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This is a somewhat underrated series. It certainly is not a masterpiece, but I found myself liking the characters, and I felt like it was a fairly satisfying watch that even did a few things I've never seen in a Mecha anime before.

In particular I like the two main characters. Their development throughout the series is heartwarming to watch, and ultimately they have to make some hard choices.

I will admit that it's been quite a while since I watched this series, but I still remember it fondly even a few years later. If you're looking for some light mecha to ... fill up a weekend netflix binge, you could do a lot worse than ID-0.

I really was expecting to enjoy this movie when I watched it, so perhaps I just had too high of expectations. However, I think there is just a serious problem with the overall message of this movie. Perhaps it was unintentional, but it's still there.

Story:

This is mainly the thing I have a problem with. In general this is a fun children's adventure story about a little girl who learns that magic is real in the most terrifying way possible and terrible things happen because of it.

I think this film would probably be quite nightmarish for some kids, but that's not the main ... issue.

Here is the problem I have here: obviously a lot of the "magic" in this story is an allegory for science. But I don't think it really comes off as a cautionary tale about science. What I think it really comes off as, is a story about how dangerous it is to leave home, expose yourself to new ideas, and look for adventure. It's much better to stay home and be happy with what you have. Ultimately Mary learns that her mother left her powers behind to become a normal girl, and she does the same: she rejects her magical heritage and is content to return to her normal life and the destiny of a normal girl.

It just seems like a strange message to give to children. "Don't believe that you are special. Don't believe in magic. Just be content with what you have, because believing in fairy tales and trying to do amazing things is scary and turns people into monsters."

It just seems like a very anti-witch message for a movie that bills itself as being about a witch's flower.

Art
The art is lovely as usual for this studio. It would be very hard to complain about the visuals. Although, I will say, that the overall aesthetic is very similar to (but not quite as good as) Howl's Moving Castle.

Sound
The music is also very lovely, and compliments the art very well.

Character
The main character is a young girl who has this attitude that shows up a lot in the main girl characters of books set in some indeterminate time that is after 1850 but before 1910. She is unhappy with her life and she is going to make sure everyone around her knows that she is unhappy. It's not easy to like her at first, although she does grow on you as the story goes on.

Sadly there aren't really many other characters in this story who are developed very much. In particular the boy who becomes fairly significant to the plot later on really doesn't get very much development at all. I really wish that we could have known a bit more about it, since he is one of only two human characters in this movie. I think he he'd been more of a real character, the whole thing would have been a good deal deeper and had more character development.

Enjoyment
It's a fun movie to watch but it just leaves you feeling a bit hollow at the end.

Overall:

These kinds of stories are best when they let you dream about something that isn't real, or when they teach a child a lesson, but I feel like the major lesson that Mary learned was to stop daydreaming and grow up, because the thing that made her special was bad, which is a pretty boring and hollow message for a film like this to have.

Go watch Howl's Moving Castle again instead.

This anime is not breaking any records and ultimately it doesn't really have anything in particular to say.

However, it is a fun sci fi adventure with some interesting characters and technology, and the animation is quite good. Also, there are lots of women in non-demeaning roles and the main character is a girl as well.

As usual with anime sci fi don't try to look at the 'science' aspect of it too hard, but if I were to hold that against it I would never be able to watch a sci fi anime. (there's never been one that was based on anything close to reality). ...

I binge watched this on a saturday afternoon when I was stuck in bed with back pain, and I suspect this is the ideal kind of situation for watching these 12 episode netflix anime. They're like very long movies rather than actual series. As such, characterization is what they can fit into 12 eps, plot is what they can fit into 12 eps, etc.

Okay so, pros and cons:

Pros:
-Great animation
-Great music (so rare now)
-Interesting tech and biotec
-Lots of good female characters

Cons:
-Very weird male protagonist who is ultimately lacking in personality
-Story is a bit simple and by-the-numbers
-Some plot elements are never really explained

Conclusion:
A nice weekend binge watch if you really like sci fi with biotec, and aren't opposed to a story with a lot of female main characters.

