Casshern Sins

Short Synopsis: Our lead character has upset a lot of (or robots in this case) by killing someone.
Highlights: That Casshern-guy is rather dull.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 6,5/10
As much as I’d like to fanboy over the unusual art style and setting, I just can’t. There were too many parts of this episode that just didn’t sit right with me. The tune that the creators picked for the OP doesn’t seem to fit the dark mood of the rest of the series, and most importantly Casshern striked me as a very dull main character. All he does in this episode is fight and angst. Come on, flesh the guy out a bit! Right now he just is another one of those angsty teens with an unknown past, even though he’s a robot. What I also don’t like about this series is its “good guys pretty bad guys ugly”-mentality. Even though they seem to have reasons for their anger at this Casshern, every bad guy ultimately becomes just target practice for this Casshern, none of them have any depth so far. The only thing I did like was that little robot girl and her caretaker. They were nice.

Rosario to Vampire Capu 2

Short Synopsis: Our lead character enters his second year at the “youkai school”.
Highlights: WHY?! WHY did this thing get a second season!?
Overall Enjoyment Value: 2/10
Christ. Here I thought that this series couldn’t possibly get any worse, and here this episode proved me wrong. This episode was downright terrible, with non-sensical characters, stereotypes all over the place and a downright ridiculous plot, not to mention the horrible setting that it inherited from the first season. It’s one thing to bore me, but a series has to be really bad if I end up face-palming through the majority of the episodes, just to get distracted from the pain that is going on on the screen. The only thing that was even remotely interesting was the “Moka-Tsukune-Moka-Tsukune”, but even that felt forced. I mean, I really want to give these bishoujo-series a chance and all, but it’s series like this one that really make it difficult for me to take them seriously.

Shikabane Hime Aka

Short Synopsis: Our lead character has yet to get involved with a group of “Shikabane”-hunters.
Highlights: A few flaws here and there, but nonetheless very solid.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
Ooh, I’m impressed. There’s a lot to like about this series: excellent soundtrack, very nice fights, a great air of mystery. I also really like the voices of the male and female leads: their voice-actors aren’t trying to be overly cute, but instead believable, which really works. The rest of the cast is a bit less, but that can be forgiven. I also like how this episode closed off with the two of them NOT staying together, and they’re still relative strangers to each other; it’s always good not to rush these things. There were a few coincidences here and there, like when the lead female fell right where the lead male happened to be, but it can be forgiven if they merely served to set up the story and characters. The two classmates were probably the most annoying about this series, but even they got a bit of development at the end of the episode. Overall, good series so far; nice potential, just don’t let this turn into a cheesy love triangle.

Hakushaku to Yousei

Short Synopsis: Our lead character can see fairies and gets kidnapped by a bunch of bishies.
Highlights: Is too busy trying to make its characters look “cool”.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 6,5/10
It’s a shame that this series started right after a bunch of awesome cat-shows as Chi’s Sweet Home and Natsume Yuujin-chou: the talking cat in this episode is nowhere near as awesome as Chi or Nyanko-sensei. In any case, this is your typical shoujo-series: female lead goes on an adventure and meets lots of bishies. There’s hardly anything that stands out, though. This series is way too busy with hairstyles that gently wave in the wind, and trying to look cool and charming. Terms as “Fairy Doctor” are needlessly translated to Engrish in an attempt to sound cool. The bishies all look way too much like each other, and none of the character-designs was really that appealing. What can save this series is that in the next couple of episodes is the way that it’s going to explore the European Folkore. If it can explore that in an interesting way, it might still stand a chance, but something tells me that our female lead is going to be too busy being saved by whatever bishie that comes near her.

Toradora

Short Synopsis: Our lead character gets to live next to a cute tsundere girl who tries to beat him up (sounds familiar, doesn’t it?).
Highlights: Parrots are awesome. This one isn’t.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 5/10
Oooooh… Kugimiya Rie… please stop doing these annoying tsundere roles that all look and sound the bloody same. They don’t get less annoying if you do more of them. I love your work at Gintama, but stop working yourself into a corner with these Shana-clones. In any case, I think it’s pretty clear that I didn’t like this series. It’s nicely animated, but that’s just about the only positive thing I can say about it. Nothing else stood out, the humour felt flat, and just about every female character annoyed the hell out of me. Considering that we’re still missing one of the lead females (I don’t even want to guess what her role in this series will be…), this promises to be one of your typical high-school romances/harems. I’ve seen enough series with overly cute females for the past summer-season, so I really doubt whether I’m going to continue watching this thing.

Hyakko

Short Synopsis: Our lead character… is lost.
Highlights: Cute.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
My first thought on seeing this series, with yet again a bunch of high-school-girl was “oh god, here we go again”. And then the episode actually started, and it actually proved me wrong. Hyakko is really a breath of fresh air after Toradora and Hakushaku to Yousei and their stereotypes, with genuinely interesting characters, with good chemistry between them. Nothing feels forced, and instead it’s just a lot of fun to just watch them interact. The characters may seem like stereotypes at first, but already within this episode, they managed to turn into something beyond the clichés. I first imagined how this would turn into some sort of Bamboo-Blade-Lucky-Star clone, but this episode proved to be really enjoyable. Let’s hope that it can keep it that way!

