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- BirthdayApr 27, 2000
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Jul 13, 2014
Telling the tale of the unfortunate Junpei Kousaka, the show revels in this poor guy’s misfortune. After knocking the head off a neko-statue, he is cursed by a deity and told he must both worship cats and also appease 100 kitties or he will be turned into a feline himself! This plot line takes a backseat to the developing harem Junpei finds forming around himself, even though he is only interested in the coy Kaede. Addressing all aspects of male fantasies, the barrage of moe, tsundere, kindergarten friend and twins that the unappreciative male finds flocking to him somehow seems more believable than many other
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similar ecchi titles.
As the episodes tumble aside effortlessly, the writer's come up with new and creative ways of torturing the poor protagonist; from an aggressive challenge from tomboy Nagi - who suddenly takes a liking to the curvaceous Kanako’s sweater-puppies, to the mysterious twins with contrasting personalities who both love and hate the brow-beaten schoolboy, Junpei's misery is what makes the show so humorous. Although Nyan Koi’s strange pretence eventually transforms into a typical harem, its friendships and group dynamics are what keep the show a step ahead of the competition.
Although there is a sense of “been there, done that” with certain romantic aspects of the show, an abundance of bizarre genres save Nyan Koi from becoming a bland snooze-fest. The typical swimsuit and hot spring features are redeemed with magical girl transformations and moments of outright ecchi. It is often the small things that stand out, and usually the perverted ones at that, but a series that makes you laugh out loud is definitely not one to be ignored.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Jul 13, 2014
Infinite Stratos is a lighthearted comedic drama following the life of Ichika Orimura during his eventful life entering a previously all-girl Infinite Stratos academy. The IS academy trains students in the use of Infinite Stratos, which are mechanized power armor suits capable of flight and extreme combat conditions that voided conventional weapons when they were introduced. One catch though...
Only women could pilot them.
Infinite Stratos is pretty much a straight comedy with a bit of drama mixed in. The antics surrounding being the only guy in an all-girl combat school is ripe with awkward moments and hilariously bad (read: so bad its great) humor. His complex
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relationship with basically the entire student body (remember, they're all girls who're interested in the only guy to pilot an IS) can be a bit much sometimes, but there are at least a few moments of GOLD mixed into the series
Of course most of the hilarious moments (and the creepy ones) belong with the main cast. Most of the conflict in the series is between the main cast over who gets Ichika. The main cast includes Houki (Ichika's old childhood friend), Cecilia (a British noblewoman going to the academy), Huang "Rin" (another childhood friend), Laura Bodewig (a strange student from Germany), and... Charles (it makes sense in context). The characters are pretty well developed for the short time we've gotten to see them on screen. Among the cast are some genuinely nice characters, others are just a bit weird.
This show has absolutely no shame about its plot or themes. It goes full-speed into the crazy and awkward with no regard for being "normal". From the copious amounts of fanservice, to the very-nearly-an-excuse-plot plot, to the ridiculous (and many times very violent) romantic subplots, this series never misses a chance to go over the top somehow.
I also found that it was voice acted quite well (I only have a tenuous grasp on Japanese, but what I did hear was quite good). The majority of the cast have their characters and their quirks down well. The inflections were frequently spot on and nothing ever seems too overacted. Still, when the cast is required to be crazy, they certainly deliver.
I've gotta say though, sometimes you've got to wonder if this show is going anywhere in particular. I realize that the plot isn't exactly a selling point but come on, is there anything else here? For nearly 14 episodes now (I've seen the first two for season two) the question of why Ichika can use an IS hasn't really even been mentioned. I'm hoping that season two starts picking up the slack on this one.
Another painful one, there are so many awkward moments in this series. It just gets overwhelming. At least every other episode has one such moment played for laughs on Ichika (and is usually followed up by a girl kicking his ass, usually hilarious). This is fine for the episode-a-day crowd, but I was marathon'ing this thing.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Jun 21, 2014
The story takes place in Tokyo Butei High School, a special school where armed detectives, known as Butei, are trained to use weapons. Kinji Tooyama is a second-year-student who wants a peaceful life but his special ability that makes him stand out makes it difficult to do so. However, when he gets caught in a bombing on the way to school, he encounters Aria Kanzaki, the most powerful S-Rank Butei student in Assault Studies.
