First Impressions: Needless, Canaan, Princess Lover, Bakemonogatari, Spice and Wolf Season 2, Tokyo Magnitude

I should have had this post out earlier but I was busy get­ting thor­oughly wet at a giant music fest­ival. I am never camp­ing at a music fest­ival again. I’ve done it twice now and I feel I’ve now got­ten a proper feel for fest­ival camp­ing aka: it’s very fuck­ing wet.

The god­dess has returned. You know, the one who’s name begins with a H. Yup, of course I’m talk­ing about Horo!

My Rat­ing Sys­tem Explained!

A = If you watch any­thing this sea­son, watch this

B = Very good, some­times sur­pris­ingly so.

C = If you have the time, you should check this out

D = Not my kind of thing, I won’t be watch­ing this

E = Bad. Very bad, ignore this show

F = Frus­trat­ingly awful

Need­less

If I had a choice between watch­ing some­thing hope­lessly dumb or some­thing hope­lessly bor­ing, I would pick the dumb one every time because at least their is a slight sense of enjoy­ment at watch­ing how incred­ibly bad the team fuck things up and it’s there­fore much easier to make fun of. So there­fore I would prefer to watch Need­less over the base­ball girls one. That’s about as far as my praise will go.

Ori­gin­ally I thought all the Gur­ren Lagann sim­il­ar­it­ies people were mak­ing was just the stand­ard reac­tion to any anime that’s manly but god Need­less really does want to be Gur­ren Lagann. The guy has Kam­ina sunglasses for gods sake. It’s full of yelling in Engrish and words shoot­ing across the screen and abso­lutely no sign of any­body really caring about the plot that much.

It seems to me the cre­at­ors thought the plot was an small annoy­ing mat­ter that they didn’t really want to put in but the men at the top deman­ded it so we got these hope­lessly badly explained plot points all over the place. And then there’s the end­ing. You’ve prob­ably seen or heard the rumours of the end­ing. It does have to be seen to be believed.

Rat­ing: E

Canaan

Wow, that was pretty damn intense. The gun­fight in the epis­ode was fuck­ing fant­astic. With the back­drop to people cheer­ing and all the con­fu­sion and people’s heads dis­in­teg­rat­ing and fall­ing into the river, that was great fun to watch. It was obvi­ously helped by the damn nice anim­a­tion. A bit gen­eric but very well executed.

But I’m going to have to keep the score down a bit for now. Canaan hasn’t revealed of it’s cards yet and some of the char­ac­ters were a bit non­sensical, like the girl get­ting a foot mas­sage. Of course this could be because she’s one of those Syn­thes­izers or whatever they were called, but it just could be we have another one of those sad­ist freaky people that I hate in my anime.

It cer­tainly looks prom­ising but as I said, I’ll have to wait a while before we know exactly how good. Although I do have to say that it has the most gen­eric pos­sible open­ing I’ve ever seen. I mean, I was laugh­ing pretty much the whole way through it as it tossed out the same routine as any other open­ing song. Luck­illy, an anime isn’t made by an open­ing or else Canaan would be a straight F.

Rat­ing: B–

Prin­cess Lover

I’m not sure quite how to rate Prin­cess Lover. On one hand, it’s full of boun­cing breasts. I mean, they are fuck­ing every­where and I hate bouncy boobs. I mean, for gods sake wear some­thing sens­ible if you are sword fight­ing, like armour or at least a god­dam bra. Then there’s those rather annoy­ing black patches/fog where cen­sor­ing has taken place, which if any­thing is more off-putting than panties.

On the other hand, this anime is far more intel­li­gent than it’s porn game roots would have you believe. One moment that got me was when the pink-haired girl acted like she had amne­sia and I was think­ing ‘oh how bloody typ­ical’ until she revealed she was just tak­ing the piss at this com­mon trope. There were sev­eral incid­ents like this in the epis­ode where it showed that it actu­ally does have a brain.

I’m not sure if I want to watch this anime. The anim­a­tion is ter­rible and the boobs are as off-putting as any­thing but it has a brain! Even the chase scene was sur­pris­ingly excit­ing and com­bat but­lers are always awe­some. It’s not amaz­ing or any­thing but it’s far, far bet­ter than I expec­ted it to be. But when all’s said and done, it’s still based off a porn game.

Rat­ing: C

Bake­monogatari

You know, not every­body who reads these pre­views knows what ‘typ­ical Shaft’ means. It’s like when people toss names of Seiyu around and I haven’t a clue what they are on about (I’ve never cared in the slight­est who voices whom in my anime) so there­fore describ­ing Bake­monogatari as pure Shafty­ness would mean abso­lutely n0thing to them.

If you are one of those people then I strongly recom­mend you watch the first epis­ode because I still have yet to see any­thing that com­pares to that style of dir­ect­ing and anim­at­ing. After watch­ing crap anim­a­tion in Need­less and Prin­cess Lover, the relief in watch­ing some­thing as well anim­ated as this is a huge relief, although cer­tainly mind-boggling.

For the rest of you, this is prob­ably a bit too Shafty for me. I much pre­ferred his more laid-back style in Natsu no Arashi or, if he is going to go wild with his dir­ect­ing, then to play it for laughs like SZS (before the jokes got old that is). I’ll still watch it, because Shaft is such a weird view­ing exper­i­ence, but really I’m just wait­ing for the Natsu no Arashi sequel next season.

Rat­ing: C

Spice and Wolf Sea­son 2

She has returned! While every­one else was clam­or­ing to see their other god­dess in action (and got to see her again and again and again) I couldn’t wait to see the return of the first anime I star­ted fol­low­ing the fan­subs to. And even with the change in stu­dio the style and feel have remained the exact same.

Brains Base have done a fine job here. The anim­a­tion is as solid as it was in the first sea­son and only someone with the most developed of animation-spotting eye­sight would notice a dif­fer­ence in the two sea­sons. The only notice­able change simply comes around from nor­mal plot-progression as Horo and Lawrence seem much closer in this season.

It’s not a mas­ter­piece. I may go on about how much I love this anime but it still was never a mas­ter­piece. Just very solid, very enjoy­able and very well-executed. It says a lot about an anime when you can watch two char­ac­ters just chat­ting and find it eas­ily the most enjoy­able anime all season.

Rat­ing: B+

Tokyo Mag­nitude

Tokyo Mag­nitude is a lot like the quiet twin sis­ter of Umineko. Both anime spent their first epis­odes intro­du­cing the char­ac­ters and the set­ting without really being that spec­tac­u­lar but both anime also had the clear signs that they could become very inter­est­ing indeed when some fan is intro­duced to a cer­tain amount of shit.

The sim­il­ar­it­ies end there. While Umineko goes com­pletely OTT with char­ac­ter designs, expres­sions and grand scenes of people yelling ‘mwa­haha’, Tokyo Mag­nitude prefers to take a quieter road, reveal­ing char­ac­ters feel­ings through more subtle meth­ods and gen­er­ally being far bet­ter dir­ec­ted than Umineko.

It wasn’t exactly hugely enjoy­able though. Not much happened and the female leads frus­tra­tion is mirrored by your own at hav­ing to watch her but it’s a very smoothly executed anime. But it’s obvi­ously going to get bet­ter and as for the earth­quake at the end…that was eerie. The giant CGI bridge look­ing like some drug-induced dream, shak­ing about like that…

Rat­ing: C+

If you’re won­der­ing where Sora no Man­i­m­ani is, I’ve decided that I’m going to start blog­ging that anime (unless the second epis­ode turns out to be a com­plete dis­aster that is).