First Impressions: Winter 2010/2011 Anime I've Tried

Well this will be my 20th post, that feels kind of nice actually, I've also learned a bit of HTML so now I can make this look more organized. And before we get started just a few things of mention: Thank you Megan and Steve who commented on my last post. And also, as you may have noticed I haven't done a rant in a while, but thats because lately nothing has pissed me off in anime enough, so if anybody would like to give suggestions for something they'd like to see me verbally bash in a rant feel free. I was thinking of a rant on Assassin's Creed 2 but 2 problems with that, its a videogame not an anime...though usually people who like one like the other and also, in the last few days that game has grown on me quite a bit. Not to the level of awesomeness that the first one was, but its good none the less. So if anybody has something they'd like seeing me rant about or for my real-life friends has seen me rant about, feel free to post ideas. Anywho, I'll shut up about random things now and get on with the real purpose of this post, the mediocre selection of anime that is the current season. I must say this season has some unexpectedly good ones, but it's still probably my least favorite season since last spring. However this coming spring looks very promising.

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Fractale

Ok this one honestly creeped me out a lot, I was slightly turned off before I even saw it by the
boys western style of dress, however it seemed like it could be a semi-substantial mystery so I decided to check it out. What I found was completely different from my expectations. First off there were robot parents, majorly detrimental in my book cuz I'm not a robot or sci-fi person 96% of the time. However I decided to ignore the creepy robot parents (though I do wonder why they were robots parenting a human O.o) and kept watching...it was one of the lowest levels of boring that I've ever seen, quite honestly this one isn't even good to make fun of it's so boring...until a bit later...then it gets good to make fun of. Why? Because the boy goes to a market-looking place and there's these strange creatures there that looked like they came out of either a circus or a childs drawing pad. They were nothing short of absolute ridiculousness. Like here's a picture of what I'm talking about because I can't even describe it. They look completely stupid
right? And seriously those aren't toys in the market, they're super fucked-up living things that talk and walk like people and that giant turd thing seems to be the boys friend or something...and that stretches and like damn near rapes him (not literally) at one point. It's insanely creepy.


I really can't think of anything more to say since I stopped watching at about this point...a minute or so later maybe, just because it creeped me out and it's waaaaaaaaayyyy too sci-fi for my tastes. Oh! that and the art looks annoyingly flat, like that of Spirited Away.

Gosick

As expected this one was marginally better than Fractale however not good enough for me to
continue watching. I love the mystery aspect of it, because I'm a huge fan of episodic mysteries and this fit the bill. I really do almost regret not continuing it, but the first and second episodes both made me almost fall asleep. The reason being is no error in the anime itself, it's just simply because I don't like Victorian or Renaissance Europe, it bores me a lot. Though for mystery-lovers who don't mind that setting I'd recommend it.

Apart from that my only major complaint is the sheer boring and dry "personallity" (if you could call it that) of Victorique, the blonde lolita girl in the picture. She was monotoned all the time and just very boring to listen to. That and she smokes a pipe! I mean I get the whole Sherlock Holmes reference but isn't having a little girl smoking a pipe a little weird? O.o That and with the weirdness, the boy in the picture, whose name escapes me, reminds me quite a lot of Lelouch of Code Geass just done in a less anorexic art style. That being said the art, as you can see, is beautiful, there's almost nothing bad I can say about that respect except for the drab colors, though I suppose that's just part of the setting.

Yumekui Merry

Thankfully this one lived up to my expectations, not getting bogged down by a dream

about a war with cats which is honestly just creepy and strange... then again it's anime. Anyway though this focuses more on Merry who is a Dream Demon, trying to hitch a ride with other evil Dream Demons back to the dream world.

Merry herself is a solid lead character with a lot of personality along with the male lead...damn I really need to remember his name. Plus the male lead has this sort of fortune telling power that lets him see what kind of dreams people will have that night based on an aura. See there's a picture of him in that war with cats
dream, and thankfully that's really the only time it ever comes up. The way they did it was actually rather humorous, I mean c'mon, the cat has a huge gun for cryin' out loud! Where else but in anime can you see something like that? It's actually in this dream that he meets Merry I believe...well I think he meets her before but she's unconcious.

My only real complaint so far is it's a tad difficult to follow exactly what's going on because of Merry's constant mood-swings (despite her kick-ass attitude and outfit) and that as of yet there's no set villain or anything. A series like this really does need a villain besides various evil Dream Demons (which are essentially the dudes that come into your nightmares. Like this guy for one: Chaser John Doe. He looks like he could be
a pretty substantial villain, but so far he's only been in the first episode. Maybe it's not even so much a villain that it needs but just more of a concrete plot rather than just meeting random people with Dream Demon problems. Though it is entertaining and does have some pretty good potential to evolve a really good plot. I'll be finishing this one all the way through, it's not good enough to be best in the season, but it is pretty enjoyable.

