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Mar 10, 2014
I went into The World God Only Knows because of the recommendation of a friend who considered it one of the best anime/manga out there. Just 1 season of the anime into it, and I already find it hard to disagree with this. So right now, I feel like doing all I can to tell people why I consider it an amazing anime that you should totally check out.
The story of this anime is about a handsome nerd named Keima, who has a sense of superiority over humanity because he understands the fictional girls in his dating sims. However, because he has considered himself a
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master of conquering these fictional girls, the underworld decides that he can do the same in real life. So a cute demon girl name Elsie shows up to reveal that he must capture spirits that have trapped themselves in the bodies of different girls. In order to avoid death for both of them, he must now win the hearts of these girls and kiss them so that Elsie can capture these lost spirits. And this begins what I can only describe as a unique twist on the usual "____ of the week" type of story. While not literally every week, Keima continues to find girls he has to have fall for him for the sake of his life. These girls range from a supposed rich girl to a pink haired pop idol, each with their own distinct personalities.
The main thing that shocked me was how much I really cared about these girls, especially the ones given the most focus. Now Elsie is more the sweet fake sister of Keima instead of a love interest but she might be my favorite. Her main purpose seems to be the naive, cute girl who learns about Keima and the human world. And despite that not being the most deep or creative character (at least in theory), it all seemed more genuine than most attempts at a similar character, and she genuinely put a smile on my face when she was on screen, especially because of her endearing actions throughout this part of this series.
There is also Kanon and Shiori. Kanon is a pop idol teen who is increasingly annoyed at Keima's apathy towards her and her performing and Shiori is (to an almost absurd degree) a shy girl who loves reading above all else. Both have fairly similar yet different arcs that involve them overcoming their insecurities, one involving a need for attention, and one coming from a fear or inability to speak out against anything. In both cases, Keima eventually figures out a plan based on what he knows of girls in games in order to slowly but surely get these girls to fall for them. However, he seems to slowly gain some respect for real life girls through these events and while his guesses are shockingly accurate, the girls tend to surprise him despite that. It seems like the series is trying to say a lot of things about stereotyping and assuming things about people and about nerds. One thing I've at least gotten out of it is how many elements of the story could be considered sexist and yet it never feels that way. The series seems more than self-aware enough so that it avoids this being about how a guy can conquer women and is more about a guy discovering things about the world while also using his incredible nerd knowledge to help teenager girls' insecurities. It seems to be on this impressive line that most writers wouldn't be able to stay on and its intelligence is one of the things that elevates it to greatness. Despite being based on the cliche of a teenage girl who is also a pop idol, I found Kanon's story to be the most believable. Just the idea of a famous teenage girl so desperate to always be the center of attention is very sad and real to me based on how real life celebrities can end up like. Shiori's was arguably the most over-the-top and silly but her character I also found the most sympathetic. I'm already sympathetic to this type of character but it being written as well as it was made it even more so.
It is really astounding how much I cared about these characters. Like more than I usually expect, even from a lot of great anime. But unlike many anime I've seen in recent years where it had to be overly depressing for that to happen, this series is uplifting and always ends with a happy ending that genuinely makes you feel glad you watched it. It's the type of thing I wish a lot of fiction understood about emotion. And while the serious stuff is great, the other thing that makes this such a joy to watch is the comedy. This series made me laugh pretty hard a few times, and I was consistently laughing throughout the series, which is really rare. I'm kinda interested in how these scenes were in the manga, because transitioning comedy from one medium to another seems like a difficult process to get down. But this one makes that look effortless, because the timing is brilliant in this series. They always know, when to start a joke, when to end it and how long to keep it going. There's just enough obvious ones or built up jokes along with stuff that is random enough that it makes you laugh but not random enough (or too frequently random) that it gets old like certain wacky series. The shocking amount of western pop culture references were also great. Elsie in particular got a lot of laughs from me, which is a big reason why she's my favorite character right now. And this comedy is what helps make the sad and dramatic stuff even better, because you get this sense of likability and fun from the comedy so that you care when sad stuff happens. It is so simple, yet so great.
