Have you seen samurai deeper kyo? I think you will like it quite a bit, the main character is a great deal like kazuma (it may not seem that way at first but give it a couple eps).
Hmmm i thought that the episode 0 of Candy boy was exactly the same as either episode 1 or 2 of the numbered series, thats why i asked you.
So episode 0 = 1 though based on what you said i guess they just re-named episode 0 to 1 and started from there when they decided to do more then one episode. I was going to put 0 on my list but i won't bother now as its just episode 1 renamed.
I was thinking of watching Hanbun no Tsuki ga Noboru Sora, on my nephews recommendation. It seemed from the synopsis to be depressing though...is it? I can handle some drama ala kanon 06 but i dont like the slit-your-wrist grave of the firefly level of depressing.
Point taken. :) Altho i believe we could have an intelligent conversation about it, its just not something i would prefer to get into. I don't necessarily dislike discussing the topic, but such weighty discussion isn't high on my fun factor, which is the only reason i come on here (as wrong as it might be, i both watch anime and come to these anime boards and stuff as a form of escapism)
Ahh ok...you may be right about belldandy, but i dunno, 'lady on the street, but a freak in the bed' may apply here :P Only keiichi will know..on day...when hes fifty (thats how long it will take them)
I love nodame, sure she is a bit of an idiot, but shes a good natured one (and a genius in her own ways).
Hmm..some of my friends and family watch anime too :P A lot of christians watch anime, just like a lot of christians watch The Matrix or Football. I don't think they believe that its the work of satan..christian doesn't equal fanatical christian :)
Why the italicized emphasis on proud christian? I am what i am...a christian is still a christian even if he isn't what others believe to be a perfect one (no one on earth is a perfect one).
I really don't want to turn this into a religious/ideological discussion, its really not why i come online :P Usually it ends up turning into a long winded debate where nobody really feels compelled to be persuaded by the other, but both futility attempt to do so anyway all the while proclaiming they are doing no such thing. :D I've found it to be a tremendous waste of time for me. If you want to know more, i suggest finding a good bible preaching church and actually speaking with the pastor if you honestly want to discuss it. In the end, its all up to personal convictions.
More importantly, how can you possibly hate everyone on my fav char list besides revy. Come on Claymore? I figured you'd love someone as badass as teresa :P
For Length:
If im offended i'll let you know :D Its not like im really shocked by anything you've said, i live in the same world you do (also christians are people too, most of which were very much the opposite of a model christian before they were saved)
It just gives you an idea of why i am kinda prudish in what i enjoy watching ;)
But i don't wanna get off on a tangent, im here for the anime related fun ;)
The timeskips are explicit. You just need to pay attention to the dates that are given throughout the series, although some of them are more obvious like episode 4 being in the summer and episode 5 being in November. There were more timeskips though. Episode 8 took place 4 months after episode 7, for example.
She wasn't able to fit in, in the sense that she's not like the other characters, but she was part of the crew since the beginning of episode 3(after the timeskip). She's in there brushing her teeth with everyone and listening to their gossip. She gets along just fine with the other girls, doesn't interact with the rough guy, and obviously doesn't get along with the playboy. The only continual conflict is with Hayami, but that's because she's a tsundere and that's a good thing.
The book part made me lol so hard. It was episode 4, and she got that because she was performing poorly with Hayami in the training for the new HWT. She thought it would help things go smoother, but it backfired and that's why you get that argument at the end of the episode(which I also liked). Other than that, she never has any problems fitting in.
I lold at your description of mecha because, I've actually some of that stuff before. Anyway I guess there's not much of a conversation to be had about the action.
If you just want to respond to what I said about those episodes with "they were all enjoyable" then there's nothing I can say because there's nothing to say. If you got something out of them then that's great, but I didn't, and I explained why. If you only wanted to say what you did then there was no need to bring up the content of the episodes in the first place.
