Jack, Author at BaconFriedRice.com

Infinite Stratos

This past season I’ve only been following one anime.

Well, if I had to say one thing about this anime, it’s that it caters to its target audience extremely well. What’s better than mecha wielding big ass guns? Women wearing skin tight clothing piloting mecha wielding big ass guns. It’s not often you get to see harem mecha anime, so I guess that’s a point in their favor.

Animation is done pretty well. There seems to be a lot of these CG scenes nowadays that make for some really nice action scenes, with explosions and lights flashing all over the place. It reminded me a lot of Macross Frontiers in terms of how much crap was flying across the screen at one time. Normal scenes are crisp and well detailed, and character design is pretty good overall. The mecha design is pretty decent too, with a very wide assortment of weaponry and ass-kicking utilities.

Being that it’s a harem, you have pretty much no character development and it’s all just focused on relations between the male and the girls chasing after him. I feel like they went a little overboard with all the Tsundere types, and in general I didn’t like most of them other than Charlotte and Houki. You get maybe 1 minute of back story for each character, and most of the time it is something dumb that is completely irrelevant. But I guess that’s not the point of the show.

The story was pretty much non-existent. There was some random episode where it looked like some evil thing appeared, but they destroy it and never hear from it for the remainder of the series. This is one series (like Angel Beats) where the first half is spent on merely introducing cast, which leaves zero time to actually develop a story. It also irritates me when you have these all-powerful teachers who could basically wipe the floor of all the bad guys, but instead they send out inexperienced students to fight. This kind of stuff really pisses me off, and is incidentally a reason I really hate Harry Potter.

The fan service in this series steadily got worse and worse. I mean, you already have everyone wearing a bathing suit while piloting the mechs, but there was an annoyingly large number of revealing camera angles. And of course, despite having only 12 episodes, they managed to shove in a beach episode and a hot tub episode, where absolutely nothing happens except fan service. Like I said, this series knows how to cater to its target audience.

Overall, the series was a bit of mindless, harem fun. I definitely enjoyed it, but it’s not something you put on a pedestal.

Darker than Black

From the outside, it would appear this anime is perfect for me. Extremely laid back, peaceful guy is actually a super powerful psychic that can manipulate electricity and he has to fight a bunch of other “evil” psychic people with unique abilities. I like his character type and I like the premise.

When I watched it, I couldn’t help but be extremely bored. I think the biggest problem is that I have no idea what is the driving plot of this series. All I could gather was some thing called Hell’s Gate disappeared and all of a sudden people started gaining psychic powers. They throw around all these words and organizations, like Pandora, and I have no idea why they are there, whether they are good or bad, what their motivation is, etc. Like seriously, who the heck is the old lady/fortune teller at the police station?

In general, you get only very small glimpse’s of the main character’s past, with the last 2 episodes giving you a bit more detail. All you can assume is at some point his sister disappeared during the Hell’s Gate event. Nobody explains how he gained his powers and why they were there in the first place. Why is he listening to these orders to kill people when he’s actually a peaceful guy? I guess he’s trying to find out what happened to his sister? I didn’t know while watching, and I still don’t know.

Who are you and why do I care?

In general, the ending was anti-climactic and didn’t tie up the tons of loose ends left over. They killed one bad guy but he has an entire organization behind him, so that’s completely irrelevant. I guess since they have a Season 2, they need to drag the story on to fill up another 26 episodes.

I really wanted to like this anime, and a lot of the psychics have neat abilities and prices for using their abilities. Individual episode plots were alright, but the overall story just made no sense. I feel like I’m missing some background info or maybe I fell asleep during a critical dialogue portion. Actually, watching this anime reminded me of playing FF13. Everything is great about it, except it’s boring and I have no idea what’s going on or why I’m doing it.

Hats

Angel Beats

This is probably a year overdue but oh well.

I first started watching Angel Beats and I was completely blown away. The animation is beautiful in every aspect, from background images to character design. Music is outstanding, with some excellent and touching insert songs. Characters are mostly interesting (except Yui, who is just fucking annoying), each with potentially deep backgrounds to explore. There is a great mix of comedy and seriousness, that is well done and delivered. They have some amazing concert scenes (similar to the ones popularized by Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi). I really thought it would be one of the best animes I have ever seen.

So here’s the plot. Main guy wakes up and discovers he is dead and is living in an afterlife for young people. There is a group that is trying to revolt against the apparent god of this afterworld in attempt to not disappear forever. However, the main guy discovers the point of the afterlife is to allow the dead to fulfill some regret or dream they had while alive but were unable to accomplish. The main guy takes it upon himself to try and help everyone out and put them to rest.

Bam! That sets up so nicely into a 26 episode series. You spend the first 10 or so establishing plot and introducing the group of characters. Then you spend an episode or two exploring the background of said characters, such as how they died, what they need to still do, etc. Once that’s been discovered, they make peace with themselves and disappear. Move on to the next one. The main characters are last with more in depth stories. Meanwhile, you develop the 3 main protagonists over the course of all these adventures and a romance starts up too. I literally just spit out a top 10 anime of all time.

I waited anxiously every week as a new episode came out and for the first 10 episodes, everything followed the exact plan I mentioned above. They developed the main character and discovered the secret of the afterlife. In episode ten, they focus on him helping one character to pass on. Wait…this anime is only 13 episodes? HOLY CRAP.

Let’s randomly introduce some sudden bad guy that tries to destroy the world and defeat him in 1 episode. Let’s just tell everyone in this group of 15 people the purpose of the world and they all disappear on their own with no additional provoking. I really think that the studio must have missed the memo saying their series would only be a half season. It’s absolutely terrible how they ended the series and completely destroys all the great buildup of the first 10 episodes.

