Armed Librarians – The Book of Bantorra – 17

by psgels, posted in Armed Librarians - The Book of Bantorra



Haha, look who’s back! It’s taken 12 episodes, but finally our little Volken has returned. And he surely brought a whole lot of intrigue to the story.

it’s series like this who are sneaky: they put a lot of hidden meanings into their first episode, stuffing tons of plot twists in it that only make sense a complete season afterwards. I love series like that that play around with their continuity. In this episode, we learn that Hamy does have one fear: Vend Ruga.

The thing is, however: this episode showed the message that Volken ran into again: “Vend Ruga is Alive. He is living inside Olivia Litlet”. Based on that message, Hamyuts destroyed that ship, and made Volken hellbent on stopping her. Olivia Litlet however turns out to be the same person that Winkeny chose to have her memories erased and play the part as Mokkania’s mother. So it wasn’t just coincidence, but rather the church’s way of playing with Hamy. And it’s true: Hamy did not know who Olivia Litlet was, so basically she let Vend Ruga escape many different times.

and again, it just shows how complex the plans of the Church are: they knew Hamy’s weaknesses very well: first it was thunderstorms, now it also turns out that they knew about the person she hated. They then took Volken, who was a man of justice, and got him to rebel against her. In the meantime, they hid Vend Ruga, for whatever reason, inside a body who was then taken over by yet another body (talk about busy) to provide the perfect cover for her. On top of that, Yucklyuck is an artifact which can harness the powers of multiple people. My guess is that the Church is ultimately trying to harness Vend Ruga’s super awesome mega powers, whatever they may be, in order to get in Hamy’s way, whatever that also may be. I believe that that tree plays a major part in it.

Now, what was up with this episode? Did Volken act in the way that the Church hoped he would? I mean, at this point we can be sure that Hamy knows about Olivia Litlet: she’s got her sensory threads for that and I’m pretty sure that she was spying on him. At this point, I have no idea: on one hand we have Hamy the masochist, on the other we have Hamy who for the first time actually does something out of desperation. I know that she likes Volken, but at the same time it’s also a huge mystery of what that Vend Ruga means to her.

Oh, and this episode also showed a new OP and ED. I approve of shows swapping their OPs and EDs, even to worse ones: it signifies change and evolution. Both OP and ED are a bit of a step down, though.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Durarara – 03

by psgels, posted in Durarara



Aside from the usual, like series with excellent characters or storytelling, I’m also a very big fan of series that can make their setting come alive. This isn’t just constantly animating the people in the background, but it also lies in the way that the story is told, and making clear that the world doesn’t just revolve around a bunch of main characters. Series that manage to do this are quite rare, but I often find myself enjoying them a lot. I actually think that it’s the area at which anime in general has improved the most at throughout the past five years, alongside CG integration of course.

And Durarara has been really good at that throughout the past three episodes. I love that while Mikado is the “lead character” of this series, every episode is told through the perspective of a different character, in a different style. In this episode, Simon, the Russian guy, suddenly started acting as the narrator. Also, I can be wrong in this, but was his voice also one of the people behind the chatting guys? That chat-room by the way is also a very nice idea: it really supports how this series shows many different sides of the bustling city life of Ikebukuro.

In any case, there are still many question-marks about the magic powers in this series. In Baccano, it was easy: some people were immortal, others weren’t. It’s a bit more complicated here, however, since there seem to be multiple kinds of powers: the headless biker (or Celty Sturloson) is one of those examples, the ability to… cut things from a distance (not sure exactly how he does it) from Izaya is completely different, and the super strength from Simon and Shizuo are different as well. Celty is also very much a mystery: in the last episode she worked for Izaya, but now we see her… “talk” to Shizuo, even though he hates Izaya to the point of wanting to kill him. My guess would be that they were once old friends until that friendship between Shizuo and Izaya just exploded (and frankly, with the personalities of those two I wouldn’t be surprised).
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Ookami Kakushi – 03

by psgels, posted in Ookami Kakushi



Well, so the animation was another step down, but the plot is progressing pretty nicely, and at the same time the characters also take their time to get fleshed out. While this episode started out as a bit of a pointless one, the second half was… disturbing to say the least. Though now that most of the characters except for one are introduced, we can start to develop this story a bit.

The set-up bears quite a few resemblances to Higurashi, actually. There’s something going on in the village that effects probably all of the original residents. There’s probably some sort of beast of wolf instinct that’s taking control over them, and the oranges are the only cure for it, it seems. My guess is that they’re either Jouga wolves in disguise, or it’s similar to the Hinamizawa disease of Higurashi.

