Spiral is a battle of wits. It’s set up in such a way that the lead character (Narimi Ayumu), who is a highly gifted teenager, has to face a number of opponents who rather than simply shooting him to death attempt to bring him down by creating all sorts of puzzle situations for him to overcome. Not really the most believable of all premises, but it does work.
Because I have to admit, these mind games are well created. They’re creative and not as ridiculously elaborate and far-fetched like you’d see in shows as Death Note or Code Geass. The creators really did well in keeping a balance between believability and ingenuity, and that’s where the fun comes from: the situations in this series are so created that a lot of them can be figured out by the audience as well. The characters make well use of their surroundings, and also carefully try to analyze the persons they’re dealing with and predict what kind of moves they might make.
The mind games and the psychology in this series is what makes it worth watching, and that’s a good thing because apart from that there really isn’t anything notable for this series. Spiral basically is a series that’s really good at one thing… but fails to stand out in any other way. The lead characters are serviceable: the creators are good at analyzing them, but they could have been fleshed out much more. The villains however are a real joke: we learn absolutely nothing about them: they’re just a bunch of paper bags with no motivation whatsoever.
But the biggest problem with this series it the fact that it leaves so many questions open. And sure, I’m not often concerned with this and I usually don’t mind if a series leaves a bunch of plot-holes open at the end. But Spiral takes this to a completely different level when it fails to answer just about every major question it asks throughout the series. Seriously, this series just stops at one point and nothing whatsoever has been solved. My guess would be that this is another series adapted from a manga that never got its second season due to unpopularity. Such a shame!
Anyway, whether or not you’ll like this series is simple: if all you want is a battle of wits, then this series isn’t going to disappoint you. Especially the first half of this show has everything that makes for a bunch of very interesting mind games. If you’re interested in something else though, then you’d better stay away, because this series sure as heck doesn’t have it.
| Storytelling: | 9/10 |
| Characters: | 7/10 |
| Production-Values: | 8/10 |
| Setting: | 7/10 |
It’s episodes like this one that really make it unfair to wait for an entire week to see what happens next. Such a powerful episode even though it was nothing like your average dramatic anime episode. Aoi Hana really feels like one of the most realistic romances I’ve seen in a long time and it works incredibly well so far.
In this episode you could really see the distance between Fumi and Yasuko. It all starts with Fumi seeking refuge at Akira because of what happened in the previous episode, which is when she realized that Yasuko is still hung up over her past crush. In the meantime Akira finds out through Kyouko (who obviously has been researching on Yasuko) that Yasuko has four sisters, one of which previously taught at their high school.
The main meat of tihs episode however was about Yasuko, finally deciding to show Fumi her family and vice versa, and at that point we get to see a totally different version of Yasuko. At home, she’s really known as the spoiled princess. As the youngest, she often gets looked down upon by her sisters. You’d think that that would make her stronger, but because she’s seen as a role model outside of her family, she instead chooses to withdraw whenever her sisters or mother start to annoy her.
On top of that, Fumi makes a huge mistake of mentioning to her sisters how one of them taught at their high school, without ever mentioning that she had that knowledge to Yasuko herself. Fumi makes even more stupid moves, by actually taking the side of her family, rather than of Yasuko, and also mentioning how she previously was in love but got dumped.
That all leads to the end of this episode, in which Yasuko proposes to break up. That’s one very nasty cliff-hanger there. If the two of them manage to stay together like this and grow to accept their differences, they’ll probably get a lot closer to each other, however the chance of the two of them really breaking up is really big, and I’d really hate to see that happen. It’s exactly because the two of them are so different that they form a very nice couple.
I also wonder. Kyouko obviously got her crush on Yasuko because of her popular image, but I wonder whether she’d be still as enthusiastic about her when she learned that she also had a vulnerable side. In that way you can really see that Yasuko cares about Fumi: I don’t think that she’s ever willingly shown her weak side to anyone else, but Fumi at the same time is just so dense that it’s going to take a lot of effort for the two of them to fully trust each other.
