Reviews

Jul 13, 2008
Mixed Feelings
Hatenkou Yuugi is a 10-episode anime based on the ongoing manga with the same name. It aired between the 4th of January and the 7th of march, 2008.

The genres include: Comedy, Adventure, Drama.

Story
Hatenkou Yuugi begins pretty randomly, but with a lot of promise. The young woman Rahzel is thrown out of her home by her dad, because he wants her to travel and see the world. She quickly finds two traveling companions, Alzeid and Baroqueheat, and together travel from place to place, helping out people with different problems. Sounds good? Sure does, but during episodes you sometimes experience these random comedy moments that destroy the series (I say sometimes, but in some episodes, there are like 10 minutes wasted on horrible time-fills like these). Sometimes they're so bad I actually laugh at them, but usually they're just failed attempts at making the series more enjoyable. The series did pick up pace, but way too late to affect this score.

Animation
This series has beautiful character designs. Every character is detailed and nicely drawn. The thing that fails though, is the fact that sometimes the movement looks awkward (a character cheering will only move his/her arm and the rest of the body just stays still, like a mannequin), wasting the good designs. If you take a look at the backgrounds, they're all nicely drawn, and look good. Too bad that the quality drops loads of times and negatively affect the series.

Sound
The far best aspect of the series. The voice actors did a great job in this series. Since you can't really rely on body language in this series, the VA's all helped. Especially the voice actors for Rahzel(Kobayashi Sanae) and Alzeid(Sakurai Takahiro) were the best of the bunch. The OP and ED were both very good and fitting of the series, and one of my favorite voice actors(Koyasu Takehito) had a guest role.

Character
The only interesting characters are the main trio, Rahzel, Alzeid and Baroqueheat. Other than that, you just have a lot of characters, simply used as plot-devices, and even though there's only just three main characters, they hardly get any development, except for the occasional hints of romance. Though I have to admit, that the main trio are all good characters.

Enjoyment
I'll be honest, I did not enjoy this series very much. Only 3 out of 10 episodes were good, and the rest were boring or worse. As I said earlier, there are many totally random events during the series. Sure, I like randomness, as long as it's kept to a certain level, but since these random events n-e-v-e-r have anything to do with the actual story going on, they're just stupid and unnecessary.

Overall: 6/10
I will not recommend this series to anyone. Do yourself a favor, and stay away from this, unless that you really like the things I hated with this series.

I hope you found my review helpful, and if you didn't, please tell me why, so I can improve myself until next time.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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