And yeah, the near-rape scene. I definitely didn’t see that coming, especially this early. Could the reason be the same as why Hiro’s classmates are so attracted to him? Small villages usually are tight-knit communities who don’t like outsiders, but this obsessive fixation over Hiro may seem like they’re looking to either make him one of them, or waiting for the right time to do something horrible to them. I actually think that these fishermen we saw in this episode weren’t part of this plot, but they did know about it.
Rating: * (Good)

Kobato – 14

by psgels, posted in Kobato



So this episode showed that Kobato isn’t planning to abandon its episodic stories in its second half. While you have a share of episodic series that start with a plot at this point, it seems that Kobato is going to continue with its current formula. Thankfully though, the episodic stories have gotten a lot better from what they were at the beginning of the story.

Again, it’s just questionable that Kobato and Fujimoto just “happen” to run into people with problems over and over, but the boy in this episode had a pretty charming story to tell. It didn’t try to be overly dramatic, and instead kept with a simple story of a boy running away from home because he can’t adjust to his new house. It was well built up and the characterization for the boy was pretty good.

I also believe that this is the episode in which Fujimoto turns in one of the genuine good guys, and crawls out of his shell. At this point, he’s got nothing to hide from Kobato anymore, so he’s probably going to lighten up over the next few episodes. At this point, it’s enjoyable enough to see Kobato and Fujimoto doing stuff together, no matter how trivial it may seem (like in this episode, delivering sweet potatoes). That’s actually a pretty good sign.
Rating: * (Good)

Some Quick Reviews: Bungaku Shoujo, Two Walnuts and Kowarekake no Orgol

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews

This is a bit of an experiment. All these three titles are pretty short and I don’t have much to say about them individually, but I might as well make a combined entry that talks a bit about all of them.

Bungaku Shoujo

This one’s a strange 15-minute special about a girl who loves books so much that she eats them. Seriously, she imagines the stories she reads very vividly and compares them to food, only to eat the paper the stories are written on literally. While I liked some of the food analogies, I overall fail to see the point of this release. To me it just seems like a really long commercial for the manga, light novel or whatever this story is based on. There is potential if it can get itself a proper TV-series: if they can make this into a sort-of story about stories, and put more emphasis on the latter than the former unlike what was done here, it might become interesting enough to warrant a watch. But even then it’s going to have to really put work in making its characters interesting. This OVA though… I can only imagine recommending it to someone who already is interested in the source material to have a quick look on what it is about.
Rating: 70/100

The Two Walnuts

This has to be one of the lazier premises of a World War II movie I’ve seen. Instead of just taking a person who actually lived through the hellish period, and expanding upon his or her life, the creators just had to take a kid who lives in 2007 and magically transport her back to a few days before the bombing of Tokyo. The rest of the antics are predictable: while the creators did well in showing the hardships of those times (especially the cruelty to animals is a major theme) it’s just all too easy for the lead character. At the end the creators try to create sympathy by going Tomino, but the melodramatic way in which these deaths are acted out is just a mockery of the real Tokyo Bombings. Stay away from this one, if you want WW2-movies: instead go with those from the eighties and nineties.
Rating: 65/100

Kowarekake no Orgol
Again, this is just a random commercial for whatever manga or visual novel it’s based on. The problem is that it was unbelievably boring, and what impressed me the most was how it kept dodging any sort of explanation of what’s going on. Seriously, every time that it’s about to explain something, it quickly cuts to some sort of boring slice of life scene. That doesn’t really work in a one-shot OVA. At this point we have some sort of story about a guy who finds a broken down android, who dies and wakes up again a couple of times, but how and why are never explained. And on top of that, the characters themselves are boring and cliched, especially their back-stories (or whatever this episode dared to show of them, anyways). It’s obviously a slice of life OVA, so if you like that then be my guest and ignore this mini-review, but for me I only find slice of life around characters I don’t care about boring.
Rating: 60/100

King of Bandits Jing – In Seventh Heaven OVA Review – 85/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews



Okay, so usually I don’t write reviews for OVAs that are based on a series, because often they’re just too similar to the series they’re based on, or just random side-stories that aren’t meant to be judged as standalone products. There are exceptions of course, when an OVA goes into completely its own direction, and improves significantly on the series it’s based on, I do want to promote it a bit and say a few things about it.

