Gokujou!! Mecha Mote Iinchou

Short Synopsis: Our lead character is pretty and gets invited to join the club of pretty people (no, seriously)
Chance of me Blogging: -30% (…)
This season I again avoided all the previews out there. I quite like this strategy, but the only downside is that I have absolutely no idea which series is which, and so I end up watching virtually everything… including the crap that nobody would want to watch in the first place. With a title as Mecha Mote Iinchou, I was expecting something with giant robots or something. What I got was a very cheesy shoujo series. And oh my god, this series truly shows the utter horrors of CG abuse. While if used well, you can get some nice effects, but the characters here are cell shaded 75% of the bloody time! Not only does the contrast with their regular drawings sting with the pain of a thousand needles, the creators also lack the budget to make them look good. The result is that people look more like strange marionettes than people: the way they move is just creepy. In the story-department, this show also sucks beyond belief: the lead female tries to reform a bunch of rebellious youths (and of course falling in love with one of them who had a tragic accident in his past that makes him all emo right now) and she tries to fight the super elite club in the school in which only pretty people can join. Even when compared to your average shoujo, this series is the epitome of blatant stupidity.

Isekai no Seikichi Monogatari

Short Synopsis: Our lead character attacks a very short-staffed flying island with his mecha.
Chance of me Blogging: 0% (No)
If I had to use one word to characterize this OVA, then it’d be ’shallow’. Here we yet again have a generic fantasy OVA that doesn’t stand out at any part whatsoever, not to mention the amount of time it tests the viewer’s suspense of disbelief. The lead character is only a teenager, and yet he can knock a small army of armed soldiers unconscious in less than a minute, and the special treatment he receives from all of the cute girls on the flying island makes no sense whatsoever. If this were a series, it might have grown into something interesting over time, but what can an OVA really add to this with its limited amount of time?

Shin Mazinger Shougenki! Z-Hen

Short Synopsis: Our lead character pilots a giant robot.
Chance of me Blogging: 20% (Depends on the rest of the season, really)
Remakes of ancient Sci-fi shows can be extremely different, depending on what they decide to focus on. Shows as Toward the Terra and Casshern Sins showed how good the genre can be. The new Mazinger clearly goes for the homage route, and it clearly wants to start the series with an as big of a bang as possible. What I really liked was the GAR-ness of just about every single scene of this episode. the manly passion really flowed continuously through the screen. And so what if it’s a cheesy save the world plot: it worked at least in this episode. My question is going to be: what are the creators planning for the rest of the show: this episode definitely was interesting and had a really fast pacing, but it also assumed that the viewers knew lots of the established characters already (which in my case wasn’t the case). Can it remain interesting, or fall down horribly in just a random string of monsters that have to be defeated each episode?

It’s quite a challenge to review the third instalment of Jigoku Shoujo, since I’m so incredibly biased for it. The third season basically continues with the same formula, of having 26 episodes, nearly all of them about someone taking a revenge against someone else. The show is evolving, though: the third season does feature a bunch of differences from the previous two, though. A few subtle differences… and a bunch of not-so-subtle ones.

The big difference in which the third season sets itself apart is the nature of all of the different revenges. There never really was a distinct line between good and evil in the Jigoku Shoujo, but at least you could see that the most of the (with a number of notable exceptions of course) ones asking for revenge sort-of deserved some sort of help. This completely disappears in the third season, when the people taking revenge turn into total misguided and deluded bastards, often sending people to hell who haven’t even done anything wrong.

This has several effects. On one side, some of the revenges become totally ludicrous: the formula quickly gets predictable, and sometimes the creators make a bit too generous use of their artistic lisences to send people to hell for the most bizarre reasons. On the other hand, though: it allows them to explore the boundaries of political incorrectness. The only thing it doesn’t touch is racism, but apart from that it confronts the viewer with countless of modern-day taboos, and presents them in a politically incorrect, and yet somewhat realistic manner; and that’s the creepy bit.

Jigoku Shoujo has also been known for its particularly strong climaxes, and Mitsuganae is no different. while I’m not going to spoil anything here, the eventual finale makes optimal use of the huge amounts of building up that the rest of the season put into it, up to the final minute of the show, and this has definitely been the best finale that Jigoku Shoujo has shown us thus far.

