Back to kekekeKaj's Profile kekekeKaj's Profile Review Moderator

The second season of Attack On Titan goes up and down like a rollercoaster; not just in terms of story but also quality.

The story of the original season began with titans breaching Wall Maria, and the second season opens with a mirroring storyline about titans appearing within the confines of Wall Rose, and the Survey Corps are forced to investigate the breach.

And that's far from the only similarity between the seasons. While Studio Wit bizarrely waited four years before attempting to follow up on their incredible success with the first season, the second season turns out to follow quite closely in its predecessor's footsteps. The strengths and weaknesses of the second season feels largely similar to the first (with perhaps a couple of major differences which I'll elaborate on later), so anyone familiar with the first should be able to guess pretty much what they're getting into here.

I'd rate the first few episodes to be pretty middle of the pack compared to the first season - mostly very good with the occasional wow moment thrown in. I was expecting it to get better as the story gains momentum but instead it gradually began feeling formulaic and actually started to lose steam. Half way through the season, the series drops what was for me an incredibly stupid twist that brought the franchise to a level that's easily as low as it's ever been. This was followed by a few pedestrian episodes which did little to improve the situation. However, the season then finishes on three immense episodes which salvages it at the end.

Apart from the twist that I found incredulous, the major differences seem to stem from single cour nature of Attack On Titan 2. While I thought the first season had pretty great pacing, I can't say the same for the second. There's just so much going on in this short season, and the solution Attack On Titan 2 relies on over and over again to compress the narrative into the time available is flashbacks. There are loads of plot points coming into fruition and they need to happen in a certain order in order to make sense, but the timing also needs to be impactful, so the anime solves this by using just-in-time flashbacks to drop the important reveals straight into the places where the information is required. There are also previously neglected characters that needs to moving into the spotlight due to the requirements of the plot, and again, the anime reaches for the flashback button to crowbar in a backstory or two for some quick and dirty character building. I'm not saying the technique can't be effective, but when it's over used and in this kind of hurried manner the story telling can feel too artificial and it leads to the formulaic feeling I complained about earlier.

Given the tight time frame the Attack In Titan 2 is trying to fit everything into, it's a bit strange the second half also had a couple of episodes where it felt like it was stalling for time. Perhaps it's a side effect of trying to time the climactic last few episodes right. The pacing even affected some pretty good Titan UFC action which would have been even better if the flashbacks hadn't put a drag on the action.

Still, it has to be said that the second season covered a lot of ground in terms of plot. While more mysteries have presented themselves, I feel like franchise is either reaching or has reached a tipping point where it no longer feels like each reveal raises at least two more questions. A couple of notable movers in the character stocks are Erwin and Eren. Erwin's has risen thanks to some incredible badassery, but Eren's has fallen in my estimation: he displayed moments of great emotional depth, but there were also times when every one of his lines in a stretch of dialogue would be delivered in a monotonous, outraged screech, which made him annoying (more than usual, I should say).

The music is as great as ever. I'm impressed by how the creators managed to consistently find catchy, energetic, hot-blooded opening anthems that you can easily identify as coming from the same show. The opening animation gets a little strange at one point as the screen fills up with a bizarre stampede of animals including (but not limited to) an elephant, a giraffe, a gorilla, and even at least one dinosaur and a fricking WHALE! What all this means I have no idea, but I can testify that only the gorilla turns up this season, and a part of me hopes we'll see the whale flopping along in a later one. The ending is rather experimental and features what sounds like a chorus of zergling and ultimately doesn't quite work.

That's pretty much all I have to say about season 2.

Personal rating: +1.5 (very good)

Helpful

read more

Cute-Girls-Doing-Cute-Things slice-of-life anime usually comes in two flavours. The first one focuses on the Cute-Girls-Doing-Cute-Things bit, smothering the viewer in moe candy floss that offers little nutritional value beyond the saccharine. I call these the K-On Klones. The second type actually gets what the slice-of-life genre is all about. These anime use the Cute-Girls-Doing-Cute-Things merely as a premise as they go about bringing into focus the sublime facets of life through the lens of the mundane.

The question is, which category does Akebi's Sailor Uniform fall into?

The show follows Akebi Komichi as she enters the all-girls middle school Roubai Academy. Growing up in the countryside, Akebi graduated from her elementary school in a class of one, so she's looking forward to attending a school where it will actually be possible to make friends.

The first three episodes of Akebi's Sailor Uniform is not that great. The characters designs may not be particularly off-putting, and the girl's voices may not be on helium, but I found the shenanigans between girls at the school to be rather inane. Worse thing is, the creator seems to be someone with a leg/foot fetish. And it's not as though this only results in the odd foot shot: you get bizarre scenes like a girl sniffing her own toe nail clippers and a whole storyline about Akebi admiring someone's legs and harassing her victim about sending her a selfie of them. When you consider the target of all this fetishisation is a bunch of middle school girls, the whole thing honestly becomes a little creepy.

However, after that the show markedly improved, with the foot fetish mostly relegated to a few shots here and there. But by then the damage was done, as I found myself viewing all the foot-related scenes with all the suspicion of a parent who's spotted a convicted pedo lurking near a playground. Perhaps in a different anime, a scene about an embarrassing hole in a sock wouldn't raise an eyebrow from me, but in this anime it reeks of yet another excuse to satisfy someone's foot cravings.

But like I said, the show does get better, and I should mention that even though the first three episodes weren't great, they were terrible either. A few moments of magic caught my attention: a dramatic reading of a book; an often absent father's struggles with connecting with his eldest daughter … these scenes hinted that Akebi's Sailor Uniform belongs in the second type of anime I mentioned at the start.

