First Impressions: Umi Monotagari, Aoi Hana, Umineko, and those other anime with confusing names

It’s been exactly a year now since I star­ted blog­ging and I star­ted off by writ­ing one of these: A Sum­mer Sea­son first impres­sions post (actu­ally it was a post where I bashed Sekirei, god that post took me about 3 hours to com­plete, Word­Press com­pletely baffled me). I could do a post on all i have learned about how to be a suc­cess­ful blog­ger but it all basic­ally boils down to ‘post often’ which is bloody obvi­ous any­way. So instead lets get down to review­ing some of these new anime.

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

Umi Monot­agari (Sea Story)

Con­sid­er­ing this anime’s plot was based of a pachinko game, I had low expect­a­tions for this anime but when you think about, why would I? I mean, what’s a pin­ball machine to offer in terms of, say, the script? What this means is the dir­ector has as much free­dom to mess about with these pretty char­ac­ter designs as he wants. And guess what? This dir­ector is good, there­fore Umi Monogonomi..Sea Story is sur­pris­ingly good.

First off, it appears ZEXCES have lev­elled up their anim­a­tion qual­ity big time. OK, it’s hardly at the level of FMA or Eden but it’s far pret­tier than many of the also-ran stu­dios out there. It has a peace­ful feel to it, with light-hearted humour but it’s the dashes of intel­li­gence that made this stand out. The occa­sional looks the char­ac­ters would give each other, or maybe I’m look­ing into it too much.

I’ve gen­er­ally not liked these types of moe stuff but I do like this. It’s genu­inely funny as well, some­thing which is sure to keep me com­ing back to abso­lutely any show. This won’t be the next big thing and it for sure won’t be the anime filling the void left by Eden but hey, I like it. Finally, after watch­ing this it’s con­vinced me that maybe I should check out Aria.

Rat­ing: B

Aoi Hana

Yuri…I just don’t like yuri. I mean, it’s not like I dis­like les­bi­ans or any­thing. Les­bi­ans are awe­some. But the one thing I hate while watch­ing my anime is hav­ing a bunch of girls being insuf­fer­ably nice to each other. Guess what the whole point of a yuri anime is? So in my view­ing exper­i­ence, yuri=yawnfest.

That said, Aoi Hana is bet­ter than any yuri anime I’ve seen thus far. Heck, it’s miles fuck­ing bet­ter. There was actu­ally some well-written dia­logue and none of that bloody ‘stand under sak­ura petals look­ing long­inly at each other’ rub­bish. I sup­pose it’s to be expec­ted of the dir­ector of Nodame, being able to keep my interest in a yuri anime.

That said, I was hardly sold on this either. It’s sort of like mush­rooms. No mat­ter how good a chef cooks them, I still won’t like mush­rooms. I’m will­ing to give this a try for a while because you do have to step out­side your com­fort zone every once in a while. Besides, maybe hawt yuri action will be bet­ter if I actu­ally know the characters.

Rat­ing: C–

Umineko no naku koro ni

Since I haven’t seen Higur­as­hi­yet, I wasn’t plan­ning on watch­ing this so I missed the buildup to it. So when the epis­ode aired a few days ago I was shocked by all the hype and fan­rage pop­ping up all over the place so I decided what the hell and got down to watch­ing it. And I liked what I saw. Well, sort of.

Most import­antly, Umineko has huge ambi­tion. You can tell from the epic open­ing to all the over the top reac­tions from the char­ac­ters that this anime is con­vinced it’s gonna be the next big thing. And I love that! The evil grandad even has a skull on his desk, how awe­some is that! But it’s got plenty of flaws too. We were intro­ducedto some­thing like 20 char­ac­ters in the first epis­ode and they’re harder to remem­ber when they are all so one-dimensional.

You can see what Umineko is doing. Bunch of char­ac­ters on an island, chest of gold that’s worth 20 bil­lion and the mys­tery of the witch? We gots ourselves a murder mys­tery! And ser­i­ously, it doesn’t take a genius to tell that this could get real inter­est­ing when shit hits the fan, so you fan­boys don’t have to go round yelling ‘IT GETS BETTER RAWR’ every­where. I hope you lot are right though.

Rat­ing: C+

Yoku Wakaru Gendai Mahou

My fist impres­sions on watch­ing this anime was ‘why do anime keep hav­ing these epis­ode 0’s it’s dumb rawr rawr rawr’ etc. until I real­ised that this was just streamed online and not on TV at all (which would explain the poor video qual­ity any­way). The actual TV broad­cast isn’t until next week so the real plot should start then.

So until then I’ll hold back any thoughts and give it a pop. Episode00 wasn’t exactly that bad but I’ll wait until epis­ode 1 before I actu­ally pass judge­ment on this anime. Ummm.…so yeah. Pans FTW and all that.

Taishou Yakyuu Musume

Oh wow that was really bor­ing. I mean, it star­ted off really ran­domly with the Dis­ney Musical but then she woke up and went straight back into her world of girls being all soft-spoken and polite to each other in a world where noth­ing remotely excit­ing or ground-breaking or heart-warming or eye-opening or even funny happens.

To under­stand why I found this so bad you may have to read my post on that yuri show. Basic­ally, I HATE anime where it’s just a bunch of girls being nice to each other. There is noth­ing more bor­ing than that. I mean, they would fall into a situ­ation that could oth­er­wise be comedic and instead just start bow­ing and say­ing ‘oh excuse me, good day to you blah de bleargh’.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen such a bor­ing anime. Ris­tor­ante Para­diso caused chronic yawn­ing but even that was bet­ter than this. And to think I had a gut feel­ing about this anime. God­dam you gut. From now on I’m stick­ing to hard fact when I look at sea­son pre­views. The only reason it doesn’t get a F– is for the ran­dom­ness at the start. Ah well, there’s one every season.

Rat­ing: F

None of the shows I really wanted to check out have been subbed yet. So with Tokyo Mag­nitude, Bake­monogatari, Canaan and Spice and Wolf still on the way, this looks to be a damn good Sum­mer Sea­son. Even if it is a bit moe-full.