All posts by draggle

Hanasaku Iroha — First Impressions

Impressions,

In the first episode of Hanasaku Iroha, Ohana moves from the city to her grandma’s hot springs hotel in the country after her mother flees their home.

This show is looking quite promising. I thought that going to live in the hot spring hotel would be a happy experience, and she would make friends and have lots of fun and this would be another show about cute girls doing cute things. Boy was I wrong. Her grandmother is harsh and forces her to work, and the employees there are not nice either, especially her roommate Minko who hates her.  In short she’s absolutely miserable. This seems like it may be a show that will actually have some bite (although I don’t doubt that she will eventually grow to get along with everyone). But don’t get friendly, get even. I really want to see Ohana stick it to her grandmother and Minko now.

The confession scene was one of the better ones I’ve seen as well— having it on the slide in the playground and making Ohana fall down at the end was a nice touch. You could see his desperation and Ohana’s confusion well, and it didn’t seem forced like most of those scenes do.

My main concern is that in the first half of this episode, Ohana’s monologues were walking the thin line between intelligence and pretentiousness. This disappeared in the second half once she got to work though, so it’s hard to tell how much of an issue this will be in the rest of show. I’m considering blogging this, depending on what else is on Sunday and how the next episode goes.

Star Driver Review — B

Reviews, Star Driver, ,

Star driver stars Takuto, a Ginga Bishounen (Galactic Pretty Boy), as he transfers schools to an island in search of his father. The island has a hidden secret: cybodies, powerful humanoid creations which give their users immense power, but are sealed by the island’s maidens. Takuto becomes embattled in trying to protect the maidens from a secret organization, the Glittering Crux, comprised of his schoolmates, that is trying to break the seals. The show is divided between ordinary school life and ritualistic battles reminiscent of the writer’s other work Revolutionary Girl Utena.

Star Driver did an excellent job at character development— it started out with some completely ridiculous characters and made them into actually likable people. Probably the best example of this is Kanako. She starts out as a young bride who married into wealth and is quite proud of it. She lives on a luxury cruise ship, has two live-in servants and a pet alligator. She kisses random people at school through a glass window. Yet by the end of the show, the creators manage to turn her into the most prepared and dependable character there is. Most of the other characters the creators spent time on become interesting characters in their own right as well— but due to the short nature of the show, this didn’t include everybody. The development was especially lacking around the main villain’s allies.

Star Driver is a fun show. It has fantastic characters and an interesting setting. It does an excellent job at building up the characters and revealing the layers of the mystery. It keeps you sitting on the edge of your seat and waiting to see what will happen in the next episode. But the biggest problem is that it wasn’t really able to pull everything together for the conclusion. I think it was a bit too ambitious for the amount of time it had, and could have used another twelve episodes.

Still, the buildup is certainly worth watching, and the journey’s more important than the destination, right?

  • Plot / Script – 8 / 10 – Excellent plot and storytelling, except for the end. Some time was wasted in the middle with too much school antics and random lesbian enemies appearing out of nowhere.
  • Characters – 9 / 10 – Large cast of characters, many of them with substantial depth.
  • Production – 8 / 10 – Consistently good animation. Nice explosions.
  • Overall – B

Recommendations – Utena, Mai HiMe, Code Geass

Star Driver 25

Star Driver,

Bones, what the hell was this supposed to be? (warning: angry rant) First of all: what on Earth was Sugata trying to do? He got in Samekh just so that he could come out and then put Samekh back to sleep? Is there some subtlety that I’m missing here?

Then we have Keito. They basically tossed out her character and replaced her with a needy, obsessive teenage bitch. Seriously, she wanted Sugata to wake Samekh so that he could become the king of the world? I couldn’t make up crap this stupid if I tried. What happened to the Keito who pulled a knife on the obsessed Sugata, sucked out Takuto’s snake venom and does Karaoke in secret?

Then we have the Hiraboshi, which Head reveals is a silly game that even twelve year olds wouldn’t be fooled by. That part at least had it a long time coming.  But then they all switch sides and decide they should never have tried to bring the Cybodies from Zero Time in the first place. But why were they even trying to in the first place again…? So it’s everyone against the Big Bad Guy (who, by the way, uses some mind control over cybodies which he pulled out of nowhere and gets broken out of nowhere).

As if this wasn’t insulting enough, we have Trans-Am Wako playing the damsel in distress, who resolves the love triangle by revealing that really, she loves them both.

Once Head is defeated, Sugata tries to seal Samekh again (why did he wake him up in the first place again?) but Takuto breaks Wako’s seal. This part was actually pretty decent.

Then Sugata and Takuto go to outer space, and Takuto defeats Samekh. I’ll just say that this ending belonged with Gundam 00 and not Star Driver.

Both the Cybodies are destroyed, and Sugata and Takuto are trapped in orbit. They cannot return to Earth since there is no space elevator. They follow in the footsteps of Sam the squid hunter, wandering the stars. Eventually they discover their true feelings and marry. Fifty years later, they find a way to return to Earth. They go to visit Wako, just in time for her funeral. She has remained alone all this time, waiting for them to return. The End.

I didn’t think that they’d have enough time left to do a solid ending, but I did think they could come up with something better than this. So many questions were left unresolved and there are gaping plot holes. Star Driver came down to a rather generic “unite to save the world” ending, and I thought that it had the potential to be so much more than this. So I’m disappointed, I’ll say, but this wasn’t enough to ruin the entire journey we took to get to the last episode.

Nichijou — First Impressions

Impressions,

A few segments were funny, in particular the dropped food segment and everything with Sasahara-senpai, but most of this episode’s humor fell flat for me. Especially the segments with Nano and the Professor— they’re just walking around being cute, but it isn’t funny at all. The segments with Mio, Yuuko and Mai are much stronger.

I’m not going to blog this, but I’ll probably keep watching it. Actually, my enjoyment of this episode was ruined because I had peeked at the manga already and read most of this episode’s jokes. Except I forgot that I had read it, and thought that this episode was just stealing footage from the OVA (I glanced through the OVA again and confirmed that this wasn’t the case). Anyway, the lesson is: don’t read the manga beforehand if you want to be surprised.

Toaru Majutsu no Index II Review — C-

Reviews,

I’ll confess, the main reasons I’m still watching this are for Biri-biri, to see what’ll get hacked on next to Crystal Dragon Jesus, and to see which girl Touma is going to punch in the face next. Index II has made especially good progress in the last category.

Index II has followed in the footsteps of the first season, maintaining more or less the same quality. It’s good for what it is, a fun action show, once Touma decides to stop talking to his enemies or on his cellphone and punch people. I felt like there were less Touma monologues in this season, so that’s good.

My favorite part about this series is the setting. It’s quite imaginative, and gives a sense that there’s a lot more to it than their showing. Building a world like this is an ambitious project, and the creators are doing well with it. Magic is awesome, espers are awesome, and crystal dragon Jesus is awesome.

The biggest problem is the characters. Not that they’re uninteresting; to the contrary, the characters are very strong. The problem is that there are too many of them and they never get enough attention. I mean, look at that maid girl who sits on the robot— she appeared in the ending credits, but who was she again? Himegami, Komoe-sensei and even Index barely showed up. It would help if they found a way to make more of the characters play a role in each of the arcs, since right now only a few characters take part in each one.

  • Plot / Script – 7 / 10 – Great world-building, but Touma can be talkative and preachy.
  • Characters – 7 / 10 – Strong characters, but they don’t get enough attention.
  • Production – 7  / 10 – Consistent but fairly standard.
  • Overall – C-

Recommendations – Asura Cryin’, Shakugan no Shana, Legend of Legendary Heroes….