So yeah, the first half is mostly nothing special for Jigoku Shoujo’s standards, but the final quarter SO makes up for it. Obviously, in order to enjoy Jigoku Shoujo, you must be aware that it’s an incredibly repetitive series: in nearly every episode, you know for sure that someone is going to get sent to hell. But what makes this such a special series is that even though it has this weakness, its atmosphere totally makes up for it: it’s very consistent and thanks to an excellent sense of build-up, it only gets tighter as the show goes on. And that’s really the strength I see in horror-series: using creepy atmosphere and storytelling to draw the viewer inside the story, and Jigoku Shoujo doesn’t just succeed in it. It succeeds in it for 78 episodes.

Short Synopsis: A certain character’s father calls Jigoku Tsuushin.
Episode Rating: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
And with this, the Winter-season is really over for me. this was the second best final episode after Birdy the Mighty, but then again, when the entire season has been building up to this point, in a season where there only were a few endings that really impressed me, Ai had to start acting like an overly energetic schoolgirl to for me to change my opinion of this series. Jigoku Shoujo has a great personal value for me: after Mahou Shoujotai it was the major reason for me to start blogging, and more than three years and 78 episodes later and it’s still going strong as an awesome series. If there is going to be some sort of fourth season, I’ll definitely be up for it.

So, the big twist? The spider is Kikuri!?!? This seems to be a major case of split personality here, but it turns out that ever since Ai and the others left from Ai’s grandmother’s house, the spider has been happily camping inside of Kikuri’s head, who does seem to be a completely different person, say, a doll. This explains why she’s always causing trouble: it was as a means for her to resist the almighty spider.

As for Yuzuki: in the end she turns out to involve herself with her clients way too much. She turns against the spider and ends up getting punished. Ai then takes the blame, and becomes Jigoku Shoujo, even after finally becoming free, in order to let Yuzuki’s spirit die in peace. A very nice and creative ending, and it does make sense if you link it to the ending of the second season: Ai is mostly emotionless, but the people she spends a lot of time with she develops a bond. This was first started with Tsugumi, and the strength of the bond only became stronger in the successive seasons, in which in the second one she had to endure a punishment of losing her body, and in the third one she had to give up her chance to finally be free of being Jigoku Shoujo.

So, I have no idea what Studio Deen is up to for the current spring season, but these guys always manage to surprise me and they have produced many of my favourites. The past half year has been relatively weak for them, since all of their shows were simply sequels apart from Hetalia, so it’s about time for them to put some new stuff on the table again. Jigoku Shoujo has once again been a joy to watch despite the repetitiveness, and Ai’s character-design has to rank among the top-10 of best character-designs ever.

Oh, and we have a prime here after this post: the part on the right side-bar under “Currently Watching” is completely empty. I’ve never had that case in all the years that I’ve been blogging so far, there were always one or two oddballs every season at least. In any case this means that I can blog 12 episodes for the new season. Definitely going to be interesting.

Hayate no Gotoku - 2nd Season

Short Synopsis: Our lead character still is the butler of a rich but athletically hopeless girl.
Chance of me Blogging: 0% (Haven’t seen the first season…)
I remember how when the first season aired, I wrote a rather *ahem*biased first impression of it. Because of this, I figured that it would be a good opportunity to give this show a second chance with the airing of a second season, and I have to say that this episode was pretty enjoyable. It wasn’t anythings special, but it got a bunch of good snickers out of me, and didn’t feel boring at all. It really makes me wonder why the heck I hated the first season with a fiery passion…

Examurai Sengoku

Short Synopsis: Our lead character still is your average tough samurai with a thirst for sake
Chance of me Blogging: 0% (Obviously not)
Here’s one I missed during the past winter-Season (or rather: couldn’t find anywhere), but it finally has received some subs. Right from the bat, it’s obvious why this series hasn’t received any attention whatsoever: all it does is look pretty. The utter amounts of cheese in this first episode were almost unbelievable, the voice-acting is terrible and the editing is way too sloppy. I did get a good laugh out of it, though. The dialogue is so utterly ridiculous and cheesy that it becomes funny. Especially that lead character is hilarious: he tries so hard to look like your average cool and bad-ass protagonist-samurai, but he fails in this completely.

Slap Up Party ~Arad Senki~

Short Synopsis: Our lead character has demon powers and travels across the land
Chance of me Blogging: 10% (If he rest of the season is really bad…)
Um… yeah. The start of this episode really was too painful to watch, and really typical of Bad Gonzo. The biggest thing was all of the hopelessly overacting characters and uninspired scripts of these people. Oh, this was even beyond cheese, this was utterly terrible. Having said that, though: the comedy does work, surprisingly enough. This show is so incredibly stupid, but it is hilarious in the process. And it’s true that Gonzo has always had a knack for combining fantasy with comedy, and this is just a case where they take this to the extreme: the fantasy is incredibly bad, though the comedy is surprisingly good.