Rating: ** (Excellent)]]> 
This show is schizophrenic! It may be called GA Art Design Club, but if it weren’t for that name you’d hardly guess that the main characters are indeed those five girls of the Art Design Club. This episode again was about the other art club, in which they turn their clubroom into a haunted house. Definitely not what I expected, but nevertheless this episode was a lot of fun.
This episode starts out a small skit about Tomokane chopping up a asleep Noda. Next up we get a little skit about Tomokane returning a game that she borrowed from Noda. It was surprisingly quick, so Noda wonders what’s wrong. It turns out that Tomokane’s brother got hold of the game, overwrote all of her saved files and got much further into the game than she did. Only now I realize that this was a clever little bit of foreshadowing.
The next scene properly introduces the real meat of this episode as we see the mysterious blue-haired boy, who turns out to have some sort of health problems, after which he enters the Art Club’s clubroom along with Yasumura. Uozumi also arrives. The clubroom seems empty, so Yasumura at first thinks that they have some kind of day off or something, but Uozumi reassures them that there are club activities that day. Which becomes all the more apparent when Awara is found under her box wrapped in bloody and nailed bandages. Yasumura doesn’t fall for it, though.
Bluehair however is quite startled, and eventually Mizubuchi also manages to scare Yasumura by suddenly appearing in a room full of skulls. It turns out that Awara and Mizubuchi found some nice material made by some former club-members, and decided to give everyone a nice scare. Those former materials also include a daily rip-off calendar (or however you call that in English) of the Mona Lisa, who slowly turns into an old hag. It turns out that in their first year, Awara and Uozumi also were scared quite a bit by their upperclassmen.
I have a lot of trouble following the names of this series around, because even the OFFICIAL SITE omits the first names of some of the characters. It’s therefore interesting to note that Yasumura(the red-haired guy)’s first name (or last name; Japanese names still confuse me) is Homura. Could be handy for the future. Anyway, it turns out that Bluehair wants to join the club, and Awara immediately jumps on him. A teacher then explains to some other teachers that Bluehair had a bad health and spent his first year with rather bad attendance records, so the nurse figured that it might help him to join a club somewhere.
Anyway, then we see some scenes of Bluehair getting introduced to the club, and the basics get explained. Then the idea comes to create a haunted house with the things that they have lying around. In the meantime Samecha (the blond teacher) gets lured into the new clubroom. Mizubuchi meets her own her way out, and guides her in and she immediately gets scared by an overenthusiastic Yasumura.
When Samecha goes outside, she runs into the Art Design club, who happened to be there. And they offer to get what Samecha was supposed to be taking when she visited the clubroom. It’s interesting that apart from Mizubuchi, the rest of the Art Club has no idea who they are. Anyway, next up they’re scared by some old ghost tricks like a wet sponge on a string. The haunted house continues for a bit, but the club members didn’t take into account that Tomokane wouldn’t be scared at all and instead would start to break everything. There are also some nice jokes, like Uozumi completely forgetting that he’s supposed to be a monster, and therefore trying to help Noda when she fell into one of the traps that were set up.
Eventually, Bluehair also manages to scare Tomokane with a bunch of fake bugs. Eventually they get to the exit, which has two doors. If I understood correctly, then Tomokane choses the wrong door and gets overrun by some of the old stuff from the Art Club, and gets even more upset and starts wrecking even more stuff. Eventually Miyabi manages to stop her with the help of her fingernails and a chalk board. Since they forgot what they were supposed to get for Samecha, they just take out a bunch of random items that in turn scare Samecha even more.
The episode ends with Bluehair’s official registration, and he turns out to be Tomokane’s older brother. Tomokane seems to hate him because he always beat her in whatever kind of game they were playing. By the way, it’s rather annoying that we never get to hear their first names. It’s going to be hard talking about them this way!
So I was a bit disappointed that there wasn’t much art design in this episode, but it nevertheless was a cute episode with as much energy as ever. There’s hardly a moment that leaves you dulled in. I especially like Awara as a character.
Oh and on a side-note: I’m surprised that an OVA has been announced. It’s nice to see this show getting a bunch of extra episodes.
And on another side-note: the art in this series looks surprisingly good, and I especially notice that when I take screenshots. This series likes to put as much characters on a screen as possible, and hardly ever makes use of close-ups that just focus on one person. That really gives off an interesting effect, and it does really well in making the characters alive, rather than posing for a camera all the time like what you see in for example an average Shinbo-series. It’s subtle, but it works really well.
