anime review – reposted

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

Review: Karin (かりん)

Posted by ranpha on 15th May 2006

Posted in: anime review - reposted. Tagged: Karin (かりん). Leave a Comment

Surprisingly cheerful for a horror vampire series.

A departure from the previous entries, now I will review a horror vampire anime with a very misleading title called Karin.

Basically, this anime is about Maaka Karin, a high school-going super strong vampire than is not afraid of sunlight (take that Alucard). Not only that, she doesn’t have any need to suck blood, and she bite people just to give FREE blood transfusions. If she can’t find a victim, she will conveniently spill excess blood all around her while glaring at other people to clean up her mess. Even her family of normal vampires with normal strength and afraid of sunlight are truly afraid of her.

This continues until she meets a human who volunteered that Karin should bite him so that she will stop spilling blood all around ever again……

=======

Story:-
The above synopsis should make everything clear, with the majority of 24 episodes was filled with the main character Karin antagonizing whether she should just bite that pitiful volunteer human instead of making him ‘bento’, or working with him at the same restaurant while avoiding a vampire hunter that have killed 10000 vampires in their class.

Her indecisiveness was repeated in many episodes, with one causing her to bite that human’s mother instead, and also the vampire hunter himself in another episode but never the volunteer human himself. This caused Karin’s older brother and younger sister to be stressed out, and they have to go out of their home to find stressed/jealous women at the city, doing what vampires should do.

Basically, you just went along the episodes to find out whether she will bite the volunteer human, and the result will be revealed at the last episode after an ‘excellent’ build-up in the previous episodes. If you are an extreme horror anime fans like me, you will certainly find this anime refreshing, with the strongest vampire in the history of Japanese anime.

As I don’t read the manga which is the base of this anime, I can’t comment whether it has fillers or not.

Character design:-

Character design has mixed results. The main protagonist Maaka Karin was beautifully designed; with pretty face, big breasts, nice haircut, big breasts, voluptuous body, big breasts, nice legs and big breasts. But the character design of that pitiful volunteer human can do with slightly more effort. I think the designers want to portray that human as average, but I think you can make ugly humans that are better looking than that volunteer human.

Considering that others has decent character designs, I wonder what holds the character designer back. Speaking about that, the strongest ever vampire in anime history is a little bit on the short side too.

Voice acting:-
Just like Yuyu Hakusho, nothing really to shout about. Except maybe for that vampire hunter (Kouki Miyata) and the volunteer human (Katsuyuki Konishi).

Music:-
The OP theme titled scarlet is excellent. I even have it on my iPod. And to get into my iPod, a certain degree of excellence has to be reached. Meanwhile, the ED theme and OST are forgettable.

Animation/direction:-
Well, great use of bright colors despite this being a horror anime. Very refreshing indeed. Can do with more bouncing breasts of Maaka’s though. Directing is great, with some great focus on her bouncing breasts in action. Such things always scored high points with me.

Conclusion:-
Will be 10 out of 10 if not for that volunteer human character design and also below average OST and ED theme. Thus I will award 9 out of 10 to this series.

Review: Yu Yu Hakusho (幽★遊★白書)

Posted by ranpha on 9th May 2006

Posted in: anime review - reposted. Tagged: Yu Yu Hakusho (幽★遊★白書). Leave a Comment

A review after an arduous period of watching 112 episodes of Yu Yu Hakusho (YYH).

The story of Yu Yu Hakusho is about Urameshi Yusuke who died, goes to heaven, then return to Earth, become a divine detective, enter plenty of tournaments, become a demon and that’s it.

====

Story:
Your standard shonen story, with a hero that becomes progressively stronger as the story progressed, plus with sidekicks that just a little bit weaker than him at all times. Throw in some love story with a childhood friend, and there you got YYH.

Watched this one because Hunter X Hunter is a great manga and anime, and personally I think this one is, really, uhmmmm, normal. Probably I watched this 1992 anime too late hahahaha.

Almost no fillers compared to the manga, and that’s a plus. Just like the Hunter X Hunter anime (are you listening Naruto??), minimum fillers really make an anime great.

The weakness in this story is there a too many tournaments. Yoshihiro Togashi must really likes tournaments because HxH also has quite a number of them. Stop finding more ideas for more tournaments (whether it was fighting tournaments or dodgeball tournaments) and finish the ant arc already!

Well, the story is just your common shounen story, so should be appealing to those standard anime lovers.

And yeah, minimal fillers is a big plus, and always is in the face of the huge episode count.

Character design:-
Nothing really you can complain about. Pretty good at 1992 era if you ask me.

Voice acting:-
Not exactly outstanding. They are not bad but not to be remembered too 20 years down the road.

Music:-
I never heard the OP/ED themes in full. How about that as clue to my opinion of the music in the anime? This also applies to the soundtrack.

Animation/direction:-
I think some scenes are reused, but nothing really spoils the experience. Direction is great, a plus point in the anime.

Conclusion:-
7 out of 10. 10 marks if HunterXHunter new chapters suddenly appears next week (as of 9th of May 2006).

Review: BECK – Mongolian Chop Squad

Posted by ranpha on 11th April 2006

Posted in: anime review - reposted. Tagged: BECK - Mongolian Chop Squad. Leave a Comment

Second post of the day is the review of the anime BECK – Mongolian Chop Squad.
The story is about a middle-schooler Tanaka “Koyuki” Yukio who joins a live band group named the BECK founded by the genius guitarist Minami Ryuusuke. Basically the story revolves from the birth of BECK towards their dreams to become professional.
====
Story:-
A slice-of-life anime, with zero magic and stuff. Some fighting is in order though. This anime doesn’t have the most captivating story, but it still pretty good at moving people emotions. The anime is suitable for all people, despite heavy music connections. This is mainly because the anime is not really obsessed at tracking Koyuki’s improvements in playing electric guitars and singing ballad rock, but also his love life, his swimming practices and others.
Story is well-paced, and nothing in the series feels like a filler episode. The ending could have some more airtime though, cause it seems that the last 2-3 episodes has been packed with too much ending events. I have not read the manga so cannot comment on the difference.
Generally, the story is good unless you despise heavy metal music and only like some sugar-coated standard anime themes. Or maybe you don’t like English expletives? There are plenty of them here, I wonder what time the anime is shown in Japan.

Character design:-
No problem really with character design. Very well done for humans of both sexes, and dogs, and parrots……

Voice acting:-
Japanese voices are quite good, especially the voices of Chiba (Shuntaro Ohata) and Ryuusuke (Yuuma Ueno). The fact that Koyuki has 2 voices probably dragged it to oblivion, mainly because the difference between both is very apparent. Others are not really outstanding to mention here.
BTW, English voices sucks. Pitiful attempts at screaming F**K, MOTHERF**KER and other American English expletives just reminded me of the student of Azrael here. The less said about the English dialogues, the better.

Animation/direction:-
While there are no apparent problem with the quality of directing,
some quality issues when it comes to little animation such as characters walking forward
at long range. Generally, nothing really to complain about.

Conclusion:-
I’ll get straight to the rating and gives it 7 out of 10. There you go.