RD Sennou Chousashitsu – 13

by psgels, posted in RD Sennou Chousashitsu


Short synopsis: Haru and Minamo go on a date.
Highlights: Really, can RD get any more awesome than this?
Overall Enjoyment Value: 9/10

If you’re wondering why this entry is so fast, I’m experimenting this time with Horribleraws. I’ve used them as well on Ultraviolet’s first episode as well (great show, by the way), in order to see whether they’re really that horrible. Well, the video and audio-quality are indeed not that good, and the Japanese commercials are even more annoying than the things we have to endure on Dutch tv, but the speed of these guys is quite impressive. Heck, I remember how they released Kaiba, more than two days before any other source got hold of another version. Right now, their quality is pretty horrible, but it’s going to be interesting if they manage to improve their quality as time goes on…

In any case, enough off-topic, because this episode of Real Drive was just AWESOME, even though it goes into an entirely different direction from the rest of the series. Basically, like mentioned above, there is no case in this episode, and all that happens is that Haru tries to chase off a bee that parked itself on a sleeping Minamo’s nose (really hilarious) and the two of them going on a date afterwards, where Haru’s past gets revealed. The entire thing was basically one huge chunk of nostalgia, and the result was absolutely charming.

During said flashbacks, some entirely new background tunes started playing. As it turns out, Haru’s biggest inspiration to become a diver was a group of dolphins he used to play with as a child. Ever since, he’s been fascinated with them. This episode shows us exactly how he went from a casual diver to a professional one, and met Minamo’s grandmother and Kushima and started working with them. He turned out to be an expert in skin-diving, which is why he probably was used in order to retrieve the red stuff in episode one.

I could praise this episode to heavens, but this is really one of these episodes you need to see for yourself in order to understand its awesomeness. Let me just say that if this series is already this awesome at its 13th episode, the God knows what the creators have in store for the rest of this series…

Vampire Knight Review – 70/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews


Vampire Knight is probably the closest you can get to a gothic anime. It’s dark-themed, lots of black, there are vampires, et cetera, et cetera. If you like your main dish to consist of angst and bishies, then look no further, because Vampire Knight has lots of it. Unfortunately, that’s also where its problems lie…

Angst can be beautiful if used well, but it can be disastrous if abused. It works best as support, or a stepping stone towards something bigger. Vampire Knight doesn’t seem to realize this, and delivers its angst with buckets at a time. The result is that nearly every episode can easily be summarized by “angst, angst, angst, bishies, angst, angst, angst, angst, et cetera”. There’s hardly anything else!

Because of this, it was indeed only a matter of time before Vampire Knights would enter the realms of cheese. It started out solid enough, but eventually, once Ichiru arrived the sinking ship was beyond rescue. Cheese can also come in good (Suteki Tantei Labyrinth, for example) and bad (the latest episodes of Code Geass come to mind as well), and the cheese here unfortunately kept edging for that nasty bad side.

I wish that there was at least something I could praise this series for, but I can’t get much further than to say that it’s been a very consistent series. For each episode, you know that there’s going to be angst and bishies, and thankfully the plot is interesting enough to have some potential for that second season that’ll arrive in October, but if you’re looking for quality entertainment, you’d better look somewhere else.

Storytelling: 7/10
Characters: 6/10
Production-Values: 8/10
Setting: 7/10

Porfy no Nagai Tabi – 26

by psgels, posted in Porfy no Nagai Tabi


Okay, so the creators did not plan some big climax for episode 26, and instead just introduce a new arc. This begs the question: what the heck are the creators planning for the final 26 episodes of this series?

At the start of this episode, we see how Porfy rides the freight train of the previous episode. He soon falls asleep, and doesn’t notice that the train boards a ship, heading for Sicily. He figures that now that he’s on the island anyway, he might as well check whether somebody saw Mina. At a local market, Porfy sees a lot of fish shops and he asks a fish-selling boy whether it’s hard to catch a fish. The boy then says that it’s quite easy, and Porfy rushes to the shore to catch himself some fish, without having to pay for it.

At the shore, Porfy located a big one, and when he’s about to catch it, he gets help from a boy of his age that suddenly popped up, named Michael. Te two of them manage to catch this fish, and bring it back to the boy, mentioned above. The local mafia, however, are quick to catch him, and they bring him to their mansion. Basically because it’s not allowed to catch any fish without their consent.

