August Roundup

One anime you won’t see in this list is Gintama. It’s not because it’s a bad show, oh far from it. Gintama is one of the greatest and most con­sist­ent anime com­ed­ies in exist­ence. The prob­lem is I’m stalled at epis­ode 70 and I haven’t got­ten a Crunchyroll mem­ber­ship yet. What’s stop­ping me is the fact that, thanks to region restric­tions, I get only a frac­tion of the anime an Amer­ican would get for exactly the same price! But I’m start­ing to give in. I really want to watch Gintama again.

Source

A Grade: One of the tops of the year. Get ready for some fan­boy­ing here

A– Full Metal Alchem­ist: Brotherhood

Sorry, even with epis­ode 19 it’s still not as good as the first sea­son. But what an epis­ode 19 was! Mustang’s ‘I sealed it with fire’ was quite pos­sibly the single most manly line I’ve ever heard. That had to be one of the single greatest epis­odes of anime I have ever seen. Come to think of it, the first sea­son never pro­duced an epis­ode of that qual­ity. More of the same please FMA.

B Grade: Hugely enter­tain­ing stuff. Not amaz­ing but def­in­itely worth watching

B+ Bake­monogatari

With Bake­monogatari, Shaft have finally stopped being the stu­dio I know I should like and have become the stu­dio I fuck­ing love. OK, maybe not quite that much or else this would be an A, but Bake­mono is by far the best Shaft pro­duc­tion. How­ever I do wish Shinbo would calm down a bit. Do we really need real life arms get­ting stapled gradu­ally across the screen? It doesn’t add any­thing Shinbo, please calm down a bit.

B+ Spice and Wolf

I was a bit annoyed at the end of Amarty’s arc. It made the earlier freak-out by Horo have a lot less sig­ni­fic­ance. Prob­ably a good thing all the same, this show would be noth­ing if Horo and Lawrence weren’t together, flirt­ing at every avail­able oppor­tun­ity. Won­der if there will be another sea­son of this?

B Pan­dora Hearts

It will never reach the dizzy heights of sheer bril­liance thanks to Xebec’s lackluster dir­ect­ing, but as this anime draws ever closer to it’s end­ing, I’m real­ising just how much I’ve been enjoy­ing this. Alice, Gil, Oz, Break. I’m really going to miss those guys when this anime ends. BTW, I heard that the last 3 epis­odes will be anime ori­ginal so that screws any chance for a second season.

B– Cross Game

Just because it’s legal to marry your cousin doesn’t mean incest sud­denly becomes accept­able. Why oh why Japan are you so accept­ing of incest? I don’t think it should be illegal or any­thing, but you get weird inbreed­ing res­ults. Aobaneeds to shove that guy off a moun­tain ASAP, or drop an anvil on his head. Oth­er­wise it’s just another week in the good old reli­able Cross Game.

B– Hetalia Axis Powers

Hetalia is never going to be the great com­edy I hoped it would be at the start of it’s air­ing, but as far as spend­ing 5 minutes of your day goes, I can cer­tainly think of worse ways. Plus my Hetalia posts con­sist­ently get moun­tains of hits every week and it’s pretty fun to blog. I’m still wait­ing to hear Russia’s ver­sion of the end­ing song though.

C Grade: It’s good enough to keep watch­ing but it’s not that memorable

C+ Sora no Manimani

I’m being a bit harsh on Sora no Man­i­m­ani but I don’t think it’s on the same level as Cross Game and Hetalia. It’s still fun though although I’m hav­ing to accept that Hime will never have any luck in her romantic cap­ture of Saku. Some­body please give Hime some love! She bloody well deserves it.

C+Umineko

Look, it’s badly writ­ten and Deen’s dir­ect­ing has always been a bit sus­pect. Still, I really want to see where they’re going with Umineko, although I just don’t under­stand Battler’s train of thought. How can he not believe in a witch that is in the pro­cess of chan­ging his­tory and make red words spin around him? I must be miss­ing some­thing in all this…

C– Guin Saga

Accord­ing to ‘Scampstotallyaccuratestatcounter.com’, Guin Saga has only pro­duced one qual­ity epis­ode out of the last 8. Heck, this anime just hasn’t been the same since the Nospherus arc ended. The main reason for this is how com­pletely hope­less this anime is at mak­ing believ­able romance. Yes, Istovan and Rinda, I’m look­ing at you two. Sorely needs more Guin, and quick.

D Grade: I’ve lost interest in this anime. If it’s a D then I’ve prob­ably dropped it

D Tokyo Mag­nitude

Before Tokyo Mag­nitude, I would be all for real­ism in my anime. It’s funny what one series can do, I really wish there were some wack­ier char­ac­ters or ran­dom shit or any­thing else hap­pen­ing in this anime. In the end I dropped it. I just couldn’t care for what hap­pens to the char­ac­ters anymore.

D– The Mel­an­choly of Haruhi Suzimiya

I was never that big of a fan of Haruhi but the Bam­boo Leaf Rhaps­ody epis­ode man­aged to get me excited or this new sea­son. Humph, even this new arc isn’t great. Thing is, Haruhi is undrop­pable, if you want to stay in the otaku-in-crowd and get all those ran­dom ref­er­ences. Meh, I guess Kyon makes this anime worth it.

E Grade: Unlike D grades where I drop out of dis­in­terest, E grades are dropped in Disgust.

E+ Canaan

Do you know when you see this girl who looks really hot from behind? You spend ages wait­ing for her to finally turn around until you sud­denly real­ise she has this dog-ugly face? Canaan is the girl in ques­tion and the ugly face is the plot. What sort of retard made that crap up? I mean really.

F Grade: Any F stand­ard anime I would only watch 1 or 2 epis­odes of so god only know how an anime could last to the end of the month and still get an F but I’m sure it will hap­pen some day

I watched Texh­no­lyze recently. That was pretty bad but even that was only worthy of an E-. F grade anime just don’t come along that often.