Some Quick First Impressions: Hataraku Maou-Sama, Devil Survivor 2 The Animation and Majestic Prince

by psgels, posted in Some Quick First Impressions

Hataraku Maou-Sama

Short Synopsis: Our lead character is an evil demon lord!
This was, by far, the biggest surprise I had in a long, long while when doing these first impressions. I didn’t expect anything from this at all. Just a random comedy with dull characters that may have had a few good jokes in it. There had been so many similar shows before, the entire premise of this show just felt redundant. What sets Hataraku Maou-sama apart though, is that the creators put in far more attention and effort than what you would expect. The animation from White Fox was actually quite gorgeous and expressive, but what impressed me the most were the characters. These guys are genuinely funny, and they have a ton of detail to them that set themselves apart. For example they start out speaking their own made-up language. The creators then commence to show all sorts of cultural differences that all in all are actually pretty cleverly done. This really is one of those genres that takes a well known and used genre, and pushes its boundaries. Finally!
ED: Simple, but actually quite catchy.
Potential: 90%

Devil Survivor 2 The Animation

Short Synopsis: Our lead character can summon beasts to fight for him.
I still haven’t forgotten the pain that was Persona 4, so perhaps because of that lingering on I didn’t enjoy this episode as much as I could have, but still: this was not as bad. The pacing was actually decent, and it didn’t try to rush through its dialogues. The fight scenes on their own are pretty cool looking, and it’s also good that this series cares for its continuity: whenever a bomb explodes in the whole city, it actually leaves its imprint: people die, take ages to get home and the whole city just comes to a stand-still. That, unfortunately are about the only positive things I can say about this episode. Bridge’s animation was decent, though nothing special for a first episode. It was decent, but did not stand out. One thing that really irked me though, was the main cast of characters, and how they acted through this episode. The two male leads don’t seem to be scared or surprised of anything, and they instantly notice the most insane details, like how an evil monster works, and one of them just manages to hijack a truck from out of nowhere. The main female is the complete opposite: scared, she doesn’t really do anything, and still she can summon really big monsters without even thinking of it. Hello people, balance! It’s not like they are interesting characters anyway!
OP: The lighting effects and poses are good, but the song here is rather boring.
ED: Dark J-rock, but not bad.
Potential: 70%

Majestic Prince

Short Synopsis: Our lead character pilots a big powerful mecha!
Let me tell you what Majestic Prince defines as “characterization”: every character has one quirk, and this quirk has to be repeated over and over. If you don’t to that, you simply try to look cool. Beyond that, this episode just did not make any sense. Here we have a bunch of commanders who are stupid enough to send out the worst possible pilots (not to mention a bunch of teenagers) to waste five very expensive mechas, despite that there are plenty of better alternatives. Yeah, it’s the usual bad stuff. The weird thing about this episode is that I’m not sure whether or not this series is in on the joke. At the end of the episode everyone was like “… did that just really happen?!”, like they too couldn’t believe their eyes there, with their distorted faces that are all over this episode.
Potential: 65%

Some Quick First Impressions: Dansai Bunri no Crime Edge, Uta no Prince Sama – Maji Love 2000% and Danbooru Senki Wars

by psgels, posted in Some Quick First Impressions

Dansai Bunri no Crime Edge

Short Synopsis: Our lead character meets a cursed girl
One of the things that I’m looking for with these first impressions is good execution. A series that really puts in effort to show its story and brings its scenes in a compelling way, instead of always taking the lazy routes. Dansai Bunri no Crime Edge, the only series to be named after a pair of scissors, has that. No, seriously, this show is weird (it’s got this strange hair fetish…), but damn: the animation was really good at times. When characters are touching each other’s hair, the movement is really well detailed, and the artistic direction of the rest of the episode also was really, really good, despite the generic character-designs. What’s most important though, is that this first episode already had a big emotional response: it introduced its characters and got an entire story with introduction, beginning and end out of them, and it was really genuine somehow. I knew that this series would have strange themes, but it’s a surprise that the creators handled it so well here. Let’s hope that they can do this as well for the rest of the series!
Potential: 90%

