anime review – reposted

All reviews written when the blog is still at Windows Live Spaces. Usually shorter and inferior in quality. Not used anymore.

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This forehead featured prominently in this series.

This is my first review using Windows Live Writer beta 2. Now with spell-checking too, so should be less mistakes from now on.  

Story:-
A high-school girl travelled 1000 years to the future to become a child soldier fighting in a bloodless universal war. She then irresponsibly recruited 3 other high-school girls to fight alongside her in the completely needless war. Then a third party appeared (led by a carbon copy of the protagonist) and the warring factions unite to face the new threat. And that’s about it.

IMHO the story is ordinary and not that good anyway. Next, the series suffers from pacing problems, where the story flows too slow at the middle portion of the story then becomes too fast when nearing the end of the run. And there’s episode 22, which I simply called a ‘WTF! What happened?’ episode, which is the highlight of the series main problem; not being able to switch between plots seamlessly. The way the main villain revealed himself (or is it a her??) to the heroines leave me speechless on how badly it was executed.

Plot twists in this series also leaves me with bad taste in my mouth.

Quoted For Truth
Quoted For Truth!

Character Design:-
The character design in this series are pretty decent. Not earth-shattering like Enma Ai is, but not that bad. When it comes to spaceship design, they resembles those designs made in those 70-80s anime series. That could be good or bad, depending on your preferences.

Voice acting:-
You can see the best and the worst kind of voice acting here. The bad one is the the voice of the main heroine which did not really suit what she is doing. There are times when she piloted her machine in a mission where I think she could do with a better voice actress that are used to action scenes. At the other end of the spectrum, Megumi Hayashibara is simply awesome. In fact, I personally think this is HER BEST gig ever, even better than Slayers or Ranma 1/2 or many of her recent works. Others are mostly decent at best.

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The bumbling spacepilot Mido Madoka (Megumi Hayashibara). probably the only reason I watched this anime to the end.

Music:-
The OP theme is good, but not so for the ED theme and the OST.

Animation/Direction:-
The animation is good (although not helped by Arienai f**k-up in the encoding process). Unfortunately directing as a whole stinks, causing what I have mentioned in the story section above. Plus the action scenes could do with a vastly better choreographer, so that I don’t have to settle with that mess of hard-to-understand space battles, especially in team missions.

Conclusion:-
5 out of 10. Even with Megumi Hayashibara best gig I have heard, she still cannot save this series from sinking into oblivion.

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God did not listen to you. Sorry.


Jack The Ripper above wanted to deflect attention away from himself, but eventually failed, arrested and brought to trial. Unlucky unlike his original counterpart at London.

Nowadays after almost quitting flyff, I returned to watching more anime. Today I presented to you a short review of the first series of the detective genre reviewed by me, Tantei Gakuen Q. Really need to finish that FF12 game later after this, I am almost there already.

Story:-
Kyu, our main protagonist with Naruto-esque voice, enrolled in Dan Detective School (DDS) as a candidate to succeed Morihiko Dan, a legendary detective in Japan and the only one who can carry a pistol. What is so special about being the only detective who can carry a concealed pistol is beyond me. Anyway, Kyu alongside his classmates in the Q class, spend the rest of the series solving homicide mysteries as they compete between themselves to become Morihiko Dan’s successor.

The whole 45-episode series takes only roughly about one-third of the manga storyline, and as the result of that, this series ends with so many questions unanswered and without a real ending. Throw in a couple of original case mysteries, and that’s it for this anime. This series definitely needs a second season (or more) and the ending of the anime really has been set up to accommodate one.

The series start up very different compared to the manga, omitting some details while adding new ones as replacements before settling into the main storyline. Most of the time, these deviations from the manga are done very well, unlike many manga-based anime series such as School Rumble. This is one of the strongest positives for this series.

