Sora wo Miageru Shoujo no Hitomi ni Utsuru Sekai – 02

by psgels, posted in Sora wo Miageru Shoujo no Hitomi ni Utsuru Sekai



Short Synopsis: Munto continues to try and get Yumemi over to his world, while Yumemi has her own problems to take care of.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10 (Good)
Hehe, you were expecting Ride Back at this spot, no? To be honest, so did I before I watched Ride Back’s second episode, but then I started thinking: the show has 12 episodes, of which the first two were slow introductions that hardly did anything besides setting up the premise. It’s going to be a show about some teenagers riding motorbikes who somehow become involved in a huge war. How the heck are the creators going to get some good development in only 12 episodes? This is Madhouse we’re talking about: compared to some of its previous series Ride Back just isn’t as interesting.

Besides, the lack of realism really became jarring in that second episode: nobody finds it strange that these Ride Back things simply drive around INSIDE BUILDINGS? Nobody tries to complain about the noise that these machines cause? Nobody finds it strange that these machines tend to break down and crash a lot? Nah, I’d rather see a bunch of elves beating the hell out of each other.

So I’ve yet to see the Munto OVAs, but apparently I don’t need to do that anymore since the first episode copied about 80% of its content. That episode reminded me a lot of a poorer version of Noein’s first episode, with the big difference being that Noein spent lots of time in its first episode to flesh out the cast before diving into the action, while Munto dived straight into the action without letting the viewer get to know the characters.

Well, that problem was partially solved by this episode, which was very un-typical of your average second episode. Most of the second episodes after a huge eventful first episode are deliberately slow, in order to explain what the heck went on in the show’s start. Munto instead deliberately chooses to slow down the pacing, but doesn’t attempt to explain much. Instead, it starts fleshing out the lead characters. I especially was surprised that they immediately showed the story for one of Yumemi’s friends.

I also like that the creators are using the Noein approach. With most series where the lead character is transported into some sort of other world, the connection between these is really something sacred: it can only be crossed once, and the conditions for someone to cross are very vague and only serve as a plot device to get the lead character involved with the plot. In Munto instead that link is fleshed out a bit more, and it looks like it can be breached more often. Seeing as how Yumemi’s friends are going to be important characters in this series too, I expect that either the series will take place mostly in the real world with your occasional trips to the elf world, or Munto is somehow going to kidnap the three of them at the same time.

Now, about the lesser parts of this series… we have a delinquent who gets saved by a cute girl and they end up marrying. Am I the only one who was reminded of a certain other Kyoani series? I also fear that most of the elves are going to lack in personality: this episode hardly focused any attention on them.

Natsume Yuujin-Chou – 16

by psgels, posted in Natsume Yuujin-Chou



Short Synopsis: Natori returns and invites Natsume to… a hot spring?
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10 (Excellent)
Best episode of the second season so far! This most likely is because it involves a recurring character again: Natori, and indeed confirmed my suspicion that the best part of the second season is going to be the stories that evolve around him and the recurring characters, rather than the standalone stories which hit their height with the firefly episode (I think I mentioned this a few too many times by now…).

And was it me, or was Natori much kinder this time to Natsume? He needed a genuine favour from the guy and his book of friends, and instead of straightforwardly asking him to cooperate, he made up a story of going to a hot spring resort in order to relax a bit. This episode also showed that he isn’t perfect: if Natsume didn’t help that big youkai at the beginning of the episode, the two of them would be screwed right now.

But my favourite moments of this episode were the quiet ones, where the pacing was really slow to show the different characters together. I was especially touched by the dream Natsume had, where it appears that he’s still really troubled by his past and hated how he showed that weak side of his to Natori. Speaking of which, I wonder how Natori spent his childhood, with his ability and all. It’s going to be interesting to see how this guy grew up.

Popolocrois 2003 – 26

by psgels, posted in Popolocrois 2003



Short Synopsis: The ending of Popolocrois 2003, in which Zephys has to be defeated somehow.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
So, it’s finally finished. Wyrdwad and the other fansubbers did an awesome job in bringing the two Popolocrois series to the English community.

About the ending, it was definitely different from what I expected. With the way that Wyrdwad kept hyping it, I expected Zephys to brutally kill everyone on the entire planet before Pinon could find a way to defeat her, but instead the body count is kept relatively low and instead this episode focused at making these deaths have impact.

