Thursday 4 July 2013

loads of anime pt 1

I thought I'd do the first lot of the mini reviews of anime stuff I've watched today (well I sure as heck haven't done any of the reviews of films I should have).

heaven's memo pad

I quite enjoyed this.

A lot of anime just recently have focused on NEETs, which is an acronym that stands for "Not in Education, Employment or Training" and is usually understood to mean young people who are not really making anything of their lives.

In this series the idea is that some of these NEETs have banded together to form something akin to a detective agency.  The members all have particular otaku-focus, so one is a military nut and the leader is a young girl who is a genius hacker and a hikikomori (a shut in, basically).

There are also quite a few peripheral characters to the main agency people, many of whom add their own interest.  The protagonist is roughly your typical nothing special cypher for the viewer, though as it goes on we see he does have some appropriate skills, though not quite in an otaku type way.

Overall the series is pleasant enough.  It takes an interesting forma in that it's a very mushed-together version of independent episodes and on-going stories, such that you could watch some episodes as stand-alone, though not quite get everything and others only work as part of a particular ark.  I guess what I mean is that it has blocks of stories, but these can run across a variable number of episodes.

freezing

This is a fighting-and-fan-service anime at its core.

And as far as those two things go, it's a pretty good example.  If that isn't your cup of tea then I really wouldn't recommend this over and above it.  It does do a lot better in the story and characterisation department than other anime in this area, but not to the extent that I'd recommend it if those aren't of interest, if you see what I mean.

The story is bobbins, obviously - a mash up of a variety of random religious and spiritual things, smooshed together with giant inter-dimensional monsters that bare an un-canny resemblance to something out of RahXephon (though with the religious overtones it has a distinct Eva feel to it too).  However, it's not that intrusive of a plot - it keeps going with the story, but you don't end up with entire episodes of info dump.  Indeed, they also didn't attempt to wrap the whole thing up in a single short season, so it doesn't actually end by the close of the series.  This, I guess, ties into the length of the manga it's based on, but is interesting because they've only just announced the second season, suggesting the second wasn't guaranteed.

While the plot may be daft, the characterisation and the development of those characters is a lot better done.  It's not subtle - a lot of the characters are quite arch and they don't tend to hide their feelings.  I have to say the girls are all a little odd as well - they all seem to basically hate each other, and it's not really clear why.

I think part of it relates to the more contentious aspect of the fighting, which is that the girls get genuinely quite badly hurt when they fight (they need to practice for fighting the bad guys, obviously).  I think the idea is that, although they get hurt, their special powers and super-science can patch them together.  I guess this makes them quite antagonistic towards each other, as otherwise they're just horrible for no real reason.

Anyway, overall I quite liked it and will certainly pick up the second season, but you have to remember it is what it is.

majikoi oh! samurai girls

After watching this I guess I now know what the anime equivalent of a train wreck is.

I actually went on Wikipedia to look this one up as I know it was based on a light novel series, and I also looked at a couple of reviews on MAL.  Part of the reason for this was because it felt like I was missing something - the series seems to start in the middle of something and also seems to do stuff like make running jokes for the first time as if you already knew they were running jokes.

It's also horribly inconsistent with its characters.  The main protagonist can be the most pervy guy with a group of pervy mates in one episode, trying to sneak a peek at one of the girls naked, and then the next he's some milquetoast who seems to want to run away if any of the girls come near him and only has eyes for the main girl.  Who is some sort of non-lesbian-lesbian - she seems to lust after girls, but also seems to expect the main guy to be in love with her and is in love with him.  Or something - as I say, it isn't consistent and doesn't make a lot of sense.

Of course at its heart this is another fan-service-and-fighting anime but compared to freezing or ikki tousen the fighting isn't particularly interesting (and a little thin on the ground) and the fan-service is kinda hampered by some non-descript character designs and a rather low animation budget.

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