Short Synopsis: Oz attends his coming-of-age ceremony
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
Well, well; it’s been a while since I accidentally deleted my own post before publishing it. At the moment I don’t feel like retyping everything again for a second time, but I do want to say that Pandora Hearts is promising to be good stuff, especially since the second episode was even better than the first. The thing it reminds me of the most is a 20th century fairy tale gone really dark.

It’s good to finally see another potentially great show from Xebec. They’re a strange production company: quite a few of their shows… fail to really impress (Heroic Age never really went anywhere, not to mention last year’s To Love-Ru and Kanokon), but at the same time they really hit the right marks for me with The Third, and some other excellent shows.

Short Synopsis: Eins trains Zwei for his upcoming missions.
Episode Rating: 7,5/10 (Good)
Next up: Phantom, the show that turned me into a huge hypocrite (not that I wasn’t already one before, but okay). It was of course obvious that I was going to end up blogging this one, since I really like Bee-Train’s style of storytelling, but yeah: in the end it’s not exactly the most original series out there. Just like Kyoani, Bee-Train sucks because they hardly try to do any series outside of their comfort zone. On the other hand, however, I really like them because of their great sense of characterization and their very slow storytelling, in the same way as how Kyoani rocks because of their huge attention to detail.

This episode like expected was mostly building up. The biggest focus was making Zwei realize in what kind of situation he is: doomed as an assassin who serves to kill people, and a lot of the episode sees him training to make him catch up his skills with Eins (Ein?). I liked how this made the use of a gun difficult, and more than just a point-and-shoot game.

I’m not sure what’s up with all of the different people behind the scenes right now. At the moment they just feel too much like one and the same person, but with a bit of luck they’ll develop through the course of the series, and end up as individuals. But yeah, that’s most likely going to take a long while, considering that this is Bee-Train and all.

In terms of music, this time an interesting composer was chosen: Hikaru Nanase. She has produced a lot of soundtracks, but most of them didn’t really stand out, with two exceptions: she composed Shigofumi and Noein’s OST. The result is quite interesting: for a Bee-Train soundtrack it’s down to earth, and yet still awesome and varied. The ED by the ALI project is a bit disappointing, though. Bee-Train has already shown that they can even get some original music out of a band that just keeps producing the same tune over and over (the soundtrack they produced for .Hack//Roots still remains one of my favourite soundtracks out there, even though the series itself was a disaster), but the ED yet again felt incredibly out of place in this episode. The entire episode built up this somewhat slow and haunting atmosphere, and there the ED blasts out of the screen and nearly ruins this atmosphere.

Short Synopsis: Dan quickly loses his status of hero when he goes up against a girl.
Episode Rating: 7,5/10 (Good)
As for the shows I’m not going to blog:
- Asura Cryin’ has annoying characters.
- K-On also has annoying characters, and its sense of humour just isn’t my cup of tea.
- Sengoku Basara’s ridiculously overpowered sword-fights are fun; I’ll give it that, but it also remains just another incredibly overblown shounen series. Fine to watch… but to blog?

Basquash isn’t exactly my favourite show of the season, and there are a lot of things wrong with this, but I decided to give it the benefit of doubt. The biggest reasons for that:
- It’s got style.
- The setting really feels like something different. Despite the silly premise, you can see that there went a lot of attention in developing it. It’s one of the few original settings this season.
- Very nice graphics, if you can stomach the CG.
- A charming cast of characters, despite being a bunch of kids they’re fun to watch.

My biggest reason not to blog this show was that I’m not the biggest fan of Shoji Kawamori. Especially when I tried to blog Macross Frontier last year: I just couldn’t get myself to like the characters in the end. Still, I guess that the cast of Basquash feels a lot more colourful (on first glance, at least). I’m not exactly sure why, but what this show reminds me off the most is Gad Guard, a surprisingly good underrated show that especially became something unique in its second half, and I’m curious to see whether Basquash can do the same.

But yeah, until then I guess that I’m going to have to suspend disbelief quite a bit for that, with the 14-year-old lead and all (at least, I think that that’s his age). Ignoring cliche’s though, he amuses me so far. Especially how his attempts at setting up a delivery business only ended up in an increase of the bounty on him, and I also laughed at the incredible incompetence of the police in the city.

What this show needs to do now is continue fleshing out the characters. The cast right now has quite an interesting dynamic between them, but it needs to keep pushing this development forward. This doesn’t really look like the series that would work if it just descended into episodic random stories: this really looks like a typical series that needs some sort of plot to keep things going, unlike shows as Natsume Yuujinchou or xxxHolic and the like.