Saint October

[b] Saint October review [/b]

Good day, comrades, I'm pleased to meet your eyes pionted on my review.
There is a small chance that you're interested in watching Saint October series, isn't there?
Well, jokes aside, be prepared in a various ways. Saint October has no mercy to your brains, daytime, way of life and relatives. It just comes and transforms yourself into another human being.

Trying to approach Saint October for the first time, I've dropped it undoubtely after the 3rd episode. As you can see, I was not prepaired. Few years later followed my second attempt - finished with a 10th mark for Saint October. Recipe: just ... get your brain ready, please. Watch Shugo Chara or Nurce Witch Komugi or smth of that genre (Galaxy Angel is fine too!). Be ready to say farewell to your concepts, ideas, stereotypes, change your mind and watch other selves of our Universe.

Well, let's finally get serious and write the review, maggots! As for me, Saint October is a mahou shoujo anime, filled with dirty and perverted transformations (they don't seem perverted, they're designed to be!), silly evil heroes and even more foolish and careless protagonist girls. I'd like to highlight the most outstanding feature of the series - they are not just full of trash, they emit trash energy waves every episode. Here we can observe an unpredictable course of the plot, the inexplicable scenes ("how could they even imagine to draw this?" - forget about your "why did they do it"), uncommon character solutions and so on.

[b] Story. [/b]
Well, just get along with the idea that you're not watching romance, philisophy or fighting series (orly?). Here we have trash mahou shoujo, nothing less and nothing more, latter is because you can't make it better. The plot is rather surprising, provided with some unpredictable turns, and gradually revealling further info about the characters involved. A set of stereotipes are gathered and intentionally made laugh of - great decision and execution of the idea. The setting itself is rather interesting - a great evil company trying to eliminate a boy and several girls. Try watching episode one.
Here we face an array of questions.
Why are they kidnapping children to find only distinct one? Why not observing before stealing? Because it is trash.
Why the great company can't use any of the real weapons? Killers, army, police? Because it really is trash!
What are those powers? Why are they dressed like that? What's happening here?? Yep, you know the answer. Just stay calm and watch.
Then why is that falsehood, unlikely story marked 10? Cause it is likely to be found attractive and exciting. Forget about noticing nonsence - producers are not imbeciles, they are making it on intention. That is for your laughs. Furthermore, this collective foolishness of the citizens doesn't develop into unbalance - since our protagonists tend to make silly steps, our none too clever evil heroes look rather similar.

[b]Art[/b]

Speaking about art, it is made rather simple during the main course, but sometimes (and rather frequent, to the authors' honour!) it changes into fascinating and stunning scenes (oh, what am I writing!). Well, there are some spectacular visual effects, especially with moving objects, or with the dynamic camera. All of them add to the trash radiance, so let them be.
The surroundings seem to be neatly and precisely made too. People, walking along the streets, moving cars, carefully drawn scenery.
Oh, right, let's get to the point of interest. Lolis are loliconic, yep. With anatomic details. And that transformation scenes! That Scenes!!

[b]Sound[/b]

Music and songs are not of the amusing or catchy ones. Nonetheless, you wouldn't find them awful. Background sounds could be ranked as high-quality, since they have a good timing (also no lack of them could be noticed on the spot) and don't seem to interrupt the course of the events.
The highlight sounds are voices. They fit characters, and provide the feeling of voice actresses really doing their job neatly and with love. Well done!

[b]Characters[/b]

Don't find it necessary to introduce every character on its own. I'll better try to make a general review.
The characters are bright and distinctive. Lots of them appear to be something more than originally expected. Some characters are slightly evolving, but in general you won't find it great psichological series (oh, man, I'm lying again!).
To make it clear, let's point out - characters are really bright! Each has its own hobby, appearence, foolishness,... even array of face expressions! You'll be screenshooting them, I bet! Not to ommit evil charas - they're something too!

[b]Enjoyment[/b]

10/10, definetely. If you appreciate trash. Predicting the next scene or the entire plot gets boring? Well, Saint October is for you. Looking for lolis fighting with rocket launchers, claymores, devil devices? Saint October is at your disposal again. Among my animelist, these series are getting the most trash, chaotic, entropic and unpredictable award for sure. Lolicon aspect is of best quality too.

[b]Overall[/b]

As you can see, I'm far from being adequate, since I've really liked this anime and therefore lack any objectiveness. As for me, it is a ten of all tens of ten. Just try it!

