Fall Anime Season 2014 Outlook

Every season of anime has a very easily recognizable image that works as a list of all the anime that will be airing in the near future. This season the image looks like this.

A few notable things are on this list.

Gundam Reconguista in G: The first Gundam made by Tomino since Turn A over 10 years ago. Young cadet captures a powerful Mobile Suit called the G-Self while protecting the Orbital Elevator.

Mushishi is coming back which is always solid. Ginko is still taking care of Mushishi problems

Magic Kaito 1412: An adaptation of Magic Kaito. A manga probably best known because the main character frequently cameos in Detective Conan. Kaito Kuroba is a teenage high school student who adapts his father’s identity as the legendary phantom thief, Kaito Kid, and unlocks the mystery behind his death.

Parasyte: The oddball this season. It’s apparently about aliens invading and one kid accidentally merges with one and uses his new found abilities to prevent human extinction. Sounds very much like Devilman, and that was pretty good so I have hi hopes.

So those are the ones that stick out to me, but hey, I’ve been surprised before. So let’s all look forward to the 2014 Fall anime season.

 

Fall Anime Season 2012: GIFs! Uppercuts and exploding faces, all in GIF form!

Sometimes you see something in a show or game or what have you that you could just watch over and over in an endless loops. That’s probably not why .gifs were invented, but that’s what I find is their most valuable use.

Fall Anime 2012 has given us a few good .gif opportunities. You’re all probably familiar with this:

It’s like a windshield wiper blade.

There’s actually another JoJo’s .gif I want to share, but I’m saving it for the show notes under the next JoJo’s podcast.

Originally, I only had a passing interest in seeing the next show, ROBOTICS;NOTES, and then I saw this in passing:

Big or small, space metal or plastic, sweet robot moments are sweet robot moments.

Now I’m watching the show actively.

Lastly, for now at least, this was another show I wasn’t watching and had no intention of watching and have no intention to continue watching. Code Breakers is mostly a parade of annoying shonen stuff that I don’t care about from what I’ve seen, but every now and then, a show goes above and beyond to please me.

No talking. Just blow up.

It’s like the show delved into my deepest action desires. Face grab: Check. Exploding face grab: Check. Decently animated exploding face grab: oh, I’m loving every second of this. Unfortunately, it’s only this long, but that one shining moment was all I needed.

There’s probably going to be more .gifs, and if they’re good, I’ll put them up.

Fall Anime Season 2012: Super Sexy Edition

Fall season is most certainly still underway and there are just a few more shows that the public needs to know to avoid or watch depending upon your taste. Actually reading through the last reveiws made me just have this horrible thought, “Ya’ know, I’ve seen some bad shows so far, but nothing has made me want to kill myself.” As a result I went on a quest to find something awful. Also I watched the first two episodes of Robotics;Notes.

Robotics;Notes

Robotics;Notes is actually one of those shows that if the writing of it can stay at a consistent level, then it will be well worth any time put into it. Simply put, the story is about a rather energetic robot fan girl and her quiet, gamer friend trying to build a life sized super robot. Sounds simple, but it’s actually a nice idea because it ends up focusing more strongly on the hard process it would actually be if someone were building a super robot in real life. However, I’m not sure why this show tries to be more realistic since its pretty obvious that building a super robot would cost too much money, would take more than half a year, would be completely impractical, and there is no God damn way a group of two people would be able to pull this off without having the police getting involved. Seriously, they are building a super weapon and the school actively acknowledges this as a club activity. Hell, their school is even funding them to make this weapon!

Facts that disprove all realism aside, one of the things that makes me enjoy this show so far is the motivation for building a Super Robot. “Why the hell not?” At least that’s what the main hero thinks. The main heroine actually just thinks,”Well this robot show was really cool, so if I have a robot, then I will also be cool.” I can’t help but feel like the robot that is her inspiration is also a bit of a Gurren Lagann reference since it is supposedly the culmination of over 50 years of mecha animation with frequent referencing to older shows. Gunvarrel, as it is called, also had one missing episode, the final episode that everyone is curious about. If only Gurren Lagann had a missing episode…wait, then I’d just be pissed.

Despite all this, the show does have one significant draw back, It’s not Mazinkaiser nothing truly substantial has happened. It’s the same issue as From the New World, where the plot doesn’t really happen until a few episodes have passed. Then again, at least there is a plot as opposed to a long series of nonsequitor plot points stringed together by a long series of over saturated color schemes in an overly flashy show that doesn’t know what the fuck is going on, K. So in short, Robotics;Notes has more potential than it really should considering the simple ideas that are its backbone. The characters are likable, the story is decently told, and the main characters are doing exactly what I would do if I had more money, and a degree in electrical engineering, and a robot design, and a lot of other stuff.

