My anime reviews

[Hicks]

Whelp! As I've gone through and put together the direct links for my reviews, I've noticed a few things. Not only did I post a few reviews more than once, but I also managed to skip over a few. So, rather than post them over the course of a few days, I've decided instead to post them all at once.

Incoming!

[Hicks]

Dirty Pair

(26 episode series)

This series is basically your average '80s buddy cop show mixed with Charlie's Angels. In fact, the title pair of women actually call themselves the Lovely Angels. Despite being the show's excuse for almost constant fan service, the two women actually do prove to be quite intelligent and quite capable. The problem is that they tend to go a bit overboard at times, and even if they don't mean to, they tend to cause a massive amount of damage for a good chunk of the jobs they do, hence the "Dirty Pair" nickname they are more commonly known by, much to their chagrin. This is the basis of most of the comedy in the series, which really doesn't take itself seriously at all. Not even when they accidentally blow up an entire planet.

The series is very episodic in nature, and there was only one story which apparently turned out to be long enough to split between two episodes. The missions the Lovely Angels go on tend to be very random, and each episode isn't always ended in a very conclusive manner – we're just supposed to accept that they made it out of whatever situation they were in at the end of a given episode. Like in one episode they rescued a bunch of engineers being held in a prison. The engineers made it out okay, but the Lovely Angels missed their ride and the episode literally ended with the two of them blasting away at all the guards from the top of a prison wall. It wasn't even a real job and was set up by Kei, the red-haired Angel as a favor for Yuri, the dark-haired Angel, because she believed an old flame was one of the engineers being held. Naturally, in the next episode, everything was normal and it was just the usual banter between the Angels' boss and the pair before being sent on their next mission. This isn't a bad thing necessarily, but this should give you an idea of what you're getting into as far as the story goes, because there is no overall plot for the series.

Actually in some ways there's a little similarity to Excel Saga in that there are some occasional in-jokes that show up during an episode depending on what the theme of an episode is. For instance, in a treasure-hunting episode, the Angels are trapped in an ancient booby trap and at one point a skeleton dressed like Indiana Jones and impaled on a set of spikes just like out of one of those movies briefly appears. In another episode, a model of the original Enterprise briefly appears on screen.

I can see why this series is considered a classic by some, and to be fair, it hasn't aged all that poorly from what I can tell. It isn't what I would really consider a good series, though. Don’t get me wrong, it isn't really bad either, it's just that at times it can get a bit boring. It might not be so bad if all one ever saw was one episode a week, but since I tend to watch series and OVAs all at once, random episodes of the week can actually get a bit repetitive when viewed back to back. And that's my biggest complaint when it comes to this series. The other, much more minor complaint is that a disproportionally large amount of humor seems to be derived from the Angels being sluts. Which is to say it doesn't bother me all that terribly much, but having them constantly go one about how they have so many boyfriends or how they hope men they work with or even men they are sent after to capture are young and attractive got old very fast. On the plus side, when the random male douches show up and try to force themselves on them, the Angels tend to beat the crap out of them instead of being helpless. Actually, when they get captured, which doesn't happen a whole lot, they tend to be able to get out of it on their own instead of relying on others to rescue them. Of course they are supposed to be the protagonists, so that helps.

Oh, and despite one of them being actually named Yuri, if you're thinking that the two of them might be partners in more than one way, I'm just going to disappoint you now. Actually, for that matter, most of the fan service consists of them being in their normal revealing outfits, or a towel immediately after a shower with the usual discretion shots you'd expect of something that aired on TV. So being the pervert I am, that was something of disappointment for me, too. What? You've got your tastes and I have mine. So what if I like seeing cartoon boobs? (BTW, watch episode 24 if you're into that kind of thing too. )

Anyway, the series managed to have just enough charm to keep me watching through the whole thing. After about six episodes, I was tempted to just skip to the last two, which apparently never aired originally on TV with the rest of the series, but was instead released on DVD as part of it. To be honest they aren’t much to talk about. The characters were a likable kind of goofy, and their "pets" tended to be kind of interesting too. One was a small robot that sounded a little like a dog's chew toy, and the other was a giant genetically engineered cat that actually looked more like a bear. They were also somewhat capable and competent, although the cat was a wuss, but they also did double duty as the comedy relief of the comedy series. Overall, this was an okay series. I'm not sure if I'd really recommend it, but if you liked Excel Saga there's a chance you might like this, too, even though it isn't nearly as over the top. 6/10.

[Hicks]

Dirty Pair: Affair on Nolandia

(single episode OVA)

If you've seen the series, this OVA sequel is pretty much just more of the same. About the only new thing about it is that it has an English dub available, and that the giant cat, Mughi, has changed colors. Also both Mughi and Nammo, the title characters' pet robot, don't play nearly as much of a role as they did in the series. Oh, and the Lovely Angels have a new ship, apparently.

The story focuses almost entirely on the Lovely Angels and their antics once they've been assigned to a case. Of course it might only seem to be a bit more than usual because this OVA is longer than a standard episode despite following essentially the same format. Basically, something odd happens and the Lovely Angels are called up by their boss to resolve the situation. We don't really see the boss this time, and the Angels are already on the way to the planet of the week. In this case we have two seemingly unrelated situations developing, namely that a woman the Lovely Angels were hired to help out has been killed and her daughter has gone missing, and a space plane has crashed on landing due to some kind of telepathic interference from a little girl. It really isn't all that hard to figure out that the little telepathic girl and the missing daughter are one and the same. From there the pair goes through the typical difficulty with corrupt local officials while being helped out by some honest ones. In this case, though, the mission, which looked to be successful, actually ends in failure, with everyone on the planet being killed. In this particular case, only a large plateau area of the planet was habitable, and the telepathic girl had a hand in basically killing everyone by collapsing the plateau. The Angels even deliberate a bit somberly for all of a few minutes as to whether this instance of mass deaths was their fault or not. And then the OVA ends with the typical light mood that really isn't all that appropriate considering what just happened.

The characters are the same as in the series. The Lovely Angels are still the same shallow yet capable women. On the plus side, there's a bit more in way of fan service in this OVA, so hurray for OVAs.

As for the dub vs. sub, really it's just going to be a matter of taste. From what I understand, the same actresses portrayed Yuri and Kei for everything except the latest reboot of the franchise. I just happen to prefer not having to read subtitles while I'm watching. That being said, the dub isn't really bad, but it does sound a bit awkward and unnatural in places.

Overall, I feel very indifferent about this OVA. You could probably go without seeing it unless you're just desperate for the full Dirty Pair experience or something. 5/10.