Thanks for reading! Hope you won't find this review disgraceful, - you've been warned to train your brains and perception on Shugo Chara before Saint October. More than that, please have a nice days watching Saint october!
Good luck!

It was difficult for me to sit down and write this review. Not because of a lack of motivation or outright dislike for the show, but due to my inability to pinpoint exactly what it tries to do. To make it simple, Saint October is made up of two distinct parts. One side is that of the comedy, where Kotono and Natsuki are being cute and eating cake together, Misaki riding around on the sentient bear she befriended, Koushirou playing the lazy tsukkomi while receiving the butt end of jokes, and Kurtz doing something absolutely outrageous in his office. Confronting that is the drama and ... the serious topics at hand. These two sides clash against each other in every episode, and this indecisiveness in direction is what I find to be the main issue of the show.

In certain anime, such as Gintama, this actually works in the series’ favour. The different tones are intertwined intrinsically and the humour moves seamlessly into the deeper themes. This doesn’t happen in Saint October. There’s a constant feeling that it’s trying to do the individual moments right, without consideration for what these moments end up forming once they align. This leads to some fundamental issues emerging even when the anime is presenting its more important topics. The humorous undertones creeps into the parts where it shouldn’t be present, and it’s impossible to fully shake it off. As an example, Misaki’s backstory is driven by avenging her lover’s death. It’s a reasonable motivation, albeit slightly underdeveloped, that offers some insight into her personality. However, the episode that is dedicated to this reveals that the person she seeks to kill is reduced to little more than a jolly robot that runs a cake shop. Unfortunately these jarring tonal shifts continue to happen throughout the series, even up to the final few episodes. You end up not being able to take what happens particularly seriously, which is a huge detriment considering there isn’t a lot of characterisation and depth to begin with.

The first half of Saint October is laid out in a fairly repetitive format. Reverse is sending out different agents so as to capture Kotono & Ewan. Think Team Rocket going for Pikachu and you already have the gist of it. Of course, this brings with it the issue of predictability since it’s evident Kotono won’t ever be defeated. The second half is where it picks up the pace a bit and steers into what ends up being a fairly entertaining show. A highlight for me is Joshua’s flashback episode that manages to develop three (!) characters at once. But in line with what ends up becoming a recurring issue with Saint October, there is one wrong to go with every right. Episode 12 is arguably one of the best episodes in the series. Kotono receives a reality check regarding what she’s been doing all along, and breaks down as a result. It was delivered nicely, without any misplaced comedy there to dampen the fall. Then the following episode comes along and gives possibly the weakest excuse you will ever hear to get her back in action again.

Honestly, I can take less than stellar writing. My biggest issue is that the amount of motivation put on the table is far from sufficient. Typically it is brought up once, dealt with, and then ignored for the rest of the series. One of the only times a theme is brought up again is in regards to the previously mentioned one. The penultimate episode touches upon this topic once more and somehow deals with it even worse. “You didn’t know, so it’s fine”. All this ends up doing is raising the question of how much the creators wanted to get the drama out of the way so they could dive straight back into the jokes again. The amount of logical liberties taken in the comedic scenes leak into other parts of the show, and it really makes you question the intellect of characters when they by all means should know better. One example of which is Kotono trying to storm the enemy headquarters alone and without any powers at her disposal. So when there’s too little, and that small amount is of low quality, disappointment is inevitable. Then again, maybe I’m the fool for expecting a show about magical girl lolis working at a detective agency to do something serious in the first place.

It’s a shame, because I really wanted to like this anime more than I did. The potential is there, the setting is too, but almost everything is underdeveloped to the point where it feels like what little there is only serves as the basis for the comedy. At its core it’s nothing more than a slice of life show that tries to bite off a bit more than it can chew. Its saving grace is the fact that the humour can actually be pretty funny, and the characters in the world are as well. Kurtz in particular ended up as one of my favourite characters ever due to his antics, and his unpredictability as a villain really put a spin on what came to be expected at times. That in itself elevated the worth of the series for me. Still, it’s absolutely true that Saint October would lose its identity if it were to pull back on or even scrap the comedy entirely. I’m certain this anime will be right up the alley of people who want some lighthearted entertainment, and while I didn’t expect something fully as genre-breaking as Madoka Magica, I for sure had the hopes that it could steer its own plot points forward in a convincing manner.

Instead, I’m still sitting here wondering how the hell Ewan could feel that Kotono was in danger when she was no longer bound by the card he gave her.