The art and animation are both really solid. They're nothing you're gonna praise as brilliant like I just did for the rest of this, but it does what it needs to do and does it quite well and that's basically all I ask for. It's nice, colorful, didn't have any mistakes I noticed, was animated decently, was fun to watch as an animated series. It's cool. The music though is great. The composer of the background music has done mostly work in JRPGs and similar titles and you can tell. There's this one scene in particular that tries to make how many different types of books there are into this grand, epic, emotional scene and it works because the music is epic in all the right ways. And that's fairly consistent with the series, just great compositions all around. The Opening too (Ending's pretty good too). It starts out as a fairly typical but extremely well done J-Pop song but then turns into this more holy sounding (only way I can describe it) mixed with I think hints of auto-tune, which is perfect for a series about a game nerd God like the protagonist in this series. Just love that. Voice acting is great too. Pretty every performance is as believable and fun as it needs to be.
If I had one very minor complaint, is that the last episode of the first season didn't feel amazing enough for the series it was in. It was still really good and there are more seasons so whatever, but it could've ended that a bit better I feel...
So I genuinely love this series and I can assume that it stays as good in the sequel seasons or the manga. It is pretty much a masterpiece and if I can, I'd like as many people as possible to give it a chance.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Nov 5, 2012
Oh Casshern Sins, you were an unexpectedly interesting anime. For better or worse. This may sound harsh but I'd be interested in more anime like it, but better. Not that it was bad, far from it but...well...
While the first couple of episodes were questionable, but the series quickly became a great series of one-off stories. It's like a post-apocalyptic robot version of a roadtrip movie for the first half of the series. Casshern (and later his robot dog buddy Friender, among others) travels around the "ruined" world, trying to find answers and finds how these characters, almost all robots, react to their sudden mortality and
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to the dying world at large. Each episode, well mainly 3-12, is each an interesting story with an enjoyable character and how they react to this post-apocalyptic world. It's a generally interesting look at inevitable mortality iwth the clever twist that it's all about robots, who were basically immortal before "the Ruin" began.
You have your core cast, Casshern the emo whiny character...but to be fair, that part is fairly tolerable and his interaction with other characters help too. Plus, it's understandable considering what happened. You have the optimistic silly child character Ringo, Lyuze, the old man, and villians. The villians are built up well, they are fun villians basically, with decent enough personalities. And it leads into some great plot twists halfway through. Afterwards it's more plot oriented instead of episodic, and at first I was genuinely enjoying that, with one fight in episode 14 that took the usually brief fighting of the series and turned it into an almost DBZ-like level of awesome. Some good continuations of the plot and it looked like it was going to head to a satisfying climax with finding the supposedly alive Luna.
...and I don't know, the series just didn't work that well in the last 1/4. The series had always had a somewhat (I hate to use this word but it's true) pretentious feel to it, but it got really annoying towards the end. The stupidly obvious symbolism, the lame twists, the contradicting message of life and death...ugh. It wasn't bad even than but compared to how much I was enjoying the rest of the series, everything after episode 18 just fell flat by comparison, even if there was still a lot of good in those episodes, it didn't come together well.
The sound design is really good. Only watched dubbed by the voice acting was typical good Funimation stuff. Nothing more nothing less. Some really good music, and the series knew when NOT to play background music, which was necessary for this series.
The art however, is gorgeous. I'd honestly say it's easily one of the best looking tv anime I have ever seen. Even what should have been brown, ugly backgrounds still look great and if anything really help the colorful characters pop. It's so good that for me, it single-handedly makes any defense of every brown and grey next gen video game a complete joke. The characters are so colorful and the animation is really good when necessary and everything is just great in terms of art. I mean for tv anime, I'm not gonna compare it to a Ghibli film or anything, that's just unfair. But still, it's fantastic. The old school designs also make it look pretty unique.