Rating: * (Good)]]> 
You might be wondering what the heck I’m doing with something that looks like a weird bastard child of Astro Boy and My Little Pony, but this is actually the last series that Osamu Tezuka directed in his life, before succumbing to cancer. In fact, he sadly couldn’t live to see its completion. It was recommended to me by hairgreen, so I decided to give it a shot.
Aoi Blink really is a children’s adventure. It follows the lead character Kakeru as he travels together with a talking flying horse, two thieves, a princess and a bus driver in the search of his father, who has been abducted by the evil bad guy. Is it formulaic? Yes. Is it simple? Yes. Does it have very odd survival chances for the lead character? Obviously. Do I regret watching it? Nope.
The format of this series of course has a lot of problems in terms of believability. The side-character’s motivation is simply that they support Kakeru in his quest to find his father, and are hungry for an adventure. They don’t have a lot of history or background either, so they’re not the most complete characters out there. The basic format of every episode is also rather predictable: the characters arrive in some sort of town, have some fight with some bad guy who is causing problems in this town and at the end of the episode everyone is happy and the characters leave again.
Yet, this series does have enough to make up for this. The characters may lack background, but because they’re such an odd bunch travelling together it becomes fun to watch them; Osamu Tezuka has always been known for his ability to create lovable characters, and here too he creates a cast with a nice little chemistry together. He also stands out in his creativity: it’s amazing that at the end of his career, he still had more than enough interesting ideas stuffed into this series. A big reason that makes this series avoid the pitfall of most boring adventure series is that a lot of episodes, while their scenario is nothing new, they are centred around some interesting idea.
At first sight, this series does have a clear distinction between good and evil: evil people do bad things and good people are nice. However, despite the lack of a gray area between them, this series starts playing with these morals surprisingly often: sometimes people you’d think are good are actually evil, some good people come across as evil at first, some good people are brainwashed to be evil and one episode even has this reversed.
This especially becomes fun near the end. I’m not going to say much about the ending because of spoilers, but the final episode in this series was my favourite of the entire series, in which in a series which seemingly existed out of random episodes, everything surprisingly comes together in a truly kickass conclusion.
Aoi Blink is a flawed adventure series, which is why I rated it rather lowly. Kakeru, despite being a kid and all, manages to outsmart grown adults over and over throughout the series. But if you’re looking for adventure, then this series has it. The characters are simple and childish, yet they grow on you. Because of this, there are a number of episodes that are a bit tedious to get through, but if you’re into children’s adventures then this series has a lot to like. If you are not interested in this genre however, this series isn’t going to cause you to see the light.
Hehe, and here I thought that the creators were going to save the bombing of Tokyo for the grand finale of this series. It seems that there’s still much more that’s going to happen after it: there are still so many problems that are left to be solved, not to mention that the creators still don’t seem to have played all of their trumps for this series!
The way this episode was executed was also something I really didn’t expect. With the entire city of Tokyo burning down, you’d expect them to create a huge action-packed spectacle out of it, but instead this episode had a much more melancholic atmosphere. It’s something completely different from what we’ve seen of this series so far, and it really works. That’s yet another reason why I’ve grown to be such a fan of this series: you’re never going to know what to expect.
This episode was surprisingly slow paced for this series, but because of that the impact on Kuniko, having to burn down the place she grew up in really made an impact. Her emotions were handled very subtly here: she didn’t break down crying, or she didn’t refuse to drop the bomb at the last possible moment like your average anime lead. She knew very well what she had to do to save the ones around her, because otherwise they’d just be overthrown by the Daedalus. This episode portrayed that feeling of saying goodbye really well. Kuniko might seem like nothing special at first sight, but you don’t often see a main character who has to serve as a leader like her.
Oh, and the eye candy! While not as gorgeous as episode 13, the visuals were nevertheless gorgeous as they showed Duomo going up in flames. You could see that especially the background artists were on fire in this episode (not literally of course), but also the CG looked really good during the fiery bits.
