more fansubs

The new anime season is upon us, but as per usual I'm still on last season.

To be honest, this is partly a deliberate move as well as a consequence of getting behind. When I start shows I usually like to watch a few episodes on the trot so that I can get a proper feel for what they're about.

Sometimes they put an awful lot of effort into the first episode and they can be kinda misrepresentative of the show as a whole. They'll often launch in with lots of action and the budget and schedule allows them to spend a bit more time, money and effort on making it well animated. Then after that things can tail off.

I therefore try to watch a bunch to really get a handle on it and a proper feel for what the story is (if there is one). Also, having now tried it with a few crunchyroll shows I'm not such a big fan of watching individual episodes on a weekly basis. I find they work better for me if I can watch them in chunks, especially if they have a proper plot, as I can then get my teeth properly sunk into them.

Anyway, as mentioned, I've been sampling some of the shows only available via fansub from the last season, so I thought I'd do a round-up of some of them:

Aria the Scarlet Ammo (hidan aria)

Derivative, uninteresting, poorly executed drivel. What makes this worse is that the light novel it's based on appears to be by the guy who did Toradora and Shakugan Shana.


Dog Days

To be frank this was just the kind of fantasy stuff I don't like.


A Channel

I guess if you'd never seen one of these moe highschool shows before you may enjoy this. I mean, it's nicely animated and the girls are cute and the humour is pitched at a fairly generic level, but for me, having seen quite a few now, it didn't really seem to add anything that really made it worth watching. At least something like K-ON is based around a music club.


Denpa Onna Seishun Otoko

I have to confess I'm not entirely sure what I think of Denpa after my prescribed two episodes. I found it well animated and it's adapted from one of those Light Novels that at least try to be a bit more intelligent than just cramming in loads of anime clichés. Not that it hasn't got plenty of those, but it's at least trying. Trouble is I found it a bit slow and the weird girl in the futon had far too many ticks in the annoying column for me to really like it. I think, were it on crunchyroll I'd keep watching, but I doubt I'd want to buy it on DVD.


Yondemasuyo, Azazel-san

What an odd show. It's a comedy, but it involves a detective agency and demons that more like cute mascots than actual demons. It's rather difficult to explain, but I enjoyed it. It actually probably helps that the episodes are half length (about 13 minutes). I think if they were longer it might start to run thin on gags, but as it is, it works well.


Fireball Charming

This actually appears to have been made by Disney Japan. It's also computer animated, so not really traditional anime. It's clearly very high budget, though this is somewhat compensated for by the fact that each episode is shy of 2 minutes long. They're basically little double-act comedy skits and I have to confess it's a type of Japanese comedy I'm not a fan of. It actually reminds me of the Tachikoma shorts they did as part of GitS: SAC, only I enjoyed those much more.


Honto ni Atta! Reibai-Sensei

Another one where the episodes are really short (5 minutes in this case). This also is a flash animation job, which is a style I'm not a huge fan of. It's a comedy where a class's homeroom teacher is a psychic/mystic type and hilarity ensues. I think you can tell it didn't do a great deal for me.


Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae o Boku-tachi wa Mada Shiranai

This looked like it would be really quite good. The story seemed a bit more complex and involved than a lot of stuff that seemed to come out in this season. Kinda like a slice of life meets tragedy show. It also looked surprisingly nicely animated.


Softenni

Perhaps if I'd never seen a cute girls doing cute things series before I'd have enjoyed this one a bit more, but as it is, it doesn't really seem to rise above the baseline for where you'd expect this sort of thing to be. I guess the girls are somewhat sex-obsessed and it did have more fan-service than is usual for this sort of show - girls playing tennis show their knickers - but it had weird censorship. What was weird about it was that it seemed to let you see plenty of knicker (and bra) shots, but then every so often one of them would be censored, even though you could see they were still clearly wearing knickers.