Uta no Prince Sama – Maji Love 2000%

Short Synopsis: Our lead character is loved by half a dozen bishies.
The cheese! Oh dear lord, the cheese! This episode was so incredibly girly, and that is really weird when the total amount of girls in the cast of this series adds up to 2. I mean, I get that this is a romance show and all, but all of the bishies were basically like “Ooh, Female Lead is amazing!”, “I’m so glad that we get to live together!”, “I love that she will compose songs for us to sing!” – guys! Know some balance for god’s sake. This was just creepy on so many levels to see them swoon over her with such persistence. Beyond that though, the biggest flaw of this series is that it thinks that it can flesh out its cast through their designs, and not their actions. What I mean by that is a lot of detail has been spent on how the characters all look, and what their rooms look like; you know, crap that you might see in a teenaged magazine. But all of them act like complete stereotypes with just one or two traits, nothing more. I actually think that this is a pretty bad message to its audience. “Here you go girls, a ton of bishies you can choose from! They all look gorgeous and they have the personality of a cardboard box! Enjoy!” But yeah, this is a problem that more harem shows seem to have…
OP: Make it stop! MAKE IT STOP!
ED: Cheese! Tough it does have pretty pictures
Potential: 30%

Danbooru Senki Wars

Short Synopsis: Our lead character gets to pilot a big mecha.
I’m not going to review every single series this season (Train Heroes and Line Town were so bad that I couldn’t even finish them), but I might as well talk briefly about Danbooru Senki’s sequel. To be honest, I expected it to be total crap, but it did have flashes of potential, in its huge rendition of the real world that is meant to simulate wars. Somewhere beneath that some depth is hidden. The question however, is whether it will actually use this. This remains a Level 5 series, and the annoyances of their series also shine through here: the male lead is incredibly generic, it keeps shoehorning kids into places they don’t belong, and the action is just flat-out boring. It all just looks so generic, none of the characters made any impression beyond dull stereotypes and the way in which this is just a glorified toy commercial also doesn’t really help (the entire world is dedicated to these robot games? Please). I don’t see this worth checking out the tiny bit of potential that it has.
ED: Apparently the animation team wasn’t done yet…
Potential: 10%

Some Quick First Impressions: DD Hokuto no Ken, Date A Live and Red Data Girl

by psgels, posted in Some Quick First Impressions

DD Hokuto no Ken

Short Synopsis: Our lead character lives in a world where there are too many delinquents.
I have two main qualms about the current season, at first sight. First of all, it looks relatively bland for a Spring Season on average. The second is that two of the biggest talents in terms of direction are doing silly comedy shows. DD Hokuto no Ken is the first, which shows Akitaro Daichi, one of the most consistent comedy directors out there, doing a Hokuto no Ken parody. The result is undoubtedly really weird, and you can again see his influence. This episode had some good jokes in it, but I also think that it’s nowhere near his best work. For the first time in a series directed by him, the jokes are hit and miss: some of them just try way too hard to be funny. But we’ll see. There is some potential for a good parody of that series especially when it’s done so well. Obviously you need to know some background on the series to fully enjoy it, but with that, I think that knowing the general premise of the series will suffice.
OP: Quite catchy.
ED: Just…. what?
Potential: 70%

Date A Live

Short Synopsis: Our lead character has to date girls in orer to save the world (no, really)
This thing… was actually much worse than expected. AIC, why? WHY? What made you go for such an incredibly stupid premise? Who… in their right mind… made the leader of the sole organization that is able to save the world… the male lead’s sister? Yeah, this show has incest written all over it (screw it: if the opening scene shows the sister showing her panties, it’s going to get to incest at some point). None of the characters are any good, the show is full of jokes that are 10 years old, and the rest of the humour also is just terrible. No potential whatsoever here.
Potential: 0%