 

Kore Wa Zombie Desu Ka?

For those of you not well versed in the Japanese language, the translation of the title is 'Is this a Zombie?'. Now, this one is probably one of the best, if not the best anime of this season thus far, yes there's a bit of ecchi, but not to the point where it's extremely obnoxious...except for this one scene when the magical girl (with a chainsaw) flys down from the sky with her panties being the only thing you can see for a good 5 seconds. Other than the bit of ecchi though it is in fact really good.

There's a great array of characters and it definitely gets points for originality, I mean c'mon, a necromancer (the knight-ish girl) and a zombie in the same series are obvious, but they took that and threw in a Magical Girl and a Vampire Ninja and...some mage looking ramen girl who hasn't appeared yet.

Now before I get ahead of myself and confuse people who know that I usually hate zombies (really, freakin EVERYTHING just has to have zombies in it these days) the zombie in this anime, really has no typical zombie qualities except for the fact that he's already dead and can't die again. He's not some creepy mindless weirdo thing (reminiscent of me at 6am) that most zombies are. He also is the only character so far that gives the anime some sort of underlying plot, which is actually
pretty neat. Because it turns out that he was originally killed by a serial killer and he wanted to be resurrected in order to exact revenge. He's alsoa pretty cool character on his own...damn for whatever reason I can't remember guy names this season O.o

But see what I mean by how he's normal other than the fact that he can't die? That picture is the best representation I can give, but he's just not your typical zombie. In fact this anime takes pretty-much everything I usually hate and twists it to make it cool. I hate vampires but the vampire is also a ninja so she's cool, I'm often not a huge fan of Magical Girls, but this one is kick-ass and has a chainsaw! Speaking of twisting things actually, notice that evil thing is a bear, the villains are freakish. I mean look, the next one they encounter is a lobster! So evil bears in a graveyard and evil lobsters in a school, because that makes sense

Blaaarrghhh attack of the killer lobster!

right? I mean everyone's school has a giant evil lobster. Imagine the yummy dinner you can make out of that O.O *drools*.

But yeah I'll definitely continue watching this as it is probably one of the most fucked-up and original anime I can think of at the moment and it's got really solid characters. Zombie boy and Eucliwood Hellscythe (the necromancer girl) being my favorites. So just as long as the ecchi doesn't kick up it should be a great watch that I'd highly recommended if you're up for something new.

Dragon Crisis:

I couldn't even watch the second episode of this one. This series definitely wasn't good by any means, however it's not particularly terrible either, it was because of truly annoying characters that I found the show to be so unbearable to watch. The top-heavy chick in the tank top is quite possibly one of the most obnoxious characters I've ever had the misfortune to encounter. Not only that but she's a complete bitch who was one of the main reasons I was turned off from this show.

Rose the blonde dragon girl is super-kawaii on many levels however she has the Pikachu syndrome of being able to say nothing other than her name. Oh! And she can say Ryuuji, the name of the horrifically dry and boring male protagonist.

All that on top of the fact that the show took way more of a treasure hunter take rather than the dragon aspect that made me really want to see it. I mean honestly, if I told you that blonde girl is a dragon would you believe me? I sure wouldn't. I am curious to see how it would progress, but the characters annoyed me far too much to subject myself to more of this.

IS:Infinite Stratos:

These are quite possibly the coolest mechas I have ever seen...not like I watch a whole lot of mecha anime in the first place but still. This was probably the anime I was most looking foreword to this season and to be honest it was a little bit of a letdown, it's still good enough to watch, but it gets a little too hung up on the harem aspect rather than the awesome mechas.

On that note however, the fight scenes are really awesome, even if they do have a strange amount of talking in them. Seriously, they're however many hundred feet in the sky just shooting the breeze (quite literally at points) with their opponent, don't quite understand that. As per usual I could do without the ecchi and the whole 'guy does something non-perverted, girl thinks its perverted somehow, girl has bitch-fit, guy gets ass beat for no reason' it really is quite obnoxious and overused. It bothered me to no end in Asu no Yoichi and it bothers me quite a lot here.

The Harem aspect isn't particularly terrible, it could be worse. It gets annoying at points as it usually does, especially since this far 2 of the girls are really pushy and annoying, even towards him, not just with each other, and then despite that picture to the right, she's fairly level headed and not creepy about her crush on Ichika. Though on the other hand most of the ecchi shots to date are of her, its easy enough to ignore however. So this is one I'll keep watching, it has enough good points to be throughly entertaining and to block out the bad points. If you like mechas at all I'd recommend giving this one a try.


