Soul Eater

What a fun series! Really, Bones did it again, creating a series with an absolutely terrific sense of style. Everything about this series clicks so far. It may not have the most realistic storyline, but it’s fun to watch without a doubt. It’s also got a great sense of humour, and I especially love that picture of the moon with a big smile. The banter between all the different characters is also hilarious, so I’ve got high hopes for this series. The question now remains: will this series have enough material for fifty-one episodes (at least, that’s what AniDB and ANN say, but these aren’t the most trusted sources)? I must say that it’s great to see another series that aims for such a length, but you do need to have enough inspiration to pull it off.

Special A

The elite are always portrayed in an exaggerated way in anime, and this series is no different. There are about eight very talented people at school, who are looked up to by everyone, they’ve got their own enormous greenhouse, drink tea all the time and they’re superior in every single way to those measly regular students. Still, at least this series gives a good reason for our main female lead to be in that club, unlike a certain Shugo Chara and dozens of other shoujo. Hikari was already quite talented because of an ambitious father, and then she met her male rival, who always stood above her. She basically spent her entire childhood chasing this guy, walking in his shadow. Also, this series knows very well when it needs to exaggerate and when it needs to be serious, so the ridiculous premise won’t get in the way of what’s really important for this series: the relationship between the female and male lead. And I must say that the creators have tackled it very nicely so far. Here’s Gonzo’s next potential classic.

Vampire Knight

This really is THE season for shoujo and science fiction. This season has really turned out better than I expected, and to think that my most anticipated day for this season (Tuesday) hasn’t even come yet! In any case, the thing that really striked me with Vampire Knight, especially after watching Special A, is that its jokes are rather obtrusive. Special A knew exactly when to deliver a joke, though a lot of jokes in Vampire Knight are misplaced, break flow of the drama and aren’t that funny anyway. That was the bad part of this series. The good parts are that the story has a lot of potential, the characters are interesting and the soundtrack is excellent. I’ve heard a lot of mixed reviews about the original manga: some people consider it their bible, while others say it downright sucks. Well, I’m interested to find out which is true.

Adapting a manga. From the outside, it looks so simple: you just have to take a page and animate it accordingly. Yet practice has shown that a lot of series have trouble with this. Sometimes entire pages are omitted completely, or the writers think they’re talented and insert some boring inconsequential fillers. A great example of this is Hatenkou Yuugi. Oh, how I wanted to praise this series, but it’s an extreme example of how you can screw up manga-adaptations.

The manga had huge potential, but in the end the only thing that didn’t end up completely botched was the dialogue. It’s deep and detailed, but you can’t really praise the anime staff for it. They only literally copied the dialogue from the manga and inserted it. It’s just a matter of simple copying and pasting, and letting your voice-actors do the rest.

And really, it feels like the creators all went through a major divorce at the same time when making this series, because all other aspects are downright lazy. This series is a string of badly explained plot-twists. Heck, we never know why the third main character ends up travelling with the other two characters in the first place, characters like to god-mode themselves out of any problems and any substance outside of the dialogue has been completely removed.

To top that, the creators apparently found out very late that they only had 10 episodes to work with. The result is a very amusing but downright disastrous final episode that thunders through revelations at a speed of Mach 5 in order to be able to finish on time, and it still remains an ending that leaves a bad taste in your mouth. I hope that future directors will use this series as an example of how not to adapt a manga, because it’s such a shame that another story with potential had to be ruined. This series remained enjoyable because of its short length and dialogue, but it could have become so much more.

Wagaya no Oinarisama

The best thing about this series? The soundtrack. It surprises me as well, but Wagaya no Oinarisama has been the first series this season where the background music has stood out for me. All other series up till now featured either some cheesy J-Pop (not really my taste to say the least) or obligatory dark tunes that do their job. In this series, however, the music is subtle, yet very varied. One moment you hear a violin, then comes a flute, and then it’s the turn for the piano. Also, any soundtrack that has a choir is automatically win in my opinion. About the rest of the series: it’s solid so far. The characters are likable, and there’s some good chemistry between them. The story is nothing special, but this series seems to go for the slice-of-life route anyway. For now, it’s looking interesting enough.

Neo Angelique Abyss

Okay, let me correct that statement a bit: nearly every soundtrack that has a choir is automatically win in my opinion. You can of course always take it too far. I’ve found that obscure series are always either incredibly good or incredibly bad, and this one’s obviously of the bad kind. Really, it’s hilarious to see all the clichés present: a huge cast of bishies, all great fighters, a pretty female lead who has huge powers that enable her to stand in the centre of all these bishies, lots of angelic themes, and as a bonus, the evil power of the bad guy’s monsters turns out to give everyone it touches (except for the bishies for some strange reason) wrinkles. Of course, the worst fear for any young girl! I’ve ranted a lot about bad shounen-series, but that doesn’t mean that the shoujo-series don’t have their disasters as well. :P

Da Capo II Second Season

Err… don’t ask me why I found it a good idea to check out the fourth instalment of Da Capo. It was worth a good laugh at the predictable plot here (and of course the waking-up scene couldn’t be missing), but I admit that there have been far worse series this season than this one. This is really another one of those “rainy-day anime”, which you can watch on a rainy day if you need to spend time other than taking for example your dog out to walk. However, that takes me to the huge size of this franchise. Including this series, there’ll be 78 freaking episodes. I acknowledge that this is a nice series to relax and all, but I really can’t imagine myself sitting through 10 episodes of virtually the same over and over again, let alone eighty-seven.