It got me thinking about those “everyone dies”-endings, and indeed their major flaw is that they fail to make each death have an impact. While a death in the middle of a series is a great way to include some character-development, if someone dies in the final episode, there’s hardly any character-development to get out of it, let alone if five or six of these people die at the same time. Most series also don’t take their time to show proper aftermaths, which makes you wonder about the point of these deaths.

While I can’t consider this ending as the best one I’ve ever seen (that spot is filled by series such as Utena, Mouryou no Hako and Haibane Renmei), this was an excellent ending nonetheless. Like I hoped, it wasn’t focused at “ZOMG kill Zephys!”, but instead it was really focused at making Luna’s mother’s death have as big of an impact as possible. It formed a perfect closure to this series, and was miles away from the cheese that you usually see in endings like this. It didn’t drag nor was it too short, and it pretty much avoided any of the common pitfalls that endings usually have.

I’m not going to write a review for this series, since my experience has shown that I’m pretty bad at that with series that I watched over half a year ago. Still, overall, the 2003 series wasn’t as good as the 1998 series due to its rather weak first half, but it did have a much better main storyline compared to its predecessor, which especially made its final quarter a joy to watch. The 1998 series, in contrast was all about its characters, and therefore was downright awesome to watch in its first three quarters, especially when Gamigami Maou and his antics became involved.

Popolocrois 2003 – 25

by psgels, posted in Popolocrois 2003



Short Synopsis: Pinon and the others try to stop the forest half and the sea half of Zephys to combine.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10 (Excellent)
Wyrdwad: you rock!

Awesome to see this series finally fully subbed. The Popolocrois Franchise has really been the cream of the crop in the RPG-adaptation genre, and I hope that me blogging it for the past three years has introduced some people to this wonderful franchise.

Anyway, about the episode, this is going to be a short post, since I’m obviously edging for that final episode. I’m pretty curious to see what the creators can make out of it. Usually in anime, this is the point where things turn dull: the big bad guy has reached its final ultimately powerful form, and it simply has to be defeated in the final episode, usually requiring some sort of hidden power to be summoned from the lead character. I really wonder what’s going to make that final episode so special and I want to find out as soon as possible.

Mobile Suit Gundam 00 – 40

by psgels, posted in Mobile Suit Gundam 00



Short Synopsis: The Ptolemy is tracked down and the innovators again continue their attack, while Setsuna is away and injured.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10 (Good)
Haha! Finally the thing that I’ve been anticipating the most in this series happened: the coup d’etat. Now the fun is really going to start. Let’s see whether that was something that the innovators took into account. My guess is that they too never saw it coming, otherwise they wouldn’t be unleashing an attack at the last possible minute. This coup is definitely going to take care of the one-sidedness of the politics so far in the second season so far (with A-Laws being the equivalent of an evil empire and all).

I’m also glad that in this episode, Saji and Louise finally knew their place: simply as side characters. The battle in this episode put them against each other again, but instead of completely claiming all of the focus their scenes were short and to the point. That’s definitely making their appearance a whole lot more bearable.

The big focus of this episode instead was on Setsuna and Marina, who got to spend some quality time together. Let’s hope that this is going to inspire her to actually DO something relevant to the plot (in fact, it’s going to be interesting to see how Kataron is going to evolve after the coup).

And it has also finally happened: Celestial Beings aren’t the only ones with a Trans-am anymore, and I can already see the system being mass produced before the end of the series, degrading Lockon and Allelujah’s mobile suits to your average custom suits. Tieria’s special powers also have been pretty much useless throughout the series, so the only advantage that the celestial beings have right now is 00-Riser’s mysterious communication powers. Unlike the first season, there’s really not much room anymore for the creators to give any upgrades to the Gundams, so right now it’s going to be a matter of seeing how long they can survive.

Unlike certain other Sunrise series, this show has already shown that this is a series where people die when they’re killed, so the corpses should start falling pretty soon. After all, Gundam 00 has been a show with many references to past Gundam series (and at the same time it managed to keep its own identity, unlike Gundam Seed which if I understood correctly simply completely copied the UC timeline), so I doubt that the creators aren’t going to ignore Tomino’s “nickname”.