Although this anime is by no means perfect, it presents some interesting mysteries and for the most part provides answers to most of those mysteries, but not all of them. Animation is absolutely top notch. Plus, unlike so many anime series of this kind, it actually has a coherent and fairly satisfying ending.

The characters are all fairly interesting and likable, but in only 12 episodes there is only so much development that they can manage for each of them. Don't get confused by the first few episodes, Koku and Keith are the main characters of this series.

I read an interview where the ... writer mentioned that he originally wanted the series to be a story about a 'dark hero' but that some of the higher ups at netflix wanted more focus on the mysteries and crime drama, and so he seems to have decided to make a show with two major plotlines, one about a dark hero with superpowers and one which is something of a supernatural police procedural. How willing you are to just go with this will have a lot to do with how much you enjoy this show. The two threads are not totally unconnected though, and honestly I enjoyed how unusual this show is. I have watched so many dark hero animes that I just can't take another one at this point.

The pacing is off at times, it could really have used one more episode.

PROS: Fantastic animation, unusual story structure, interesting world building

CONS: May be very frustrating to people who prefer straightforward storytelling that doesn't force the viewer to have to try to figure things out on their own. The strange story structure may also be off-putting.

CONCLUSION:
Interesting if somewhat convoluted story, great animation, fun to binge on a weekend and probably forget about a few weeks later. I would love to get more of these characters and this setting in a sequel.

This is the most hilarious manga I've read in a long time.

Seriously I do not understand why no one has even written a review for it.

Story- The tale of an aspiring middle manager in a generic corporate office, just trying to make it in this strange crazy world. The fact that he is a complete and total moron makes things a little difficult, though.

Art- The art is not really anything that special, but the pictures of fierce animals when he is going to do something like buy a new office chair or trying to learn to use a computer just crack me up so ... bad.

Character- This hardly even applies due to the kind of comedy that's going on here but you just can't help but hope he manages to muddle through life somehow.

Enjoyment - I never fail to laugh reading this manga.

Overall - Seriously, it's a story about a dude working in an office, but the chapters have names like "Rising Dragon" and "Enraged Demon." The entire second chapter is about him trying to break his desk's chair so he can get permission to buy a better one. Go read this right now.

So look at the numbers I have put on this one, and you will see something strange.

Story - 7
Art- 10
Character-8
Overall-7
Enjoyment-2

But...enjoyment 2? really?

... Okay, so here's the deal with this manga. Don't pay any attention to any review written by someone who hasn't read all or almost all of the chapters. For the most part this is just a fun violent story about a werewolf fighting gang members. It's pretty hard on the gore, but I mean...werewolves.

But then the story gets to this place and I just.....

I mean I understand that a lot of writers, especially male writers, think that having a girl get raped is a good way to give her some character development, or that it's like trauma for her to deal with or whatever and I can even understand if it's a little over the top for some titillation for more pervy readers.

But look. Look. A few pages. MAYBE one chapter even, I could understand.

But Ookami, I guess feeling like it needed to distinguish itself, is not satisfied until it has devoted more than FIVE ENTIRE CHAPTERS to this woman being graphically raped repeatedly by like 7 dudes. Every single detail of what happens to her is right there for you to see.

Anyway after all of that, no matter if she got rescued or shot or what, I was done with being able to engage with the story at all.

Seriously, this manga should have "hentai" as a genre, because it is really that bad and that long. Basically it is so bad that it not only cancels out everything good about this manga, it just keeps going until whenever you see a picture of the cover or read the title later, you just think "Oh yeah that's that manga with the 5 chapters of gang rape" and you move on.