The mafia-boss that speaks to them turns out to be a rash man, who apparently knows this Michael. Of course, only one fish can be overlooked, but Michael turns out to be a member of a rivalling mafia-family, which rather complicates things. Porfy tries to take the blame for catching the fish, but the guy doesn’t want to listen. They get saved by Monica, the guy’s sister, who apparently isn’t that worried with the rivalry between the two families.

She called for Michael’s brother (father?) to come and pick them up. While they’re waiting for them, Porfy tells Michael and Monica about Mina, and he shows them Apollo. Then Jack (the brother) comes in a cool sports car, and he nearly starts fighting with Andre (the angry guy) if it wasn’t for Monica.

Porfy then eats dinner at the Michael and Jack’s family, and Porfy meets Jack’s father. Apparently, he’s an American merchant who trades in olive oil. Afterwards, Porfy spends a bit of time alone with Michael, who explains him the apparent meaning of a family. That evening, Porfy helps fix Jack’s car a bit, and he heads off to what I guess is Monica’s house to see her. I suspect that both of them are in love.

At the moment, there are so many possibilities in which this series can go. I’m personally hoping that from now on, the stories will get darker as the series progresses, but let’s see what the creators have in mind.

What caught my attention was the huge amount of Americans with blond hair. If I recall correctly, then only one American in this series didn’t have blond hair. Interesting, how with the huge amount of realism in this series, this one detail remains a bit inaccurate.

Soul Eater – 13

by psgels, posted in Soul Eater


Well, I asked this at my Nijuu Mensou no Musume-entry already, but it doesn’t hurt to ask this again, in order to get some more reactions. Another thing that caught my attention at the reader-survey was the relatively large amount of people who’d like to see those quick synopsises that I had about a year ago back.

For example:

Short Synopsis: As it turns out, the “secret training” turns out to be getting Soul and Maka to argue with each other in order to get them closer together.
Highlights: Makes sense; character-development; finally an exciting fight in this series.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10

(Yeah, I dropped the “bad”-part of this synopsis. If I recall correctly, the original reason why I dropped it was because this forced me to say something bad about each episode).

I must say, I’m impressed. I’m still not sure why, but this fight was the most exciting of the entire series. There was a pretty nice combination between humour and character-development. That werewolf was a pretty interesting enemy to fight against. On top of that, Maka’s blood turning black was an interesting new plot-twist, making me wonder which direction the creators plan to be heading to.

On a more serious note, Windspirit rather confirmed something that I’ve been noticing for a while now: Soul Eater isn’t the right series for me to blog. It’s not a bad series by far, but I’m always struggling to say something interesting about this series, so I just tend to fill space by nitpicking on useless details. There’s an interesting line-up standing for the upcoming Summer season, and I’m already planning to blog a lot of the new series. So yeah, don’t be surprised if I end up dropping this series from blogging next week, in favour of a new series. Even though this series ironically is my biggest source of readers at the moment. ^^;

Rocket Girls Review – 82,5/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews


I really need to be more careful on choosing which series I want to drop. When Rocket Girls first aired, I lasted four episodes until I gave up. I mean, it was about a space-agency that plucks a random girl off the streets in order to make her an astronaut; I was sceptical from the start. I tried to give it a few chances, but the first four episodes were mostly about the female lead Yukari being the teenager that she is, and disagreeing with everything. I predicted that these training missions would take until episode 10 or something, so that the final two episodes could launch her off into space, and that didn’t seem like worth the effort to me.

Well, that’ll teach me to make baseless predictions… as it turns out, those first four episodes were just proper build-up and Yukari ended up in space in already the fifth episode. The whimsical nature of the first few episodes is only because a major theme in this series is the contrast between responsibility and irresponsibility. I’m glad I went back to this series, as it turned out to be pretty enjoyable.

With the biggest strength of course being the characters: they’re pretty nicely developed for a 12 episodes series. Yukari may be a hard character to warm up to, but once she gets past her moments of teenage angst, she really starts shining. There’s an overall good chemistry between the different members of the cast, the side-characters also have defined personalities that make them come alive.