I wasn't disturbed by the drama, but I definitely noticed it. Just enough to think, "Hmm...that was kind of weak," or "That scene went on for too long after it made its point," or things like that. Remember I did give this a 6. I'm mentioning things I thought were done poorly but the end result even with these things still ended up being a 6, not a 2. I haven't seen ZnT3 nor will I for...a painfully long time, most likely, so I have no idea what it did.
If you want to use the burger analogy here, I'd say this anime is a burger, and that's it. Not even a bun, or a piece of lettuce. It is still a burger and yes that's fine, but even for a burger, it doesn't come with the things a burger usually does. I liked the same things you mentioned there, but those are just a few quick comedy scenes. That's really all you can do with an undeveloped cast of characters so there was a lot of that stuff. I enjoyed it, but I took note of what it was and why I was seeing so much of it.
I guess if we both remember the same amount and types of music then there's nothing more to say there.
If you were talking about enjoyment then ok.
I see what you're saying about character development and I kind of agree. I think "as long as it is enough" is kind of dangerous as a threshold, but yes, it could work. I don't think undeveloped characters are ever a good thing though.
As for every anime needing character development, I've only seen a few anime that didn't depend on it's characters at all, and...they weren't very good. Clearly you can make an anime with no character development, but I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole.
The first episode was 2 battles. It was nothing other than military stuff and fighting. I wasn't sure what the anime was going to be like at this point due to that one PBE team getting killed, and that one woman getting blown away by machine gun fire.
The second episode is like a normal 1st episode in a school comedy. It was nothing at all like the first one.
The third episode has a 1 month timeskip between it and the second one. There isn't very much comedy and there's no action. It's that episode about the festival and the flashback to the other guy that died before. It was nothing like the first or second one.
The fourth episode is about the introduction of the new HWT and who's going to pilot it. It's mostly a training episode, although nothing much comes from it. There is a little bit of comedy near the end but that's it. It's nothing like the last 3 episodes.
The fifth episode has another several month timeskip and is about Mibuya. I'm sure I don't need to say that it's different from the rest.
The first 5 episodes are all over the place with no transitions. Mai wasn't even in the first episode except for the last second as an unidentified soldier, and she's only the focus in episodes 2 and 4. It wasn't about her trying to fit in. After she shows up in episode 2, there's a one month timeskip and she's just one of the crew after that. I would have really liked to see how she became adjusted to living like that, but it was skipped.
I'm not saying there shouldn't have been action. I don't have a problem with the fact that there's a war going on. The action itself was pathetic. The choreography of the fights was extremely basic, and there were too many times where the pilots shot into a cloud of smoke and said they hit the enemy. The way Mibuya got hit in episode 5 made me think that these pilots can't even see what's going on outside.
Drama, huh... Well, there was the whole first episode. First with the PBE plane getting blown away from out of nowhere. Then when Mibuya was trapped under the brain, completely surrounded by enemies. Hayami was in there saving her in less than half a minute. There wasn't any tension or even any time for any tension. In episode 3, the flashbacks of when that one pilot died were introduced briefly and then that plotline was dropped afterwards. Other than the fact they're taking part in the Obon festival, no one says anything about how they were affected by his death, or what that guy meant to them. He was just some generic death that the anime came up with to try to create some drama. Your train scene is in episode 3 and it's not exactly the best example to use. Mai walks onto a train with Hayami, she asks about the boat he's holding, he says it's for the Obon, and she says "ok." Then he asks her if she's going home(for vacation) and she gets angry at him. That's it. Mibuya's situation involved everyone standing over her while she was on that table and offering generic support such as "hang in there" and "don't die." Besides that, the way it was handled afterwards was really bad.
I honestly remember there being about 5-10 different songs throughout the anime, and they were very situational such as the "characters are messing around" song, "dramatic situation" song, etc. I heard the same exact songs for the whole 12 episodes over and over again. There is no soundtrack for this anime which is bizarre, but it's probably because there weren't enough tracks to create one.
