Kotoura-San Review – 80/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews

Some seasons of anime are better than others, but the past winter season has hit a really low point. If you ignore the sequels, then it has been the worst season I ever blogged. Out of the series that did catch my attention enough, Kotoura-san turned out to be best. Not perhaps because it was the most consistent, but because it was the only show that really managed to stand out in a way. Yeah, it’s nothing special, but at least it’s something.

It’s especially the first and the last episode in this series that made sure of that. Perhaps they’re overdramatic at times, but the first episode plays really well with its mood-swings, making for a nice introduction, and the last episode wraps everything up nicely with a lot of character-development, making for a nice conclusion. Kotoura-san’s characters are by no means good or sophisticated; they’re all really simple teenagers without much depth. Still, they are genuine. That gave them a charm that I missed in all other non-sequels this season.

The series does have some big problems, though. You know the saying “it’s not about the destination, but about the journey”? Well that totally does not apply for Kotoura-san. I mentioned above that for Kotoura-san, it’s start and end are great. Inbetween though… it clearly had difficulties in filling everything in. This results in a pool episode, a beach episode, and a silly crime story that all feel really forced. The creators had some nice ideas for the characters, but they didn’t know what to do with them. Because of that the journey in this series can be really tedious because there really is not much interesting stuff going on. It also does not help that the antics of the bunch of perverts in this series gets annoying really fast. Still, it’s fun. It charmed and entertained me more than the other series this season.
One-Sentence Review: Kotoura-san is about mind-readers: it’s honest and genuine and that gives it a charm that makes it worth watching, despite the fact that it doesn’t know how to use half of its airtime…
Suggestions:
– B Gata H Kei
– Hitohira
– Mahou Tsukai Tai

Zetsuen no Tempest Review – 87.5/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews, Zetsuen no Tempest



Spiral was a series that was all about mind games. The characters had to battle people who used puzzles and mind games. Zetsuen no Tempest is the next logical step from its original author: a world-shaking plot that can decide the fate of the entire world, but somehow it managed to find a way to make it entirely dependent on the logic of a bunch of teenagers. It was glorious!

This may sound weird, but really: the characters in Zetsuen no Tempest really are excellent. All of them are fresh and witty, and they play off each other really well. I mean, it’s nothing new that series put a lot of consequences on teenaged emotions, but it has never been done with a cast that works so well together, not to mention with a cast that tries so hard to put logic into the plot as well. The two lead males in particular look like your average male hero at first, yet they turn out to be completely different.

I have sometimes called this “mindfuck, the anime”. This series really loves its surprises in its plot. And while it’s not the first series to attempt some mind-screws, it did manage to pull them off in a unique way. The key here was how it played with its own logic. On one hand, it took itself entirely seriously, on the other it deliberately just ignored it and just went wild with emotions. This dual battle is a really big theme in this series. Logic versus emotions, Genesis versus Exodus, Magic versus Technology, Tempest versus Hamlet (this will all make sense when you see the series). My one complaint though is that it takes a while to get going, and the ending is not what it could have been. The goodness in this series really is in the middle.

Also it also helps that this series has an incredibly epic soundtrack. No, seriously. The animation may be normal, but the soundtrack is just amazing. Right from the start, it just bombards you with complex and classically inspired tracks that just keep coming.
One-Sentence Review: If you’re looking for a good mind-screw with a godly soundtrack and fun characters, then this is a series to check out!
Suggestions:
– Death Note
– Un-Go
– Armed Librarians – The Book of Bantorra

Zetsuen no Tempest – 24

by psgels, posted in Zetsuen no Tempest

From the New World and Psycho Pass had endings that really impressed me. The downside to that is that they did raise the bar on endings quite a bit now. You can’t just defeat the evil monster and do nothing beyond that. You have to do something special now as well. I guess that that’s why I was underwhelmed by the first half of this episode, because that was exactly that. Not to mention: this series prides itself inits logic. A fight scene ending doesn’t have the same impact compared to if they would have based it on logic.

The second half of this episode was much more satisfying as an epilogue, though. This really showed everyone being able to move on, and quite a few characters have changed their ways or beliefs thanks to what happened in the series. Aika also showed again that she was a really compelling character to watch. She was a character who was dead at the start of the series, and yet her impact is all over it. She definitely was my favorite character here.

