Review: Black Jack 21 (ブラック・ジャック 21)

Posted by ranpha on 30th August 2010
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The main protagonist makes his (presumably) final return to this blog.

The awesomeness of the slice-of-life anime Black Jack TV reviewed in this blog last month prompted me to watch its sequel right after the the ‘Anime of the Year 2010’ audition was over. Black Jack 21 is a 2006 anime title, therefore it will have a chance to dethrone the slice-of-life anime Chocotto Sister, the reigning ‘Anime of the Year 2006’ title holder. This anime does have a very big shoe to fill though, therefore will the plot that this new season will have helps this anime scale the heady heights that its predecessor has reached before? Read on to find out.


And he went for the highest fee he has charged in the whole first season, right in the first episode in the second season.

Story:-
Our main title protagonist BJ (this abbreviation that is used in the second season unnerved me somewhat – for obvious reasons) was reunited with his estranged father under professional circumstances. And within a single episode, some vague questions that have always bugged me during the course of the first season were readily answered straight to the point. You know, questions like what the hell happened to BJ’s mother after the explosion in the first episode of the first season. After extorting some good amount of money out from his father for a routine plastic surgery (he does this too a couple of times in the first season – the plastic surgery I mean) he went home just to find himself in yet another explosion that destroyed his house and nearly killed him. With that explosion, this anime has truly switched genres from slice-of-life to shounen, as the main protagonist has to run away from a mysterious organization that wants him dead and buried, Amazing Race-style.


This explosion completes this anime’s switch from slice-of-life to shounen genre.

When I first learned that the second season will have a prevailing plot, I thought the story would be seinen (like Wolf and Spice or Kaiji etc.), based on what I have seen in the first season. Instead, whoever wrote the main plot for the second season has decided instead to wrote a kiddy storyline that targets the elementary schoolers, not unlike what you can see in Onmyou Taisenki and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. And this is where my first complaint comes in. Unlike what the writers in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann has done, the writers for the second season doesn’t bother to remove any of the clichés associated with such kinds of storyline though. This makes this anime extremely predictable except for one occasion (which will be explained later) and gratingly very cheesy too.

Now armed with a prevailing plot, you cannot skip any of the episodes anymore and expect to still understand what is happening in this anime. Yet this anime still inherits one of the few weaknesses that the first season has, which is uneven story development. There are many occasions where the events and/or scenes seems to happen unnaturally, as if it being forced upon the viewers. This weakness was compounded by the fast pacing, despite this anime not being episodic anymore, and also undermined BJ’s strong point seen in the first season: the awesome surgeon skills he has. You know, mad skills like that out-of-the-world, so ridiculous it must be fictional, anesthetic-free open heart surgery he performed in one of the episodes. Is that even possible? The awaken patient doesn’t even groan!


This anesthetic-free self-surgery that he does upon himself pales in comparison to the anesthetic-free open heart surgery mentioned above.

Maybe if the director can slow the pacing a bit, he can extend this anime up to 21 episodes, which will fit the title theme perfectly instead of only 17 episodes. I think the uneven flow of the storyline and the fast pacing can be blamed by the need to cram at least one full manga arc inside only one episode maximum, instead of letting the arc flows into the next episode. And this will become worse as the anime nears its end, where you can see 2 manga arcs (presumably modified) being rolled into one anime episode. In those episodes, presentation of this anime really suffered a lot.

By the end of this anime, I definitely have thought that the prevailing plot that the second season has did not exist in the manga version. But I do not read the manga therefore I do not know for sure.

As expected, the very conservative 4-episode 2-phase ending arc is naturally predictable, cliché-laden and has a over-the-top plot (HOLY SHIT! NUKES!!). But one very good exception in the first phase of the ending arc is the hidden daughter-turned-assassin plot twist, which I really didn’t see coming. What makes this plot twist an excellent one is that the writers has already dropped hints about it in the previous episodes, but I didn’t even know what is going to hit me later. This is almost comparable to the shocking episode 44 in the first season when it comes to impact, and would have been just as good if the fast pacing and horrendous flow of the story doesn’t dilute the impact by the time the first phase ends.

Character developments is one aspect where the second season has done tremendously very well compared to the first season. The prevailing plot allows you to know more about BJ’s background, and the plot also allows his character to develop according to conventional shounen genre development strategies. His pseudo-loli assistant is more subdued compared to what she is in the first season, maybe because her character has already matured due to what happened to her in the first season. Therefore BJ is definitely the best character in this anime.

Will there be a third season? If there is one, the anime should just returned to its roots shown in the first season where all we can see is BJ’s extreme greediness combined with awesome people-cutting skills.



You won't see him doing these Indiana Jones stunts in the first season.

Character Design:-
My comments for the same section in the first season review still applies.

