February Roundup

There are two anime at the moment (plus one epis­ode from a series that should’ve been out long ago but was enjoy­able nev­er­the­less) that stand far above everything else this sea­son, leav­ing this monthly roundup post look­ing oddly lop­sided. On the bal­ance of things, I can’t really decide if I prefer only one or two great anime or 4–5 of good anime but no great ones. Also, no header image this time because I can’t decide what I want to put up here.

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

A Full Metal Alchem­ist: Brotherhood

The finale is set­ting up and oh boy am I excited. If I remem­ber cor­rectly, this was where the ori­ginal FMA fell down quite a fair bit and the end­ing felt like a bit of a mess. Broth­er­hood has man­aged to have all these dif­fer­ent gangs of people on their own stor­ies and yet keep each and every one of them as inter­est­ing as each other. Really bloody excited about how this will all shape up but most of all, I’m look­ing for­ward to some action scenes as epic as Mus­tangs ‘I sealed it with fire’ line.

A Dur­arara!!

Have I men­tioned that I love Dur­arara? Well I’m pretty sure I haven’t quite said it enough yet so I’m going to say it again: I love Dur­arara. Already the char­ac­ters of Shizuo, Izaya, Celty, Shinra, Simon, Kida etc. have etched them­selves per­man­ently in my minds. While I don’t love it quite as much as I did Bac­cano, one area I think it might just eclipse it is the cast of char­ac­ters. The extra time gives each char­ac­ter more atten­tion and it’s really pay­ing off.

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

B+ Bake­monogatari

No, it wasn’t worth the wait. That stu­pid delay­ing by Shaft should not have happened in the first place. If they didn’t have the epis­odes close to com­ple­tion they shouldn’t have announced that it would be aired online at a spe­cific date. But this epis­ode did remind me why this show shaded its way into my top 30. Remains one of the most witty and intel­li­gently writ­ten cre­ations in anime his­tory, although the new open­ing sucked.

B– Cross Game

Cross Game has had its purple patch of fine form the past two months and now all it really needs to do is put a lid on the series and wrap it up nicely. This month wasn’t quite as stel­lar as the few before it but Cross Game has trudged along, provid­ing solid enter­tain­ment for the past year. Never felt rushed but was never really cap­able of wow-ing me. I couldn’t really care less if they win at Koishen, I just want to see which ships stay sail­ing at the end.

B– Gun­dam Unicorn

I have mixed feel­ings on this one. First, there were the numer­ous amounts of cliches, some of which even made me roll my eyes. Then there was the fact that I under­stood very little of the polit­ics that were going on, prob­ably because this was my first expos­ure to this ver­sion of the Gun­dam uni­verse. But oh god was it awe­some when it wanted to be! The music, the glor­i­ously anim­ated mecha action, the, the.…actually the reas­ons I liked it were incred­ibly shal­low but it’s been so long since a decent mecha anime came along. You can give me this one.

B– Sora no Woto

My B– grade can often by a sort of a cop-out grade I give to some­thing when I’m not entirely sure what it deserves. Sora no Woto falls right into that cat­egory this week (unlike last week where it really just was a B-). At the moment, Sora no Woto’s qual­ity depends entirely on how it handles its end­ing. If it involves stu­pid Duex Ex Machina’s I’ll be annoyed. If it’s noth­ing more than a few quiet char­ac­ter devel­op­ments I’ll be dis­ap­poin­ted. But there’s that third option. We’ll just have to wait and see…

B– Nodame Can­tabile: Final

FINALLY!!! After about 5 epis­odes with a pain­fully small amount of Nodame and Chiaki, this show has finally returned to the two of them in the latest epis­odes and it has been fant­astic. Not only that, but some of the devel­op­ment to Rui is start­ing to show more rel­ev­ance to the Nodame and Chiaki rela­tion­ship. Tanya is still as bor­ing as fuck but hey, she’s no longer being focused on. Fin­ish up this series strongly and I might just for­give those earlier poor episodes.

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

C+ Cobra

Fuck yeah Jet Piran­has! Con­sid­er­ing I was con­vinced I wasn’t going to watch this show and very nearly didn’t after the first epis­ode, Cobra has really grown on me since. In fact, epis­ode 8 was by far my favour­ite the series has pro­duced so far. It even went so far as to not just be cornily enter­tain­ing but quality-induced enter­tain­ing. It’s never going to win any awards but damn is it fun to watch.

C Baka to Test

Two epis­odes of abso­lute shitty recycled jokes has me ser­i­ously doubt­ing the qual­ity of this anime to the extent that I was won­der­ing how long this would take before I dropped the thing, not want­ing to exper­i­ence another Maria Holic. Thank­fully, the latest epis­ode was a big step in the right dir­ec­tion and has pretty much guar­an­teed that I’m watch­ing this to the end. If it can keep up the jokes then it might still hold the title of  ‘sur­prise hit of the sea­son’ by the end.

C– Hanamaru Kindergarden

When I looked into my crys­tal ball, I foresaw that I would enjoy the first few epis­odes of Hanamaru before get­ting bored of repet­it­ive cute­ness. This isn’t what has happened at all. In fact, the cute­ness was still funny 5 epis­odes in and when it tried to do some­thing dif­fer­ent, it star­ted to fail badly. The drama is as bor­ing as hell and any anime that includes the line ‘onee-chan no baka’ and means it gets a face­palm from me.

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

D+ Book of Bantorra

Book of Ban­torra has suc­cess­fully gone down the path pre­vi­ously trod­den by Daugh­ter of 20 Faces and Guin Saga. They start of excel­lent and I find myself really enjoy­ing them, but being sim­ul­tan­eously sur­prised when nobody (apart from psgels, obvi­ously) seems to share my opin­ion. Then, around about the halfway mark, the show just stops being inter­est­ing. I don’t know why this hap­pens. Maybe I’m uncon­sciously affected by hype or something.

D Katanagatari

When the two of them are talk­ing away in the desert, doing their weird hair-fondling bond­ing ses­sion, this show aint bad. But oh dear lord those fight scenes are unbear­able. Fight scenes are sup­posed to be about fight­ing. Not mak­ing one move and then talk­ing about it for the next 2o minutes. Heck, even those typ­ical shoun­ens like Dragon­ball at least had the char­ac­ters thrown a few punches in between. Any­one who praises this show and cri­ti­cizes shounen series are hypocrites.

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

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