So overall, it was a good anime. It's a shame about how dissappointing the last few episodes was, but it's still a genuinely good anime worth watching. I had a lot of fun for the most part watching it, and it makes me want to see other anime with similar themes or in general a more somber look at the overdone post-apocalyptic setting. I'm sure they exist, I just haven't watched them yet.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Aug 13, 2012
Well, this is the series that will now forever be tied with the unexpected Toonami revival. That's honestly a major reason for this review, because this is actually fresh off of a decent amount of people watching it, and I'm not good at catching current anime episodes in Japan. And also because this is a very interesting anime, for me at least.
Now, the story is a very cool idea. Deadman Wonderland is just a very clever and terribly dark prison where absurd games are the only way to get money to stay alive or eat etc. Lots of possibilities for creativity just from that and
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it's very mature and dark and shocking. And they quickly go into typical shonen territory. Filled with one on one fights between people stronger than any human and have bizarre attacks and also a rebellion and a forgotten past. ...ok.
The characters are pretty good. The main characters, Ganta and Shiro, can be annoying but usually work decently for what they are. Ganta being the kid who constantly suffers through crap no kid should go through and wants to be stronger because of it and his seemingly dumb possible love interest character who is actually uncontrollably strong and dangerous at times. Most of the other characters are either weird or don't have nearly as much of a fleshed out personality.
The art is just fine. It works, it's decent enough. Animation's pretty good. I can't praise it a lot but often all I ask is competence for anime on tv. Music's also pretty decent, can range from dramatic to being a lot more fitting for the dark setting. It isn't too memorable for the most part but it works well enough.
Now, you might be thinking, this sounds like an anime that's ok at best, below average or bad at worst. So why an 8? Well first of all, it's an arbitrary number, who cares? But second of all, I still enjoyed it quite a bit, maybe more than I should have. There's 4 main reasons I've thought of.
1. First impressions. It has one of the best first episodes I've seen in a series. It immediately grabs your attention, shocks you and gives you no choice but to be interested in where it's going. It's what any first episode should do, make you want to continue watching. Even if you are annoyed by Ganta, you have to feel bad for the kid. He goes through so much crap and while I'm not a big fan of trying to be shocking in a story considering how often that means "not making sense or being offensive for no reason", it works here and gets your attention.
2. It's a shonen series. Like, I'm not sure if it's actually a shonen series, but the weird mix of childish and mature stories, the one-on-one fights, the variety of bizarre characters that have unique attacks all from a similar source of power and everything about the series is very much like your typical action shonen series. And I'm a big fan of a lot of shonen, so this really appealed to me.
3. It's only 12 episodes. Now I often care more about characters the longer a series is (short of maybe some notable character derailment) and I tend to prefer a series continuing to see more stories and see how stuff is resolved. But how shocking this series was had worn off after a while and nothing exactly made me beg for a 2nd season. If it continued, I have a feeling the flaws would be made so much more apparent and annoying.
4. Being the first show on the new Toonami. This was probably the perfect choice for the first series on new Toonami. It was now late-night, Adult Swim with an audience a few years older. Now, the great first impression helped but also, what was the most popular anime on Adult Swim? Shonen action anime. And since this is like a TV-MA shonen series, it just fit perfectly. It was the type of action anime people loved on Toonami, but with more blood and violence and swearing etc. It makes complete sense.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Dec 30, 2011
Oh boy, I'm not gonna be popular after this, meethinks. I saw the japanese version, btw.
Well, I think you can immediately tell what I thought about this and downvoted me respectively. Cool, whatevs. But I really did not like this series...mostly. Haven't seen anything else from this series, I believe it's based on some visual novels or whatever. I don't know, but these 13 episodes were ulitmately not a good experience by themselves at least.
