Seitokai no Ichizon

Short Synopsis: Our lead character has his own harem as a member of the student council.
I was fully expecting this series to suck. The way that along with Kämpfer this was labelled as the clichéd moe show of the season, and the utterly horrid character-designs made me expect the worst out of this series. However, two things proved me wrong in particular: first of all, for once we have a bit of a “realistic” portrayal of a student council: just a bunch of teenagers goofing off and having fun, rather than a bunch of elitist bastards that are perfect in every single way and are looked up to by everyone in the school. Second of all: the male lead. This guy is a complete asshole and knows it. He’s so different from your average male lead in these kinds of shows. In fact, these horrible character-designs were exactly part of the point of this show: as a parody. There is no way that you should take this series seriously, and instead it attempts to parody just about everything moe. And really, for me it succeeded so far, I laughed quite a bit. The dialogue just hardly ever seemed to stop and there always seemed to be something going on. My main concern right now is that the creators seemed to be a bit too edging on including a bit of drama at the end of this episode. PLEASE STAY AWAY FROM THAT!!!
OP: Really cheesy J-pop song, but I think that that was the point.
ED: Very funny. Really quirky animation that works.
Potential: 50%

Armed Librarians - The Book of Bantorra

Short Synopsis: Our lead character is the leader of a group of strangely-dressed people that fights some sort of occult group.
Whoa, we’re already 2 days into the season and I’ve already found a contender of the most intriguing first episode of the Season. Armed Librarians is no pretty series: the characters, background and CG don’t mesh at all, and don’t ask me why all of the important characters have such weird outfits compared to everyone else. Nevertheless, it’s the story that caught my attention, which has a lot of nice ideas thrown into it. While at first sight it may seem like yet another band of heroes that fights generic evil organization, but the magic takes itself surprisingly serious: when the lead characters fight faceless goons and they cut off these people’s limbs they really start screaming, rather than just scream and fall down. The bad guys also make use of human bombs, talk about radical! There are lots of different characters, all with different intentions. This really looks like it’s going to be a series that’s not going to seduce anyone with its visuals, music or snappy direction. Instead, the creators are just going to focus on the pure story. I can appreciate that.
OP: Very generic ALI-Project song, but very nice and original visuals.
ED: Just a slide-show with a song, neither which are that special or catch attention.
Potential: 80%

Kämpfer

Short Synopsis: Our lead character can transform into a hot chick and fights other hot chicks.
Oh, the pain. Where to start with this thing? The absolutely horrid character-designs for the male lead? The bland action? The horrile voice-acting? The moe stereotypes? It’s really series like this that give anime a bad name. Here we have a guy who can transform into a girl who then fights with magic fireballs. His love interests include at this point a shy girl and the most popular girl in school (who at this point are already in love with him), the acting his horribly bland and uninspired and it’s chock-full of incredibly shallow fanservice. Watch this if you want something to laugh at, stay away otherwise!
OP: Horrid, cliché, cheesy, a waste of the few good shots of animation with the stuffed animals.
ED: Fanservice galore and really weird hip-movements! The music is also not much better.
Potential: 0%

In today’s age, there are few things that could still be considered truly original and never done before. Especially in anime, in which about 90% of all the series are based off of something else, true originality is even harder to come by. Nevertheless, out of all the series for the past year, Basquash stands out as the most original. I mean, to base a series around cars with arms and legs that play basketball? How the hell do you think of this?

But yeah, this unique setting of Basquash is what prompted me to start blogging it weekly. Overall, it really is the single most inconsistent series of the past half year: it has moments of brilliance, fun, stupidity, boredom, excitement, intrigue, chilchés, depth and shallowness, all packaged into 26 episodes, which makes it really hard to determine if it’s worth watching.

The first eight episodes are especially awesome. They’ve got this real sense of chaos, in which everything is going on at the same time, a lot of characters are developed at the same time, and even though Dan is an impulsive teen-aged lead, he definitely has his charms in his innocence and how he continuously tries to make up with his sister who is in a wheelchair after an accident. It’s all good and very unpredictable fun, but after a while the show becomes much more straightforward, predictable and uninteresting.

To me, it seemed like this series never really knew what it wanted to be. Sure, it gives variety, but some parts of this series are incredibly stupid, and are best watched by not taking the series 100% seriously. At other times however, this series nearly begs for the audience to take it seriously when it spends ages on slowly exploring and developing its characters, which demand a much more personal mindset when watching it. In the end, these parts don’t mesh really well and the drama feels shallow because of it.

Personally, I liked the beginning and finale for this series. the middle part just took itself too seriously among the far-fetched premise of this series, and I felt it hard to care about the characters. The series closes off with a pretty exciting finale though, combined with some absolutely gorgeous visuals. In the end, this series is a great watch at some times, but really dull at others.

