Clannad ~After Story~
Short Synopsis: Our lead character and his friends enter a baseball match.
Highlights: Fun episode to start the second season.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10
And so the second season of Clannad has begun. This episode basically shows the lead characters as they play a baseball-match against a professional team, which is a fun way to start the series and get familiar with the characters again. This episode definitely beats Haruhi’s baseball-episode. Overall, the new OP is better than the first one, while the ED has become much worse. The graphics still look solid, although the few instances of CG looked horribly out of place. Ah well, the thing I liked about Clannad were its climaxes, so we may have to wait a bit for this series to get really good. I loved Air, I hated Kanon and I liked Clannad, so let’s see what the after story can do once it catches steam.
Kuroshitsuji
Short Synopsis: Our lead character is the butler of a mysterious kid.
Highlights: Ah, the cheese!
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
Okay, you know that anime creators are getting desperate when they start to rip off Hiroshi Watanabe’s works! Seriously, anyone who’s even remotely seen Suteki Tantei Labyrinth will recognize the obvious resemblances: both Mayuki and this series’ kid live in a huge mansion and lost their parents. Sebastian is Seiran, Hatsumi is the clumsy maid, Sanae is the gardener, the kid has powers, the butler too, and let’s not forget THE TEA. I mean, this just begs the question: if you’re going to pick a series to rip off, for god’s sake: Why Suteki Tantei Labyrinth?! But I digress: this series will be plenty enough to satisfy my inner-cheese-fanboy. The over-exaggerated glamour of Sebastian the butler was hilarious, and the three servants were just awesome. The background music was just awesome and over the top, fitting the cheesy mood exactly. Seriously, don’t watch this series unless you want to laugh at it. Not with it. This series does have to live up to its expectations, though. I’d better see something that surpasses a pet alligator in a closet and unfortunately placed dog poo (you’ll understand these references if you’ve seen Suteki Tantei Labyrinth). But what probably baffles me the most about this series: people were actually looking forward to it!?
Akane-iro ni Somaru Saka
Short Synopsis: Our lead character gets to live with a cute girl (no, really).
Highlights: Horrible character-designs, but at least the dialogue is nice enough.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 6/10
I keep wondering why the creators of these harem-anime spend so much time to make their female character-designs as extravagant and ridiculous as possible, while it’s most often the simple designs that look best. I mean, Real Drive showed this perfectly: even though you don’t have main characters with the perfect bodies, they still can look great. Really, in this series, it just seems like the creators took one body, copied it about twenty times and gave them different ridiculous hairstyles and eye-colours in an attempt to make them cute. Still, I have to admit that this series isn’t all bad. I enjoyed it more than Toradora, and the director seems to be good at the slice-of-life moments. The problem, however, is that he’s pretty much terrible at everything else, including setting up his story. Having cute girls swarm over you is one thing, but letting all of them be the most popular girls in school is a whole different story. The comedy is funny, but not for the reasons it’s supposed to be; the action downright sucks and the drama makes no bloody sense at all and feels forced. Overall, this episode was enjoyable enough, but it just doesn’t have any potential at all, and I suspect it to go downhill very soon.
I’ve been looking forward to Kuroshitsuji because the manga is hilarious (before it turns darker, then it’s a bit like Yuki Kaori’s Earl Cain). Sadly, the anime invented its own story in this episode and took out most of the humor – I suppose it’ll be only 13 episodes long so they’ll have to hurry to establish the (serious) main story. Nevertheless, I found the episode enjoyable. By the way, all that over-exaggerated glamour was done on purpose. The humor in the manga is usually pretty straight-faced.
Actually, Kuroshitsuji is darker than it looks. I still haven’t watched the anime but in the manga , it got some darker mood later on. I won’t say it has a good plot or anything like that but at least it tries to have a more mature theme, well at least I would say it ‘s better than Zombie Loan.
And Sebastian will surely attracts fangirls, even if he has many exaggerrated movements , I will admit those are pretty cool and yeah, good for a laugh.
Finally Kuroshitsuji aired ^_^
Actually the Kuroshitsuji manga predates the Suteki Tantei Labyrinth manga by 4 months. Both manga series starting in 2006.
What struck me about Kuroshitsuji was the wonderful background music.
And speaking of cheese, what gets more cheesy than a Butler using freaking BUTTERKNIVES as deadly weapons. That’s just too awesome.
the trailer for Kuroshitsuji made me imagine a anime with a darker story but as other said maybe it will take a while
and really!!?? rip off in anime! i am like whatever but the story from Suteki Tantei Labyrinth belongs to its mangaka (or so i would believe) so it is his merits not really all Hiroshi Watanabe’s but i know you don’t like manga that much so you don’t pay much attention to them
and btw even if most things you mentioned about Kuroshitsuji you enjoyed it quite a lot
Westlo: ah, that explains. It indeed makes more sense that STL ripped off KS than the other way around. 😛
Archer: call it a guilty pleasure. I know the cheese is bad and overexaggerated, but I can’t help but enjoy it. ^^;
“I hated Kanon”
=> Nuance : you hate Kanon 1-10, which, I think, is quite different.
there seems to be like a million definitions and slangs for cheese. what does it mean in this case? “Ah, the cheese!” what does that mean?
Cheese: Cheese in my book is overemphasized drama: drama that is about nothing, and yet the characters act like something major has happened. Think of it when the coffee was about to spill over the table, and Sebasian went to great lengths in order to pull the table cloth away before that would happen.
Can’t wait to start the first two, ignoring Akane.
Wow, you really like Clannad After Story’s baseball episode more than Haruhi’s? I definitely thought Haruhi’s was WAAAAAAY better. But then, that’s probably because Haruhi’s wasn’t really about baseball, whereas this one was – and I don’t like baseball. (:
I also really liked how, if viewed in the proper broadcast order, Haruhi’s baseball episode was only episode 4, occuring long before you knew about what had happened in the main storyline, so all the subtle references to the main storyline were really intriguing – a few of the lines in that episode kinda made me laugh a little, as I was like, “dude, what the hell happened?! What are these characters all talking about?! I have GOTTA keep watching this show, and find out why everyone is so scared of Haruhi getting bored!” 😉
Clannad After Story’s baseball episode was still cute, don’t get me wrong… but only because I really like the characters. The actual content of the episode was kinda boring, I thought.
-Tom
I have to disagree. Kuroshitsuji and Suteki Tantei are remarkably different. Of course there might be a convenient similarity that would make you think otherwise, but clumbsy maids have always been popular in anime and rich tea-drinking shouta boys are the usual bait for the sadistic antagonist or the creepy-ass ‘other’ main character. 1) Dunno what’s up with the gardeners, 2) Kuro has a useless chef *thumbs up*, and 3) butlers are becoming more popular nowadays in anime.
All in all, the Kuroshitsuji anime was absolutely terrible and it still is. It terrorizes me that they even announced a second season, which means they’re most likely going to shove it up Toboso Yana’s ass and do whatever the hell they want with their so called ‘storyline’. I recommend reading the manga. It makes SO much more sense than this angel vs. demon bullshit they threw in there just for teh lulz, I bet.
on kuroshitsuji the manga is definitely way waaaaay better, while the first few episodes came from the manga it got sidetracked more and more. the anime failed to highlight the background for “the cheese” and you won’t be able to call it cheese if you knew what really happened to the boy ciel.. well I’m not angry, just taking it out on this comment how the animation sucked ‘to the core’