I was going to do another Mystery Meat post today, this one on "Kaitou Tenshi Twin Angel OVA", but I couldn't watch it through. It was terrible. Just dreadful. It was blatantly a ripoff of Sailor Moon, complete with a mysterious guy (with white roses) who showed up to save the Angels at critical moment.

And just to show how derivative it was, there was a cybernetic tank straight out of the Ghost in the Shell movie.

Once the first battle was over, they switched to what I think was a middle school where our two cuties are students, being chewed out by the headmaster -- but I'd had more than enough by that point. I got about five minutes into the first episode of two. There's only so much pain I'm willing to tolerate on your behalf.

I guess I hadn't realized just how much Sailor Moon was imitated.

UPDATE: By the way, it would seem I'm not alone in holding this opinion about the show. I am currently running 93 seeds, and this is one of just 3 for which I have uploaded 0 bytes. (The other two being Melty Lancer and an obscure soundtrack.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Mystery Meat at 02:24 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Well, it wasn't bad. It wasn't great, but I'd put it considerably above average for a Gonzo show -- which is a case of damning it with faint praise.

The ending felt a little rushed, and a bit contrived, but it was satisfying, ultimately.

After the final critical battle, there's a brief "And life gets back to normal" segment, which includes this:

Another cornball group challenges Ryoko in K-Fight, and she's ready to go, and about to wipe them out.

And the committee is there to televise it, as always.

Surprisingly, the fan service was pretty mild. About 90% of it was Ryoko's panchira, but we're not talking full-screen zoom-into-your-face like with Strike Witches. It's about like those last two I just included, and nearly always it's very brief. No shower scenes, no nudity that I remember.

Some of the combat scenes are pretty badly animated, with lots of shortcuts, but several of them are surprisingly good, among the better ones that I've seen. No, they don't measure up to the fights in Jubei-chan, but nothing else does either. That's a pretty high standard. They're better than DBZ, for the most part, so it's pretty good.

The characters are pretty engaging, especially the two leading characters, Ryoko and Shizuma. I think that Shizuma changes more in the eyes of the audience over the course of the series than any other character, but the fan favorite is still going to be Ryoko, just because.

If I was going to rate this, I'd give it 2.5 stars and a thumbs up. It's not a waste of time. Well, most of it isn't a waste of time. A couple of the episodes were really tedious, and it's pretty crummy to have a recap episode in a series which is only 13 eps long.

It was fun, and I'm glad I watched it. I can imagine myself watching parts of it again.

UPDATE: In fact, I think I am going to watch it again, though with some skipping.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Mystery Meat at 08:54 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Today's Mystery Meat is "Welcome to Pia Carrot 2 DX". Which is probably a fan service show.

UPDATE: It turns out to be a non-H adaptation of a hentai series which was based on an H-game.

Is there anything consistently worse in anime than non-H adaptations of hentai? (Well, I suppose there's yaoi...)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Mystery Meat at 05:26 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Today's Mystery Meat is "Ichigo 100%". All I remember about it is that it's a harem comedy.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Mystery Meat at 02:15 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Today's Mystery Meat is "Melty Lancer". I downloaded it to get bonus points.

Turns out to be a science fiction series from Gonzo with lots of combat by six super-powerful women. They were some sort of special combat unit, or law enforcement unit, or something but the unit was disbanded a year previously. Now there's some sort of major threat.

A guy named Collins is pulled out of a cell in a high security prison by three political bigwigs who tell him they'll release him, if he takes command of a reunited Melty Lancer for one mission. Having nothing better to do, he accepts, but other than that he isn't really a factor in the first episode.

He's assigned an aide, a wimpy guy (you can tell because he's wearing glasses) who has been sent out to collect all the women who are scattered hell-and-gone around the galaxy. And he manages to do so early enough in the episode so that there's time for them to engage in a major battle.

I'm sure that the wimp has the same voice actor as Pyoro in Vandread, but it's not listed in that seiyuu's CV on ANN. It would help if I knew what the wimp's name was but I don't think they ever said.

Collins has the same voice as Samson in Banner of the Stars. I didn't really recognize any of the women's voices, though.

The art was mediocre and the animation pretty standard. Little or no fan service that I noticed. The voice acting was a bit over the top. Generally pretty forgettable and after one ep I am not really tempted to watch any more of it, even though there's a loli mahoutsukai and a loli catgirl in the group.

I guess there's a reason few people are seeding this one. Right now there are only two of us.

UPDATE: Today's series was going to be "Girl from Phantasia", but damn. I got five minutes into it and couldn't force myself to watch any more. The pain...

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Mystery Meat at 05:22 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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1 Girl from Phantasia was the pilot for a TV series that never eventuated.  Now you know why.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at October 11, 2009 11:28 PM (PiXy!)