So that’s all I have to say about this series. The first 10 episodes are some of the best achievements in anime production history. Then they crap on themselves and try to wrap up the story in 3 episodes. Angel Beats is the perfect example of wasted potential.

More Suzumiya Haruhi

I remember last year they released the Suzumiya Haruhi movie in Japanese theaters and [Mazui] made a cam fansub (meaning guy sneaks a video camera into the theater). Unfortunately, the video was slanted at 30 degree angle and terrible resolution, so I had to postpone my viewing till they released the DVD/BluRay in Dec 2010. I recently started updating all my old anime to 1080p/720p and came across this forgotten thing.

After they trolled us with eight identical episodes in Season 2 of Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi, I wasn’t expecting any sort of masterpiece. Honestly, I’ve never really liked Suzumiya Haruhi’s character very much. Kyon, and more specifically Kyon’s seiyu Tomokazu Sugita, is the main reason I watch this series. His cynical commentary on everything Haruhi does is the highlight of each episode for me. So I guess it should please me that the movie is very Kyon monologue heavy and also much more Nagato centered.

What is strange is that Haruhi and Kyon have pretty much no development at all in the movie. In fact, Haruhi is absent from the majority of it, and her disappearance only serves as the plot driver. At first I was kind of annoyed by this, given that I expect to see some sort of development in their relationship. However, I realized that this movie is based off a single novel, so it probably was the novel used to develop Nagato. Makes a lot more sense if you think of it like that.

Haruhi disappears and Kyon needs to figure out why. There is some time travel and randomness and somehow Kyon ends up reverting time to go back to normal. I didn’t particularly like the plot too much. It seemed kind of stupid and didn’t make much sense to me. Then again, most of the storyline of Season 1 and Season 2 aren’t particularly interesting. It’s mostly the interactions that are fun to watch.

What I did like was how they portrayed Nagato as a super shy and embarrassed girl with a crush on Kyon. There’s always been that underlying feeling that the robotic Nagato actually is hiding a ton of emotion underneath her emotionless speech, but it all came flowing out here. The shift in character was so startling. I have to admit I really enjoyed it when she grabbed Kyon’s sleeve to keep him from leaving. That scene was probably the best part of the movie for me. It is somewhat sad though that even though Kyon seems to care a lot about her, he clearly is still focused entirely on Haruhi.

Serious Nagato

Versus Shy Nagato

Mikuru continues to annoy me. The only point where I liked her was when both her present and future self were there and Kyon refers to them in the plural “Asahina-sans”.

Kyon once again ends the movie in the exact same way. He has a long monologue in his head where he admits to himself that he in fact likes spending time with Haruhi despite the fact that she bosses him around. I find it strange that this is the EXACT same ending to season 1, with an almost identical revelation. Like I said earlier, I had hoped he would progress his relationship with Haruhi a bit more, but in the end it stayed pretty much the same. I tend to rate movies and animes heavily on the ending and the impression it leaves me with, and so this is quite the let down.

Overall, the movie was alright, although long as hell (2hr 40 minutes or so). I don’t think I will be re-watching it anytime soon though, unlike season 1 which has a few episodes I re-watched multiple times. I liked some of the dialogue and Nagato is now a lot more interesting. It’s a big improvement over Season 2 though, so when they inevitably milk the cash cow more with season 3, I’ll be here to watch it.

Nagato Final version, inbetween super serious and super shy

Happy Valentine’s Day

Durarararararararararararara

It’s taken me some time, but I finally finished Durarara this past week.

I really enjoy this style of opening, where they cycle through all the different characters. The studio Brains Base has done this style before, and I absolutely love it. At no point in the series did I feel the need to skip past this thing.

Heavy amounts of dialogue done in non standard ways. One of the things I think anime does extremely well is handling face to face dialogues. Instead of actually showing the people talking, the camera pans across random static images like a table, doorway, sign, etc. Although the original purpose was to save money by minimizing the number of animated scenes, it’s become somewhat of a trademark and something I really enjoy. In Durara, there is a lot of online/anonymous interaction, and so you get a significant amount of plot and dialogue through forums and chatrooms.

The whole story revolves around having an enormous cast of characters living in the same city, and all their separate storylines somehow get intertwined. There’s a lot of flashbacks, hidden pasts, secret identity crap that goes on, and most of the time it works out pretty well. A few characters you see in the openings get very little attention (Shinra’s dad shows up for maybe half an episode, the policeman is there for like 5 minutes, etc) and other main character’s stories seemed a bit rushed.

The ending was a bit anti-climactic, in that nothing really happened. Everyone just sort of went home and lived happily ever after, so to speak. Not to say the ending didn’t make sense, it was just a little bit tame given all the buildup they had.

Overall, I’d put the anime near the top of my 2010 list, and is definitely worth a watch.

Happy Birthday

Amagami SS End

Amagami SS finally finished up and I have to say it was an extremely enjoyable series. Like I said before, I normally get fed up with high school harem romances based on dating sim games. However, this series was able to keep my interest throughout all 25 episodes and I even was looking forward to when the episodes would come out. I will say both Sae and Rihoko annoyed the crap out of me, but luckily once their 4 episodes were done, you never saw them again. The other 4 girls had much better characters and story lines.

The only thing I would say was a bit unfortunate about this 4 episode reset system was that there was little time for character development of any sort. But then again, this is a harem not a single romance series so I guess that’s to be expected. I will say this is probably the best harem anime I’ve seen in quite a while.