I'm going to hold off on a real post about this, so just a quickie for now.

It's about â…“ Strike Witches, â…“ Petite Princess Yucie, and â…“ Pokemon, with lots and lots of nudity. About half the first episode was spent in bath scenes, all heavily censored with fog and rays of light, this being the MX version of the show. But it's also running on AT-X, so I'm going to wait until that shows up, if it does.

It's got a good voice cast, as it turns out. The basic concept: there are five worlds in five universes. One day something happened and opened a portal between the five worlds. At the same time it gave special powers some high school girls on each of the worlds. They've all collected together to fight a mysterious enemy called Neuroi Oroboros. It seems like the Oroboros opened the gateways, and there seems to be a tendency for all the worlds to eventually merge, which will destroy them all.

There are two kinds of girls involved in this fight. First are "Progress", front line girls who actually engage in combat. Then there are "Alpha Drivers", who sit in the rear and bond with the Progress, giving them power boosts.

Which is to say that this is based on a collectible card game and the Progress are cards and the Alpha Driver is the player. In our case our Driver is Amane and she has five Progress working for her, one from each of the worlds.

So more on this after the AT-X version of the show appears.

UPDATE: I might have known that Fapservice would be all over this (NSFW) and they say that it won't show up on AT-X for days, and it will still be censored. So I guess these are all Buy The BD's shots.

The most noteworthy thing for me was that Amane, the player surrogate, is voiced by Tamura Yukari, who does the voice of Nanoha Takamachi. She isn't actively trying to sound like Nanoha but she isn't trying not to, either, and it really does sound a lot like Nanoha.

Anyway, to the extent that there is any kind of story beyond "Hey, cute girls flying around firing energy blasts!" it seems to be about Saya, the magical girl from Earth who is in Amane's team. But it isn't much of a story, I suspect, and this is mainly going to be about eye candy.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 02:23 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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The web site for Ange Vierge says that it's broadcast time is 25:30 on Saturday July 9. I've seen that before, and it's always confused me. I thought there were only 24 hours in a day. Is that not true in Japan? (If they've got a 25 hour day, maybe that's why they're so productive!)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 05:44 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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With fifty or sixty new anime titles each season, and this going on for decades, the studios have a hard time coming up with names for them. Sometimes they don't have to because the name comes from a manga or a light novel so it's someone else's problem.

But as a result when we look back on our history we find there are some trends which appear, get used a few times, and then fade away. Like using incoherent phrases in English (e.g. "Neon Genesis Evangelion").

The latest one seems to be to use WORDxWORD or LETTERxLETTER. I think it may have started with HunterxHunter, and continued with SisxSis (which became known to its fans as "SxS"). Then there was "High School DxD" and now this season we have "Masou Gakuen HxH".

The latter three were all soft core porn, and I think that LETTERxLETTER has become a shorthand for "pandering".

The first episode came out today and I didn't watch it. But Fapservice is right there, doing what they do best, and if you're willing to risk it, here it is.

It's borderline hentai. If this was broadcast on anything except AT-X, it probably got censored up the wazoo. I haven't seen anything so lewd since the Maken Ki OVA.

There's an audience out there for this kind of thing, but I'm not part of it. I can't drop it because I never picked it up, but if I had I would.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 07:58 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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They don't call it a "preview" because they got tired of trying to be comprehensive.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 04:35 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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This was pretty good. It certainly makes me want to watch more of it.

Our Hero was named "Justice Akazuka" by his parents, a name he really doesn't like. His nickname is Seigi, which is the Japanese word for "justice".

His parents aren't around anymore though we don't know why or what happened to them. It doesn't appear to have been unexpected, however, since Seigi's mom asked his childhood friend Touko to take care of him.

She is ridiculously well built and the first time we see her it's a closeup of her boobs jiggling. I don't know if that's a good thing or not. She surely isn't the only girl in this show and it's sending up "harem" smoke signals like mad.

The other main girl, so far, is an American named Izzy (or "Easy"?) who is a lieutenant in the US Army. The Americans have developed a super weapon and made a bunch of copies of it, but a fair chunk of them got stolen and sold to the Yakuza. Izzy has been sent to recover all the ones that got away.

The super weapons look like black drawings and when installed they sit on the inside of the person's hand. Such a person is known as "Sealed" and they become faster and stronger than any normal person. They also gain some sort of special power which they can activate if they have the proper trigger.

Izzy's extra power is to create air bombs by concentrating high pressure air and then releasing it all at once. To do that, she has to hold a piece of chalk, which she absorbs. So she has a holster on her thigh full of pieces of chalk.