[Hicks]

Dirty Pair: Project Eden

(1986 movie)

Being an actual movie and all, one might hope for an increase in animation quality and maybe even a somewhat more involved storyline. Well, do not look to hope, it has forsaken this movie. Now the animation isn't horrible or anything and neither is the story exactly, it's just that everything is pretty much on par with the original TV series. What that translates into for this movie is a long drawn out storyline that actually made it a little difficult to remember what the Lovely Angels were originally sent to do when the movie was finally getting close to being over. The movie tried to make up for this a little by filling up time with musical action sequences, some of which were in slow motion and none of which had any dialog. Basically it was like someone had made some AMVs and stuck them in the middle of the movie.

As for that actual story, it revolved entirely around some strange lizard creatures attacking some kind of unobtanium plants, killing everyone in sight, and running off with the unobtanium. There are two main factions on this planet, one of which is capitalist and the other communist, and both sides are convinced the other is behind these destructive attacks. The Angels are sent in to figure out what's going on. It doesn't take that long for the movie to reveal that some mad scientist type is behind it all, apparently seeking some kind of next stage in evolution or some crap along those lines. These creatures are basically the result of him zapping some kind of a fossil with a weird-looking vagina eye energy ray.

While the Angels take a brief side trip to one of the factories that had been ruined in one of these creature attacks, they meet a thief who very obviously is also supposed to double as a love interest. Naturally this happens when the Angels are taking a bath, since there were conveniently a couple of tubs available right next to each other in some completely ruined room whish also apparently had hot running water available to them. As you might expect, our thief/love interest, Carson D. Carson, falls into the tubs, both of them. He even manages to feel Kei up. And for me, this is where mediocre started to go downhill, because from this point on the Angels suddenly aren't as capable as they always otherwise have been, basically just so this thief can prove his worth to the Angels. It's a classic example of making one character look better at the expense of others. They also do that whole love/hate thing between Kei and Carson, where the two act like they don't like each other even though it's really obvious that they're supposed to have a thing for each other.

As it turns out, Carson is looking to get back at the mad scientist and his butler for stealing some very rare wine which he stole himself fair and square. The movie then quickly becomes a fight between the mad scientist, his butler, and the lizard creatures against Carson and the Angels, which is why it became somewhat difficult to remember why the Angels were even there to begin with. The movie, being oh so stereotypical in pretty much every way imaginable, manages to have its cake and eat it too by having Carson not only make the heroic sacrifice, but live through it so he and Kei can get their kinky thing on. Of course, this wouldn't be an episode of angels without things ending in disaster, so the movie ends with the Angels having unwittingly unleash a ton of those lizard creatures on the entire planet.

When it comes to the characters, there really isn't a lot to say. The Angels are pretty much the same as in their previous outings, except that in this movie they become somewhat less capable after Carson shows up. Mughi is the only other character from the original series to show up in this movie, and his role is very limited. Nammo didn't even turn up at all, which disappointed me a little because I always liked her better than Mughi anyway. Carson is a very stereotypical sympathetic thief archtype who we're just supposed to like. I have to admit that I liked some of his responses to the Angels, but otherwise he was somewhat boring.

As for the fan service, well, it's pretty much like the TV series, which is again disappointing if you're a perv like I am. Pretty much all of it was the teasing type that didn't really allow you to see anything, except for the very Bond movie-like opening and one scene where Yuri gets her makeshift shorts torn. To make things worse, there is plenty of fan dis-service, mostly from the lizard creatures. The thing about them is that their long neck and lack of a distinct head was somewhat phallic-like, which wasn't helped much by their tendency to spew some kind of white sticky substance from their mouths. Later versions of these creatures all had some nice racks and asses, but with the typical anime anatomy, though in this case it wasn't a bad thing. Aside from being lizard creatures, they also lacked a typical head, and had something resembling a head nestled where the breast bone would normally be on a human, though their mouths were where the neck would normally be.

I don't hate this movie exactly, and I don’t even regret seeing it, it's just that it's not an experience I ever intend to repeat. I can honestly say that this is the worst outing of the Dirty Pair franchise that I've seen to this point. The only fun to really be had in watching it is in how very riffable this movie is. 3/10.

[Hicks]

Dirty Pair

(10 episode OVA)

While this OVA is listed as a sequel to the original series, with all the differences from the series, I'd say that this is closer to a reboot. The 3WA building is different, a new ship, and a distinct lack of Nammo highlight the main differences. Other than that, it tries to be very much in the spirit of the original series, with the two lovely Angels, Kei and Yuri, going on random missions every week while trading the usual shallow jibes at each other. It also tries to be funny, but most of the time it doesn't succeed.

I'd honestly compare this OVA to the Slayers series that I saw recently. It has lousy voice acting that accounts for most of the laughs to be had while watching it, and while at times it seems like it's intended for a more mature audience, most of the time it comes off as a lame Saturday morning cartoon aimed at kids. The vast majority of the humor also comes off as forced, and I honestly feel that while the series wasn't exactly all that great itself, it certainly had a kind of charm that this OVA lacks. It also actually managed to be funny from time to time on purpose. Just as an example, in the series the Angels managed to destroy a planet completely by accident and through no real fault of their own, and this was actually somewhat funny. In this OVA, the Angels destroy no less than two planets and it manages to not be funny at all, even though the OVA was trying to play it up as funny. Of course at its start, the OVA also really tried to play up the James Bond aspect of the series by featuring a Dr. Q who comes up with random spy weapons which usually fail to work properly. Again this was supposed to be funny but just wasn't.

This OVA is boring and very skippable, and I recommend that you do exactly that. 0/10.

[Hicks]

Dirty Pair: Flight 005 Conspiracy

(single episode OVA)

After watching the other OVAs and the movie, this OVA is like a breath of fresh air. While it seems to be a continuation of the 10 episode OVA, it isn't nearly as corny, except in the beginning when the Lovely Angels, Kei and Yuri, are getting their traditional beginning of the episode briefing. Once again the joke is supposed to be how horrible the "Dirty Pair" are, though in this case their boss and the Angels almost seem like they aren't all that familiar with each other. In any case, the joke, which wasn't really all that funny, ends up falling flat because the way the story unfolds, the Angels are shown to be competent and the destruction of a large military station is the fault of a person they rescued, not their own. And for once this isn't really played for laughs either. Actually, outside from some comedy relief early in the OVA, this outing is a lot more serious in tone than pretty much any of the other Dirty Pair animes I've seen.