There’s one little issue with the voice-acting, though. After the first half of this series, a third main character shows up, and her voice is way too high-pitched for her own good, which tends to break the flow of this series a bit. The rest of her character is fine, but her overly squeaky voice made her my least favourite character in this series.

The creators obviously simplified the setting a lot, when compared to real-life rocketry, in order to make it not get in the way of what’s really important in this series: the characters. It was also a solid way to not get lost in its own techno-babble. Still, they overall did a pretty good job in coming across believable. This series has a lot of similarities with Sky Girls, and if you liked one, you’ll probably like the other.

Storytelling: 8/10
Characters: 9/10
Production-Values: 8/10
Setting: 8/10

June Summary

by psgels, posted in Monthly Summaries

Well, the end of the month couldn’t have come at a better time, because it offered me a good opportunity to experiment a bit with my new rating system. What caught my attention is that the average score seems to be lower than usual, but that can also be because this spring-season overall has turned out to be slightly disappointing, compared to other spring-seasons.

#26 (new) – Ikkitousen Great Guardians – (5,5/10) – If I had a dollar for every time I wanted to punch any of the Ikkitousen-characters in the face for being so annoying, then I’d be a rich man.
#25 (23) – Allison to Lillia – (6,75/10) – Admittedly, the train arc is better than the Fiona-arc. But it still baffles me that Allison and Will just went along with the Major and shot a seemingly friendly craft without knowing what was going on.
#24 (16) – Vampire Knight – (7/10) – Well, my interest in Vampire Knight is dying more and more now that it’s decided to deal out cheesy plot twists as twins who are out to kill each other. I’ve got more problems with this series, but I need a full review in order to be able to list them all.
#23 (18) – Toshokan Sensou – (7,25/10) – Toshokan Sensou took a nosedive in its final episodes. The climax didn’t work for me at all, the angst was too forced, and the end result was half-baked.
#22 (new) – Chocolate Underground – (7,5/10) – This series is strange, but interestingly enough it’s not yet a total trainwreck. I’m really curious to see what this series can get out of only five-minute episodes.
#21 (21) – Code Geass – Lelouch of the Rebellion – (7,5/10) – Aaaaaand the trainwreck has begun. It seems to have started rather early this season: R2 up till now wasn’t anything special, but at least it was solid enough. That all ended with the utter cheese that was episode 11 and 12.
#20 (10) – Itazura na Kiss – (7,75/10) – Itazura na Kiss has reached the point where the humour starts getting dull and the characters need to develop in order to make this series interesting again. Let’s hope that the creators can pull it off.
#19 (14) – Soul Eater – (8/10) – My biggest problem with Soul Eater is that I’m finding it incredibly hard to find something to recommend it for. Nothing really stands out: the fight scenes are okay, the characters also do their job, the story has potential, but it’s been twelve episodes and I still haven’t been impressed, other than by this series’ style.
#18 (9) – Kurenai – (8/10) – The ending was solid, but there was a surprising amount of writing errors, turning this into the least enjoyable month for Kurenai for me.
#17 (new) – Telepathy Shoujo Ran – (8,25/10) – There’s too much angst, but apart from that there’s a lot to like in this series: great music, nice slice-of-life, charming characters. Good stuff.
#16 (17) – Macross Frontier – (8,25/10) – Okay, so as it turns out, you do need to have watched the original Macross in order to understand this series, because otherwise some of the plot twists won’t make any sense at all. In any case, this series is showing some good signs in the direction of character development.
#15 (6) – Gintama – (8,25/10) – Gintama’s back to comedy again. Especially episode 62 was hilarious, and it’s pretty amazing that this series has managed to stay funny for 62 episodes.
#14 (19) – Wagaya no Oinarisama – (8,25/10) – It’s nothing special, but this series continues to surprise me when it turns much more enjoyable than I would have imagined.
#13 (13) – Junjo Romantica – (8,25/10) – The characters are way too quick to jump into bed with each other, but apart from that, this series delivers, whether it wants to be funny or serious.
#12 (20) – Blassreiter – (8,25/10) – Well, now that thingy and whatsit are dead, this series seems to go back on track, especially episode 12 was surprisingly good compared to the emo-fest of the earlier episodes, but I first want to know what the creators have been planning for the second season before getting excited about this series.
#11 (15) – Chi’s Sweet Home – (8,25/10) – This series was about to get dull, and then it came with the beyond awesome episode 41, which entirely changed my opinion of this series. I now understand Karura‘s fascination with large cats.