Blame is one of my all-time favorite manga and I have no idea why. When you first pick this book up you'll be like "WFT is this he's just walking through endless hallways and occasionally killing monsters"

I've read the entire thing at least 4 times from beginning to end, and it wasn't until the last time I read it that I finally feel like I actually know what happened in it.

Story- So I promise you there is actually a story going on in BLAME. However, the writer is not going to make it easy for you to figure out what it is. ... There is no narration, almost no internal dialogue, and honestly not even much normal dialog. Entire chapters can pass by without there being a single word bubble of any kind. This helps to accentuate the bleak, endless nature of the environment the characters are living in, but at the same time it can be kind of daunting to figure out what's going on sometimes.

Art - Tsutomu Nihei has a very distinctive style of art. It's clear that he improves from the beginning of the series to the end, but it's still his distinctive style, and I suspect that some people will love it and some won't.

Character - This one is difficult. Since there is so little internal dialogue it can be difficult to figure out what a character is thinking or why they are doing what they are doing. I don't think that you could say this is a series that focuses on character interactions or development, so if you're looking for something psychological this is probably not the manga for you.

Enjoyment - I certainly enjoyed reading it. The strange cyberpunk setting, the fights between screaming robots, the graviton beam emitter gun that shoots 300-kilometer long beams. Not to mention the antagonists who are seriously freaky looking biomechanical monsters. And sometimes he will just throw in these incredibly random little interludes that will hurt your brain and then he'll just move on and you'll never really know what was up with them.

Overall- Like I said it's one of my favorite manga of all time, but I really couldn't tell you why. It's just very different.

Bleach is a weird one in terms of how to review it, not just because it is so long, but because of how strongly encapsulated each story arch is. So the quality varies greatly from one story the next, almost like different books in a series of novels.

Let me start out by just doing this briefly and if you want you can read the much longer part.

Story- The story started out fairly weak and episodic in the first section. Then the second section was decent and began some really interesting things. However, the third section could not manage to completely ... follow through, and the main plot line for the majority of the manga falls apart completely by the end of this section. Ever since then the author introduced a completely new set of antagonists that seem largely unrelated to anything that happened before, but it's clear at this point that the series has just gone on for way too long.

Art- The art starts out very very weak but he improves steadily as the manga goes on until by the 300th chapter it was quite solid. It has only continued to get better since then.

Character- There are lots of interesting characters in Bleach, but the main character tends to fall a little flat sometimes. Anyway there are very few who I would consider to be genuinely unlikable and in MOST cases he even gives you some insight into what the antagonists motivations are. (But not all, and he is especially bad about this with his main antagonists, for whom it's most important).

Enjoyment- Many exciting fight scenes, if you're into that kind of thing, and there is quite a bit of light-hearted comedy here and there. Generally up until near the end it's a fun manga to read.

Overall- Read more below, but basically it was fun for a while but never really delivered on it's potential.

I'm going to take you through the experience of Bleach as I experienced it, while reading it, so you can understand exactly why it was so popular for a while, but now has gotten so much hate. It's something that happens a lot in long series, so it's not like this progression is anything new.

Spoilers in large numbers will follow. This is also really long, but I mean the manga is like 500+ chapters so, what can you do?

-ARC 1 - THE HIGHSCHOOL KIDS DEMON HUNTING MANGA-

So I started reading Bleach like 5 years ago and no lie, I dropped it after chapter 10 and didn't try to read it again for more than a year. The reason was because I felt that the art was laughably bad. At the same level as the first few chapters of Shingeki no Kyojin, but without that series far superior plot and characters. It was this fairly poorly drawn manga about this boy who can see spirits, and meets a spirit-girl who gives him spirit hunting superpowers. They have fun adventures together with his quirky classmates and funny little sisters and it's all fairly lighthearted and good times. I gave it a second chance a few months later and found it to be diverting, but not exactly a masterpiece. But then at the end, some bad shit goes down, the spirit girl gets kidnapped, and the MC is left at the brink of death by the character who is going to be the antagonist of the next arc.