Back to Seigi: his family runs a dojo. Now that his parents are gone, his grandfather runs it. Seigi has been training all his life and by this point he's really good. He's walking home one night and sees two thugs trying to mug an old man, so he gets involved and stops them.

The old man thanks him and rewards him by putting something on his hand, which gets absorbed. He now has a tattoo. Then the old man walks away.

So we get a bunch of fighting, and eventually Seigi takes on a big guy from Los Angeles who has a tattoo and tries to fight him -- and loses, and is about to get his head pulped, and then his tattoo activates.

Izzy recognizes the effect. It's called Void Maker, and it looks like it killed the guy. It's also a "triggerless tattoo" which means that he doesn't need a piece of chalk or whatever else; it just happens when he wants it.

The next ep teaser says that Izzy is going to recruit Seigi for a special team. Presumably it's to hunt those who have tattoos and shouldn't. And it looks like it's all young good looking women.

The ED is nothing but women, starting with Touko and Izzy and going from there. According to the series web site there are four others, and three of them have tattoos.

The director previously directed Aria the Scarlet Ammo which was really dumb -- but it had good action scenes, and so does this one. This director isn't responsible for the story, because it's based on a manga. The Studio is J.C. Staff and one thing they're good at is drawing good looking women.

Touko, the childhood friend, lives with Seigi because Seigi's mother made Touko promise to take care of him. She does his cooking and takes care of him and that sounds exactly like Kaede from Shuffle and let's hope not. This show is going to have enough action without her becoming yandere and going after him with a knife.

There's plenty of opportunity for this to turn to crap, but it isn't inevitable. Here's hoping it stays good.

UPDATE: Touko is not as stacked in the manga.

UPDATE: Actually, she is too. That picture was not typical. I just read up to chapter 12 in the manga and...

...it's really stupid.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 07:54 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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I watched the first three episodes of this series and decided it was idiocy and dropped it. What I read about it later did nothing to disabuse me of that impression. Zombie Apocalypse caused by mutant psychic gerbils? Please.

So the 12th and final episode just ran and I decided it wouldn't be fair to write a scathing review of the whole thing without watching it.

And you know what? It was stupid but it was fun. Maybe the biowarfare part of the story got explained earlier; in any case it didn't sink (heh) the final episode.

It took mammoth suspension of disbelief but a degree of Rule of Cool helped a lot. The main disbelief was that with all this firepower going on, apparently no one got injured let alone killed. (Given how many zombified crew there were on Musashi, it's hard to believe no one died there, but they kind of airbrushed all of that. We only saw them once, for about one second, during the boarding action.)

I'm still not sure I could manage to get through watching the whole series, because that would mean fully embracing the stupid, and there was a lot of stupid. Maybe I'll go back and read RandomC's episode reviews for them all.

But the last episode really was pretty awesome. I think I'll watch it again.

UPDATE: It wasn't as good the second time; too many "Wait a minute" moments. Sometimes a show improves on second watching (like the Girls und Panzer movie) but sometimes they get worse.

I want to know the back story about the zombie plague but I'm not sure I'm willing to invest several hours and a lot of brain cells I can't spare in order to find out.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 02:54 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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I've been sitting here for fifteen minutes trying to decide how I should write this up and have come to the conclusion that I shouldn't. It's the last episode of the anime, and they constructed it out of chapters 39 and 44 of the manga.

I was hoping for another onsen episode, perv that I am, but they were right. Chapter 44 was an outstanding choice for ending the series.

It's common in comedy series for them to try to find a touching story to end it, and to temporarily turn off the comedy tap, and usually it doesn't work. It did work this time. The final story made Hane cry, and it gave me tears, too. Watching Hane running down the street pretending she was riding a motorcycle was heart breaking. And then Lime appeared.

This is a huge spoiler. DON'T READ IT UNTIL AFTER YOU'VE WATCHED THE EPISODE! Lime came across from the other timeline and took Hane back. If we needed any more evidence that she's a kami, this was it.

And then we got a happy ending.

It was an excellent way to end the series. If you have fallen for the girls in this series, you'll love this episode! The second part won't make you laugh but it will make you smile.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 11:41 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Even though I enjoyed watching it during the original broadcast I couldn't really let myself go because I was certain that Kyoani was setting us up for a particularly dreadful Gainax ending.

Well, it turned out I was wrong. The ending is a good one, and it turns out that this series is one I like rewatching, at least parts of.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 03:07 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I think this was the funniest episode yet, and for this series that's really saying something.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 12:26 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 08:13 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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