Star Crossed Anime

Contrary to popular belief, Mitsudomoe is not first and foremost a fanservice series. Sure, it’s full of panty jokes, but at its core it really remains a comedy series. Still, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have its mind completely drowned in the gutter.

Remember back when you were around ten years old, and how everyone kept making the most immature and tasteless jokes they could think of? Well, that’s this series: 13 episodes of toilet-jokes and innuendo at the level of ten-year-olds. The thing is that the delivery in this series so good that despite the subject material, it had me laughing out lout in every episode, aside from perhaps the first two.

This series especially loves making use of the way that in the Japanese language, you can often omit huge parts of a sentence if it’s clear about the context you’re talking in. It comes up with all kinds of scenarios to get the best out of this little quirk that’s unique to the Japanese language. Apart from that, it also loves toying with the chemistry between the different characters. The jokes it tells are just wrong at times, but I really couldn’t help but laugh. The jokes here range from utterly stupid to surprisingly witty, and they’re often surprisingly creative.

The big problem with this series is that it doesn’t have enough material for 13 episodes. Every episode is divided into about four or five short sketches, and every episode has at least one sketch that is just repeating the same jokes that were already used before. Especially the boob jokes and the Gachi Rangers get milked out too much, which really has me worried about the recently announced second season: when the first season is already struggling to fill 13 episodes, then there is no way that the second season will be as funny as the first one.

This series does need to take a bit of time to really find its niche. The first two episodes miss the mark completely: they try way too hard, are completely disgusting and will probably turn off many potential viewers. After that though, it becomes a pretty hilarious comedy series with a top-notch delivery. The reused jokes will probably become a huge turn-off in the second season, but this first season still has enough original content and jokes that are actually developed throughout the series, rather than merely copied and pasted.

Storytelling:	8/10 – Hilarious whenever it isn’t repeating jokes; it really has excellent delivery and comedic timing.
Characters:	8/10 – Their mind is completely in the gutter, but they’ve got a good chemistry.
Production-Values:	8/10 – Bridge is completely new, but they’ve done a pretty good job here with the animation.
Setting:	7/10 – Nothing special, and doesn’t really make use of it.

Suggestions:
– Yoiko
– B Gata H Kei
– Usavich

During the past Summer season, the thing that I disliked the most was AIC. They did come out with four new series, but they were. all. moe. anime. And not even the good ones, like Geijutsuka Art Design Class; all four of them were completely underwhelming, had no idea how to use their time correctly or how to tell a story for that matter. Asobi ni Iku Yo at least set itself apart from the others by showing that it at least somewhat knew what it wanted to do.

It just threw all pretense out: it’s a harem with a lot of guns and aliens, and just tried to make something enjoyable out of it. This worked… somewhat. Asobi ni Iku Yo has its enjoyable moments, but they’re too few and far in between for a series that only has twelve episodes. This series is at its best when it doesn’t try to be anything. It’s a bit corny, but the slice of life moments of this series work well enough. On top of them, the action scenes themselves are also pretty enjoyable. It’s what’s in between that’s really the problem.

The story is interesting, and has a few neat ideas here and there, like the whole concept of aliens with cat ears coming to earth in order to establish diplomatic relationships, but most of it is just predictable fodder, including a number of very badly inspired bad guys who fail to create any kind of tension. The big problem here is that the series spends way too much of its time on pointless exposition that never really goes anywhere. This series only has twelve episodes, and way too often it just fails to entertain because it somehow found the need to explain another boring detail in the bad guys’ plans.It doesn’t seem to realize that neither its premise nor its characters can carry a serious plot.

As for the characters, they’re better than your usual harem, especially compared to AIC’s other series this season. Characters at least talk sensibly without trying to be too cute, and that’s something I could appreciate (and this is also what made me able to watch it all the way through). There is a decent chemistry between them, but they’re still riddled with problems. There is hardly any character-development, and due to the above-mentioned tendency of this series to waste its time on its plot, they really could have been fleshed out more. The worst is the love triangle that develops, though. Kio, the lead male is dense beyond belief (again, very original), which completely goes against any kind of development that could have made this series better. The romance here is just there to insert pointless drama, and the way it gets resolved made me bang my head on my desk. I mean, I know that I should be glad that a series for once resolves its love triangles and stuff, but the way in which this series does it is a total Deus ex Machina insult.

