Level E – 05

by psgels, posted in Level E



After the end of the previous episode, I already had a suspicion that this episode would focus on Ouji’s plans to create the earth rangers. That indeed turned out to be true, but I didn’t expect him to kidnap a group of innocent children to do it. Seriously, this episode was just nothing but a grown man grabbing a bunch of random kids and playing a ridiculously unfair game with them. And it was hilarious.

It’s perhaps not as good as the previous episodes, but even then I absolutely loved this episode. It again takes a group of random guys, this time in middle school, and this time it’s non fiction. Again, their designs were nicely unconventional for anime, and really feel like Ouji picked the nearest five kids that he could find. The way in which they tried to deal with the fact that they had been turned into power rangers (without any actual powers besides a bunch of illegal ones) in a great little parody of the super sentai genre.

This episode subverted a ton of these tropes, like how most kids who get these powers really aren’t going to play along, and how for some the powers may just rise to their heaDS. Or the way in which they couldn’t use most of their weapons because they were grossly illegal.

I also liked that twist with the teacher, and how she as an alien immediately noticed that something was up, and also how she laughed when she found out that Ouji was behind everything. I’m not sure whether this was a one shot episode or whether it’s going to continue next week. That would be interesting, if only to see a bunch of kids beat up Kraft.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Star Driver – 18

by psgels, posted in Star Driver



Milestone time: this is going to be the 4000th post on this blog. Whoa, I’ve been writing a lot…

In any case: building up episode. I do hope that this was one of the last building up episodes that we’re getting in this series, because at this point it really should start delivering and using this build-up. It was an enjoyable episode nevertheless.

The fireworks and the random games weren’t anything special, but they were fun. I also like how Takuto’s apartment actually got burned out. That definitely was good for his character, even if at first it seems just like a cheap trick to get Sugata and Takuto in the same house. Keito’s twist meanwhile was a bit simple (still clinging to the things she was obsessed with in her early childhood instead of exploring new things), but nevertheless was a nice twist. As for what the hell she was doing at the end of the episode: that’s for the next episodees to answer.

In any case though, Star Driver is one of those series where a lot is going to depend on the ending. Because of that I’ll withhold judgement for now whether this is a really memorable series, or simply a really enjoyable one. I do want to say though that my initial hopes of this series becoming the spiritual successor of Utena are probably not going to be met. The entire series could have had more variation and creativity for that at this point in the story. Plus, it also turned into a bit too much of a harem. I mean, Utena had a ton of fangirls and all, but it did have a ton of other complex and deep character relationships and didn’t boil down to the entire cast only liking one or two characters (the recently introduced romance story of Ruri is a welcome addition because of that).

Also, the animation of this episode seemed surprisingly mediocre for Bones’ standards. This can point at one of two things: 1) the budget ran out or 2) the creators are saving the best budget and animator for last.
Rating: * (Good)

Some Quick First Impressions: Suite Precure

by psgels, posted in Some Quick First Impressions

Suite Precure

Short Synopsis: Our lead characters can become mahou shoujo.
Um, yeah. The differences with Heartcatch Precure are ufortunately apparent: this much more goes back to the standard that the old Precures set with silly non-threatening villains, and uninteresting stock characters. The biggest issue though, is that compared to Heartcatch Precure this series lacks life. The poor animation is nowhere near good enough to really portray the characters beyond their stereotypes (the usual tomboy and smart girl who hate eeach other but actually love each other). Compared to the first episodes of other Precure series though, it’s not the worst. There were strings of good drama here and there, and the soundtrack is also really excellent. What stood out the most though was the obligatory magical world for this mahou shoujo. It’s completely bizarre with singing cats,living instruments and not to mention the three henchmen of this series’ villain: they communicate entirely bBY SINGING. The thing is, the Precure series is highly repetitive: it needs some sort of hook right at the beginning to get its audience’s attention. I did not see that hook here yet.
OP: Two small scenes of great animation. Apart from that, pretty generic.
ED: Even Heartcatch Precure’s EDs were terrible, but this one is even worse.
Potential: 30%

Mitsudomoe Zouryouchuu! – 05

by psgels, posted in Mitsudomoe



Not the best we’ve seen from this sequel, but still really funny. There were some jokes that were of the milked out category, but there also were enough new and hilarious ones.

To start with the positives: this episode finally made Satou’s three stalkers into three individual characters. Satou meanwhile also kept himself out of awkward situations and instead works much better as a straight man type of character. Usually the creators seem to try too hard with his character, but this episode avoided that. Oh, and to my delight the female teacher also finally proved to be more than the dumbest woman on earth, when she ended up teasing the girls and their attempts to screw their own measurements.