Character development wise, Akebi's Sailor Uniform manages to introduce quite a few different characters while focusing its efforts on a Akebi and a few of her closest friends. I'd say the show fleshes out most of the characters to the point where they feel like real people and not just objects with feet attached. Even the characters who only got a single episode of focus time mostly feels real, and in fact my favourite episode is about one of them. The episode in question involves this slacker student wanting to learn the guitar. This kind of episode is like a litmus test for the pedigree of a slice of life show, most notably one that K-On spectacularly failed on. Well, Akebi's Sailor Uniform not only passed the test, it knocked it out of the park, producing a believable story with the kind of attention to detail that an anime about music would have been proud of. Having briefly messed around on the guitar myself, I found the anime pinpointed the exact pain points that I discovered as a complete beginner, and the progress of slacker student strikes me as realistic. And all this is just a framework for a character study of a slacker who's learning the joy of throwing herself into something for the first time!

This kind of attention to detail is a strength of the series. Akebi's Sailor Uniform understands the value of subtlety. For example, details like the peeling window panes and leaky roof of Akebi's house suggests that her family isn't very well off, even if the anime never explicitly states this. In fact the whole premise of Akebi's attachment to the sailor uniform of Roubai seems silly until you consider the likelihood that a large part of her appreciation for clothing comes from the fact that her mother makes them herself. Likewise, the anime never tells you why Akebi's elementary school only contains Akebi and her sister, but you can make that connection if you know about the hollowing out of Japanese rural communities due to urbanisation and low birth rate. When you join up the dots, the slow demise of Akebi's old school isn't just sad, it's tragic, and the sight of the Akebi's classmates briefly breathing life back into the old gym becomes all the more bittersweet.

Despite Akebi's Sailor Uniform's eye for the provocative details of every day life, it sometimes struggles with finding enough meaningful material to fill entire an episode. When it fails those episodes can be quite dull for large stretches. The guitar episode is interesting throughout but for me the series only hits that kind of height once. Another episode about a girl learning to get comfortable with her body through its growth phase only really gets good towards its conclusion. The last episode is also surprisingly weak. Interestingly, the penultimate episode is much better and contains all the elements normally reserved for a slice-of-life finale: an re-iteration of one of the anime's main themes of friendship, the encore for all the characters etc. Unfortunately the story hasn't wrapped up by that point, so instead we're left with a montage-laden, overly sentimental last episode which rehashed the revisited themes from the penultimate episode.

Another element that drags Akebi's Sailor Uniform down is that, in addition to the foot fetish elements, the yuri baiting and the presence of tired tropes like one girl falling into the breasts of another signals to me that the show is primarily aimed at a male audience rather than one that resembles the main characters. This adds to creepiness although, to be fair, the show also had scenes which could have turned more fanservicey in a seedier series but didn't in this one.

Overall, I did rather enjoy this anime. While parts of it's a bit cringey, Akebi's Sailor Uniform does enough of the important things right for me to say for certain: this show really does get it.

Personal rating: +0.5 (decent)

Helpful

read more

Humans have reigned at the top of the food chain for a long time now. Other predators like sharks and bears might rip us apart if we have to engage them in a fist fight, but in reality we kill far more of them than they do us. But! What if that's no longer the case? What if something replaces us at the top and start preying on us? This is the conceit that "Attack On Titan" builds upon, and does it so compellingly that it became one of the few shows to break through the walls of anime fandom into mainstream consciousness.

Set in a world where unintelligent, man-eating titans suddenly appeared one day and snacked humans almost to extinction, the story picks up with Eren, who lives in an outlying city on the edge of a civilization protected by colossal walls that could make Trump envious. The walls have kept the residents safe for a hundred years. But one day, a titan several times the normal size appears out of nowhere and kicks a hole in the wall. With the walls breached, titans flood into the city and Eren's life is thrown into chaos.

While the whole unintelligent human-eating-humanoids idea isn't exactly fresh - the zombie apocalypse scene having been done to death already (or should I say undeath har har) - "Attack on Titan" adds a twist to the formula: it made the humanoids huge. The change seems stupidly simple but the effect is drastic; all of a sudden, the odds become so much more stacked against humans: this is not a case of buffaloes being hunted by lions, but of mice hunted by cats. The size mismatch naturally makes the titans formidable, and "Attack on Titan" hammers this home right from episode one by graphically capturing the result of titans descending upon a human settlement. In addition, the titans' appearances, humanish but with creepy facial expressions and strange skin tones (the latter of which might be the unintended result of subpar CG but it works), serves to make them even more unnerving in an uncanny-valley-esq way.

So how do humans fight back against these grotesque mountains of flesh? One of the main methods involve "vertical manoeuvring equipment" which, via some gas-powered piston-shot grappling hooks, essentially allows humans wearing them to move around like Spiderman swinging through a city. This in turn gives them the ability to evade titans and attack their weak point on the back of the neck. It's a pretty cool concept that lends itself to some spectacular battle choreography.

Despite being a shounen, "Attack on Titan" immediately distinguished itself in both its brutality and pacing. The action often feels raw and gory in its violence, even though it often doesn't display everything in full graphic detail. One gruesome scene might be animated in shadowy outline, another might cut away in a shower of blood just as someone gets pulverised underneath a giant stomping foot. The anime shows and implies enough to achieve a stronger effect than what could be done through fully animating the violence. That said, the early episodes contain a few odd scenes where the action cuts-away in unexpected places (and in a way that left me confused over what happened) and inserting in its place a few seconds of jarringly placid scenery. It makes me wonder whether these were production fuck ups or whether the scenes were censored (which would be strange given seemingly more horrific sequences were animated to some extent).

The plot of "Attack on Titan" rarely stands still, with events constantly unfolding and bombshell twists exploding with regularity. While there's a good amount of lore and background information woven into the world, the show is economical with its world building. It does a good job of not letting exposition drag down the plot, and uses opportunities like commercial bumpers to convey across tidbits of info that enriches the world. (Though it's worth noting that the last commercial bumper info dump was like a whole essay so I've no idea what those who are watching it live on TV without the benefit of a pause button was supposed to get out of it.)

Despite the fast pace, "Attack on Titan" doesn't feel hurried for the most part. The training arc is exemplary: occupying just a single episode, it conveys across the difficulties of using the vertical maneuvering gear, then uses that as a representative for the rest of the training and moves on without dragging the whole event out. Contrast this to the likes of "Girls und Panzer" where the training feels too easy and other shounens where training could take up most of a seasonal arc.