Tempest was great. It’s a shame that there is not going to be a bones series next season, because they are always interesting, even when they’re weaker. But really, their last weak series was Heroman for me. I eagerly await their next work.
Rating: 4.5/8 (Good)

Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo Review – 79/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews, Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo



Teenaged romance shows are a dime a dozen, so it has to take something special for a series to catch my interest. For that, the past Autumn Season was a source of gold. Kamisama Hajimemashita was awesome, Sukitte Ii na Yo was a surprise hit, and Sakurasou also seemed like the series to bring new life in the shounen romance genre. It kinda did, but if you want to stay with that impression, then don’t watch the second half.

Sakurasou really managed to set itself apart with its execution. From the outside it looked like an average romantic comedy, but when you started watching it became clear to me how good the chemistry between the characters was. The banter had a lot of comedic gold in it, and it was full of energy. Scenes were well set-up, and there were a number of really sharp characters in this series, whose lines pierced through all pretense. That made this series a roller-coaster of emotions that was actually really well balanced.

The level of writing really was good there, and consistently so. I can only recall one bad episode, which randomly introduced incest for no reason whatsoever). You’d expect this level of writing to get better as the series goes on and gets more chance to build up, but somewhere along the way it just loses its spark. Especially the final third just misses the energy and wit that made this series so addictive at the start.

The early parts of this series are about hard work versus talent, and working hard towards your dreams, and coming of age. The show ends with a love triangle and a silly subplot about a bunch of dorms being closed down. It totally lacks any kind of impact, and the series ends with a melodramatic ending that is too scared to really resolve anything. The only good parts about the final third is where the creators focus on the themes that made the first half so good, but there are unfortunately too few moments to really salvage the series.

It’s a shame, really. I really endorse series evolving and changing. Doing the same thing over and over gets boring. But if you want to change your attention, you have to make sure that you have something interesting and logical to follow up with. Sakurasou didn’t and just got bogged down in its genre conventions that unfortunately spoiled what could have been such a good shounen romance.
One-Sentence Review: If you are interested in Sakurasou, my tip is to watch until episode 16, and let your imagination fill in the climax, because if you do you’ll get a really rewarding and witty romance series, instead of having to sit through the downer climax that follows…
Suggestions:
– Kaze no Shoujo Emily
– True Tears
– Yumekui Merry

Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo – 22, 23 & 24

by psgels, posted in Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo

Okay, I’m going to combine these three episodes into one entry in order to wrap up Sakurasou. My impression of them is that Mari Okada overshot herself a bit here. Her strength has always been in the way she used melodrama, but the actual climax of this series… yeah.

So the idea of the final three episodes was simple: episode 22 resolved the romantic subplots, episode 23 handled the subplot about Sakurasou about to close and episode 24 was then the epilogue. The best was episode 22. Sure, it was incredibly predictable and had it coming for the entire series, but it was charming enough. I enjoyed that. Been there, done that, but charming.

Episode 23… dear god, what a bawl-fest. I mean, I can enjoy a good cry and all, but that was just too much. It’s in character for Misaki to just hijack something as important as the graduation ceremony. It’s not in character for everyone and his dog to be so emotionally attached to that speech. I mean, that was just total melodrama.

In the past, Mari Okada’s endings have always stood to me as endings that managed to deliver high emotions really well. They were overdramatic, but they were well built up, were believable, and had some variation: they weren’t a bawl-fest from start to finish and had quiet, funny or other moments that broke up the mood. That was like, “Whine whine whine Sakurasou is awesome, whine whine whine I love you all”. There is such a thing as too much love here…

Episode 24, I liked it at the beginning. Until it revealed its true colours as an ending that couldn’t pull through with the decisions it made. The sister didn’t enter the school? Hah! She actually lied to Sorata about her student number. Jin and Misaki go away in order to live their own lives? Hah, they just marry and conveniently start to live next to Sakurasou. What was all of the build-up for? What was all the growth for? I really dislike those kinds of half-assed endings.

