Giant Killing – 25

by psgels, posted in Giant Killing



So this is it: the climax of Giant Killing (next episode will be some sort of epilogue, I guess), and THANK GOD it was every bit as awesome as I hoped. It was just one rush of adrenaline from start to finish, Dulfer’s team played to its full potential (it even switched out its attackers to focus on defence), the use of music was perfect (the creators even used a track that they hadn’t used before at), and I loved every minute of this episode.

I mean, I’m not going to deny that the outcome of these matches are predictable. We know that goals will be made. What makes this show so addictive though are the questions of “who?” and “how?”. This is especially why this final match kicks ass beyond belief: in every single episode, the creators pick out different members of the team to get their place in the spotlight, either because of their actions or by delving into their heads. This is a match that was constantly evolving with so much dynamics that I haven’t seen in any other sports series so far.

This time, it’s finally time for Gino to shine by, along with Sugi in order to make the second goal. Natsuki in the meantime only proves that he picked his role back up: he doesn’t end up in the spotlights. Instead, most of the credits for the final goal go to Murakoshi, for opening up the way to the enemy half, and Sera, for finally getting the chance and pulling off the stupid stunt that got in that third goal. And even beyond that, the creators never neglected the support of the rest of the team to get them there, with the possible exception of the Keeper since Osaka got no shots at the goal in this episode.

I really hope that this isn’t the last we get to see of sports series that focus on professionals, rather than high schoolers. They can lead to completely different series, and series that are based on adults have a ton of stuff that high school sport series don’t have, and vice versa. In this age in which the Japanese economy is doing poorly and there are more and more moe and bishie series, I’m really glad to see that there are still series like this one that try to be different in presentation, art, storytelling and execution. This final arc was really the perfect way to close off this series, and the results were really magnificent, and I can only hope for more series like this.
Rating: *** (Awesome)

Sengoku Basara – 23

by psgels, posted in Sengoku Basara



I still like what this series is trying to do here: action series often consist out of long strings of long action scenes, which may get boring if they go on for too long. This series however intends to make its action count by keeping it short and sweet.

Of course, whether that’s going to work is will depend entirely on that final episode!!

I mean, talk about putting your stakes here. This isn’t the case in which a series is badly paced so far: the past few episodes have built up enough for that and there is no worry for a rushed ending at this point. This is nothing like series as Sora no Oto, which tried to cram way too much into its final episode. Instead, the final episode has about five major battles scheduled. With an average of four minutes each, making everything as epic as possible, the creators will be forced to make every battle here short, but sweet. And god dammit I can’t wait until next week to see whether they can actually pull it off!

As for this episode, especially standalone I have no complaints about it whatsoever. It did its job perfectly of building up, while containing enough action to remain exciting from beginning to end. This really was that perfect balance between short action scenes, plot and dialogue that I would have preferred to see in the rest of the series. Everything flowed really well into each other, and even though this isn’t that final episode yet, you can really see the build-up pay off here, even though this episode also spent just about all of its time building up as well.

Also, the ninjas busting Katakura out of jail while taking advantage of the fact that Toyotomi’s army is gone. I like that. I was thinking that the creators were perhaps setting up some kind of battle between him and Date, involving some cheap “you betrayed me”-drama, but instead it was all meant to build up for a battle between him and Takenaka.

I’m also curious what the creators have in store for Ichi. Really, I nearly forgot about her, but it’s interesting that the creators really found that her time as a character was over, and she’s more like a weapon in this sequel, and she indeed did seem pretty much like a life-less ghost than the annoyance she was in the first season. Speaking of weapons: they even got a freaking death ray?! I mean, in terms of physics it makes no bloody sense whatsoever, but I love the idea, and it’s just something this series might pull.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Heartcatch Precure – 32

by psgels, posted in Heartcatch Precure



Most kids’ shows face the problem of how to prevent sensible adults from taking over the series, most of the time this results into them getting dumbed down beyond belief, just to let the kids shine, and even when everything makes sense, people like parents, teachers and grandparents are often reduced to completely unimportant and unimpressive. Heartcatch Precure avoids this with its rule that only certain girls can become Precure, along with the fact that Grandma is just AWESOME.

