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.

Now that the summer holidays have begun (well, for me, at least), I found it a good time to start wondering whether Star Crossed can be improved somehow. It’s been ages since I changed something on this blog, and I’ve basically been using the same blogging format for two years now. This is why it seemed an interesting idea to run some sort of reader survey. Perhaps some nice idea will come from it. Let me start with the following question: which part of Star Crossed do you like best?

	Which part of Star Crossed do you like best?
	Episode Posts
	Series Reviews
	Quick First Impressions
	Monthly Summaries
	Season Previews
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I’d also like to ask a number of questions, for which you can leave the answers in the comments:

1). What do you think of the amount of series I’m blogging at the moment? Is it too large, too small, just about right? Are there too many popular series?

2). Those who’ve looked at the archives probably noticed the huge amount of dead or botched-up pictures. Three image-hosts after each other turned against me, causing me to lose more than a year’s worth of screenshots. I’m currently slowly trying to re-upload these pictures, but how important is it to have these pictures back online again?

3). Is there something about Star Crossed that you’re missing? Is there a feature you’d like to request? Is there something about Star Crossed that you don’t like?

4). Regular commenters know that I’m not someone who replies to every single comment that gets posted on this site. I read every single one that gets posted, but I only reply if I feel inspired. Do I need to reply to every single comment? (apart from the ones like “where can I find subs of show X”, perhaps?)

5). Is there something else you’d like to add, but which I forgot to add to this survey?

Thank you for taking the time to read and reply to this. :)

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. :)

Spring 2007 was a big year for the epic mecha-series. There were plenty of huge-scale battles between mechas, space-ships and other sorts of futuristic technology, ranging from amazing (Toward the Terra, Bokura no), to the entertaining (Gurren Lagann, Heroic Age) to the downright cheesy (Kiss Dum). Among them was a series with a premise that could give Code Geass a run for its money in terms of political incorrectness:

Far into the future, twelve of the major countries enter a battle royale: every one has one overpowered mecha, and the goal is to be the last one standing, and be the country to rule the world. Whoop-dee-doo… guess which two countries will end up being the only two left? This series is way too full of nationalistic messages like “Japan rocks!”. This of course isn’t really the message that an international medium like anime should have.

Credit has to be given for the creators in their attempt to solve the language barrier in such an international series, but even that turns into a disaster once the characters start talking horrible Engrish. So indeed, in the final episodes, the creators just turn to universal translators in order to solve this problem. Eventually, they give up completely and make supposed English people talk Japanese without any reason whatsoever.

The saving grace for this series, however, is its characterization. Gigantic Formula would have been a total train-wreck if it wasn’t for the characters. Every single pilot of the mecha of each different country gets sufficient attention and development, in a way that surprisingly goes beyond all stereotypes. Every pilot has his or her own problems, and the creators do a really good job of making the viewer empathize with them, despite the ridiculous premise of the story. My personal favourite was the episode about the Venezuelans. At that point, I was actually willing to call this series a success…

Unfortunately, these thoughts got completely bashed into the ground by the ending. To be blunt: the final climax of this series is utter crap. Even compared to other series with disappointing endings, this ending was just bad. It forsakes nearly everything that the series has built up for, it descends into a boring cheese-fest with overmoralistic views that were most likely pasted together at the last minute. I guess I should have known that there was no way to get a satisfying climax out of such a premise as this…

I’m not sure who to recommend this series to. It’s obviously got a number of good points, especially around the middle when the nationalistic messages weren’t so god damn obvious, but at the same time it’s got an equal amount of bad or downright painful points. Even if you want cheese, you can better check out Kiss Dum. I guess that this is one for the mecha-fans, because it does have mecha-designs, coming from 14 different famous mecha-designers.

Ah, I should have known. There are no villains in Porfy no Nagai Tabi. A simple fight over the toilet doesn’t cause one to become mortal enemies. Everyone has his or her own reasons for acting. I so expected the mayor to come up with a terrible scheme to humiliate or hurt Porfy. Instead, he just looked for the quickest way to get rid of him, aka help him search for Mina. I totally forgot that possibility existed as well.

This episode was really heart-warming. It starts as Porfy helps around Iralia’s farm with all kinds of chores, and looks at the trees which in a few weeks will give off some ripe fruits. This reminds him of home again, and gets his spirit down. At the city hall meanwhile, Maximilian removes a poster that has been put over Mina’s poster, as the Mayor runs into him again, thinking how ridiculous it must be to keep searching, through Maximilian says that any piece of information is welcome.

