PinkuBentoBox

I haven’t made a substantial update here in ages. My last major update was about six weeks ago. This one’s going to be kind of unstructured, just talking about what I’ve been up to as far as anime goes. Also, with the new season coming up very soon, I’ll talk briefly about what I intend to watch.

The chief reason for all this is that I’ve been sick, and additionally have been extremely busy. For those that care, I’m nearing my final few weeks in my Honours degree, I’m swamped with assignments, and I’ve kind of lost motivation. Just want to end it.

Anyway, since I last updated, I’ve been watching a decent amount of stuff. It’s called procrastination, it’s quite enjoyable. Obviously, one of the big things of late was Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children. By now, everyone’s heard about it a dozen times, so I’m not going to talk about it again. I really enjoyed it, it was basically a gigantic nerdy fanservice title, filled with awesome hyper-kinetic fighting and generally an awesome thing to geek out to. That said, I played it again a couple of days ago and my mother watched it and enjoyed it a lot, so it’s got some level of interest even to non-FF fans. Still, I think Squenix made the right call by putting it straight to DVD. Essentially, this is exactly what The Spirits Within should have been. Also, the CG is a lot better, especially in the texturing and cloth simulation, which means that it suffers a lot less from the Uncanny Valley that plagued its predecessor.

I finished Fushigi Yuugi a while back. Great series, don’t know why I held off watching it so long. It certainly had a few painful moments, but overall once it actually started to get moving it was an excellent watch.

I must also take a moment to recommend Honey & Clover. This is an excellent series, very much different to the average anime which is pumped out nowdays. It has a similar muted, pastel palette to Marimite, and I’ve noticed that there seems to be a lot of crossover between fans of the two series. Not that Honey & Clover and Marimite share many similarities or anything. To be honest, I can’t even pick out whether Honey & Clover is intended for a male audience or a female one. Also, it deserves bonus marks for having a vocal tune inserted at the key moment in each episode, it’s a really nice touch. Hopefully they’ll put out an OST or something with all those pieces on it.

Da Capo Second Season… last time I updated I was complaining about Aishia being annoying, but it only got worse. Now they’ve brought back Nemu, who was one of the main issues I had with the first series. Bland, boring and incredibly irritating character, but her incestuous ‘brother’ seems to put on girl-blinders whenever she’s around. What is it about Japan and preferring family members to decent, normal girls?

Meanwhile, Shuffle is still holding out. Once you get past the fact that it’s not going to be some kind of brilliant, earth-shaking series, it’s actually an extremely enjoyable watch. I’m hoping they start getting some plot moving though, it’s starting to get a little stale and it would be a shame if they drove it into the ground.

Full Metal Panic: The Second Raid has only had a few episodes since I last updated, due to the loss of three weeks due to the tennis. It’s easily the best series currently running, and whoever it was that decided to hand the license to Kyoto Animation deserves a pat on the back. Gonzo, by trying to fuse the two different elements that make Full Metal Panic so interesting (the dramatic action side with the mecha and stuff and the high-school romantic comedy stuff) ended up producing a much weaker product. By separating the humor into Fumoffu and the drama into The Second Raid, they’ve ended up with two absolutely top-notch productions. Also, by making shorter series they can focus more on the plot and don’t have to produce filler. TSR will only be 13 episodes, but if the current trend continues then it will be 13 episodes of pure gold. And then they can make another fumoffu and then another new series after that. I hope.

I decided I might as well get going on catching up with Naruto, since it’s nearly finished with the filler stuff. I’ve seen to 148, and I must say that by taking a break I think I enjoyed the series a lot more than I would have had I continued straight into it. The first of the filler arcs was kind of pointless, but it had Sanae Kobayashi (<3) and it made Sakura’s decision to become Tsunade’s apprentice make a lot more sense, which I quite appreciated. The second of the filler arcs which I’ve only just finished with involved Mizuki, the arrogant wanker from episode 1. Overall nothing happened with it, but at least it wasn’t Inuyasha-style filler where some stupid fucking moth demon appears and fucks around with people until it gets killed. The third of the filler arcs has Hinata, so it wins.