Still, the minor characters do suffer a little from the pacing. With the show being so ruthless, characters often drop like flies around a toxic turd but it's not always easy to give a fuck. Or even remember who they are. As "Attack on Titan" goes on, the show does get better at juggling the character development while driving the plot at a clip, and the later deaths do feel like they hold more weight.

If I have one main complaint about the story, it would be that some of the scheming isn't entirely believable. The overarching plot often has a battle of wits feel where a few players are manipulating events far above the ground level that we see. But it's as though some of them cheats on occasion by reading the script a few pages in advance before making their move. Superhuman levels of deductive reasoning often possessed by fictional characters doesn't need to be realistic, but it does need to come off as believable, and "Attack on Titan" doesn't always manage to sell its leaps of logic to me as convincingly as, say, "Death Note".

Thematically, "Attack on Titan" ends up on a path well-trodden by shows involving humans vs monsters. To quote Nietzsche: "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster." Like "The Walking Dead", "Shiki" etc, the more you watch the more you start to question: who are the real monsters here? The show's emphasis on the needs of the characters to make sacrifices and become monsters aren't exactly unique, but the ideas are naturally compelling enough to not wear out their welcome. It's rather fitting that the show's main character is in his own way a bit of a monster. At first Eren comes across like a typical shounen protagonist: a screechy, spunky try-hard who's rather annoying. As the show continues though, it becomes increasingly clear something’s not quite right about the boy; he's a bit unhinged, a bit too much on edge, and I find him kinda fascinating to watch as I'm never quite sure when and how he'll snap.

Given the story of "Attack on Titan" is so full of tragedy and twists, the dramatisation pretty much handles itself. For the most part, the series also does a good job on the executing the drama. I particularly liked the music production. "Epic" is an overused word, but the music of "Attack on Titan" fits the bill. Choral heavy and possessing an exotic, middle-eastern twist, the music would ebb and flow, swell and diminish around the events happening on screen, complementing story tension and release with melodic counterparts.

However, "Attack on Titan" also makes a few mis-steps when it comes to dramatisation, and those often devastate the grim atmosphere. A few moments in the story seems contrived purely for the sake of laying on more drama and as a result come across as silly and unnecessary. Some of the art style of "Attack on Titan" also doesn't sit well with me. The show frequently uses shading and parallel hatching on characters' faces to convey dark moods, and, combined with the ultra-serious facial expressions this often yields an accidental comedic effect of similar style to "Cromartie High School". And there's also this wonderfully animated sequence of Eren swinging through the air, dual wielding blades and yelling out battle commands, then executing an epic aerial spin as though about to unleash a climactic whirlwind of attacks. Alas, the dramatic weight attached to the scene was not matched by the actual ending which saw Eren simply land on top of a wall.

Additionally, I also found the series' comedic sensibilities rather dubious. Not that the comedy isn't funny (although it is hit and miss), but the show likes to peddle in a sort of dumb humour that does not mesh with the more sombre parts. I mean, some of the characters feels like they're auditioning for Wacky Races or something.

These problems are a bit too numerous for "Attack on Titan" to hold a spot on my personal favourites list - for now at least. I also wonder how much of my enjoyment got hampered by having the first major plot twist spoilt for me. Still, in its finest moments, this series blazes on all cylinders, and can certainly make a passable impression at being on par with the all-time greats. It's not hard to see why it whipped the fandom into a frenzy back when it aired. It's still early days in terms of the overarching story though, and this first season has, for all its plot twists and reveals, left me with more questions than answers. Will the the myriad mysteries of the plot click together and resolve into a triumphant conclusion? I don't know, but "Attack on Titan" has certainly launched into a solid start.

Personal rating: +1.5 (very good)

Helpful

read more

I ended up watching this after Crunchyroll's random feature landed me on its page. At the time of viewing, this show's rating average barely broke the 5 mark, so it's fair to say I didn't exactly have high expectations. Still, how painful could it be to sit through a series of sub-5 minute show? (Actually, I just remembered my experiences of grinding through "Teekyuu" so the answer would appear to be "very".)

Perhaps due to my low expectations, I ended up rather enjoying these shorts, finding the episodes to be silly and fun.

But what is Hakata Mentai about?

Uhh, I'm not entirely sure I can describe the premise properly. From what little information I could find, the show is supposedly based on a shopping district in Fukuoka's Hakata district. The main character Pirikarako is some kind of ... fairy ... thing? Who, along with her companions - a red blob and three floating strawberries - goes around and ... does weekly weird stuff ...... Look, the plot doesn't matter okay? I'd no clue what the heck was going on at first, but I found it's easy to move past that and just sit back and enjoy the zany humour. The setup might be strange, but the individual stories are coherent enough to entertain.

Over the course of the series, Hakata Mentai features various food items that I presume the real life Hakata district is well known for. The series can come across as a thinly veiled advert for the local attractions, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I remember when I used to watch traditional TV a long time ago, I often enjoyed some of the adverts shown during the breaks for their creativity and sense of humour ... at least for the first five times or so that I watched them. Well, Hakata Mentai is a bit like those. Most of the entertainment value stems from the amusingly random nature of the show and the often well delivered punchlines at the end of each episode. For sure, some of the episodes are significantly funnier than others - in particular, a few of the episodes in the middle were duds - but with such short episodes, there's barely enough time to be bored before it's over.

The animation quality is about as cheap and static as you would expect for a series with such short episodes. It has a fittingly bright, childish colour palette, but beyond that there's not much more to say here.

Having watched it, I'm a bit surprised by the low ratings garnered by the show. It's true that no sane person's gonna unironically declare this as the epitome of anime, but I personally found it to be a charming, amusing romp. If you've got a few spare minutes, you could do worse than spend it watching an episode of this.

Personal rating: +0.5 (decent).

Helpful

read more

Everyone loves a good underdog story, a story about some gritty protagonist who overcomes their disadvantages to climb to the top through a combination of superhuman effort and sheer force of will.

"Hyouka" is not one of those stories.

