Short synopsis: Haru and Minamo go on a date.
Highlights: Really, can RD get any more awesome than this?
Overall Enjoyment Value: 9/10

If you’re wondering why this entry is so fast, I’m experimenting this time with Horribleraws. I’ve used them as well on Ultraviolet’s first episode as well (great show, by the way), in order to see whether they’re really that horrible. Well, the video and audio-quality are indeed not that good, and the Japanese commercials are even more annoying than the things we have to endure on Dutch tv, but the speed of these guys is quite impressive. Heck, I remember how they released Kaiba, more than two days before any other source got hold of another version. Right now, their quality is pretty horrible, but it’s going to be interesting if they manage to improve their quality as time goes on…

In any case, enough off-topic, because this episode of Real Drive was just AWESOME, even though it goes into an entirely different direction from the rest of the series. Basically, like mentioned above, there is no case in this episode, and all that happens is that Haru tries to chase off a bee that parked itself on a sleeping Minamo’s nose (really hilarious) and the two of them going on a date afterwards, where Haru’s past gets revealed. The entire thing was basically one huge chunk of nostalgia, and the result was absolutely charming.

During said flashbacks, some entirely new background tunes started playing. As it turns out, Haru’s biggest inspiration to become a diver was a group of dolphins he used to play with as a child. Ever since, he’s been fascinated with them. This episode shows us exactly how he went from a casual diver to a professional one, and met Minamo’s grandmother and Kushima and started working with them. He turned out to be an expert in skin-diving, which is why he probably was used in order to retrieve the red stuff in episode one.

I could praise this episode to heavens, but this is really one of these episodes you need to see for yourself in order to understand its awesomeness. Let me just say that if this series is already this awesome at its 13th episode, the God knows what the creators have in store for the rest of this series…

Vampire Knight is probably the closest you can get to a gothic anime. It’s dark-themed, lots of black, there are vampires, et cetera, et cetera. If you like your main dish to consist of angst and bishies, then look no further, because Vampire Knight has lots of it. Unfortunately, that’s also where its problems lie…

Angst can be beautiful if used well, but it can be disastrous if abused. It works best as support, or a stepping stone towards something bigger. Vampire Knight doesn’t seem to realize this, and delivers its angst with buckets at a time. The result is that nearly every episode can easily be summarized by “angst, angst, angst, bishies, angst, angst, angst, angst, et cetera”. There’s hardly anything else!

Because of this, it was indeed only a matter of time before Vampire Knights would enter the realms of cheese. It started out solid enough, but eventually, once Ichiru arrived the sinking ship was beyond rescue. Cheese can also come in good (Suteki Tantei Labyrinth, for example) and bad (the latest episodes of Code Geass come to mind as well), and the cheese here unfortunately kept edging for that nasty bad side.

I wish that there was at least something I could praise this series for, but I can’t get much further than to say that it’s been a very consistent series. For each episode, you know that there’s going to be angst and bishies, and thankfully the plot is interesting enough to have some potential for that second season that’ll arrive in October, but if you’re looking for quality entertainment, you’d better look somewhere else.

Okay, so the creators did not plan some big climax for episode 26, and instead just introduce a new arc. This begs the question: what the heck are the creators planning for the final 26 episodes of this series?

At the start of this episode, we see how Porfy rides the freight train of the previous episode. He soon falls asleep, and doesn’t notice that the train boards a ship, heading for Sicily. He figures that now that he’s on the island anyway, he might as well check whether somebody saw Mina. At a local market, Porfy sees a lot of fish shops and he asks a fish-selling boy whether it’s hard to catch a fish. The boy then says that it’s quite easy, and Porfy rushes to the shore to catch himself some fish, without having to pay for it.

At the shore, Porfy located a big one, and when he’s about to catch it, he gets help from a boy of his age that suddenly popped up, named Michael. Te two of them manage to catch this fish, and bring it back to the boy, mentioned above. The local mafia, however, are quick to catch him, and they bring him to their mansion. Basically because it’s not allowed to catch any fish without their consent.

The mafia-boss that speaks to them turns out to be a rash man, who apparently knows this Michael. Of course, only one fish can be overlooked, but Michael turns out to be a member of a rivalling mafia-family, which rather complicates things. Porfy tries to take the blame for catching the fish, but the guy doesn’t want to listen. They get saved by Monica, the guy’s sister, who apparently isn’t that worried with the rivalry between the two families.