Now, the question is going to be: how are the creators planning on filling up the final quarter of this series. The Daedalus hasn’t fully disappeared: it’s still inside Atlas because that’s a part that can’t exactly be burned down. At the same time, the end of this episode shows Medusa finally losing control of itself, after Karin pushed him too far in her attempts to take advantage of the huge carbon emissions from the forest fires. and to think that for a moment she was like the richest person in the world. She was bound to overstep her borders at one point, but I still wonder what the creators plan to do with Medusa going out of control: is she simply going to lose Medusa, or is her entire fortune coming along with it?
It’s very interesting: for most series at this point, you’re going to have a good idea what its finale is going to be about: what the main goal is going to be to overcome. With Shangri-la, I have no bloody clue. Sure, there is busting Ryoko from Atlas, people are going to have to rebuild their homes, Karin is going to have to cope with Medusa, but which one is going to be taking the main focus? What is Ryouko going to do now after cooperating with Kuniko? There are still so many questions left open.
At this point, there are five episodes left. That’s enough for this series to wrap up everything with a conclusion, and let’s hope that everything isn’t going to end up rushed!
Rating: ** (Excellent)]]> 
And this episode starts what’s probably going to be the final arc of the first (and really hopefully not last!) season of Guin Saga. It turns out that we’re going to go to large scale warfare again, since the main focus is going to be Remus, getting Parro back from the Mongols. And damn, I really have to say that after the change of clothes he and Linda got they look a lot more mature than when they walked around in those silly robes and pirate clothes.
I wonder what Guin is going to do in this arc. While he was the main character of the first half of this series, his role got much smaller in the second half in which the focus fell more on Ardnaris and Remus. The end of this episode shows a bunch of people who seem to be after him, but I still don’t see him picking up the lead role in this arc any time soon.
The romance also got developed in this episode. Remus turned into a huge chick magnet and landed himself a future wife, and in the meantime Istvan temporarily says goodbye to Linda as he attempts to become a worthy man to become her husband.
Rating: * (Good)]]> 
Haha! Finally an episode that doesn’t focus on Henderson, and it also was much better than the previous episodes and much less annoying. Instead, this episode develops Mildred, and pushes her character into a different direction. A nice idea, and I especially liked the moments in which nothing was said, yet we all could see how Mildred is longing for attention.
Unfortunately, this episode again played out like a soap opera. The moment in which Mildred came running to Anne and the two made up was cheesy at best. This is the kind of drama you’d expect from a teenaged romantic comedy, not the World Masterpiece Theatre for God’s sake. I’m not sure how many people were following the summaries I wrote for this series, but I’m going to quit doing them. This series simply isn’t good enough for that, especially since I’m now also writing detailed summaries on GA.
I can only hope that the cheese isn’t going to hop over to the Thomas family. This series is in a way like Ie Naki Ko Remi: some parts were really cheesy, but others made a huge impact on me. The big difference is that Remi was an adventure series, while Anne is slice of life. But still, Henderson is much more annoying than the worst character of Remi (which was the character that the big bad guy developed into; in the end he just became a bit too stereotypical for his own good). She’s now reached the point with me that any scene she appears in becomes annoying.
Even though the past few episodes have been dramatic, you can see that this series is building up to some of the more darker parts. We know that Anne is going to have to leave the Thomas family at one point, and arrive at a new family of hers. That’s where I have my hopes on for this series. With a bit of luck she’ll also move away to a different city so that that Henderson will also disappear. At the moment, the creators are going to have to put in a lot of development to get Anne to the character she was at the start of Anne of Green Gables, so let’s see whether the creators can do this, or they become too caught up in their own cheese.
Rating: (Enjoyable)]]> 
I love how this show at first sight can make it seem that an episode isn’t really going to contribute to the plot, and yet time and time again it proves you wrong. Every single episode, although slow, has contributed to the plot and none of them have felt wasted. This episode too: I first thought that it was going to be a strange filler in which Kou and Aoba’s families spend the Christmas Vacation at some sort of a spa resort. I was wrong.
It turns out that they were invited to the place at which Aoba’s grandparents live. They used to play there during summer vacations when Wakaba was still alive, so this was an entire episode stuffed with nostalgia for both Kou and Aoba. And finally we get the first direct and solid clues that they’re into each other! Hah!