Code:Breaker

In the apparently continuing trend of having a symbol splitting the name of your show, we have here Akimine Kamijyo’s Code:Breaker. Now, i’m going to be honest here, despite how I wanted to find piles of shit shows, Code:Breaker isn’t actually that bad. Don’t get me wrong, it has quite a few Shonen stereotypes in both characters and plot, but it does some things that are just rather well done. It has a rather normal shonen set up, girl meets boy, boy has magic powers and is a bit of a dick, girl wants to fix that. Rather normal set up for the demographic this is supposed to appeal to. However, the main character is actually what has made this show a bit decent. He has the rather simple power of making shit burst into flames, but his method for doing so is by grabbing someone’s face and then they explode into fire. I just love it.

It’s not even like he only does that on occasion, it happens all the time. The only times that he doesn’t do it are when it’s physically impossible for him to do so. Not only that, his constant air of being a dick is actually a bit enjoyable because it makes him very desensitized to the world around him. Instead of being all like,”Oh my God! I’m gonna have to kill this dog because it’s going to die anyway,” he’s more like, “I will end your misery.” That’s how you know he’s supposed to be dark, or at least shonen dark, which for some reason works for him. His dickishness is actually most prominent when he is in the presence of the main heroine who is quite a bitch and needs to learn how to shut the fuck up about justice and the proper way to punish criminals. It’s fun to actually watch a character be treated the way I would treat them, assholishly.

Unfortunately, he can’t be too good, afterall this is a shonen show we are talking about. The main character does have one verbal tick that royally pisses me off. “Eye for and eye, a tooth for a tooth, an evil for an evil.” The real issue with him saying that, is that he does it every time he is about to kill some people, so the only saving grace I suppose is that the statement will always be followed by face grabbing and I’m always in the mood for a face being grabbed. Really I just want the show to be a looping gif of him grabbing faces in progressively cooler ways.

Onii-chan dakedo Ai sae Areba Kankei Naiyone!/

As Long as There’s Love, It Doesn’t Matter If He is My Brother, Right

Hahahahahaha. Pornography. What? This show has Onii-chan in it’s name, what did you expect it to be? It’s just another by the books harem where one of the girls is the main character’s twin sister. The only thing redeemable about this show is that the main character isn’t a complete dumbass seeing as how he reacts to everything in a calm way, and has created a system based on her little sister’s fucked-upedness that earns him money. If you don’t believe me about this show, watch the opening and tell me it’s not exactly what I just called it.

So yeah, I wanted to offend myself and as a result I watched porn, a rather good show, and a surprisingly ok show. I guess that’s just how anime works nowadays. It’s unfortunate, in the past, if you wanted to make porn you could just go and contact Go Nagai and he would make your porn cool, but now we just have to put up with this bullshit. It also used to be that if you wanted to make an all right shonen show, your name was Akira Toriyama and you made Dragon Ball, so maybe the past wasn’t that great.

What About the Show Makes the Least Sense this Season? It’s K.

GMX is this weekend and I’m busy coming up with interview questions for our illustrious guests. You’ll be getting all that coverage over the weekend and next week, but for now there’s something I need to append. When I wrote the article about what show’s I’d been watching for Fall Season ’12, I had a niggling feeling that I’d forgotten something. There was a show I had watched some of that completely slipped my mind while going over every detail of the shows I was writing up, and doesn’t that just sound like a good foot to start off on?

K

K or Backwards K, Regular K is the story of… I’m not sure. Seriously, I only have a vague grasp of what’s going on. The first episode starts off with part of a fight, then follows a boring kid through his boring day, watch out for the naked lady oh she’s gone, then someone tries to kill him because he’s SECRET EVIL OH NO, then the episode ends. There’s two people trying to kill him, one group that has only one important character who rides a skateboard while holding a baseball bat while shooting red particle effects and one guy who has a katana and powers. The second episode pretends that the first episode makes sense and immediately doesn’t explain the SECRET EVIL OH NO because katana man and baseball guy have to fight for four seconds, then the main character’s cat turns into a naked lady with ultra tits for no reason and helps him run away from katana man who found his house. They run around for a literal day time lapse, then eat breakfast together and the episode ends. Actually, “stops” is a better word than “ends” because… what?

It’s not until the third episode that we get some semblance of explanation, but that doesn’t make any sense either. The two main characters who would have been having the fight in the first episode, one with red particle effects and one with blue, but then they don’t and red guy is arrested. Blue guy, who leads a team of army people whose uniform and character designers have never even heard of Hiromu Arakawa, then exposits to red particle guy about a bunch of terms you’ve never heard before.