Starry Sky

So. Many. Bishies. It nearly made me puke, usually I don't have that much of a problem with them either, but this was just purely puke worthy.

First of all each episode was only about 12min long, I'm not a big fan of short episodes. Second of all, one of the characters was French or something, which annoyed me to no end. And third, the zodiac representation here was more of the constellations rather than the animals like I was hoping. I mean there was so much talk about stars and constellations that I felt like I was in an astronomy class. I couldn't even finish the second episode because it was so mellow and boring and blech. It had the same feel of being in an art gallery actually. All the snooty French-ish artsy people, the mellow atmosphere,the music, it just made it so unbearably boring.


Haiyoru!

I'll just put this one bluntly: the animation sucks and the 4min episodes suck. This looks like some fan-made crap done in Flash, and yes that picture to the left is actually from the anime, it's ridiculous. The animation and the art are both retarded. The first episode of 4min consisted pretty-much mainly of this scene right here, though I forget exactly where the hot dog came in but that's irrelevant. What is relevant is I couldn't even sit through 4min of this crap, that's how bad it was. Honestly I couldn't even get the story because...well who could get a story in 4min of Flash animation? But to be honest I don't care, the animation is just so terrible that even if the story was the best thing since Death Note, 11Eyes or Fairy Tail I still wouldn't want to watch this.


Beelzebub

This almost had me wanting to keep watching, despite Beels creepy baby penis hanging out all the time and Ogas purely stupid parents simply because the main characters were pretty solid but the way the show was carried out was just really quite annoying. This anime is a kid on sugar because there's random shit happening all the time with no rhyme or reason whatsoever but not in a funny way either, in more of an obnoxious "what's going on?" way and their attempts at humor I don't really find funny. I cant exactly pinpoint what it was that turned me off from this anime, but there's something about it that made me horrifically bored to the point where I couldn't even finish the second episode. If I had to really pick something it'd probably b the whole delinquent theme that just really annoyed me, not exactly my cup of tea.


Maho Shoujo Madoka Magica

This is another one that has amazing potential to be my absolute favorite anime of the season, which is interesting considering I don't usually like Magical Girl anime. However this is the farthest thing ever from your typical Magical Girl anime, first of all it's very dark, I know that picture doesn't exactly prove it but it really is actually. A main character dies in the 3rd episode already O.o And one of the character's magic is to use guns and another uses a sword. Oh! That's another thing, these Magical Girls don't just go around being all happy and casting pink spells all the time, they have to fight witches that are out to kill people in strangely brutal ways. Even one of the Magical Girls, Mami-san (the yellow one) says how being a Magical Girl is hard work and that you risk your life every day to do it and save people from the witches. As hard as it is to believe for a Magical Girl series this really is pretty dark and has a healthy amount of action to it.

On that topic of dark, lets talk about the art shall we? The normal art that's shown through most of the anime is good, simple, but good, something you'd expect from a Magical Girl anime. However the witch realms (see picture on the right) are a whole nother story. I would really love to know what the hell the art staff was smoking when they drew this stuff cuz it gives the the heeby-jeebies. Some of it looks just downright creepy like you see here, and some of it looks like the artist was doing LSD at the time of making this, that's just how bizarre it is. This goes beyond the point of originallity and abstract, it looks like something by Salvador Dali. If I'm not mistaken those fucked-up looking things are supposed to be the witches. Now there's originality, which is what Soul Eater did with witches, but this is just strange on so many levels. It doesn't make the anime any less enjoyable, but it does make you question the sanity of the artists especially when they also drew something as purely adorable

as Kyuubei (that little white creature thing). I mean c'mon, that's adorable, it even rivals Mokona of various CLAMP works.

In any event though, even if those surreal witch realms creep you out, I'd highly recommend trying this anime because it's very original in the way of Magical Girls and it has something for two polar opposite fangroups. Shoujo/Magical Girl fans, as well as fans of combat and slightly darker anime such as myself. It actually reminds me of Soul Eater for some really strange reason that I can't put my finger on.

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And that's it...well, sorta, I still have yet to watch Houkago no Pleiades since it starts tomorrow I believe, really curious about that one to see why Subaru has their hand in making an anime. Anyway, thanks a lot for reading, comments, feedback of any kind, subscriptions (free obviously XD) are greatly appreciated. And if anybody has any idea for a post/rant they want me to do, please don't hesitate to suggest. Thanks!