Ah, these are some of the ones I’ve been waiting for. It’s great to see the good parts of this season, among all of the other rubbish. Sumomomo might have been somewhat disappointing, but the latter two promise to be awesome.

Sumomomo Momomo

Another harem. At least, I think it is. The other girls should arrive in the next episodes. Anyway, this one has the standard girl-loves-boy-for-no-apparent-reason, but with a twist: it’s a comedy. At least, it tries to be. It has funny moments, but at times, I feel like it’s trying a bit too hard. The jokes could have been presented in a much better way. Not to mention the fact that our main female character’s character design kindof failed. The promo-art looked very good, but the creators of the anime somehow found it a good idea to give her ridiculously large eyes. These don’t fit at all. The huge amounts of fanservice also could have been toned down a bit. Still, the thing I liked was the main character. His reaction to all of the things happening to him was the funniest part of this episode.

Asatte no Houkou

I can’t believe how well this turned out! I knew that the concept was something to be looking out for, but I never could have imagined how extremely likable each of the characters are. After seeing this episode, I think that so far, Asatte no Houkou has delivered the best first episode of all the fall-season shows so far. The story’s like this: we have a young girl, who lives together with her older brother. Their parents died, and the girl hates to be a burden on her brother, so she hopes to grow up fast. On the other side, we have a woman, who longs to be young again. Guess what? The girl grows old and the woman grows young, with the help of a strange stone. The character designs actually show that you can create beautiful characters with a small budget, the music fits perfectly, and this has been extremely well written. I’m not sure whether I’m going to continue this series raw or not. Depends on how fast the subs are coming out…

Black Lagoon, The Second Barrage

Finally, Black Lagoon returns with its second season. The first episode was mostly meant for introducing the bad guys of the following arc. This time, we’ve got two homicidal siblings. They’re just small children, but they’re already a bunch of incestuous killing machines. So far, so good. The creators really made them look extremely evil. But will they be as awesome as Roberta? That depends on the next episodes. I’m also wondering how Rock and the others will get involved in this matter, as it’s mostly an issue for Balalaika and the other maffia-boses.

Muaha! Another great episode! And it’s actually dedicated to the main story. The Clow Country we saw at the end of the previous episode seems to be the product of Sakura’s powers, meeting the book of memories. This transferred our protagonists to the Clow Country which Sakura remembers. There are a lot of holes in her memory, so the world appears without any people in it. It was a nice piece of background story. ^_^

Fay reckons that the feather is in a place which was mysterious for Sakura at that time. These are the ruins, of course. The fun stuff then realy begins when Syaoran realizes that Kurogane’s mother was killed by Fei Wong’s assistants as well. This does explain why he became more keen on helping Syaoran, as things have gotten personal for him as well.

Speaking of the devil, we finally see him again, after his long absence. He still has no way to see what Sakura and Syaoran are doing, His only method of knowing where they are is the Syaoran-clone, who actually comes into action during this episode. What exactly is his purpose? Why did he take over Syaoran, in order to beat the guardian of the feather?

Also, Fay finally uses his magic. Kurogane starts this by pointing out that if one wants to discern a certain magic, you would need an even bigger magic. Fay pretends to ignore this, but it seems that Kurogane did hit the right nail. For some reason, I’m fearing that Fay’s power is incredible, if it’s even enough to beat the magic which has sealed away a feather for more than 3000 years. Then, when Kurogane goes after the guardian, Fay wonders whether he shouldn’t try to help Syaoran, and in the end, when it seems that the magical influence of the place is preventing Mokona from transferring worlds, he creates a barrier which enables Mokona to do his/her magic.

But why did they end up back in the same world again?

Overall, great episode. Loved it. Want more.

Ooh, I’ve been waiting for this. Finally, after a month of absence, Tsubasa Chronicle returns. After the previous episode, which was so incredibly awesome, the anime continues in the same world we left off. It seems that the book from the previous episode was a copy of the book of memories. This one stores the memories of the person who touches it, and shows them to whoever gets to be the next to touch it. The real one is hidden in a large library, and it contains the feather. 3004 years ago, this feather caused a catastrophe when it got in evil hands. Ever since, it’s been sealed away, in order to prevent another tragedy like that.

That’s another way you can do it. During the first arc, there were two arcs dedicated to people, abusing the power of the feather they received. But if such a thing happened 3004 years ago, this matter definitely had already been solved by other people. I like this setting a lot. It really shows that Tsubasa Chronicle is full of originality.

I know. I remember calling this series a horrible mess around episode five and six. I totally take these words back now. This anime is great, period. The characters are just so incredibly likable. Both in moments of comedy as in moments of drama and in moments of romance. This episode definitely was no exception. It was another brilliant episode. Ranging fro Syaoran’s apologies to Kurogane to Mokona, portraying Kurogane as the father of a poor family and Syaoran comforting Sakura to the cliff-hanger at the end of the episode, in which our protagonists suddenly ended up back in the Clow Country.

(On a side-note: during the eye-catch, it seems that the official spelling for “Fye”’s name is actually “Fay”. I’ll try using it from now on.)

Another batch. More harems. Woo. Exiting. I think I’ve done most of the harems so far. I´m eagerly awaiting the subs for the good shows now. But then again, the harems may be almost over, there´s still a bunch of shounen-action series…

Happiness!

Okay, I admit. This one isn’t as bad as the other horrible shows we’ve seen so far. It’s got cute character designs for once. The graphics also are pretty and in good quality. It’s also a mahou shoujo, always nice. The characters actually have a history, and secrets. The main male character also seems to have a reason for refusing to be healed by magic. Good, good. I also liked his cross-dressing friend. If I understood things correctly, this friend likes to act and dress up as a girl. Nice touch. However. This doesn’t mean that it escaped the oh so horrid clichés of the bishoujo harems. For starters, our main female character is in love with our main male character, simply because he did something nice to her when they were children. It’s like the creators saw the beginning of Revolutionary Girl Utena, and saw a good excuse, without even bothering to check the ending. This anime is also rather ruined by the useless fanservice, our main character has the usual horny classmate with which he’s friends with, apart from that, he’s surrounded by girls, girls and only girls (yes, even the cross-dresser acted too much like a girl. There was almost no way to recognize that he actually wasn’t a girl). Oh, and did I already mention the amount of valentine chocolate he received?

Kanon

This harem isn’t that bad either. It cleverly stays away from some of the clichés which often plague similar harems. The characters are a bit more than just stereotypes, there isn’t much focus on fanservice and our main character isn’t surrounded by girls who love him. It feels a bit more natural now. Also the graphics are pretty. It seems that people were willing to spend a big budget for this. Still, that doesn’t mean that this anime doesn’t have any flaws. Where it does things good at some points, it messes up at other points. While the graphics may look good, the character designs are ugly. All females have incredibly emphasized eyes. It’s supposed to look cute, but it turned out fake. Our main male character also is another one of those ctrl+c-ctr+v characters. Okay, girls don’t love him for an unknown reason, but because of that, he turned into a huge player. That’s also not the best type of character you can think off. (Also, aren’t the girls bothered by the cold, while walking in the snow without any pants?)

Mamoru-kun ni Megami no Shukufuku wo!

Both Happiness and Kanon showed that you can have harem-series with a few good qualities. Because of them, I actually began to think that some harem series might not be that bad. Unfortunately, after having seen this horrible piece of garbage, I totally take back what I said. Seriously, watching this anime made me almost lose faith in humanity. Even for a harem-show, this series is pain. Do not go near it! *twitch*