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Kanon 12: 9.5/10

One of, if not the, best episodes thus far. Screentime for Nayuki, Ayu, Shiori, Kaori, some fugly ichinensei and of course Mai <3. And as if that wasn't enough, there was the beautifully animated waltz (which was actually a waltz in the truest sense, gotta love KyoAni). I still prefer Live Alive better, but that's probably because of the state of shock I was in whereas the dance was a long time coming. I still miss Makoto.

Code Geass 10: 8.5/10

Truthfully, I never really appreciated/liked mecha, it’s always been my downfall as an anime fan. However, among the slew of relatively crap mecha shows, once in a while a diamond in the rough will appear, last time it was the FMP series and this time it’s Code Geass. The reason why these two rise above all other mecha shows I’ve watched is because of the battle tactics. It’s not simply two overpowered mechs going head to head, it’s armies of them being strategically placed to set up ambushes, flanks and feints. Geass goes as far to compare the battles to an intricate game of chess, that’s mecha at its finest. Much more entertaining than watching a Gundam rip through 50 lesser models. (Gundam fans, please don’t hurt me. Better yet, correct me if I’m wrong, I’ve only watched a couple episodes.)

Episode 10 of Geass was the best since the Shinjuku Ghetto raid. Lelouch is a master tactician, using the elements against his opponents and backing them into a corner predicting their every move. Though, one complaint I do have about the series is that Lelouch has become obsessed with his conquest to crush Britannia. The Black Knights has completely engulfed his life as he now completely ignores his school life and his pseudo-harem. As a contrast, Sagara, despite being a military otaku, had a life outside the Arbalest.

Gift ~eternal rainbow~ 12 [END]: 7.5/10

A very anti-climactic ending, the sheer amount of angst built up in the previous episodes fell apart in the ending. I was expecting Kirino to go Kaede-level psycho and offer her body to Haruhiko or something, anything to capitalize on the build up, instead we got a rather predictable and generic harem ending. But I still crown Gift as this season’s best original harem/romance drama. It wasn’t anything truly innovative in terms of story or animation, but it was the standard triangle romance plot done exceptionally well. This is what I was expecting heading into DCSS, but instead got Aisia, orz. Kudos to Haruhiko for sticking with Riko for the entire series, sis-cons everywhere rejoice! Kirino can go die.

Negima!? 9: 8/10

Negima continues to confuse the hell out of me. With the series being comprised of seemingly random non-linking events and no discernible overlying plot I’m left wondering where Shaft is going with this. I never finished watching Pani Poni Dash so I don’t know what to expect in terms of an ending, or if there will even be one. In any case, Negima!? still looks amazing and manages to get me laughing out loud once in a while, at the very least it’s an entertaining waste of 20 minutes of life.

That’s all for this week! Due to the lack of subs I don’t have any material to make fun of Happiness and YoakeYori, nor can I continue praise Death Note. Stupid recap episodes. Oh well, off to watch Ouverture.

Merry Christmas Eve!
~ Shirukii ~

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May not look like much, but this is the replacement for those lengthy episode summary posts. That’s not to say I’ll stop doing episode summaries and analysis completely, but they will be scarce and random. Instead I’ve decided to employ a ranking system, it’s pretty self explanatory, series in the right column, episodes in the top row and rankings fill the cross sections. I’ve also included running averages and standard deviations, the latter being a measure of how tight the cluster of rankings are. Basically, the larger the number, the more inconsistent the ranking of the series.

[aside] I’ve heard many conflicting opinions on this fall season, some are saying it’s been excellent while others are cursing the mediocrity. Personally, I feel it’s been a decent season. Aside from heavy hitters the likes of Kanon and Death Note there have been a few diamonds in the rough such as Gift ~Eternal Rainbow~ and Asatte no Houkou. However, one thing that leads me to think this season isn’t doing so well is the speed of the fansubs. I have only been watching ongoing series for about a year – a year and a half (previously having just marathoned completed series) so I’m not entirely sure if this is normal. But this is the first season where I’ve noticed that more series that are lagging behind in terms of fansubs. Is this because fansubbers have lives as well and went through exams the same as the rest of us or is it that the popularity of the series and therefore anticipation of the subs is at a low? [/aside]

Hopefully someone has an answer to that, it’s been bugging me for a while. But I digress, onwards!

Kanon

The above image alone is enough to convince the majority of its awesomeness. The Kanon remake is one of the series I find myself anxiously anticipating each week, and having already watched the original that’s quite a feat. With multiple moe modes centered around the overlying theme of sad girls in the snow accompanied by KyoAni animation, how can you lose? On that note, despite living in Toronto, there’s been a serious lack of snow thus far. Plenty of sad girls though, sporting the “I just got wtfpwned by that exam” look.