It's the opposite: a celebration of the sort of genius that burns so brightly that ordinary mortals like you and me can only sit back and admire, often with envy, knowing that no matter how hard we try, we'll never be the next Mozart or Holmes.

On the surface, "Hyouka" tells of the mystery-solving escapades of a student literary club. But like most anime involving detective work, this aspect of the show is a bit rubbish. Underneath the dressing lies an intriguing character study of a genius and his effects on the people around him. The story centres on Houtarou Oreki, a high school student with Sherlock-esq powers of deduction. But while Sherlock Holmes puts his powers to good use, Oreki's philosophy to life is that of an energy conservationist: "If I don't have to do it, I won't; if I have to do it, I'll make it quick".

Then one day Oreki meets a girl Chitanda, who's fresh off of the conveyor belt of Kyoto Animation Studio's infamous moeblob factory, and the encounter precipitates a gradual change in his attitude to life.

A recurring theme of "Hyouka" is that of living a "rose coloured life", particularly in regards to highschool. Highschool life is something much romanticised in Japanese culture. A lot of how the west feel about university life - the plentiful club activities, the vibrant social life, and for some even the first steps of independence of moving away from parents - seem to apply with even greater force to how the Japanese view their high school years. And in the context of "Hyouka", the metaphor of a "rose coloured life" goes further than just the bright and beautiful: it encompasses not just the splendour of a rose, but also the prickliness of its thorns; it represents a high school life of many ups and downs, of experiencing joys and growing pains - in other words, a life lived to the full.

I'll be honest: I didn't approach "Hyouka" with high expecations, given what I'd seen of KyoAni studio's prior output consisted mostly of pandering moefests. But "Hyouka" - Chitanda aside - immediately struck me as a different breed, with character designs that aren't an immediate turn-off and skillful use of classical music lending an air of elegance to the production ("Legend of the Galactic Heros" eat your heart out).

Sure enough, the potential hinted at in the opening episode was brought to fruition. Perhaps it's because "Hyouka" originates from a series of novels rather than some disposable 4-panel comic or manipulative nakige (which I believe translates roughly as "crying-porn games"), but it's an anime that lacks neither substance nor good writing and characterisation.

The show's crowning achievement is its thoughtful exploration on the themes of genius and self worth against the backdrop of adolescence. Epitomising this is the fascinating dynamics between Oreki and his friend Fukube. On the surface, Fukube seems content to play second fiddle to Oreki's genius, often self deprecatingly labelling himself as a human database, a store of knowledge without the analytical ability to join up the dots. As the show goes on though, it becomes obvious that Oreki's effortless brilliance is constantly eroding Fukube's sense of identity and self worth, and he does not want to be stuck in this situation.

This theme also plays out in other character interactions, and it's interesting to see the different ways people deal with being in the shadows created by someone else's light. The side story involving Fukube's friend Ibara and her run in with Kouchi (a fellow manga club member) serves to illustrate this nicely: while Ibara meets these situations head-on with a mixture of earnest praise for the greatness of others and despair at her own ordinary-ness, Kouchi's reactions are a combination of outward denial and inward grudging admiration.

These vignettes of personal crises cuts especially deep in the high school settings. Adolescence is, after all, a turbulent time for a lot of people: it’s a time of emotional instability, of trying to discover who you are. And as much as I find teenagers rather trying at times, (who doesn't?) I can also sympathise with the amount of damage a sense of inferiority and big knocks on confidence can inflict on these young adults during this vulnerable time of their development.

The tragedy is deepened by the fact that we, as viewers, can see clearly see these characters are far from worthless. And not just us: each of the characters can cherish the values they see in others - Fukube's emotional intelligence, Ibara's endearing earnestness - but they cannot seem to appreciate the values present in themselves. Their mistake lies in trying measuring themselves against the geniuses' strengths and not seeing their own. The supreme irony is that even geniuses rarely thrive in a vacuum: Mozart’s talents was nurtured in draconian fashion by his father from a young age, and Oreki, without all his friends coaxing him towards a rose-coloured life, would have wasted all his talents conserving his energy and achieving fuck all - they may envy his brilliance, but he needs THEM in order to shine. And so beneath all the cheerful overtones runs a strong undercurrent of pathos as the characters flounder in the misguided perceptions of their own inadequacy.

Despite the mostly great character work and the sparkling interplay, "Hyouka" doesn't quite fire on all cylinders here. Though in Ibara we have a rare example of a decent KyoAni female character - a down to earth girl with a likeable streak of sincerity - the studio had to cancel it out with an opposite example in Chitanda. I could feel a certain tension within Chitanda's characterisation: on one hand her character clearly contains some complexity, given our glimpses into her family life outside of school, but on the other hand her creators really wanted to make her appealing in typical KyoAni moe fashion. This results in an odd character who's practically throwing herself at Oreki with wide, purple-eyed innocence while occasionally revealing an inner layer of maturity and capacity for subtle manipulation. These two facets comes together so poorly that you can practically see the fault line running through her characterisation.

Another shortcoming of "Hyouka" is that the mystery genre foil holding the real story together functions better for some scenarios than others. The foil works okay in the earlier episodes, but as the drama intensifies, the mysteries start feeling jarringly inane. The show sometimes also tries too hard to be clever, engineering convoluted solutions for problems that have far simpler fixes. But I get it - it can't be easy to consistently come up with stories that convincingly showcase Oreki's genius. My own fascination with the underlying themes means that I could look past this weakness in narrative for the most part, but your own mileage may vary.

Some of the conflict scenarios also feels overwrought. I don't know what it is, but KyoAni's sensibilities when it comes to depicting dramatic conflicts often feel a little too stilted to me. Even though the symptoms are much lighter here than in most of their other works, they're still present.

Thankfully, even though some of KyoAni's weaknesses still shows in "Hyouka", so do their strengths in emphatic manner. Their talents at capturing the vibrancy of school life is on full display - there is so much movement and bustle, with minute details crammed into the every frame. "Hyouka" is heavy on dialogue, but the studio even managed to make talking interesting through the use of dramatic angles, quirky framing, and interesting visualisations. I want to single out a particularly memorable visual metaphor for a rose-coloured life that turns up towards the end of the series, as the extraordinary use of colour and beauty of the scene was breathtakingly.