The story itself seems to be a bit of a rip-off from the only two-part episode from the original series. A space liner explodes and while it was supposed to have been fully loaded, there is no crew or passenger manifest available, and either no one on board had anyone to miss them, or all of their families for whatever reason never bothered to file any kind of legal or civil action as a result of the "accident." The Angels are sent to investigate both this, and the disappearance of a scientist and his family, and as you might guess the two incidents are connected. Where this becomes a bit of a rip off of a previous episode is that it turns out that no one was aboard the liner to begin with. That aspect aside, the story actually was marginally interesting, with the Angels investigating and people trying to kill them almost every step of the way. Oh, and as an added bonus, there are space Nazis.

Naturally the Angels manage to successfully complete their mission, and while there ends up being a significant amount of collateral damage and loss of life, as I mentioned before, this isn't played for laughs. Actually this outing seems more like a traditional space opera than the light-hearted girls with guns action comedy that it's always tried to be. I'm not saying this is a negative thing exactly, but I am noting the difference in tone from the rest of the franchise that I've seen up to this point. The ending actually underlines this difference because while usually an episode would end on a light note, even if it wasn't entirely appropriate, this time the Angels lamented the loss of people who had helped them along the way while the people they'd rescued mourned the loss of a loved one who had died to save them.

There isn't a whole lot to be said about the characters in this one. The Angels' boss is seen only in the beginning, and he's pretty much the same angry police chief stereotype that he's always been. The Angels start out about the same as they've always been as well, teasing each other and going on about men they find attractive. Of course even early on there were some differences I noted, like Yuri being more of a wuss and the Angels not getting nearly as upset about their "Dirty Pair" nickname as in the series. As the story progressed, they became a lot more serious themselves, and stopped taking the usual gibes at each other. There also wasn't nearly as much of the usual fan service from the Angels or any of the other characters.

I wouldn't say this OVA was especially good or anything, but it was definitely an improvement over the other OVAs and the movie. It might be worth watching if you liked the series. 5/10.

[Hicks]

Dirty Pair Flash

(16 episode OVA)

This is probably a great example of what a bad reboot looks like. Reboots are pretty much just an excuse to take a basic concept but change details, and that's exactly what happened here. This isn't always a bad thing, and in a lot of cases the reboot can actually be better than the original. This isn't one of those cases.

On the surface, making Kei and Yuri hate each other at first isn't really a bad idea per say, especially in light of the comedic nature of this anime. It isn't even all that far off from the way the original characters tended to trade barbs occasionally. But this, like so many other things in this reboot, are amped up to eleven, and manage to not actually be funny. It also doesn't help that they used some voice actresses with some of the most annoying voices to play the main characters, because a joke that might have actually managed to get a chuckle becomes irritating when told by a voice that sounds like nails on a chalkboard. Actually the fan service is probably the thing I found most amusing. You know, the standard stuff. Like Yuri being in a sailor outfit when she's first introduced, and their clothes being torn to just a few gravity and physics defying shreds that manage to just barely hide the bits they aren't going to bother drawing in anyway, which we actually get to see thanks to the magical girl transformation sequence which dissolves their clothing and forms new fan service outfits over their naked bodies. Don't worry, no nipples to traumatize us with. I do kind of like how they had their cake and ate it too, though, because not only did they get the transformation sequence, but they lampshaded it by having a group of dirty old men enjoy the stripperific display. Of course the somewhat disturbing thing is that both Angels are actually 17, which would make them both under-aged, which is a little worse seeing as how Yuri is obviously supposed to be a slut. Okay, they aren't that under-aged, but still, oh Japan...

Gone is the very episodic nature of the original series. Which is to say that while there is more than one unrelated mission, they stretch out over several episodes, and they'd only make sense in sequential order since the OVA follows all the team-forming stages the Lovely Angels go through, even if the "storming" stage tends to stretch on somewhat indefinitely. Somewhat unfortunately, also gone is the level of competence the Lovely Angels had in the original series, and as a result their "Dirty Pair" nickname is somewhat more deserved.

Another area this anime suffers is in animation quality. Normally this isn't a huge deal for me, but in this case the quality is noticeably worse than the original, which came out a decade earlier in the mid-80s. I'd actually make the comparison to Slayers again.

So to sum it up, The stories and characters aren't particularly interesting, the comedy isn't all that funny, and the animation quality is pretty bad. It does manage to revive some of the spirit of the original series, but really it has a lot more negative about it than positive. To be honest, after the halfway-point of the series I basically just started skipping through the rest of them because I started to get bored. 1/10.

[Hicks]

Golden Boy

(6 episode OVA)

This is something of a guilty pleasure of mine, simply owing to the fact that I happen to be a pervert, though not as big of a pervert as Kintaro Oe, the main character of this show. While I can definitely understand his obsession with the female form, I have to say that the toilet fetish is definitely something I don't, even if I do still find his kinks hilarious. And that being said, this anime definitely isn't for everyone, because it makes other sex comedies look absolutely charming by comparison.

Basically the whole point of this OVA is to follow Kintaro around on his adventures as a "student of the world", going around getting some random job each episode despite the fact he would have a law degree if only he applied to graduate. His goal is to learn as much from life as possible, which is why he does this. He'll also scribble down any random bits of knowledge he finds "very educational" in a little notebook he has, often right next to sketches he makes of the various good-looking women he encounters. His mantra is to, "STUDY STUDY STUDY STUDY!" He's also pretty much just a clumsy, socially awkward, mostly inept, perverted idiot who tends to massively screw something up during the job he happens to have during a given episode, only to be revealed to have somehow done something really good during his time there, or as in the first episode completely make-up for it by basically doing something impossible. You wouldn't guess that he's actually quite intelligent and capable from how he looks or how he acts, but at the same time, I personally didn't really care because I was too busy laughing my ass off.

Now, I've seen other reviews that tend to give this OVA a hard time due to its heavy use of clichés and the crude nature of it humor, but to me the humor is just hilarious, and the clichés are a big part of that. If anything, this OVA makes fun of the kind of fan service and awkward romantic buffoonery one might see in other anime that's actually playing everything completely straight and completely seriously and just cranks it all up to eleven. Take, for instance, breast physics. I've poked fun of this kind of thing before in shows like Divergence Eve, where breasts will jiggle about at even the slightest movement of a female character, but here they not only do that, but they make it obvious that they're making fun of it during certain scenes where Kintaro is being verbally ripped to shreds by a female character like Madam President. This is where the clichés come in, and why the woman he ends up helping in each episode tends to be a different cliché. Madam President is the stereotypical Ms. Fanservice, wearing skimpy clothing everywhere, including to her office job as a software developer. In another episode, there's a stereotypical manipulative school girl who likes to play innocent to her father (the Japanese TR) and get various men into trouble. Kintaro naturally calls out all these stereotypes for comedic effect, so I can't really understand complains about clichés and stereotypes because that's pretty much the point of the show. If you’re looking for something that takes itself even remotely seriously, this is not the show for you.

