Ookiku Furikabutte – 07

by psgels, posted in Ookiku Furikabutte



Interesting to see that as the team keeps winning more, we get to see more and more of their family members. This episode showed a ton more parents and siblings who came by to support the lead characters. It’s an excellent way to flesh them out, and I’m glad that with such a large cast the creators also weren’t afraid to draw in such a large cast of parents and siblings. This is no standard show in which everyone and his dog lost their mother due to some illness or something: for once the mothers act like actual mothers: very talkative and supportive of their sons. I like them so much more than the “weak mother” stereotype.

Mihashi and Abe also were a major theme in this episode, I especially loved the contrast between their families: they’re both only children, but with Mihashi’s family the mood is very fidgety. Abe’s household is much calmer and colder, and yet you can tell that they’re family of each other. It was specifically a big episode for Abe, because he finally found out that he isn’t exactly the best friend.

It’s a bit of a shame that the creators glossed over the game for the best sixteen here (I would have loved to have seen what the heck happened in that fifth inning…) but it looks like the next match is going to get full coverage as we finally have a team who analyzed Mihashi’s pitches beforehand. Could prove to be very interesting.
Rating: * (Good)

Sarai-ya Goyou – 05

by psgels, posted in Sarai-ya Goyou




That was… amazing. Seriously, talk about a powerful episode, this series is just getting better and better with every episode.

The pacing was slow… but this really allowed the characters to show their best sides. After only five episodes it’s astounding to see how much the creators have already fleshed out the characters. The conversations here felt natural: it felt like Ume and Matsu talked about their pasts and problems, rather than it just being exposition for the story. It really was a chance for the characters to get to know each other better. It’s really one of the things I love about this series: screw exposition, every sentence is meant to give these people a richer character.

I also love how the creators handled Masa’s sickness. For once it isn’t the dreaded “anime cold” that’s over within a day, and instead of trying to create cheap drama with it, the creators focus on Ume and Matsu and the rest of the cast instead. Yaichi hardly played a role either. Matsu’s part in particular hit me, with how genuine it felt from the otherwise so distant guy that the previous episodes showed him as. Even when he got saved by Yaichi.

What’s also interesting is that Ume has also become a lot kinder to Masa, compared to how cold he was in the first few episodes. And yet Masa himself hasn’t changed yet: perhaps hampered by that sickness of his, he’s still the guy who hardly says anything.

You know, this season I’ve really been hard-pressed to point out my favourite. There are three shows that equally excel for me: Yojou-han, Sarai-ya Goyou and Giant Killing. With this episode however, this series has set the standards really high for the other two. While it has the disadvantage that it’s only got 12 episodes, it’s really not wasting any time to bring life to its characters. And while these two series have their unique points that Goyou doesn’t have, I’m getting more and more confident to say that Sarai-ya Goyou has the best characters of the entire season.
Rating: *** (Awesome)

Yojou-han Shinwa Taikei – 04

by psgels, posted in Yojou-han Shinwa Taikei



This series was already a bit surreal at times, but this episode took it even farther. The visual symbolism in this episode was just all over the place, and it loved pulling all kinds of weird visual references to events that were happening, the most obvious being the point at which Higuchi started singing.

It was a really weird episode, and probably the hardest one to understand so far due to all of the things that were thrown at us, ranging from the scavenger hunt for the weird brush to the rock-paper-scissors match at the end.

Watashi wasn’t exactly a loser here, as much as a devout follower of Higuchi and his weird ideas. Ozu this time was the bastard in the way that he was playing a bit of a double spy. They’re far less extreme than in the previous episodes, but I think that that’s because of Higuchi’s influence at work, who kept them at bay. Ozu could only be a small bastard, because for some reason it seemed impossible to really make Higuchi’s life bad.

I’m also very curious about the next episode. Wasn’t this series supposed to be just about four stories? Could that mean that we’re going to revisit the tennis club again in the next episode? Overall, the status quo in this series seems to be two deaths of Watashi, one life in hiding, and one life wasted on some weird guy.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Durarara – 18

by psgels, posted in Durarara



So this episode delivers Kida’s background. I have a few problems with it, but that doesn’t take away that this was a very interesting episode. This episode has been hinted at ever since we saw that mysterious girl in the hospital, and I’ve been dying to know what happened to her. This episode tells exactly what’s up with her, and why she’s so important to Kida.

As amazing as a middle school gang leader may be, he was quite naive in thinking that he could just do what he wanted, and therefore ended up paying the price when the blue squares he was at war with went too far. While I don’t quite get why she’s still in the hospital after all these years (couldn’t she have gotten herself a wheelchair or something), it gave quite a bit of insight into Kida’s character. The reason he went back to the yellow scarves turns out to be the need to protect, ironically from the threat of the Dollars.