What unique uniforms that I’ve never seen before ever.

Blue particle guy rattles off the terms, in order, “Weismann level,” “Sword of Damocles,” Kagutsu crater,” and “Dresden states.” Now, most of those are probably words that you can maybe guess at the meaning of. You see swords in the first episode hovering in the sky, so maybe that’s the Sword of Damocles. Red particle guy’s “Weismann level limit” is supposed to bring down the Sword of Damocles, but later on some other character says his high power is a lie or something but it’s a half truth. And there’s a psychic gothic lolita who works for the group that baseball bat guy is part of, but he’s actually part of a different group while working for this group HOMRA, probably because HOMRA doesn’t seem to do anything even though they can apparently offer a ten million yen reward for info on some guy even though people who see the ad for that think it’s just another one of their pranks and…

Shut down. I can’t handle it anymore. I’m not deliberately trying to confuse you. This is just how the show progresses. Plot points are thrown at you randomly over the course of the episodes before they just stop on what I think are supposed to be cliffhangers or “the adventure continues” moments. There’s a point where katana guy explains that the particle effect colors come from color kings, one for each of the colors of the rainbow, and a colorless king who is the main character even though he doesn’t know that. Then he describes the red clan as violent, we see a scene with bat guy, then two pretty people are dancing in a sky fortress, then back to the main character and katana guy. That was me trying to explain the progression of the show at a better pace than the show itself, but did that make any more sense? If you can understand the plot of this show, you deserve a prize because I have no idea what the fuck is going on at any point.

This makes just as much sense in context

This maybe wouldn’t be a breaking point as this show was very clearly produced to be very visually engaging. It’s just that it falls flat in that aspect as well. There’s good flow of motion especially in fight scenes, one of which includes a face getting grabbed which you know I love, but that’s really it. You may be able to tell from those pictures that there’s this obnoxious screened green-to-blue gradient overlay on the whole show that sometimes looks ok and other times looks like shit. Things are also usually too bright and shiny. This might be the first anime you need to watch with sunglasses on. Colors look over-saturated especially when people are using their color powers. It’s a visual mess.

That’s to speak nothing of the character designs. This show doesn’t know who it’s being marketed towards. On one hand, it’s bishonen central. All the guys are pretty with their sparkly power interacting with the sparkly, over-saturated backgrounds making a sparkly bishonen festival for half the episode. It’s apparently supposed to be some cross media project aimed at fans of that sort of thing, there’s even a prequel manga that might make the show itself make more sense, but that stops making sense when you see the primary female characters. There’s that naked, transformed from a cat lady whose always naked or wearing a jacket just to hold her tits for maximum cleavage. She’s gets fanservice shots in the opening and ending and during the show, but it’s not just her. The other big time female character in blue particle guy’s army thing wears a miniskirt that is so mini you can see the crease of her ass cheeks poking out from under the bottom on top of her ridiculous and poorly drawn boobs. Seriously, I know that anime tits are similar to  real breasts in the same way a beach ball is similar to an orange, but look at this picture and tell me if you can see what’s wrong with it:

You see it, right? How her left boob is bigger and further forward despite that it’s further away from us meaning that it’s something like 1.5 time as big as her right one due to perspective? Not only is the female fanservice obnoxious and completely out of place, it’s not even drawn well.

So Mirror K, Normal K is a complete mess. Nonsensical story with confusing progression, ugly, overstylized visuals, and crappy, unoriginal character designs that can’t decide who they want to pander torwards make a show that’s only value is trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. In a lot of ways, I see K as the opposite of JoJo’s: The Animation. Where davidproduction had to work around a thin budget by using high stylization and excellent direction to make JoJo’s, the design philosophy of K was, “Look at all the money we have! Let’s just throw it around randomly!” I wouldn’t bother.

Anime Fall Season 2012! The Tiny Psychic Robo Horse Hides a Terrible Secret

Fall season is decidedly underway. I don’t usually keep up with anime shows as they’re being released so I can watch the shows I want at my own pace. Sometimes, though, a show will come along and I just have to watch it regardless. Back in spring, DG and I had two of those shows, Aquarion EVOL and Sakamichi no Apollon which I learned about because we decided to watch EVOL. Like that, watching JoJo’s made me decide to keep up with a few of the other shows that are around because if I’m watching one, might as well see what else is on the internet.

Most of these shows wouldn’t end up in the podcast since we just prefer talking about shows that go, “This is fucking stupid and I LOVE IT.” The non-JoJo’s shows aren’t really like that so far, but they’re worth talking about all the same. I would have done this more immediately, but I wanted to give each show the full three episode test before espousing on it. So here’s a quick run down of what I’ve been watching this season.