She called for Michael’s brother (father?) to come and pick them up. While they’re waiting for them, Porfy tells Michael and Monica about Mina, and he shows them Apollo. Then Jack (the brother) comes in a cool sports car, and he nearly starts fighting with Andre (the angry guy) if it wasn’t for Monica.

Porfy then eats dinner at the Michael and Jack’s family, and Porfy meets Jack’s father. Apparently, he’s an American merchant who trades in olive oil. Afterwards, Porfy spends a bit of time alone with Michael, who explains him the apparent meaning of a family. That evening, Porfy helps fix Jack’s car a bit, and he heads off to what I guess is Monica’s house to see her. I suspect that both of them are in love.

At the moment, there are so many possibilities in which this series can go. I’m personally hoping that from now on, the stories will get darker as the series progresses, but let’s see what the creators have in mind.

What caught my attention was the huge amount of Americans with blond hair. If I recall correctly, then only one American in this series didn’t have blond hair. Interesting, how with the huge amount of realism in this series, this one detail remains a bit inaccurate.

Well, I asked this at my Nijuu Mensou no Musume-entry already, but it doesn’t hurt to ask this again, in order to get some more reactions. Another thing that caught my attention at the reader-survey was the relatively large amount of people who’d like to see those quick synopsises that I had about a year ago back.

For example:

Short Synopsis: As it turns out, the “secret training” turns out to be getting Soul and Maka to argue with each other in order to get them closer together.
Highlights: Makes sense; character-development; finally an exciting fight in this series.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10

(Yeah, I dropped the “bad”-part of this synopsis. If I recall correctly, the original reason why I dropped it was because this forced me to say something bad about each episode).

I must say, I’m impressed. I’m still not sure why, but this fight was the most exciting of the entire series. There was a pretty nice combination between humour and character-development. That werewolf was a pretty interesting enemy to fight against. On top of that, Maka’s blood turning black was an interesting new plot-twist, making me wonder which direction the creators plan to be heading to.

On a more serious note, Windspirit rather confirmed something that I’ve been noticing for a while now: Soul Eater isn’t the right series for me to blog. It’s not a bad series by far, but I’m always struggling to say something interesting about this series, so I just tend to fill space by nitpicking on useless details. There’s an interesting line-up standing for the upcoming Summer season, and I’m already planning to blog a lot of the new series. So yeah, don’t be surprised if I end up dropping this series from blogging next week, in favour of a new series. Even though this series ironically is my biggest source of readers at the moment. ^^;

I really need to be more careful on choosing which series I want to drop. When Rocket Girls first aired, I lasted four episodes until I gave up. I mean, it was about a space-agency that plucks a random girl off the streets in order to make her an astronaut; I was sceptical from the start. I tried to give it a few chances, but the first four episodes were mostly about the female lead Yukari being the teenager that she is, and disagreeing with everything. I predicted that these training missions would take until episode 10 or something, so that the final two episodes could launch her off into space, and that didn’t seem like worth the effort to me.

Well, that’ll teach me to make baseless predictions… as it turns out, those first four episodes were just proper build-up and Yukari ended up in space in already the fifth episode. The whimsical nature of the first few episodes is only because a major theme in this series is the contrast between responsibility and irresponsibility. I’m glad I went back to this series, as it turned out to be pretty enjoyable.

With the biggest strength of course being the characters: they’re pretty nicely developed for a 12 episodes series. Yukari may be a hard character to warm up to, but once she gets past her moments of teenage angst, she really starts shining. There’s an overall good chemistry between the different members of the cast, the side-characters also have defined personalities that make them come alive.

There’s one little issue with the voice-acting, though. After the first half of this series, a third main character shows up, and her voice is way too high-pitched for her own good, which tends to break the flow of this series a bit. The rest of her character is fine, but her overly squeaky voice made her my least favourite character in this series.

The creators obviously simplified the setting a lot, when compared to real-life rocketry, in order to make it not get in the way of what’s really important in this series: the characters. It was also a solid way to not get lost in its own techno-babble. Still, they overall did a pretty good job in coming across believable. This series has a lot of similarities with Sky Girls, and if you liked one, you’ll probably like the other.