This has me slightly worried about an annoying climax, though. I mean, it’s another one of those “talk to each other dammit!”-finales. It’s going to have to come down to the creators properly balancing everything out and make it believable why the three friends refuse to talk to each other. I’m especially looking at Anri, now that she knows about Kida. Please talk to someone about it, rather than gathering your army of zombies in response.

We also finally learn about the strange board-game that Izaya has been playing: as it turns out the three kinds of pieces stand for the dollars, yellow scarves and saikas. In this episode he grabs a bunch of cards to symbolize the rest of the cast. It was just a way of foreshadowing and symbolism, and as everything went into flames here, another possibility of the ending could be total chaos, rather than total annoyance.

I liked this episode quite a bit now that the story is coming together very nicely. However, this episode did leave me disappointed in one area: the way that it did not show how Kida actually managed to become the respected leader of an army of people older than him as a middle schooler. It just starts him off as the leader, but we never actually get to see what makes him such a good one; we never get to see why he was so special. While Mikado and Anri had very good and believable reasons for being special, I just fail to see that with Kida: how did his network grow? How did he pull that one off? To attract these kinds of people you’d expect him to have tons of money, but we never see any hints for that.
Rating: * (Good)

Rainbow – 06

by psgels, posted in Rainbow



Looking at this series, I can really tell how good the manga must be. A bit more subtlety, and this really is an excellent look into the depths of corruption inside prisons. If it were so easy for one person (in this case the friendly guard), there would not have been a problem at all, however this episode showed that it’s really impossible for him to stand up to his superiors.

It’s way overdone, but heck, I’m really warming up to the themes of friendship here, and the bond between the lead characters. This isn’t just one-sided, in which An-chan protects the six ones around him because of the suicide of his former friend in prison. You can also see that everyone tries to return his favour, and help him out to defy psycho guard.

This episode also kept hinting at the practices of that really creepy doctor. I tried to look at some statistics about prison rape, and got quite scared of what I found. In 2007, there were already 70000 prisoners raped. Just think of how worse it would have been in a world recovering from the biggest war it had ever run into. I find it really hard to determine whether that creepy doctor is portrayed accurately or not.

Psycho guard is a bit too much though. Even though I have no idea how the minds of these corrupt officials work, he still feels like a caricature: for 24/7, it feels like he’s busy trying to make An-chan’s life miserable. Now there are grudges, and there’s hate so ridiculous that it just stops being believable.
Rating: * (Good)

Senkou no Night Raid – 06

by psgels, posted in Senkou no Night Raid



So this episode shows Yukina’s brother. I’m not sure whether I understand his plans, though, but the dialogue was surprisingly complex in this episode. I just fail to see the reason why he would kidnap Natsume, just to show him an international conference between the Asian leaders, in which he did nothing but talk about how he wants to create a united Asia but doesn’t have any plans to back them up with.

However, this all does show that we’re about to get to the historically sensitive part of the story. Especially considering this. I don’t know anything about Chinese history, so I looked up the “Mukden Incident” in Wikipedia. Apparently, the Japanese staged their own attack to give themselves a pretext of invading a part of China. The controversy about the whole incident is that some Japanese actually blame the Chinese for it (note: this doesn’t mean all of them).

The interesting thing here is that either the broadcasting station or this series is going to be in the wrong, considering that it’s not going to air. There are two possibilities here: the series doesn’t shy away from blaming the Japanese, and the broadcasting station didn’t agree with it, or the series mixed in some weird conspiracy theory that probably has something to do with Yukina’s brother causing the whole incident, which is what the broadcasting station found too much to air.

I’m actually very much interested in the next episode, no matter what the cause turns out to be. It’s been established by now that this is historical fiction: all historical stories end up screwing real history in one way or the other. The danger of these things is of course to not delve into useless nationalistic propaganda. Either way though, I’m very interested in how the creators actually decided to solve this matter.
Rating: * (Good)

Uragiri wa Boku no Namae wo Shitteiru – 05

by psgels, posted in Uragiri wa Boku no Namae wo Shitteiru



Hmm, I’m actually liking the quieter episodes more than the climaxes with this series. The previous episode might have been a tad cheesy, but this episode was actually quite charming. I liked the balance, and the new characters have potential.

The children in this episode are quite an interesting addition. They prevent Yuki from turning into a damsel in distress, and I’m glad that after he left the orphanage, the creators didn’t intend to drop this plot thread. I also liked how the creators used such a long car drive to flesh out the characters: with so many hours being together, the characters all showed a bit of a different side of theirs. I’m also glad to see that the police have also become involved with this series. With so many monsters roaming around, there’s bound to be a few unsovlvable incidents that the police have no idea how to handle. It’s the simple things like this that manage to retain my interest in this series.