Red Data Girl

Short Synopsis: Our lead character is a shrine maiden with special powers.
Red Data girl is… weird. I mean that in a good way, but I’m also rather confused because there are some parts that it doesn’t bother to introduce. Because of that you’re thrown a bit into this episode without knowing much about what’s going on or anything. I do have to say however, that if it can explain all of this well, then we can have ourselves quite an interesting series here. It has ingredients you see everywhere, but also ingredients that you don’t see anywhere. The lead male and lead female hate each other, but this does create a strange chemistry, and especially the lead female struggling with her own shyness was quite well done: she’s got special powers and everyone takes care of her, yet she is completely weak at the same time, causing a lot of trouble for others. This still needs to be fleshed out a lot, but the series has eleven episodes left to do this. I’m positive for now.
OP: A dull song, but nice symbolism for the rest of the story.
ED: Great vocalist. The visuals aren’t really that interesting though.
Potential: 80%

March Summary

by psgels, posted in Monthly Summaries

March… was crazy. For one I had my life getting in the way of actually updating reliably, but also in terms of how every series concluded. Some series got much better, others got much worse. Because of that, this list is completely different from last month’s. It’s good; keeps things exciting and unpredictable.

#17 (16) – Amnesia – (5/10) – Oh dear lord. That obsessive stalker. Things really did not improve afterwards, with the actual ending as a really cheesy conclusion that tried to stuff as many infodumps as possible into its airtime, and things still did not make sense. It was incredibly cheesy and bad. I now feel stupid for thinking that this had potential.
#16 (7) – Robotics;Notes – (7/10) – Robotics;Notes completely fell apart for its ending. All of the subplots it has built up were joined together in a completely hacked way that just felt so incredibly forced. Then they introduced brainwashing and other kinds of cop-outs. Nothing really made sense and nothing really was concluded in a satisfying way. Blagh. I had high hopes for this one.
#15 (14) – Tamako Market – (7.1/10) – Oh dear god, Tamako Market. What on earth were you thinking with that stupid marriage subplot that overtook your entire second half? It didn’t really go anywhere and you could have used your time so much better. Like, on actually developing your characters. My favorite episode so far was the one that focused on Tamako’s father, but that was not enough to make up for how boring the rest was.
#14 (11) – Magi – (7.5/10) – Aah, I wasn’t able to catch up to this series. I’m at this point eight episodes behind, with a lot of other stuff that I also want to check out and watch. I didn’t want to do this, but I don’t think that I can finish it. Did this series turn better in its finale? Will its second season be interesting?
#13 (10) – Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo – (7.6/10) – A been there, done that ending. The only thing that really stood out was how incredibly cheesy the whole subplot with the dorms closing down was. Apart from that I can hardly remember anything that caught my attention, and the whole ending was full of cop-outs that got I the way of change. The script just had none of the wit of the earlier episodes.
#12 (15) – Kotoura-San – (8/10) – The whole killer subplot was stupid, and I didn’t really like that. As for the actual ending though, I liked that one surprisingly much. I’m not sure what happened ,but it’s there where this series got really genuine with itself and its characters. It was one of the big reasons why this is pretty much the only non-sequel series from the past winter season that I enjoyed watching.
#11 (13) – Saint Seiya Omega – (8/10) – Things were much less predictable than what I expected. It wasn’t the best month for Saint Seiya Omega, but still the battles in it were quite good and full of emotions. Also ZOMG, the director of Heartcatch Precure is going to return to do the second half of this show!
#10 (8) – AKB0048 – (8/10) – A decent finale. A bit cheesy with some problems here and there, but it was fun and enjoyable while it lasted. The second season of AKB0048 was less interesting than the first, but still it was a fun little animated musical.
#9 (12) – Shirokuma Cafe – (8.25/10)

I must say, this surprised me with how solid the ending was, especially since the creators saved some of their cards for the end. I laughed quite a bit and this was the best month for this series in quite a while, which is really handy for an ending.

#8 (9) – Hunter X Hunter – (8.25/10)

The finale of the Greed Island arc is definitely done better in the 2011 version of Hunter x Hunter. The animation is much more up to par, and it doesn’t drag on. I still find some parts of it boring though, since half of the arc is basically nothing but a glorified training-arc. And finally, after a year and a half of recaps, we are about to get to the new material!