White Album – 03

by psgels, posted in White Album



Short Synopsis: Rina arranges a new job for Tooya.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10 (Good)
I’m starting to like this series more and more. The writing is very subtle, and likes to skip scenes of dialogue, to instead just show the expressions on the characters’ faces. And especially with Rina: it’s really hard to try and understand what she’s thinking. Why is she so specifically hitting on the boyfriend of one of her good friends? The girl is a very good actress, so it’s hard to tell where she was simply putting up an act or genuine, and the writers of this series are really good at switching the impression the viewers are supposed to get of her multiple times within one episode.

First, she invites Tooya to a job: be Rina’s assistant manager. When he arrives for his first day, Rina turns out to have fired her old manager, so that Tooya has to become her main manager. Then, after seeing Tooya and Yuki flirting with each other while she was rehearsing, she smacks Tooya (twice) and a day later he’s fired. Then it turns out that it wasn’t Rina who fired him, but her brother. Yuki was also supposed to have a day off at Saturday, which she planned to spend together with Tooya, but this was cancelled due to a sudden job that came up. I’m not sure whether Rina was behind that one too, but the possibility is definitely there.

I’m surprised at how badly this series is received. Weren’t shows with cute girls and eroge adaptations supposed to be popular? In any case, I like this series, and how it intentionally waits with playing all of its trumps in the first round. There’s a lot going on in this series, but most of it is still pretty much hidden, and instead the creators go for a slow but solid and natural progression of events.

It’s a shame that the animation quality went down this episode, but that was to be expected. Now I just hope that the creators have enough budget to return back to the same quality of the first episode (a la Birdy the Mighty), but I do fear that the biggest part of the animation budget was blown on the first two episodes like you see with most short series like this one.

Jigoku Shoujo – 67

by psgels, posted in Jigoku Shoujo



Short Synopsis: A girl whose brother is a rising DJ calls Jigoku Tsuushin.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10 (Good)
What is it with anime and sibling complexes? Heck, it’s supposed to be a taboo, but you see it broken so much in anime that it’s become an exception for a brother and a sister to not have romantic feelings for each other. Good grief, do all Japanese grow up as only children or something?

Having said that though, this episode was actually a pretty good character-study of both brother and sister, who both unknowingly looked up to each other. The sister was a huge klutz and has a stupid smile all of the time, but because of that she gets lots of attention, and her brother dislikes that because this causes himself to get no attention at all. The sister at the same time is well aware that everyone just finds her stupid and talks about her behind her back, and is just smiling because otherwise she couldn’t bare it. She in turn is jealous of her brother’s successes as a DJ. And as it indeed turned out, the brother’s dreams of becoming a DJ fails, so both envied each other for things that didn’t exist. I like that, it’s down to earth and a typical problem that siblings like them can have.

Of course, the ending where the sister sends the brother to hell because her brother refused to keep a promise he made when they were small, about how he’d marry her once she became pretty was a bit forced, to say the least. Do people really put that much value into a promise that was made as six year olds? But then again, that’s also where the premise of Jigoku Shoujo comes in, and the ease at which you can send someone to hell.

Yuzuki’s role was pretty pretty small in this episode, but not wasted at all. This episode was really designed to make her stronger, and to teach her to not give up, or simply assume that everything is the way it looks.

Birdy the Mighty Decode – 15

by psgels, posted in Birdy the Mighty Decode



Short Synopsis: Birdy meets her childhood friend again.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
Whoa!

I somewhat expected that the second season would be better than the first, but such a huge difference in quality, I never saw coming. The first two episodes were quiet and set up the basic premise for this series, with lots of Senkawa behind his teen-aged self. The second season however, immediately jumps into the action, the animation is consistently awesome, rather than usually average with awesome animation for the big action-scenes. Seriously, it looks like the second season is going to top the first season in just about every aspect, and with a bit of luck it’s going to be the best of the sequels that started airing in this Winter-season.

But my favourite change: Senkawa. The past two episodes showed no intention whatsoever to drag on his romantic relationship. In fact, it’s time for Birdy to have her romance, and that one’s also looking much more interesting than the romance of the first season. On top of that, Senkawa is now more experienced in love matters, so he can actually give Birdy a bit of advice here and there.

This episode also showed: the director of this series definitely also did Noein. The animation was fantastic, even during the quiet parts the characters are drawn in a very messy style, but this way they gestures and motions have extra expressivity, and they really make the cast come alive this time. It doesn’t make for the best screenshots, though. ^^;

I also love it when the writers go creative with ring-tones. It may be something small, but it’s fun to see what kind of tune the character in question has chosen, and it’s even small things like these that add to the fleshing out the character. It’s amazing how Natoru has only appeared for 2 episodes, and he already feels like a regular member of the cast. Especially during the big fight scene at the end of this episode. That was seriously brutal! Seriously, this second season has buckets of potential.