"Hyouka" was actually recommended to me through a secret santa event and, despite my initial reservations, the recommendation turned out to be a genuinely nice gift. To me, the series represents a turning period in KyoAni's output. Their anime I watched pre-Hyouka were mostly duds, while the ones I watched afterwards I've mostly liked. In fact, "Hyouka" is probably one of, if not the best anime KyoAni has ever done. With the studio's polished production applied to a story laden with fascinating ideas and themes, "Hyouka" is one classy anime.

Personal rating: +1.5 (very good)

Helpful

read more

It's all too easy to make fun of an anime christened with an unfortunate name like "Wind: A Breath of Heart" (try saying the title fast) ... but that would just be immature of me.

"Wind: A Breath of Fart" is one of those patchy anime that feels like it got stitched together from three different shows. Starting off with some horribly crappy first scenes, it improves into a borefest with the occasional amusing moment, then magics in a dramatic story towards the end.

When I first watched "Wind: A Breath of Fart", I found its mix of highschool hijinks with a dash of magic rather peculiar, but this was before the time when Kyoto Animation studios conquered the anime world with its adaptations of Key's haremy magical realist visual novels. Even taking that into account though, I still think the anime's poor execution of the premise added to my confusion. There's a scene early on where a group of friends were casually discussing their superpowers. I didn't really take it seriously, thinking that the girl who claimed she can jump really high was just athletic, and sympathising with the one who said she can create wind because I assumed she was simply suffering from flatulence. Either that or they're delusional chuunis who think they can do things like shoot ninja stars out of their arses just by yelling out the name of their special attack. Anyway, like I said, I didn't think much of it, particularly as the series plodded on as a dull highschool slice of life. Then it turns out those superpower are real. I was like "WTF?!" If the anime had been less casual about those earlier conversations then I would not have felt so shocked.

At around the three quarter mark, I started to wonder what's the point of this anime. I think the people who made it must have pondered the same question, cos the all of a sudden "Wind: A Breath of Fart" started breaking wind in a different direction and actually - to my utter amazement - began to carve out a story line. On one hand it's sure is an improvement on fuck all happening; on the other hand, the change of pace and direction made it feel like a completely different show. While I won't deny the newly made-up-as-they-went-along-story had points of intrigue, there weren't many episodes left to play with. Predictably, this resulted in a half-baked story that didn't feel like it's been thought through properly, and an ending that cuts off so suddenly it left me wondering where the rest of the story was.

"Wind: A Breath of Fart" then took the odd decision of making the last episode a recap. It flashed back to all the boring part of the show, and it's a testament to the extraordinary depth of the dullness that I don't even recall seeing some of these scenes, so they actually felt like new material to me!

Like the story, the characters are a bit boring, and could have done with better designs that distinguished them by more than just their hair colour. The character writing also leaves much to be desired, particularly around consistency. I struggled to discern convincing motivations for when characters do something unusual, like when a cheerless girl decided to break character by dressing up and going to a fair. Also, the main character has a habit of under-reacting to what should be shocking revelations. On the positive side, at least he isn't too annoying like a typical harem lead, though I am a bit puzzled by why his harem seem to look up to him as though he's a much older senpai rather than a peer.

Dialogue wise, "Wind: A Breath of Fart" tends to fail the hardest when the writers tries to go deep. For example at one point in the show a cat got stuck in a tree and they had this bizarre discussion on whether or not to rescue it, with the content of the discussion serving as a metaphor for something more serious that was going on in the story. Now, perhaps I'm just an uncultivated buffoon, but "to rescue or not to rescue a cat" does not strike me as an intellectual heavyweight question worthy of philosophical debate, so the aforementioned dialogue made no narrative sense, and I found the whole thing unintentionally hilarious.

As much as the last few episode jars with the rest of the series, I have to say I rather enjoyed the plot development and the unfolding of drama, and vastly prefer it over the pedestrian portion of the show. And for me, this last unexpected charge salvaged the show somewhat. I also quite like the music, though admittedly it had an easy job to do for most of the series as nothing was happening on screen. The opening theme initially made a decent match for the anime, though it matched less well once the anime radically changed direction towards the end.

I really struggled to judge this anime as a whole because the different parts of it is SO different. But on balance, "Wind: A Breath of Fart" probably averages out as a mediocre show. But ironically, despite its inability to do anything particularly well, I much prefer its incompetent mediocrity to the meticulously engineered terribleness of those KyoAni visual novel adaptions. In the very least, it doesn't make me want to throw things at the screen.

Personal rating: -0.5 (mediocre)

Helpful

read more

"Witch Hunter Robin" is one of those anime which grabbed me from the get go. The engrossing atmosphere drew me in, and the realistic art style is just the kind that I favour. But as the show progressed, it became obvious that it simply isn't as great as it first appeared, and I became less and less enamoured with it.

"Witch Hunter Robin" takes place in a modern world where magic is a thing and an organisation called STN hunts down magic-wielding witches, often with the help of magic-wielding "craft users". The show focuses on the Japan branch of STN, where a young craft user named Robin becomes a latest member of the witching hunting team.

"Witch Hunter Robin" came out around the turn of the millennium. Like a typical TV anime of the era, the series ran for 26 episodes and has a structure which starts off mostly episodic, establishing the settings and characters etc, but transitions to a second half more focused on a central plot. I found the standalone episodes quite enjoyable, but the second half disappointed me a little. Not because it became terrible, but because I expected the story to kick into a more exciting gear like other anime that followed a similar formula. With "Witch Hunter Robin", I didn't think the second half got much better than the first: the more substantial plot, while interesting, didn't quite reel me in, and I felt it told the internal political conflicts in a rather confusing manner.

The world building is also quite confusing. The story of "Witch Hunter Robin" features some intriguing parallels between craft users and witches, raising questions around why society accepts the former but not the latter. However, the effectiveness of the concept gets blunted by the anime's reluctance go into details about the difference in classifications. As a result, you can read reviews written by three different reviewers and find three different understandings for something that should have been easy to clarify.