Everything from each episode ends up with Kintaro not only proving himself, but usually with the end result of the woman he helps each week wanting him. This all leads up to the last episode, where Kintaro finds himself working at an animation studio, and ends up calling in favors from all of the women he's helped. Then, as with all the other episodes, he disappears and leaves all the women to chase after him.

So you could definitely say I found this OVA very entertaining, and in fact my local anime club has made it something of a tradition to show it once a year during finals week of spring semester. It's something you can turn your brain off for and just enjoy the hell out of. It has some very perverted humor to go along with everything else it makes fun of, so don’t watch this and then complain about how crude it is.

, have a look. And this.

. So, with the full knowledge of what you'd be getting yourself into, I would definitely recommend this OVA. Actually, you could probably watch all of it on

. 9/10.

[someonenonotyou]

Oh wow this is so helpful thanks for all the reviews i have been looking for some good anime reviews

[Hicks]

Shiny, glad I could help. :cool:

[Myrodis19]

When can we expect more reviews from you man?

[Hicks]

:shrug: Don't know. Next on my review list are 2001, 2010 and Shotgun, so whenever I get that done and start watching anime again.

[Hicks]

High School of the Dead: Drifters of the Dead

(single episode OVA)

Well, being the nerd that I am, I just had to watch this follow-up to the series. And this is going to be a short review, because there isn't all that much to say about it. You know how in the series review I mentioned that this could have been a serviceable zombie apocalypse story if it weren't for all the fan service and mood-swing-ish comedy? Yeah, the OVA has given up any pretense of doing even a semi-serious zombie story.

I guess the people who made this decided there just wasn't enough fan service yet, so they decided to throw in a beach episode for the hell of it, as this OVA is just an excuse to get everyone into bathing suits and to frolic together. Oh, that and since this is an OVA they finally drew in some nipples. Still, not much to write home about. Then, of course, there's the reinforced misogyny in the form of all the women pressuring the two male characters into searching for food, just so they have an excuse to play around on the beach and have fun. This is made even better by the fact that when the main protagonist (at least of the series), Takashi Komuro, fails to get anything, the same chick who was basically in charge of getting all the girls out of work gives him crap about it. The OVA tried to say this was funny, but I wasn't amused. But hey, there was fan service, so I guess I wasn't supposed to notice. Naturally the fat nerd character that the audience is no doubt supposed to identify with is the one who gets everyone food.

The expected demographic.

No one gets a chance to eat, though, as the perfect time has come for more fan service. This time, everyone gets to hallucinate so everyone has a chance to make out and/or have sex with each other. Everyone apparently sees their own ideal partner, with the nurse seeing her girlfriend, and the angry aggressive chick seeing her mom. Yeah... And if that wasn't fun enough, it's implied that Takashi made it with a zombie when he thought he was doing it with the psycho chick who got off on the violence during the series. At least they show him managing to keep several bikini-clad zombies at bay while still hallucinating that it's the group of women he's with.

Of course, this OVA just admits that it isn't even trying anymore by expositing all the "important" information at the beginning and end of the OVA, with the characters even hanging the lampshade about it. As you might guess, I'm not going to go easy on it. And before anyone asks why I bothered watching it – to make fun of it. It's not that I was expecting much out of it or anything, and as an added bonus it's only about 16 minutes long, about 3-4 minutes of which is the opening theme. I did kind of think there might be some semblance of story, though, kind of like the series, but nope. 1/10.

[Hicks]

Moonlight Mile

Season 2: Touch Down

(14 episodes)

This series left me feeling frustrated, because while it definitely improved in terms of both writing and maturity, it still ended unresolved, and just as I was really starting to like it, too. Cuss words! You have no idea how much I hate it when a series does this.

This season picks up right where the last one left off, though it was nice enough to do a "previously on..." montage just to refresh my memory. Just to refresh yours, this series follows two main characters, a Japanese man named Goro and an American named Lostman. The two of them climbed all of the world's highest peaks together and on the summit of Everest they decided that they both wanted to climb even higher, by going to the moon. They both did this in an extremely roundabout way, Goro becoming a notable construction worker and Lostman becoming a notable Naval pilot. So by the end of season 1, both were in orbit with plans to head to the moon – Goro through the International Space Agency's project being constructed from the International Space Station, and Lostman through a secret military base run by a secret branch of the US military. The other notable thing about the show is that it was basically an excuse for Goro to get laid every episode, and for use to see how good at drawing breasts Studio Hibari is. Which is to say that they're pretty good, but I think they should seek other reference material since most of them looked porn star fake.

In any case, I was just interested enough to seek out the second season of this show, due largely in part to the unresolved storyline. Just as I suspected, the first season was just the set-up, but then the season titles probably should've tipped me off. The thing that took me by surprise, though, was that the second season was actually a lot better than the first. The writing was better, the story was more in depth, there was actually a little character development here and there, and best of all, the show even matured a little, so it wasn't basically Golden Boy in space. Oh, there was still fan service, but it was definitely cut back on, and it was to the show's benefit that it could concentrate more on the whole "going to the moon" storyline instead of just making weak excuses to get Goro laid.

There were still a few drawbacks, mainly coming from the insistence of the show that the vast majority of Americans are assholes. For instance, there was this Arab kid who helped to save Lostman as a POW back during the first season, and we get to see how he's doing in the US. While I could see the government giving him some grief being a recent immigrant from the MidEast and gathering up a bunch of rocket parts, not a lot else makes sense as far as the racism the kid faces from basically everyone. And really, at every point the show makes a point of showing Americans to be complete assholes, so that didn't earn it any points there. And while there are plenty of assholes in every country, and I've met my fair share of them from both the US and Canada, it's not nearly as bad as this show made it out to be. And this is coming from someone who tends to hate people in general. But there's plenty of anime that seems to have someone with an axe to grind when it comes to the US, so I try not to take it too personally.

The other major weak point of this series is actually the characters, though this is more a case of "too much" than any real lack of trying. The problem here was more that there were simply too many characters for any of them to get much of a chance to be more interesting than just some random extra with a name. While I like ensemble casts, this show only really got half-way with that. Unfortunately the show also picked up something of a spokesperson in the form of Maggy, a somewhat obnoxious young woman, at least in front of the camera. Apparently she's the host of a show that's all about selling the ISA's moon project to the public, and she just happened to take the form of an obnoxious, somewhat moe Japanese hostess despite not being Japanese. She even goes into space. Thankfully, the astronauts reacted the way most normal human beings would when exposed to moe.

