Various Thoughts

I decided to watch this series on a whim after seeing some artwork related to it elsewhere. Surprisingly enough… it’s quite engaging.

The storyline and universe are fairly ridiculous, making the characters the main draw. The main premise reminds me of Kaze no Stigma, while the various character designs are reminiscent of numerous other series. There are resemblances to Kyosuke from SoulTaker, Seras from Hellsing, Kotarou Fuuma from Nabari no Ou, Zangetsu and Kenpachi from Bleach, and Lockon from Gundam 00. I think a lot of the fun was seeing all these basically cross-over characters interact with one another.

The series begins with a strange opening sequence: A young girl seemingly manifests some chains out of thin air and uses them to kill both herself and a young boy, whom I assume is her brother, while another girl looks on from the doorway. I say ‘seemingly’ because the boy (Kakeru) is seen grown-up and attending school shortly after along with the girl seen in the doorway (Yuka). The incident depicted earlier is retroactively explained as his sister having committed suicide, and no mention of his death or impalement is mentioned. Before long, this rational world is shattered and Kakeru and Yuka are transported to an alternate red-tinted version of reality where monsters roam. They pop back into their normal reality after a near-tentacle-rape experience; the transition somehow tied to the resonance caused by physical contact between them. The first episode ends with Kakeru’s allegedly dead sister (Kukuri) appearing and sending them back to the alternate reality, where they are again set-upon by tentacle-wielding mushrooms.

The second episode begins where the first left off, with Kakeru and Yuka surrounded by monsters. They are soon rescued by girl (Misuzu) wielding an electric-katana. They begin traveling together and eventually stumble across a girl trapped inside a crystal formation (Lisette). They’re accosted soon after by a group of black-clad antagonists who call them ‘Fragments’ and wish to destroy them for the crime of existence, and pop back into normal reality just before Kakeru gets his head forcibly removed from his body. Kakeru wonders what kind of power he could possibly have that would get him dragged into the Red Night, and Misuzu casually mentions his right eye. Which makes quite of bit of sense. You have to wonder why he didn’t take the eye-patch off the first time it started hurting.

Episode three begins with the Black Moon imposing its existence into normal reality. Kakeru eventually works out with some wordplay that the Red Night is somehow centered on him, and that he’s the one who’s been pulling the others into it. He decides that he must awaken whatever power is hidden inside and so goes to beg Misuzu to give him some martial training. That night they get sucked back into the Red Night and are confronted by two black knights. Misuzu engages one of them while the other chases after Kakeru and Yuka. Misuzu defeats her opponent thanks to another Fragment’s timely appearance, while Yuka and Kakeru appear to have been saved by Kukuri.

I began watching this series for one reason and one reason only; I saw a picture of the cast in either a 4chan thread or an ED article (I forget which) and thought to myself "Who is that white-skinned girl? She looks interesting.". On the plus side, Chiana did indeed turn out to be interesting.

The first two seasons are fairly good. It felt sort of like Battlestar Galactica mixed with… something. I used to know what the ‘something’ was, but that was weeks ago when I first thought of the comparison. I suppose I should have wrote it down…. No matter.

The third season, however, is trash. Total and complete trash. Not only does pretty much every episode contain nonsensical situations and pointless storylines, but the two new crew members that are introduced are both useless and have horrifically grating personalities. The first, Jool, replaces Zhaan and has not a single redeeming quality or, indeed, even a purpose in existence. Jar Jar Binks has more of a right to exist than this character. No joke. The second, who is introduced toward the end and becomes a regular in the fourth season, is Noranti. Basically a giddy hedge witch version of Yoda. Horrible on all levels.

The fourth season rises above my ground-level expectations by returning believability to the episodes’ premises. It also replaces Jool with Sikozu, a character who actually does something other then run around like a chicken with its head cut off. It ends on a questionable note however, with a ludicrous cliffhanger seemingly pulled out of thin air.

The Peacekeeper Wars miniseries begins by mostly reverting said cliffhanger, and then proceeds to jump to the spontaneous outbreak of a full-scale galaxy-wide war between the Peacekeepers and the Scarrans. The war feels like a heavy-handed plot device. The whole baby subplot also feels like a heavy-handed plot device. Still, it’s a decent finale to the series and finally ends the ‘capture John to gain his wormhole knowledge’ reoccurring storyline… albeit in a heavy-handed deus ex machina way.

This series is fantastic. It is as if someone mixed The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya with Da Capo and then layered it atop a base of Air. The best parts of those series are combined to form something that easily rivals them all.

The beginning is more akin to Haruhi while the end is more like Da Capo, but the two series’ influences can be felt throughout. However… it does hiccup a bit around two-thirds of the way through, when the Harem elements threaten to overwhelm everything else. Thankfully, it manages to ground itself a few episodes later. A solid series all-in-all.

The After Story, however, is terrible. It’s nothing but a wholly inferior Kimi ga Nozomu Eien.

