Well… yeah… at least I never saw this coming… it’s not every day where you can see an idol who cancels her first concert, crosses a galaxy and tames hordes of huge bloodthirsty soldiers just by singing. The sudden serious nature of this episode really caught me by surprise, but the most baffling was of course the way that it went from seriousness to silliness when Ranka arrived.

I’m obviously not that big of a fan of those Zentradi who all forgot about fighting and dumped their weapons, just because Ranka showed up. In fact, I’m wondering how they’ve even heard of Ranka. I can understand how she’s known in the Frontier-fleet, but I think that the entire universe is a bit too early to think about when she hasn’t even done her first live concert. Either that, or I hardly know anything about the Japanese idol-scene. I suspect it’s the latter…

One interesting detail is that Sheryl finally seems to realize that she isn’t going to get Alto that easily. In the last episode, she knew the date of Ranka’s first live concert, and one of the reasons she invited him to come along was probably so that he would miss said concert. Now that that plan failed, she became sick and Ranka found a device that crosses time and space in an instant (that may have required a bit more build-up, but whatever), I can see some nice character-development coming for the second half of this series. :)

Also, here’s a question to those who saw the original Macross: the “Macross” that Alto and Ranka ran into at the end of the episode, is that some kind of mecha that appeared in an earlier series?

xxxHolic Kei is the second season of the anime-adaptation of Clamp’s manga about modern Japanese folklore. In contrast to its predecessor, there are only 13 episodes, but to make up for it, the creators have put into these episodes the rumoured best chapters in the manga. The result is a second season that surpasses its first season in quite a few areas; not only in terms of manga, but also the anime staff learned some new tricks.

Without a doubt, the highlights of the second season are the first three and the final three episodes. Both contain rock-solid chapters, where the main characters Watanuki, Doumeki and Himawari (who have already been fleshed out really well by the first 24 episodes of the first season) really come together and get some major character development. The final episode is surprisingly light-hearted, but it does provide a perfect closure for the series.

The rest of the series is filled with stories, more reminiscent of the first season. They range from Yuuko, teasing Watanuki for the umpth time to some really effective standalone horror-stories. What’s interesting is how compared to the first season, the creators make use of much, much more foreshadowing. The stories in the first season always didn’t feel like a part of a whole, and this is fixed really nicely by the second season, which constantly drops hints and characters of stories that are still to come, which brings an interesting sort of unity to a series that consists out of random stories.

The animation has also improved a lot. You can see that the creators got a bigger budget for the second season, which makes especially Watanuki’s ramblings into some great visual comedy. Unfortunately, the animation dulls a bit in the less important episodes. The creators made good use of their CG to support the supernatural aspects of this series, and also the sound department is better than ever, although some tracks may have been played a few too many times.

Unfortunately, I can’t call the second season better than the first season. There’s something that holds it back from doing this, and it’s not just the length. In the second half of the series, there’s one particular multi-episode arc that breaks the flow of this series: the Kohane-arc. The only purpose of this arc is to show a mistreated little girl, and nothing else. Nothing really new gets introduced, and the way this girl gets abused despite her awesome powers have a good chance of breaking your suspense of disbelief. Especially for a 13 episode-series, if two episodes disappoint, it will be much more noticeable than if there were 24 episodes.

Still, xxxHolic Kei definitely carries the highlights of xxxHolic. It’s less consistent than the first season, due to the disappointing Kohane-arc, but to make up for that, it features the Spider Queen and Himawari-arc, along with a number of successful standalone episodes. The art has become better, and the characters also make use of the time that was spent on fleshing them out, so this series has been just as enjoyable as the first season for me.

Aww, such a sweet episode to close off this series. The decision to make the final parts of xxxHolic focus on the heart-warming, rather than the tension was a great one, as it’s provided a wonderful closure to the series. It’s clear that this is the end of the xxxHolic anime, and I’m glad to see that it left on such a positive note.