#10 (11) – Nijuu Mensou no Musume – (8,25/10)

Okay, so this was clearly a month of building up for Nijuu Mensou no Musume. Ken’s changes are rather questionable, but I’m really curious to see where this series is going to evolve to.

#9 (12) – Druaga no Tou – (8,5/10)

This month, Druaga showed its serious colours, and it worked. I didn’t expect this series to pull off a successful climax. Well, halfway-climax. Looking forward to the second season.

#8 (8) – RD Sennou Chousashitsu – (8,75/10)

RD continues to be as charming as it’s ever been. On top of that, this month has also started to give the major characters some more background

#7 (22) – Persona – Trinity Soul – (8,75/10)

Whoa?! How did this one suddenly turn good? I remember noting that this series wouldn’t be able to pull off a good climax… And as it turns out I was wrong.

#6 (2) – Porfy no Nagai Tabi – (8,75/10)

In June, Porfy stopped travelling for a little while in order to stay at Maximilian and his family. This resulted in the quietest month of Porfy ever since the earthquake. It was nice to watch, but nowhere near the highlights of this series.

#5 (7) – Crystal Blaze – (8,75/10)

That was a really strong and solid finish! Crystal Blaze has been wonderfully told from start to finish, without any signs of weakness. Okay, perhaps there’s Manami.

#4 (5) – xxxHolic – (9/10)

xxxHolic hit its all-time height and all-time low in the same month, interestingly enough. Kohane’s arc was dull, but Himawari’s arc was goooooood.

#3 (4) – Amatsuki – (9/10)

Amatsuki came together in a very strong finale. Now where’s that second season?

#2 (3) – Himitsu ~The Revelation~ – (9,25/10)

I love how Himitsu is playing around with its mysteries and morality. I’m really curious as to what this series has in store for its second half.

#1 (1) – Kaiba – (9,25/10)

Urgh… The only bad thing about Kaiba is the fact that it keeps taking these bloody hiatuses. This is no way to treat the best series of the spring season.

Nijuu Mensou no Musume – 11

by psgels, posted in Nijuu Mensou no Musume


To hijack this post for a bit, after a few days of using my new star-rating system, and quite a few problems have arisen (with many thanks to the commenters left their opinions):
– It’s too fuzzy
– It’s hard to relate the meaning of the scores, it’s unclear what the maximum number of stars is
– Some PCs can’t support unicode and instead only see a bunch of question-marks.

To conclude, it was a nice experiment, but the star-system sucks, and I’m going back to numbers out of 100 again. I’m going to keep rating, based on Storytelling, Characters, Production-Values and Setting. My biggest beef with my original rating system was indeed how it was inaccurate as hell. In the original system, I had basically ten categories for which I’d give out a rating, where the eventual rating would be their average. These categories always ended up overlapping each other.

With only four categories, this’ll mean that not every number will be utilized (the ratings will quite probably be 8o, 82,5, 85, 87,5, 90, etc. out of 100) but I hope it will make my reviews a bit clearer.

To continue hijacking this post, another thing that caught my attention about the reader survey was the relatively large amount of people who’d like to see the little summaries that I had a year ago back. Are there more who’re interested to see this return? Like, for example:

Short Synopsis: We learn a bit more about Haruka, and last week’s enemy continues to target Chiko
Good: Excellent change from light-hearted to dark throughout the episode
Bad: I’ve never been that big of a fan of brainwashing, and this is no exception. Auntie’s murder attempts keep getting more ridiculous.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10

Very interesting, the way this episode started promised to be a strange beach-episode, but this series managed to add so much more that I’m surprised that it all fit into just 20 minutes. First of all, it is revealed that Haruka had a twin sister. She reveals this as her dead image keeps haunting her since the beach in this episode is the place where she died, and apparently Haruka blames herself for her death.