Now, as for the bad stuff… the lesbian jokes were kindof out there. Generally this show is at its worst either whenever it’s milking the misunderstanding jokes (although that quick dog poo joke in this episode was dumb, yet strangely hilarious) or when it’s artificially making its characters dumber than they usually are. I mean, a lot of this episode was about the usual nonsense talk between kids of their age, but the point Miku started eating the cookies of that occult girl’s face was just… weird. The same goes with that scene of Miku’s mother, sneaking into the classroom, but that one was saved by the way in which she smacked Mitsuba’s face on the table when she got caught.

In a way, Mitsudomoe is also a lot more nostalgic than I’d want to admit. Sure, it’s very exaggerated and all, but at that age I too was just discovering toilet humour,and started caring about what my classmates thought of me. This is also why I appreciate how the second season has gotten more down to earth compared to the first that just tried too hard. I’m not fond of admitting it at all but some of the scenarios and lines in this showw are surprisingly easy to relate to…
Rating: * (Good)

Letter Bee – 43

by psgels, posted in Letter Bee



That OP just looks amazing. I guess that we now know why the previous episodes suddenly came with a recap OP: Studio Pierrot was still working on the real one in order to get it just right. When it looks this good, it really was worth the wait.

Also, I’ve said this before, but my stance on anime original material is that, as long as it works, I don’t mind it at all. With that in mind, I enjoyed this episode quite a bit. There were some strange technical issues, like a giant explosive garbage disposal machine that can be turned on by a big ripple in the water, but it’s easy to forget about that as it lied in the middle of a huge corpse graveyard!

This episode also made great use of the fact that the Letter Bees aren’t on the right side of the moral scale, despite believing to be so. Despite the services they provide to deliver hearts, they’re still on the side of the government, which has made quite a few enemies. This makes choosing between which side to join a much more interesting dilemma beyond the usual “am I good or am I evil?”

Regardless of however good the manga may be, the anime so far did create a pretty interesting job of coming up with an original story, but it’s not there yet. It’s clearly currently building up to something, and that really does need to pay off in the end. In particular, the creators are apparently no longer bound by a manga-format, so I hope that they make use of that instead of playing for safe.
Rating: * (Good)

Bakuman – 18

by psgels, posted in Bakuman



Akito’s brother… am I the only one who got Light vibes from him?

Anyway, it’s taken a while, but I’m liking this series quite a bit at this point. After the Nurarihyon no Mago debacle, I really began to fear for series that took their time at the start, but this thankfully proved to be a good example of how to do this. We’ve seen eighteen episodes of development into these characters, and it’s paying off quite nicely at this point and turning Akito and Moritaka especially into well rounded characters.

This episode also reminded me of how this is coming from the Death Note authors: we’re talking about a shounen jump adaptation here, and yet this episode was filled with dialogue (though admittedly it’s not as extreme as it was in Death Note). It’s what made this episode really interesting in any case.

Even though the tone is apparently very different compared to the manga, I do understand now why everyone forced me to blog this show. Even the series’ weak side, the romance, got progressed quite a bit in this episode. Akito and Kaya actually feel like a genuine couple now, and this finally sparked Moritaka to do something about his own as well. The past episodes have also upped the pacing a tiny notch, and if the creators can keep this up for both the rest of this season and the sequel, this could turn into quite a satisfying series in the end.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Wolverine – 05

by psgels, posted in Wolverine



Half a year ago, when I blogged Sengoku Basara 02, another action series, I remember noting how its biggest flaw was that it spent too much time building up and too little on actual action. That is one flaw that Wolverine really managed to avoid. Heck, it’s been a long while since I have seen an anime that had this much actual action. And the great thing is that it’s not like the usual shounen ish action of “2 minutes of fighting and 10 minutes of staring at each other”, this show continues to push itself forward with its action, preventing itself from dragging on by using its surroundings, new characters or different sets.

In other words: I’m really warming up to this series, and this episode was the best episode of Wolverine so far.It obviously lacks any animation budget here, but still: the action does not devolve into still frames, or the usual cheap shortcuts you see with action scenes. There really is a ton of movement in this show and I really like how the creators make use of this and make this not another action show with just a bunch of close-ups.

Meanwhile: the story. Still simple, but it’s a very neat twist that this episode was hinting that Yukio was the one who killed Tesshin. Simple, but neat twist for in the future. Omega Red’s double comeback also was a neat little twist, in the way that the creators promised another huge fight, and instead solved in a matter of minutes. Oh, and the ending! I didn’t expect that another one of the X-Men would make an appearance here.

Finally: is it just me, or was the music in this episode even better than usual? There were tons of interesting tracks here. Compare that to Iron Man: it just had one awesome theme song (really the height of any episode when that was played), but beyond that the rest of the songs were just forgettable. Even the composer (yes, the two series share composers) has tried much harder for Wolverine.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Gosick – 05

by psgels, posted in Gosick



So, you’re a bad guy. You know that the good guy has something you really want, so you go to the good guy’s room and turn it into a mess in the hopes of finding it, but you fail to notice that huge suspicious cupboard that could hide a small person. Um, tunnel vision?