So yeah the first arc is like a very lighthearted ghost hunting mystery story. There's nothing particularly dark and only VERY vague hints at something bigger going on. That ending though...it pulls you in because you got to like Rukia so much, of course you have to know if she's okay.

Which leads us in to the second part of the story, which most fans will tell you is "the good part" because it is the story most fans were looking for from the beginning.

-ARC 2 - THE SHONEN ACTION MANGA-

So in the second arc, the MC has to rescue his little cutie spirit girlfriend, so he gets himself all powered up and goes to the spirit world to rescue her. In the spirit world he goes though a VERY standard set of Shonen Action Hero steps to doing this, involving fights that he loses at first, then goes and does some training and then winds the second round, or just rallies his resolve and manages to overcome the odds. Finally against an implacably powerful foe, he pulls out some turly crazy demon-like powers and manages to win, but he holds back from actually killing his opponent, instead coming to an understanding with them and rescuing his little girlfriend just in the nick of time!

At the same time, there is this murder mystery going on, and THIS, THIS is where the trouble for this series started, although no one knew that at the time. So at the very end, after saving the girl, suddenly this asshole shows up and stabs the MC in the stomach, then just sort of struts off, saying that he'll see everyone in 3 months when there's gonna be a bigass war.

So once again, the arc ends with the main character getting stabbed by the person who is presumably going to be the main villain of the next arc.

This second part is pretty much the classic shonen action series. The story advances by way of a number of unique battles that the MC has to fight against increasingly powerful opponents, with all the expected last minute powerups and speeches about ones resolve to fight and all that. Also as a side note, the art in Bleach steadily improves as it goes on, and so by the time we got to the middle of this arc, it had reached a level that was really pretty great.

There are also a large number of colorful and interesting characters introduced, and the cosmology of the setting really gets fleshed out a lot.

And the whole murder mystery plot SEEMED really cool, with lots of potential for interesting future developments.

I have to say, if the series had ended with the MC saving the girl and going home to live out the rest of his life in peace, Bleach would have been a pretty decent entry into the shonen genre, there would have been a neat 50-100 episode anime based on it, and people would still be writing fanfiction forever.

If only they could have been content with this.

-ARC 3 - THAT LAST ARC SOLD REALLY WELL SO MAYBE WE'LL JUST DO THAT AGAIN...ONLY THIS TIME MAKE THE ENEMIES SCARIER-

So in the third arc many of the characters who were antagonists in the second arc are now on the MC's side, helping him out. And since the villain ran off to the world of darkness and evil spirits, he now has a bunch of really REALLY vicious monsters working for him.

And here is where things begin to go off the rails. The monsters from the demon world are more powerful than previous enemies (Of course, because this is a shonen action series) so the story just becomes a retread of the previous arc, with the main character losing fights, then training and powering up, all ground that has pretty much been covered before. They even kidnap one of the female characters, taking her off to be imprisoned in the demon world for some unknown (but presumably nefarious) purpose. Just like in the previous arc, the MC has to go to the demon world to save her.

So the problems begin when they have nearly finished fighting their way through the demon world and finally find the kidnapped girl.

First of all, while they were trying to rescue her, there was a good deal of time spent on showing the reader what she was doing while she was stuck there, basically being psychologically abused by, and subsequently developing stockholm syndrome for the demon henchman who was in charge of holding her prisoner. I'm not sure if the author just liked this demon character a lot, or if the fans really liked him, but he just got more and more out of control powerful and unstoppable and unbeatable as the story went on. So FINALLY the MC manages to defeat this unbeatable demon by using another crazy shonen action hero powerup. But the thing was, that because you had gotten all these scenes that involved this demon, you had a feeling for his personality: so when the MC and this demon finally had their final battle, you felt like you knew both of the characters and so it mattered who won and how it happened. Anyway the MC eventually wins, and saves the girl. BUT, instead of the story ending, then he has to go fight the MAIN villain.