In the second half of the episode, our long-haired enemy returns again, and his/her weapon this time is brainwashing all those important to Chiko. Like mentioned above: I’m not too big of a fan of brainwashing, mostly those kinds that can be resisted easily. I mean, if you were a villain, using this technique, wouldn’t you make sure that the people you brainwash never get near the conditions to break out of this mind control? Here too: I’m still not sure why exactly Tome was the only one who broke free…

Still, apart from that, I was surprised at the sudden dark tone. When it wants to, this series takes no prisoners, and it immediately throws every one of Chiko’s friends against her. What were those pills supposed to do? I failed to pick that up. Were they just poison, or did they have another effect? Speaking of poison, I’m really not sure what Chiko’s aunt is thinking… before, she came with intricate plans to kill Chiko through poison, and now she has turned to throwing flower-pots at her head. Can’t she just hire a professional killer or something?

Hunter x Hunter Review – 82.5/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews


It’s strange… the more I experiment with my new series rating-system, the more annoying the old system becomes…so that’s why I’ve decided to stop using this old system. In any case, the reason why the next old anime-review this time is partly because I had other things to do, and also because Hunter x Hunter has 62 episodes. And to think that after the series, I still need to watch three OVAs that came out after it, but those are for another time.

Hunter x Hunter starts out as a classic shounen-series. It takes a group of people with special powers (Bleach has shinigamis, Naruto has ninjas, Hunter x Hunter has… hunters), gives them a number of different powers and specializations, creates a number of large organizations and picks a generic young male to be the main character. Of course, with such a huge amount of episodes, I was redundant to check out this series, but ten episodes in, and I was hooked. This is everything a shounen-series should be.

Hunter x Hunter is basically divided into two halves, with an incredible difference between them. The first half feels like a huge game, where Gon (the main character) and his friends need to overcome a number of challenges in order to become hunters. It’s a standard shounen-plot, but its charms come from the cast of characters. It’s so much fun to watch not only the main characters, but also the side-ones as they try to become one of the hunters, and on top of that, the main villain stands miles above his counterparts in series as Naruto, Dragonball Z and Bleach.

This series only really sets itself apart from the rest of the genre with its second half, though. It starts out pretty bad, admittedly. The Zoaldyeck-arc is pretty much the worst arc of the entire series, only to be followed by yet another dull training-arc, but afterwards the series slowly unfolds into a story about the mafia, that for once isn’t about destroying/ruling the world. It’s here were Hunter x Hunter introduces real jobs, such as being a body-guard, and interesting ways for hunters to make money.

The problem with lengthy shounen (at least the ones I’ve seen), is that they get duller and duller as they go on, usually thanks to some kind of training-arc where the creators abuse their powers a bit too much in order to god-mode their main character beyond the point of believability. Gon indeed gets powered up a bit too much, but what I like about this series is that he still is nowhere near the power of the strong guys. Heck, even the main villains aren’t the strongest characters in this series. The creators also make use of the fact that Gon is just a child: it unconsciously lets his enemies spare his life, instead of killing him.

One major annoyance with this series (apart from the training arcs, that is), is that during the times of building-up, it’s got the “everyone who isn’t strong is an idiot”-mentality. Whenever Gon is facing weaker enemies than himself, they’re always portrayed as cocky idiots without any brains or tactical knowledge, and things like a one-in-ten-million talent are pulled out of the creators’ sleeve in an attempt to explain his superiority. Thankfully, there are enough characters with depth to them. Especially Kurapica is someone to watch out for, because the character-development he goes through is truly memorable.

Also, this series has avoided one more subtle pitfall of shounen-series: wounded characters remain hurt, and don’t get magically healed in the next episode. When characters get punched in the face, it remains swollen until it gets a logical reason to heal. The overall animation isn’t anything special, but I really appreciate details like that one. The soundtrack is also really effective for a shounen-series.

Overall, in terms of seriousness, Hunter x Hunter is definitely my favourite shounen-fighting-series. Overall, it still doesn’t match up to the humour and fights of the Law of Ueki, but it easily takes second place. The thing that worked against it the most was its main character: Gon. He does have a number of really memorable moments, but the creators waste way too much time in trying to make his power catch up to the strong people, and he often takes away the screen-time of the much more interesting characters. It’s a thing that unfortunately every series of its kind has. The rest of the cast is rock-solid, though, and especially the second and final quarter of the series deliver. I’m curious whether the three OVAs that came out afterwards will keep this same quality, or fall horribly like nearly every other show of its kind.