Fortunately she gets better, for the most part. She's actually shown to be somewhat more normal when she's not on camera, and she even tones it down a couple of notches when she's in front of it not long after she gets into space. Of course this is also after she's revealed to be close to 30 and an aspiring journalist, so I guess they thought she should be a bit more serious to actually reflect that.

As for the story, big improvement over the first season, mostly because it's a lot more focused now. The ISA's heavily involved in colonizing the moon in order to exploit it. Just like in the movie Moon, they're after Helium-3 as a power source. So this multi-national project is named Project Nexus, and it's being pushed especially hard by the US. Since the last season, the ISA has been dropping crates full of supplies and building materials for the future moon base, and the first half of this season is mostly about building the Galileo, a large spaceship meant to take a dozen astronauts and even more supplies and building materials to the moon so they can start construction of the base. Naturally, pretty much everything that can go wrong does, and just as the new big ship is finished and the crew selected, a massive debris field messes the ISS up with everyone on it, and they lose several astronauts. They also mess up the space shuttle that is the only remaining means of getting back to Earth's surface, as the evac shuttles had been deployed earlier thanks to the most massive solar flare in recorded history. So, with the Galileo miraculously undamaged, everyone who's left (coincidentally 12) heads to the moon, including the obnoxious TV hostess.

Meanwhile, the other big element of the story is all the politicking going on. China isn't having any part in Project Nexus because they want to have control over the distribution of Helium-3. So to start things off, they launch what is initially believed to be an anti-satellite satellite, but what turns out to be two space fighters. Good thing the United States Space Force (*snicker*) already has its own fighters. Unfortunately for them, the Chinese space fighters are a fairly even match for them, which is why there's a ton of debris that messes up the ISS. Next China builds its own space station, and then quickly announces its existence in order to prevent the US from adding even more debris to Earth's orbit.

Unfortunately, while everything just kept building up, it became obvious in the last few episodes that most of these plot elements were going to go unresolved. And just as it was getting interesting, too. Hell, they'd even come full circle and actually showed what lead up to the opening scene of the series, though it didn't really make any more sense, unfortunately. Presumably since this series was based on a manga, they'd simply run out of material to adapt to screen, and had to stop. Or maybe the show just got non-renewed. Or both. But, just as with Zipang, whatever the reason this show had to just stop mid-stream like this, it's still disappointing. I suppose that's actually a mark in this show's favor, simply because it was interesting enough for me to actually care about what would happen next. This show was not only interesting, but it managed to hit some of the right notes in order to resonate with me during a few episodes. That pioneering feeling that goes with space exploration and all that, not to mention an episode that ripped off October Sky (they even called it "The Rocket Boys"). So I guess you could say this was something of a double-edged sword, and you should really be aware of that if you think this show sounds interesting and you decide to watch it.

Overall, this was a fairly decent series and I think it was worth the trouble I went through to find a fansub of season 2, since apparently no one has bothered to pick it up yet on this side of the Pacific. 8/10.

[Hicks]

Shiki

(24 + 2 episode series)

This series was both good and somewhat disappointing. It was good in that it had an interesting story and somewhat interesting characters which kept me watching, but disappointing in how the majority of those characters reacted to what went on around them, as well as in how the series ultimately ended.

This story is a little like Higurashi in that it takes place in a small, geographically isolated village, and that a lot of bad things happen to good people. In this case, ironically enough (on purpose, no doubt), Sotoba is a quiet little village that is famous for having a certain type of tree that gets used a lot to make grave markers and coffins. Also like Higurashi, rather than taking place in modern day, it takes place at some point in the past, in this case the 1990's. That's about where the similarities end, though, aside from having some little children which turn out to be evil because of what happens to them. There are no time-loops or take-backs, though, just a lot of dead people.

This series has something of an ensemble cast, but focuses mainly on three characters: Natsuno, a high school boy who's also a prick, Dr. Ozaki, dean of the small hospital in Sotoba, and his friend since childhood, Seishin, a local junior priest who also writes novels on the side. The story starts soon after an old traditional mansion on one of the local hills was torn down and replaced with a western-style castle. No, really, a castle.

Nothing forbidding about this at all.

It was built by a family of rich outsiders, who also move in during the middle of the night, rather rudely awakening some people so they can ask directions. Still, all most people complain about is how the castle doesn't really fit in with the rest of the village, and how the new people pretty much keep to themselves and otherwise act so strangely.

Shortly before their arrival, there had been a number of strange deaths which left an isolated part of the village, which is spread out over a valley, completely vacant. Then, soon after they arrived, the local moe blob who thinks she's destined for greater things, goes missing after approaching the castle and is found to be in a strange lethargic state. Soon afterwards, she dies. While I was hoping this would be a permanent death and the story would be done with her, this series is actually about vampires, as you might have guessed what with the castle and all that. It seems this "family" of vampires, the Kirishikis, has decided that Sotoba would make the perfect place make a safe haven for their kind, and soon set about feeding upon the locals. Unlike most vampire movies, it takes several feedings to kill a victim, who even then might not necessarily reawaken as a vampire. Pretty much all the other movie myths are shown to be right, though, and as an added bonus these vampires are not like the fangirl fap material that Anne Rice novels and the Twilight movies have made them into more recently.

So initially, no one knows what is going on, except of course that an unusual number of people seem to be getting sick and dying. Dr. Ozaki initially thinks he has some kind of epidemic on his hands, and gets pretty stressed out trying to figure out what it is and how to combat it all while trying to keep it a secret so people don’t panic and possibly spread it further. To complicate matters, the people who are sick insist they are simply fighting off a summer cold and refuse to be treated. This is because while a single feeding isn't enough to turn someone into a vampire, just being bitten means they can be hypnotized by the vampires to do and say whatever they wish. This actually made for a pretty gripping story, even though the audience is fully aware of what's going on even as the characters struggle against what they think is an epidemic of some kind. It actually takes a while for the bites to be seen, and even then these are taken to be insect bites and therefore a possible vector.

In the meantime, Natsuno has been getting the feeling that the moe blob who liked to dress like a slut and had a creepy stalker crush on him, is still stalking him from the bushes outside of his window. He reacts by hanging out at basically his only friend's house, sleeping over there at night to avoid feeling like he's being watched, and having strange dreams. Unfortunately for him his stalker follows him and takes her frustration out on his friend, who soon dies. I'd feel sorry for him and all, but he is an asshole and I never took a liking to him. I'm not sure if the audience was supposed to find him all "stoic" and therefore admirable, but I just thought he was a jerk. However, he is the first to figure out what's going on, since he basically witnesses his stalker come into the room and feed on his friend, though at first he thinks this is nothing but a dream. It also kind of comes back on him, too, because his family is from the city, so while Natsuno figures out what is happening and his best friend comes back to feed on him, his father undoes everything he does to try to protect himself.