Voice Acting:-
My comments for the same section in the first season review still applies.

Music:-
The OST is still has the same average quality seen in the first season. The first ED theme uses the 3rd ED theme from the first season, and frankly speaking, this is the only theme that is any good. The OP theme and the 2nd ED theme wasn’t really good.


The main protagonist tried to portray his nemesis using an apt description that, ironically, also applies to himself.

Animation/Direction:-
Do you know the horrendous animation technique I have always disparaged in this blog before? Unlike the first season, this anime employed the same technique too, but unlike the other anime titles that does so, this anime uses the said technique correctly. Yes, you heard that right, this anime uses that blurry animation techniques extensively only in very slow motion scenes, which can be flashbacks, or during surgeries etc. That animation technique really doesn’t have a place in fast-paced scenes or even normal ones.

Apart from that, the animation quality in this anime is still average just like the first season. There are more fast-paced scenes in this action shounen title, and the quality is also passable. Choreography is just ordinary though. The directing has regressed if the presentation of this anime (fast pacing and rough storyline flow) is taken into account.


By the end of this anime, his fee has now risen to the equivalent of a GDP of a small country, therefore…

Conclusion:-
8 out of 10. This anime failed to match the awesomeness of its predecessor, and Chocotto Sister survives the challenge on its throne. So what random anime title I will review next?



…all greedy people will meet their deserved end.

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Review: B gata H kei (B型H系)

Posted by ranpha on 21st August 2010
Posted in: anime review. Tagged: . 1 comment


The best character in this anime: the main female protagonist.

The waiting for the inaugural ‘Anime of the Year 2010’ title winner ends today with my review of B gata H kei, the 10th title in the audition. Frankly speaking, it doesn’t really meet my lofty expectations that made me put this anime as the finale in the audition in the first place. Anyway, this anime is not that bad, but its eventual scoring means that the first winner of  the ‘Anime of the Year 2010’ title will not have a perfect 10 out of 10 score. Working!! and Durarara!! are the two front-runners with similar 9 out of 10 scores, and one of them will take the title at the end of this post.

Which one of them? Read on!


Quoted For Truth!

Story:-
The beautiful main female protagonist, with the awesome name of ‘Yamada’, starts her high school life aiming to complete the epic mission of sleeping with 100 different guys. As we all know, all long and difficult journeys began with one simple step forward as she made the unassuming main male protagonist her first conquest, but oh boy did she has a lot of obstacles doing just that!

The main storyline isn’t exactly original, almost below average in quality and utterly predictable; the plot is a cross between a certain arc in the josei manga Girlfriend and a hentai OVA I have watched a long time ago which title I cannot recall at the moment. Nevertheless, despite the main female protagonist’s virtuous ambitions, this anime is just a romantic comedy at its very core, just like ANN’s tags told you. The two things that make up for this anime’s weak storyline are the character strength of the main female protagonist (this fact is important, and will be explained below) and to a lesser extent, the humor.

The main female protagonist is one of the better tsundere characters out there, at least she is not obnoxious enough to make me wanting to kill her unlike her counterparts in Hayate no Gotoku and Zero no Tsukaima series. Ironically, despite the main female protagonist’s noble endeavors, she comes across more as a funny character than a perverted one. Combined with fact that she is a tsundere that is also bloody single-minded at doing everything, these facts makes her a very powerful and interesting character that makes me wanting to see more and more of her as the series went on. I’ll repeat it again, the main female protagonist is a very powerful and interesting character (and beautiful too) that more than makes up for the blandness of the main storyline.

And this anime will need all the help it can get from her because she was paired with a very weak main male protagonist. This is a reverse of what happened in Hayate no Gotoku, where the relatively strong main title male protagonist (this anime’s main female protagonist is still better though) was paired with a weak and de-evolving tsundere main female protagonist. The similarity between the main male protagonist of this anime and the Hayate no Gotoku tsundere borders on the eerie, and made even starker with the fact that the former has 12 episodes to destroy himself while the latter can take it slow with 50 episodes or so. His indecisiveness grates me, but what kills him is that as the series goes on, his lack of modesty was eventually exposed. In fact, at the end of this anime, he is probably more perverted than the main female protagonist herself. Perverted, yet indecisive. Now that’s a suicidal combination, if you ask me.


The worst character in this anime: the main male protagonist.

This anime could do with a main male protagonist like Moroboshi ‘Darling’ Ataru, whose perverted tendencies is actually one of his big assets. He would also made short work out of the main female protagonist though, turning this anime from a TV series into an OVA or something. And that would be a bad thing.