One of my favourites parts of "Witch Hunter Robin" is the action. The battles can be quite flashy and tense, and the animation seems to excel particularly when the action involves flames. I wouldn't say the anime counts as an action-heavy show though, and part of me wishes it were. The battles tend to be short-lived affairs; outside of that, the plodding sense of mystery forms the main draw, but one that didn't engage me as much. The ending in particular failed to draw much of a reaction out of me, despite what seemed like an attempt to do something out of the ordinary.

I think the main reason I couldn't engage with the story more is the characters. I'm very much a character-oriented person when consuming stories, and "Witch Hunter Robin" disappointed in this aspect. While initially appealing, many of the characters don't get much development, and for the ones that do, the development sometimes feel stilted, their changing attitudes coming across as overly-sudden or out of character.

I do love the character designs of "Witch Hunter Robin" though. In a break from most other anime, the series goes for a more life-like look for the characters and for the most part pulls it off in style. Goofy anime staples such as super deformity and exaggerated expressions are nowhere to be found, which sits just fine with me. The designs also strikes me as distinctive, especially the titular character's hairdo. One minor grumble I have is the occasional stiffness in the characters' expressions, particularly around the mouth, although I suspect the only reason it's noticeable is because of the anime's realistic style. The characters' wardrobes frequently feature long, shadowy trench coats, and the anime's colour pallet consists of mostly dreary shades of dark and grey which complements the sombre atmosphere nicely.

That said, while the anime does "dark and gloomy" well, it falls over whenever it tries to lighten the mood. The humour in the show sucks particularly bad. The dry deliverance of flat punchlines results in jokes that are hard to pick up. The show does have some funny moments, but I found myself wondering whether the writers even meant them. For example, one of the characters cocks up so many times it's like a running joke, but the show itself doesn't seem aware of the joke.

The last complaint I have is regarding the music: I rarely complain about the music of a show because it's generally adequate. However, the music of "Witch Hunter Robin" is noticeably bad. The opening doesn't fit the mood; the background tracks are bland and not particularly pleasing to the ear; the ending track is okay until the singer tries to sing in English, and sings it so badly that I didn't realise the "English" parts existed until most of the way through the series.

But despite all my misgivings, I'd still count "Witch Hunter Robin" as a good anime. The show comes off as refreshingly dignified and mature without resorting to the "edgy and violent" shortcut that some other anime take. While I don't see myself revisiting the series, I enjoyed it well enough as I was watching. I guess I'm simply disappointed that, after such a promising start, "Witch Hunter Robin" didn't end up as anything better than just plain old "good".


Personal rating: +1.0 (good)

Helpful

read more

Have you ever wondered who's the toughest waitress around, and wished there exists a martial arts tournament that can help you answer this intriguing question?

Well, me neither.

But apparently, someone had, as this is the premise for a fighting anime called "Variable Geo", which features said tournament of the same name.

I only picked up "Variable Geo" because I'd played the original SNES game before (a fiendishly hard game by the way - I couldn't even get to the boss on the easiest mode), and since the anime comprises only three episodes, I thought: why not?

I'd braced myself for a bad anime, but the shittiness of "Variable Geo" somehow managed to surpass even my expectations. Its first mistake, like many other fighting game adaptations, is pretending to be something it's not. Instead of fully embracing its shallowness and concentrating on just being a great fighting anime, "Variable Geo" fancies itself as something deeper and more philosophical. As a result, you get meaningless pseudo-philosophical drivel such as "I'd like to see the petals in the tea" strewn all over the place, along with ill-judged attempts to do some soul searching on why the characters fight, like "when I fight, I feel like I'm communicating with them, that's why I fight." Yeah right. I guess no one told this character the existence of a communication method called "dialogue". Is it just me who get really irritated by fighting anime trying to come up with inane reasons to justify the fighting - no one fucking cares, start beating the shit out of each other already!

I also couldn't extract much sense out of the story, and the parts I did understand seems laughably flimsy. When a fighter in a martial arts tournament turns up for a match with glowing metal rods sticking out of her back, you would think that, in the very least, her opponent would smell something fishy going on, but no. Precisely zero eyebrows were raised at this strange occurrence.

If you're wondering whether you should pick up this anime to see some ass-kicking action, don't bother. None of the fights last long enough, and most of them quickly descend into dull affairs where the fighters start blasting energy at each other, and the fight would get resolved by who's got the stronger projectile attack. Have you ever seen one of those Street Fighter matches where it's Ryu/Ken vs another Ryu Ken, and it mostly consists of them throwing fireballs at each other from across the screen? Well it's like that. Going to the toilet and taking a piss feels more satisfying.

You might wonder what is the point of "Variable Geo". As the terribly uninteresting fights play out on screen, the anime finally reveals its raison d'etre ... in the form of girls getting their clothes ripped off by the attacks of their opponents. THAT's the kind of audience it's fishing for. And if that sounds like the kind of thing that floats your boat, then congratulations on discovering a new anime to watch. But for everyone else, "Variable Geo" is a hard sell: the series isn't just bad, it's ludicrously bad, and not even in a so-bad-it's-good kind of way. Its only redeeming factor is its length: at three episodes, the torture didn't last too long, fortunately.

Personal rating: -2.5 (abysmal)

Helpful

read more

I first began writing a "Legend of the Galactic Heroes" review many years ago and couldn't finish. Now I come back and find my opening paragraph on how democracy is overrated and not a magic bullet that solves everything has aged rather too well to remain impactful. In the intervening years, quite a few political earthquakes have shaken people's faith in the system, highlighting weaknesses that they seemed blind to before.

At the time I started my reviewing attempt though, "Legend of the Galactic Heroes", or LoGH for short, provided a refreshingly nuanced commentary on different political systems that stood out amongst the monotonous chorus of "more democracy needed" slogans thrown at any problems a country might have. In particular, LoGH poses an intriguing question: how does democracy stack up against a benign dictatorship?