There is technically an overall story to all of this. It's a shame it's far too vague and pointlessly cionfusing in an attempt to be deep. I mostly get what they
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were going for but it just didn't work. It was just boring and with some painfully obvious sky, above the clouds, birds etc. metaphors all about the same general idea.
The characters are a different story. Normally I complain in a series that the secondary characters aren't used enough. This series has the opposite problem. Those 3 other girls that aren't Misuzu I honestly can't stand. It is the perfect mix of the most generic and boring comedy from them, followed by some poorly written tragedy. The 2 "sisters" story is honestly one of the best examples ever of making tragic events combined with magic and suicide symbolism...and being boring. It's just dialogue not said by any human being and I can't stand it. I just feel somewhat depressed watching it, yet at the same time bored. And it really feels like it's trying way too hard to be deep and annoys me. So by episode 6, I was hating this series (and while previous episodes were better, they weren't that much better). And I came into this series expecting it to at least be good, so I was truly dissappointed.
And then those characters were basically never seen again, focused on characters that mattered and it got better real quick. I was actually enjoying it after that. Flashback episodes with character names I can't remember had characters that were fun and kinda funny and enjoyable to be around and not depressionly boring. My god, that was fun. They have an adventure and find her mother. I liked those characters for what they were. It wasn't like amazing but I liked it, and I do admit I like any sudden increase of action in a series that at first has none. The ending of that story was silly but ok.
And then we spend the rest of the series focusing on Misuzu and her mother. Again, some weirdness, but the sad parts work. I can see why her mother acted as she did and her struggle with her relationship with Misuzu felt genuinely touching. Not to mention the twists, while kinda dumb, made you sad but not bored this time. You wanted to see both characters are ok, which is always important, I think especially for a series like this. I was not exactly in tears but it was really sad, a good story, I enjoyed it.
And of course the big final episode is a recap...wait what? Really? Couldn't let the show end on a high note I guess or it was used to advertise some sequel OVA or I don't know. The point is that I hated the first half but kinda liked the 2nd half for the most part.
The art was ok. I don't know, the faces I didn't exactly like but...the art was ok. It was too bright at times but it still looked decent. Sound was mostly ok, although the voice acting could get annoying for those secondary characters I don't like. But that's made up by the performances of Aya Hisakawa and the late Tomoko Kawakami. Misuzu's aunt is the best character and the voice acting helped...or maybe vice versa. But I did buy from her voice the drama of those last few episodes. Misuzu herself was also good, a role that could have been annoying is made genuinely sweet yet tragic. Most of the rest are just ok, not worth mentioning at all really. Same with the music, but that being said, I really like the OP. Good stuff.
Yeah, maybe this series isn't one made for me. But one of my favorite series is the fairly depressing Welcome to the NHK!, which was written infinitely better and got how to make characters act and talk like real people more than almost any fiction I've ever seen. This show, rarely got remotely close sadly. And I know a decent amount of people who agree so at least I know I'm not alone. It isn't an awful series if you can get past episode 6, and in fact if you ignore episodes 2-6 I would likely call it a good series. But those episodes were awful, could not enjoy it at all, and the rest of the series was unable to make me fully forgive that. And I've kinda not interested in other series that I at least assume are similar anymore.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Nov 8, 2009
Often, I am not a fan of movies with original stories based off of anime. They often are ridiculous and have some of the most pathetic and annoying characters introduced, for some storyline that the anime would never go near thanks to it's horrible cliches and terrible attempts to make you care about the characters introduced in the movies.
Detective Conan is a very popular shonen anime, and I had guessed before knowing there were movies based off of it that there were movies based off of it. However, unlike most anime, some of the movies have actually been pretty awesome. Perhaps it's because this anime
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doesn't have magic and avoids stories about annoying princesses that are protected by the protagonists and stuff like that. Or maybe because they are basically one big case in each movie, except with more explosions than a typical Conan case. (although I admit I haven't seen movies 8-11, which I've heard weren't that great).