So then the author remembered, I guess, that this unbeatably powerful demon who was just killed was supposed to have been WORKING for the main villain. So the main villain, then, by default, MUST be more powerful than this all-powerful unbeatable demon.

Thus ensues one of the most ridiculous case of a Villain-Sue that has been seen in a comic book this decade. The shonen action powerups just get more and more ridiculous, random, and insane. Most of the original cast just kind of disappears into the background, and everyone's power levels go completely off-kilter just so that it can be established that yes, really, this villain is really the most powerful being in the universe. But the problem isn't weather this guy is more powerful. The problem is that HE wasn't the one who we got to know over the course of this story arc, instead all the character time was given over to his various demon henchmen. Since we don't actually know what this villain's motivations are, or anything about him other than that he's a jackass Villain-Sue, nobody wants to see him fight: by this point I'm pretty sure everyone reading the manga was just sick of him, and wanted him to die already.

Anyway eventually the author actually had to resort to sending the MC into an alternate dimension where time moved more quickly so he could get 3 months of training into and hour of subjective time. EVEN THEN the villain was so powerful that after no less than 6 mid-battle power-ups and transformations, he couldn't actually be killed and could only be imprisoned, and just to do that, the MC used an attack so powerful that he went into a coma for three months and lost all of his powers.

And really, where can anyone go from there? When you have used a villain who is so powerful that he literally cannot be killed, there just isn't anywhere else you can go with a shonen action series. But by this time the artwork was finally looking really really solid, and bleach was still making buckets of money.

So of course they had to continue it.

As of now they're about 3-4ths of the way through the 4th and allegedly final story arc, and I know it's about 3/4ths of the way through, because it is all just the same story as last time, just with an even more ridiculously over-powered group of villains who the main character will likely once again have to pull out all sorts of crazy bullshit to defeat.

The thing that I think frustrates most people was that they got really hyped up for the end of the third arc and then it just never delivered. The second part of the story was really good, and then it set the next arc up as being this big epic battle, but that big epic battle took like 200 chapters to get to, and wound up just being a whole bunch of bullshit. A lot of hints were dropped about things that might turn out to be true later, but then a lot of them got dropped or were just picked up again in weird ways.

As one of my friends put it when I showed him the first episode of this:

Every shoujo anime cliche in the history of anime happens in the first 5 minutes.

This is show is so trite and unoriginal it manages to cross the line into unintentional hilarity. If you were one of those girls who spent a lot of time back in middle school sitting around watching sailor moon and magic knight rayearth with your little friends eating pizza and talking about how to beat bosses in final fantasy 7, then you should seriously consider watching at least one episode of this anime, because you ... will seriously LOL.

But, there's no reason to ever watch more than one episode.

This manga is insane and amazing.

Story - The story is strange and will not go exactly where you expect. When I first started reading, I thought he was just doing a mecha for fun but now I realize that he is trolling us really hard. This series has all the standard mecha features, but everything is twisted and insane and delightful.

Art - The art is great, even if it's a little different from his other works.

Character - The characters are really fun. I can't say that there is lot of what I would call actual character development, but they are ... all interesting and weird. And the love triangle between the boy, the girl, and the boygirl that transforms, somehow, into a love triangle between a boy, a boygirl, and a gigantic monster made of space goo is just....I don't even know. I don't even know.

Enjoyment - There are plenty of epic space mecha battles for action, and then also details of the really strange sci-fi setting, not to mention the mysterious past. It's very enjoyable to read.

Overall - If you already like Tsutomu Nihei stories I'm sure you'd like this one as well. And if you like something really weird and different, that includes a gigantic monster made of goo who behaves like teenage girl, then seriously take a look. Really I don't even know what to say about Shiranui. Like I really thought I knew what he was doing with this story and then she showed up and I didn't know anymore. Anyway go read it, it's pretty great.