The humor is another aspect of this anime that helps mitigate the weakness in the main storyline, but it doesn’t have the same standalone mechanism unlike the humors in other anime titles, such as Working!! or Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu. In this anime, the humor is bound to the hips of the main storyline (with little effects) and also of the main female protagonist’s instead of being allowed to stand out by itself without any context whatsoever. The quality of the humor in this anime is not that spectacular (inferior even to what you can see in the aforementioned Working!! and Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu) but the single biggest contribution it has done for this anime is to help define and shape the main female protagonist into a funny tsundere character, strengthening her character even more. This anime could have benefited more from a properly executed comedy gigs, as seen in the two titles mentioned above, but I settle for it being used for character reinforcements.

Returning to the story, this anime has an average start for the first half (which takes up one whole school year) because the story focused only on the two main protagonists most of the time. Things looks more promising in the second half of this anime as it seems that the writers has decided to inject additional characters into the storyline, mostly as the rivals for the main female protagonist. But in the end, whoever wrote the story decides that making the main female protagonist facing intense rivalries is not a good thing, and the anime reverts back to what you can see in the anime’s first half. This then lead up to the utterly boring and predictable ending, which may or may not lead to a second season (I think it will be the latter). The flow of the storyline in this anime is just average, and the pacing being haphazard, mainly because the anime straddles the calendar year very indiscriminately.

Character development in this anime is mixed bag, with the main female protagonist being the best character of them all, by a million miles. And as mentioned above, the main male protagonist is the worse of the bunch. The two rivals of the main female protagonist would have benefited greatly if only they can have more airtime and more stabs at the storyline. And for the others such as the main female protagonist’s best friend, they have done their job impeccably as the side characters that they are.


The main female protagonist in 'seek and destroy' mode.

Character Design:-
This anime’s character designs are good overall, especially for the main male protagonist (probably only his positive attribute). The design for the main female protagonist could have been better, because her best friend and a couple of her classmates looks more beautiful than her. This makes her status as the school idol looks questionable. Black hairs are rare for recurring characters, except for the main male protagonist (see what I mean?) while other colors are extremely popular, like auburn.


The main female protagonist was helped by the fact that one of her rivals has some mental retardation problems.

Voice Acting:-
Voice acting in this anime is patchy in general, but as expected, the main female protagonist has done really well in this department. But here I want to draw your attention to the main female protagonist’s maroon-haired rival, whose voice acting gig is on another level entirely. Her creepy laugh is on the same level as Moroboshi ‘Darling’ Ataru is, plus the voice actress is really skillful at depicting the multiple personalities that her character has. A positive aspect for this anime.


Meanwhile, her other rival for a place inside the main male protagonist's pants is more formidable. That's maybe why the writer doesn't give her more airtime, else she would have kicked the main female protagonist’s ass.

Music:-
The OST of this anime is good, but not so for the OP/ED themes.

Animation/Direction:-
Animation quality in this anime is decent even in fast-paced scenes. Choreography in this non-action anime is non-existent. The director failed mostly on controlling the haphazard pacing of this anime and also at keeping the flow of the storyline smooth. If you do not know better, you would have thought that this anime is an episodic title, where any given episode is independent from each other.


The main male protagonist's older sister is a sad panda after seeing her brother de-evolved through the course of the series.

Conclusion:-
6 out of 10. Not as good as the two front-runners in the audition at the end.

With this, the two front-runners for the inaugural winner of this blog’s ‘Anime of the Year 2010’ are Durarara!! and Working!!, both scoring 9 out of 10 scores. Things would have been easier for me if one of the titles in the audition managed to score a perfect score, but alas, that wasn’t meant to happen. Without further ado, by the skin of its teeth, I chose Working!! as the first winner of the ‘Anime of the Year 2010’ title, mainly because its ending is just slightly better than Durarara!!’s.

At 9 out of 10, Working!! position is not very tenable though, but then again I have not seen any potential challengers for it yet. The 2010 anime titles that is currently in my queue are the second season of K-On!, Kaichou wa Maid-sama, Katanagatari and High School of the Dead. From those 4 titles, Katanagatari is probably the only one that can challenge Working!! for the title. I also has high hopes for Bakuman and The World God Only Knows in the future. In fact, the manga version of the latter is one of the two manga titles I followed religiously (the other one being Umi no Misaki – won’t be animated soon I think). If The World God Only Knows can follow the source material the way Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood does, it has a very good chance at winning the title.


Usually I don't collect DVD/Blu-ray version of any given anime I have watched, especially if I already have a HDTV version, but I will make an exception for this title.

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Review: Durarara!! (デュラララ!!)

Posted by ranpha on 17th August 2010
Posted in: anime review. Tagged: . Leave a Comment


The main male protagonist.

The penultimate review for the ongoing ‘Anime of the Year 2010’ audition will be made specifically for Durarara!! ahead of B gata H kei. I’m saving the latter for the finale of the audition because I have heard ‘good’ things about it. It is not to say that the former isn’t good; in fact it is and is able to go toe-to-toe with the current front-runner for the ‘Anime of the Year 2010’ award, Working!!