Storytelling of the original manga homicide cases are done very faithfully, and this is where the series really shines. I watched the anime, already knowing who’s the murderer is every time but that fact does not really stop me from watching the series. The animation of the static pages I have read reminded me how much I like this series. Complete in colour to boot! While original anime homicide cases are not done as well as the manga ones (the city bombing one must have been shoved there to counter critics that DDS students only do homicide cases, like CSI) they are nevertheless still watchable.

Character design:-
Not exactly inspiring, let’s just say it is forgettable. And the amount of characters having black hairs are minuscule, mostly reserved to secondary characters. Green, pink and purple rules the day.

Voice acting:-
Kyu’s voice acting is strongly similar to Naruto, in fact I suspect they have the same voice actress until I checked that this is not the case. If Naruto’s voice actress got sick or something, the producer knows to call on Megumi Ogata. After all, she has piloted EVA Unit 1. Anyway, the voice acting here is pretty good, and probably a little bit better than Jigoku Shoujo.

Music:-
My hope went up when listening to the first OP theme, but it swiftly goes down the drain after a listless OST and other themes.

Animation/Direction:-
Animation is one of the drawbacks of this series. It is easily observable that the animation is way below average, and failed most of the time in fast-paced scenes. There are also problems with lip-sync in this series. Direction otherwise, is quite good although not unlike the best ones like Jigoku Shoujo.

Conclusion:-
6 out of 10
. Bad animation, unfinished storyline and hopeless music hits this series really hard.


Poor little cutie a.k.a. murderer. If you did not meet Kyu you would have gotten away with it.


I’m better than Sakura, honest!

A third review in as many days, this is again a double review of the first 2 seasons of Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha series. This will be done the way Jigoku Shoujo review was done, albeit with less pictures. The third season, as on writing, are still ongoing and I will watch it after they are fully subbed.

Story:-
From the title, it should be obvious to anyone that this series are similar to those of Sailormoon or Cardcaptor Sakura; with a magic-wielding girl (complete with the customary magical staff of course) saving the world from the villain who wants to destroy it. All this while dropping her mobile phone like a klutz. The only difference between the 2 seasons is who the villains are. You know, just like Spiderman movies. Only that, I think Nanoha is better than Spiderman anytime.

Still, I do think this series has better stories than Cardcaptor Sakura or Tsubasa Chronicles, for reasons that will be stated below.

First, unlike the 2 titles above and some other series in the same genre, the story of both season are relatively straightforward with no bullsh*t and unnecessary plot-twists. Not to say that this series does not have any plot-twists, but they are put there out of necessity, not because the story writers can.

Second, unusual for a magical girl series, they really has cut down those fan-service costume-changing scenes, using them only when necessary and not every time Nanoha changes to her battle attire. I really like this a lot, because it did not detract from the storyline.

Third, there are none of the romance crap that made me hate Cardcaptor Sakura, Tsubasa Chronicles and others. Sure there are romantic elements here, but here they are relegated to the sidelines and do not really factored into the main storyline. Unlike certain anime series I have already named.

Fourth, because of their relatively short runs of 13 episodes each season, we do not have to deal with bullsh*t filler episodes that plagues many other titles in the same genre that has longer runs. Plus, even with their short runs, the pacing of the storyline in this series is simply perfect, not too fast or too slow.

This series is a fresh breath of air unlike the complex monstrosity that is Cardcaptor Sakura and its clones. Although it does not have exactly a compelling storyline the way last 5 episodes of Jigoku Shoujo Futakomori have, this series is still highly enjoyable.

Character Design:-
Not much different compared to Cardcaptor Sakura really. Definitely not exactly original.

Voice acting:-
With Yukari Tamura as the lead voice actress, there’s nothing that can go wrong really here. Not the greatest voice acting lineup but still can be considered as above average.

Music:-
It has good OP theme and OST, though the ED theme is forgettable.

Animation/Direction:-
The animation is really good, even at high-paced scenes. The special effects for all those magic are simple awesome. The directing though are not exactly stellar.

Conclusion:-
7 out of 10. That’s about it.


Nanoha is just to be abused by a mysterious person…..