First Impressions: Sora no Woto, Baka to Test to whatever, Dance in the Vampire Bund, Onamori Himari

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

Sora no Woto

Well I think I’ve suc­cess­fully covered what every­one else thinks of this show,but as for myself, you can col­our me mildly impressed. Sora no Woto falls into the cat­egory of humour­less slice of life, a genre that quite often leaves claw­ing at my face through sheer bore­dom. So con­grats to Sora no Woto for keep­ing me inter­ested thus far.

It’s going to be inter­est­ing to see how the story is man­aged from here. There were clear hints at a far big­ger pic­ture over­all, what with that big fossil and the tank and everything. I know I shouldn’t be pla­cingmy action lov­ing pref­er­ences onto this show but if that tank doesn’t get used before the end, I’m going to be a migh­tily dis­ap­poin­ted aniblogger.

Also, I’m not sure if any­one has noticed this yet, but doesn’t the char­ac­ter designs look awfully sim­ilar to the K-ON ones? Just say­ing

Rat­ing: C+

Baka to Test to Whatever

I knew Sil­ver Link had nicked a bunch of ex-Shaft people. Even so, I wasn’t expect­ing the sim­il­ar­it­ies to be so pro­nounced. If someone had told me this was by Shaft, I wouldn’t have bat­ted an eye­lid, except maybe to say “he’s calmed down slightly for this one”. Not quite full Shafty­ness but plenty of Shinbo influ­ence here.

The show itself is so utterly ridicu­lous to the extent that you can’t help but love it. The whole plot runs like the brainchild of an ima­gin­at­ive child who has kept this story idea through to adult­hood. The whole idea of these fights is utterly mad and yet this show plays with tropes very effect­ively. It’s ima­gin­at­ive and *gasp* original!

If any­thing though, this show isn’t nearly mad enough. Think of how crazy Seto no Hanayome was and you’ve hit upon exactly what this series lacks. Shinbo is work­ing on the wrong series this winter. He is not the type of dir­ector suited for Vam­pire Bund. That mad was needed on this series. Ah well, too late to change now.

Rat­ing: C+

Dance in the Vam­pire Bund

Well that was an unusual start to the series. An entire epis­ode based in a game show wasn’t what I was expect­ing from Vam­pire Bund at all. To be hon­est, I can’t say it was pulled off that effect­ively either. I couldn’t really see what the point of the entire sequence was and we didn’t really learn any­thing about the characters.

Actu­ally the more I think about it, the less impressed I am. I knew watch­ing it that this could hardly be how the manga star­ted out because the whole thing was dragged out for way too long, although the way the manga fans were talk­ing about it you could swear they thought Shin­bo­had hired 4kids or some­thing equally apo­ca­lypse inducing.

Eh, actu­ally maybe I’m being a bit too harsh. I’m def­in­itely going to give it a few more epis­odes to prove its worth, although I think this might become the series where I isol­ate myself from inter­net dis­cus­sion on this series. While no way near as bad as VN read­ers, boy can it be annoy­ing to listen to these manga fans at times.

Rat­ing: C–

Onamori Himari

You know, this wasn’t as ter­rible as I was expect­ing. Oh sure, it was a con­stant stream of hor­rible cliches, the char­ac­ters are the dullest cookie cut­ter bunch you could ever get and I have abso­lutely no inten­tion of watch­ing any­more of this, but it cer­tainly could have been worse. At least there were no mutant crois­sants pos­ing as pigtails.

Con­sid­er­ing the manga fans were pan­ick­ing that the plot might have been ignored, frankly I think this would have been bet­ter off without it. There wasn’t a single ori­ginal or invent­ive or even remotely inter­est­ing part in the slight­est. Frankly, I would have pre­ferred more fanservice.

Some­thing that bugs me with these fanser­vice shows is they don’t seem to under­stand sex­i­ness. You can’t just toss in a bunch of boob and panty shots along with a lead who loves the main char­ac­ter and then instant tit­il­la­tion. There’s got to be more heart, more subtle flir­ta­tion and less bloody panty flashes. I’m fuck­ing sick of panty flashes.

Rat­ing: E+

8 shows and still noth­ing worthy of even a B? I shall be patient though. For­tune favours the patient…or something.