She can’t transform anymore (of which this episode actually provided a pretty interesting explanation), and yet she acts as a good mentor to the lead characters here. Usually she’s nice and supportive, but this episode was very interesting as she tested their resolve to see if they were worthy for the power with which she once failed to kill Dune.

Also, I may be an idiot, but the plot twist in this episode hit me completely by surprise: I did not suspect it at all, but the mysterious identity of the mysterious man who has been protecting Cure Blossom and Cure Marin was awesome beyond belief. I never considered the possibility, but with the way that the creators have kept building up the great Koppei, it makes sense for him to be able to do such a thing. His actions throughout the series also make perfect sense now.

Oh, and this episode included “the power-up”. I already said before that I don’t really like those practices, but this episode handled it tastefully. It’s not just another “Princess Mode”, but instead there are some definite risks involved in using it (as shown by grandma), in order to balance out the new powers. Using it at the same time provided an excuse for the return of Cure Moonlight, so I guess that this episode couldn’t have let things play out any better than that it did.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Densetsu no Yuusha no Densetsu – 12

by psgels, posted in Densetsu no Yuusha no Densetsu



Miran really likes killing people, but to learn that he already was plotting to take over the world at the age of five… That’s some hardcore bad guy.

In any case, I wonder what the creators intended to do by suddenly killing off a ton of different people who were conspiring against Shion: it’s either going to fuel the other anti-Shion people in the kingdom, or they intend to take care of them all at once. Either way, this episode was building up towards more international intrigue with those pink-haired people and all.

I’m still waiting for something to catch my interest, though. People keep saying that the second half of this series will be awesome, and I’m willing to wait for that. My main issue right now is that there are no characters that interest me left: there just are too many of them and they’re too similar. Even the humour between Ferris and Ryner is getting old. The best is probably Miran: I feel that if this guy develops, he can change into something great, as this episode hinted.

Perhaps I’m comparing this show too much to Guin Saga (which arguably did have a much better direction, and it did pull off a huge cast), but I’m not really feeling anything with this series at this point. At this point in the series, that’s nothing too disastrous, though, as there still is plenty of time for this series to redeem itself, though it is a bit of a chore to get through these episodes.
Rating: (Enjoyable)

Shiki – 11

by psgels, posted in Shiki



To the people who have yet to check out this episode: be careful. The entire ED is full of spoilers for the second half. >.< Either way, this was a bit of a bizarre way to end the first half with: an entire episode dedicated to none other than Itou Ikumi. Didn't see that one coming, yet it worked surprisingly well to show how the villagers are starting to suspect things. This episode did really well in portraying such a weird character as herself, and she's actually quite charming. I remember some commenters talk about how I should hate Shiki because its story is just a standard vampire story and has hardly any originality. The thing with this show is indeed that the general story is about a bunch of vampires attacking a town, nothing special with that. The reason why I love this show is the huge amount of creativity and energy it puts in its delivery and storytelling. It's true that I like shows with a lot of plot twists (provided that they don't take this over the top and are too lazy in other areas), but I also love the series that have simple stories, yet excel in their delivery, storytelling, or characters. That's pretty much the reason why my review scale talks about "storytelling", rather than "story". I don't care how big your story is, I'm mostly interested in how it's used. I think the best way to describe the storytelling in this show is that it leaves hardly any room for the audience to take a breath: every second is busy showing something. There seem to be hardly any seconds there to just fill time. It's also a series that makes excellent use of its soundtrack to create its atmosphere: it knows when to start playing its tunes, and it also knows when to keep quiet. It works really well so far. On top of that, I also love the kinds of series that actually make their setting come alive. At this point, it's actually working pretty well so far, and this episode was a key to it: it showed that the lead characters aren't the only people in the world, and the villagers are definitely also involved here. I feel like the creators can take this even further, but that completely depends on the kind of direction that the second half will go into, and whether it will abandon the rest of the villagers, or instead focus even more on them. Series that really manage to portray an alive setting are very rare, but it would be awesome if this show manages to do it. Rating: ** (Excellent)

Kuroshitsuji II Review – 85/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews, Kuroshitsuji II




Okay, you can say a lot about Kuroshitsuji II as a sequel to Kuroshitsuji. But at least it has BALLS.