Shinsekai Yori (From the New World)

Shinsekai Yori was one of those shows that I knew would be engaging if written well when I read the description of it. It’s based on a speculative fiction novel that managed to win the Nihon SF Taisho award, a Japanese cross media award. That means that book managed to win over not only other books, but television shows and movies. It’s a pretty high award, and the premise gives a good window into it. Humanity has entered another age after a catastrophe unknown today. Towns are now small and secluded with people relying on their simple psychic powers instead of technological advancement to survive. A group of children discover an archive robot that tells them all about the war that brought humanity to where it is now shaking the foundation and their perception of the world they live in. Done well, this could be a very interesting story. Done poorly, it’d probably end up as your standard shonen show. We seem to be dealing with the former.

What the show has done very well with so far is world building. I’m a complete sucker for shows built around the idea of , “Come explore our world of mystery.” It’s one of the reasons I liked Mushishi so much. The set dressing of the show is very attractive and goes a long way in establishing an interesting world for the characters to live in. There’s a folktale read during the first two episodes that exist pretty much only for this reason and those were some of my favorite parts of the show both in the stories themselves and the visual way they’re told. The first one goes outside the show’s normal art style which creates this almost otherworldly feeling even from the show itself, but it is a core aspect of that world. It’s very well done. The entire show could be about stories like that with a somewhat involved main character who goes around experiencing those stories and the parts that aren’t just stories. You know, like Mushishi.

One thing this show maybe does have over Mushishi is an underlying plot and unsettledness with people in the world and the pocket societies themselves. A second, more deeply tied folklore in the first episode is about a monster that will kill children who are unable to make it to the psychic school after a certain age. It’s presented as just a legend, something kids make fun of each other with to scare others. The weird thing is that the main girl’s parents act extremely relieved when their daughter finally does make it to the school. They play it off as just being happy she made it since she was the last of her age group to get in, but their suspicious behavior coupled with her insistence that she’s seen the demon makes it seem like they’re definitely hiding something. It’s very gripping, and that’s only one of the events like that in the show.

If the show has any weakness so far, it’s that it wakes up late. The show is very gripping and will get your attention, but episodes end before it’s done anything with your attention. The episode that follows doesn’t seem to acknowledge it too much either. This seems to only be a problem with the initial three episodes because the third ends with a jump start to the plot.  It’s just that if you’re not comfortable with that slow progression, I could see why the show might not hold you for those episodes. I’m not like that. Like I said, I could watch a show that was just world building for a sufficiently interesting world, which this one is in spades. This show is one I’m holding onto for the season and in a serious way, not the, “I love this show because it’s so fun stupid,” way.

How many times did I say “world” in those four paragraphs?

Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai! (Regardless of My Adolescent Delusions of Grandeur, I Want a Date!)

I’m just going to throw all my cards onto the table now for this show: I don’t particularly care for KyoAni shows, I started watching this show partially out of spite, and I came in expecting to dislike it. From that, you might expect that I don’t like this show, and you’d be correct but not in the way that sentence implies, so let me back up.

KyoAni and I have a bad rap. Of the six shows of theirs I’ve watched, Kanon, AIR, Haruhi 1, Haruhi 2, Full Metal Panic: Fumofuu, and Full Metal Panic: The Second Raid, I’ve only liked two, Haruhi 1 and Fumofuu. The other four were either just kinda lame, Haruhi 2 and FMP:TSR, or complete garbage, Kanon and AIR. So when a show by the same studio following the same patterns as those two crap ones, a middle/high school boy who wants to lead a normal life exasperatingly deals with his weird, possibly magical female “friend” who is overly attached to him because of some reason while surrounded by a cast who fulfill stereotypical roles, immediate family who is far more understanding about this than he is, single other named male classmate who only talks about dating and gateways to dating, you can kind of see why I might be a little put off going in. I only watched it at all because I saw a lot of praise singing and figured that if people are getting this into this show, it can’t be all bad or at least I can add it to the list of reasons I never listen to certain sections of the internet.

Pleasantly, this show is not entirely like that. More so, it seems to be that setting done with some of Haruhi’s self aware attitude. The main character’s exasperation at the main girl’s antics are presented in a sympathetic way. He acted like an ass during eight grade by pretending he was the dark, cool not-main-character guy shonen stereotype and wants to let all that go and is now being drawn back into that world and constantly reminded of how much of a tool he used to be because of this girl acting just like he used to. That’s what the “chuunibyou” in the title comes from. She is presented to be annoying and him sympathetic. A lot of the positive response I’ve seen has been from people who did act like that when they were younger and have that, “Oh, God what did I used to be,” reaction. If this had been like those horrible Key adaptations, those wouldn’t be intentionally annoying and actually would supposed to be cute and qualities that would make you want to do that character. After all, Kanon and AIR were adapted from pornographic dating sims. It also helps that while there are other girls that would exist in a dating sim as other love interests, the main character’s interactions with them don’t seem like they’re cut and paste from one.