Death Note

Extreme writing, extreme potato chip eating, extreme cell phone calls, and something about the rise of a God, Death Note has a lot going for it. The amount of intellectual fencing that goes on between Kira and L is what draws me to this show. Both risking their lives as they play a game of wit and tact where the slightest oversight could be fatal, one of the best plots I’ve seen since Monster. Too bad I’ve been spoiled multiple times by readers of the manga…bastards. The introduction of Misa in the latest ep was interesting, it’s sure to change the entire dynamic between Kira and L. She sounds too much like Haruhi though =\

Asatte no Houkou

This show surprised me, I hadn’t started watching until episode seven or so, I decided to dl it on a whim. I was taken aback at how much I liked it. The pacing and style reminds me of Honey and Clover, though the story is quite different, a slice of life drama with a twist of fantasy. The characters are what really draw me in though, while not being overly complex, they each have their own intricacies and interesting pasts. On a related note, this is one of the few series where I’m not rooting for the imouto, Shouko FTW! It may have something to do with the lingering loli image of Karada, I’m usually all for lolis but she had very little moe appeal. Kudos for charging head on into a life without her Hiro-nii though.

Gift ~ Eternal Rainbow ~

Ah, here’s my siscon fix for the season. Gift, in my eyes, ranks as the best original harem/love romance of the season. It’s what DCSS should have been, Riko has looks one step down of Kotori and a personality one step down of Nemu, great combo. Kirino can go die though, ffs she’s annoying, perhaps it’s because she has the same seiyuu as Aisia whom I also disliked, but I just can’t stand her. Though she is a catalyst for RikoXHaruhiko, so despite not liking her, I will admit that she is a necessity to the plot. If you aren’t watching this, give it a shot, if anything it’ll bring back happy memories of Da Capo…or incite murderous rage from Kotori fanboys.

Negima!?

Following neither the manga nor the previous Mahou Sensei Negima series, this show is all sorts of crazy. Much like PPD it’s filled with seemingly random, yet hilarious, arcs as well as the ever changing blackboards. Not the best show of the season, but it sure is a looker, the perfect anime if you’re looking to stave off boredom for half an hour. Ep 4-6 arc was made of pure winnage, though lacked SecchanXKonoka love =(

Tokimeki Memorial

Tokimemo started out as a off the wall school comedy reminiscent of School Rumble and while it retains some of that randomness, it becomes more predictable by the minute and in my opinion should have chosen to go full harem or full sukuran clone. What’s left is a decent story about your typical undeserving and indecisive male lead with three bishoujos competing for his love. The energetic sports bishoujo Tsukasa, the shy yet dedicated Mina and the composed ojou-sama/iinchou Sayuri. We seem to be heading for a Sayuri ending, which disappoints me because I’ve fallen into the Tsukasa camp. Tsukasa FTW! Though she seems to have a couple loose screws o.O

Otome wa Boku ni Koishiteru

Psst. Mizuho, you’re covering the wrong area. Mizuho does not have a penis, cast those worries aside and fap with pride! I was expecting a Strawberry Panic replacement with OtoBoku, but alas, hopes of yuri have faded to nothing but a dream. That’s alright though, onwards to a Takako ending! That’s not a spoiler, just my hopeful victor.

Yoake Mae Yori Ruri Iro na Crescent Love

How did an inanimate green sphere get nominated for Saigar? Decent story, terrible animation, hyped ending, I’m still puzzled as why I continue watching Yoakena. I’ll attribute it to the “so bad it’s good” Train Wreck effect. There’s plenty of drama and angst, but the poor animation quality overshadows all good aspects and the overall effect is ruined. I have a very difficult time ranking this show, thus it has the highest standard deviation of the bunch.

Happiness

Watarse Jun. That is all.

Dropped:
- Kujibiki Unbalance (terrible characters)
- Lovedol (terrible everything, exempt: “I sing for revenge” lawl)
- Su(mo*6) (couldn’t get into it, possible revisit in the future)

Possible pick ups:
- Code Geass (something about pizza hut?)
- Pumpkin Scissors (despite the name…)
- Hatakari Man
- Souko no Strain
- Haruhi Live Action porn

Recommendations on these would be great. Other than that, I’m absolutely clueless as to what’s coming up in the winter season, anyone willing to fill me in on what looks to be good?

Til next time!
~ Shirukii ~

I concur

Despite, what I thought to be, a slow start, Negima!? is finally living up to the expectation I carried into the beginning of this season. Episode 1 and a fair bit of 2 were concentrated on character and arc introduction, with that out of the way, Negima!? really begins to shine.

Episode 2 was expected, with Asuna learning Negi’s secret and the resulting hilarity. Some rather major changes from the past season though, Asuna seems to be much less interested in Takamichi this time around and showing immediate and obvious attraction to Negi. Also, her tsun tsun : dere dere ratio got a huge boost on the dere dere side, this is sort of disappointing as I tend to enjoy the tsun tsun phase more.