Aww, it’s still good to see a great ending from this series, considering what an incredibly bumpy ride it’s been. The past two episodes were definitely the most visually pleasing episodes I’ve seen the past three months. Satelight really dominated in terms of Visuals during the past season. Their animation may be rushed but damn, these people surely know how to make things look good.

This episode also succeeded in terms of storyline. All Dan had to do is create a Basquash strong enough to save both Earthdash and Moonies, and sure it took a lot of effort to get there, but they managed in the end. The creators didn’t try to create some forced twist in the end like with Macross Frontier and its Vajra-twist.

Instead, the episode was spiced up with a number of twists on the side-characters, that were surprising and yet didn’t get in the way of what was really important in this episode. Do not ask me how that moon-giant was able to fly to Moonies on Flora’s butterflies, or why Slash turned into a 4-year-old of all things, but they fit inside the series well enough to not be much of a problem. In any case, this episode really returned back the series’ roots of fandom: sure the performers are nice and all, but the fandom can also kick ass, and that was portrayed really nicely in the side-characters as they tried to save the various Moonies citizens that were about to float off into space.

The aftermath was also nice and concise: it slightly developed the characters and actually remained subtle about them, leaving a lot of things to our imagination. I especially liked seeing Coco walk again. A nice twist and perfectly logical if you can accept the fact that Slash of all people invited her to Moonies to begin with.

But yeah, the things I liked best about this episode was that it knew that it was supposed to end with a bang, and how it suddenly found its subtlety back. With the current director, I never expected that to happen. I mean, this is the guy who made Dan fight the police with Basketballs. :P

Reflecting on all of the different series that ended this season, I’m really impressed. Usually during these times, a lot of series end with rather lackluster endings, but this time it’s different. There were perhaps two or three endings that I watched that didn’t deliver, but apart from that all of them closed off nicely. That’s very impressive, especially considering how I watched around 17 endings this month.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Nyan Koi!

Because I’m allergic to cats, I can fully understand the horrors of the lead character, having to live inside a house with a cat. It must be near-impossible for him to try and keep things hair-free. Anyway, this episode wasn’t as bad as I expected: the characters are still pretty generic teenagers, but at least they’re not stereotypes and the production-values are pretty solid as well. The only really annoying characters were that lead guy’s characters. The romance is pretty shallow: guy who hates cats can understand cats and needs to help them, he falls in love with a girl who loves cats but can’t seem to understand them and so tortures them. Still, it’s a decent enough romance story, so why the heck are the creators planning to turn this into a harem, if we are to believe the OP and ED? My main problem with this series is the following though: cats are supposed to be awesome. Just look at Kuruneko or cheezburger. The cats in this series are very generic and uninteresting, and the humour mostly comes from the wittier-than-usual male lead.
OP: Very generic and formulaic J-Pop that I definitely do not like.
ED: A bit more bearable than the OP, but still generic and formulaic.
Potential: 40%

Asura Crying 2

I actually liked the first parts of this episode. The introducing monologue caught my interest, the OP was good, and it all made me interested in how this series would pan out. But yeah, then male lead came, opened a door and ran into his love interest while she was changing clothes. *headdesk* I mean, fanservice is one thing, but for this series to pull the biggest harem cliché within the first three minutes is just too much. The rest of the episode also reminded me why I originally dropped this series. It does have a few interesting-looking side-characters, but the main cast is so utterly generic. The male lead and that big-breasted girl especially are very badly acted, clichéd and one-dimensional. To me, this looks like nothing more than yet another whimsical teen-aged adventure that fails to stand out anywhere aside from perhaps a bunch of pretty good theme songs.
OP: Much better than the first, in which Angela tried to sound a bit too much like the ALI Project
ED: Nice enough, although a bit generic.
Potential: 10%

Queen’s Blade: Gyokuza wo Tsugumono

Well, so the Autumn Season has started, and let’s hope that with this series, we’ve got the worst to air first. From now on, I’m just going to put these quick first impressions, and re-post them as I watch more. Do warn me when this starts flooding RSS-feeds. In any case, this first episode of Queen’s Blade’s second season is at least not as abysmal as the way the first season started. At least there’s some narrative as it introduces the premise for this season. But yeah, that doesn’t excuse the fact that the characters are still walking around in the most impractical outfits imaginable. Wherever these women go, they have the chance to be tentacle-raped (no, seriously), and yet nobody seems to find this strange. It’s obvious that I’m not going to follow this series but at least it didn’t burn my eyes as much as the first episode of the first season did.
ED: Just a slide-show of the characters, but the music is decent. (in case you’re wondering: I got this idea from Cinammon Ass)
Potential: 0%