As for the characters, if you liked them then that's fine. I didn't. I didn't dislike them either. I just didn't see enough to make me care for them at all. You agree that they're stereotypical and nothing special, and I agree with you that those things don't automatically mean they can't be enjoyable. However, most of them only got a really small amount, like one scene, of character development. The rest of them got none at all. I don't see how you can call such an undeveloped cast of characters great, unless you're just talking about your enjoyment.
The problem I had with Mibuya's death was that I only knew two things about her: She was not a good pilot and she was stuck up. That's it. That's what the writers had to work with when they killed her. Killing off undeveloped characters, early on in a series before they have a chance to develop(although I see that wouldn't have happened anyway) is bad writing. It was just too early to kill anyone off, certainly if the anime isn't even going to touch on it for more than a few scenes in the next episode.
Groove said: The way I seen it, it was "Okay they showed me something I didn't want to see, but at least it's over now, and we're back to the fun things, things I do enjoy, things that I actually watch the show for".
You say it was a bonus for you that it was dropped because you didn't want to see it, I see it as bad writing because that's what it was. I don't want to get back to the things I watch the show for because I don't watch the show for specific things. I enjoy certain things more than others, but I don't want any part to be sacrificed, and the drama took a huge hit because of the way her death was handled.
The end of episode 6 through the end of episode 7 is about them being in the woods.
Wow, did you really say it's ok for only one character be developed in a 12 episode series? That's completely absurd and I don't believe I have to discuss this. How many 12 episode series have you seen where only one character receives development? Even some of the worst ones on my list managed to do more than that.
I didn't feel like I wanted to know about any of them either but that's not a good thing to say. I didn't care about them because there was nothing to care about beyond their character stereotypes. If you did care about them for just that, then fine, but the anime certainly didn't need to be twice as long to develop more than 1 character.
I thought the beginning of the anime was bad. Not really bad, but it was nowhere near good. It didn't seem like it knew what it wanted to be judging by how different the first 5 episodes were, all lacking transitions. Regardless of whatever each specific episode was about, the action was weak, the drama was without substance, the music was either non-existant when it should have been there or just barely noticable in the background, and the characters were nothing but cardboard cutouts. You had the playboy, the rough guy, the tsundere, the plain guy, etc. There's nothing special here at all.
The situation with Mibuya was handled extremely poorly. It's like the writers realized that episodes 1-4 were lacking any significant events and decided to do that to some random character that I know next to nothing about as a last ditch effort. It did not work at all. The way it was barely brought up in the next episode was even worse, and after that the plotline was just dropped. It was a meaningless act, and even though I still have no reason to care about her, I can say that her character was treated like shit.
Starting at the end of episode 6, and up through the end of episode 7, the anime finally figures out how to do drama well. Unfortunately, the drama just goes flying out the window after this point, never to be seen again. They finally managed to do it right and then just abandon it which seemed very ironic.
Episodes 8-12 fix the character development problem...for Mai, and only Mai, as the anime completely changes into a romantic comedy. There is an extreme lack of a transition from what episodes 5-7 and 8-12 were like, but other than that, the last 5 episodes are all decent at the very least, with most of them being good. Episode 11 was easily the best episode.
Like I said before, most of the elements of the anime like music, action, characters, and so on are very weak, and when I step away from the anime after it's over and look at it, Mai is the only thing worth mentioning. Other than her, this anime has no substance at all. Since it at least had something worth mentioning by the very end, I gave it a 6. It was decent, but it's nothing I haven't seen 100 times before, literally.
It's just me here, and I've gone through survival training(Green Green, Girls Bravo, etc.) so an earthquake is nothing for me. There really wasn't any damage at all, but everything that wasn't bolted down(DVDs, books, lamps, things in cabinets etc.) fell all over the place. I just need to find a better way to store things.
I'll come up with something by tomorrow, most likely.
