Well, I’ve made up my mind. I just finished episode 150 of Gintama, and it was indeed awesome. The perfect way to close off the series, no matter where you are in the series. Still, with this I’m going to drop this series. It’s the same with Ranma 1/2: I’d rather remember the classic first part, rather than stick with it for a few good episodes in a sea of mediocrity, especially since the good episodes don’t even come close to the standards that the series set in the past. But this review isn’t about the three digit episodes of Gintama, you can read about those here. This post instead is a review of the first 100 episodes, and a series that stands among the Law of Ueki and the Excel Saga as my absolute favourite comedies in anime.

Gintama is about a group of people who are willing to take any job for money, in a setting in which the earth has been taken over by evil aliens who settled in to live there after their victory, while the humans still live around as if it were feudal Japan. It’s structure is mostly episodic: most of the episodes are standalone stories in which the lead characters meet someone, or have some objective to overcome. While this formula can get incredibly boring in the wrong hands, the creators of Gintama turned it into gold.

Thanks to an amazingly witty sense of humour and a nearly limitless amount of creativity, the creators really manage to make the best out of this series’ format. In its jokes, it takes absolutely nothing for granted, and there are a number of absolute classic episodes that just deliver one brilliant joke after the other. The humour varies from parodies to character-based to downright random, all with their own highlights.

But what really sets Gintama apart from nearly all other comedies is its attempts to be serious. Usually, comedies fall apart horribly when they try their hands at some serious drama, which most often fall apart in horribly dull and cheesy messes. Gintama however only turns better when it gets serious. It knows exactly how to build up its stories, make them relevant and develop its characters. Its sense of dialogue in particular really is amazing: deep, meaningful, inspired and very detailed. Gintama was a series that could make me weep manly tears again and again.

Granted though, this series’ brilliance doesn’t last 24/7. Gintama does have a fair share of lesser episodes that, while nice to watch, border on the cliché, milk their jokes a bit too far or just fail in what they set out to do. Especially the first episode was one of the worst things that the creators could have picked to start off the series, because it ranks among the weakest of the series, but overall the entire first part of the series is hard to get into.

But when it does, the good parts really get better and better, and this trend continues for 100 episodes. I really recommend this series for anyone looking for a good laugh, because this series is just about everything comedies should be outside of compactness. The episodes after 100 are a lot less impressive, though. While they still have a good episode here and there, they just lack the creativity that made the first 100 episodes so awesome.

Okay, at this point I have no idea what’s going on with this series anymore. This episode was… disturbing to say the least. For the first time in this series, the gore really disturbed me, and this also is the episode that really put my ability to not believe in the witch to the limits. This time, Beatrice really goes all out with her magic.

So at the start of the episode, we’re left with five people still alive: Battler, Maria, Rosa, Genzo and Genji. It would therefore be logical if one of them were the culprit:
- Maria, if she indeed were the culprit, must have had some sort of help. Yeah, I suspected her before to be some sort of reverse red herring, but then again, she could never have killed six people at the same time.
- Battler would of course be the perfect culprit: how often can we suspect the lead character of being the murderer? But yeah, he’s just been accompanied with others too often.
- Genji is one of the more obvious culprits this arc: he distances himself away from the others near the end, he somehow ends up finding Nanjo and Kumasawa’s corpses in the middle of the rain, even though he was supposed to be inside, ready for the orders of Kinzou. And what the heck was he doing as Beatrice’s servant? That could have been an illusion from her just as easily. the question remains though: how did he fake his own death in the first arc?
- Rosa also is an important suspect, because she is one who could have faked her own death in the first arc. But in this arc she has been constantly surrounded by Battler and Maria. If she were indeed the killer, she would have had to ally with the two of them.
- And what about Kinzou? He survived in this arc, as opposed to getting himself burned. What’s the difference? Also, the only reason we have that he didn’t fake his own death is because he has six toes. Did he perhaps have an identical twin brother or something?

Also, I’m intrigued because in this episode Beatrice didn’t seem to realize that Meta-Battler differed from normal Battler, who acted totally different in this arc. My guess would be that in the first arc, he had less reasons to despair because at least George and Jessica, who he seems to like a lot, survived. In this arc, he had nobody and had to be accompanied by the ever-paranoid Rosa. Instead, the one who fought back in this arc was Rosa, in my guess she was motivated by some weird kind of mother instinct, but in the end it seems that she lacked the willpower of Battler in the first arc to fully reject the witch.

I think what made the gore in this episode work better was that for once the creators didn’t try to be as graphic as possible. For once that eliminates the need for censorship, but it also left a lot to the imagination, the psychological side of the gore. Especially during the *ahem*”dinner scene”…

Umineko at the moment is really like Higurashi’s first arc over and over again. At first it seems like an incredibly disturbing murder mystery, but when the truth gets revealed there turns out to be such a deep story behind it. Heck, can we even be sure that everyone got killed here? Knowing Higurashi, there promises to be so much going on, despite that at first sight this just seems like a repetitive killing spree.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

At the start of this year I wasn’t exactly the biggest fan of romance, but damn. 2009 has surely proved to be an excellent year for this genre. The year already started out with gems as Clannad’s After Story and Genji Monogatari, then it continued with the truly excellent Ristorante Paradiso and Cross Game, and if that wasn’t enough the Summer season only continued this trend of awesomeness with Spice and Wolf II and, of course, Aoi Hana.

