and confusifying it was

Well it was indeed a very busy and confusing weekend.

I think I managed to do everything I had to do. I've burned all the anime series I can to DVD. That doesn't mean I've burned them all of course, because some are not finished, but those that are finished are all done. It's free up about half of the hard-drive I use.

I made some headway with all my recorded telly too. I now only have two things stacked up - a drama called Red Riding and the new episodes of Lewis. Everything else is cleared (I've decided to by the Wire on DVD, for example).

Plus, thankfully, the burden of new shows has lifted somewhat - according to my scheduling I've only about 12 hours or so of new shows due this week, where it was nearly double that last week.

I also scanned all of the regular magazines I had to, including the new megami. It'll be a few weeks before the other mags turn up so that's given me some breathing room there too.

I also took the opportunity to watch some of the last of the new anime shows from last season:


RideBack is awesome. I have to admit going in that it sounded a bit cheesy - ballerina (Rin) rides motorbike/robot thing :/ - but it's actually really good.

It helps that the animation is of a very high standard, I think. I'm guessing the robots have been done with CG, but if so it's some of the best blended CG I've ever seen. They'd look hand animated if not for a slight over-smoothness. But also the animation is generally anyway - very smooth and clear - with really great cinematography.

The story is also pretty well done. There's only one part I'm not sure about - there seems to be a war/revolution background to the world's setting that at the moment is quite divorced from the main story of Rin riding the robot-bike things. I guess it becomes more apparent later, but since I always only use fansubs to sample the first few eps it may be some time before I find out.


Viper's Creed is okay. Unfortunately, it feels a heck of a lot like Blassreiter meets Shirow. Now I'm sure that's just a coincidence (well, Blassreiter anyway). Anime takes years to develop and Blassreiter was only on recently, so it'll just be coincidental that they both featured mecha-bike riding teams.

The trouble is I love Shirow doing Shirow, but am not so keen on other people doing Shirow. And Blassreiter was distinctly 'okay' - it got better at the end, but was pretty generic at the start, and Viper's Creed seems to share the same problem at the front and my sample won't take me far enough to find out about the back end.

The only saving grace was that there was a nice focus on the characters at some points, so maybe there's hope for this too.


Genji Monogatari Sennenki - I only had one episode of this available to watch as that's all I could find fansub wise. I'm not particularly disappointed by that, though - it didn't really scream at me that it was my sort of show.

It seemed to basically be an overwrought romance for women. It certainly had the classic character design you get in those sorts of girls comics - weirdly proportioned men with enormous shoulders, tiny heads and scary-thin limbs, but vaguely androgynous too (think CLAMP).

Not that that's a criticism as such, more an observation that it seems to conform to type and it's not a type I am particularly bothered about; although I wouldn't say it was bad either. What I did find annoying is that half the screen always seemed to be shaded out to black. I've seen this done when they want to censor (cover over) things like gore, but there was no reason for it here. All it did was the pictures feel tiny.


Chrome Shelled Regios - er... whut?

I had almost no idea what the hell was going on in this series. My guess it that it's based on a Japanese RPG or something like that. Maybe one of those light novels they have in Japan. It certainly has the feel of something the audience is already supposed to be familiar with and doesn't really pay much regard to helping newbie's come along. It's like watching the second series of something having never even heard of the first.

It's also a type of fantasy that doesn't really appeal to me and features the classic (tedious) anime tropes of people shouting out their next special move. And that brings me to the battles - they're okay in and of themselves, but the problem I had with them was that they were backed up by this pounding dance/electronic soundtrack that's so aggressive it kinda browbeats you.

The only saving grace is that when it's not getting up to all those things it has some reasonably interesting character relationships. So if it wasn't for all that guff I'd probably like it more, but as it is it's not really for me.


That really only leaves a couple of shows unwatched, only one of which is fansubs. I do still need to watch Strike Witches and then there are a couple of things that were made available on Crunchyroll which I need to at least sample. Plus there's a couple of films I should watch.

Oh, and I also finished Death Note - it had a good couple of last chapters, but they should definitely have happened 6 volumes ago.