For both of them this becomes clear through jealousy: Aoba really gets jealous looking at an old book of photos in which Kou and Wakaba are really close to each other. Kou on the other hand gets in trouble when an old childhood friend of Wakaba shows up, and suddenly gets Aoba to smile like she never showed at all. Since we’re talking about Adachi here, it’s very likely going to take some more ages for both of them to realize this, but I really wonder how he’s going to let this play out. Especially since the new guy looks like that second pitcher of Touch whose name I can’t remember, and he turned out to be a challenge for Tatsuya to overcome for completely different reasons. What especially surprised me about him was how Aoba totally didn’t act tsundere when she met him.
Rating: ** (Excellent)]]> 
Short Synopsis: Our lead character meets a strange fairy who’s going to help her overcome the problems in her family.
Potential for the Future: 2/10 (Could be a serviceable comedy, but nothing more)
Okay, so I used to do my first impressions in batches of three, but I’ve now reached the point at which this system has lead to just too many problems, so for the upcoming Fall Season I’m going to do it in a different way, and even though we’re not even halfway through the Summer Season, Ontama’s first episode that just got released sounds like a good way to experiment. My idea is to just basically create a single post for every new show that airs. Obviously, the potential problem with this system is that it’s going to lead to waves of posts during each season, so let me know when the amount of posts becomes just too big. I’ve also stopped rating these episodes, and instead I’ll just be looking at the potential they create: there are plenty of awesome series with dull first episodes, and in the same way there are also a lot of series with great first episodes that only dull in afterwards.
Anyway, Ontama is a rather childish show about a girl whose original parents are divorced and her mother remarried to a guy who’s rather nasty towards her. So she meets a fairy (this time in the form of a stuffed bear) who takes her back to right before she was born so that she could meet her real father. I must say that I’m surprised at the creativity of this scenario and there are some nice ideas, but the presentation is just mediocre in every way. There are some moderately funny jokes, but the lead character is just too stereotypically hyperactive and will probably get annoying very soon. The animal side-kick of this show also listens to every stereotype and doesn’t have anything original to it, and this episode was also full of nude jokes. You might like this if you like energetic yet brainless series, but other than that I don’t see much money in it.]]> 
Oh my god… this was seriously the best episode I have ever seen from Full Metal Alchemist. No question possible. I knew that we could expect fight scenes in this episode, but that it would be this intense, and that it would push the plot into that kind of direction… And to think that nearly the entire episode lacked any sort of presence from Ed, who is supposed to be the main character here.
It was this episode in which the Homunculi made their move on Roy Mustang and the others, in an attempt to spread the knowledge of them from flowing out, but they failed miserably there. Gluttony first fails when Roy finally shows himself as the leader of the investigation behind them, and Lust even gets as far as killed!
But to think that the homunculi in this series are created with Philosopher’s Stones! Now there’s something that I never saw coming, especially considering how the first series had them all going desperate to find them. And to think that they all have the power to regenerate. Those Homunculi sure are on a much different level than they were in the first season, in which they were about evenly matched with Ed, of all people!
And damn. That fight against lust was absolutely beautifully animated. It because an incredibly intense fight due to the amazing animation direction that made just about every frame a visual feast, especially when she was about to die. Seriously, Bones is on fire this season.
I now understand why Full Metal Alchemist is considered as such a great series: both the good guys as the bad guys pull absolutely no punches and are in no single way incompetent or naive, unlike nearly every other anime you see nowadays. That really makes seeing these behemoths going up against each other a scene to behold.
And yeah, Barry gets the award for most pathetic death I’ve seen in quite a while. There’s really something ironic about getting killed by your own body like that. And it’s a bloody shame that he’s gone now. As for the others, they’re probably still alive since we never saw their deaths, though I imagine them to be badly wounded. Al’s role in all of this was also pretty small, but he too made a lot of impact in this episode when he returned to Winry in the end.
Speaking of which… Hohenheim finally made his entrance! I can’t wait to see what his role is in this series. Especially considering how his older clone is the leader of the Humonculi.
Rating: *** (Awesome)]]>