Story: This story is very similar to some of the other Conan movies in that there are many people in danger and many people die because of a large case that needs to be solved. The other movies had other parts of the plot that were more relevent to the actual characters but this takes it to a new level. The Black Organization, the powerful, mysterious organization Conan has been trying to stop for a long time, ends up involved in this case.
Now, something I really hated about the 5th Conan movie is that the Black Organization was barely even seen in the movie and that the entire thing, at least a times, felt like an excuse for Conan to be an explosion-filled, dangerous situation. This movie avoided both. With the exception of the end, the movie felt very similar to Black Organization cases in the anime. They are unexpectedly involved in this, and we slowly but surely learn why. Of course, a little more than half way through the movie and it seems to avoid anything Black Organization related a bit too much, and quite honestly, the case itself, while certainly good, gets a bit boring (especially compared to the Organization, which I am always find entertaining). The ending is great, although I admit it was kinda silly.
Another thing worth mentioning is the amazing continuity. Sometimes people who make a story for an anime that isn't based off of the manga can do a horrible job at remembering why people liked it in the first place. One of the many reasons I enjoy Conan is the amazing use of continuity and how so many of the cases are at least briefly mentioned eventually. I can think of no less than 10 references to older cases, and all of them are awesome to anyone who actually remembers those cases (and one of those references was only in the manga at that point).
Art: I don't have much an opinion of the art for this anime, but I did really enjoy the art I guess. It looked better than normal anime episodes since this is a movie and since the anime art works best when the setting isn't a normal, sunny day, the parts when it was night or evening were pretty great. But other than that...I thought it was really good. That's all.
Sound: Like the anime, the voice acting was great. I love all of the voice acting and it was nice to hear Kamiya Akira as Kogoro one more time (this was the last thing translated before we got Kogoro's new voice actor). Not much else to say, the voice acting for all of the characters is always amazing. Especially the Black Organization members. When they talk, I almost automatically think that something awesome is going to happen because of their voice acting.
The music is...ok. There was some good music but way too often they played this annoying song in the background that, according to the official soundtrack I heard, was actually like 30 very slight variations of the same song. It was not enough to ruin anything in the movie but it was still very annoying.
Character: I should point out that I think that about 95 percent of the recurring characters in this anime are really awesome. But there was more than the usual characters in this movie. In the anime, while Megure, Takagi and others are in many of the cases since they are in that area, there are a number of other inspectors and detectives that have appeared when they have gone to other prefectures. Almost all of them appeared and the interaction between them was amazing to most Conan fans. Gunma's idiot Yamamura interacting with the recently introduced serious, and badass Nagato Inspector, Yamato was hilarious because of how different their personalities are. Even better was the amazing "deduction" Kogoro did later in the movie and how his two fanboys, the loud but fun Sango Yokomizo and Yamamura reacted to it made me laugh. The continuity also helped and the characters felt much more in character than I would expect (not that I care for the movies as long as they aren't absurdly out of character). However, something was wrong with Gin. He seemed way too happy. Not even in typical "Gin is going to kill someone" happy that I would expect, but more of a bizarre happy. And some of the things in the ending were kinda silly.
Enjoyment: I enjoyed this movie. Most other Conan fans probably will too. I think others can enjoy it as another random movie instead of actually watching the entire series, but a lot of the things in the movie make me think that even Conan fans who never pay attention to anything that isn't in the manga would enjoy the interaction between characters and the amazing continuity.
Overall: 9
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Oct 14, 2009
I have been a huge fan of shonen since the original Dragonball was on Cartoon Network about..I dunno...maybe 7 years ago? At times, I could almost say I am somewhat easily amused by the typical shonen anime, filled with action and adventure with tons of character development and dialogue to explain every single thing that is going on. You know the type I'm talking about. As at least some of us know, shonen is not just those type of anime. It's a word to describe the target audience: young boys. It is surprising to see how many unexpectedly different types of anime and manga have
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shonen as the target audience.
