Short Synopsis: It’s Cosette’s birthday. The majority of the episode focuses on a present Fantine made for her.
Good: I love this show, and this episode only strengthened this opinion; omg @ Eponine.
Bad: Episode six, and still no real bad points, whoa. I am SO hoping that 52 episodes is going to be the right format for this story.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8.5/10

You could call this episode a Fantine-episode, as she played a role in most parts. During the first half, we see her get her secret exposed, which makes her lose her job. On top of that, she finds out that Cosette has become sick. At least, that’s one of Thenardier’s plans to suck even more money out of her. Thankfully, she manages to find another job at the shop of an old lady. This one actually doesn’t mind that she has a daughter. Later, we see her work on a birthday present for Cosette: an odour of some blue flowers Cosette used to really like (I forgot their names, sorry). She finishes and sends it to Cosette.

The second half of the episode focuses at this present, as you didn’t expect Thenardier to just give it to Cosette, did you? Instead, she finds it a nice present for Eponine. She should NOT have done that, even though the results of this turned out amazing. Eponine just couldn’t resist showing this present to Toron, who peeks inside and finds a note of “happy birthday, Cosette”, which obviously reveals that this isn’t Eponine’s, and it does suggest that she stole it from Cosette, while she didn’t know anything when she received it. With this, her hate for Cosette is only going to turn worse. That really was so sad.

Jean, meanwhile, gets a bit of development, and we see a bit more of his history. It seems that when he arrived in the town, he immediately gave himself a good reputation by saving two children from a burning house. I’m assuming that after this, he continued to do these kinds of things, until people started to find him suitable for the position of Major. Aran, meanwhile, has been noticing that he’s been feeling unwell at times, and tries to do something about this. I wonder how this’ll turn out.

It’s interesting. The spring-season has only just begun, and I’ve already fallen in love with two of its anime. That’s entirely different from the Fall-season, which featured a bunch of good series with a few flaws. Master of Epic and especially Les Miserables have caught my interest immediately. Especially Les Miserables has been consistently good so far, and it has chosen the perfect bland of drama and build-up.

Hanoka is a unique anime. It’s the first anime which has been entirely made out of vector-graphics in flash. The result is quite interesting. It’s also one of the shortest tv-series ever. It’s got 12 episodes with a length of 5 minutes. If you deduct 90 seconds for the OP, and 30 more seconds for a recap of the previous episode, then all this anime has is 3x12 = 36 minutes of airtime.

For the story, the creators must’ve been put in front of quite a challenge. Not only did they have to think of a story to fit inside those 36 minutes, it also had to comply with the episode length of 3 minutes, and it still had to give enough opportunities to show the capabilities of flash-graphics. For that, it chose a story about a war being fought, between humans and large machines, owned by strange creatures called the citizens of the stars. The story is extremely basic, but still the creators managed to add romance, betrayal, a bit of background, and a fairly consistent story.

The creators could have done so much worse with this. The story was nothing special, but because the episodes were so short and the creators threw in enough interesting plot elements due to a fast pacing, this anime never really felt boring or annoying. The only really bad point is the ending, where the creators suddenly introduce another villain for no possible reason, even though it already had the material to make a good ending. Instead of focusing on this, this anime preferred to focus on that final antagonist, who didn’t really add anything to the story.

The graphics in flash are a hit or miss. Because they’re made in flash, don’t expect the drawings to be of an extreme or realistic quality. Personally, I quite liked the style though. Animation in vector-graphics is quite different from the animation in normal anime, so it was really refreshing to look at it. Others, however, might get too bothered by the unusual look.

Overall, it’s been a cute, short show. I rather enjoyed watching, even though this is nothing really special. Still, I’m suspecting that by far the largest part of the anime-community will never touch this show. It’s been made in a style that you have to like. If you’re into experimental anime, then you could check this out. However, you won’t find much joy in this if all you can stomach is Kanon-styled graphics.

Short Synopsis: The Waragetcha get their own Senshi-suits! Random sketches about the shopkeepers we all love! What the heck is up with the main character!?
Good: Whoa, an actual plotline; The first episode finally has been subbed.
Bad: Even though the first episode has been subbed, the number of people who noticed it is… not very big; What the heck is up with the main character!?
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10

Two focuses for the episodes this time. The random sketches were all about player-started shops. You know, the ones you see in crowded places, where people try to sell the stuff they found while adventuring. You can make huge amounts of money this way, if you do it right. This episode, this becomes fatal for our green-haired male Elmony when it seems that he’s stuck so many gold coins in his pants that he’s become unable to move. ^^; Another guy uses this system to hit on a girl he noticed. A Pandemos, to be exact. While he was a bit annoying, I do admit that he was kindof cute when he tried to say something to her. :P

The rest of the episode, with the exception of a very strange office lady who likes to turn into a dragon, was dedicated to Waragetcha. And believe it or not, this episode actually introduced a general plot line. Okay, I’m not sure what the creators were planning with this, but still. It’ll be interesting if this plot continues, and involves more and more characters along the way. Still, it also means that I’m going to have to pay attention again, otherwise I’ll miss some of the story parts.

Things start rather random again, when Warage Black seems to have found new uniforms for the Waragetcha. These transform them to some kind of strange Senshi-team. They spend most of their time then acting like a proper Senshi-team should behave: make lots of random poses at lots of random places. Then a giant robot appears in front of them, claiming to related to the producer or something. I didn’t quite catch that part. When it’s defeated, it returns to its base, and it appears that a male Pandemos has been piloting it (Bukotsu?). I’m not yet sure what this is all about, but who knows. It might become interesting.

And it may also have been great to see the main character on a date like this, but when will we actually get to see her in action? I mean, her pink version was someone else, wasn’t she? She’s also been in almost every episode, though all she did was act like a mere NPC. What are the creators planning to do with her? XD