2 Oh, brother, do I. Even just in those five minutes, I could tell that it was completely derivative. There wasn't anything original about it at all.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 12, 2009 03:24 AM (+rSRq)

3 I watched a couple of episodes of Melty Lancer back in 2001 or so. It was sort of amusing and I was open to continue. But it was before the strict no-GONZO policy.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at October 18, 2009 05:30 PM (/ppBw)

4 By the way, I'm 100% ok with derivative shows. The real fault line is in the show's quality, and not being derivative. For all that's said about RahXephon being a clone of EVA, I found it much better made and far more enjoyable.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at October 18, 2009 07:31 PM (/ppBw)

5 I tried watching RahXephon for more or less that reason.  Found I lost all interest after two eps.  I suspect this was because I was more in a TTGL, Nanoha mood, as far as my anime tastes went.  Maybe I'll give it a try sometime.

Or maybe I'll just rewatch Nanoha. 

Posted by: metaphysician at October 18, 2009 07:45 PM (M5Kik)

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Today's Mystery Meat series is "Sumomomo momomo". It isn't quite a mystery, however; I downloaded it just a few days ago and have some idea what I'm getting. NSFW below the fold.

UPDATE: Ubu Roi responds.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Mystery Meat at 05:15 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Today's Mystery Meat series is "Requiem from the Darkness".

UPDATE: Looks like it's still available in R1, so I've got a guilt buy coming. (I wouldn't want to be visited by them, you know!)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Mystery Meat at 07:01 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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I was looking in my archives and saw that I never explained why this series is called "Mystery Meat". So here goes: I downloaded a whole bunch of stuff from BakaBT and started seeding it. For a lot of it, when I just look at the title, I don't have the slightest idea why. I know the main reasons why I picked things: for potential bonus points, or because of fan service, or because they looked like they might be good.

The Mystery Meat series of posts consists of me going out to my now-rather-large archive of downloaded fansubs and picking one about which I can't remember a damned thing, and watching the first episode and blogging about it as I watch.

Today's Mystery Meat series was going to be "Uta Kata", except that within 30 seconds of beginning to watch it, I remembered all about it. So we're going to try Koihime Musou.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Mystery Meat at 08:43 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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1 Coincidentally I watched part of the first episode of this last night. I think it is yet another anime adaptation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. My take on it agrees with yours- not very good. I might finish watching the first episode sometime, but then again, I might not.

Posted by: tds at October 03, 2009 08:55 PM (zjX5u)

2 The coincidence of names was the most interesting thing for me: Kan'U Unchou? Long black hair? Polearm? Big boobs? Sounds familiar, don't it?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 03, 2009 09:13 PM (+rSRq)

3 I took a look at your seedlist. FtN? Genki Senki Leda? Where do you even find all that

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at October 03, 2009 09:51 PM (/ppBw)

4

Different ways. Some of the low-seed-count stuff I found by resorting the "browse" listing by seed count (you can do that) and then moving to the last page and reading forward.

Sometimes when I see a user listed in one of the TOP lists, I'll look at their seed list (or used-to-seed list) and occasionally I've spotted something in there I thought was interesting.

It also turns out that you can click on a keyword and it'll show you all the seeds which use that keyword. That's particularly handy for keywords like pantsu. (heh)

As to Leda, I honestly don't remember just how I stumbled on that one.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 03, 2009 10:13 PM (+rSRq)

5  What coincidence? They're both drawing from Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Koihime Musou is a gender-swapped retelling; Ikkitousen is a modern "reincarnation" story.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at October 03, 2009 11:00 PM (vGfoR)

6 I found a cast pic from the game with the character names cross-referenced from the original novel (Chinese-type names, so it matches the Dynasty Warriors games, not Ikkitousen). It's here. Be warned - terrifying cross-gender Diao Chan at the bottom.

Also, a chart showing various depictions of a few of the characters, including Ikkitousen and Koihime Musou. Much smaller chance of horrific eyeball burn with this one.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at October 03, 2009 11:08 PM (vGfoR)

7 I remember watching the first two episodes of this when it was airing.  I think I made it to the eyecatch of the second before saying "this is too stupid, even for me."

Posted by: Wonderduck at October 04, 2009 12:18 AM (/O6qY)

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Today's Mystery Meat show is "Netrunmon, the Movie". And it's entirely too silly to believe. More, including a couple of borderline NSFW frame grabs and a lot of spoilers, below the fold.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Mystery Meat at 02:54 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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Our second Mystery Meat series is Samurai Girl Real Bout High School. I'm pretty sure I got this because it sounded like a poor man's version of Ikki Tousen. And also because of one or more keywords.

Blow-by-blow, plus 32 frame grabs, below the fold. A few of the grabs are NSFW, but it isn't anything like as raunchy as the last one.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Mystery Meat at 05:33 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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