In today’s anime, in which it’s very difficult to come up with really interesting plots and storylines, and people rather try to stay at the tried and true, Kuroshitsuji came, made optimal use of its creative freedom, discarded the manga it’s based on completely, trolled just about everyone who watched it and came up with quite an interesting concept for its sequel. This lead to many good things, but also many bad things.

But still, out of all of the series that premiered during the past summer season, I really can’t deny that Kuroshitsuji II had the best plot out of all of them: it made the best use of its episodes, it was the least afraid to include some caring yet thought out plot twists, it was very good at building up its own storyline and actually using this and overall I have to say that I enjoyed most of it.

But the biggest selling point of this series is without a doubt the new cast of villains, especially Alois and Claude. The two of them are like a trainwreck: completely derailed but yet so interesting to watch. Especially the antics of Alois are consistently captivating, and you can see that the creators had a lot of fun portraying him as this insane teenaged noble. The creators realized this very well, and so they prepared a number of plot twists that really attempt to bring the best out of these two characters.

On the flip-side, this is a series that likes trolling its viewers. This is especially noticeable in the way that it follows a very awesome first episode with a completely disappointing and badly executed second episode. And in fact, the first third of this series has just about everything that made the fillers of the first season so tedious to get through. Episodes 2 to four are a bit of a test of patience, they’re necessary for the plot and all, but this series makes no attempt at hiding its vast array of annoying characters.

After that though, this series really gets better than ever. Its humour gets snappier, the way the series uses its unique selling point of god-mode butlers gets used better than ever, both for the serious purposes and the over the top silly ones (which work more and more as the series goes on).

This series also has the weirdest allocation of animation budget I’ve seen in a long while. The animation in this series ranges between average to very smooth,like what most series do. However, the creators have this very interesting tendency to spend the most frames on the most random scenes, especially on hands or lip-syncing, while the action-scenes usually have average animation. And don’t get me wrong here: it actually works pretty well. Those detailed scenes add an interesting amount of life to the characters, and the action scenes are kept interesting by the plot twists anyway, so they don’t really need any stellar animation.

I have ranted about Kuroshitsuji, I have ranted about the fillers, and I have ranted about the ending of this sequel (which, the more I think about it, was actually pretty good), but really: we need more series like this. Series in which the creators disregard any conventions and just go with a bunch of interesting ideas that actually lead to some unique stories.

Storytelling: 9/10 – Well paced, fun, tense and exciting and manages to get the best out of the plot and characters. At times it might not seem like it knows what it’s doing but in 50% of the cases it’s just trolling.
Characters: 9/10 – Alois and Claude may not be the deepest characters, but they’re delightful to watch. This sequel also gives an interesting new dimension to Ciel and Sebastian.
Production-Values: 8/10 – Strange uses of budget that somehow work. Oh, and Yuki Kajiura has an insert song somewhere.
Setting: 8/10 – Makes optimal use of its creative liberties with a seemingly endless supply of interesting ideas for the plot to work with.

Suggestions:
– Touka Gettan
– Futakoi Alternative
– Ga-Rei Zero

Kuroshitsuji II – 12

by psgels, posted in Kuroshitsuji II



Look… just look at this picture. Got it?

