsis: Our lead character joins a club in high school.
So… remember the awesome promo-art that this series had? Yeah, they really don’t do anything with that in this episode. Having said that though, this episode did have heart. The set-up may be a bit generic, but you can see that the people from Gainax were inspired to work on this (in comparison, I got the total opposite impression from Medaka Box). Their previous works have shown more than enough times that these guys really like guns, and they wanted to do them justice here, and that passion was something that managed to win me over as well. As for the characters, they still need a bit of work, but they’re definitely not bad, actually. I actually empathized with the shy girl: some of her scenes were done quite nicely. Yeah, the series is obviously a sell-out (let’s have some cute girls with guns fight each other!), and my biggest worry here is keeping things interesting. Gainax ain’t going to have the budget of this episode for the rest of the series, and they’re also not going to suffice by just having a random battle every episode: that’s fun once, but not an entire season, so they really need to focus on that characterization.
OP: Generic opening bleh.
ED: What’s up with those random drawings? Really bad ED otherwise by the way.
Potential: 75%

Fantasista Doll

Short Synopsis: Our lead character gets a bunch of dolls to fight for her.
Call me crazy, but I’m going to try and keep up with this series. This show is weird. With that, I don’t mean that strange stuff happens on it, but it’s more like there might be potential hidden behind this one. It’s flawed oh boy, it’s flawed, but not in the ways that I expected it to be. I mean the acting for one is really weird and the lead character behaves in a very strange way to stress, and yet: she isn’t a generic lead. She has a personality, and a backstory. She uses dolls to fight for her, but she also “softof” participates in the battles, albeit in a really stupid way. The dolls themselves as well: their acting is weird, but they don’t try to force their stereotypes down the viewers’ throats. Oh and the music is awesome. It’s this weird project that is in one way or the other supervised by Goro Taniguchi, who is actually really talented, but it’s directed by someone completely different. Something will happen here. The question is what, and whether it’ll be good.
OP: A great musician was at work here, unfortunately the same can’t be said for the vocalists and animators…
ED: Nice art
Potential: 70%

Teekyuu Season 2

Short Synopsis: Our lead character plays tennis
I’ve said this many times before: Mappa get your stuff back together and make an actually serious series here instead of this stuff! I mean this made me laugh hysterically and question my sanity and all, but this is Mappa: they can animate series that most other studios can’t! Leave the Teekyuu stuff to the lesser studios! Anyway, Teekyu. It’s completely random and stupid, yet I laughed a lot yet again, and this one stood out as even one of the best of the series. The general trend of comedy sequels is to either repeat yourself, or take the material of the first season even more to the extreme. Teekyuu seems to have picked option number two, but with this type of series that thrives on complete random humour, adding a bit of insanity actually helped here. The characters branch out into a kindergarten that is lead by one of the most awesome principals. This will be good for my two minutes of insanity each week.
OP: This looks like it was made in an hour… I’m not sure whether it’s a compliment or not…
Potential: 70%

Symphokyushinken Prismonogatari DXD

Short Synopsis: Our lead character goes to school and does stuff.
You know? I’m just lumping all sequels that I don’t care about together for the sake of efficiency. Because really: I tried watching them, but just didn’t have the patience for any of them. Yes, this entry is shallow, but the main factor here is my own patience! My impressions: that Fate Spin-off was chock full of really boring banter and annoying characters. Symphogear wasn’t as stupid as I remember the first season to be, but that left something that just didn’t stand out in any single way, which is still bad. Monogatari started off good by how it described Hanekawa, but then that Mayoi turned up and they started talking about how Araragi molested her and I tuned out. Ro Kyu Bu highlighted progress and was much better than the first episode, but it still was too boring in the end and not my type of series. High School DXD was the worst of the bunch with its boobs and Genshinken was probably the best of the bunch, but I only really liked two characters (Oguie and one of those new girls), while finding the rest (especially that one male) to be too annoying. That’s not enough to make me continue watching something that I haven’t seen the prequel of.
OP: They’re all bad! Even Monogatari’s isn’t up to Shaft’s usual standards with just a collection of random memes.
ED: With none of them I actually got to this point…
Potential: 0%