Storytelling: 8/10
Characters: 9/10
Production-Values: 7/10
Setting: 9/10

Telepathy Shoujo Ran – 02

by psgels, posted in Telepathy Shoujo Ran


Ah, it’s good to see another good series about middle-schoolers. I’m not sure why, but in average, I tend to like these series much more than the series that focus on high-schools. Perhaps it’s the impulsive way that they try to solve their conflicts, or their innocence. Or how your average middle-schooler is much less annoying than your average high-schooler. In any case, this is going to be the first show I’ll be blogging this season.

Overall, Telepathy Shoujo ran is a great way to start the season, though it’s not perfect yet. It’s a tad heavy on the angst already, and it’s a shame that that masked guy didn’t reveal himself nor his intentions at the end of the episode, because now I have no way of knowing whether its mysteries will be stupid or not. At the moment, there still is a chance of this series ending up in the pits of cheese like Suteki Tantei Labyrinth or with a stupid plot like Allison and Lillia. One series with a dead body spiked on top of a radio-tower is enough.

Still, the potential’s there: the slice-of-life moments are nicely done and detailed enough to keep my interest. Ran also started out like an interesting main character, and even the romance is pretty cute. It’s talked about death already, so it’s not afraid to be a bit dark, despite the young age of its characters, which is a plus as well. After rewatching, I also realized that it’s also using a lot of foreshadowing. Always good for building up.

Another annoying thing is the overuse of CG for the psychic scenes. I liked the method Night Head Genesis used much better, but I guess that it does the job, and it’ll be easy to get used to. It’s in any case a huge contrast between the normal world and characters, which I think is what the creators had in mind with it.

Apart from that, the art looks excellent, despite its simplicity. Yoshihiro Ike also managed to deliver a great soundtrack and the OP and ED are both really good as well, so this series is solid on the production-values as well.

Amatsuki Review – 90/100

by psgels, posted in Amatsuki, Anime Reviews


I really like Studio Deen. Sure, they may screw up their series very often, but when they hit a classic, they really deliver an amazing series. Their newest series to add to that list is Amatsuki, with the interesting thing being that even after watching it I’m still not 100% sure why I liked it so much.

For starters, Amatsuki combines history, science fiction and fantasy with each other when the main character (Tokidoki) gets sucked into a virtual world, which ends up being the ayakashi-infested feudal Japan. At first sight, it’s not the most original premise, but it’s the execution that makes this series unique.

The dialogue in this anime is absolutely amazing. They’re really deep and detailed, and you can see that a lot of time has been put into them. It’s no wonder that this series shares a director with Le Chevalier d’Eon. These characters could start talking about watching paint dry and still make it come across as interesting.

On top of that, this series also has an excellent sense of storytelling. It carefully builds up everything that you need to know for this series (again with that excellent dialogue), and there have been so many subtle details added that makes this series come alive.

Then there’s also a very complex storyline. This series really likes to make the boundaries between good and evil as fuzzy and complex as possible: every character has some kind of secret agenda or own goal. Today’s friend may be tomorrow’s enemy, and vice versa. Because of this, this series is especially in its element when many characters are together at the sane place: there’s so much going on at the same time.

Obviously, this series’ main selling point is talking, so don’t even dare to come near this series if you’re expecting Naruto and Bleach-esque fights. Sure, there is some action in this series, but it often gets overshadowed by said dialogue. That’s not to say that the fights are bad, though. It’s quite the contrary: fights are brutal, they come out of nowhere in a light-hearted mood and progress to mercilessly beat down the characters, with large amount of blood.

This also isn’t a series that you can watch to relax. You need to constantly pay attention in order to catch all the subtle details and nuances to get the most out of this series, even though the overall pacing in this series is similar to that of .Hack//Sign (in other words: sloooow).

Whether or not you’ll like the graphics is a very personal thing. Studio Deen has always been a fan of brightly coloured and frilly character-designs. The same goes in Amatsuki: everything looks very stylish, but it’s just a matter of personal preferences. The soundtrack is an excellent one, though, although a few tracks may have been played a bit too much.

Overall, I recommend Amatsuki to those with patience. It’s a wonderfully written first half of a series that’ll be continued… some day. It’s very stylish, with a unique sense of storytelling and a complex storyline. Another outstanding series by Studio Deen.

Storytelling: 10/10
Characters: 9/10
Production-Values: 9/10
Setting: 8/10