Captivated by his amazing skills, Aria sets out to make Kinji her partner. Can a guy who desires peace ever team up with this loli tsundere S-ranked Butei student?
Here’s something truly amazing
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about this anime. It’s an Action anime with some Romance, Ecchi and Harem. It has Supernatural elements in it. It has terrorism as a base premise, a bit of historical elements and some good old fashion mild nudity. There is so much in this anime that it manages to balance all of these important aspects. It’s truly an outstanding anime.
This is a JC Staff anime and that studio knows how to properly balance elements to make an anime shine. If you’ve ever watched some of its previous works like Shakugan No Shana or Toaru majutsu no Index then you’ll love Hidan no Aria. Those two shows also have action, romance, ecchi and a hint of harem. You can trust JC Staff to deliver another awesome show like that.
The other characters where nicely done as well. The other girls, who sadly fall on the clichéd, are interesting on their own. Even though we have probably seen their type done to death in other anime, they still make the story more solid and more fun to watch. The interaction between the characters is nicely done and I believe this is the time to thank the seiyuus for that. There are some minor characters in the anime that appears seldom but even they have a great personality. It’s great even though, yes, we have all seen it before.
The action sequences are also nicely done. It’s not the best you’ll ever see and there is actually more talking than biting in the action parts. There is still character development during these fights so the fighting is not that prominent though the conclusions of the fights are very fun to watch. There’s nothing wrong with the action sequences despite its lack of actual action. There is enough to further enhance the story and make the characters shine.
JC Staff is never lazy with the animation. The fight scenes are nicely animated and completely thought out. The anime uses some CGI elements like in the guns and bullets, the light rails and some of the vehicles in the first arc. I’m never a fan of CGI but it make the anime look more “cooler”, I suppose.
The character design isn’t new. If you have seen Shana and Index then you have basically seen all the characters in Hidan no Aria. In a way, it helps the viewer familiarize with the anime but at the same time, you do wish the change it up a bit. I guess if it’s not broken then don’t fix it, right?
The OP and ED soundtrack was not that great in my opinion. I does not really stand out and sounds like your typical opening and ending song. It does not jump out and grab you like some great songs does. The songs were overshadowed by everything else in the anime.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Jun 14, 2014
When I first heard about Another you would not believe how excited I was. First of all, it is a horror anime, a real-life bona-fide animated J-horror of which there are incredibly few. Secondly, the fine artists of P.A. Works, who have only just finished giving us the beautiful and generally enjoyable Hanasaku Iroha, would be making it. And finally, it would be an actual novel adaptation (opposed to a light novel) which would only add to the novelty (pardon the pun) that Another would bring to the season and year's smorgasbord of anime. Yes, I was very excited and I was still excited as
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a creepy opening sequence explained a little of what I've included in my synopsis, accompanied by the beautiful artwork I had hoped for and expected and voiced in the manner of two school girls sharing a creepy rumour. Excellent, I could not have asked for more from the first thirty seconds of Another - and then I hear the OP. It was listening to the worst anime theme the ALI Project have ever provided that I started to suspect that, somewhere in the labyrinthine construct of this studio anime production, something had gone very, very wrong. Yes, the opening theme had made me very afraid but I doubt in the way that the makers had been intending.
That pall of twilight shivers never lightened; in fact, it darkened deeper and blacker than purest night as my high hopes took a high dive into an abyss of despair. Problem one: every good horror show needs a great protagonist, Another gives us Kouichi Sakakibara. Let me be blunt, Kouichi isn't a stereotype - he doesn't have enough personality to be a stereotype. If you ordered a "Kouichi" from Domino's they would send you a pizza base. Yes, he is meant to be a placeholder character that we can all project ourselves onto so it's as if we're the hero and it is as if we are the ones exploring the dark mystery of what appears to be Japan's on shore equivalent of Silent Hill (only if that had been true...) but it's impossible for me to use Kouichi as a viewer avatar - I'm just not that bland. That all said about him, how about the supporting cast? Well...
