Hatenkou Yuugi

Overall I think this anime deserves an 8.5 on my scale, but unfortunately there isn't that option.

Story: The story itself is fairly basic, but has some interesting back story thrown in every once in a while. However, the anime does seem rushed. I think a lot of people did not give this show a chance because the beginning is so chaotic. The first episode does not feel like an introduction at all, in fact you are pretty much thrown into the story.

Art: I really enjoyed the animation. It seemed to be well done (it better for being 10 episodes). Maybe, it is the ... little girl in me, but I appreciated that they changed the main characters clothes and hair throughout the show.

Sound: Characters voices were fitting. The music throughout the show was very nice and enjoyable. Originally, I didn't like the intro song but it grew on me.

Character: This is one of my favorite things about this show, but at the same time could've been better. Rahzel, the main character, was AWESOME. She had a great back story, was interesting, kicked butt and was everything I wanted her to be. However, the other characters could've been so much more. I really saw potential for interesting characters and there were definitely moments, but I think the anime just didn't flesh it out well.

Enjoyment: Basically this show just captured me and kept me hostage. There is such a great mixture of humor, action, and friendship/love that I kept thinking "I'm going to rate this a 9!" I couldn't justify that high of a score overall, but the enjoyment level was definitely a 9.

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.

If you're in the mood to settle for less, this is the anime for you!
Because this may very well be the most generic anime i've ever seen.

It doesn't feel like any emotion was put into the creation of this series, it feels like it was made to fill a time slot, by people who had to use every cliche in the book to make up 24 minutes of content.

I felt like I'd already seen the premise to every episode of this show done better in Fullmetal Alchemist. While I understand that it's hard to make an episodic series without taking ideas from different places, none ... of the characters were likable enough to take my mind off of how lackluster the writing seemed.
Pretty much every character has a really grating and stupid sense of humor, the kind of quirky shit that you only hear when you're watching something that thinks it's really funny but is NOT (ex:"ur stupid" "wat?!? i am not stupid my precious kawaii-chan!!!"). Not to mention the fact that they flip from thinking the others are stupid and annoying to TREASURING OUR PRECIOUS FRIENDSHIP whenever the plot calls for it, which is about once or twice every 2 episodes.
Take Cowboy Bebop for a better example. They did plenty of "homages" that were pretty much ripoffs of other stories, but they had style! and characters that you could think of as people, and not just anime characters.

The biggest issue I have with this show other than the annoying characters is the pseudo-philosophy that the girl spouts near the end of most episodes. The main girl speaks wisely about the emptiness of revenge and the importance of friendship, but it's all the same shit we've heard in every other shounen anime on the planet, so it only results in climaxes that are almost as lame as the fucking jokes.
The difference between this and something like Gintama is that Gintama, for one, is actually FUNNY, and manages to bring some life into these stereotypes by giving the characters that espouse them actual compelling reasons to, and bringing them out during developed story arcs, instead of just SAYING them because they might as well

In short, you'll only like Hatenkou Yuugi if it's one of your very first anime and you're 12 years old. Even then, you should probably just stick with Gintama or anything else I name dropped in this review.