Thank goodness the overall quality of this batch is better than the previous ones, with major thanks to Night Head Genesis for this. It’s great to see that for each bad show, there also is a good show during this season.
Night Head Genesis
Despite the cheesy title, this definitely is one of the better series to air this season, aside from Otogi Juushi Akazukin perhaps. Especially the first episode is beautiful. Two young brothers, both paranormally gifted, are shunned by everyone throughout their entire life. One of them can make things blow up when he’s angry, while the other can read people’s minds if he touches them. When the oldest one was about ten years old and the youngest five years old, they got separated from their parents, as they became too dangerous. Especially the reaction of the oldest brother when he found out about this was just too sad to see. Another MAJOR plus of this anime is the terrific music it features. The tunes are extremely simple, but I think it’s because they’re so simple that they work perfectly. I’m really recommending this show.
FLAG
This show already is extremely popular, after only its first episode got subbed. I think, however, it’s still a bit too early to label this show as good or bad, as the first episode was just one big introduction to the anime. The background story got explained, the characters introduced, but nothing really happened. I think that that’s up for the second episode. In any case, this anime tries to be as realistic and believable as possible. The story features around a small country, in the middle of civil war. A young photographer makes a picture which later turns into the symbol of peace. When the peace negotiations are threatened to get interrupted by extremists, this photographer gets sent back to this country, in order to report for a local army, which plans to fight the ones who oppose the peace. I’m not sure whether it was a good idea for the creators to include mechas for this army, when the anime clearly focuses at photography. Still, a lot of thought was put in the design of this mecha. For once, things actually made a bit sense, as the creators tried to show how the mecha works from the inside. It’s better than the usual techno babble we see in most mecha-shows.
Mamotte Lollipop
Okay. This is just stupid. Not necessarily in a bad way, but unfortunately not in a good way either. It’s definitely the shoujo-series, from beginning to end. The story’s like this: our main character’s dreamguy is someone who protects her from anything bad coming her way. What does she get? Not one, but *gasp* two pretty bishounen who protect her from anything bad coming her way. All because she swallowed a magical pearl they need in order to succeed for their magical exams. If we ignore the very unorthodox final exam the magical world features, the anime’s decent. Some funny jokes are made, some of the characters are interesting, but overall, it doesn’t really add anything new. It seems that the entire show will be focused around these two guys, protecting the girl. I’m not planning to follow this one, as I doubt that I can endure more of the same for twelve more episodes. Still, the flying car was hilarious.
