little bit of a scan

I've not really been getting stuck into the scanning like I'd hoped.

The hope was that with my getting to the animage's, which relatively easy and quick to scan, I'd blast through them. The flaw is of course that the hope in question is entirely dependent on me actually sitting down and doing some scanning - quicker to scan they may be, but if I'm watching telly or reading a book, they ain't quicker at all.

I have done a bit, though, so I've done some mini-reviews of the fansubs I watched. I'm actually rapidly approaching the point where I'm going to run out of fansubs. I'm guessing I'll probably have a proper crack at the series that are on Crunchyroll until the new season rolls around.


Amagami SS

I wasn't entirely sure what to make of this.

It seemed to be one of those series you get occasionally that tries to do the more standard anime plotlines in a more serious way. The last one I remember like this was White Album, which seemed to be to be trying to be a harem show, but a kind of grown-up harem show.

So, in other words, the male protagonist seemed to have a bevy of hot chicks (idols, no less) in love with him, but it did away with the 'childish' fan-service. I didn't really like it and initially I didn't really like Amagami SS either.

I'm not sure if White Album was, but Amagami appears to be based on one of those girl-chasing/dating type games and so you've got that element of their being lots of girls around. However, the boy appears to really only be interested in the one girl. Well, I say that - there's something of a suggestion that there are going to be multiple 'arcs', but I didn't watch far enough to be sure.

Anyway, I guess the point is that this is a fairly gentle, fan-service light romance anime with a dash of humour. It didn't strike me as ground-breaking, but also didn't really offend me either.


Asobi Ni Ikuyo

Asobi seemed to be a bit of a mess.

The distinct impression I got was that the writer wanted to make a proper science fiction show with aliens and conspiracies and all sort of stuff like that, but it's also a fairly generic romantic-comedy harem & instant girlfriend type of show.

Whether this was because the writer genuinely wanted to combine the two, or he felt he had to include the harem stuff to give it appeal I don't know. It could even have been at his editors insistence (from what I understand editor's are pretty powerful in Japan). Or of course, because the anime is based on a series of light novels and I've expressed before that the majority of light novels are clearly generic crap, it could be because of that.

Anyway, the point is that the series ends up being a horrible mish-mash of the genres that just doesn't really work.

It also manages to completely ignore what are clearly story telling requirements. It's like when people are meeting the alien cat girl (oh no - more cat girls, like there haven't been enough of those in recent seasons!) no-one really questions that she's got cat ears and a tail (note that she's got cat ears and normal ears :/) or what she's wearing or anything.

And normally they at least try to give some reason why the cat girl likes the milquetoast lead, but here there's nothing - he's not specifically kind to her or anything, she basically just gets in to bed with him and that's it. There's also no reason given why all his friends set out to rescue her - you'd expect her to have done them a favour or been nice to them or something, but nope - they just decide to rescue her.

To add insult to injury, even though this is clearly meant to be a fan-service heavy show they're doing that horribly annoying thing of obscuring the fan-service really badly with beams of sunlight, etc. This therefore renders the only remaining reason you might have kept watching null and void. Especially since there doesn't seem to be an uncensored version kicking about either.