So yeah, if I knew what I know today, I would have blogged Kamisama Hajimemashita and Sukitte Ii na Yo for the past autumn season’s Romance shows. But unfortunately, this was something that I just could never have seen coming. Sakurasou lured me in with its 24 episodes, plus its really strong start. It just did not make good use of its second half at all.
Rating: 3/8 (Mediocre)

Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure – 23 & 24

by psgels, posted in Jojo's Bizarre Adventure

And here are the penultimate episodes of Jojo. And seriously, I loved the fights here. The creators really went to the extreme, while keeping true to their philosophy of putting huge over the top powers on one hand, and really delicate things on the other. One one hand you have Stroheim yelling like crazy, while weilding what is basically a giant lamp as a weapon. And the duel with Cars was also really good in how it used Lisalisa in such a painful position as a hostage.

Surpringly, the least interesting part of these two episodes was where Speedwagon started to explain what happened to Joseph’s parents. It’s not that it didn’t have any good points (I liked how one of the smarter minions of Dio worked his way up as an aviation commander in the Royal Air Force), but come on. You’re about to punch Cars to death. Don’t break up the momentum with that. Thankfully the actual finale promises to be epic.

My only gripe: Lisalisa didn’t really get a chance to stand in the spotlights, did she? I mean all other major characters got their chance to show off, but she has the bad luck to be immediately just brought to an inch of her life. Give her some credit, man. If she’s a ripple master, let her show this off!
Rating: 5.5/8 (Excellent)

Zetsuen no Tempest – 22 & 23

by psgels, posted in Zetsuen no Tempest

And these are the penultimate episodes for Zetsuen no Tempest, with its finale about to air tomorrow. They weren’t about a mindfuck, but instead about a complete role reversal from what you’d expect: Hanemura gets to play the hero, while everyone else plays backup. It might seem insignificant, but I find this really refreshing to see: it isn’t trying to force its main characters into the spotlights. Instead it’s offering everyone his chance for this.

And I really like Hanemura by the way, for a character who got introduced in the second half of this series. He is a very good example of a wimpy looking character done right. First of all because amongst the cast, he was often the only one stupid enough to state the obvious. Plus, his little outburst in episode 22 was pretty damn cool for him. I really loved the irony there: this series prides itself with its focus on logic. And here Hanemura just coms and kicks some emotions back into the characters.

What also was really refreshing was the way episode 23 ended: when they were all rounding up those crewmembers on the boats, I was really wondering why everyone just complied like sheep. I mean, I know that they put bombs on the ships and all, but the way in which everyone just complied neatly felt a bit like they were all just plot devices. To think that nobody was crazy enough to try something… And they did. It’s not the first time Yoshino has been shot to near-death, but this is slightly different than before, with all of the build-up of “we’re not going to care about you or anything”.

Now, as for the actual ending… Zetsuen no Tempest really was an awesome series, but I do not think that it will have the strongest ending out of the “Big Four” of the Autumn Season (Psycho Pass, Tempest, Jojo, From the New World). Out of all of the penultimate episodes, I’d say that this one has the least hints that it’s going to become something special. But who knows? It might surprise us again. I’d love it if it did that.
Rating: 5.5/8 (Excellent)

Amnesia Review – 64/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews

I wanted to get this review out as soon as possible because… I have to apologize. I’m sorry. I endorsed this series when it first came out. I just didn’t know. I had no clue what kind of a trainwreck this would be. honestly!

Okay, so to start at the beginning: I actually liked Amnesia when it first started. It had a concept that really piqued my interest: the lead female wakes up not knowing anything, and suddenly she is dating this random guy with a weird fashion sense and she has no idea what’s going on. Over the course of the series she experiences this multiple times, each time dating a different guy. That had the potential to be a very interesting mystery-series with the right execution. It’s just… the execution was not right. Not right at all.

And yeah, the storytelling may be awkward and the animation may not be special and all, but those are just mere details. I called this a trainwreck, and I mean it. By far the biggest cause for that is the cast of characters.

Usually I try to avoid spoilers, but to get a good grasp of what went wrong I need to give some vague hints of what happens in the story. You see, this series at heart is a harem: over its course it shows the lead female together with a number of potential partners that it thinks appeal to its audience. Or at least, that’s supposed to be it. Regular harems work that way in any case. If Amnesia was based on the same principle then the creators have got a really low image of their target audience because, bar one, every single character in this show is a total prick.