The story, so far, seems to be centered around Evangeline and her mission to suck Negi’s blood and free herself from her loli form (why she would want to do this is beyond me ^^). And so the assaults on our lovable chibi sensei commence. Before an all out fight erupts, Negi tries to reason with Evangeline, offering to set her free if she promises not to attack anyone. Being a vampire, Evangeline promptly refuses and goes for Negi’s neck, only to be stopped by…a shoe?

Enter Asuna! Throwing all nearby objects (shoes and a boat) at Evangeline, she buys some time for Negi to escape. Evangeline goes psycho, freezes the lake and hurls shards of ice at the two. Asuna takes it in good humor, but not to be outdone picks up one of the shards and prepares to return fire, only to be stopped by…a tsukaima android.

Some explosions, a provisional contact, Cloud’s buster sword and slapstick comedy later, Evangeline lays in defeat, Asuna lays in hunger and the animation team gets lazy and decides to use paper cutouts…freaking awesome indeed

Thoughts

I was wrong in expecting a deeper, more plot centric version of the original from Negima!? Under the influence of PPD’s creators, episodes have become 20 minute long YTMNDs. And I love it! The complete randomness and unexpected comedic elements has made the show unpredictable and utterly hilarious.

The main story is still there of course, but they seem to be using it as a catalyst for hilarity, rather than the central focus. It seems like the Evangeline arc has been wrapped up for now so I’m curious to see how much they plan on covering, the plot pacing looks to be going ridiculously fast.

However, plot and randomness aside, the real reason why I’m loving this show so much right now is…

Makoto Asuna ftw!

Standing atop the list, in front of Nadoka and Set-chan, Asuna is made of so much win this time around. Usually when I see a fiery red-head tsundere, Asuka pops into my mind along with “been there, done that, next!” and that’s what I thought of her in the first season. But this time around, Asuna = winnage, her hyper-idiosyncratic behaviour and greatly improved dere dere mode made her my fav character (previously Nodoka).

The technical aspects of the show continue to excel, but I think the impact of the beautiful animation is being undermined by pixelated source files and my screen stretching the 480p resolution to fit my 1680*1050 native resolution.

So it looks like I won’t be dropping this, and if time permits, I suppose I’ll continue to blog it as well. I may be dropping YoakeYori though, if episode 4 doesn’t wow me.

Needs more tsun tsun =(

ROBE.SAPPHIRE – Materialize!

Load silver cartridge…

Lute!

Zangetsu o.O?

lawl, poor Makie

~ Shirukii ~

A pantsu shot not even 3 minutes in, good stuff

First off, sorry for the 404 on the previous post, I don’t know what happened, the post just disappeared into nothingness. But oh well, I’ll throw together another one, it won’t be nearly as lengthy as the original but I have some time to spare so why not.

Negima!? is the second remake airing this season and while I wasn’t as excited for this as I was for the Kanon remake, I was still pleasantly suprised. There was much speculation as to whether this would be an entirely new, manga-independent, storyline or just a remake of the first. Judging from the content in the the opening episode, I’d say the latter. Sporting new animation and character designs, but bringing back the original seiyuu cast, Negima!? has ton of potential.

Synopsis

The episode starts off with a flashback to 15 years ago. A powerful looking mage, known simply as the 1000 master, takes on a vampire-mage, Evangeline. Without a clear ending to the fight the scene cuts back, to the present, to a grand cathedral. Here we see the son of the 1000 master, Negi Springfield, graduating from the Magic Academy, vowing to become a great mage like his old man.

After a quick cut to a present day Evangeline standing atop a building and foretelling the approach of the 1000 master’s son we’re treated to an artsy pseudo-OP sequence. Afterwards we’re thrown into a conversation between Negi and his two sisters who have diverging opinions on Negi’s post graduate placement to further his mage training. Apparently he is being sent to Mahora Gakuen in Japan, an all girls school, to teach English.

After much deliberation and anxiety Negi arrives at the gates of Mahora Gakuen with his trusty ferret tsukaima, Kamo-kun. After a short dialogue the two are promptly run over by a tsunami of girls rushing into the school, which apparently has a population of over 30,000. Ouch.

The scene then cuts to two roommates, Asuna and Konoka. Asuna seems to be having trouble waking up, much to the dismay of Konoka, who doesn’t want to be late on the first day of class. Enter Set-chan! The katana wielding bishoujo bodyguard offers to wake Asuna up by slicing her to pieces, Konoka thinks it’s better to just leave her to her own pace.