While Natsuno is feeling watched, Seishin is likewise being stalked, but this time by a little girl who follows him out to his secret hideout in the woods, a small church. He at first thinks she's just a strange little girl, but she keeps dropping hints that she isn't quite normal and is actually much older than she says she is. She's also a fangirl for him, and has totally read all of his books.

Isn't she just the cutest little killer you ever saw?

While I think Seishin had an inkling (and who wouldn’t with eyes like that), he only really accepts it when Dr. Ozaki also starts to figure things out and asks his old friend to help him keep watch on a patient overnight, because he's convinced she's being fed upon. This is when both of them see a local woman who they both knew to be dead, hovering outside of the second story window of the patient's room, asking to be let in so she can feed. The two of them naturally resolve to save this woman, but the next night the vampires conduct an overt attack on the clinic, which unfortunately only Dr. Ozaki and Seishin are around to witness. They all attack the patient and kill her, but leave the doctor and the junior priest for now, basically telling them to back off or the same will happen to them. And this is where the two characters react differently. Seishin is a pacifist, so he elects to basically do nothing, and is disgusted at Ozaki for suggesting that they capture one of the vampires so he can conduct tests on them.

And really, this is where the show tries to get all moralistic and argue something that really doesn't make much sense to me. Basically, it tries to humanize the vampires by having them argue that they didn't exactly ask to be vampires, which is a valid point, but they then go on to argue that since they have to feed to stay alive, humans are no different than animals to them. This is not a valid argument, even though it's one that PETA tries to argue all the time. The difference is that humans are sentient beings, and animals are not. The vampires also refuse to seek any alternative solution which wouldn't require them killing human beings to feed. This makes them a threat, and frankly I don't have much sympathy for them, despite the show's best attempts to play up the tragedy of the vampires. It's true that some of them met tragic ends, and this is especially the case for the vampires who then go on to refuse to feed on anyone. But where I lose sympathy is when they try to use this tragedy as an excuse to kill others, who either stay dead, or are reborn into the same living hell.

Since both Natsuno and Dr. Ozaki have determined that they will try to fight the vampires, the vampires have decided to kill or otherwise punish the two of them. Natsuno is the most proactive and is actually recruiting some of the other students who agree with him, so they take him out first. Just to drive this home, they send his friend to do it, and while he initially doesn't seem like he can go through with it, despite threats from the other vampires against his family, he does go through with it. Luckily for Natsuno, he doesn't either die or turn into a normal vampire. Instead, he turns into a werewolf, though here a werewolf is basically what Blade is in that franchise – he has none of the weaknesses of the other vampires, and all of their strengths, or at least he would if he fed on humans. The Kirishikis also have a couple of werewolves in their employ, who basically have been doing all of the dirty work for them, so that plays out somewhat interestingly.

When it came to Dr. Ozaki, however, they decided to punish him by feeding on his wife. This was a rather stupid move on their part, because as it turns out, Dr. Ozaki is despicably pragmatic, so his reaction is to let them kill his wife, so he can them watch to see if she rises, and then conducts a series of experiments on her in order to figure out how to kill the vampires. So basically he tortures his own wife to death. And while the cold, calculating part of myself kind of agrees with what he did, I also agree with his friend Seishin, who was just disgusted at what he had done, and how unapologetic he was about it. But while Ozaki now fully knows what he's up against, he then goes on to do nothing. While he had all of this evidence he could have sent to the outside world while that was still possible, he didn't, so when he was finally bitten by one of the Kirishikis, he ends up destroying most of this evidence under her hypnotic control.

Really, things only came together at a point when I was just about to give up on this series out of disgust. And while the bad guys winning doesn't necessarily turn me off to a show by itself, in this case I was getting fed up because no one who knew what was going on was really doing anything about it. It was getting to a point that I felt that the people of this village deserved what was happening to them since they refused to do anything about it. Hell, Seishin actually goes to live with the Kirishikis, which is supposed to be him "accepting" them for what they were.

Thankfully, things finally happened. As it turned out, Natsuno had planned on this happening along with Dr. Ozaki, who manages to self-treat himself with a blood transfusion so he can free himself from the hypnosis he's under. He then fools his attacker into thinking he's still under her control, and convinces her into checking out a festival the village is throwing that night at the local temple. As it turns out, the shrine actually weakens her, and Ozaki uses this to out her in front of what's left of the village, who then resolve to kill all of the vampires in order to defend themselves. The odd thing here is that the doctor insists that they do this secretly, without involving the outside world. And this is where a lot more tragedy plays out.

While the series really wants the audience to feel for the vampires, with most of them I really can't, as I explained earlier. So really the only tragedy I feel comes from those who were recently turned into vampires and refuse to feed, but are killed along with the others anyway. There are also a number of people who were killed who didn't have to be, because some of the villagers get too overzealous and either didn't pay attention to Dr. Ozaki's explanation that people who were bitten don't turn into vampires unless they die and therefore kill anyone who is bitten by vampires as they attack them, or argue that the bitten are collaborators since they are acting under the direction of the vampires and therefore should be killed anyway, even though they are nothing more than victims. As the series is winding down, all the temple people end up being murdered as collaborators as well, because Seishin, who was a collaborator, hid in another part of the temple grounds and they knew nothing about it. So really, tragic all around, unlike all the vampires who convinced themselves that their friends and family along with every other living human being were all cattle and it was totally cool for them to kill them as such, only to have some of these "cattle" visit it back upon them now.

For me, the disappointing part comes from how the series ends, so if you don't want to be spoiled anymore than what this review has already given away, just skip the next paragraph.

Basically, the entire village is burnt to the ground, making the entire ordeal the villagers have gone through in order to wipe out the vampires to protect their village is all for nothing. While the outside world naturally gets brought into the area to put the fire out, the fire did succeed at destroying all evidence of the slaughter the villagers were carrying out, it also destroyed all the evidence Dr. Ozaki collected and any evidence they might have which the outside world might actually find useful, considering that vampires exist and all. Then there's the way the pre-teen vampire fangirl and the recently converted Seishin manage to escape during all the confusion with the fire. And that’s how the series ends. Hell of a note, isn't it?