In this episode, it feels like every character who’s made an appearance in multiple stories returns, and along with that, we sometimes see characters from the stories in the first season return as random by-passers. On top of that, the animation was really good, and the best tracks of the soundtrack were played throughout the episode. Overall, the anime staff did an excellent job for the second season.

Overall, I must say that xxxHolic Kei has done a pretty good job in living up to my expectations. Obviously, my expectations for the second season have been a bit too high, which made the lesser points of this series stand out much more than usual. Despite this, though, the spider queen arc and Himawari-arc were especially worth it.

I must thank everyone for replying on the reader survey, because I got a lot of interesting feedback. I’ll try to consider some of the things you suggested, but what caught my attention the most is the criticism for my rating-system. In a way, I agree. Most of the times, I don’t see the difference between 83/100 and 84/100, so it would be near-impossible to try and explain this.

The things these guys have said on the matter got me thinking about the right rating system for Star Crossed. This guy has a point as well: why waste so many different ratings on the bad shows? Why should one have so many room to differentiate all the different kinds of badness?

I don’t think that there’s one universal kind of rating scheme, it all depends on the reviewer. In my case, I’m in my element when I can praise a series to heavens, and while it’s fun once in a while to bash bad shows, I’d much rather spend time on the good stuff. Then I took a look at my list of reviews, and noticed that I already split up the series into basic categories, and wondered if I somehow could combine some sort of ambiguous star-like rating with this:

“100-94: A masterpiece, the best of the best
93-90: Outstanding series, with perhaps one or two small flaws here and there
89-87: Excellent series, definitely worth a watch
86-83: Great series, really enjoyable to watch.
82-77: Good, but could have been better
76-72: Has some great points, but significant flaws are holding this series back
71-65: An average series with one or two great parts
64-56: Mediocre series, not really worth your time
55-40: Bad series, stay away from these
<39: Painful, garbage, crap, etc”

I’ve never been that much of a fan of the 5 star-rating, for some strange reason. I’ve tried a few times, but they never really express what I want to: 5 different kinds of options do feel like to little, and if I include those half-stars, I’m with the problem again that the lowest categories will hardly be used. In fact, why do we always need to use a rating system with a number of options that can be divided through 5 or even 10? Why not something like… seven? So:

✩✩✩✩✩✩✩: A Masterpiece
✩✩✩✩✩✩: Outstanding
✩✩✩✩✩: Excellent
✩✩✩✩: Great
✩✩✩: Good
✩✩: Decent
✩: Mediocre

And the bad series just get a category with no stars at all. I mean, both Lucky Star and Shining Tears were unwatchable, and I can’t see why you’d want to differentiate between the two, if I’m not going to recommend it anyway. I’d much rather have a detailed distinction between the good series. And my current scoring would be relatively easy to change into this system.

The next idea was splitting these ratings up in different parts, to differentiate on what makes a series good. I refrained from doing this, mostly because I don’t agree with the standard system that review-sites as and Myanimelist are having. They make it seem like good animation and music together have just as much weight as a good story and characters, while I’m personally much more interested in storytelling. It’s no use to add in extra categories, because that’ll just end up cluttered. After a bit of thinking, I came up with the following areas that I find important:

- Storytelling (you can have a magnificent story in your head, but if it isn’t told well, it’s worthless)
- Characters (do the characters connect? Are they fleshed out and developed well enough?)
- Production-Values (thanks Autonomous Monster; this is basically a combination between graphics and music. In other words, a series with a high rating in this category is a proverbial feast for the senses)
- Setting (In other words: how much time has been put into designing the setting, and keep it consistent? How complex is the setting, and does the storyline make full use of this?)

I’ll call it the SCPS Rating system for now. For the next couple of weeks, I’m going to try and experiment a bit with this system. I’ll still continue to give out numerical ratings, in case this was a bad idea, but for each review I’ll give out a star-rating for each of these four categories, along with an overall one and see how things go. If it works well, I might dish out these star-ratings for individual episodes as well.