Because of the whole procrastination thing I also decided to sit down and watch some of the stuff I’ve had sitting around for a long time. For some reason, I decided to finish up watching some of the dodgy 10-minute-episode stuff I have. First I finished Final Approach, which was actually surprisingly decent. Certainly nothing to write home about, but I certainly didn’t feel like I wasted my time either. I also watched Wind ~a breath of heart~ which was also quite good, but felt like there was massive chunks of plot missing at the end, and Hanihani ~operation sanctuary~ which was pretty mediocre. I also caught up with Futakoi Alternative, which AnY finally seem to have remembered about and started subbing again. I might be able to see the end by Christmas after all. :V Also, Mahoraba ended. This was a brilliant series, extremely underappreciated. Really worth picking up at some stage.

So that’s about it for stuff I’ve been watching since last update. In the next few weeks we’ll be seeing a few series end and new stuff take their places. There are a few that I have my eye on and will be looking forward to seeing.

First off, Rozen Maiden Traumend. Rozen Maiden was an absolutely brilliant series, extremely suprising since it pretty much came out of nowhere. Whether or not the upcoming sequel can hit the same buttons that its predecessor did remains to be seen though. Currently it’s looking more and more like there won’t be any more of Suigintou, which will be a real downer for me and for a lot of people since she was probably the best thing about the series. She stands out as being one of the few anime villains who really was evil. Plus there was that creepy giggle. Her replacement looks interesting, but we’ll have to wait and see. At the very least, there will be more Suisei Seki antics. Also, I was a little disappointed to see that the rumor that Yui Horie was going to be voicing Kanaria turned out to be false. Still, this will be one to watch.

Secondly, Mai-Otome (or as they seem to be referring to it now, My-ZHiME). My-HiME was a real surprise hit last year and earlier this year. Pretty much everyone had already written it off as being another generic fanservice series, and that’s certainly how it started out looking. However, a few episodes in we started to get hints that it might get darker, and it certainly did. The absolutely terrible ending with its complete lack of tension left a lot of people, myself included, with a bitter taste in their mouths. As such I suspect this one’s going to be met with quite a bit of hostility. However, I have faith that the writing team can probably pull something off with this too, and maybe this time they’ll stick to their guns and make sure the end is in keeping with the tone leading up to it. In reality there was nothing wrong with the way My-HiME ended, the flaws were in its execution. Anyway, given how good its predecessor was up until the end, it would be silly to write this off before it begins.

Blood+ doesn’t really interest me, but I’ll be watching it anyway, and for one good reason: the score. It’s not every day that an absolute legend like Hans Zimmer is involved with an anime. I’ve personally never seen Blood: The Last Vampire, and have no desire to. The animation on this one looks dreary. That said, Japan seems to be very good at doing vampire-related stuff - I highly enjoyed Vampire Hunter D, Vampire Princess Miyu and Tsukihime. I guess it will come down to how they execute it in the end. Still, it’s replacing Gundam Seed Destiny and anything would be better than that shitpile at the moment.

I was kind of interested in Cluster Edge, the other series Sunrise has in the works, until Nagi pointed an important fact out to me: the director’s previous credits include Gundam Wing. Additionally, all the characters are male. It’s quite logical to assume thinly-veiled homoerotic prettyboys running around shooting at each other will be the name of the game here. I’ll probably give it a look, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be worth much more than that.

Other than that, there are a number of questionable series which I’ll probably also give a look at at least. Black Cat looks okay, as does Lamune (though I suspect Shuffle will be all I need as far as that style goes). Jigoku Shoujo looks like it might be a darker one and looks quite artistic. Happy Seven looks terrible, but in a good way. Aria the Animation looks kind of crappy, but I’ll probably give it a look.