Tales of Phantasia is a small OVA, consisting of four episode and based on the RPG with the same name which came out about ten years ago. I truly recommend this to everyone who’s looking for something interesting to watch.

People might claim that this anime is only worth it if you played the game as well. That is absolutely not true. I didn’t play the game either and I totally loved this. Okay, in the beginning, you’ll see a lot of inexplainable thing happen. But don’t see that as a reason to quit this anime, see it as a reason to use your own head for a bit. Try to figure out what happened before. This way, you’ll be able to enjoy this OVA even more.

The graphics in this anime are totally amazing. Perhaps they even stand above the extreme quality of Tsubasa Chronicle Torikago no Kuni no Himegimi. In any case, they belong in the category of top-5 best graphics ever. The CG is just brilliant to see. There’s just so many attention put into the details, and don’t forget the incredible way the creators integrated these with the rest of the graphics. The character designs are also one of the very few today that really are unique. Each and every one of them stick to your mind like superglue. It doesn’t really plan to come off too soon. They look just too awesome, my favourites are Arche and Klarth. The music also is a masterpiece. Ranging from the OP to the ED, from the quiet moments to the dramatic moments to the battles, everything just perfectly fitted.

The characters themselves are also greatly developed. Especially if you consider that this OVA just takes a mere two hours to tell its story. I know some anime which couldn’t even come close to achieving this much character development in four times the same amount of time. I also liked the fact that every personality has something unique, which at the same time really characterizes that particular character. The way each character interacts with the other is also just amazing.

The story itself isn’t too complex. This, however, is greatly made up in the way it’s told. The creators somehow manage to make each second of this anime count. As the tale to be told is huge, and there are only hours available, the pace of storytelling is high. There are some rushed parts, but these take in no way at all away the power of these scenes.

There’s just one thing I don’t like about this anime. It’s just too damn short! I would have loved to see each of the characters fleshed out even more. I would have loved to see even more character developments, backgrounds, stories, et cetera. Maybe four episodes was a bit too little for such an awesome series. Still, I’m glad I was able to see this.

Final Rating: 95/100

Oh my… god. This episode was just utterly, utterly incredible. A worthy ending of an awesome anime.

We start of with the prologue of the great battle against Dhaos. We first see the representatives of a couple of races gather in the middle of the rain and place their trust into our heroes. Still, the soldiers are gloomy about the upcoming battle. Then, we switch back to our main party, who appears to have split up into three groups. It starts snowing, meanwhile (some of the best snow ever to be seen in anime, by the way. Muchas creditos to the animators). Cless and Mint come out of a café, and start acting nostalgic. Arche and Chester meanwhile get closer and closer to each other (figuratively, that is). Klarth meanwhile tries in the middle of the snow to talk some sense into Origin. It appears that Origin is not much of a talker, but Klarth still manages to find out that Dhaos did the things he did because he wanted to protect Iggdrasil (if I’m not mistaken, that was the giant tree from episode two). If you combine these three with each other, then the results get amazing. Even though they’re incredibly simple, they’re done in such incredible atmospheres, you can’t help but like it.

Then, the creators try to be smart and make good use of the time which was originally meant for the OP to roll in, because during the OP-tunes, the usual video-material has been replaced with our heroes combining the ring, Origin and the two swords in order to make Dhaos’ castle show up and enter it. This really shows that they make use of every single second available to them and use it as optimal as possible in order to provide as much storytelling as possible. I think that there should be more series who should attempt this.

Anyway, once in the castle, the group gets assaulted by Dhaos’ minions. A great thing to see about these fights were the actual strategy-elements which were inserted. They were especially focused on the importance of teamwork, with some terrific results. We then switch to outside the castle, where Suzu appears. Right next to her, several other ninja’s appear, apparently hostile. Suzu won’t let them pass, but before we get to see their fight, we switch back to Cless&co again. This time, the assaulting monsters get a ‘bit’ bigger and meaner, resulting in Cless getting separated from the others. He then ends up in a large mass of water, in which Dhaos tries for a final time to try and stop him with words. That doesn’t really work, even though Dhaos is partially right.

We then switch back to Suzu, who managed to finish off every enemy ninja, except for the leader (the one who appeared at the previous episode as well). That just shows how awesome Suzu can be. Anyway, it then appears that this ninja-leader is nobody else but her own father. To make it even more awesome. Despite this fact, it really does become clear that she’s even prepared to fight her own father if she had to, which was just too sad to see. At the same time, though, it only added up to the awesomeness of the episode.

