Been watching quite a bit of anime recently. I’ve already mentioned Banner of the Stars III, so I won’t talk about that again other than to say it is now available subbed. Rumor has it that ANBU managed to convince their old translator Crustol out of retirement to do it too, haven’t seen it yet so I can’t vouch for that information.
Previously I’d been glowing about Da Capo Second Season. It certainly started extremely well. Unfortunately, the recent episodes had far too much Aishia and not enough Kotori, and kept repeating the same plot - Aishia tries to convince Jun’ichi to teach her magic by performing annoying hijinks. One episode of this crap was enough, but they decided to do it three times which has really hurt the final product.
Conversely, I’ve found that SHUFFLE has really grown on me. I was pretty ambivalent at first, I actually gave up halfway through episode 3 thinking it was garbage. Gave it another go, and it’s really not that bad. I’ve certainly seen worse. I hear that episode six (released this morning by Froth-bite) has a double helping of Primula, which is a very good thing. I still have some reservations about the show though - for one, some of the voices are extremely irritating, especially Kaede. My other main issue is with the similarity in the names - we have a Rin-sama and a Rin-chan and a Rim-chan. Extremely confusing.
I finished all of Hajime no Ippo. By ‘finished’ I mean ‘watched in awe as Ippo struck the final blow’. Fucking awesome series, A++++++ would watch again. If you’re looking for an action-based Shounen series, then this would definately be one of the first you should check out.
Full Metal Panic: The Second Raid continues to be impressive. I’m finding I’m enjoying it a lot more than the first series - giving the license to Kyoto Animation seems to have been a great thing. I’m not sure how close they’re following the books (can’t be too close, apparently in the book the Chinese assassin twins were guys) but I really don’t care. If they continue to put out episodes at this level of quality then it’ll be one of the best shows of the year.
Kamichu episode 4 was released a couple of days ago by the ADTRW guys, who have now teamed up with iichan. This episode was pretty wierd though, involving a martian that looked like a gigantic pink gelatinous penis. Maybe I’m just imagining things though. Either way, it was incredibly cute as usual, and the fact that it’s delivered in 720p HDTV without being recompressed (I <3 MKV) is a major bonus.
I was convinced by the #marimite crew to check out Eureka 7. Only gotten three episodes so far (I STAB AT THEE, TELSTRA) but I’m really liking what I see. BONES stuff seems to alternate between being weak and being excellent every other series, and this appears to be one of the higher points. It remains to be seen whether it hits the same level of quality as Fullmetal Alchemist - it’s quite possible, but I doubt it. Will definately be watching more of this.
Since I’d basically run out of new anime last night, I decided I should dig through my collection of older stuff that I’d archived and not watched. Feeling the desire for some Fantasy, I picked out the first thirteen episodes of Fushigi Yuugi. Ages back, I’d been given the whole series and had only watched episodes 1-2. I recall that I wasn’t that impressed at the time, probably because I was expecting something a bit darker and more mature. My gateway shoujo, way back, was Ayashi no Ceres, which was originally penned by the same author, Yuu Watase. I still have very fond memories of AnC (incidentally, it also started me down the path of Ayako Doctrine). Anyway, since I was really wanting something a bit longer to watch to replace the void that Hajime no Ippo (and Inuyasha before that) had left, I thought ‘why not’ and sat down, intending to watch another one to two episodes. Next thing I knew, it was 3 am and I was on episode ten. I think I’m addicted. Seriously, it’s not that great, but it sure beats a lot of the tripe being produced in the last year or so.