This beautiful long-haired brunette here, who is immortal and ride a bad-ass motorcycle that is every environmentalists' wet dream, is our silent main female protagonist. Did I say she is beautiful? You can gawk at her beauty with the picture above.

Story:-
A country bumpkin who has a thing for big breasts, enrolls in a private high-school in Ikebukuro, Tokyo after being invited there by his old friend. Never being out from his rural village before, his wish for a life out of the ordinary was swiftly fulfilled as he encounters the upright, law-abiding and outstanding Ikebukuro icons; such as a Ghost Rider-like female grim reaper who is looking for her missing head, a Sadako-like sword-toting freak who slashed people randomly, a debt collector who hurled vending machines at other people, an informant who likes to stomp on mobile phones and more. Thinking about it, this anime is no different than Arakawa Under The Bridge after all.

This anime spends the first 8 or 9 episodes or so planting the multiple story arcs that will converge themselves later, and also do character introductions and developments. Prominent in this phase is the Kara no Kyoukai-style time-shuffling story presentation technique, usually applies in character-specific episodes like the ones for the aforementioned grim reaper and the debt collector. In fact, I think this anime uses that technique better than Kara no Kyoukai did. After the initial phase, the multiple story arcs mentioned above has merged into a single multi-faceted larger storyline that flows very smoothly with flawless pacing, all the way to the ending.

The story itself is very good and has one trait that is rarely seen in other titles in the same shounen genre: unpredictability. This anime has its fair share of plot twists that steered the story in a different direction compared to what I have originally predicted in the course of watching this anime. For example, at first, I thought that the story would paint itself a darker tone in the middle of the series during the Sadako slasher arc but eventually it doesn’t, taking up a more conservative turn instead. In hindsight, while the anime doesn’t go far enough out from the mainstream in that arc, the alternative turning point the anime has taken is not that bad either.

This anime also have some references to other anime/manga/novel titles. A very glaring example is the wolf-girl cut-out board early in the series. It was so blatant that even I, who are used to external references done by other anime titles, paused the episode at that point wondering whether this anime is trying to pull my leg or something. The only weak aspect of this anime’s storyline would be the ending, which amounts to nearly nothing at the end despite the frenetic activities in the flurry of events that makes up the final 3 or 4 episodes. So many things happened, yet nothing is over. The ending set up a potential second season very nicely though, although if ANN is to be believed, there is none in the pipelines.

Character developments in this anime are done very well all-around. The ones that really shine includes the main antagonist and the main protagonist’s best friend. Talking about character developments, the main female protagonist has a very weird and negative character developments strategy. She is a cool character up until the scene where she performed that skyscraper-descending bike stunt (the Ghost Rider movie also has a similar stunt) before kicking plenty of asses, halfway in the series. Right after that, she forgot that she has a head to find and highly likely, she forgot that she is a grim reaper too. Being separated from her head sure does serious damage on her personality.


Proof that the Japanese in this anime who doesn't have black hairs dyed theirs. This probably applies too for characters in other anime titles.

Character Design:-
The character design in this anime is just your average shounen genre stuff. Black hairs are quite common though, and those who doesn’t have one has definitely dyed their hairs. See above.

Voice Acting:-
This anime has done very well in this aspect overall. Outstanding characters notable for their voice actors/actresses great jobs includes the two best characters in this anime, the grim reaper and the slasher. Definitely a positive for this anime.


The main antagonist and also one of the two best characters in this anime.

Music:-
The OST of this anime is excellent, definitely the best one amongst all 9 anime titles reviewed in the audition so far, by a million miles. B gata H kei will have a lot of work to do to match this anime in this department. Too bad though that the four OP/ED themes cannot keep up with the OST excellence, with only 1st ED theme worth listening.

Animation/Direction:-
Animation quality in this anime is good, even in fast-paced scenes. This anime did use that blurry animation technique mentioned negatively before in this blog, but only briefly and under the correct context (flashbacks), therefore I will let this one slide. Choreography in action scenes is decent overall. The director has done a very good job in this anime, as seen in my commentary about the presentation aspects in the story section above.


The main male protagonist's best friend, also one of the best characters in this anime.

Conclusion:-
9 out of 10, the same score as Working!! I would not proclaim this anime to be the new front-runner for the ‘Anime of the Year 2010’ title though, because the final anime in the audition, B gata H kei, may gazump both of them with a perfect score and run away with the title instead. The next entry will definitely see a new winner at the sidebar of this blog for 2010, joining (as of writing) Chocotto Sister (2006), Bokurano (2007), One Outs (2008) and Zan Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei (2009).


Just one of the creepy monsters that inhabits modern Tokyo, therefore YOU SHOULD NOT GO THERE!

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