Tytania – 14

by psgels, posted in Tytania



Short Synopsis: Zalish’s mother goes crazy, Fan meets an old acquaintance again and the Estrads carry out their plans.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
I’m beginning to see what made Legend of Galactic Heroes such a loved anime. These creators are just really good storytellers. They know exactly when and what to build up, and from there they proceed and make everything snowball out of control. What simply started as an innocent plan of Alses to get his hands on Fan is escalating into chaos, which lead to the death of two people, and the arrest of countless, and there doesn’t seem to be an end to the bloodbath yet.

When this series started, I found all the tactical planning pretty lame and dull, but thankfully they were only building up for their second half. There was plenty of juicy character-development in this episode. The always so composed Zalish is starting to crack under the pressure of his brother’s death and his mother’s rages. Jouslan meanwhile shows his true colours: he didn’t simply lack ambition like I originally thought, but he’s much more someone who waits for the right moment in order to for a complete and utter checkmate. He resembles Idris in a way, with the only difference that his patience lasts longer than that of Idris. ^^;

Still, this episode did remove quite a few actors from the main stage when the entire Estrade family and their allies gets rounded up like it’s nothing. I really thought that they’d last longer than that. But at the same time, it’s about time for the creators to reveal the purpose of a certain princess. I mean, she can’t do nothing for much longer, can she?

Some quick first Impressions: Sora wo Miageru Shoujo no Hitomi ni Utsuru Sekai, Catman and Genji Monogatari Sennenki

by psgels, posted in Genji Monogatari Sennenki, Some Quick First Impressions, Sora wo Miageru Shoujo no Hitomi ni Utsuru Sekai

Sora wo Miageru Shoujo no Hitomi ni Utsuru Sekai

Short Synopsis: Our lead character has the power to save a strange country of elf-people.
Chance of me Blogging: 50% (If the shows I’m planning to blog turn out bad, I’m going for this one)
Ooh, very nice! Kyoani is finally getting a bit out of its comfort zone. Sure, this series is just a rehash of one of their earliest franchises, but it’s at least a step along the way to get them to adapt something actually other than high school series (with the first step obviously being Clannad’s After Story). Overall I’d love to have seen the studio going for something completely new, but there’s no doubt about the potential of the Munto remake. This episode set the foundations of an epic storyline in a pretty interesting parallel world, with pretty nice animated effects that know when to be subtle and when to be over the top. What this series needs to do now is make its cast of characters a bit more interesting. All I saw in this episode was a bunch of people that are fighting a bunch of other people, and those other people are about to find a girl who can help them fight against those people. They lack an identity so far, despite their distinctive character-designs: give them more sides, life goals, motivations, weaknesses, whatever. Make them interesting!

Catman

Short Synopsis: Our lead character is a solitary humanoid cat.
Chance of me Blogging: 0% (But an interesting short nonetheless)
So, inspired by Touhou’s animation project (and trying to find something to cover so that I wouldn’t have to wait until the 24th before being able to post this entry…) I started looking for other short and experimental animation works. Eventually I fond this nice series of flash animations, called Catman. They’re basically a series of short videos without spoken dialogue, about a city of cat-people, following the titular Catman as he lives his life and gets himself into trouble. It’s nice and down to earth, but what especially caught my attention was the soundtrack that fully consists out of catchy ska-songs, which really works and creates a very nice mood for this series. Apparently, it also won some awards, so if you ever have the chance to watch something of this, then it’s a nice way to spend 3 minutes.

Genji Monogatari Sennenki

Short Synopsis: Our lead character grows up as the daughter of a prestigious household.
Chance of me Blogging: 100% (Noitamina + Feudal Japan + Osamu Dezaki? Hell yeah!)
Oh boy, this one’s going to get popular. When Ultraviolet already received so much hate, I don’t want to know how badly the character-designs of Genji Monogatari will be received. Still, I don’t care! This episode had by far the best visuals of the Winter season. Uniting Noitamina with Osamu Dezaki was a large gamble, but it really worked out so far. The pacing in this episode is slow, and yet lots of stuff has already happened and already two characters have received quite a bit of depth. With only 11 episodes, this series really wasts no scene, and I’m predicting lots of great stuff for the rest of this series.