For December, I decided to write my summary a bit earlier than usual, so that I can gather a bit more time to work on my 2008 Summary, where I list my highlights of the past year. Overall, this has been a very straightforward month without many big surprises: the series that I expected to do well did well, and the ones I expected to disappoint disappointed indeed. Nevertheless, there quite a few series with very strong finishes, despite looking mediocre at first glance.

#24 (24) - Junjo Romantica - (7,5/10) - The story between Misaki and Usagi has been gobbling up way too much airtime, it’s even more extreme than in the first season. While I agree that Usami’s family ties are finally starting to make sense a bit, I still hardly care about these guys, and wish that the creators would have focused more on those other couples.
#23 (20) - ef ~ a tale of melodies - (7,75/10) - It’s a shame that this season turned out to be not as good as its prequel. The conclusion lacked impact, and it didn’t really make an impression on me, although Kuze’s storyline did have a satisfying conclusion.
#22 (23) - Kannagi - (7,75/10) - The climax so far has just been too forced. While I admit that it’s better than your average conclusion of such a series, it just feels out of place in this series.
#21 (10) - Chaos;Head - (8/10) - Well, so the ending sucked. This definitely was the worst month for Chaos Head, and it’s a shame that it didn’t have a strong finish. Still, I enjoyed the rest of the series a lot, so at least it delivered for most of its airtime.
#20 (19) - Telepathy Shoujo Ran - (8/10) - Well, so the final arc wasn’t among the best of the series, and the final episode was way too cheesy for its own good, but nonetheless it’s been a fun series to watch.
#19 (16) - Nodame Cantabile - (8,25/10) - Like the rest of the series, this month for Nodame Cantabile was good, but nowhere near as awesome as the first season. I also heard that the creators rushed some of the chapters of the manga for no reason, so the second season has definitely been a step back for this series.
#18 (14) - Kurozuka - (8,25/10) - The ending wasn’t the highlight of the series, my favourite parts were where Kuro had to go up against the turtle guy. Nevertheless it’s definitely been a fun series with lots of good action and horror.
#17 (8) - Tales of the Abyss - (8,25/10) - Mohs annoys me. He needs some development. Apart from that, this month Tales of the Abyss mostly spent building up for the real meat of the story. So far, so good.
#16 (13) - One Outs - (8,5/10) - What this series needs to pay attention to is that it needs to evolve in its second half. The mind games are fun and all, and I’m still really enjoying them, but can the series really remain fresh in the second half? Well, there’s only one way to find out!
#15 (22) - Gintama - (8,5/10) - Another hilarious month for Gintama this time. My favourite was the episode where the girls suddenly all needed to lose weight. Brilliant!
#14 (17) - Mobile Suit Gundam 00 - (8,5/10) - The good: a thickening plot, lots of development and no important character is forgotten. The bad: Saji and Louise. The ugly: some of the name of these Innovators… -_-
#13 (11) - Clannad - (8,5/10) - Ah, finally! The characters have left school, and finally this show really sets itself apart from all other visual novels for real. I’m getting really curious what this series can offer now that nearly all of the characters have left and/or grown up.
#12 (18) - Ga-Rei Zero - (8,5/10) - I love how everything did come together in the end for this series. I definitely had my doubts at times, but this series managed to deliver a solid climax, worthy of that first episode.
#11 (6) - Skip Beat - (8,5/10) - While the story with the director’s daughter may have been a bit too cheesy, I forgive this series completely because of the downright awesome chicken suit in the episodes that followed. I never knew that poultry could be this much fun.

#10 (21) - Tytania - (8,5/10)

Finally this show is getting good! It took a while, but I’m finally getting warmed up to the series and the show is getting better and better with every episode. This is exactly what I hoped for when I started watching this series, and especially episode 12 went into the right direction.

#9 (9) - Hyakko - (8,5/10)

I’m definitely going to miss this series. The finale actually turned out to be really good, despite being a comedy series. For once, such a finale doesn’t try to be as dramatic as possible, but instead it focuses on perfectly normal problems, and at the same time it also allowed the viewer to get to know the entire cast better. Another excellent series from Nippon Animation!