This series is essentially a much less serious version of Spiral.

The majority of the episodes are strictly formulaic. The first half tends to be some basic build-up while the second half consists of Neuro explaining how the murder took place. It gets old fast. What keeps the series afloat is Yako’s character development, her evolving relationship with Neuro, and her reactions to the various supernatural events taking place.

It should also be noted that right around episode sixteen or so it gets a touch more serious. Most of the formulaic framework is discarded to focus more on Sai, his origins, and his connection to Yako.

My feelings toward the series are mixed. Beyond the above, it’s fairly difficult to categorize. I originally wanted to describe it as a more childish version of Spiral… and while in many ways that’s true (the suspect face morphs for instance), in others (mainly Sai’s entire existence) it most certainly isn’t. Even the animation style tends to switch back and forth between realistic and cartoonish. It’s watchable for the most part… but I would not waste any large amount of effort to track it down.

Mnemosyne is an interesting six-episode series that spans the course of roughly a century. It’s focused upon an Immortal who’s working as a detective while being hounded from time to time by an acutely sadistic immortal angel.

Immortals in this series are women who have consumed Yggdrasil’s fruit of life, while angels are men who have consumed the fruit. The Immortals are basically normal women who will eventually regenerate any damage done to their bodies, thus making them immortal. Angels, on the other hand, are little more than mindless beasts who only live for a couple weeks and think about little more than raping and devouring Immortals.

I’m currently torn on whether the gratuitous violence and sexual content make the series better or worse. In one view they’re simply a form of fan service, while in another they are integral to the story’s characterizations and events. Perhaps it’s a bit of both.

This is a surprisingly good series, despite the fact that it’s technically a Lolicon-infused Harem version of… something. I was going to say ‘Bleach‘, but that’s not very accurate. There are similarities of course; Tōma’s personality is not all that dissimilar to Ichigo’s and Stiyl bears a strong resemblance to Renji, for instance. Still, there are enough differences for the comparison to fall apart.

It’s mainly something of an action-centric romantic comedy. The romance, however, is light-hearted and confines itself mostly to embarrassment with periodic spates of physical humor. Nothing on the level of Kämpfer. Thankfully. The humor tends to take two forms; the aforementioned physical, or loli-based:

As for the action scenes… well… they can get a bit ridiculous at times, with their blatant bias toward letting Tōma do everything right-handed and all. Still the series is fun to watch with its solid animation style and has few problematic sections, with those few able to be skipped over without missing anything important.

This is the second Anime based on the Phantom of Inferno visual novel, and the one that does it far better credit.

It’s broken up into three stages (to mimic the visual novel’s three chapters I assume), and each one has its own ending and beginning. The first arc concerns itself mainly with Zwei’s transformation into an assassin and Claudia’s early plotting. The second is inferior to the first in many ways, the main reason being that it loses much of its earlier focus on the assassin lifestyle and mindset to introduce a large amount of pointless plotting by Claudia and the displaced Scythe Master. The last arc could be better or worse than the second depending on your point of view. It ditches the mafia setting completely and turns itself into something of a school-life series with an action end-cap. Also; how the hell did Cal grow so much in only two years while Zwei got younger?

The opening third is fairly fantastic on all levels and easily puts the OVA series to shame. The rest, while mostly watchable and fairly entertaining, does not do the series any favors. It should be noted that the final confrontation between Ein and Scythe was fairly well done and complements the series’ beginning nicely, but the non-canon ‘twist’ ending should have been avoided.

The final installment to the Garden of Sinners series of movies makes a valiant attempt to tie up a couple of hanging storylines and wrap everything up in a nice happy ending. The majority of the movie is quite good, almost rivaling Paradox Spiral… but it dismantles itself near-completely in the final twenty minutes.

Wrapping up this series with a happy ending, as they did, just feels so wrong. So very wrong. While it is true that it’s a Romance at heart, that genre had always taken a backseat to the Action and Mystery surrounding Shiki’s work with Tōko and the actions of Tōko’s former associates. To end it the way they did without resolving the issue of Sōren Araya cheapens the series quite a bit.

I was shocked to discover that a Darker Than Black continuation exists. It had felt as though they had told the story they wanted to tell, and I didn’t really see any room for an expansion. They found room by completely shifting the focus of the story; it now has a distinct infusion of Magical Girl… which is something of a detriment. Though it does manage to make up for that by having said MG look like Komugi from Soultaker/Nurse Witch Komugi.

Most of the trappings of the first season are still present, only now Suou takes the “warm” counterpoint to the contractors’ “cold” instead of having Hei switch back and forth. He’s gotten quite bitter between then and now and only manages to regain most of his personality later on in the series.

Although it has some noticeable issues (such as MG transformation scenes in most episodes, a storyline rendered mostly obsolete in final episode, and Hei’s hypocritical harping about “proper contractor behavior”), it’s a nice addition to the series.