Problem two: why does everyone Kouichi meets feel the need to mutter vaguely about everything? From the very moment they meet in the hospital, all of his classmates glance around nervously and share cryptic out of context sentences like some secret cabal and it is all so horrifically clunky that Steven Seagal couldn't make the dialogue more stilted and wooden. The painfulness is threefold: firstly, people keeping secrets don't talk like that, so it kills any sense of realism. Secondly, when combined with the show's habit of conveniently interrupting any moment of possible exposition, it feels cynical and contrived and also terrible for the shows pacing - after spending half the show telling and showing the viewer practically nothing all the exposition comes in an info-dump episode that horribly stalls what narrative there is. Thirdly and most damningly, very few characters ever emerge from the amorphous cabalistic whole that Kouichi's classmates represent until far, far too late in the series and never really made an impression on the story. If I hadn't seen it I would never have believed these cardboard characters could bleed.
Problem three arises when people start dying. Deaths in horror are and pretty much always have been the primary tool the genre has had for producing its namesake (i.e. horror) in its viewers. Sadly, for the horror writer, the wholesale desensitisation of the media enjoying public has made plain old death rather ... passe, so the brutality or rawness of the depiction needs to increase in order to create the shocking event the writer desires. Once again, Another misunderstands that point. Yes, more needs to be done for something to be shocking but too much takes you past shocking straight to comical. The deaths in Another are absurd. If I write a scene where one of the nicer, more enjoyable characters in my show dies in a disturbingly horrible way and my audience's first reaction is to cry "bullcrap" at how contrived it was then I failed as a writer. The only thing Another effectively and comprehensively kills are the laws of physics.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Jun 14, 2014
Angel Beats follows the story of one Otonashi, an amnesiac that suddenly pops up in what can only be called Purgatory. He quickly meets two of the residents of this strange world: Yuri and Angel, whom are locked in a never-ending battle of sorts. Yuri leads a group of humans like Otonashi in "rebelling" against the system, while Angel seems to be an agent of the system keeping them in line.
Angel Beats is another short anime coming in at only 13 episodes. As a result, the pacing is pretty good most of the time. The plot is presented in a fine manner. I do wish
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we had more character-centric episodes though.
That said, what we do get out of the series is good. There's quite a bit of character exploration going on with the main characters of the story (Otonashi, Yuri, Angel). Some of the supporting characters aren't bad either, Yui and Hideki are pretty well explored too.
Without spoilers, I can safely say that they have some very complex reasons for existing in this purgatory. Everyone has some reason that they refuse to move on.
As a side effect of such a world, most of the members of Yuri's group are eccentric. These aren't the usual archetypes that you'll find mashed together in anime. Yuri openly opens that most of them are idiots and that she is only slightly better than the rest of them. It's an oddly funny (and welcome) way to lampshade these misfits.Especially at the beginning, Angel Beats dips a bit too far into senseless comedy shenanigans. To be honest, it feels like we should have been doing something more important than having a music episode or a journey underground through traps (I will admit it was funny though).
As such, the series gets a bit of thematic dissonance going between the early episodes and late episodes. They are just a bit too thematically different for me to give it a pass. Even if the early episodes were meant to help us get acquainted with the characters, it felt like there wasn't much of it going on anyway.
This all is probably a result of the short episode count though. The show is a bit too ambitious with such a large cast of characters. There's a lot of ground to cover in the series and only a fraction of the characters get any major development. I think the show could have very well benefited from more time to develop the cast more. This is probably the biggest problem that Angel Beats overtly has.