When it comes to the characters, it's really a mixed bag. As I said, it's an ensemble, so there are a lot of characters the series follows. I find that this actually works somewhat against the series as it becomes difficult to keep all of them straight, let alone to remember all of their names. There are also some characters who only seem to exist so we can hate them and actually want them to die horrible deaths, which they do, twice. For me, though, the most interesting dynamic is in the character of Dr. Ozaki, because while he's more or less a good guy, he does some pretty horrible things, and to his own wife to boot. And while both Ozaki and Seishin have an interesting background which explains why each is the way they are as far as how others have expectations of them which lock them into lives neither of them wants, Seishin is a coward and frankly I found myself wishing bad things would happen to him.

Overall, I'd say that I did like this series, though. It was refreshing to see something with vampires that actually depicted them as monsters instead of as love interests for once. So while there were still aspects of the show I didn't like, I'd still recommend this one to others, even though it isn't exactly among my favorites. 7/10.

[Koby]

Wow, I don't think our opinion on Shiki could have been any closer. I pretty much agreed and thought the same throughout watching it.

[Hicks]

Shiny. That was a pretty fast response, too. Someone on Teh Bukkit recommended that one to me, so hopefully he isn't too disappointed - I think he liked it a lot more than I did.

[Hicks]

Durarara!!

(26 episode series)

Brought to you by the same company who brought you Baccano!, this is pretty much the same type of show, only not quite as scattershot in its storytelling. The opening titles even helpfully name all of the show's many characters for you, and show you relevant scenes from previous episodes it's going to pick up one or more of its many storylines from. The only catch was, for me at least, it was easier to keep track of the storylines than the characters, although part of that may be because when I watched this, I was on some pretty serious pain medication to help me recover from some surgery. Of course in Baccano! I could never keep track of all the characters either.

The story mostly follows Mikado Ryūgamine, seemingly an average high school student from the country who's just moved to Ikebukuro in Tokyo, Japan in order to attend an academy one of his childhood friends is at, along with a female dullahan named Celty Sturluson, who's in Japan looking for some head-I mean, her head, which was stolen from her some 20 years ago. She now exists in Ikebukuro as an urban legend – the black, headless rider who rides a black motorcycle at night with no light and no sound, except when it brays like a horse. There's also a cluster-frak of other characters, including some of who are larger than life, like the guy who can toss vending machines around like toys and punch a guy out of his clothes. There's also a group of four otaku (including on yoai fan girl) who seem to have not much else to do but sit around in a riced out van all day.

I'm not going to lie – when I started watching this show, while I got all the meta and referential humor in it, I just wasn't really interested in Mikado and his friends, or in his fish out of water story. It wasn't until the show focused more on Celty that I got more interested, though to be fair, a lot of the characters also had something to like about them. And while there is a story, this show seems to mainly be about having fun. Not that that's a bad thing, exactly.

The story itself was about how basically everyone had some secret about them and how everything intertwined together, mostly due to the effort of an information broker. He ended up in possession of Celty's head, and he had convinced herself that she and other dullahans were actually the same as valkyries from Norse mythology, or to but it another way, like a grim reaper. He was convinced that the only way to make Celty's head wake up so he could see what happened was to manipulate the many different parties in Ikebukuro into conflict. So then along the way we learned things about the different characters and about the different groups involved, such as the dollars gang and the yellow scarves gang, that were twists on what was initially told to the audience about them. The narrative tended to set all of this up and reveal it in a very round-about way, which I have to admit kept things fairly interesting to watch, though this could also be a bit frustrating. Thankfully only one episode went out of its way to tell its story out of chronological order. Of course a side-effect of having so much going on is that, like so many other anime, there was a wealth of expositionary narration just to explain everything to the audience. This was somewhat offset by making the narration from the limited perspective of some of the different characters, but I've never been a huge fan of narration.

As for the characters, they and the large amount of humor are pretty much what make this series. There are way too many characters for me to have any real hope of going into, so about the best I can tell you is that none of them were really bad in the sense that I wish they hadn't been in the series. There was a creepy woman who loved her brother in, you know, that way, and even a magnificent bastard who loved to manipulate everyone, nut no one I really hated. Actually most of them had a humorous side of them as part of the show basically just being about having fun with itself. Kind of like how Celty, essentially an invincible eldritch abomination, was afraid of some unusually aggressive motorcycle cops. Probably the only annoyance I got was from Mikado and the large-breasted high school girl he had a crush on, and how their little ... relationship was basically the same as every other socially awkward "romantic comedy" type thing you usually see in the moe crap that's been making up most of the anime coming out of Japan lately.

So while this was a fairly fun anime to watch in many ways, I wouldn't really count it among my favorites either. It's worth watching at least once, just for the fun of it, but I'm guessing only the more seasoned anime fans would like this one, because people who are new to anime probably wouldn't get a lot of the humor. 7/10.

[Hicks]

Gasaraki

(25 episode series)

This is another military drama series, for the most part anyway, with a heavy focus on giant mecha. I can't help but reiterate how silly the idea of a giant humanoid robot being physically piloted is, despite all the technobabble explanations and excuses given for the "Tactical Armor system" in this series. They try to claim something like this would be as fast as any rapid armor by running, but as an engineer I can't really see that being the case with such a design. The other informed abilities, such as being highly maneuverable and the like are also pretty bullshit, simply because of the size of these machines and the fact that having a humanoid structure would actually tend to limit how well they can move around. And as if to prove my point, for the most part that's exactly how these TA's are presented – as lumbering giant robots, slowly and sluggishly moving around, except of course when the plot needs them to move around really fast so they can evade and take out traditional armor. I guess if there's one positive thing about this, though, it's that in this case the giant robots actually have their weapons built into them, instead of having ridiculously huge rifles or pistols they have to physically carry around in their robot hands.

Really the only reason I'm bothering to bitch so much about it is because of how much the story revolves around these giant robots and how supposedly awesome they are, even though the story itself really isn't about them. Instead, it follows protagonist Yushiro Gowa, member of the large family owned military industrial company Gowa Industries. He's being used as a tool to bring back some kind of ancient beast/weapon known as the title name drop, which he can apparently do by doing some kind of weird ancient traditional Japanese dance, or just by being pissed off enough. Initially the series tries to build up a lot or mystery about him, along with another test subject just like him named Miharu, who pulls double duty as the love interest. She's being used by an international mega-corporation called Symbol, which starts wars for fun and profit, apparently. Fortunately, both Yushiro and Miharu develop personalities as the series progresses, or I might not have made it through this series.