This is probably going to be the most difficult review of the past month for me. First of all, it’s always difficult to review your favourite series without delving into plain rambling, but this also isn’t a case where I just sum up the points I loved about it and get things over with. Himitsu is a series with a lot of weaknesses, and yet after Kaiba, it stood out for me as the best series of the past half year.

Let me first get these weaknesses out of the way. Himitsu is basically a crime series, where the main characters try to find the culprit of a crime by looking into the mind of the victims. Its biggest mistake is that can be a bit over-theatrical at times. Its got an excellent soundtrack that can however sound a bit too cheesy when put into practice, and it’s got those nasty tendencies of showing some strange instances of fanservice for the fangirls (why this is considered to be worse than blasphemy, while female fanservice is always praised, I don’t know).

Then there are the issues with the series’ messages. Because it involves policemen who look inside the brains, you’d expect a lot of ethical debates. A series that makes you think about whether or not it’s right to look into the privacy of a deceased. This however, doesn’t turn out to be the case: Himitsu merely just lists a large number of taboos that even Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei didn’t dare to touch, and presents its own views about them, but it doesn’t try to spark any discussion.

So, despite all this, why did I like this series so much? Well, first of all: it just is an excellent mystery-series. Every case keeps you guessing what’s going on. Because in the series, the memory-recovery system is a very advanced technology, people often need to wait a couple of hours before a new piece of the victim’s brains are loaded in the computer. This series is a master in timing its revelations, and keeping the viewer busy and wondering what’s going on.

This also is a very inconsistent series, for the good and the bad. If you liked one case, you can be sure that the next case is going to focus on something completely different. This isn’t exactly good for your expectations, but at the same time it makes the series extremely unpredictable: you’re never going to know what’s going to happen next. You’ll never know what the next episode will focus on. Every episode is different, and focuses on something else, and this makes for a very varied episodic series.
This series is also excellent in the few times it delves into horror. If you thought that Code Geass was shocking, just wait until you see a few particular episodes of this series. Madhouse has always been a production studio with very little censorship, and this series ranks along with Shigurui to their least censored series, making for a few gruesome cases that pop up once in a while and take you by surprise.

And then the characters. They really are a case on their own. For a long time, you’ll be wondering what the series is planning to do with them. Because this is a series that focus mostly on the people that are involved with the case, the actual main characters, the investigating policemen, at first sight seem to be neglected a bit. But as it turns out, the creators knew exactly what they were doing with their characters. Because they moved away from the manga this series is based on, they were able to plan this series exactly for the length of 26 episodes, and they’ve been fleshing out the main cast very subtly throughout the series.

The result is that the cast of this series comes together wonderfully in the final quarter of this series. All of them are developed very subtly, and each of them becomes memorable somehow, and overall they become a lot of fun to watch as they try to solve their cases. The finale of this series forms an excellent conclusion for this series, where this development is used to its full extent.

In terms of graphics, a lot of people may disagree with me, but I absolutely loved them. Madhouse has always had the reputation of straying away from the overly moe or GAR character-designs, and it’s the same here. The character-designs look excellent, and never seem to be trying to be overly cute. Overall, this is one series where the foreground characters and background art really mesh excellently with each other, making sure for some awesome shots.

Overall, it’s really a shame that the subs stopped right before the best episode of the entire series, and Himitsu has definitely been the most underrated series from the spring-season for me. It can be surprisingly intense at times, while surprisingly touching at others, fully tying in with the “fooling the viewer”-theme of the past half year that I’ve mentioned a few times already. It knows very much how to tell a story, got an awesome set of main characters and definitely turned into my favourite series after Kaiba ended.

Short Synopsis: Maki rushes in to find the hidden pieces of Suzuki’s memory.
Highlights: A bit over-exaggerated, but an incredibly tense ending.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
Okay, so this episode loses points for over-exaggerating a bit too much, but thankfully it turned into that over-the-top ending that I’d hoped for. In the end, it didn’t beat RD’s ending, but it really took second place. If it had a bit more subtlety, this episode really could have been incredible, but that field of flowers really was a bit too much. The hypnotism also was unrealistic, and the episode’s end was a bit too theatrical for its own good (why didn’t the MRI explode the way it did when Suzuki shoot it?).

But really, that climax between Aoki and Maki was SO intense that it made up for everything. Now everything really is clear: Kainuma’s final plan wasn’t to just proclaim his love for Maki and go for just the shock factor. He wanted to shock the guy, and then hypnotize him into murdering the entire of Daiku. Because Suzuki saw it, he went berserk instead.

The final bad guy? Daiku’s boss. It turns out that he’s been trading people’s memories for money. Now he’s had enough and wants to close it off by having Daiku kill off each other. He probably sealed Suzuki’s memory of Kainuma, because that’d be the perfect way to time their deaths. Unfortunately, this went wrong because Aoki realized in time that Kainuma was trying to hypnotize them.