No, the reason I don’t like this is much, much simpler. This is a comedy anime and it isn’t funny. My reaction to this show is very similar to my reaction to Hetalia, though these are two very, very different shows. I imagine watching this show with someone who really liked it and having to constantly ask them to explain the humor to me. I keep reading these comments about the show being a laugh riot and wondering if I’m watching some other show with a similar name. Even the things I can clearly identify as attempts at comedy, like this .gif, have me looking at the screen and going, “I think that was supposed to be funny.” So a show I came in expecting to be like another groan inducing dating sim adaptation just ends up being a show that I’m outside the demographics that would enjoy it. Maybe this show makes you laugh, and good for you if so. It’s just not doing it for me.

BTOOOM!

This is another show I was interested in despite expecting to dislike it. After watching even a clip of it, you’ll start getting an immediate Highschool of the Dead feeling from the visual presentation. Big anime titties, slickly animated motion in some places, crappy ass CG objects in others, and the way things are colored just make HotD jump to mind. I resolved to watch the show after learning that Yousuke Kuroda, the series composer and screenwriter for HotD, was also writing this. I wanted to know if my distaste for the presentation and writing of HotD was his doing or it was the result of using bad source material. After all, all the KyoAni examples from above were adaptation including the ones I like, and I’ve read the originals of the first Haruhi series and thought it was fine, so maybe this guy just needs a break like a good source.

The fanservice was not as ridiculously present as I expected it to be. HotD was the kind of show you’d watch while constantly checking the door to make sure no one was coming in. BTOOOM! is more restrained in that aspect with a few female characters managing to appear without getting sexually exploited for the sake of titillating the audience. The main girl that you’ll see lots of fanservice pictures of if you look the show up on Google Images manages to display some competence and bravery in some places. Of course, that girl’s competence and self defense skills all evaporate when some fat guy tries to sexually assault her and only come back when he stops doing that. And of those other girls, one exists only to explode and dies within twenty seconds, and the other girls get either violently date raped or violently regular raped to give the main girl back story. So… Yeah, the point I was trying to make kind of got away from me. I’ve never read the manga BTOOOM! is based on, but I’m starting to feel that these poor writing choices are Kuroda’s doing because I know it was written by a different person than the guy who wrote HotD manga.

So the writing is pretty bad. The story is about this guy who’s really great at the online game BTOOOM!, but then he ends up on an island where he has to play it BUT FOR REAL! It’s not the most original plot, somewhere between Battle Royale and a darker The Last Starfighter, but it could be used to make a good show. People are chucking bombs around with huge explosions, and proper planning can mean the difference between life and death. It could be good, but it isn’t. This show was apparently expecting its audience to be really stupid. The main character not only goes through the standard, “OH MAH GAWD WHAT AM I DOING,” to, “This is real, I have to be serious time,” but it’s not enough for him to just be standard. He also has to narrate everything around him as it’s happening. His character growth, the actions of others, the growth and characteristics of others, something that just happened, all things he’ll explain right after you’ve seen them. That woman who exists only to explode explodes due to a trap laid for people searching for food. When the main character, also searching for food, sees this and has an inner monologue about that someone’s using the food to lay traps for reckless gatherers. That could be two sentences, but it goes on for a few minutes with visual aid made up of the stock footage from the scenes you just watched happen. So BTOOOM! is pretty stupid. I would watch it only for spectacle sake.

Girls und Panzer

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. No. It says something about a show when the only thing engaging about it is the troll subs that nobody liked. This is one of the most flat, uninteresting, lifeless shows I’ve seen in a long time. Strike Witches was at least annoying. This is the equivalent of watching static for twenty minutes.

So that’s been my season so far. I’ve heard rumbling about other shows, but I haven’t taken the time to watch them. I’m somewhat interested in ROBOTICS;NOTES, Psycho-Pass, and the upcoming Cyborg 009 movie. I’ve heard off and on things about those first two, Psycho-Pass specifically I’ve heard is a less effective, more violent Ghost in the Shell:SAC, and I wasn’t into the CG that the 009 movie is using, but I’m still interested in them enough to try them out.

Regardless of what you watch, try to have a good fall season 2012.