Unfortunately, at this point there’s still no sign of Mina. Iralia’s father makes a proposal, that if Porfy doesn’t end up finding Mina, whether he’d stay with them or not. Porfy, however, declines and says that he’s going to find Mina, no matter what. Iralia’s father figures that this would have been the obvious thing to say. Then Maximilian returns home, and he brings along Daisy, and Daisy proposes to introduce Porfy to her father’s shop. In there, Maximilian orders a new bag for Iralia, to give her for Christmas.

Daisy then mentions how she wants to see the new bag when it’s done, though Porfy then notes that by the time the bag finishes, Porfy will already be gone, though Daisy says that he shouldn’t be thinking that way, and when he finds Mina, he could come back to this city again. They then visit what I guess is the storehouse for Iralia’s farm, or something similar. Maximilian then starts telling ghost stories, as the Mayor suddenly pops up with the news that he might have seen someone with news about Mina. Ironically, he’s carrying the same bag model that Maximilian ordered.

Porfy wonders whether the mayor still is angry about the time with the toilet, but the mayor quickly changes subject. Apparently, a guy who works at a local funfair thinks he saw a person who looked like Mina. Porfy immediately wants to go to that person. After Porfy shows this person the picture of Mina, and tells her that a guy with cards was with her, the guy says that this might possibly have been Mina, and they went to a city in the west.

After hearing this, Porfy wants to leave immediately. Iralia suggests Porfy to leave the next morning, but Porfy wants to chase after Mina as fast as possible. With that, comes saying goodbye, but first Porfy gets to ride a merry-go-round along with Daisy. As it’s the first time he’s seen such a thing, he had the time of his live while riding it.

A bit later, Porfy says goodbye to Iralia’s parents, who give him a bit of payment for the chores that he did, and Rebecca is actually crying to see him leave. Iralia, Maximilian and Daisy then drive Porfy and Apollo to the station. When they do, they say goodbye and Porfy heads off to the train, with Daisy being the saddest to see Porfy leave. After waiting a bit, however, Porfy finds out that the train he was supposed to take was cancelled. A freight train which was on the station is also heading in the same direction, so Porfy jumps on it and lands on a pile of bags, and the episode ends.

Porfy no Nagai Tabi has two different faces: heart-wrenching drama and warm slice-of-life. This episode showed the best of the latter, where the themes of saying goodbye in the final parts brought a really nice conclusion to this arc that I really didn’t see coming. With this, I also have no idea what the creators have been planning for episode twenty six, because it doesn’t look like it’s going for the big climax now that it just rounded up the longest arc ever since Porfy started travelling.

This was another one of those building-up episodes, mostly dedicated to show how l33t the powers of Medusa are. That’s one thing I rather dislike of shounen-series: it takes ages to get to the good stuff, and the building-up episodes hardly provide anything interesting.

This episode was decent enough, I suppose: we see the identity of the head witch and Maka finally stops angsting over Soul and in the next episode, she and Soul will get some special training in order to power up. I really hope that the creators won’t end up god-moding their characters this way… a common pitfall of these shounen-series is that they power up their lead characters way too much, instead of choosing for the more continuous growth. Claymore is one of the few who actually avoided this one.

Now this is more like it. I’m not a big fan of the new and angsty Ken, but he does spice up things a bit if he continues to develop like that (which is very likely, considering the nature of this series). This episode pushes the plot forward again, and I’m glad to see that some actual meaningful villains appear, rather than those goons of the previous episode.

It also seems that the supernatural research for the past world war is going to play a big theme in the rest of this series. In this episode, a doll, carrying Nijuu Mensou’s pendant appears in front of Chiko. In the meantime, Chiko’s aunt is still trying to poison and kill her (if I understood correctly, Chiko faints in this episode due to the poison that she was fed). Tome and Chiko also get a lot closer together in this episode.

The next episode is going to be the halfway-point of this series, so I hope that that one will give a few more hints as to where this series seems to be going. There are a lot of storylines going on, but no goals, apart from finding Nijuu Mensou. I want to know why the creators bothered to forcefully introduce such a supernatural element in this series, and what difference it would have made if they were just excluded.