The lecherous main male protagonist, on top of one of his sexual conquests.
This review of Kaze no Stigma will be the last for quite some time, as the usual end-of-year activities eats up my free time. Kaze no Stigma is a shounen 2007 anime, which will then compete with the newly crowned ‘Anime of the Year 2007’ winner Bokurano. After this anime, I planned to watch either Ookiku Furikabutte, Paradise Kiss or Clannad After Story. The order is not determined yet, you simply has to wait until their time comes.
The main male protagonist, yet with another woman in his arms, making fun of the luckless and miserable main female protagonist (the one at the left).
Story:-
Our main male protagonist loses a duel against the main female protagonist for a family heirloom called the Enraiha, causing his father to disown him. He then went overseas, and somewhat managed to obtain an ultimate power during his journey. He then returns to Japan after 4 years in wilderness and easily exacts revenge upon his father that he hated. After that, the anime went downhill and you can safely drop this anime from your watch list.
Sheesh, this anime started so well (and raised my hopes of seeing a decent shounen title) but the story craps itself out after only four or five episodes . A minor savior of this anime is the mildly interesting main protagonist who are standing head and shoulders above the others. The main female protagonist is ordinary, the side characters are uninspiring and the antagonists are the usual genre-standard low dogmatic characters. But in the end, the main male protagonist was tarnished by one of the most obvious anime endings I have seen for quite some time, it was even worse than the one in Shangri-La when it comes to predictability. BTW, the ending is structured to have a second season that probably will not come.
The story arcs after the first one are bland and sometimes ridiculous, sandwiching the occasional filler episodes that served their purposes of not advancing the story or doing character developments. But regardless of what I think about the story itself, the fillers and the lame ending, I can’t deny that this anime does have good presentation; this anime has a decent plot flow and development path plus with excellent pacing that was only marred by the filler episodes. The same can be said about the lame ending too, which has plenty of airtime to develop that ridiculous plot-twist non-event. Thinking about that, the thorough preparation for the ending only makes the flaws of the ending stands out even more.
Character developments is yet another negative aspect of this anime. Despite being the most interesting character in this anime, the main protagonist has an almost static character development strategy. This means that the main protagonist in the first episode is almost the same as the one in the final episode. The storywriter depends too much on past events (shown to you courtesy of admittedly very-well presented flashbacks) to expose the essence of his character. As for the main female protagonist, the way (or the lack of any) she falls in love with the main male protagonist is just as bizarre like what happened with the social club president character in Princess Lover! Therefore I think there are no outstanding character(s) in this anime.
One of the cheesy lines he used to pick up one-night-stand victims.
Character Design:-
The character designs in this anime are just your usual standardized designs you can see in any given average shounen title (big eyes, impossible body shapes and stuff like that). Black hairs are rare, in some very unimportant characters. If they exist at all.
Voice Acting:-
Here, the voice acting is only average, with the main male protagonist being the best in this anime. The other voice actors/actresses are just filling their roles with no visible efforts to make their characters comes to life.
Music:-
Only the second ED theme (the one with daylight animation montages) in this anime is decent. The OST, the other two ED themes and the OP theme did not meet my standard.
When in battle, the main male protagonist has no qualms whatsoever at breaking any Geneva Convention rules he can; in this case he is using a pixie (instead of human) shield to cover his ass.
Animation/Direction:-
The animation in this anime is good, even in fast-paced scenes. The choreography in action scenes is just average though. The directing in this anime is great despite the average story, mostly because of the presentation (I only realized that he is also the director of the best ever anime I have watched in the course of writing this review). Definitely a positive point of this anime.
Conclusion:-
6 out of 10. Bokurano makes short work out of this distinctly average anime. Clannad After Story, Paradise Kiss or Ookiku Furikabutte; which one of them will come next? Find out about that in the not-so-near future.
This anime may be a couple of years older than Koukaku no Regios, but spoken English in this anime is still better by a distance.
