Okay, so now that this series has also delved into baseball for all-female teams, I just can’t help but hijack a part of this post for some comparisons on that other baseball show that’s airing this season: Taishou Yakyuu Musume, because this episode pretty blew all of its focus on baseball away.
In a way, Taishou Yakyuu Musume and Cross Game are quite similar: both are slice of life series at heart, with a bunch of characters who just happen to play baseball. TYM plays in the 1920s, while Cross Game takes place in what I guess are the 1980s (due to the lack of PCs anywhere…), and both are feminist in their own ways, without shoving “women rock” down the viewer’s throats.
TYM has one advantage over Cross Game: none of the characters are naturally born talents, destined to be among the nation’s best baseball players. Instead, what keeps the team together is the passion of the central characters to make the team they compiled together, and show that girls can just as easily do sports that were meant for guys.
But yeah, Cross Game pretty much owns it in every single way in terms of development. I’m still not sure how the girls of TYM became this good at baseball within only one year of training, considering how they started with absolutely nothing. Cross Game meanwhile first establishes its characters as people with extraordinary talents and then develops them utterly flawlessly.
This episode really had the best baseball match of the series for me so far: we know that Aoba is extraordinary talented, and she worked hard to hone her talents all through her childhood. And yet this episode showed that she’s not alone, and even though she’s able to bring an entire team together and significantly improve its performance, this episode really showed that there are many other different kinds of talented players out there.
I remember how Major also tried to do this, but instead of creating formidable foes, it instead came with a bunch of shounen-esque villains: a bunch of one-trick ponies who only had one thing they were good at and that’s it. And in that way, Taishou Yakyuu Musume does shine: even though it has lots of characters, it does care for its characterization and uses its limited time to move its characters away from their stereotypes, instead of the overblown melodrama that turned me off at Major, where I really didn’t like the overly cheesy drama.
Anyway, long story short: this episode rocked. TYM pales in comparison, but still is pretty nice slice of life.
Rating: ** (Excellent)]]>
My Dilemma with Gintama
I have a question for the people who have been keeping up with the latest episodes of Gintama. As some of you may know, I’ve been keeping up with Rumbel’s subs for the series. Now that Horriblesubs have released the final missing episodes between Rumbel’s and the start of Crunchyroll’s, I decided to slowly marathon up to the latest episodes. Right now, I have just finished episode 124 and am seriously considering to drop the series altogether.
My question to you is: is Gintama really going to improve?
Because seriously, my patience at this point has entirely run out. I have heard that around episode 140, this series gets serious again with a bunch of good episodes around Kagura’s past, but is that really going to be worth it if the creators are going to delve into boring fillers again? Is it really going to be worth it, watching a dozen episodes, just to get to one good one?
Ever since the new director took over at episode 101 for me, this series has lost all of its charms, but I had faith in the series, hoping that it might pick itself back up. However, then I reached episode 120, which was the funniest episode ever since this guy took over. So what was the best joke in that episode? A rip-off of one of the best jokes of the first director. It was at this point that I realized that it was getting pointless to watch this series.
I truly rate the first 100 episodes among the top comedies I have ever seen. Sure, it also did have its share of weak episodes, but those were vastly outnumbered by the number of awesome and really well written episodes. The new director however just failed to live up to it in every single way. The penis jokes for example have become way too obvious, and that’s just the tip of the ice-berg.
Another pet peeves of the new director is that he tries to stuff in as much references to other shounen series as possible. I’m always in for a good parody, but that’s the problem: instead of parodying, the new director is simply listing a bunch of references without making fun of them. After a while this becomes really, really boring.
Then there’s also the matter of the increase of lengthy arcs. In the first 100 episodes, the only arcs that took up more than 2 episodes were the ones that mattered: the ones that developed the characters and made optimal use of their length. Right now the long arcs are just dragging on beyond belief, often wasting entire episodes with things that can be solved within only 10 minutes. The biggest example of this are episodes 121, 122 and 123: what the heck was the point in dragging this on for three episodes? The entire story would have fit into just a half of an episode, and instead it became an utterly predictable bore-fest that just would not end.
A more fundamental problem however is that the quality of the script-writing has gone down a lot. The first 100 episodes were really good at tugging at my heart-strings, not through its characters, but because of its subtle writing that knew exactly what to say. Especially the long monologues of the characters were deep, meaningful and really got the best out of the characters in the serious moments. That’s completely gone now as well. The dialogue has become uninspired, cheap, and way too much focused on over the top violence in an attempt to make up.