Overall, would I recommend marathoning this series? No, there are many better series out there. This series fails to see what it’s good at and instead wastes too much time on its story and drama, which both don’t really accomplish anything. Add that to its silly and cliched premise, and you have a series that everyone will have forgotten in about half a year.

Storytelling:	6/10 – Poorly balanced, too much exposition for a series that’s supposed to be fun and light-hearted.
Characters:	7/10 – Characters are not stupid and obnoxiuos, I at least praise this series for that because it’s the only AIC series this season to avoid this pitfall. They also fail to stand out and the drama between them sucks.
Production-Values:	8/10 – Solid, hardly any bad frames.
Setting:	7/10 – There are a few neat ideas, but overall it’s underutilized.

Suggestions:
– Magikano
– Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ouki
– Mahou Tsukai Tai

A few weeks ago we had this discussion on the shoutbox about Berserk. I was really looking forward to it, but people were saying that it did not hold up, compared to its manga. And fair enough, the anime is only 25 episodes long, while the manga has been running since 1990 and still hasn’t finished, meaning that there was no way for the anime to be able to completely tell a story that wouldn’t conclude, even thirteen years after its airdate. The original manga of Berserk also seems to be one of the most well received mangas out there.

The thing is though, and most people who have been reading this blog for a while have been very much aware of this, but I’m terrible at reading manga. Blame a lack of time, but series like Blade of the Immortal, Bokura no, Himitsu Top Secret, Pandora Hearts: I loved all of them despite being somehow unable to just grab and check out their respective mangas. Even though some of them made huge changes and none of them get to the real meat of their source material, I’m still a huge fan of them as standalone, albeit very incomplete stories, based on manga that are God knows how good. I’ve been stuck at the Bokura no’s thirtieth chapter for years now, despite it being awesome just like its anime counterpart.

In any case, Berserk is the same: ridiculously incomplete, ending with one ridiculous hell of a cliff-hanger, but it’s also a ridiculously well executed anime.

I t really immediately sets itself apart from all of the other fantasy series that were spread across the nineties. The atmosphere is dark and gritty, it doesn’t try to glorify its battles (this series is completely brutal when it needs to be, and never tries to hide it), and the battles themselves are very well drawn, detailed and animated. The series quickly stars focusing on battles on a larger and larger scale, and yet the series consistently stays many levels of believability above what you’d usually expect in series that focus on medieval warfare.

What really sold me to Berserk was its character-development, though. Even though I have no idea how good the character-development in the manga must be, the anime really makes excellent use of its time to put as much meaning as possible into its three main characters. The plot is entirely meant to explore them, push them forwards to their goals, and get the best out of their characters while remaining perfectly paced so that each event flows into the other.

As a contrast though, the rest of the cast pales in comparison. They’re mostly static and really not the most interesting. There are unfortunately a lot of episodes that focus on them, and I feel that this series would have been even better when it made its characters, especially the people who end up on the other end of Guts’ blade, a bit more down to earth and give them a bit more character, rather than having Guts kill the same hordes of punching bags over and over again.

Really though, just for Guts, Casca and Griffith I’m really glad to have watched this series. It’s really one of the most mature action titles out there, both with its gore and the way it uses this gore to look at its characters. As for the ending… I don’t think I really need to describe in how many ways it gave us the middle-finger, but I nevertheless consider this series to have an amazing finale.

Storytelling:	9/10 – Slow, but very solid, and absolutely brutal when it needs to be.
Characters:	9/10 – The side characters are nothing special. The main characters are wonderfully developed, though, with a lot of meaning put into them.
Production-Values:	9/10 – Gorgeous artwork from the nineties. Plus, its soundtrack was composed by Susumu Hirasawa.
Setting:	8/10 – A detailed look into medieval warfare, but ridiculously incomplete.