My point is that this is not one of those different types of anime. Yet at the same time it is. Basically, this IS a Detective anime. There are tons of cases and mysteries in this series and Conan Edogawa is pretty much always one who has to solve them. However, it is done in such a way that at times it feels like they took a typical action adventure shonen and replaced fights and magic with cases and deduction. It is very interesting and done in a way that made me a fan of the detective genre, something I thought would never happen.
Story: The story is done in a very interesting way. I'm sure not everyone will like it but considering the continued popularity of the series, it sure as hell worked. In the first 100 episodes (ignoring filler, which we almost all hate anyway), the plot everyone wants to see (anything involving those "men in black" that gave Shinichi the drug that turned him into Conan) almost never goes anywhere and instead focuses on random cases and some fun character development (mainly involving Shinichi/Conan's love interest, Ran). The individual stories of the cases are so great however, that you can't really complain. But either way, after the first 100 or so episodes, the story goes in the direction of having a few episodes that has character development for the many characters in the series for every one episode that involves those men in black (although the main plot is probably not what you think it is, if you haven't seen the series).
The main plot is always interesting, exciting and quite mysterious. It makes you wonder what will happen next pratically everytime a plot episode happens. The fact that cases are not connected from one case to the next to the one after that etc. almost always makes it seem much more different from anything I've ever seen that has such interesting long term storylines. It also makes it so that almost each case usually has a guest character (who appear once in a while and have importance to the main plot or the side plots) that make the case that much more interesting, no matter how little or how much character development there is.
With the exception of one particular character, the major side plots that don't involve the main plot are usually relationship related plots. They are really fun more often instead of being truly deep or emotional (at least in my opinion) but they are interesting so I honestly think that's more than ok.
The cases themselves deserve mention. Despite usually being only two episodes, many times these cases become tragic and sad (someone died so that's obvious I guess. And almost always the culprit has damn good motives to kill the person so it is extremely well done).
I will say that if you have ADD and need to see major plot development often then this is probably not your anime. But people who wait long enough will love the plot.
(The rest of the review should be fairly short compared to this. I think.)
Art: The art is pretty great. In the first nearly 300 episodes it is kinda uninteresting an art style but it works perfectly for a somewhat realistic detective anime. The art style after that was much better and did the same thing without being a boring (yet still good) art style. The newest art style that only started in episode 521 is interesting. It basically is the worst art style when they are in a normal, bright setting but when the characters and objects etc. are shown in a dark area or there is some fun lighting like from a sunset or something, it looks pretty great.
Sound: The music kinda fits what I said about this kinda being similar to actiona adventure shonen while still being a detective anime. The music fits the detective feel extremely well while also being like music you would expect in other anime. (the only way I explain it: you know how Naruto's background music often sounds like it fits a ninja anime? Well this fits a detective anime in the same way.)
The voice acting is legendary. I can't overexagerate this. The major characters fit their roles so perfectly that to this day I truly can't imagine ANYONE else in the same role. (which I can't say about any other anime ever, quite honestly) This is especially true for Kogoro (Akira Kamiya) and Conan (Minami Takayama), whose voices are amazing and do such a perfect job at so many different emotions that I can't even describe how great they truly are.
Character: The characters are infinitely fun. Everytime I see at least half of the recurring characters, I get a smile on my face. They are not ridiculously deep characters but they are always fun and they almost all have enjoyable personalities so I think it's awesome. You may not agree. Ok.
Enjoyment: I have said how much I enjoyed throughout this review. It is honestly my favorite anime and even my favorite show ever. It has so much fun in it, without becoming too deep or too pointlessly complicated a series, which is just amazing and it made me enjoy an entire new genre, known as detective.
Overall: 10.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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