Some quick first impressions: Bamboo Blade, Da Capo II and Sketchbook ~Full Color's~

Bamboo Blade This one turned out into a pretty decent high-school anime. I like the male and female lead, who for once aren’t destined to love each other. The male lead also is an adult teacher, and there are more important male characters than him, including a geek who actually has his own girlfriend. Nice one. The banter between the different characters is fun to watch, and there’s good chemistry between them. It’s just a pity that the black-haired girl had to ruin everything. She somehow manages to beat heaps of adults at one time without breaking a sweat, she’s silent and never goes beyond her stereotype. This series is about a guy who has to assemble a team of five girls for kendo. If he does that successfully, his colleague will give him a year’s worth of sushi, or something similar. So far, we’ve seen three of the girls, one clichéd and two with promise. Let’s hope the other two will be worthwhile. The animation was definitely rushed for this episode: those were some crazy camera-angles, were often you wouldn’t see a character’s mouth when he or she was talking. Ah well, the thing this series needs to watch out for the most is not falling into a moe-fest. Da Capo II I haven’t seen the original series, but I decided to check this one out, just in case I missed something really good. Well, it turns out I didn’t. The major problem lies with the characters. The cast comes with a lot of females (who can be conveniently recognized amongst generics due to their near-outrageous hairstyles), who’ll probably all end up getting close with our main character, who looks suspiciously much like the main character of any other harem-series. Basically, every member of the cast is a stereotype. There’s the younger sister who helps the local nurse, the elder sister who acts motherly towards her brother (yes, the main character), there is the childhood friend, the little girl that makes us doubt how she got in a high school in the first place, the big-breasted blonde girl, the obligatory male best friends who keep acting annoying and let’s not forget the most popular girl in school. I think the only harem-cliché that misses here is the android, though I wouldn’t be surprised if she turned up somewhere along the way. Sketchbook ~Full Color’s~ Oh my, this one actually turned out funny. It’s thankfully not as moe-centric as I thought, and the different characters have interesting personalities, which work together quite well. I’m not going to call this a success yet, as I remember how a previous 4-Koma adaptation (Lucky Star) turned dull quite fast, but if this series can manage to remain fresh, it’s going to be an interesting watch. Basically, it’s about the art-club in a local school. The funniest parts of the episode were the crow and the members of the club, trying to come up with inspiration for their next drawings. The only downside is the main character, though. It’s not the way you think: she’s fun to watch, but she makes Mugi from Hitohira look like a talking machine: I’ve only heard three actual words come out of her mouth throughout the entire episode. While it’s nice to hear her voice-actress having fun to explore the different meanings of huffing and puffing, I’d prefer to hear some actual dialogue out of her, besides her inner monologues. ^^;]]>