I’m really beginning to feel that I’m just watching the show for the heck of it, which is a shame because there are many better shows at the moment that I’d rather spend my attention at. In the end, there really seems to be a curse on shounen series that go beyond the 100 episode mark: Dragonball Z would have been fine if it just ended after 26 episodes; it would have been a nice action series that way. Naruto was pretty much a good series until the start of the final Chuunin Examinations, after which it dragged its story on and on beyond belief. Bleach was also a very entertaining shounen series for its first 30 episodes… until it descended into a bunch of boring and predictable fights around the Ichigo the Marty Stu. Gintama lasted longer than the others, but in the end, my enthusiasm for the first 100 episodes is just completely gone at this point.
So yeah, if I do end up dropping it (which is pretty likely at this point), what do you want me to do? Write a review about just the first 100 episodes, or is that review not really necessary?]]>
Pandora Hearts – 22
Well, since the manga is going on way beyond the end of this series, which is going to come in three more episodes, I’m not expecting too much from this series’ finale. Sure, the final episode may end up to become awesome, but the story isn’t going to come together like with most endings, and it’s probably going to keep me hungry for more until that second season gets announced. If it ever gets.
Nevertheless though, this show just keeps surprising me. Some of the flashback parts in this episode were utterly demented, not to mention that just about the entire episode was dedicated to Break’s past. We also learn about how Alice and the Will of the Abyss used to be twins, somehow strangely connected through each other in the Abyss. When Alice got killed, I assume that the Will of the Abyss remained in the deepest parts of the abyss, while Alice herself was just cast into the regular Abyss, where Oz ran into her.
Thinking back though, this series did miss out on being a classic. Now that this series has nearly ended, I’m beginning to understand why: compared to the other series this season, the cast of Pandora Hearts didn’t grow on me as much. This series has always excelled at two points: the complex storyline and back-story behind everything, and the demented style of storytelling that just keeps the surprises going. But it also excelled at these points incredibly well.
In the end, Oz ended up as a bit of a flawed character: he works when the focus isn’t on him, but when this show focuses on him it starts focusing a bit too much on his cheesy self-retrospection. As for the rest of the characters: the thing that made them awesome was this series’ style of storytelling: the people from Xebec did a great thing of translating the style from the manga to the anime, and give it as much impact as possible. But in the end, the cast members on their own just aren’t as interesting as the cast of Guin Saga, Phantom, Shangri-la, Full Metal Alchemist, Cross Game, the New Mazinger and some other shows.
Nevertheless, where as the spring season of 2008 brought some truly inspiring science fiction premises and the autumn of 2008 brought lots of new things to the table for the horror-series, the spring of 2009 excelled at the fantasy-premises. The new Full Metal Alchemist, Guin Saga, Pandora Hearts and Shangri-La (which walks a bit in between fantasy and science fiction) and if you include the winter-season Kemono no Souja Erin all came with great and inventive premises that really contributed to the fantasy genre.
Rating: ** (Excellent)]]>
Phantom – 23
Okay, the calm before the storm episode. Most of this episode was very quiet, and yet at the same time a lot of things happened, were built up and had me glued to the screen.
With the biggest event being Lizzie’s death. At this point, it wasn’t meant to be a shocking plot twist, but rather to symbolize how much has gone wrong with Drei. Throughout the series, she has always been the most solid and stable character: she had no hidden agenda, and instead she worked with a mindset with a healthy balance between friends and money. She was the one who watched Cal train in her Drei-form, and in this episode you can really see that now that she has found out what drove Cal to be an assassin, she really regrets to see what she turned into.
In this episode, the inevitable indeed happened that Drei was forced to shoot Lizzie. She really doesn’t care at all about her job, as long as she gets to kill Reiji, and in this episode we see her kidnap Mio, to prevent him from running away. In the end though, Helen takes the bait. The next episode is going to be awesome, I can feel it. But yeah, this episode still rocked. At this point, the characters can be drinking tea and I’m still going to love them.
Also, how large is this soundtrack anyway? This episode introduced yet two new tracks. I’m growing into more and more of a fan of Hikaru Nanase. At first I believed her to be some sort of one trick pony, with Noein’s soundtrack and all. But after watching this show, and finishing Zone of the Enders, I really have to take that back: Hikaru Nanase really is an amazing composer, but she does need a great show to draw out her full potential.