This is best for someone looking for a good, short series that will invoke some powerful feelings. It is pretty much guaranteed to invoke one tear somewhere in its run. It has some nice characters and some wacky humor.
All things considered, it was good.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Jun 14, 2014
Not exactly, but it's not much better than that series. Akane Iro ni Somaru Saka is yet another visual novel anime in a sea of recent visual novel anime that have all become the rage in Japan as of late. But how does it fare against most others of its type? Not very well, honestly. Despite cute character designs, a decent cast of actors and actresses, and a few humorous bits here and there, most of the series spends 12 episodes saying things it could have said in half that.
Part of this is responsible by a single character: Yuuhi. If tsundere was an actual part
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of the English dictionary, you would probably find a picture of her there (along with nearly every other role done by her actress, Rie Kugimiya). Frankly, I'm sick of romance series plagued with these kinds of heroines, as these characters come off less as girls who are shy around their love interest but act mean or violent as a way of hiding their true feelings than robots that have switches on the back of their heads that allow them to change emotions at will. One episode she's being shy, flustered, and helpful, the next she's being a grade-A bitch.
Not like Junichi is much better. He's surprisingly careless when it comes to those around him (especially to his sister), and comes off less as a teasing but well-meaning guy like Yuichi from Koyoto Animation's Kanon and more like an ass who only thinks of himself, only having a venerable change of heart when the show needs him to open up to Minato and Yuuhi. Oh, and let's not get into how he lusts over his sister a couple of times in the series, even fighting his inner demon at one point to resist the urge! As for Minato herself, she's domestic to a tee. It's less cute than it is disturbing, and Aya Hirano doesn't sound all that interested in her character as she reads from the script (can't say I blame her). So already Akane Iro ni Somaru Saka fails to tell a decent romance story by having a couple with no chesmisty or any reason for them to get together other than the writers making them do so.
As a comedy, it's not much better. Akane Iro ni Somaru Saka attempts to be funny by having Nagomi, a weird pink-haired girl, randomly pop up in places and jot down data concerning Junichi and Yuuhi's relationship. While a fairly amusing character, she is underutilized and doesn't really do much until the final episodes. The rest of the "comedy" revolves around the same tired jokes you've seen in stuff like Love Hina and Girls Bravo. Like the boy walking in on the girl while she's naked, or the lights go off and the guy falls on top of the girl and touches her breast, or the girl getting embarrassed by something and slapping the guy in the face. (Stuff the Japanese consider to be "comedy gold".) The only genuinely funny moment I found in the entire series was when Minato told Yuuhi about her older brother's porno collection, keeping a straight face through out, even when she reveals to her his second stash of porn. It doesn't sound funny when you read it, but trust me: that one scene is funnier than 90% of the series hands down. I rarely laugh out loud when I watch anime, but I did then.
Okay, so the humor is (with the exception of the above scene) stale and not all that funny. But hey, this is a visual novel anime adaption! Surely there are other girls that you can attach yourself to and like, right?
Again, not really. There are other girls in this series, but since they all think Junichi and Yuuhi should be together, it takes a lot of the tension that could have build up between them. Again, this wouldn't bother me so much if Yuuhi was a like able character, but she isn't, especially when Junichi's childhood friend, the snoopy Tsukasa (voiced playfully by Marina Inoue) is a much nicer girl overall and (in my opinion) would make a far better choice as a girlfriend for him. The rest of the female cast isn't very interesting. There's Karen, the rich, pampered girl, Mitsuki the cutesy student body president, and various other supporting girls. The show mainly revolves around Junichi, Yuuhi, and Minato, and they never let you forget it.
