January 15, 2006 – 9:01 pm
A new year, a new anime season. Having nothing better to do while waiting for my GitS SAC 2nd GIG (doncha love abbreviations?) DVDs to arrive from Amazon, I decided to abuse^H^H^H^H^H test my office’s bandwidth with some questionable – but having minute potential to be mildly entertaining in a mindless sort of way – new series.
Of the bunch, this is what I got:-
Fate/stay night
This was very hyped, and although I didn’t have much expectation at first, eps 1&2 lead me to believe this could be THE show for me to watch over the next 4 months.
- High production values (even if I find the characters generic looking, they are nicely generic, and the art and animation is top-rank TV)
- Very attractive female characters (well, to be honest only Rin for me, as Saber looks a bit too cute for my tastes, but she’s got plate mail and a big sword and is really powerful, so 3 out of 4 ain’t bad)
- A male lead that isn’t annoying (whom I am in fact cheering on… the guy is the best anime male protaganist for this sort of series as far as I can remember)
- Nice detail on the characterizations, such as Rin’s reactions to Archer, and Archer’s corresponding manipulations of her ego
- Music by Kawai Kenji who sounds like he’s trying to pull a Kajiura Yuki, heh.
Not hot on the story, or the weird interspersed SD humour, but the series is looking very good. Now, if only Rin would start hitting on Saber!!! :D~~~~~
Kagihime Monogatari Eikyu Alice Rondo
*phew* what a mouthful. Grabbed it because I was bored and desperate and this was the only anime out at the time that looked like it might fall in my line (didn’t want to watch no weeper about some dude with hepatitis falling in love with some girl with a terminal disease, and babes on battleships, puhlease, that’s so 80′s…). Thought maybe since it was a Kaishaku anime it’d be whacked but have some redeeming factor for us ancient otaku. Hmm… now I can say (to quote a friend) that whatever made Kannaduki great, it wasn’t Kaishaku. Toss, don’t touch this with a 10 foot pole. Too bad, since the animation quality is nice and the voice acting, while annoying as hell, is actually good. Someone grab Miki and stuff him back into Utena. Or replace him with Kozue and we can talk.
Lemon Angel Project
Ugh, I remember some hentai anime from the 80′s called this… or something similar. That’s not why I bt’ed this. Okay, I have to admit the word “yuri” somewhere in the middle of the bt listing page caught my eye. But honestly, I checked it out for the premise of an idol group and j-pop songs, and the character designs looked nice, okay? Unfortunately, the music was shit, the voice acting was really subpar (I liked the voice, and I thought the flatness was refreshing, until I realized it was a 14-year old who really didn’t know how to inject a modicum of variation into script-reading), and the execution is sadly sadly mediocre. What a waste, if Avex had hit this with any level of enthusiasm and inspiration, instead of tossing a budget and what was obviously some clueless exec’s idea of cashing in on the moe/idol boom, it might have been something I would follow. Hmm, then again I didn’t get past ep 2 of Fancy Lala, and that was much better overall. Ah well.
Kashimashi ~Girl Meets Girl~
You think with a title like that, and the setup of a 3 girl (or to be more exact, 2 girls and 1 guy-turned-girl) I’d be jumping over this right? Wrong. I knew about this from before, and the manga just never caught my imagination even after flipping through a chapter. I think it’s the overly cute chara designs. Nice and pretty, but not really my thing. Or perhaps it’s that love triangles don’t sound terribly appealing when you don’t like how any of the characters look. Gee I sound so shallow right. So to rectify, and to find out why every anime blogger worth his mpeg decoders was hyping this, or really just to hear exactly what it was that was making every english speaker howl in laughter, I grab ep 1.
- On the plus side, it’s really pretty looking, it’s got a 3 girl triangle (@_@), the VAing is decent (ahem), and Hazumu looks cute as a girl, and goddamn that was the funniest thing I’ve heard in years, since, “You, the master of unlocking…”
- On the minus side, everyone looks cute enough to rot my teeth, it’s really love-triangly, and… I dunno, too nice and fluffy and feelly and … ugh … teeth … rotting…
So I may watch more, I may not.
More (dubious?) stuff to look forward to, coming soon:
Ergo Proxy which just looks cool dudes
Strawberry Panic! with brilliant slapstick Yuri Humour by … not, wait, that’s the Strawberry Shake manga, which changed it’s name to Strawberry Panic!, which is not this anime! No! This is the team that brought out such travesties as Futakoi (a bunch of moe cute twins pining after some loser sap), and Futakoi Alternative, the brilliant sequel that spawned that term, “twincest” *shudders*.
For a good roundup, read anime on my mind’s post. Then again, with this title splash, I may have to bt one ep, just to, um, validate my disdain, yeah…
No, honestly, that last anime was there because I had really thought it was said manga adaptation, and it was only halfway through writing my post and hunting for a synopsis that I realized my mistake.
Hey is it just me or has this season turned into some massive moe fest? I swear 90% of the shows feature an almost female cast in various incarnations of cuteness. I need my GitS DVDs quick, or I may succumb to the hawt yuri twincest of Full Metal Panic: The Second Raid. Yeah, Kurogane is hilarious, and he’s a fellow Malaysian! If I am forced to go back home, at least I have the comfort of knowing there’s one more hawt yuri fan in the vicinity.
Okay dudes, enough fun. Love Sundays, time to watch Mai-Otome 14.
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