Review: Yu Yu Hakusho (幽★遊★白書)

Posted by ranpha on 9th May 2006
Posted in: anime review - reposted. Tagged: . 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.

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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: . 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.
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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.

Review: Tenshi na Konamaiki

Posted by ranpha on 10th April 2006
Posted in: anime review - reposted. Tagged: . Leave a Comment

The first review for this blog is for the anime Tenshi na Konamaiki.

Basically the story revolves around the main protagonist Amatsuka Megumi, a boy trapped inside the body of an extremely beautiful high school student. His (or her ) mission is to find the magic book in which the devil that put the curse lives, and return him to normal. Meanwhile, he (or she, whatever you prefer) and his best friend Miki has to put up with bunch of MALE students who has fallen in love with him, in adventures that includes fishing, saving a drowned man, stopping a pre-arranged marriage and more.

Story:
The story itself is pretty average and your standard anime fare. While there is magic involves, they are rarely seen being practiced in this show. The majority of the time are spent in a typical high-school setting, with no devils or magic books in sight.
The weakness of this story is that it is filled with needless episodes that bloated the series to a massive 50 episodes. I think it will be safe to kill of at least 10-15 episodes and no one will notice the difference. Meanwhile, the story itself have done a good job in the first half of the series at keeping the lid on how the story will end, but this unravels itself at around episode 30 onwards.
The ending seems to be rushed, especially in the last 3-4 episodes. Funny, considering how much trivial stories stuffed into earlier episodes. I still remember how near the end of the series, that an episode ends with the Amatsuka’s gang failing to find the entrance to the enemy’s lair, just to find out that in the first 30 seconds in the next episode, the so-called ‘great problem’ is resolved just like it wasn’t even there.
And, did I say the ending is predictable?

Character design/Voice/Animation/Music:
The voice acting is great, as expected from the famous Hayashibara Megumi, a veteran of many anime titles such as Ranma 1/2 and Slayers trilogy. Amatsuka’s sidekick, Soga, voiced by Wataru Takagi also works great for a reformed gangster who has fallen in love. Generally, I have no complains about the voice acting.
There is nothing to shout about the character design and animation/direction though. Amatsuka is supposed to be the most beautiful girl alive, but it seems that she is just an above average female student with other female characters being made ugly. I have seen more beautiful characters in hentai titles. Male characters fare much better though, they are appropriately designed. The animation is sloppy at times, and the director sure made some (many) strange decisions (mostly negative) on how some scenes panned out.
About the music, the in-show soundtracks are good, but most of the OP/ED themes are uninspiring (read: I skip them all the time). An exception can be made for the first OP though.

Conclusion:-
Not exactly a masterpiece. I’ll give it 6 out of 10.

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