#8 (12) - Blade of the Immortal - (8,75/10)

Second Season Where?! Seriously, this show is just too good to end at this point. There’s buckets of potential lost if this isn’t somehow continued in some way.

#7 (15) - Jigoku Shoujo - (8,75/10)

Well, this month didn’t manage to convince me otherwise: this show is weird. Nevertheless, this month has shown some of the best episodes of the third season so far, so I don’t mind at all. ^^;

#6 (1) - Casshern Sins - (8,75/10)

Not as impressive as in November, but I’m still really enjoying this series with its very powerful sense of storytelling.

#5 (7) - Shikabane Hime - (8,75/10)

Ooh, that was a very solid ending, which exactly used what the rest of the series had been building up to. The climax of the series is definitely a worthy highlight of the first season, and I’m looking forward to what Kuro can offer.

#4 (2) - Michiko e Hatchin - (9/10)

Very eccentric broadcasting policy aside, this show has been pure gold, and especially the brutal storyline surrounding Michiko has been awesome. Hatchin’s storyline has managed to form a very strange contrast in comparison.

#3 (3) - Bonen no Xamdou - (9/10)

Now it’s finally the time for this series to show off what it’s been building up for, with some amazing results.

#2 (5) - Porfy no Nagai Tabi - (9/10)

It’s a shame that I have to write this before the big moment of this series, but nevertheless the conclusion of Porfy no Nagai Tabi has been excellent so far. Every episode just makes you want to see these people reunite again, and the creators know exactly how to keep the viewer hungry.

#1 (4) - Mouryou no Hako - (9,25/10)

And now it’s finally time for this series to show what all its building up has been good for, and as expected this series has become absolutely amazing. Even though it’s just a series about talking, some of the dialogues make a huge impact. A truimph in subtle storytelling.

Short Synopsis: Casshern and Lyuze run into a certain someone.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10 (Excellent)
Ah, so that was the meaning of the insert song of the past two episodes: it’s the new ED, or at least a version of it. Ohoho, very clever, although I do hope that in the future, it’ll get its own animated frames, rather than recycled cells from the series. But then again, I’m still convinced that the first ED had recycled cells from one of the final episodes as well.

In any case, this episode revealed quite a number of juicy plot twists when the creators let the main characters run into Braiking Boss. As it turns out, the guy has completely lost his power after the destruction began. He reveals that Ouji isn’t just a random person who keeps running into Casshern, but instead he was the one who created Casshern. He already had Ringo with him at the time, and she seemed to have a very strong bond with him, although she seemed to have forgotten that as well. In fact, she too is a being that’s somewhere in between a human and a robot: she feels the effects of the destruction, she doesn’t need to eat, and yet she has blood.

It was also Braiking Boss who ordered the destruction of Luna, since he felt that there should be only one person in charge, and Luna was beginning to undermine his authority. Well, that plan backfired like crazy on him, since it also cost him his authority, but it seems that that’s the reason why Casshern killed Luna. I’m not sure whether I understood things correctly, but Ouji seems to really believe that Luna’s dead. And at the very least, Casshern once had the full intention to kill off Luna, and there had to be some way for him to gain his immortality.

I also really wonder: what was the cliff-hanger for? It seemed to me that for this small arc, there’s not enough information left to fill yet another episode, and yet the cliff-hanger came at such a point where Casshern was about to kill himself, but got stopped by Ringo. The bond between the two of them really seems to be a central one in this series; it seems even more important than the one between Casshern and Lyuze…

Short Synopsis: Fan Hulic and Miranda attack Alses’ mansion to rescue Lyra.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10 (Excellent)
And so this episode quite forcefully removes the last fear I had against this series: the fear that the cheesed up romance between Fan Hulic and Lyra would ruin the series. The creators first proved me wrong by making their reunion actually adorable, rather than annoying, and if that wasn’t enough already they then proceeded to actually kill her off from the show! So that’s what that sequence in the ED meant, where she is covered in thorns: it wasn’t to symbolize that she’s the eternal damsel in distress of this series, but rather that she never could live a really peaceful life.

