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Oh my god the art is sooo bad. Like, seriously. The amount of fanservice pointlessly shoehorned into this is incredibly laughable as well. The first case was fairly entertaining, and most of the ones after that were at least fun to read, but the clear problem with this series' approach to whodunit is that the author doesn't give the reader the tools to solve the mystery. Instead we have to rely on the male lead (you know, the low-rent "L" character) to feed us clues. Except for most of it he keeps his cards close to his chest.

I dunno. I say just go read Death ... Note instead. And even though I know in my heart of hearts that Death Note came later, I can't help but feel like Remote is a cheap imitation, minus the supernatural element.

Koroshiya Ichi is one of the weirdest things ever created by a human being. With a twisty storyline, disgustingly real artwork, and nuanced and multifaceted characters, it is one of those series that I really WANT to recommend to absolutely everyone, despite the fact that I know for a fact that it isn't everybody's cup of tea.

Hell, it isn't really anybody's cup of tea. I don't even know that I'd call reading Koroshiya Ichi an enjoyable experience. Interesting? Yes. Entertaining? Of course. Enjoyable?

...

Well...

One of the main things I like about Koroshiya Ichi is just how uncomfortable it is. Not only the gruesomeness of the imagery, ... but also the strange, sexualized nature of it. The way it is expressed in terms of BDSM. It's kinky, not necessarily in the sense that it titillates sexually, (I mean, unless you're really into that kind of thing) but that it is a sexualized expression of violence. In many ways, it's downright Freudian.

I suppose in order to articulately explain what the hell I'm talking about, I have to get into some amount of detail. One could say the work has duel protagonists. Or perhaps duel antagonists? Either way, neither of them are particularly good people. Together, they are each as one side of the S&M coin, Ichi being a sadist, Kakihara being a masochist, both of them taking these roles to extremes. In his private life, Ichi is incredibly submissive, almost childlike, whereas Kakihara is dominant, being the head of the Anjougumi, and imposing his will on all those around him. And yet when you look at Ichi's "relationship" with Kakihara, something flips. Kakihara was a masochist from the start, receiving extreme sexual gratification from experiencing pain, while Ichi is the opposite. He just loves killing. Like, a lot. Like, no, seriously.

And as much as I want to continue this, and believe me, I really do, I feel like if I say anything else, I'll give too much away, and you're not really likely to be reading this looking for a recommendation, as I have a feeling you already know whether or not you like this sort of thing, but for the sake of making this a "complete" review, I will say this: whether or not you can stomach this is entirely your own business, so I'll leave that much up to you. But if you can stomach the bizarre, gory, sexualized, S&M violence, then yes, I certainly do wholeheartedly recommend this. The story is excellent, and filled with colorful characters of all sorts, although mostly bad people. And it taught me one very important and useful piece of advice: Never venture into Kabukichou late at night, because you might run into one of these sick fucks.

THIS REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS. I will try to be as oblique as possible, but if you correctly guess who or what I am talking about, that's your own damn fault.

Hot Gimmick is all right. It's not a particularly good manga by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not an offensively horrible one either. The art isn't bad, it's actually pretty good, albeit uninspired. The story is rather standard Soap Opera fare, and I mean that in the most positive way possible. It is ostensibly about Hatsumi, our intrepid heroine, but throughout the series we see her will subverted by the male lead(s). However, ... my issue isn't that she isn't a strong or willful character, because I can still say, "Well, at least she isn't flat." And she really isn't. There is some small amount of depth to this character. She has internal conflicts and drama. It's everyone else I don't like.

All of the men in this make me feel incredibly uncomfortable. Like, reading this, I can't help but feel like the mangaka was sexually assaulted at a relatively young age, or perhaps knows someone who was. All of the guys in this are either so transparently evil you can practically see them twirling their moustaches, totally ineffectual, willfully ignorant of what Hatsumi really wants in favor of whatever the hell it is THEY want, obsessed with sex, on the autism spectrum, or some combination of these things.

For instance, let's take Ryoki, Hatsumi's "slave master." Aihara-sensei spends the entire series trying to convince us that he does have feelings for her. But I just don't buy it one bit. All he cares about his own gratification, he spends so much time actively trying to make her suffer. And when he isn't doing so intentionally, it's because he really doesn't understand anything about how Hatsumi thinks and feels, or any other human being for that matter. But what makes me even more frustrated with his character is that despite the fact that he's so easy to read, Hatsumi can't understand anything about him or his worldview either! Is assholishness really so foreign a concept that the average Japanese high school girl can't wrap her head around it?