Cless and the others, still separated, make their way through the castle. They’re getting pretty heavily beaten up, especially Cless, as he doesn’t have Mint with him. He then finally manages to make his way through to Dhaos’ chamber. In there, probably one of the best anime-end-boss-fights begins. Not only because it isn’t just a duel between the main protagonist and antagonist, as the rest of the team joins Cless soon, but also the way he is eventually defeated. It makes sense, sort of. In most cases in other anime, both parties try to attack with all of their powers, and finally one side ends up losing, mostly the antagonist. Variations include the antagonist winning, or both parties losing and dying at the same time. Still, it mostly ends up with a bunch of characters throwing a bunch of flashes to each other. This time, however, only one party charges to its full power, while the other clearly has trouble trying to survive. This ends in a very enjoyable climax. It’s predictable, of course, but I somehow feel the creators knew this and tried to make the best out of it. In my opinion, they succeeded.

The ending itself might be debatable, but I loved it. After all, the goal of this anime was defeating Dhaos, with the side-goal of Suzu defeating her own father. These are exactly the two scenes we get to see before the credits roll, including with two sentences explaining why Dhaos did what he did, a bit more in-depth than at the beginning of the episode. Afterwards, the episode ends. Most anime try to involve risking the life of some main character at this point, this anime doesn’t. I just loved it.

Too bad the title of the episode revealed what was to be happening at almost the end of it. It took away a bit of the power of that moment. Still, I never would have thought for it to be carried out this far and this horrible. Anon really is one heck of a bad guy.

But still, after this, he’ll probably have the entire world, including heaven, against him. Ueki’ll probably defeat him in the end anyway, though. That’s the only thing that an be said. We also still have to see the moment in which he gets his wings (the thing the OP and ED have been subtly hinting at since the beginning of the second season). I so hope that the side-characters will play a big role in these events.

I just love Jigoku Shoujo. This episode was again totally incredible.

We start off with Tsugumi who has another vision. This time, involvind a plane descending and a couple of random sceneries including a hospital. She tells Hajime about it and the two set off. The victim this time is a nurse who works at this hospital. Hajime investigates a bit and comes to the conclusion that we have a horribly nice person here. Everyone likes her. Tsugumi still choses Ai’s side, but has problems with it.

Hajime keeps searching, and finally finds someone who holds a grudge against this nurse: the widower of a woman who died in the hospital. He was cornered, so he decided to blame another party, which ended up being this nurse. Hajime pays him a visit. Meanwhile, Tsugumi has her worst attack yet. She begins screaming afterwards. It was just too horrible to see.

That was the good part. Now the awesome part begins. It appears that this person’s never heard of Jigoku Shoujo in any way. So that means that another person holds a grudge against the nurse. Before we’re able to figure out who it is, it’s too late and she gets sent to hell. Tsugumi was just too sad to see. If it wasn’t even enough, she ends up connecting with Ai at the end of the episode. Apparently, there was some boy in Ai’s memory with which she used to share lots of happy memories. Combine this with episode twenty, in which only the words of killing your family managed to penetrate through her memory, and we’re in for some incredible final three episode.

I so LOVED this episode. Especially Tsugumi. She just keeps getting better and better. And better. It’s aweosme to see her struggle like that. What is the right thing to do: revenge or no revenge? I can hardly wait for the last episodes.

These series, good and bad. You have to give them credit for one thing: the ones that have OPs, have amazing OPs. In Himawari’s case, I haven’t found anything to give credit to, though…

Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni

Oh, my. I think I’ll have lot of fun watching this. Even if it was because of the extremely enjoyable and powerful cliffhanger. I can imagine why this was so popular. It’s of course certain that the girls didn’t commit the murder themselves, as we see a man commit it at the beginning of the episode, but still, they have got something to do with it. I can’t wait to find out what. This will certainly be on my list to blog. The only thing I didn’t really like was the ridiculous amount of hair each character has, but I doubt that’ll cause a problem in the future.

Renkin San-kyuu Magical Pokaan
I really have diverging opinions about this series. On one hand, it’s just stupid, but in a good way. It doesn’t make any sense, all the scenes are Haruhi-ed together and the jokes sometimes really work. On. The. Other. Hand. It’s just stupid. In a bad way. Most of the airtime just consists of useless fanservice, when the jokes don’t work, they really DO NOT work, and the characters are just plain boring.

Himawari

I think I can describe this series in one word: mediocre. That’s what it is, mediocre. It isn’t totally bad, it isn’t totally good. We just have a classis love-story involving a wannabe-ninja and a normal person with an age-difference of about ten years. Of course, this wannabe-ninja has a background, she’s special in some kind of way. This normal person becomes a teacher in a ninja-academy, at which all the ninjas are after his life. This is nothing special, and judging by the preview of the next episode, it will never be.