And an excellent example of this is King of Bandits Jing’s OVA. The TV-series itself was all over the place; some episodes were awesome, though most of them were very simplistic and unimpressive. Now here the OVA comes, and it takes the best parts of the series, and just goes all out into an awesome mindscrew.

The visual direction really is amazing. It takes place in a semi-dreamworld, and just about every shot is creative, and beautifully drawn. There’s so much creativity put into just three episodes. If you finished the TV-series and liked its weird stuff, then you owe it to yourself to take a look at it, because it’s entertainment at its finest.

The three episodes are also completely different from each other. The first is chock-full of visual comedy and uses its creativity and unique direction to create a very entertaining adventure through a dreamlike world. The second episode is more serious, and actually tells about Jing’s past. While he doesn’t exactly gain much depth, it’s still very interesting to watch. The third episode in its turn is a character-study of the major villain, which was very interesting and well scripted.

Thanks to Jing’s tongue-in-cheek personality this OVA has a unique feel, but it’s not to the point where the style gets in the way of what’s important. The characters’ antics and the visuals are just as important and the animation is actually really good. Add to that that one of the best character-designers out there has worked on this, and you’ve got something consistently entertaining.

Storytelling: 9/10 – Tongue-in-cheek execution with tons and tons of creativity.
Characters: 8/10 – Great emphasis on character background despite the weirdness.
Production-Values: 9/10 – Absolutely stunning designs.
Setting: 8/10 – Tons of nice and neat ideas, though the concept of the series remains questionable.

Sora no Oto – 03

by psgels, posted in Sora no Oto



I finally have the name of the mysterious disease you see pop up in so many different anime: it’s malaria. THANK YOU, Sora no Oto, for finally giving it a concrete name! Seriously, I’ve been puzzled by ages at how weird the Japanese colds are: You keep seeing shows that talk about “cold” and “fever”, but it turns out that those were just too lazy to do any research. I think only Tokyo magnitude did the same. Apart from that I don’t think I can recall any other series that gave these “fevers” a descriptive name. I’ll give this show a number of inaccuracies though, like Kanata recovering very fast, and Rio seemed to think that only children could catch it, which I doubt is really true. But then again, I don’t see her for someone with lots of medical knowledge.

In any case, this was a good episode for Rio and Kanata: both of them were fleshed out pretty nicely in this episode, and we also got to know their background. Very nice to see that this series is making use of its episodes. There’s one thing I didn’t like, though: Kanata became fascinated with music when she saw a blond girl play the trumpet. It’s an event that shaped her entire life. Now coincidentally, Rio also learned to play the trumpet from a certain blond woman. I mean, coincidences are one thing, if they make the story flow better… but what’s the point of it here? There’s no reason whatsoever for Kanata and Rio’s past to be linked somehow…

What I’m asking for now is the same kind of depth for Kureha, Noel and Phylicia, and an end where all of this development comes together. Characters with depth are nice, but you also have to use them correctly.
Rating: * (Good)

Armored Trooper Votoms – The Brilliant Heretic Review – 77,5/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews



The Brilliant Heretic OVA was made in 1994. It never actually got subbed, but a raw version is available, so I decided to check out its content. It’s set about 30 years after the end of the television series and so it’s the only OVA so far to be a sequel to the series, rather than a prequel. As a series from the Votoms Franchise, it just isn’t as refined as Ryousuke Takahashi’s other works, however it’s still an interesting watch.

One thing that will be hard to swallow in this OVA is that the main focus doesn’t fall on any of the lead characters. Instead, we have Chirico doing what he does best (fighting), Vanilla providing support, Gotho has degraded in some sort of a mad old man, and Fyana really has gotten the short end of the straw because she’s nothing more than a damsel in distress throughout the entire OVA. A role that she avoided so well in the TV-series! The rest of the cast doesn’t appear at all, and instead the depth in this series comes from the setting, and in particular one new female character.

This new character is actually pretty interesting, in the way that she fits in the political system of the setting, but she’s not perfect. She’s quite a bit cliched and her *sigh* romantic feelings fail to make any impact. The relationship with her father is very interesting, though. I think my favourite part were the ones that focused on the politics: at first sight they’re simple but they’re actually quite interesting.

The animation is very inconsistent: it ranges from very stiff to really good, though most of the animation edges to the former. There are a number of scenes that have the same kind really smooth animation that Ryousuke Takahashi would later perfect in Gasaraki.

However, because of one final twist this really is a must-watch for any Votoms Fan. I’m not going to spoil exactly what’s going to happen, but while this series doesn’t live up to Ryousuke Takahashi’s usual high standard, and the new characters while they have their times of depth also have their times of shallowness, it really doesn’t deserve that it’s not gotten subbed.