Then there's Azusa. He's an okay character, I guess. You might actually enjoy reading about him. Y'know, if you're stupid. I don't want to give anything specific away--even though I'm very clearly recommending you not read this manga--but there's a part very early on in the series where he does something pretty awful, and the entire rest of the series we're led to believe he's an okay guy. No, he's not. He's a jerkass, and this "ends justify the means" bullshit isn't gonna fly here. "Oh, he had a really tortured past, he can't help but be bad." You know who else had a really tortured past? Adolf Hitler. There, I said it. Godwin's law can go to hell.

So, is Hot Gimmick good? No. Is it bad? ...No? I wanna say it's a horrible train wreck nobody should ever read, but the plotline, standard and predictable as it is, was fairly entertaining throughout most of it. There were some plot elements that seemed like they were shoehorned in ("WOW WHAT A TWIST! I CERTAINLY DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING" "Of course not, because it wasn't set up in any way shape or form and really just came out of nowhere"). So, while I can't say that I hated it, I also can't say that I'd recommend this to anyone. Maybe if you're thirteen years old. I mean, that's how old I was when I originally read it, and I really seemed to enjoy it back then. But as is true of a lot of things I liked back then, it cannot withstand the harsh light of day being shined upon it.

I was a little late getting on the EVA train. About sixteen years late. See, what happened was, I was sitting in my Japanese class and we're totally geeking out about mech anime while we wait for sensei to arrive. I end up admitting that I hadn't ever seen EVA before, and so this guy sitting next to me basically explains how my life has been incomplete due to the gap left by a lack of Evangelion. I initially wrote this off as a simple overstatement, but I decided to sit down and watch.

He couldn't have been more correct.

Now, before watching, I had had some ... previous exposure to this series. I knew how it ended, or, perhaps, how it didn't end. I mean, how could anyone have gone this long without knowing about that whole "Congratulations" scene. But I digress.

Story: 10
In constructing Evangelion, Hideaki Anno created a bizarre and multilayered universe, which, on the surface, doesn't look too terribly different from our own. Really all that's different is the whole angel thing (and that's if you aren't including the setting in all of this). When you first get into it, you make all kinds of fundamental assumptions about the EvaVerse, the most important one being the origin of species. I'm not going to spoil it, but let me just say that no matter how you think that humanity came about, it ain't got nothing on EVA's background. On top of the worldbuilding aspect, there's plenty of fun to be had following the twists and turns of Shinji's adventures in the Evangelion, although that last bit may have painted a picture of a typical shounen action series, which EVA decidedly is not. No, Evangelion starts off somewhat cheerful (well, as cheerful as an anime set in post-apocalyptic Japan can get) and grows progressively darker from there. I don't remember at which exact moment I realized "holy f*ck this got really dark," but it was probably somewhere between episodes 16 and 18. Overall, the story is so complex, it's impossible to understand it after just one run-through, to the extent that there is an entire wiki dedicated to in-depth analysis of this series.

Art: 8
While I would not go as far as to call the art of the series beautiful, I definitely liked it. I really like the designs for the "monsters," a term I'm using somewhat generally to refer to both the angels and the EVAs. First of all, the angels do not look like your typical Judeo-Christian conception of what an angel looks like. They aren't pretty, they don't have halos, (except some of them do and they all do in the Rebuild movies) they don't play harps, and they certainly aren't messengers of any god that I'd like to meet. They look like how many angels in the Bible are described. For instance, the sixteenth angel, Armisael resembles the angels, called Thrones, described in the book of Ezekiel as "Wheels within wheels." The EVAs, on the other hand, are much more humanoid in appearance, except for certain aspects of their design, meant to invoke demonic imagery. In their preliminary design stages, they even had horns, playing them counter to the "heavenly" aspect of the Angels. Hell, EVA Unit 01 is referred to as the Beast while in Berserker mode, so it's not even that much of a stretch.
As far as character design goes, I definitely liked the way they look. I feel like the best-designed character would be Gendou, both in appearance and as far as his costume design goes. Every bit of him just exudes an air of malicious secrecy, telling us that he knows something that we don't, and probably never will.