Seriously, there are not many series that have so many unlikable characters in them. There is a murder suspect, a guy with bipolar disorder, an obsessive stalker, an incredibly whiny ladies’ man. The worst is the obsessive stalker. When I watched his episode, I had to do a double-take before I realized what the creators just pulled. I really have to restrain myself from just typing that out loud here. Let’s just say that every sane human being would just give him a kick in the groin at what he did there. The lead female just doesn’t do anything. Everything in this series gets done for her. And she doesn’t even realize it, just walking away happily as if she was the one who did all the work.

Oh, and as for the mystery part of the story… yeah. The final episode features an info-dump that has a good story buried somewhere underneath. But yeah, the final episode rushes through everything in order to stuff in all of the required exposition, which only ends up forced as hell.
One-Sentence Review: A series with interesting potential to finally be a good Otome Game adaptation… only to fail horribly with some of the worst characters imaginable.
Suggestions:
– Matantei Loki Ragnarok
– Saiunkoku Monogatari
– Ashita no Nadja
Note: with suggestions I mean series that worth watching if you liked Amnesia. NOT the other way around…

Uchuu Kyoudai – 50

by psgels, posted in Uchuu Kyoudai

With this episode it’s finally time for Nitta to tell his story. We’re at episode 50, and he was already building up to this episode from the moment that the second exam started. Back in like, episode 13 or something. It only became obvious in the current arc, though. Nitta is basically the opposite of Mutta: the older brother, whose younger sibling is just a complete failure. A neet who refuses to do anything.

That cliff-hanger of last week indeed was really evil, but in the end what made it the most annoying was not the fact that I wanted to know what happened to Nitta’s brother, but that it ended just as it got really good (that’s something I noticed with a lot of other series with nerve-wrecking cliff-hangers). This episode just commenced to head for the most obvious solution as if it’s nothing. Of course, an astronaut should not be allowed to head into his own direction. That’s complete suicide. Sure, they will lose the challenge there and there will be some consequences, but in the end it was the only right thing to do here.

And with this we’re nearly one year in, and still going strong. At the start of this series I never imagined that this show would go on for more than a year. This would have been a crappy episode to end with by the way. “Yeah, we’re in the middle of the desert with a ton of potential left. Bye bye!”
Rating: 5.5/8 (Excellent)

From the New World Review – 90/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews, From the New World



Shin Sekai Yori, or From the New World, is a series that set out with a mission. Nowadays most anime adhere to their set of stropes. This is one of those shows that just said “screw conventions!” and it just went with an execution that just took so many different risks, taking almost nothing for granted, and ended up as quite a unique experience because of it.

Where most series that are based on something are based to a manga, visual novel, or things like that, with From the New World they actually set out to adapt an actual novel again, and it shows because the pacing is totally different from any other anime out there, including multiple timeskips that see the main characters grow up from small children to full grown adults. The story… makes use of this really well…

It’s hard to really talk about the story without spoiling, but let’s just say that you should not think that even though there are kids in this series, it’s kid-friendly. Shin Sekai Yori is DARK. It uses a lot of build-up to get to where it’s going, but when it’s there it makes one hell of an impact. It has created this unique setting for itself, and it takes a while to set everything up, but that also makes this series quite varied in its mood. The setting has got a lot of depth to it, and the creators actually managed to pull a ton of potential out of it.

The downside to this series is that it is not the easiest to watch, by far. Some episodes have animation that takes quite a few… “artistic liberties”. On one hand this had some of the best animation of the past half year in any TV-series. It can be absolutely gorgeous when it wants to. For a few shots each episodes. The rest of the airtime is full of inconsistent character-designs, weird camrea angles and jerky direction that makes it really hard to figure out what’s going on. It’s not bad or anything, but this will get jarring on some people.

It’s definitely not a show for everyone. Let alone the dark parts, this is a show for people who are looking for something experimental. A show that isn’t afraid to trip itself up over and over for its vision. And believe me: the vision that this series has is amazing.
One-Sentence Review: Taking a unique setting, along with a “screw conventions!”-mentality, Shin Sekai Yori delivers a storyline with a ton of depth to it for those with an open mind.
Suggestions:
– Bokura no
– Casshern Sins
– Strange Dawn