Dansai Bunri no Crime Edge
Short Synopsis: Our lead character meets a cursed girl
One of the things that I’m looking for with these first impressions is good execution. A series that really puts in effort to show its story and brings its scenes in a compelling way, instead of always taking the lazy routes. Dansai Bunri no Crime Edge, the only series to be named after a pair of scissors, has that. No, seriously, this show is weird (it’s got this strange hair fetish…), but damn: the animation was really good at times. When characters are touching each other’s hair, the movement is really well detailed, and the artistic direction of the rest of the episode also was really, really good, despite the generic character-designs. What’s most important though, is that this first episode already had a big emotional response: it introduced its characters and got an entire story with introduction, beginning and end out of them, and it was really genuine somehow. I knew that this series would have strange themes, but it’s a surprise that the creators handled it so well here. Let’s hope that they can do this as well for the rest of the series!
Potential: 90%
Uta no Prince Sama – Maji Love 2000%
Short Synopsis: Our lead character is loved by half a dozen bishies.
The cheese! Oh dear lord, the cheese! This episode was so incredibly girly, and that is really weird when the total amount of girls in the cast of this series adds up to 2. I mean, I get that this is a romance show and all, but all of the bishies were basically like “Ooh, Female Lead is amazing!”, “I’m so glad that we get to live together!”, “I love that she will compose songs for us to sing!” – guys! Know some balance for god’s sake. This was just creepy on so many levels to see them swoon over her with such persistence. Beyond that though, the biggest flaw of this series is that it thinks that it can flesh out its cast through their designs, and not their actions. What I mean by that is a lot of detail has been spent on how the characters all look, and what their rooms look like; you know, crap that you might see in a teenaged magazine. But all of them act like complete stereotypes with just one or two traits, nothing more. I actually think that this is a pretty bad message to its audience. “Here you go girls, a ton of bishies you can choose from! They all look gorgeous and they have the personality of a cardboard box! Enjoy!” But yeah, this is a problem that more harem shows seem to have…
OP: Make it stop! MAKE IT STOP!
ED: Cheese! Tough it does have pretty pictures
Potential: 30%
Danbooru Senki Wars
Short Synopsis: Our lead character gets to pilot a big mecha.
I’m not going to review every single series this season (Train Heroes and Line Town were so bad that I couldn’t even finish them), but I might as well talk briefly about Danbooru Senki’s sequel. To be honest, I expected it to be total crap, but it did have flashes of potential, in its huge rendition of the real world that is meant to simulate wars. Somewhere beneath that some depth is hidden. The question however, is whether it will actually use this. This remains a Level 5 series, and the annoyances of their series also shine through here: the male lead is incredibly generic, it keeps shoehorning kids into places they don’t belong, and the action is just flat-out boring. It all just looks so generic, none of the characters made any impression beyond dull stereotypes and the way in which this is just a glorified toy commercial also doesn’t really help (the entire world is dedicated to these robot games? Please). I don’t see this worth checking out the tiny bit of potential that it has.
ED: Apparently the animation team wasn’t done yet…
Potential: 10%
Utapuri sounds awesome
…*cough*
…well, it’s not like my expectations are high? It ought to be some nice eye-candy entertainment to relax to, like the first season was.
…I’ll end up picking up over 20 series again, won’t I?
*finds herself watching date a live, turns it off before the end*
*Watches utapri, smiles*
..dammit! =P
Oh wow, I didn’t even realize that Gundam AGE and Inazuma Eleven were Level-5 properties. Maybe I need to level up my game (har har).
My conception of Level-5 was just Dark Cloud, Dragon Quest 8 and 9, Professor Layton series, and Guild01 (the last of which I’ve yet to touch).
There’s Level-5 and there’s the Level-5 Hino/Nagano children’s franchise monopoly. Professor Layton, Gundam AGE, Inazuma Eleven, Danball Senki, (and Youkai Watch too I think) are Hino’s children. They’re his stories. Things like Time Travelers or Cinderellife aren’t. And Nagano has done the character designs for Layton/AGE/InaEle/Youkai plus Fantasy Life.
So psgels’ experiences with Level-5 are pretty much the games Hino has been heavily involved with. Hino has issues with writing to say the least… His stories tend to be really fun regardless.
The first episode of Danball Senki Wars doesn’t have a proper OP or ED because it was first shown at ACE and thus no spoilers allowed.
They have an entire school and underground base dedicated to stimulating wars and training children so if another terrorist attack were to occur, they’d have an army to fight them. It’s super ridiculous, but the two prequels basically featured kids skilled at these toys fighting freaking terrorists with their LBXs. The tiny robots make lethal weapons. Ridiculously fun.
I tried to read the manga of Dansai(?) before and I forgot what it’s about. I remember long hair and scissors but I forgot the rest lol.
Oh god, Utapri 2000%…as in 2000% of cheese! Really, the reason I finished the first season was that I can’t take it seriously, and it really did cheer me up (because it’s so cheesy lol). The boys fawning over her were really funny. I guess that’s why I kept on watching it even if it’s ridiculous. But yeah, I’m just in for pinpointing and cracking up. Doesn’t make me think much. =.=
Is it me, or does the amount om truly bad shows seem to increase with each season? Thanks Psgels, for wading through the piles of crap for us.
It’s just you.
The Severing Crime Edge was one of those manga I’ve wanted to see an anime adaptation of for quite some time: based on the first episode, I think we got ourselves a winner. 😀
Dansi Bunri having a 90% potential….
holy shit, this season is going to be bad…
I liked Crime Edge too, but I wouldn’t call the execution great. It really didn’t tell the story well. I mean the grandfather telling the Male MC about the scissors came out of bloody nowhere. I’m not exactly sure how that conversation came to be.
And the fact that this is the director of Fate/Stay Night anime does nothing to quell my distrust. Other than that though, everything else was great.
“It’s just you.”
To expound, I guess most shows just don’t suit my tastes lately.
Crime Edge is a random wtf series, with terrible characters and oh the cheese, it’s so forced and constructed. This is slightly better than date a live. Still bullshit.
couldn’t agree more…
I haven’t seen all of Utapri’s first season, but it looked amusing enough to justify one viewing. It’s just so silly you have to kind of take it for what it is, besides a reverse-harem. It didn’t really take itself too seriously either, but as much as I love bishonen, even I had to step away from the rainbow of glam-rock hair for a bit.