Sound: 7
The sound design and music was actually incredibly good. However the sound quality is quite lacking. Now, I gave it some leeway due to it being more than a decade and a half old, however I'm taking a somewhat holistic approach to this, embracing both the English dub and the original Japanese. The Japanese is nearly perfect. There are a few hiccups with the voice acting, but that's to be expected, all things considered. It's the English voice cast that brings the sound quality down for me. They just didn't seem to match in a few ways, the most glaring one being that the sound quality of the voice acting was leaps and bounds better than the background music and sound effects. However, there is one thing that saves it, and that is the performance of the voice cast. Spike Spencer as Shinji, Tristan MacAvery as Gendou, Allison Keith as Misato, and Tiffany Grant as Asuka stand out to me in particular, among a cast of scenery chewers and character actors.

Character: 9
I don't like Shinji. But then again, we're not really *supposed* to like Shinji. He is pretty much universally referred to as the whiniest protagonist in all of anime. He is entirely passive, doing only what other people tell him to do, especially when it's something that he doesn't want to, like piloting the EVA. But, as a character, I really like Shinji. He has realistic wants and fears. He has a motivation.
Asuka is not a well-adjusted individual, but in the world of EVA pilots, being screwed up in the head is pretty much a requirement for the position. She's clearly got daddy (mommy?) issues and is, once again, an interesting character with a deep background and realistic desires.
I think that it's unfortunate what's happened to Rei. When this was made, the idea of a short, blue-haired, emotionless girl character was rare, if not original. She's well-constructed, overall, however I just can't look past the way that her character has been copied to death, and occasionally even being done better than the original. It's nothing personal, Ayanami. I've just seen it all before. I'd probably have a different perspective if it were 1996 and I still hadn't watched, like, any other anime, but it's not. It's 2014 and the waters have already been poisoned.
I really like Gendou. I don't think that can be overstated at all. He's like what you get if Machiavelli decided to have a kid and also human instrumentality second impact giant fighting robots desu. He's sort of set up to be a bit of a minor villain, and, well, once the threat of the angels is dealt with (as if there was any doubt that it wouldn't be) he gladly steps toward that role, even if it is eventually filled by the other shadowy government organization. He also has some really interesting relationships with other characters. His nurturing relationship with Rei is possibly the polar opposite of the way he treats Shinji. There's just so much going on inside that calculating head of his.
Ritsuko is kinda screwed up, but then, if you had to deal with the stuff she's had to go through, so would you. I like her relationship with her late mother, the way that, even though she sees herself as the opposite of her mother, she has stepped in to essentially fill that role. Even her relationship with Gendou is exactly the same as the one her mother had with him.
Misato hides her pain behind a thick barrier of booze and duty. Fifteen years after her father's death in the Second Impact, she is still reeling from the loss. She refuses to reach out to anyone, as she fears that she might get hurt. She took a chance in taking Shinji in, and that led to some great times for the both of them (and also Asuka once she joins the party).

Enjoyment: 10
I liked it a lot. Especially when it got dark. It was fun. As this is a qualitative measurement, there's not much else to say.

Overall: 10
This anime is not for everyone. But if you like giant mech battles, Christian imagery, and Immanuel Kant, then this is the anime for you. Also, if you enjoy being congratulated. That's definitely an added bonus.

I have said numerous times that Haruhi is the greatest anime/light novel series ever, so I decided to read the manga. Going in, I expected copious amounts of Adaptation Decay and I was most certainly right. However, while most fans find that the re-ordering of events ruins the storyline or makes it impossible to read, that is the precise reason why I decided to read it. And not only that, but the amount of filler. And not just any kind of filler, but well-written, enjoyable filler, not like that Naruto crap that I wish never happened (except for the one with Mizuki, but I digress). ... Many people absolutely hate the art. I don't. I find the art to be, while slightly different, well done and, once again, another take on Haruhi. The way I feel about this manga is similar to the way I feel about the third Harry Potter movie. It was a good movie, just not a good Harry Potter movie. I view this series as a fresh look at the Haruhi Mythos, and as a completey separate work, as opposed to "an adaptation of the hit light novel series," because Adaptation Decay is simply what makes each adaptation its own work.

This is one of those mangas that the more you read it, and the more you think about it, the less you like it. I mean, to tell you the truth, the only reason why I liked it to begin with was because the main female protagonist, Ai, was actually kinda hot, and because of the bewbs. ^_^

Lemme break it down.

