Some great anime have a very detailed art-style with absolutely gorgeous animation. Others have a smashing soundtrack, performed by a famous composer. Others hired a cast of well-known voice-actors to perform on their characters. Again others put a lot of attention to their dialogue to make this as deep and thought provoking as possible. And more others don’t have any of this and just want to tell a good story. And that’s where Crystal Blaze belongs: an excellent anime on a low budget and the dark horse of the past spring-season.

The production-values are nothing to write home about. The animation is simple, the CG is obvious and not integrated and it doesn’t have a big animation-company working behind it (after all, Studio Fantasia’s reputation is rather questionable). And still, it makes up for everything through its amazing storytelling. The story itself is not very complex, but the way it’s told makes it something special. Throughout 12 episodes, not even one scene was wasted. Every episode continues to develop both the characters and the plot, ending in a very satisfying climax. There are no plot-holes whatsoever, everything gets closed off nicely, there are no stereotypes. For a fan of storytelling such as myself, this series was pure gold.

You should be aware of one thing if you want to watch this series, though. This series became the dark horse of this season for a reason. There’s one particular character which will turn off a lot of viewers: Manami. This is supposed to be a tale about adults, but she’s one of the very few teenagers in it, and she very easily gets on your nerves. She’s not a bad character by any means, and her weaknesses are used well, but the fact remains that the combination of an annoying voice and her continuous whining make her a very hard to like character. Thankfully, she gets less annoying as the series goes on.

Speaking of voice-acting, this is the second series along with Kurenai that did something interesting with its voice-actors. I can’t exactly pinpoint to what it was that the creators did, but conversations end up sounding much more like ordinary conversations instead of coming from a recording-studio.

All in all, Crystal Blaze turned out to be among my favourites this season, due to its great cast and awesome storytelling. This is exactly what a twelve-episode series needs to be, and I hope to see more non-fanservice series from Studio Fantasia in the future!

Oh god, the creators actually did it! They actually pulled off a great ending as well. This episode was really good, and amongst the best of the entire series. One thing I’ve noticed with endings that they often feel rather lukewarm. I think that my opinion of this seems to change with every season, but right now, I believe that a good ending comes from an episode that uses the building-up of the rest of the series. Too often I’ve seen endings that never use anything that’s been built up for apart from that bad guy that’s dead now, or something similar.

[SPOILERS sort-of follow for the endings of Ghost Hound, Kurenai, Bokura no and Seirei no Moribito] As much as I hate to admit it, thinking back, Ghost Hound’s ending wasn’t that good. It looked like a series that kept building up, but it never really built up for the stuff that actually happened in the climax. In the same way, Kurenai’s ending where Murasaki proposed to stay also came from nowhere, which is probably why that ending felt rather weird. An example of a good ending is Seirei no Moribito: it was very straightforward, but it kept the same pacing and mood as in the rest of the series. The ending for Bokura no is such an example as well: it remained within the flow of the original series, while also providing a lot of new things that fitted within the series.

Crystal Blaze in the same way stays within the same mood in its final episode, and doesn’t become anything completely different. There’s still its great sense of storytelling present, and it still had a lot going on. There were a few clichés here and there (the self-destruct-button that needed to be stopped, the finish with a big explosion), but the execution was done well enough to make these twists acceptable.

I have to especially give this series credit for the way this episode started. I mean, how many times have we already seen an important character, about to be shot, followed by a fade-out and a cliff-hanger? I nearly forgot that people can actually get shot in these kinds of things. Seeing Sara getting shot in the back was a real way to catch my attention, as ironically, I never saw that one coming, even though she’s got the powers to regenerate and all.

This was also really an episode where the characters really come together. Everyone apart from perhaps Manami (who only played a really small part anyway) was really awesome to watch. The humour was better than ever, and you’ve got to love the return of JJ. As it turns out, the poor guy was never caught, and instead he had been hiding inside the building’s air shafts for all this time.

Now that everything is over, I’m still of the opinion that Crystal Blaze is among the best series this season, and it really knew how to use its limited time of 12 episodes. Especially since the production-values are nothing to write home about, this really surprised me. For those who quit this series due to Manami: don’t worry. Once this series hits its second half, she becomes a regular side-character and the focus shifts to the other ones.

To close off, this series has one of the funniest aftermaths. Even when compared to pure comedies (who never seem to be that good with their aftermaths anyway, for some strange reason). Doc, dressed up as Kitoh was awesome. Although I didn’t wish to have seen that “particular” shot of Porilyn…

This episode started out strangely straightforward for a regular Himitsu-episode: a number of boys mass-committed suicide, and saw the image of a boy just before they died. It seemed a bit too obvious for them to just have died, while being haunted by a boy whose death they were responsible for. And indeed, this episode turns out to be much deeper. Those who have been waiting for Maki’s background can rejoice, because this episode really gives the details of how he ended up shooting his partner.

It all happened during the investigation of a horrible mass-murderer, who murdered twenty-eight people and left their bodies in the most horrible states. When he was caught, he ended up killing himself. Katsuhiro (Maki’s former partner) was in charge of examining his brains, but when he looked at it, he turned crazy, shot the MRI-device containing the murderer’s brains and when he attempted to shoot Maki as well, Maki was forced to kill him.

In the end, this same murderer turned out to be behind the mass suicides. At the end of the episode, we’re given the reason of hypnotism, but that can’t just be everything. You can’t hypnotize anyone to do something against his will, let alone kill himself, so perhaps he combined this hypnotism along with whatever caused Katsuhiro to go crazy.

Overall though, excellent episode. Can’t wait to see the second half of this story next week.

Aww, such a charming episode this time. This one’s about Minamo again, and a blind girl who she meets at the beach. The girl turns out to be a former classmate of Minamo’s classmates, and she’s blind. This was an interesting episode to show how blind people have been dealing with the metal and all.

The dialogue writers were in their element again, so it was another one of those hard-to-understand episodes, but from what I managed to understand: the girl is a metal-artist. She’s used her imagination that she got from her blindness to create unique world, concepts and objects that people with vision would never think about, which is why she got a lot of fans. If I understood correctly, then this went out of hand a bit when one of her rivals caused her to go brain-down.

The next episode-preview was a really interesting one: all it showed was a shot of Haru and Minamo, relaxing. Nothing more. Due to the nature of these previews, and the fact that series usually seem to save something special for episode 13, I’m really looking forward to it, and something’s telling me that something major is going to happen to the two of them. And even if that doesn’t happen, the episode still will focus a lot on the two of them, which is good enough for me. :)