The length of this series is going to be a bit of a problem, with just 12 episodes. I hope that the creators are going to either announce a second season at the end of its run, or create something of their own ending to at least close it off a bit without falling into the pit that trapped many series before it by slapping an ending that’s too shallow onto it.
Rating: * (Good)

Giant Killing – 06

by psgels, posted in Giant Killing




Muaahahaha! That was AWESOME! Never since the bald gay ambassador of Samurai Champloo have people talked in actual Dutch in anime. Hearing the voice actors trying to utter the Dutch sentences totally made my day. What an awesome series.

En dan te bedenken dat deze aflevering ook vol zat met Fransen en Engelsen, het zou helemaal geweldig zijn als de Zuid-Amerikanen ook ergens in de serie zullen verschijnen. C’est génial de voir que anime de plus en plus orienter vers un anime international. Wo man früher nur ein paar Sätze in Engrish finden konnte, werden ganze Gespräche in anderen Sprachen geführt.

The creators actually did pretty well. There were some voice actors who just couldn’t take it at one point, but that Dutch coach was voiced really well, he even got that nonchalant monotone tone that you often hear with Dutch guys nailed. He also spoke English with quite a good Dutch accent, without overdoing it. The same goes for the French coach. It’s a shame that Tatsumi himself didn’t get the best voice actor: you could see him struggle with his English, which caused some lines to be just replaced with their Japanese counterparts.

This episode introduced a ton of interesting looking characters. What I also loved was seeing just how many different, varied and unique character-designs the creators could produce. Seriously, every character here has unique character-designs that stand out. Every person has his own features.

On top of that the creators also slapped the start of the new football match at the end of the episode. Neat. I also loved the way it was written: everything seemed to be going well, everyone was in the right spirits, the fans even brought a huge-ass sign to cheer everyone on… and suddenly the ball misses and the opposing team makes a goal. It’s really a great way to introduce the next episode.
Rating: *** (Awesome)

Heartcatch Precure – 14

by psgels, posted in Heartcatch Precure



Happy Mother’s Day everyone.

You know, I often dislike it when creators kill of a characters’ parent. It’s overdone, a cheap way to care about a character… ah, screw it. This show just surpassed itself. This was the best episodic story that Heartcatch Precure has shown us so far, and it pushed all of the right buttons. Screw cliches, there’s nothing wrong with them if used right!

It’s an awesome idea from the creator to make a mothers day special, because it really fits the main themes of this series (family) perfectly. The main focus of this episode this time fell on one of Tsubomi and Erika’s classmates, who has lost her mother a number of years ago (probably due to the birth of her younger sister). It’s really an episode about the loss of one’s parents, and how this forces her to take on responsibilities, even though she’d rather be playing around.

Shiku really was a strong girl for her age, but at the same time that went at the expense of her childhood. This episode was all about her, sorting out her own feelings about her mother. Her character-development was also handled really well: after she realized that she shouldn’t be so hard on herself, she really started experimenting with being a kid again, joining the fashion club. Speaking of which… this means that we’re going to see much more of her, right? This sounds very, very promising.

As for the bad guys… they intrigue me a bit. With the main theme of this show being family, it really hasn’t been reflected at all in those three grunts that always change people to desatorians and whose name I forgot. However… was it really a coincidence that that narcissistic one was walking around with a bouquet of flowers on MOTHER’S DAY? I mean, something tells me that that was a bit too much of a coincidence.
Rating: *** (Awesome)

Full Metal Alchemist – Brotherhood – 56

by psgels, posted in Full Metal Alchemist - Brotherhood



And King Bradley shows his fangs again. Apparently, he’s fast enough to avoid bullets and cut them in half, and his presence is so great that he’s able to create shock-waves of air to smack down his victims. Bones, that may have been a bit too much; those are tricks that cheap shows use in an attempt to make characters look really strong.

Nevertheless, talk about an action-packed episode. The previous episodes were full of euphoria, and here Bradley comes and completely turns the table. None of the characters who have a good chance of actually beating him (Roy, Hohenheim) are anywhere near, so instead characters as Greed and the people from Xing are going to have to keep this guy at bay. This episode already started with the first casualty on the good guys. In any case I love how even in the finale, the creators try to make everyone important.

The promised day was actually a very interesting way to bring everyone together at the same place: everyone currently is in central city, trying to prevent it from occurring. It’s a lot more impressive than what the first season pulled, as it tried to pull some really weird plot-holes, just to keep the characters inside the story. Thankfully, this season really knows that there are some characters who have no business being here, like Rose, and the library girl whose name I forgot. I’m also very glad that the creators also didn’t try to shoehorn Winry in somewhere. She really served her purpose well, but it’d be just stupid for her to suddenly appear int he middle of Central City, just for some extra drama for Ed. Instead, the climax really takes place between a lot of different parties that all do have their business and reasons for being there.
Rating: ** (Excellent)