Story: 5
It actually started out pretty well, in my opinion. It had a strong opening and I actually enjoyed how Ai went from being a jimi (homely) to being a beautiful young lady. In fact, I loved it until the end. Then, after the end, ... I decided to go through it again. This time, I realized just how stupid and superficial the plot truly is. But I give Izumi-sensei kudos for being able to hide it so well (by inserting bewbs somewhere in the middle).

Art: 9
I actually did quite like the art. It was very unique and that's pretty much all I can say, simply because I'm not that good at criticizing bad art and praising good art. Although, I must say that I did like the shading on the bewbs. And yes, I am inserting a random comment about a woman's breasts at the end of each paragraph.

Character: 6
Sou is a douchebag. I mean, he could honestly care less if Ai fell off a cliff and was hospitalized for the rest of her life. He'd just move on and find another girlfriend. After all, he is a total bish. That's what girls are into these days, right?
Ai has no self-confidence. I understand that that's supposed to be the theme of this entire manga, but seriously! Make her at least a little interesting.
Yuichiro is sorta different. He's actually kinda funny and somewhat interesting. Yes, I understand that since he's a supporting character he has less personality than Sou (which only serves to make the series worse).
Mina is probably my favorite character in this whole thing. Even though she isn't really hot enough to be mai waifu, and she's a bit of a bitch at times, and extremely creepy, she actually has a likable personality compared to Sou, and she isn't simply a vapid and uninteresting character whose only purpose is to doubt herself and have big bewbs.

Enjoyment: 7
I actually enjoyed this, to tell you the truth. I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it so much if I had read it now, but I still actually had fun the first time I read through it. Even though it had a stupid plot, Izumi-sensei figured out how to distract me from that just long enough to keep me interested. I also enjoyed seeing the bewbs.

Overall: 6
Two years ago, I probably would have given this a 10. After two years of thought (actually, I made up my mind after one week, I just hadn't gotten around to posting a review) I have decided that this manga is most certainly not the best that I've read. Also, the bewbs only lasted for one panel and they were somewhere in vol. 4 (I don't know what page exactly and I have to go, so I can't be bothered to check).

I loved the first "season" of this series. The ending left me wanting more. It started well with the brilliant "Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody." Then came Endless Eight. When I watched the first episode of Endless Eight, I actually quite enjoyed it. This time there's nothing going wrong! It's just the last week of summer and everyone's having fun. After that I watched the second episode of Endless Eight. Well, this doesn't seem so bad. I've only already watched the first one and I don't mind seeing it again. Then the third one, and the fourth one. Pretty soon it got really boring. Instead of actually ... watching the fifth and sixth, I just played free cell while listening to the dialogue. "Kyon-kun, Denwa." After that, it just got boring. For the seventh and eighth ones, I just watched the first three minutes and then skipped to the end. When I heard Kyon shout "I HAVEN'T FINISHED MY LIST YET!" I cheered. It was finally over. However, that was the biggest waste of 3 hours and 15 minutes of my life. But I guess this season can be redeemed by The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya, as I found that especially interesting, because this time I had actually read the book before watching. The only problem I have with this is with Endless Eight. If they had taken Endless Eight and made it into Endless Two, or even Endless Three, then I would have been much happier. However, Endless Eight takes up more than half of this "season," so that constitutes one major glaring flaw of this series. But I probably wasn't as pissed as some other fans of the series, because I had only found out about the series this January, not in 2006, when the first "season" was originally aired. Now, despite the fact that I hated Endless Eight with a passion, the one other redeeming quality is the voice cast. Yūko Gotō, Minori Chihara, and my absolute favorite Seiyū ever, Aya Hirano all performed quite excellently. Super Driver was a great opening theme (although I do prefer Bouken Desho Desho from the first season) and I liked the ending theme.

Nyoro-n Churuya-san was one of the most out there and random Animes I have ever watched. After finishing Haruhi-chan, I was still craving more Haruhi-related randomness, so I decided to watch Churuya. It was killer. I enjoyed Churuya's childlike way of looking at the world and her rabid obsession with smoked cheese. My only problems with this anime are:
1. I didn't quite like the art style. The way that all of the Brigade member's faces are just a series of lines arranged to make a face seems to reflect a sort of laziness.
2. Yūko Gotō didn't do the voice exactly the same. I know that's ... a sorta picky thing to say, but that's just the way I am.

However, I enjoyed watching the show with my favorite episode being 7, featuring Churuya's Great Great Adventure, a video game starring the one and only Churuya-san.