This really was the episode to show that, even though everyone’s dressed in frilly clothes and drinks tea when going into battle, the creators mean business. Alses losing his eye is the perfect example of that, and I think that this really is the perfect closure for the first half of the series: it’s been quite dull at times, but nevertheless it knew exactly how to build up, and the real meat of the eries is about to start, with Fan Hulic finally hating Tytania enough to fight against them seriously.

I feel that Alses losing his eye is going to trigger a snowball of reactions within Tytania, which is going to really upset the balance they have created so far. Salish is going to have to deal with a deranged brother, Idris lost one of his lackeys, and Ariabart and Jouslain are also probably not going to sit still after these events.

Visual novel harem adaptations have really become a notorious genre in anime. A lot of them are simple uninspired high school romances, but like with all other genres, there’s always a series that tries to go into a completely different route. An example of this: Chaos;Head, or as it’s official title seems to be ChäoS;HEAd. In twelve episodes, it presents a tale of delusions, paranoia and mind games.

While most of these series try to appeal to the otaku by letting lots of girls fall for the same guy for often inexplicable reasons, Chaos;Head goes even a step further, by featuring an otaku and hikkikomori as a lead character. For once, the lead character isn’t your “typical loser”, but rather one of the biggest losers that you can think of. He has no social skills whatsoever, has fallen in love with a fictional character and imagines her as a real person, and he’s generally hopeless in everything he does except for playing video games. This anime attempts to show what’s going on inside his mind, and how the guy reacts to all the weird things that happen throughout the series.

That’s nice and all, but what indeed makes this series enjoyable is the huge amounts of question marks that fly past the screen. There’s a huge backstory behind everything, and especially in the beginning episodes hardly anything makes sense, and it’s a lot of fun to watch everything unfold and see the pieces of the puzzle come together.

The problem with this series lies with its characters. This series is a harem series after all, and as the series goes on, more and more females strangely gather around the male lead. Thankfully most of them have very valid reasons to do so and don’t feel out of place, with one exception: Rimi. As the show goes on, she transforms from mysterious do downright annoying, and her romance is really underdeveloped. Combine that with an underdeveloped ultimate villain, and indeed, the ending becomes way too cheesy for its own good. It basically ignores most of the building up of the rest of the series and goes with a very predictable and unrewarding conclusion that just doesn’t match the series.

So no, when it comes to confusing series about visions and the altering of reality, then this series isn’t the best. Serial Experiments Lain for example is still better than this series, but it’s a very fine attempt nonetheless.

Giant Robot shows from the seventies are pretty like today’s harem series: there’s a lot of bad stuff among them: uninspired premises that get nowhere apart from perhaps a rushed conclusion in the end. The trick is of course to find the good ones among the crappy ones, but that’s not always easy, considering how all of them look so much like each other. Still, I’ve managed to find one (thanks to this guy, link only in Dutch, unfortunately): Invincible Superman Zambot 3. This series is so much more than a simple robot-bashing show. This is a giant robot-series, Tomino style.

This show makes it clear that even before creating Mobile Suit Gundam, Yoshiyuki Tomino was already trying to popularize the realistic side of mechas. While the series starts out as your average series, where a bratty 12 year old kid gets the unlikely chance to pilot a giant robot, it soon becomes clear that saving the world isn’t just going to be a simple matter of beating every enemy robot that starts wreaking havoc. Already after a few episodes do we see the public reaction to the titular Zambot descending into sheer hate, as people start blaming the lead characters for destroying their homes in their fights.

Throughout the series, this continues to escalate into further chaos. Because the lead characters are a bunch of adventurous kids, they take way too long in realizing what sort of arrogant idiots they’ve been, and at the same time the tactics of the bad guy (with the awesome name of “Killer the Butcher”) continue to get more desperate and gruesome.