I really don’t understand the bad girl of this episode. So, she’s looking for a book that contains a letter that contains a rare stamp (the Penny Black, the first stamp in the world, and a misprint at that), that is left behind by a phantom thief. She finds the book, but fails to remove the letter and instead hides it at a bizarre place, only to knock down Kazuya when carries the book when Victorique already removed the letter. Not to mention the bizarre reason in which Victorique managed to find back the book. I mean, if I were to hide a book in a library, I’d look for a random place and then think of an easy way to remember its place. Not the other way around. And how did Victorique get this on her first guess? See what I mean by her “script logic”? Am I missing something here?

Anyway, I had some hopes for this episode, and it did tie together some of the threads that seemed rather random in the previous episode. The way it did this was forced and mediocre, but that’s not really a surprise for this show at this point, because I have to admit that piecing things together creates at least an interesting back-story> i just hope that this wasn’t the final episode of this arc, because it left so much unresolved, especially the backgrounds of these characters: who were they? This episode answered this for none of the characters involved: the bad girl: who is she and why is she the second incarnation of the phantom thief? Avril: where did she come from and what is her relationship with her grandfather and where did that letter come from? What exactly went on between Maxim and his sweetheart? I mean, leaving some of these backgrounds unanswered is no problem, but this was just too much.

One thing I did like in this episode was its clever use of a red herring: her bandaged hand seemed to suggest time and time again that she also decapitated that motor driver, and the entire previous episode seemed to hint that these two stories were connected… and they weren’t. Those wounds were just bite marks. I have to give that to this series: that’s a neat little twist.

Also, to nitpick a bit: “the train from England to Sauvure”… how did that work exactly in those days?
Rating: (Enjoyable)

Yumekui Merry – 05

by psgels, posted in Yumekui Merry




I really like episodic series. Sure, they’re easy to screw up without the right execution, and their main storylines don’t become as smooth as series with a continuous story, but really: who cares? They’ve got plenty of ways to make up for that. This episode showed that even episodic characters are just awesome if they use each other to build up and flesh out the story. Seriously, this episode was amazing.

This was EXACTLY what I was hoping for when I started this series. Sure, the story started off with a number of cliches and all, but this was a really emotional episode that did just about everything right. The first half of this episode was full of wonderful slice of life that makes me take back what I said earlier about this show, in the way that the characters in this series don’t have the most interesting personalities: the way in which this episode fleshed them out was wonderfully down to earth and showed a lot of new things about them, like Isana suddenly liking a famous pop star. Or the fact that Merry has been lost and killing off other dream demons for ten years now. Yeah.

Then the second half came, and that was the point for this series to suddenly contradict a lot of what it had been building up for. Seriously, how many series this season have already done this right? Yumekui Merry gave another wonderful addition to the collection of amazing plot twists of this season: it turns out that Merry didn’t have the power to send demons back at all! In fact, there was no way to get back to the dream world in the first place.

The second half of this episode also wonderfully moved the lead characters into the gray area of morality: in this episode a character representing justice shows up. She’s very much like your average protagonist here: searching to exterminate every dream demon in order to get revenge on her sister and to stop their evil deeds.

The animation also was gorgeous and really inspired, even for this series’ standards. I mean, this just shows the amazing things you can do with generic character designs, if you’ve got the right artists and animation direction behind it.
Rating: *** (Awesome)

Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica – 05

by psgels, posted in Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica



That new girl made her proper entrance in this episode. She at this point is a bit too stereotypically evil, and I would like to see her character in a bit more detail than someone who just wants to kill people. Other than that though, this again was an excellent episode.

She did have a good point in this episode, though: becoming a mahou shoujo, just to protect others is a very shallow reason: in order to remain strong enough to protect innocent people, you need to collect the grief seeds, which can only be collected after a witch had a meal on some innocent people. It’s a vicious cycle, and Sayaka doesn’t really seem to understand this. Sayaka really is a ticking time bomb at this point.

Also, the more this show goes on, the more trollish the OP appears. The tone is obviously misleading here, but also the transformation scene which felt completely out of place could be just a subtle jab to other mahou shoujo and some of the tropes that they just continue to overuse. Especially considering how at this point Madoka still hasn’t become one. I have seen Phantom, Gen’s other work. I know that this guy has pretended the death of characters, only to bring them back later. At the same time though, it’s not like he’s afraid to kill of characters either. My guess is that Mami will return eventually when Madoka chooses her wish. At the same time though, I’m expecting quite a number of actual deaths with the rest of the cast here.
Rating: ** (Excellent)a