Back at the school we see the aftermath of the stampede as Negi and Kamo recover. Upon closer inspection Kamo notices that he chipped a tooth and goes on some rant about tangerines…or something like that. Thinking quickly, Negi risks blowing his cover and whips out his magic book to fix the tooth. Much to their horror, just as he finishes the spell, a half-asleep Asuna looks on. In a panic, Negi tries to cast a memory erasing spell, only to be interrupted by Konoka and Set-chan who come running to drag the zombified Asuna to school.

Much of the rest of the episode was dedicated to introducing the many, and I mean MANY, bishoujo students who are about to be under a 10 year old’s instruction. The class rants and gossips about a supposed vampire attack on one of their classmates, who even has bite marks to prove the encounter.

Meanwhile Negi is greeted and briefed by Pedo-sensei Takamichi-sensei, who has been teaching magic to Negi since he was a kid…err…more of a kid, and is now a colleague at Mahora. And so the two go to introduce Negi to the class and begin the semester.

Mere seconds after being introduced to their new 10 year old homeroom teacher, a deafening “KYAAAA!” resounds through the campus as all the girls instantly fall in love with their new sensei. Negi, of course, does not deal well with girls and is terrified at the notion of teaching 31 of them. Add the fact that Asuna, the girl who witnessed his magic show earlier, is also in his class and desperately trying to figure out why Negi looks so familiar.

The episode continues with with a brief introduction to the current Evangeline, who is for some reason in the form of a high school student, along with her robot tsukaima. The ep comes to a close with Negi moving in with Konoka and Asuna until he finds a place of his own. Making himself at home while Konoka fetches some tea, Negi hears her voice let out a piercing scream soon after leaving. When he runs outside to see what happened he sees Evangeline suspended in mid-air cradling her unconscious body.

Replace the ED sequence with a power rangers parody, baka-rangers, and we have a winner!

Thoughts

While it didn’t leave me as excited for the next episode as Kanon did, Negima!? looks like it has a lot of potential. The storyline seems to be following the original (and therefore manga) kind of loosely, all the content is there, but there’s just enough randomness so it can’t be called a complete remake.

The pacing seems to be going a lot faster, Kamo-kun is there from the start and we’re thrown into the Evangeline arc right from the beginning this time. Whether this will be a good thing, or lead to unnecessary and crappy fillers, remains to be seen. In terms of action, I thought it was quite good, the EvangelineX1000 master fight was well done with a semi-cliffhanger ending. I also loved the randomness of it all, unrelated and random messages appearing on the blackboard (a la PPD) and I think I saw an azumanga reference in there somewhere, too lazy to rewatch and verify. Tiny, yet hilarious, details are always welcome and seperate the good from the awesome.

Technically, I’m having mixed feelings about Negima!?. Many a blogger has used the original Mahou Sensei Negima as a reference point for poor animation as compared to the other works of 2005. The animation is much MUCH better than the first, but the style is so different, I think it needs a little getting used to. However, technically it is superior, the animation is fluid and sharp, (or at least I think it is, the sub I watched had bad encoding) with specific reference to the eye candy of the campus at the beginning and the magic casting scene a little later on.

With the lack of a proper OP and ED, I can’t say much about the audio. The background tracks during the actual show were not that striking and were mediocre, in my opinion, so much so that I didn’t even notice them (then again, I’m sleep deprived at the moment, so that may just be me XD)

Character designs is a point of conflict for me personally. Certain character designs worked out for the best, Asuna and Set-chan coming to mind immediately. While others were less appealing, Ayaka and Takamichi falling into this category. I think that once I become accustomed to them, I’ll come to love the character designs, as was the case with Honey and Clover. However, at the moment they’re sort of meh-ish to me. In terms of character development and personality, they all seem to be more or less the same as they were in the original, which is mostly a good thing.

All in all it was a fairly well done opener, though my expectations were a tad-bit higher, it certainly did not disappoint. There’s a lot of room to improve on the original, whose animation, character development and (most importantly) ending were rather subpar. So I think once I get used to the animation style and the character designs, I’ll really enjoy this series.

Sorry about the sceenshot quality, the source material was encoded improperly or something, they even apologized for it in the commercial break transition

I thought I had accidentally clicked FMA here

Experts agree: New character designs increase pedo rating by 70%!

If nothing else, these three are more than enough a reason to see Negima!? through. Nanoka got an ahoge!

A bit too much bleach there, ne iincho?

Pure comedic genious

I won’t bother doing my victories/phailures bit since I covered pretty much everything that needed to be said in the rest of the post. This ep didn’t have much new content over the original and there’s only so much I can say about visual superiority.

So while I’m not rocking back and forth in a corner awaiting the next release, I think Negima!? is looking pretty good so far. Here’s hoping that they tap into the vast amount of potential that has been displayed in the opener…or at the very least not royally screw up the ending ^^

~ Shirukii ~