Rating: ** (Excellent)]]>
Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 – 09
Oh my god. I’m just… at a loss for words after this episode. This episode was just beyond sad. I’ve been a huge fan of Noitamina for years now, and I have watched every single of its shows aside from Honey and Clover. But damn, this series has a good chance to be the best thing that Noitamina ever brought forth…
Now that we’ve finally arrived at the last part of the story, it’s time for all of the build-up to pay off. IE: it’s time for this series to get back to the amazing quality of the first five episodes. Mari gets home this time, and starts looking for her mother and daughter. At first sight, they appear dead, but eventually they turn out to have survived in one of the most heart-wrenching reunions. Usually when anime try to play around with “is he dead or not”, this feels rather cheap, but within the context of this series it becomes downright scary. With so many people dead, and at the same time so many survivors left not knowing what happened. There’s no way of telling who might have survived or not. Heck, are we even sure that Mirai’s parents survived?
Speaking of which: OMG at the cliff-hanger at the end. Mirai and Yuuki have actually decided to travel to their homes ALONE!? Taken into account what happened to Yuuki in the previous episode… how the heck are the creators going to end this?! Probably the most evil thing of this episode was that even though Yuuki is most likely SPOILER just about everything kept Red Herringing around him.
I now see why I was so disappointed with episode 6 and 7: with such an amazing start, I expected the rest of the series to be also this consistent in quality, while in fact they were meant as a calm before the storm: they were meant to build up, and take it easy a bit for the finale. I’ve indeed been incredibly stupid thinking that this series was going to jump the shark in its second half. This episode was utterly amazing, and the final two episodes… wow… just wow.
Rating: **** (Fantastic)]]>
Basquash! – 22
Okay, I admit. This episode was pretty much fun to watch. The plot still is one big failure and mish-mash of clichés, but I don’t think anyone cares at this point about whether or not Dan is going to succeed in saving the world.
For an episode with such a cheesy premise, I really enjoyed this episode much more than I thought I would. In any other anime, an episode in which the male lead finds out that his love interest has had her mind wiped, and manages to get her memory back through the power of love, it would have been an incredibly cliché bore-fest. But with Basquash, in the end I couldn’t really expect anything else. The same goes for the climax of this episode in which the creators try to be smart and seemingly “kill off” Dan. Sorry Kawamori, but after Macross Frontier I’m not buying that anymore.
And granted, it seemed to have been the entire plan of the bad guys to have Dan come, play Basquash with Rouge and then trigger the events for the apocalypse, or whatever is similar to that, so I guess that this show is excused at this point. In any case, this episode finally had another fun basketball match again, and in combination with the concert, it delivered for me. It’s also good to see this series briefly return to its themes on fandom, which is something I remember praising this series for before it jumped the shark and somehow completely abandoned these themes.
Just one thing: something really weird is going to happen for me to blog Kawamori’s next series…
Rating: * (Good)]]>
Urban Legend Story Hikiko Review – 65/100
Okay, so apparently Urban Legend Story Hikiko was an OVA, released about a year ago. It’s a fully CG-Rendered movie done by some guy who also seems to have worked on Catblue Dynamite. Since I’m always in for a bit of good horror, especially since the past spring and summer season didn’t have any of it, I decided to give it a shot. So, did this movie do its job and give me a good scare?
Well, it did give me a good laugh…
This OVA is THE example of why 3D-rendered movies have a looong way to go at this point. While in theory, it seems like a logical thing to do: you can get smoother animation, there is more detail, you can get a more dynamic background and a more realistic set of character-designs than the drawings of traditional anime. It sounds all nice in theory… but this movie just looked so incredibly fake.
It’s a shame, though: this OVA does have a very neat story: there’s plenty of build-up, a deep main character, a nice set of plot twists. In traditional 2D animation, it would have been a pretty good horror OVA. The big problem however is that the characters’ expressions and motions look incredibly unrealistic. So unrealistic that they’re nearly impossible to take seriously. This may be because I’ve been too much used to anime, but even though there’s plenty of animation in this, but all the animation feels jerky, and especially the facial expressions of the characters look nowhere near accurate and more like a bunch of puppets.
There’s a saying in art that goes as follows: “if you can’t make it, fake it”, and 2D anime has become very good at this. It knows that its artwork is very detailed for animation standards, and that there’s no way to continuously animate everything in drawings, and so over the years they’ve perfected the art in simulating movement even though there isn’t any. As long as it doesn’t stand out as “fake” or “too much” in any way, these cinematic effects really work.