Storytelling: 8/10 – A bit disjointed, but interesting politics, the same dark atmosphere as Votoms.
Characters: 7/10 – A bit of a mixed bag.
Production-Values: 7/10 – Again: mixed bag.
Setting: 9/10 – Interesting setting that tries out many new and different things.

Hanamaru Youchien – 02

by psgels, posted in Hanamaru Youchien



Oh, screw it. I know I said that I was going to blog Nodame Cantabile’s Finale, but I really fail to see why that would be interesting. I know myself by now. I’m going to spend every episode complaining at how it doesn’t live up to the spectacular first season, and continue to talk down to a series that would otherwise have been at least a bit of a decent romantic comedy. In the end, the first episode of the new season showed enough to me, in the way that it overplayed Nodame’s antics too much. To me, it feels like this season’s Noitamina is wasted.

So yeah. I can try to sugarcoat it, but why bother. At this point, I’ve covered eighteen seasons of anime at this blog, and I consider this one to be the worst out of all of them. I very often disagree with those “worst season ever”-comments, and with a good reason: usually there are all sorts of underrated gems that are being ignored. But this season… I just can’t make any cheese out of it. Not only is the season itself incredibly small, there also are so few series that carried over from previous seasons.

At this point, there are only five series that I’d consider truly excellent: Armed Librarians, Durarara, Cross Game, Full Metal Alchemist and Marie & Gali. Depending on how they turn out, I can only see Sora no Oto if its uses its characters right and Ookami Kakushi if it gets its pacing right joining this list. That’s a definitive low in all of the eighteen seasons I’ve covered so far. So yeah, with that I’m stuck with really old series (Seikai no Monshou), guilty pleasures (Cobra), shows that are never meant for greatness but have one or two nice things (Kobato and Letter Bee), shows and OVas that only air once a month (Katanagatari and there are a number of OVAs that air in a few months that I want to cover) and… this.

Again, I’m not expecting the next GA or Ooedo Rocket here. All I want from this series is entertainment until this season is over, and at that area it pretty much delivers. It’s obvious problem is that the moeblobs here don’t really feel like actual kids, especially Anzu and Hiiragi are way overdone, and that story that the headmistress told, about how all kids would magically adapt the personality of their teacher was just stupid. Though Tsuchida himself and the other teachers are pretty nice to watch, and the chemistry between the characters is also pretty nice.

What I also want from this show is creativity. At this point, I don’t really care whether or not the characters in this series are stereotypes. I’m happy enough about the lack of teenagers (just about the only thing at which this season DOESN’T disappoint: the teenagers for once aren’t dominating the different series). What I want from this show is creative situations that the characters were put in. And the ED was actually pretty much what I meant. I never saw it coming that the creators would pull a space opera parody with these kinds of characters.

I’m not sure whether I’m going to have enough to say about every single episode, but ah well. For now, who cares?
Rating: (Enjoyable)

Cross Game – 41

by psgels, posted in Cross Game



This episode was full of just about everything that makes Cross Game awesome. These few episodes right before the tournament starts are pure gold, because the creators are subtly trying to get the final few developments in before the matches start for real.

Speaking of which… how about the manga? Has it actually ended already, or does it continue? I mean, the characters are about to hit the final tournament of their high school careers. I can’t imagine this series continuing afterwards.

In any case, this episode was full of these small and subtle jokes as well: right after a point when a character is doing something seemingly cliched, there always turns out to be some ulterior motive. I found it strangely assertive of Aoba to just offer her ladder to Kou when he needed it it. And indeed it turns out that her father once borrowed it from Kou’s father and forgot to return it. Or when Azuma reacted emotionless when Kou brought up his birthday… only for it to turn out that Kou got the date wrong. Or take Aoba’s very subtle birthday present: a piece of cake, right after Kou just gobbled up a cake made by Akane.

Speaking of which, Kou’s eighteen now! He’s an actual adult right now, and so would Wakaba have been if she were alive at this point. That means like, what? Around eight years have passed since the start of the series? I personally love those kinds of series that show multiple flash-forwards, and don’t just stick with one or two versions of the same character.

In this episode I also realized that Kou and Aoba’s father can relate to each other very much: both lost the one they were in love with, and thought to spend the rest of their lives with. That became especially apparent as both of them stood near the graves of Wakaba and her mother.
Rating: ** (Excellent)