Eventually Akane Iro ni Somaru Saka gets serious and stops playing with kiddie gloves when it comes to Junichi and Yuuhi's relationship, but not until the final two episodes. The writers waste whole episodes on stupid filler (like the obligatory school festival and the obligatory "haunted" house) instead of utilizing the time they had to flesh out the characters more (main and supporting alike). You know who I found myself liking the most in the series? Junichi's amusing parents, who are explorers and travelers by nature, infrequently arriving in helicopters to talk to their son about what's going in his life. They're cool, calm, and collective (unlike the rest of the series' cast), which is part of the reason I attached to them pretty quickly. Every time they came and left I felt a little annoyed, because I knew that I would be going back to the Accidentally Careless Boy Lives With His Annoying Fiance and Overly Domestic Sister Show soon after.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Jun 14, 2014
11eyes starts off as a stereotypical visual novel adaption. You have your male protagonist who has his own personal issues, the best friend who (not-so-secretly) loves him, and your secondary characters that introduce themselves several moments after the first climax. You also hear the “I will protect you” line played almost every episode in between the “make the useless male protagonist into a hero” training scenes. In a nutshell, aside from the unique set up of the story, everything else is simply predictable and average. All of the characters, save for one or two, could have been generated from a cookie-cutter, but even that is
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not a huge issue. What turned this average series into a disappointing one was Satsuki Kakeru and Minase Yuka’s performance as the main leads. It made me cringe every time they stepped into the spotlight and it is difficult to enjoy a series when you despise the protagonists that much.
The story itself starts off with a fair number of questions. What is the Red Night? Who are the Dark Knights? What makes these kids so special? However, these questions are answered later rather than sooner. And when they are answered, you’re left with more questions than when you started because of the “unexpected” twist they throw at you near the end. The ending can come across as either unique and satisfying or random and unexpected depending on how well you can accept the facts at face value. Unfortunately, I could not appreciate the ending because I felt its plot was poorly executed. It had a lot of potential in the beginning and even in the middle, but I could not get past the plot holes they left unfilled along the way.
Although the series as a whole seemed like a let-down, there are a lot of promising areas that kept my attention. Aside from the main love triangle, which was super awkward, I found myself focusing my attention more towards the other characters’ relationships. The secondary characters all have interesting histories and stories that get revealed little by little each episode. The antagonists also have interesting backgrounds, though it is revealed way too late to mean much, but it does help show that their intentions are not just to be bad for the sake of being bad.
I feel like I am not giving 11eyes enough credit because in all honesty, it probably deserves more. However, I would not advise you to go watch it just to go looking for its good points since there is very little to find. As much as I tried to enjoy 11eyes, in the end I found myself watching the last few episodes for a sense of closure more than anything else. I watched it as a way to pass the time in between other shows… and trust me, it did not make time go by any faster.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Jun 14, 2014
The animation in the series is well enough done, they clearly put some time into it all. It feels like the blending of the CG elements and the more traditional elements doesn't go very seamlessly though.
For everything it lacks, it does have some genuinely good character moments sprinkled throughout. They are few in number to be completely honest, but you know, you take what you get when it comes to a series like this.
This series is so absolutely hilarious sometimes. I can't honestly tell if it is intended, but most things come off completely hilarious rather than serious. I mean, I have to admit, even
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when the series tries to play scenes out completely seriously, it almost feels like they are trying to parody the scene. Since this whole show is basically a "drama", I guess this was entirely intentional. It still feels like it isn't on some level.
The purest form of an excuse plot I've ever seen. As I told you at the beginning, the entire purpose of the plot is to make a situation where a guy must date a diverse range of girls and load up a ton of fan service in the foreground. There is absolutely nothing else here. The plot exists only to serve the fan service.
As such, nothing in the show seems take itself seriously. The most serious scenes in the series come off, at best, amusing. The character back stories are all over the place, ranging from one-dimensional to unintentionally hilarious, furthering this conclusion. The whole feeling of the show doesn't really give the feeling that this meant to be serious at all. The stakes are low even from early on and they rarely get raised at all. Even in death, characters come back either hilariously or insanely.
If I had to say, this is average, but it has some sort of perverse ability to keep the audience watching. Maybe it is that thrilling feeling of watching a train wreck in slow motion that humans find irresistibly interesting to watch. I have absolutely no idea why I find it even remotely interesting to watch, but
they managed to convince me I liked it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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