First Impressions: Pandora Hearts, Tears to Tiara, 07 Ghost, Guin Saga

My pen­ul­tim­ate first impres­sions post and with this group of anime the year takes a much brighter look as I real­ise exactly how many high qual­ity anime are out at the moment. Toss in the fact that legal stream­ing seems to be tak­ing hold, it’s a good time to be an anime fan.

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

Pan­dora Hearts

Being a soc­cer fan I’m going to use the age old cliche term to describe this epis­ode. It was a story of two halves. The first half was some rich fam­ily with not-so-funny char­ac­ters mak­ing humor­ous faces with a bit of mys­tery about some Abyss thing that involved chains. All very bor­ing stuff to be honest.

But whatever the man­ager said to them at half time worked a treat. Sud­denly Pan­dora Hearts got mys­ter­i­ous and creepy. The creepy sequence where our hero was trans­por­ted to another world was fant­ast­ic­ally done and kept you on your toes as you just weren’t sure what was going on or what was real.

After that it went back to rich old fam­ily house stuff but the injec­tion of mys­tery had taken it’s toll. Now the char­ac­ters seemed much more inter­est­ing, the tale about the Abyss much more rel­ev­ant and the char­ac­ters con­ver­sa­tions now actu­ally meant a lot more. I am not a big fan of XEBEC (which is a nice way of say­ing ‘they are rub­bish’) but if they play their cards right with this they could be onto some­thing. Although don’t go buy­ing any stock in Pan­dora Hearts just yet.

Rat­ing: C+

Tears to Tiara

Well, there were a lot of bad signs here. First, the attempt to anim­ate events in the dark wsa poorly done. I couldn’t see a blas­ted thing. Then the vil­lain was just so gen­er­ic­ally evil (I like inflict­ing pain upon little chil­dren rawr rawr etc.). Toss in some a hope­lessly corny scene where one char­ac­ter gets trapped behind a rock­fall and yells ‘go on without me’. Now you have a recipe for don’t watch this.

How­ever Tears to Tiara has ambi­tion. For all the poor anim­a­tion earlier, the scene with that devil bil­low­ing out of the chest was really well done and, des­pite all the dull­ness before­hand, left me want­ing to see what hap­pens next. Because ToT has ambi­tion. It is con­vinced it’s an epic fantasy tale, like it’s sis­ter series, Utawarerumonononono..mono.

But I amn’t really a fan of fantasy. Twelve King­doms bored me silly and I never what was the big whoop about Moribito. I think I can only handle one fantasy series a sea­son, so it was between this and Guin Saga. One has amaz­ing anim­a­tion and based upon a set of best-selling nov­els and the other has dull anim­a­tion and based off a porn game. Guess which one I’m watching?

Rat­ing: D+

07 Ghost

There’s one of these every sea­son and the Geass vibes should’ve given it away. Back in Autumn it was Kan­nagi. This time round, the shock hit of the sea­son appears to be 07 Ghost. Going into it with very little expect­a­tions, I was treated to prob­ably the best first epis­ode all sea­son. I felt like I had just watched some­thing hour long. They had packed so much into this first epis­ode without once feel­ing rushed.

First off, this is very Geass-esque. The uni­forms cer­tainly seemed to be taken straight from Area 11, as do the char­ac­ter designs. It also seems to have taken Geass’s love for the slightly over-the-top dra­mat­ics, com­plete with suit­able back­ground music and cam­era angles. Deen have actu­ally pulled some damn good anim­a­tion out for this series, the fight scenes are as slick as any­thing this season.

This anime seems to have been dis­missed in some quar­ters as fangirl fod­der and the sheer amount of bish­ies do cer­tainly bring about that con­clu­sion. There lies my only real prob­lem with the epis­ode, I think I saw one pair of breasts in the entire epis­ode, and the porn mag doesn’t count. How­ever 07 Ghost is far more than that. For pure, edge of your seat excite­ment and drama, this seems to be the place to go.

Rat­ing: A–

Guin Saga

Hello Tears to Tiara. This is Guin Saga speak­ing. I have a mes­sage for you: This is how you make a fantasy anime! You first cre­ate your wildly com­plic­ated world com­plete with evil nations, mys­tical proph­ecies, dan­ger­ous creatures and even it’s own God, Yarn. This is quite clearly an anime of epic pro­por­tions. One has to won­der how Satelight are going to pull this off, espe­cially if they try to do this in too few episodes.

Guin Saga is won­der­fully anim­ated, prob­ably the best of the sea­son. The back­grounds are suit­ably lus­cious and it also has a fine eye for cine­ma­to­graphy (the gradual reveal­ing of Guin through the shad­ows was excel­lent). Actu­ally, Guin is the real star of this anime. Talk about an entrance scene, he kar­ate chops a man into the ground for Yarns sake!

There are a few prob­lems, such as how Guins voice doesn’t match his mouth at all. Also I kinda hope Guin gets some clothes fairly soon, it’s rather offput­ting hav­ing his ass-cheeks take up the screen. Oth­er­wise, this looks like it’s set to become an epic fantasy. I’m not a fan of the genre but based off this first epis­ode, I’m will­ing to give fantasy another shot.

Rat­ing: B+