This show was great. As expected of noitanimA. First of all, this show has such an imaginative setting! It reminded me a lot of some of Isaac Asimov’s stories – in particular the ones about the people on Solaris, where there are only about fifty people on the entire planet, and they live in huge mansions and never see one another. It is considered rude to even touch other people. It seems that this world isn’t quite at that level yet; people do make physical contact (as evidenced by the drug dealers and the police). I’m quite curious to learn more about the setting’s social structure.

It seems like access to the satellites which stores everyone’s data is controlled by some sort of religion which the girl that showed up is part of, and I’m interested to see where that is headed as well. In addition to having a great setting, the direction does an excellent job of exposing it as well. Instead of having the boy say “I am not used to human contact” we see him flinch away from the girl he meets; instead of saying “I’m going to upload my data to the satellite” we see him praying. This is one of the most important rules of storytelling: show, don’t tell, which animated media such as anime are able to do even better than books with facial expressions and cues which would remained unnoticed until the second or third time you watch the show. Yet show many shows fail miserably at this and have endless spoken exposition from the characters which adds nothing to the story. (“I’m going to punch you!” “This cross will… *technobabble*… make everyone Catholic!” Yes, I’m looking at you, Index. The technobabble part only took about three episodes.) So thank you Fractale for not assuming your viewers are idiots!

On the negative side… there isn’t too much to say, but I am a bit concerned about a few of the characters. In particular the main “villains” (although I highly doubt they will remain in this state for long) are giving awfully strong Team Rocket vibes. And I am a bit concerned that now we have a young girl who just hatched from data, hopefully this will not be like Dragon Crisis. But given the overall direction of the first episode, I think that the show will not fall into these traps.

I would have said that this is the best show of the new season, but unfortunately I already watched Hurou Musuko, which takes the cake by a long shot. I will probably make a post on this tomorrow, as well as on Madoka which had a great second episode. Infinite Stratos had a horrible second episode… I think I may have misevaluated the first one. I was laughing my head off for the first episode because I thought it was hilariously bad, and I only assumed something so cliched could be intentional. But in retrospect it seems like I was wrong, and the creators were actually serious.

I should apologize to walking corpses, whom I insulted in my last entry by associating with the main character of Dragon Crisis. Walking corpses, as seen in Kore wa Zombie Desu Ka, are awesome. We finally have a main character this season, Ayumu, who isn’t a complete wuss and doesn’t spend half the show whining. Even when he is turned into a zombie he just invites the necromancer who resurrected him to live in his house and begins to search for his murderer.  The two female characters are quite entertaining as well – Eu because of Ayumu’s delusions, and Haruna because, well, she is a magical girl with a chainsaw. All of the zombie jokes so far have been hilarious as well, although I could see how if they keep repeating them it might get old. The jokes in this show were great, coming fast and unpredictable. The transformation sequence at the end was especially great. Let’s hope that the creators can keep up this pace.

Based on the description, I was fully expecting this show to be a complete disaster. It goes to show that you can never really tell how something will turn out before watching it. This season I thought that this show and Onii-chan no Koto would be completely unwatchable, but it turns out they’ve been two of the best shows so far. Still, you can’t really judge by the first episode, comedies always seem to taper out by the end, where non-comedies build momentum towards the end. We still have the two noitanimA shows to look forward to, hopefully they won’t disappoint!

This episode was downright painful to watch. A useless douchebag’s cousin returns from studying abroad (like all Americans, she has a disturbingly large chest, wears a tanktop and has brownhair with twintails). She brings him along to rob the mafia equivalent, and a little girl comes out of the suitcase and can only say the main character’s name.

We’ve only seen a sudden girlfriend appearance before. And every person in the show is a walking caricature (well, aside from the main character, who has the personality of a walking corpse).  Rose (the dragon) is not going to do anything but look cute, the cousin is never going to have the camera centered on her face, and glasses girl is going to be a glasses girl. Looking on the bright side, the music was somewhat decent.

In Level E, a baseball player moves from Tokyo to the countryside, to find an alien squatting in his apartment. This wasn’t particularly bad or anything, but I just found it boring. The story seemed to move really slowly and there was hardly any development in the characters to justify this. The alien shows that he really is an alien – great. And he and the main character seem to have some homosexual tendencies. Unfortunately, said main character is apparently not into tentacles. How will they overcome this wedge in their relationship?

For the first episode, we had an entire episode of Gachi rangers instead of the usual antics. Power rangers parodies have been done to death but this one was still pretty funny, mainly because it’s willing to go to levels of brutality and ridiculousness that other shows aren’t (Gachi morning star, deaths of children, the incinerator). Still, the Galaxy Angels transformation sequence into the giant robot is my favorite parody of this genre. 🙂

Anyways, it’s basically where we left off last year, still going strong with the crude childish humor and the crazy Hitoha eyes. If you liked the first season you’ll probably enjoy this one, and the same vice-versa. Personally, I think that the show isn’t really that much cruder than many other shows – it’s just more obvious since it’s an elementary school girl doing the fondling instead of a high school boy.