Dagan Ronpa The Animation

Short Synopsis: Our lead characters are imprisoned by a bear.
Persona 4 made a big impression on me. Thanks to it, I now hate Seiji Kishi with passion, even though he does have some good series behind his name (though a fair amount of those are the types of series that are very hard to really screw up). I say this, because Dagan Ronpa has a bear in it. Now, instead of Persona 4 where this was just supposed to be this random side-character, here he is the main villain. And he just doesn’t work in the slightest! Every point at which he appeared and tried to look scary, it just ended up silly and my entire attention was gone again. About the rest of the episode… the thing is that Dagan Ronpa has a really good premise. The way they introduced it here though, could have been much better. For one thing, it just makes no sense whatsoever. Seriously, turn off your suspense of disbelief completely. Deadman Wonderland sounds like the most reasonable thing in the world next to this thing. Second of all: it relies very heavily on stereotypes in this first episode. Now I understand that with a cast of fifteen people, you need to start with caricatures in order to be able to get everyone in and all, but this episode took it too far: the vast majority of the characters just repeat their quirks over and over (fat guy (har har, he likes to eat), scared girl, sceptic guy, muscle guy, aggressive guy, bossy girl, spoiled girl, it’s just too much!). Also, Dagan Ronpa. Are you serious to say that you aim to create this cast of colourful and widely different characters… and yet you pick the main character to be Average McNormalpants? And you aim the female lead to be an idol? Oh come on.
OP: A slide-show that really says nothing about the characters beyond the stereotypes that we’ve seen already.
ED: Just a song with credits, and it’s decent I guess.
Potential: 60%

Love Lab

Short Synopsis: Our lead character joins a club in high school.
Really, don’t be fooled by the seemingly misleading title: this is just another “bunch of girl sit in a club and do nothing”-series, only this time it does sortof have a theme: love. The characters talk about it a lot, despite the fact that there are no males or lesbians in the entire series. And the random club happens to be the student council (not like we haven’t had enough of THOSE series…). Most of the series really is the banter between the two main characters, so yeah; its success depends entirely on whether that is good or not. And it isn’t. It’s too often random, and they just try too hard to be funny. It plays with tropes, but it’s the kind of series that just adheres to the things it parodies, rather than just making fun of them. The animation is good. Much better than this show has any business being. Skip this one, unless you like the genre.
OP: Hey look, it’s the 2518th series that grabbed a copy of Generic Openings 101
ED: “Hey, you know what’s a good idea? Let’s make that one really lame joke even more!”
Potential: 10%

Rozen Maiden

Short Synopsis: Our lead character gets to be the servant of a doll.
The big question for Rozen Maiden was how on earth it was supposed to fix the way that the original series left it behind, seeing as how that seemd to go into complete anime original material. Well, don’t ask me how, but they somehow nailed it with this first episode: for people new to Rozen Maiden it provided a good overview of everything important that happened in the first few volumes of the manga, thus making it accessible for people who haven’t seen it. On the other hand it is worth watching for the people who already watched the first anime because the events are totally in different order, a new character suddenly shows up and while some things are similar to how they happened, others are completely different. Seriously, the creators managed to do A LOT in just one episode, and while it was obviously rushed, it was coherent, it was engaging and you can follow what was going on. It’s great for giving a taste of what Rozen Maiden is about. Also, Suiseiseiki made her annoying “desu”-trademark far more bearable, and the animation is really good, and actually quite experimental with how it combines CG with its regular animation. And the music is awesome as well.
OP: ALI-Project again, but there was no way for them not to do something here. And this OP does look really nice.
ED: The art here is amazing. Great direction.
Potential: 95%

Servant X Service

Short Synopsis: Our lead character is a civil servant.
Colour me surprised: Servant X Service is actually good. I really was expecting this to be just another Working, or another show with bad jokes that really wasn’t about anything. Guess what? The comedy is actually good. What we have here is finally another slice of life series that doesn’t take place in high school, doesn’t have terrible jokes, isn’t completely pointless, doesn’t have characters that are just copied and pasted from other series and that doesn’t just desperately try to fill its time. This was actually a very charming look at the other side of the desks of the civil service that we usually just take for granted as this annoying bureaucratic institute. This show deals with the ups and downs, and the weird people that undoubtedly show up once in a while. What I especially liked was how this show portrayed all of the different people that came by. That rang home so much, and that was done so believably. The big problem with the cast is that every character just is one-dimensional and depends a bit too much on a collection of two or three quirks (that has the potential to be really annoying fast when handled poorly) and the biggest challenge for this series will be to remain interesting for an entire season. But this was good!
OP: This is actually a very good opening. I really like how it combines live action with drawings and how it explodes everything
ED: By all means not a meaningless opening. Also candy!
Potential: 80%

Kitakubu Katsudou Kiroku

Short Synopsis: Our lead character joins a club at schol.
Kitakubu is a show that has a lot of stuff that just ticks me off. It’s not like there is incest or fanservice or anything. Instead, all my prolems here can be summarized by one word: laziness. The setting? A bunch of girls in a club that doesn’t really do anything. The characters? Various stereotypes from other shows. The humour? Either really lame jokes, parodies that don’t really parody anything and jokes that were copied from other series. The content of this episode? Completely random and pointless. Voice acting? Lame. Animation? Nothing special. The only good thing I have to say about this series is that for some reason or the other the creators here really like animals. The best animation here is that of a pigeon walking around. Heck, the animals in this series looked much more interesting than the actual characters. Why don’t you make a show with THEM in the lead?
OP: Badly sung and lame.
ED: Breaking the fourth wall is so funny, har har.
Potential: 0%