3D animation has yet to discover these techniques, and instead just try to… animate. The thing is, that unless you’ve got the budget of a small country or the imagination of Hayao Miyazaki, there is no way to perfectly emulate every subtle nuance in human movement, and this movie especially fails at it. The few attempts it makes to make up for the lack of movement are some of the most pathetic cinematic techniques all around, like a couple of cheap but loud sound effects during the intense part, and lots of shaking the camera around while looking at the characters with extremely scared faces.
The thing that 3D animation is going to have to learn is the art of cutting corners. American 2D-animation does this by extremely simplified drawings, Japanese animation does this by trying to limit the number of frames that need to be animated. At this moment, there’s nothing wrong with the artwork: show any still frame in this movie, and it looks gorgeous. Combine them… and they don’t.
| Storytelling: | 9/10 |
| Characters: | 8/10 |
| Production-Values: | 2/10 |
| Setting: | 7/10 |
Umineko no Naku Koro ni – 10
According to tealovertoma, this episode was supposed to be mediocre, but I can’t see why. It yet again was a standard episode for Umineko, but the mystery yet again deepened, it gets harder and harder to explain everything with simple logic, which is exactly what the witch wants, and the situation gets more hopeless with every single episode. Sure, this show isn’t as good as Higurashi at this point, but what exactly is turning this series into a disappointment?
I mean, seriously: what the heck is going on here?! At a certain point in this episode, the characters split up: Maria, Battler and Rosa go off in one group. Gouda, Sharon, Genji and George go off to the other room. At one point, Genji stays behind because he has to keep alert for any requests of his master. After that, Gouda, Sharon and George get attacked by the supposed “Beatrice”. Rosa, my prime suspect behind the murders, could not have done this, because she was with Battler all this time. Gouda (who I also suspected as the culprit) at the same time could have done it, but he got killed off at the end of this episode. It could be a big illusion, though. At the same time, we have Genji, whose whereabouts are unknown. Yet at the same time, he couldn’t have been the killer because he died in the first arc. Either that, or that was an illusion as well.
But then again, there’s a good chance that the murderer is some sort of a magician. He could have pulled a fake body in any of the occurrences. What about Kinzou? All we saw was his dead body, but he at the moment is the only one who has the freedom to move through the entire house without being detected. He’s the one with the master key, right?
It’s also interesting how the Battler in this universe is the complete opposite. While I called Natsuhi unstable at one point, she was like a sweet little kitten compared to Rosa. Because of this, I think that he gave in to the witch in this case. Or that could have been yet another illusion by Beatrice to get him to break down. I have no idea what’s real anymore: we know that the red texts are true, but is there any other part that we can really trust?
I’m really starting to see the appeal of the Umineko series: it really builds further upon the first arc of Higurashi: mad, twisted, and nothing is really what it looks as things start looking more and more impossible to have happened without any sort of magic. Sure, this series isn’t anything amazing as of yet, but hey: we’ve still got tons of episodes left. Right now this series is quite likely building up.
Rating: ** (Excellent)]]>
Aoi Hana – 10
Oh, what a powerful episode this was. It was entirely quiet: no overblown or forced drama, nor an overemphasis on angst whatsoever. I believe that this episode was the most subtle of the entire series, and with Aoi Hana, that has to say something.
The first half showed the wedding between Yasuko’s sister and teacher: this sealed the deal, and her teacher has now officially become impossible to reach. It really was a time in which Yasuko was finally able to close off a big part of her teenaged life. After that, we see her telling a bit about how she originally came to love her teacher. We also see how she cut her long hair short, as a means of symbolism. At the same time we see her befriend Kyouko, who also cut her hair short in response. With this, I’m beginning to see the relationship between Yasuko and Kyouko: Yasuko really does like Kyouko as a friend, but has gotten annoyed with Kyouko’s obsession over her.
But the really good part of this episode happened in the second half, in which Fumi (who was absent at the wedding) invites Akira over, and Akira’s brother and Yasuko end up tagging along. What follows is a very awkward scene, in which Fumi tries to distance herself as far away from Yasuko as possible by using Akira, and Akira’s brother keeping Yasuko a bit busy by telling her about how Akira used to be in the past. I especially loved the last part in which Yasuko tries to apologize to Fumi, and then getting rejected. You can see that she really broke up with Fumi in a tantrum. She ruined things between the two of them herself, because she should have known that Fumi is a really emotional person who takes what people say to her very seriously, especially since she was heart-broken once before.
