Some quick first impressions: Rakugo Tennyo Oyui, Oban Star Racers and Koi Suru Suru Tenchi Angelique
A rather strange batch this time, with anime that many people probably don’t even know or remember.
Rakugou Tennyo Oyui
Ugh… can’t believe I missed this one. It aired during the winter-season, and got its first episode subbed around May, I think. It’s a fairly standard mahou shoujo, with characters who actually attempt to differ a bit from the clichés. Okay, there is a samurai-girl and the main character is rather hyperactive, but the others all have some kind of element which makes them interesting. For example, we’ve got a class rep with an obsession over our main character and we finally have a young genius who actually behaves like a normal person. I also liked that our main character isn’t the first one to discover her powers. I also like the contrast between the normal world and the medieval world.
Oban Star Racers
Can anyone imagine my surprise when I saw this one float by on DUTCH television? Dutch television, of all things. (For the ones who don’t know, Holland has an absolutely crappy anime industry. The TV-stations used to air some good series (Flint The Time Detective, Medabots and Digimon, both first series) but right now there’s barely any anime on, and the ones that do get featured contain the biggest garbage ever) This anime seems to be an international project, and I can imagine that it’s also being featured on German, French, English and American television. Well then, I’m not going to even bother to try and follow this series on the Dutch television, as the network it’s being aired on is notorious for its eccentric broadcasting policy (as of right now, every day features two episodes, and most of the time I’m at the university when these episodes air), and like every other show, it has been dubbed in Dutch, and it sounds horrible as usual. Still, the show itself actually showed promise. If there really went six years into developing this anime, it can become really interesting. Basically, it features races between aliens on strange terrains, and there don’t seem to be any rules present, so contenders can just try to blast each other out of the competition. I’m hoping that a Japanese version will pop up somewhere once, though there’s one major problem with this anime. During the races, it sometimes has the nasty tendency to use deus ex machina at the climaxes.
Koi Suru Suru Tenchi Angelique
Yeah, I got a bit impatient and decided to check out the raws. Well, I can understand why it hasn’t been subbed yet. It’s cheesy as hell. A goddess of some sort needs to have one chosen girl, so from all over the country, all beautiful girls are invited into a castle, in order to determine who the chosen one is. Well, she appears to be different from the other girls who were invited, as she somehow likes to hide her beauty behind a cap of some sort and some geek glasses. In the end, she gets discovered and she now gets surrounded by no less than nine pretty bishounen. Still, why did I like this? This show has some kind of atmosphere which has been really appealing. It may be my love for fairy-tale-like shows, but I found myself enjoying the first episode. And the character design was surprisingly good, although a bit creepy at times.