#7 (17) – Little Busters – (8.4/10)

Well, there you have it. On the home stretch, Little Busters actually got really good there. Kud’s story was by far the best out of any of the girls, and the final episodes were just individual stories about some of the characters. And you know what? These things are what makes Little Busters good! Just screw all of those long complicated arcs that try way too hard to be sad. Just give me more episodes like these! If the entire series was like that, then this would have been a really good series. Now though, I can’t really recommend this show because of some of the crap that you have to sit through.

#6 (1) – Chihayafuru – (8.75/10)

Chihayafuru in this month was mostly build-up, but still it was of edge of your seat quality. It still managed to develop a ton of characters at the same time, and made the entire main cast count, instead of simply forgetting about them when they’re not needed anymore. It wasn’t the best month, but still rock-solid.

#5 (2) – Zetsuen no Tempest – (8.75/10)

The actual ending of Zetsuen no Tempest wasn’t its best, but it did have a really good finale. Especially how everthing just fell into place, and how on one hand it embraced logic, and on the other it just went completely against it. The characters really made this a really enjoyable month for me.

#4 (4) – Uchuu Kyoudai – (8.75/10)

Uchuu Kyoudai this time is in the middle of the desert for a training mission. The pacing still is quite slow, but the characters still are rock-solid. Especially Nitta and Mutta were in the spotlights this time.

#3 (6) – Psycho Pass – (8.9/10)

Psycho Pass had a really solid ending. Perhaps it did not answer everything, but it did wrap up its biggest points in a satisfying way. Not everything got solved, but things evolved. It concluded its view on its own setting and it made for a great emotional climax. More series like this, please.

#2 (5) – Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure – (9/10)

The fights this month really were epic. A great example of how these things should be done. Instead of just being boring with characters exchanging punches until one falls down, the creators introduced all sorts of cool stuff to keep things interesting and varied, ranging from incredibly over the top to small and subtle. Oh, and Stroheim is awesome.

#1 (3) – From the New World – (9.25/10)

An absolutely fantastic ending for From the New World. One of the best I’ve seen in a long, long while. The animators really showed one final time how great this series looks, and the main villain here was one of the best you could get.

Chihayafuru – 36 & 37

by psgels, posted in Chihayafuru

These two episodes showed a match and a half. The first was surprisingly short, the second surprisingly long. Usually episode 11 and 12 are some sort of midway climax. Not here. Here they’re just meant for build-up.

What I liked most, was Desk-kun. A support character like him has been done before, but I just loved Nishida as he wanted to prevent Desk-kun from turning into one of them. The ones who can never stand on the spotlights because they’re just not as good as the aces. It’s rare to see a show actually tackle that issue, because there are not many series that can balance their characters out as well as this series did.

But dammit, I have to say this: Megumu and her fanclub really are annoying. Especially the latter. This series has this unnerving talent to make any single character great, but I do wonder how they were planning to do it with these stalkerish types. The best they did so far was note that Megumu has improved, but that could just as easily have been done without them. And I like Megumu’s teacher and advisor.

I’d also have loved to see more of the other match that went on in episode 12, but that only appeared in a few details (like when Megumu accidentally grabbed some cards that belonged to them, that was a nice detail).
Rating: 5/8 (Great)

AKB0048 Second Season Review – 80/100

by psgels, posted in AKB0048, Anime Reviews



The first season of AKB0048 was a big surprise for me for taking such a silly premise, and actually creating something good out of it. Here is the second season, and was it as good as the first? Nah. Still, it’s worth watching if you watched the first season.

The direction for the sequel is slightly different from the first. The first had a lot of fun with criticizing the idol business next to telling its story, showing its darker sides. The second season takes this the other way around, by celebrating it instead. everything here is glorified, instead of played down. It’s got an interesting effect, and it is great to see these two sides of the coin together. But standalone it does miss something.

Mostly because I find idols to be incredibly cheesy, and this series just goes all out in glorifying them (like, what I was afraid of that the first season would be). That’s a bit of a bummer, because it does make the series a lot less interesting in terms of its plot.

So it was up to the characters and the music to save the day! They did partially. There is a lot of good character-development in this sequel, and the rather large cast has a lot of moments for even the side characters to show off themselves. The series has a really large cast, and unfortunately it does look like a bit of a mess because of it, but the advantage of this is that this series can come from out of nowhere to deliver something heartfelt and genuine.

