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Nearly forgot to post on here today!

Think I'll just give a round-up of the animu I've been watching - not done that in a long while!

Darker Than Black

I'll give it a proper review later over at trismugistus.com, but overall I've really been enjoying this show.

To be brutally honest it's not the most original show. But it does represent something of a breath of fresh air. I mean there's not one character in the show that could be said to be remotely moe, for example. How many shows a year are there where you can say that with genuine accuracy?

Which isn't to say the show doesn't feature a bevy of beauties, but these are beautiful women, not pretty girls. They also feel like genuine, real, grown-up characters, rather than caricatures.

Which is saying a lot when you consider it's one of those shows where characters die in their droves. It makes for a real sense of poignancy - you could easily do entire series about half the characters that killed off in Darker than Black and it's that strength of writing that really helps to carry the show.

They could easily have made them two-dimensional bit players, but they're not. Instead, they're (mostly) fleshed out people who feel like they could exist. Well, apart from the whole super-powers thing, obviously.


DOGS OAV

I actually started buying the DOGS manga recently. I've not read it yet, but I really liked the artwork, so I thought I'd give it a go.

I've therefore no idea how close these OAVs are to the original, but if they're anything like each other I'm thinking I'll enjoy the manga. However, I must admit the anime wasn't quite what I was expecting.

The thing that took me by surprise was the humour. The first episode was fairly serious, but the second was really quite amusing and I wasn't expecting that at all. I was also expecting more of a solid plot.

I guess with it only being four episodes (And four 15 minute episodes at that) that's a bit unfair, but I thought they'd try and include some kind of overarching plot across the four. Well, I say that - with my usual approach of watching only a sample of the episodes, maybe it turns out that there is more of a plot, but I certainly couldn't see any longer plot strand sin what I watched. It was more like a series of shorter stories involving the same characters, rather than an overall story.

Still, I enjoyed it, so let's hope the manga is as good and they pick this up for a full anime series.


Tears to Tiara

I had absolutely no idea what to expect from this. I'm guessing I have seen some pics from the anime mags, but I've gotten so far behind with watching stuff that I have basically completely forgotten what they were.

When it started I have to admit I rolled my eyes a bit. Straight fantasy is generally not my thing and animes that are based on RPGs can get a bit tedious. They're also easy to spot a mile off - I could tell this was one before I even checked.

But then a while back I watched a show called Druaga that was really rather good, and that was a fantasy RPG game adaptation type anime too.

Tear to Tiara was also surprisingly good. Perhaps I've gone soft on fantasy? Or maybe it's more to do with the strength of the writing. One clever thing it's doing is to give you all the standard RPG tropes but to bugger about with them.

It's not quite subversion, but they're definitely tweaked enough to make them interesting. So in the first episode a "Demon King" god is resurrected, but he turns out to not really be evil/the bad guy (or at least not yet, from what I'd watched). So you've got a fairly standard fantasy element, but treated in a different-from-the-norm way.

It also has quite a bit of humour, and humour always goes a long way.

Oh, and it's interesting how bloody/violent it is as well - gore splatters all over the place. Not sure why, but it seems to add something to the show. They can be quite tepid these sorts of fantasies and it makes it a bit more... I dunno, weighty, for the violence to be more graphic.