In memory of

Ciel Phantomhive

Who died at Aug. 26th, 1889

That would have been the perfect ending here. That was how this episode SHOULD have ended. I mean, the creators wouldn’t be crazy enough to actually try and revive Ciel, right? They’re not going to do something as stupid as negating the entire ending of the first season. They couldn’t, right?

So yeah, we got trolled here; big time. Dear god, reviving is one thing, but get this: in his last moments, Alois forged a contract with Johanna that turns Ciel into a demon. Because he is a demon now, he can’t die, yet his contract with Sebastian is still running, even though there is no way for Sebastian to absorb Ciel’s soul. So yeah, Ciel and Sebastian will actually be able to live together FOR ALL ETERNITY. Bloody Nora, they actually went there. This series actually was entirely meant to realize the wish of the squealing yaoi fangirls to have those two together until doomsday.

I’m a bit bewildered by all of this, especially on how I’m going to write the review for this series. I mean, was this episode bad? It was perfectly told if you ignore the things it tried to tell: everything took its time to let all of the revelations play out, the second half of the episode was well produced in how the creators portrayed Ciel saying goodbye to everyone. I have no problems with that.

Now, whether or not the big twist is bad, here’s the thing: I have seen a ton of bad endings at this point, and this episode really looked like none of them. Usually, the endings that disappoint me are either the ones who lack ambition (as in, they resolve things fine but the way they do it does no justice to the build-up that it has gotten), ones that fail to resolve anything (it really depends on the rest of the series and how those delivered whether I dislike or accept those) or ones that are just too rushed.

This episode was neither. The creators knew exactly what they wanted to do (dammit!), they knew exactly which revelation they wanted to save for when, and they knew exactly how to plan everything out, not just in this episode, but throughout the entire series. I mean, how often did this series troll anyway? It feels like it trolled both the fans of Ciel and Sebastian as well as the fans of the new approach, twice or even more.

I’m really going to have to sort out my thoughts for a bit for the review of this series.
Rating: #^% (Akjsdfh)

Ookami -San to Shichinin no Nakama-Tachi Review – 77,5/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews



For the series that had the most hard to remember title of the past summer season, I was expecting something like a fairy tale story with some moe elements. Instead, we got a moe story with some fairy tale elements. Obviously that was a bit of a disappointment, but it’s still a pretty decent series.

I think the best way to describe this series is that it’s generally well executed, but it has a number of things that ended up holding it down. JC Staff really put some of their best animators on this series, which really results in a show that is chock full of interesting animation, with rich and detailed movements. It’s well directed, the dialogue is also pretty well written and presented. The characters are lively and are portrayed as such. At these aspects, it’s a very charming series.

Unfortunately, this is one of those series where it’s really the plot and content that hurts it the most, in which your mileage may vary depending on how much you can stand moe and harem stereotypes, because this show is chock full of it. Maids, tsunderes, boob jokes, punks, magicians, popularity contests, fireworks, pool episodes, you name it and this show probably has it. This is great for if you love these kinds of things, but personally I was rather annoyed with all of the stock situations that this series came up with, even though it often provided some sort of twist or creative twist to their cases. You can see that this series likes to be tongue in cheek about its subject material, and it’s very much a homage to various moe stereotypes, but for my tastes it wasn’t tongue in cheek enough.

The presentation is, like mentioned above, pretty solid, though there are some strange and notable exceptions. You know the good comedies, who even when a joke falls flat remain fun and interesting to watch. Ookami doesn’t have that: when a joke falls flat, it really falls flat, and this show often has a tendency to repeat those jokes over and over again. The most notable here are the boob jokes (there are way too many of those here, and they just refuse to leave), but the narrator also has some moments in which she thinks she’s funny while she actually isn’t.

This is also one of those series that doesn’t try to hide the fact that it’s based on a still on-going series of light novels. It just ends. There is no real conclusion, and the final episodes fail miserably in their attempts to at least have some sort of climax by introducing way too many new side-plots and turning the big bad guy of the series into an evil genius with huge holes in his plans. And to the rest of the villains of this series, the creators aren’t really kind either: most of them just end up as one-dimensional punching bags for the lead characters, so they fail to introduce any kind of tension.