The disadvantage of such a messy cast of characters is that some characters just don’t work. For variety’s sake this does not have to be such a big problem, but it kind of is when one of those characters is the main character. She never really knows what her role is in this series until it gets forced upon her in an entirely non-subtle way.
One-Sentence Review: AKB0048’s sequel is not as good or interesting as the first season, but it’s still quite an entertaining, albeit messy, animated musical.
Suggestions:
– Macross Frontier
– Simoun
– Mouretsu Pirates

AKB0048 – 23 – 26

by psgels, posted in AKB0048

So, the finale for AKB0048. I’m going to combine these final four episodes in one entry.

Episode 23… did not start out well. I have no idea what happened here, but this episode felt really weird in which the characters suddenly detoured in this weird mushroom world for no reason other than to stall time. And I can understand building up for the finale, but when the characters randomly started singing with these weird creatures I can only imagine Shoji Kawamori poking his nose into the script here demanding some Macross references or something.

Things got much better in episode 24 which surprisingly focused on the fathers of Nagisa and Chieri. That had a surprising amount of depth to it, especially from Nagisa’s father, and I really liked that. The creators also with this dropped the whole Chieri’s father being evil-subplot, so I’m glad that the creators did not intend that as the eventual climax.

What they did intend as the climax became clear with episode 25, as people started diving into the other world: the AKB48 Theater. It really does symbolize well how this series has changed. The first season of AKB was all about criticizing the idol business. The second season however, is about celebrating it and all of its weirdness. The way in which it showed where AKB started was a really big hint to that for me. Personally I like the first season over the second because of that. But this was not bad either. There is plenty to like in the second season, just not as much. I mean I quite liked how the people from Akibastar changed as well with Des getting more on the foreground again.

Episode 26 had something to live up to, because my favorite episode so far was the final episode of the first season. So did the second season live up to that? Well, it spelled out its message a bit too literally. “Please don’t hate entertainment.” That message alone would have been incredibly cheesy out of context, unfortunately. Within context, I can see what they’re getting from, but I do feel that it lacks substance compared to the first season.

I also feel that Nagisa becoming a successor…. came a bit from out of nowhere. Suddenly they’re like “oh, here she is now!” It’s too sudden and forced for someone who used to be unable to do anything for a very long time. The ending was cheesy, though I did enjoy the part where Chieri just dived into that spaceship as if it was nothing, to tell everyone to stop fighting.

I think that this was a case of Mari Okada taking up too many series this season. AKB, Sakurasou and Zetsuen no Tempest all had endings that could have been more and lacked a bit of creativity. If she had more time then she could have done something interesting with them. With this though, she was oveworked. Ideally, she needs to work on two series at the same time, and no more. She has shown that she’s able to handle those and deliver some really great things. Three is too much though…
Rating: 4/8 (Enjoyable)

Polar Bear Cafe Review – 81/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews

If I said that a really good comedy for the past year was a show about a Penguin and a Panda walking into a bar, would you believe me?

Polar Bear Cafe is an interesting beast here. Series that combine slice of life with comedy are nothing new, but this series does it in a way that has not been done often before. For one, its characters stand apart in their simplicity,and how they try to stay away from often used cliches. One, by being a bunch of talking animals, and two, by focusing not on teenagers, but on the working class adults.

Most humour in anime is energetic. Polar Bear Cafe though, is all about deadpan. If you enjoy that kind of humour, then you should give this show a chance, because on one hand, it contains really every day conversations between its characters, and on the other hand it is really creative in how it delivers its jokes. It constantly pokes fun at itself and its silly concept and contains more running jokes than you can shake a stick at. The self-referential humour is what I liked best about this series: it spends so much time carefully creating its setting, yet at the same it’s also constantly breaking it down and poking fun at it.

50 episodes is long, but I have to say: during the best episodes I really fell off my chair laughing. For me, they were the Penko episode, and the Bar MC episode. Beyond that this series also made me laugh numerous times, but there were unfortunately also plenty of episodes that failed to raise a laugh, or that were just plain dull. Like I said, 50 episodes is long.