At first sight, Aoi Hana may seem like your average lesbian series with lots of girls who cheesily fall in love with each other, but this series quickly proves those suspicions wrong when it subverts just about every cliché in the romance genre imaginable. FOR ONCE, romantic relationships are portrayed realistically, rather than those overly romanticized relationship you see in most average romances. For once, you see childhood friends who really behave like childhood friends, rather than the creators using the childhood friendship as a cheap plot device to get the lead couple in love with each other. For once, the two lead characters don’t end up falling in love with each other, and instead the main romance plays out between one of the lead character, and a side-character. And really: for once in a gay show we see actual straight romances. In fact, there’s only one lesbian in the entire series (Fumi, one of the lead characters). The rest is either straight or bi.

On top of that, this series is incredibly well told. there’s a huge amount of subtlety within the relationship of the most important characters in this series: the way they behave, feel and interact with each other is really done with a superb attention to detail. The series is only eleven episodes long, and yet the personality of each character can’t just be explained in one sentence. There’s absolutely nothing that’s shallow in this series.

The animation for this series also really stands out among the best in the romance genre. It’s very subtle, and portrays very accurately how all of the different characters move. But it’s especially the scenes in which people are touching each other, whether holding hands or messing with each other’s hair, in which the animation really makes those movements feel so incredibly real.

I feel hard-pressed to pick up any flaws for this series. Obviously, you don’t want to watch this series if you dislike a slow-paced series, but it really is a must-watch for any fan of the shoujo-ai genre in the way that it so realistically portrays lesbian relationships. There are a few scenes here and there that could have used a bit more build-up (like Kyouko’s fiancee, or the ending), but those moments are few and far in between. Aoi Hana really is one of my top picks of the past Summer Season.

Ah, this really was a cute ending for such a consistently excellent series. While not the best single episode of the series, it provided closure in a “life goes on”-kind of ending. The series feels complete, even though the manga goes on after this point.

As for my big fear for the ending: thankfully the creators didn’t end up making Fumi and Akira a couple, although this episode did play around with the romantic feelings between them. I began to fear a bit when Fumi saw Akira hanging out with Kou together and got jealous, but in the end the creators had a very nice explanation for that: Fumi had forgotten that her first crush was the one she had on Akira, when they were little. It’s this realization that made for the charming ending, and yet at the same time you could see that Fumi and Akira weren’t cheesily falling in love once they realized this. They could become a couple in the future, they could not. Who knows? Thankfully it feels much more natural than just about every other childhood crush out there.

Overall, I’m really glad that I managed to stick with this series. It definitely stands among my Top 3 of the series that premiered at the Summer Season, along with Tokyo Magnitude and GA. At the beginning of the season, I claimed that this could be one of the best summer seasons ever. That unfortunately didn’t hold up, since a number of series did end up a bit disappointing after their initial episodes (most notably, Canaan, Bakemonogatari and Sora no Manimani), but I do have to agree that there are surprisingly few series that are below average. And Aoi Hana really ignored everything and just went on to deliver one consistently solid episode after the other.

At this point, it seems pretty likely that I’m going to be forced to blog Kimi ni Todoke next season. I have no idea what it’s going to be about, other than that it’s also going to be a shoujo romance, but I do have to say that it’s going to have to try really hard to be able to beat this series.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Well, I guess that with this, Higurashi finally comes to an end, and I have to say that the creators couldn’t have chosen a better way to close it off than with Rei. It really made excellent use of the OVA format to surpass itself, in terms of comedy and silliness in regards to episodes 1 and 5, and in terms of solid scriptwriting for episodes 2, 3 and 4. I’m really going to miss this series.

Anyway, I’m not going to write a review for this OVA, because I know from experience that I’m terrible at those kinds of reviews, especially if I don’t marathon them. What I do want to say though, is that everyone who finished the TV-series should really also give the OVA a chance. It’s one of the very few cases in which the OVA is as good as the series it’s based on.

Anyway, this episode closes off Higurashi with another silly chapter, in which Rena swallows a “Magatama” which makes her fall in love with whoever holds an identical “Magatama” in a different colour, which shows Rena spooning up to Tomitake, Takano, Oshii and eventually Keiichi through a hilarious episode. I liked it better than the first episode of Higurashi Rei, because even though it was very silly, it also showed a new side of Rena: the side of her that wants to be close to others, and so is very easy to adapt her hobbies to others.

This also leads to an awesome Mah-Jong match, and at that point you could really see that it was a wise decision to put the director of Shion no Ou on the director’s position, rather than Chiaki Kon. The Mah-jong match in this episode which probably only took up 5 minutes was more exciting and creative than anything I’ve seen in Saki for the past half five months. It really reminded me that there can be game-based series that don’t have to rely on god-mode powers and Deus ex Machina.
Rating: ** (Excellent)