And yet… despite all that I said here… I do kindof like this show. The lead characters are pretty charming and nicely characterized, and all of the protagonists have their own backstory and personality. The episodic nature of this series prevents it from dragging on and the fairy tale roots of the series aren’t really a core of the series, but they do provide the series with a nice amount of symbolism which really helped this series. It is indeed a show focused heavily on moe stereotypes, but I have watched tons of blander moe shows.

Storytelling: 7/10 – Solid, though a bit too reliant on stereotypes at times.
Characters: 8/10 – The good guys are interesting to watch, the bad guys not so much.
Production-Values: 9/10 – Excellent animation, I have to admit.
Setting: 7/10 – Too many moe stereotypes that will turn off those who aren’t interested in them.

Suggestions:
– GA Geijutsuka Art Design Class
– Kannagi
– 7 Comments

Rainbow – 24

by psgels, posted in Rainbow



Okay, so contrary to what I first thought, the Suppon arc is going to take up three episodes. That makes me all the more curious to that mysterious final episode through which the creators are going to close off the series (please! Heitai!), but as the final multi-episode arc of this series, Suppon’s story works really well. For the biggest amount of drama, the creators could have chosen to save Mario or Joe for last. Instead, they chose the much more mellow and melancholic Suppon: a guy who really embodies the major theme of this show through and through.

And frankly, I like it that the creators used the least sappy story for last. This series always had its cheese problem: despite its excellent plot, it’s the reason why I’m never going to rate this show as a masterpiece. Still, it is one of those examples which really makes up for its cheese. Out of all of the arcs of the second half though, I find the Suppon arc the most interesting. That’s not to say that the other arcs didn’t stand out, though: Mario’s was the most intense, Joe’s was the most heart-warming, Cabbage’s was the funniest and Baremoto’s made the best use of the flaws of its character. They all had their own way in which they stood out, and that’s what made this second half work so well.

As for the Americans… yeah, they were decent I guess. The biggest problem was that they were portrayed like most thugs in anime: without much of a personality (except for that one boxer guy perhaps). The voice actors actually got their accents quite right and it wasn’t like the usual Engrish here. But at the same time, you can really hear that this dialogue was written by a Japanese, and then translated to English without trying to make it sound natural from the mouth of an American. But yeah, this is just me, saying things. I have no idea how natural anime sounds in the ears of Japanese people.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Nurarihyon no Mago – 11

by psgels, posted in Nurarihyon no Mago



So with this episode, apparently the real story of Nurarihyon no Mago should have started. And really, I’m impressed so far. Not with the potential, but the idea of the author to start things off with Nurarihyon and Yura, as they immediately get attacked by whatever evil youkai that have moved into town.

I liked the chemistry between them, and the creators made good use of the tension and the fact that Yura was actually really liking the one she wanted to kill in the first place. I really wonder what that attack would have looked like with Yura out of the picture, which would have allowed Nurarihyon to show some of his powers: I’m very interested to whether this guy still has his bite, or whether he has just turned into a regular old guy. I never really understood how youkai age, to be honest: they seem to be able to live forever, or at least for many centuries, and yet some of them age while others don’t. When a youkai is in an old man form, does that also mean that he’s weaker than his younger version?

I liked Yura a lot, especially now that this episode finally gave her the chance to actually summon her full force. Her weakness is still pretty big, though: she only has to hope that she can buy enough time to actually summon all of them. Especially since she works alone, she is very easy to surprise and take out at this rate, though I guess it’s worth the effort considering the great stuff she can pull off when she actually does manage to summon all of her Shikigamis.

The rest of this episode was quite light-hearted, but all of it was pretty enjoyable. The youkai together remain cute, and even Rikuou’s classmates are nice enough to watch when they don’t belong to the main focus of the episode.
Rating: * (Good)