It’s a bit of a dilemma for this series. Ideally its length would be at 39 episodes, but the long length does lead to some really good character building. At the end of the series, you really feel like you know these characters. The “people” you see hanging around in bars, cafes that you sometimes talk to and hang out with. The ones who are constantly trolling each other, who don’t try to get others to like them, yet get their charms from that.
One-Sentence Review: Random slice of life combined with deadpan comedy: that’s what makes this show work although it is too long with 50 episodes; plus Polar Bear is a great character.
Suggestions:
– Excel Saga
– Poyopoyo Kansatsu Nikki
– Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru

Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure – 25

by psgels, posted in Jojo's Bizarre Adventure

Okay, so I thought that this was the final episode so I was ready to go all out. And then at the end of this episode there was this “To be continued”-message. Yeah, I was confused. But boy, am I glad, because it means that there will be one more episode of Jojo. They managed to squeeze one more into the airing schedule. David Production also did this with the Armed Librarians. And seriously, these guys have with this earned a spot amongst my favorite production companies out there. The way they handled this adaptation was just fantastic.

I loved the final battle against Cars, because it was more than “let’s just send a huge beam towards the angry monster until it dies”. No, instead Joseph managed to hijack a plane and turned this into a cat and mouse chase. Future action series should really take this episode as an example for their penultimate episodes, because this: the fight had so many interesting things in it. I also loved the small details again, like the meat eating squirrel.

And Stroheim. God, I love this guy. He’s completely one-dimensional, but his theme song ever since he became the terminator is just awesome, and he always appears at just the right moments, doing the craziest things surpassing even Joseph in this. Last episode was already glorious when he apparead with his squad of lamp-weilding guys, but in this episode… to think that he had been hiding in the plane for hours, waiting for the right moment to arrive.

All of the main villain of this series so far have had their dying moment: an episode dedicated to their final trump when they’re near death: Dio had his head, AC-DC was reduced to a brain, and Wham also had his episode dedicated to his final moments. They really seem to be doing the same to Cars as well, but knowing this series, they probaly are intending this one to be special. And it will be between Cars, Joseph and Stroheim on a burning volcano. Oh my god, so much manliness.
Rating: 6/8 (Awesome)

Tamako Market Review – 75/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews

Kyoani. I really respect… your animators. They are able to put in so much detail into their drawings and movements and your anime have much more dynamic movement in them than the competition. Now, would you start making interesting series again? Pretty please?

At this point I’ve already written off Shaft: these guys will just repeat their style over and over unless a really good writer like Urobuchi Gen or something makes them do otherwise. Tamako Market however was for me the final chance I’d give for Kyoani’s slice of life series: if I didn’t like this one, I’d just stop bothering with them. So yeah, at this time I have lost my patience for the as well: I’m not going to give them any more chances. If something like Hyouka appears again, it’ll be obvious that it’s different and interesting right from the start.

Tamako Market did have the best first episode of the new season. It showed a lot of different characters, ranging from high school girls, high school boys, shop owners, adults, families, an eccentric bird, young kids. It seemed so much more than the usual series that are just about a group of random high school girls.

In the end though, this potential never really got used. The shop owners never have any identity for themselves: they are all just lumped together into a collection of random stereotypes. The high school girls aside from Tamako also hardly have any personality aside from one trait. The talking bird got annoying right at the moment he gained weight. The high school boy’s only role in the series turned out to be having a crush on the lead female.

The family is the only part of the first episode that actually got any depth. The few moments the family was at the central focus, this series was at its best. The first half of the series spends most of its time on cultural references. That too was pretty interesting. In the second half though, the series gets overtaken by this really stupid marriage plot that really doesn’t go anywhere. It’s completely mindless, doesn’t really do anything, it’s not charming at all and was really annoying to get through to be honest.

So yeah, with this I’m done with Kyoani. Their series just aren’t for me. Wake me up when they start making something different.
One-Sentence Review: Really good and detailed animation for a slice of life series that doesn’t really go anywhere.
Suggestions:
– Aria the Animation
– Hyakko
– Rumiko Takahashi’s Rumic Theater