The monster of the week theme does remain, though, so that’s a bit of a downside, and there are really way too much transformation sequences. And as it turns out, there’s a whole backstory there to explain why out of all people, we have three kids piloting the robot who decides the future of the world. To be honest it sounds a bit far-fetched, but at least it’s better than nothing, and it’s sufficient to support what this series is really about: the fact that war is BAD, and should never be underestimated. A bigger problem is that a number of characters aren’t fleshed out enough. Especially the main villains are a bit too one-sided. It’s also strange that Kappei’s father, without a doubt the manliest member of the cast, is useless throughout the largest part of the series: he hardly ever does anything, he’s just there, even though there’s enough for him to do.

Nevertheless, the point of this series was to show that robot battles aren’t as idealistic as portrayed in most of these giant robot series, and that’s exactly what it did. When a building gets destroyed, it really gets destroyed and doesn’t magically disappear. People are going to care about it and get angry. Saving the world has never been easy, and especially the series’ finale lets that message sink in. Yeah, I can understand why Tomino got his nickname now. ^^;

Usually, I’m not too big of a fan of school life series. I dunno, but they always look the same, there’s always the same set-up, often filled with dull moments. It makes it really hard to separate the cream from the crop at first sight, and even the ones that do seem vaguely attractive often turn out to be somewhat enjoyable, though not entirely worth the time invested in it. However, there are obviously exceptions to every rule. For this one, it’s Hyakko. I’m still not sure why I ended up enjoying this series so much.

From the outside, Hyakko seems like yet another comedy about a group of four friends. And yet, it feels fresh and engaging. Instead of simply focusing at a group of four or five friends, the creators attempted to bring an entire classroom to life, and that actually turned out pretty well. High school (or middle school or whatever the school system in Japan is called) indeed isn’t a time that you spend simply with three or four other people over and over and over again, you actually meet lots of different people with very diverse interests, and that’s what Hyakko is about.

And what makes this series extra enjoyable is the very strong cast. Unlike other school series with lots of characters like Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei and Pani Poni Dash, the characters may all have their own traits, but none of them are cardboard cut-outs, and all of them receive a bit of depth through the series, making their quirks even more enjoyable. Especially the lead character Torako is really fun, but really: the entire cast is enjoyable to watch with hardly any exceptions. I really laughed hard during the best jokes of this series. I also just have to give credit to the teacher’s voice actor: this guy sounded like he was having the time of his life while voicing his character, resulting in a bunch of awesome one-liners from the guy.

Unfortunately, like most comedies out there this series also got the inexplicable need to introduce some drama as the series nears its end. But as a surprise, it actually doesn’t suck, and it’s in fact pretty good at times. This series never forgets that it’s also supposed to be a comedy, and just when the drama gets too heavy, it’s sure to insert some sort of hilarious joke to brighten up the mood. This works great, compared to most other comedies which completely forsake their comedy for the sake of a dramatic ending. The ending itself is also really original: for once it isn’t about some sudden overdramatic plot twist or love triangle, but instead a very normal problem that is handled very subtly. Really, more comedies should look at this series for that.

My only complaint with this series lies in the sound department, something of which I hardly ever have problems with. The serious scenes of this series were nearly ruined by the sound director, who at times is a bit too eager in inserting sad piano music when there’s absolutely no need for that whatsoever. The OP and ED are also plain baaaad. Seriously, Hirano Aya should stop doing singing stuff she’s bad at. And it’s not even one mistake she made, she just keep taking jobs that are simply way too far out of her league. Her work on Nijuu Mensou no Musume was excellent, but apart from that I really haven’t heard any performance of her that really impressed me.

Nevertheless, in a season full of good comedies, Hyakko has turned out to be the best of them after Skip Beat. There are only a few episodes that are just mildly hilarious, apart from that all of them hit the mark. The drama is a bit too cheesy at times, but for a comedy it’s way above average in that aspect. And even though it has received mixed reactions, I really enjoyed the characters. I’m really getting amazed at how each non-kiddie series from Nippon Animation seems to turn into something special.