So as I mentioned, the giant robots play a big part in this series. We're shown the TA system being tested out by a small group of JSSDF officers in Japan, with everything being finished up just in time for a war to start in some made up Middle Eastern company run by a Castro wannabe. Basically the US picks a fight over what they believe to have been some kind of WMD test in this country, though everyone important to the narrative knows that this is actually the same kind of summoning that Yushiro Gowa was trying to do early in the series by doing his weird dance. This ends up turning into a UN sanctioned, NATO backed invasion of the small fake country of Belgistan. *snerk* Anyway, the Gowa family manages to arrange for their new TA's to make their debut in combat by going to this country, after the US-led invasion forces have been devastated by some other giant robots. These are Symbol's, which they call "Fakes", and they're doing basically the same thing Gowa is.

I'll say right up front that this is basically the most interesting part of the story for me, mostly because it's a fairly straight-up military drama with some mystery and intrigue thrown in for fun. While it's obvious that Gowa isn't on the up-and-up itself, Symbol is the big bad mega-corporation pulling the strings, with their fingers in basically everything. Symbol actually has US military assets, as well as military assets in other parts of the world, which they try to use to capture Yushiro. The Belgistan campaign is also where the JSSDF group that Yushiro is a part of has more of a role, which was nice because they were a fairly interesting group of characters. Yushiro and Miharu also come face to face here, first in combat, and then in secret as they try to meet up and escape capture by Symbol. This is also where Yushiro stops being a boring automaton, doing everything his family wants him to do.

Of course, Miharu ends up being recaptured so there aren't too many questions that actually get answered yet. The action then moves back to Japan, where there's a conspiracy to overthrow the Japanese government and install what certainly sounds like a fascist government led by a very old-fashioned douchebag. This guy only dresses traditionally, and carries a katana around with him, which he actually used to blind himself because he couldn't stand to look at modern Japan. Everything this guy said led me to believe he was another bad guy and that he was going to complicate life for Yushiro and our band of JSSDF heroes, and to be frank even though the story took another direction, I still view him as a bad guy, who really was no better than Symbol. Really the only difference is that Symbol wanted to take over the world (

), ol' scar face only wanted to take over Japan and rule it with an iron fist based on the rigid, supposedly ancient ideals that the earlier fascist government made up to control its people back in the 1930s, all so he could get rid of the foreigners in Japan, basically, and to get the Japanese people to give up such decadence as personal wealth and self-determination. Oh yeah, later on, this guy gets made out to be a good guy, but at least before the half-way point of the series this was looking like a fairly interesting drama of sorts, even with the little jabs here and there at the US.

Things really looked up as the truth started to come out about Yushiro, and he grew a pair and ran off with Miharu, who had been captured in an attempt to infiltrate Gowa's research facilities. The two of them do make a good run, and find out the truth of their pasts, but this is actually where the story started to go downhill for me. Coincidentally, this is also where the series wasted a few episodes showing us a revised history of 11th century Japan, with many of the same characters as earlier incarnations of themselves. Naturally, they all looked exactly the same. This is also where the series really started to grind an axe against the US, which was apparently being a douche to Japan for no reason other than that apparently Symbol wanted to, for reasons which were never really explained beyond taking over the world. And supposedly everything started out with the USDA, being the evil entity that it is, lying through its teeth in an official report claiming that grain harvests were way down. This set in motion a convoluted plan that scar face was going to try to take advantage of to meet his aims, and to allow the series to show the US acting as a terrorist force to attack Japan, you know, because. Oh, and this is also the point that scar face and his plan is made out to be in the right, probably because this is someone's fantasy. After all, so much of this series devotes itself to being fan service to traditional Japanese ideals going back to ye olde days of the samurai and such, supposedly. Really the best part of this was the way scar face repeatedly whipped his katana out and used it as an allegory for pretty much whatever the hell he wanted in order to justify his ambitions.

Speaking of ambitions, the Gowa family was naturally involved in this plan, which would see it put in place as a powerful military industrial complex that was the real power, in the shadows, pulling the strings, because that sounds awesome to some people, I guess. This is also where Gasaraki comes in as the eldest son seizes power of the company and family from his father, and plans to use scar face's plan of domination to his own ends in true bad guy fashion.

Anyway, as you might expect, while the US was totally going to go to war with Japan for no reason, the President apparently saw the light (read: made a sane decision) and called everything off, including the embargo on grain exports it had put in place for no reason, which is what had started everything off to begin with. Why the US had it in for Japan or how a ban on exports to the rest of the world was somehow specifically a slap in the face to Japan is never explained, everything just kind of resolves itself. Scar face suddenly sees the light himself (impressive for a blind guy), and after calling off his own plan to hurt the US economically, he commits suicide, in the way you might expect a self-declared samurai to do.

This leaves bad guy Gowa to carry out his own fiendish plans, which involve the use and abuse of his annoying little sister to bring on Gasaraki and give him the ultimate power . This is also where all that time wasted in medieval Japan comes to bite the series in the ass, because everything is resolved at the last minute and there is no real closure. I guess the fun part here was the obvious rip-off of the last couple of episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion through the use of abstract imagery and live action footage mixed in with still imagery. You know, the stuff NGE did to try to look cool after their animation budget had run out before the series had a chance to end.

When it came to characters, Yushiro was kind of interesting, at least once the series got going. He finally started to resent the way his family was treating him and finally resisted it, though in my opinion he should have been a bit more active than just trying to run away, and later on just basically yelling at his oldest brother for being an evil bastard. Miharu got the short end of the stick as far as development was concerned, because while she was also starting to resist due to the treatment she was getting from Symbol, after the pointless trip to medieval Japan she basically lost all of her personality and basically became a defenseless damsel in distress that Yushiro had to rescue. I was also somewhat disappointed when it came to that group of JSSDF officers Yushiro was initially assigned to, because they also seemed kind of interesting, and they really deserved some fleshing out and development that they didn't really get. Actually, for some pretty long stretches we didn't even get to see any of them, until the series just decided to focus on them as part of the larger story, which unfortunately was executed in a somewhat sloppy fashion. So overall there was a kind of blandness when it came to the characters, and between that and the story, which was somewhat interesting, I found myself somewhat bored watching this series at times, especially during the middle portion.

I guess if there's anything positive left to say about the series, it's that it tried to make all the sides fairly ambiguous, rather than making everyone just straight-up evil for no reason. That was left to the oldest Gowa brother, and for an earlier ancestor who did pretty much the same stuff back in medieval Japan. The downside is that while parts of this series were interesting, large portions of it were pretty boring for me, and it actually became something of a chore to watch. It picked up more toward the end of the series, mostly because it had to in order to resolve the story, but even there it was pretty lacking, and we never get to see the fallout of what happened over the course of the series. So really, overall this is an okay series, not especially bad, but definitely not very good either. 6/10.

[Myrodis19]

Just got caught up on your reviews (Busy busy past few weeks) and love em. Ive got a few new animes that i will be downloading.