Hetalia: Axis Powers

Short Synopsis: Our lead characters… are a bunch of countries.
Chance of me Blogging: 100% (yeah, because I’m already blogging it)
I’m still a bit bitter that Holland wasn’t made fun of in this series so far (especially when even Estonia has its own character), but sarcasm aside, I really liked this series. You can trust Studio Deen to come up with the more crazy mangas to adapt, and the huge amount of country references was hilarious to watch. It’s going to be interesting if this series can keep this up. As for the ones who got offended by this series: you should start poking fun at other countries yourself.

Fresh Precure!

Short Synopsis: Our lead character receives the power to become a magical girl.
Chance of me Blogging: 0% (Obviously not)
So yeah, I checked this out in the hope that it might actually be something worthwhile, but in the end I couldn’t really find anything to really make me keep watching it, although it did turn out a bit better than your generic mahou shoujo series. I particularly liked how one of the bad guys put too much sugar in his tea because he had never seen it before, and the costume design is nice enough, but overall it really doesn’t try much to set itself apart in the mahou shoujo genre. Especially the lead character just tries too hard to be funny, the mascot character too. Not to mention the abysmally animated concert scene, the the downright painful ED and how everyone conveniently disappears when a monster shows up. I could also whine about the very bad physics in this series, but hey, this is a mahou shoujo series for kids. What else could you expect?

Denpateki na Kanojo

Short Synopsis: Our lead character is a legendary king who happens to be stuck in the body of a random high school boy.
Chance of me Blogging: 40% (Perhaps)
Yeah, the way this one started definitely got me worried. Here we have a legendary demon king inside a high school boy, and guess what: a cute girl arrives from out of nowhere to protect him. Still, this OVA is good stuff. The episode was well told and pretty nicely built up with some pretty good suspense parts. The lead characters slowly grew likable, and the action doesn’t aim to be as over the top as possible, but kept all the fight subtle but believable (I love it when a character actually gets disabled when hit by a very hard and solid object). Some parts were a bit too emo for my liking, but this is going to be a pretty good OVA if the rest of the episodes can keep up this pace.

Short Synopsis: Well… just watch the episode…
Episode Rating: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
Zomg…. what the heck happened here?! I was already expecting a lot of great stuff from the second season, but that Kazuki Akane would actually go this far… Oh my god, I still can’t believe the potential of it all. To those who were all whining about the predictability of the end of the first season, which stuffed Senkawa back in Birdy’s body. Well, let’s just say that IT WAS ALL DONE WITH A REASON!

Because of that, Senkawa has now been inside Birdy’s body for a bit too long, and the two of them have begun to merge with each other, effectively causing Senkaway’s consciousness to overwrite Birdy’s! This leads to a hilarious episode in which Senkawa has to take over Shion’s tasks, but he also lost his own real body, meaning that he’s not going to be able to show himself in front of his friends, and Birdy’s going to disappear as well.

Normally, this sort of issue will probably solve itself within the next episode or so with some quick Deus ex Machina, but this is KAZUKI AKANE we’re talking about! We’re only at the fifth episode at this point. Who knows what he’s going to pull in the rest of this series!? Something also tells me that we should be fearing for the girl in the wheelchair. She’s getting way too much along with Natoru. I just feel that something’s going to happen to her. After all, she’s the perfect bait for hostages.

And also, that was one awesomely animated fight scene!

Short Synopsis: Hatchin meets a boy of her age at a local bookstore.
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
It’s the episodes like this one that make this series so deceptive. One episode tells a cute love story between a bunch of kids, and yet the next one can focus on the incredibly dark Michiko-storyline. This really is a very varied show. Perhaps not the most balanced one, but you’ll never know what you’re going to get with every episode.

This episode definitely focused on the cute side of this show. while Hatchin’s stories generally lack a part in the overall storyline of this series, her character more than makes up for it. In this episode she also for the first time gets to find out what it means to have a crush on someone, ,though she more shies away from it. Especially the final shot of this episode made some impact. You could see that Michiko felt Hatchin’s sadness because it didn’t work out with the boy, and yet it was done with some great subtlety so that it didn’t turn out into an endless angst-fest.

And some more random comments: nice Ergo Proxy-reference with Vincent Law the author (he seems to have written quite a few books, they were really all over the bookstore ^^;). This episode also showed that it’s got a very talented musical producer: the background music never really stood out, but it was very varied and subtle, and overall it added really well to the different scenes.

Oh, and in this episode something finally happened that made Michiko and Hatchin sound like mother and daughter: Michiko wanted to have something, (a book in this case), and asked Michiko for permission to get it. That was definitely the sign (even more than the hug at the end of this episode) that they’re growing closer together. Oh, and next week should prove to be fun: another double-episode. Woo!