The 110 episode juggernaut that is LoGH takes place thousands of years in the future, in an age where war is being fought between two factions who between them control most of the known universe. On one side we have the Free Planets Alliance, a democratic republic rife with corruption. In the other corner stands the Galactic Empire in which a young, upright noble with huge ambitions seeks to climb to the very top of the hierarchy. It's also an age when humans have spread throughout the galaxy, when battles are being fought by spaceships, a giant Death Star-esq space fortress, and ... battleaxes? Eh??

It didn't take me long to notice that a lot of details in LoGH seem kinda odd. For a show which has garnered such wide critical acclaim, it has more than its share of rough edges, particularly in the earlier stretches.

For starters, the world-building comes across as overly artificial and reliant on plot devices. The two factions in the story are connected by just two narrow "corridors" due to the "unnavigable space" around them, the nature of which never gets elaborated. The idea of unexplained, invisible but physical choke points in between two massive regions in space seems rather absurd. Then there's the mix and match of future and past elements. Though not necessarily a problem as the likes of "Cowboy Bebop" and "Gankutsuou" have pulled off similar stunts with great success, LoGH simply doesn't have the stylistic panache to make the combination work. What it ends up with is juxtaposed silliness like rebellions on distant planets by peasants with pitchforks, and troops running around on spaceships waving battleaxes (the latter courtesy of another overpowered plot device called directional Zephyr particles).

More than the world-building though, what really holds LoGH back is the storytelling. The director Noboru Ishiguro notably directed the original "Macross" series, which I enjoyed because of its human drama despite the silly story. In LoGH though, he initially seemed driven to abolish as much as he could the human touch that made "Macross" engrossing to me, deploying a method of storytelling which smacks of a history textbook: aloof and dry in a quest for objectivity. Unfortunately, this means for the first twenty-odd episodes or so, LoGH takes what should have been a compelling story and imbues it with all the compelling quality of someone reading off a historical timeline: in 795 UC, this happens, then that happens, and the fleet is commanded by Admiral Karlheinz Friedemann von Duchebaghoffermeister in the flagship PHXHFYAKJH ... [two scenes later] he was killed in this battle. Due to the stuffy nature of the narration, when occasionally LoGH does try to loosen up with some decidedly odd humour, the effect is tonally dissonant like a socially awkward professor telling a lewd joke at an academic conference. The occasional sensationalist scenes of cannon fodder yelling out "MAMA!!" just before they get graphically blown to bits also jars with the series' generally scholarly tone.

Those who claim that LoGH contains great characters are only telling you part of the story: they neglect to mention that most of the anime's 2763 characters are cannon fodder. Despite this, LoGH still insists on giving them VIP character treatment, providing them with the screen real estate to announce their title and full name, the latter of which is often so long that it'd threaten to run off the right side of the screen. Most of these characters are so shallowly written that you'd struggle to extract a single dimension even if you pooled them all together. They seem to serve no purpose other than as stepping stones for the more important characters, making them look good and helping them ascend towards their rightful, lofty place. As a result, while LoGH does have a decent amount of good characters, they end up getting buried under the sheer weight of the number of useless ones.

However, gold is still gold even if you take a shit over it, and eventually, the strength of LoGH's underlying story starts to shine through as the storytelling slowly improved. In the anime world, LoGH is perhaps unparalleled in its scope and ambition. At the forefront of this is its political commentary. I can't think of any other anime that approaches its sophistication in this area. LoGH recognises that the world is rarely made up of absolutes, and strives to highlight the shades of grey in the political landscape. In fiction, you can find plenty of stories that criticise autocracy and authoritarianism, but not so many that can articulate its potential advantages in areas such as speed of reform. Fewer still can point out subtleties like the paradoxical parallels democracy has with autocracy in its tendencies to follow charismatic leaders rather than ideas. LoGH may not always be eloquent in making its arguments, but its ideas do give you pause and make you think. That said, one subject which LoGH does deal with rather primitively is religion, for which the only representation comes in the form of a bunch of fanatic cultists. I'm not a fan of religion, but LoGH's portrayal seems excessively one-sided even to me.

Once you get over the first part of the show where every cannon fodder and their dog, as well as the fleas on said dog, are vying for your attention, the good characters eventually manage to scrape together enough screen time to distinguish themselves from the faceless crowd. People tend to summarise LoGH as the story of the rivalry between Yang Wenli, a military genius of the Free Planets Alliance, and Reinhard von Lohengramm, the rising star in the Galactic Empire. However, I don't think this is quite right. To me, Reinhard stands alone as the central figure of the saga - even if LoGH does tend to frame him as the antagonist - as the whole story revolves around the imbalance in LoGH's universe brought about by the weight of his influential life, with Yang Wenli acting as the heaviest counterweight to his rise. This interpretation makes particular sense when you consider how things pan out in the final season of the show.

Given Reinhard's importance to the story, it's fortunate that he's also the most complex, most fascinating, most well-written character in the series. As a victim of the aristocratic system, he wants to climb to the top and change the system for the better. But to get to the top, he often faces tough decisions that pit his ambitions against his sense of righteousness. This tension within him and the vastness of his ambitions is reminiscent of a flawed hero in a Greek tragedy, and it's what drives my interest in his character. Early on, I thought I could see where his inner conflict might lead him, but the story actually ended up in places I never expected.

Being an OVA produced over the course of a decade has benefitted the quality of the production. As a result, LoGH has aged pretty well for a 100+ episode old series. You'll not find howlers like headless or badly deformed character models here. That said, people singing the praises of its music to the heavens and back just because the soundtrack comprises purely of classical music seems to me to be doing rather lazy critiquing: "Mars of Destruction" also used plenty of classical music, and no one talks about the greatness of its music, at least not in a non-ironic way. How the music is used is as important as the quality of the music, and I'd give LoGH's usage of music a pass, but not much more - sometimes it enhanced the atmosphere but on other occasions LoGH's choice of music can also be distractingly inappropriate or painfully unsubtle and cliched. Anime such as "Hyouka" and "Nodame Cantabile" serve as far better examples of anime making great use of classical music. I also wish the space battles could have been more excitingly animated. Instead, we mostly get boringly plain lines of lasers flickering on and off amongst bulky ships floating around at snail pace, while commanders stand around looking at flat, monochrome, primitive geometric shapes on their screens. The unimaginative battles scenes are often dull enough to send people to sleep, so definitely don't approach the series expecting to be wowed by spectacles such as the Itano Circus.