Suggestions:
– Shin Mazinger Shougeki! Z-Hen
– Gilgamesh
– Gungrave

I think that from the start, it was obvious that Heroman would be nothing like the usual standard you’d expect from Bones. Even Bones’ flawed series are full of ambition, have this sense of maturity even when focusing on kids and teenagers, and are produced with a lot of attention to detail. Heroman however was a concept that none other than Stan Lee presented to them.

Now, it’s one thing that the creator of Spiderman, the X-Men, the Hulk and Iron Man was involved here, but Heroman is just so safe, it just has so many cliches, it has such a mediocre writing staff and it has the maturity of a 13-year-old, that it’s easily one of Bones’ weaker premises. Not the weakest, that title goes to the Mars Daybreak, but Heroman lacks both the ambition and execution to make it into any kind of memorable mecha series.

The premise: there is a kid who is pretty much a very kind-natured loser who finds a giant robot who is more powerful than anything mankind has ever created, he has a rich female childhood friend who acts as a semi-girlfriend, and he’s friends with a high school teacher who clearly is an uninspired homage to Doc from Back to the Future. Throughout the series he battles a bunch of aliens with powers that pretty much appear whenever the plot needs it.

With so many cliches, it really depends all on the execution here: how enjoyable is this series? How good are the characters? Heroman tries, but doesn’t really seem to know how to either develop its characters or create an enjoyable action series. Joey himself is very unlikable as a lead character: the creators tried to make him too pure, resulting in that we see 26 episodes in which a whiny little kid ends up saving the world. The creators do try to give the lead cast a little depth, but for some reason they decide to wait until twenty episodes have passed in order to only reveal some of the most basic of background information (I’m looking at you, Psy!).

Out of the 26 episodes, there are about four, possibly five episodes that really have good action. The rest aren’t anything special, and depend more on the story to keep the tension and the attention of the audience. This works decently in the first half, but in the second half the creators lose track of the plot completely, resulting in a bunch of pointless filler episodes that try to tie themselves into the main plot, but could have been deleted just as easily. The final battle of the series is way too rushed for the epic level it tries to reach.

There have been plenty of examples in which I’m able to ignore those kinds of flaws if the end result ends up enjoyable. High School of the Dead, for example: I am fully aware that it has flaws, but the way it played out was varied and kept my attention from start to finish. That’s what I look for in an anime. Heroman is different, though. I really get the feeling like it doesn’t know some of the basic techniques of storytelling, like a proper build-up. After you pass the climax of the second arc, there is hardly any variation left: we’re treated to things that we’ve all seen before and the things that are new don’t fit in the story at all.

In the past, Bones has already made a series about a kid who gets a toy that is able to fight and uses that to fight through hordes of opponents amidst bits of simple intrigue, and this was in 2001. The only part in which it doesn’t dwarf Heroman is that it tried to be much less epic, which is only a good thing, to be honest. Heroman completely has no value. I was positive about this series for a while, but in the end, now that the series is properly finished and I can get a proper look at the whole picture, I really have to admit that it wasn’t really worth my time to sit through this entire series (that is also why the rating for this series is much lower than the ratings I’ve been giving it at my monthly summaries. If you’re slightly interested, then watch up till episode nine: for that part, this series still is pretty solid. It’s in the part after that for which this series leaves too much to be desired, and this only gets more obvious as the series goes on.

Storytelling:	6/10 – The first half is solid enough, but especially the latter half is poorly laid out, and really fails to entertain or captivate.
Characters:	7/10 – Way too safe with its stereotypes, and the development comes way too late into the series.
Production-Values:	8/10 – Here is the thing: the animation of Heroman is very good with Bones’ usual standards, but I can only remember relatively few animated scenes that really impressed me. There are more frames than with most series and they are all solid and well quality checked, but it’s just so safe.
Setting:	8/10 – America, which is decently portrayed and decently responds to the main storyline; it does what it needs to do, but nothing more.

Suggestions:
– Angelic Layer
– Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann
– Overman King Gainer
These are just a few examples of how redundant Heroman is and how it could have been done much better.