In a way, Fumi has grown out of this as a stronger person, but at the same time it’s also sad to see that she’s completely shielding herself away right now, afraid to be hurt for a third time.
So, with one episode left, I really wonder how the creators are planning to end this series. I really hope for a “life goes on”-ending: an ending that’s just going to show a final part of the characters, and what’s going to happen to them after that is just going to be left to the viewer’s imagination. Especially since it’s very unlikely to see a second season of this, it would be the perfect ending for such a small little series.
Just one thing: PLEASE don’t end the series with Fumi and Akira falling in love with each other. This series has done SO WELL in avoiding just about every romance cliché in the book, it would be such an incredible shame to ruin it at the last possible minute!
Rating: ** (Excellent)]]>
Shangri-La – 22
Haha, how awesome! Just when I thought that this show had already passed its best point, it just keeps the surprises coming. Seriously, with this series I was expecting the final episodes to be all over the place, like what it did in the middle part of the story, which had so many different plot twists about so many different characters.
Instead, the past few episodes have been the most solid and focused episodes of the entire series. Because of that, it lost the erratic pacing that I liked so much in the rest of the series. Usually when a series pulls this, it gets rather boring, but this episode really was surprisingly good. In fact, it was awesome, and well for the fact that this series has much more than just that pacing: it still has its great sense of characters, plot twists, visuals, music, et cetera. And the slow pacing leading up to the ending actually improved on them: we now can really focus on the central themes of the series. And hey, this series has completely shifted its style of storytelling before, so for once it doesn’t feel like the creators lack inspiration for the finale.
I really liked the reason why Sayoko was freed by one of Ryoko’s henchmen: he discovered that Sayoko was his older sister he had never known, so he decided to be a good brother for once and let her go. While it seems like a rather flimsy reason at first, the more I think about it the more it fits within this series: it ties in very much with this series’ themes of family bonds: families being torn apart, growing away from each other. You see it everywhere in this series: Sayoko lost her daughter, Takehito having lost his little sister, Kuniko taking her grandmother for granted and getting into a fight with her, Karin and the distance from her parents, and there is of course also my theory of Ryouko, being the mother of Kuniko, Mikuni and Kunihito, which is getting more and more likely, which I’ll get into below.
Most of this episode was spent on Mikuni, trying to decide whether it was worth destroying the world for the sake of revenge. The thing is however, that she’s just a little kid: very easily influenced by the scary Ryouko. Ryouko on the meantime really proved to be an excellent villain here, if you can accept that she’s so screwed in her mind that she’s willing to destroy the world, and it was her who hacked into Medusa earlier.
So in the end she did turn into another villain who’s planning to destroy the world, but in my opinion she stands much higher above the usual villains of this type. In a villain, I’m not looking for someone who necessarily has to be morally ambiguous, like these misunderstood good guys. Those people also have their sets of problems. What I’m looking for in a villain is a personality: a well fleshed out character who isn’t a cheap excuse for a bit of conflicts. Well backed-up reasons are a plus, but not necessarily required: I mean, how many evil overlords in the real world are screwed in the head? The reason why I dislike most villains in anime is because they’re too often just paper bags who are there for the sake of having a villain.
And yeah, I’m getting more and more convinced that Ryouko is the mother of Mikuni, Kuniko and Kunihito. The final twist this episode really was an awesome one: I love it when these character who infiltrate the enemy tell nobody of what they’re doing, not even the viewers themselves. I already found that it was strange that he’d suddenly get so close to Kuniko, I already found it weird for the creators to suddenly start establishing a strange romance between him and Kuniko. Now everything makes sense!
And really, Ryouko looked so much like an angry mother who’s urging her child along when she took Mikuni along with her. She really had that feeling of parental authority when she dealt with her. And besides that, I can’t think of any reason why she would want to obey the successor of Atlas, other than some sort of strange and deranged case of family bonds, in a series which is full of broken up and dysfunctional families.
Out of all the shows that are going to end in the coming month, the ones that are promising some outstanding endings to look out for for me are the new Mazinger, Shangri-La, Tokyo Magnitude and Phantom. These are the shows which were excellently planned across their total airtime, and are promising to close off with a finale in which everything comes together. There are only a few shows of this caliber every season, and I’m glad to see that this season again has a fine selection of them.
Rating: *** (Awesome)]]>