Warfare forms a big part of LoGH, and the series is famous for its deep, strategic battles. However I regard this aspect of LoGH to be radically oversold, and while the story and characters do redeem themselves as the show goes on, I became only more disillusioned and disappointed by the warfare of LoGH. The praise seems to stem mainly from the tremendously detailed nature of LoGH's space battles, and their being modelled on real naval battles. Neither of the two reasons necessarily results in something great, but they're probably enough to pull the wool over the eyes of those who aren't looking too hard. But I personally don't think most of LoGH's battles stand up to scrutiny.

Like its world-building, LoGH does a poor job of integrating the old and the new when it comes to warfare. It's all very well taking inspiration from naval battles, but when the results are strangely two-dimensional space battles with the plot devices like the "unnavigable space" playing significant roles, then something's gone awry. When the show tries to get inventive, the results are usually … a bit strange. Ironically, there's an admiral in the series derided as "Succumbed to Theory Staden" because of his over-reliance on theory, and yet LoGH itself often feature whacky things like the "infinite walls of defence" formation and the "snake eating its own tail" battle situation which, though theoretically interesting, are so riddled with practical problems that I have a hard time envisioning their existence in reality.

As for LoGH's love of detail, the problem is that constructing large scale battles with convincingly good strategies and tactics is hard, and the more details you add, the harder it gets for those details to come together coherently. Sometimes, less is more, and I can't help but feel LoGH should have shown more of the forest rather than the trees. Instead, a typical LoGH battle will often feature details on the level of: a ship commander farts at just the wrong time, causing a crewman to accidentally press a button and fire a laser, which just happens to hit the weak point of their flagship, blowing it up and turning the tide of battle. Sometimes minute details and sheer good/bad luck can and do play a crucial role in battles, but I just feel this happens too much in LoGH. What's more, when two commanders clash, misfortunes only ever plague the one with less plot armour. Yang Wenli for example, with his colossal amount of plot armour, never seems to have to deal with random shit that's out of his control, whereas a key hallmark of a great commander is often their ability to adapt tactics to unfavourable turns of events - the battle of Dragon Fang from "Last Exile" being a prime example in anime.

This is not to say LoGH's warfare is uniformly terrible. One aspect I did like is how I could feel the difficulty of manoeuvring large ships in space. Perhaps as a result of being modelled after navy battles, the ship's movements feel lumbering and unwieldy, which strikes me as far more believable than typical visions of flashy space battles where nimble ships dodge and weave between laser shots like in a dogfight.

As much as I like to moan about the strategic shortcomings of LoGH, the show contain moments of genuine brilliance. My problem is that it doesn't contain enough of them - most of the battles comprise important characters using perfectly ordinary tactics to beat down idiotic admirals. I want to see more battles won through brilliance and not lost through utter stupidity. Instead, we constantly get TOLD about the fearsome reputation of a lot of these commanders, but I couldn't FEEL it through the battles themselves.

And that's a recurring problem in LoGH - too much telling, not enough showing. It's interesting to compare the series with the movie "Overture to a New War" which retells the events at the start of the saga. The movie fixes nearly all the problems I had with the main series: it's more tightly written, it humanises the characters with deft touches, and it quickly got me immersed in the story. Notably, the movie had a different director. Had the LoGH main series been more like "Overture to a New War", then it may well have ended up as one of my favourite series. As it stands though, while LoGH can sometimes live up to its billing as a sprawling epic, at other times it comes off as a galumphing, clumsy hulk of a story. On balance, I think LoGH certainly qualifies as a good show but falls short of being a great one.

Personal rating: +1.5 (very good)

Helpful

read more

"Why the fuck does a 12 episode series need a recap?!" was my initial reaction to "Girls und Panzer: Introductions!".

"WTF? There are TWO of these?!?!" was my next.

The first half of the first episode seems to confirm my worst fears: its opening salvo serves as a crucial reminder for the mountain of material contained in the previous ... five episodes. Following this, we're "treated" to an introduction of the many moeblobs littered around the show, giving us the full information shower on their unique moe quirks, including such juicy tidbits as what flowers they like, their favourite classes, and maybe what coloured buttons they prefer on their shirts. Those agonising minutes induced me to give a grand total of about ... half a fuck, maybe? No wait, I think it was zero actually. Yes, I'm pretty sure zero fucks were given, including for the moeblobs' favourite tanks. 

However, from there on, "Introductions!" miraculously started climbing out of the depth of Tedium Valley. First, they introduced the main tanks used by the protagonist's school, which gave some context for the strategies deployed, for example why certain tanks are used for scouting etc. Then they went through the battles that had taken place, and at this point I realised I'd grossly misjudged the value of these recap episodes: far from being the most useless recaps ever, they're probably the most useful ones ever! 

Here's why: while watching the battles for the first time during the main show, I did not think much of them. Too many inexplicable events that happened during the battles made me rant "what bullshit is this?!" For instance, one tank shot at another at point-blank range and still couldn't take it out, and these recaps explain that it's because the attacking tank was a lightweight, bearing a cannon not powerful enough to penetrate the heavy armour of the tank it shot at. In addition to explaining the WTF moments, "Introductions!" also highlights other small details which enhanced my understanding of the battles, such as how important it was for some tanks to get in close to their targets, a detail that went over my head initially.

So for anyone interested in making sense of the battles of "Girls und Panzer", "Introductions!" make for essential viewing. But here's a thought: like other recaps, these are forged in the fires of production hell. Had everything gone to plan, these would not exist, and I would have given "Girls und Panzer" a mediocre rating, never knowing the amount of thought and detail carefully plotted into the battles. And as much I applaud production team for taking advantage of a bad situation and creating something useful, this begs the question: if there's so much detail here crucial for understanding the battles of "Girls und Panzer", shouldn't they get incorporated into the main series?

Helpful

read more