Various thoughts on a variety of topics.
The catlike aliens known as Nyanbo are looking for pieces of their UFO so that they can to return to space. Sometimes they get tired of searching however and just wish to play around like actual cats.
The show primarily features live action visuals (including real cats), with only the Nyanbos themselves being animated. The comedic style ranges from slapstick to romantic comedy.
More Information:
aniDB
Crunchyroll
Wikipedia
When the CGS mercenary group is contracted to transport the leader of a Martian independence movement to Earth, they become the target of Gjallarhorn, a police-like organization which seeks to keep Mars under Earth’s control through any means necessary. Earth however is not united, and the mercenaries quickly become entangled in an elaborate political scheme.
A mecha action drama with child soldiers as the protagonists. Like many Gundam series it focuses on the themes of colonialism, prejudice, rivalry, and chains of revenge. Less common are the mafioso elements it eventually adopts.
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aniDB (1, 2)
Crunchyroll
Daisuki
Fansub.co
Wikipedia
Goryoukan Academy is a prestigious all-girls school located in the middle of the city. Unknown to the general public this school is the training ground for the Fifth Force, a group of girls with the ability to see and fight the inter-dimensional invaders known as O’bli.
Equal parts daily school life antics and monster-fighting action with an early focus on training. The ecchi level is moderate and mainly takes the form of skimpy clothing and numerous bathing scenes.
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aniDB
Crunchyroll
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Strange suicides have begun occurring in Shibuya, deaths which bear a resemblance to the ones from the ‘New Generation of Madness’ incident from six years prior. For reasons of his own, the president of Hekiho Academy’s newspaper club has decided to investigate these incidents… ending up a target as result.
A horror thriller that eventually acquires the aspects of an ESP action series. While it’s a direct sequel to Chaos;Head, watching that is not required to watch this (though if you haven’t it would be a good idea to skip the ‘episode 0’ recap since it only works as a refresher).
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aniDB
Crunchyroll
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The Boy Detectives Club led by Kogorou Akechi accepts and solves jobs of all sorts, ranging from lost pets, to missing people, to rampaging robots. On one such job they meet a strange boy surrounded by what appears to be an invincible force field, who may be related to the connection between Akechi and master criminal The Fiend with Twenty Faces.
An action drama with a bit of comedy inspired by two novels from the late 1930’s. It features both episodic stories and an over-arching character-driven plotline.
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aniDB
Crunchyroll
Fansub.co
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Taking place a little while after the end of the second game, this third installment in the franchise is basically a combination of the first two with an overhauled combat system. Making it easily the best of the bunch (once you install the re-translation project to reduce the terribleness of the localization).
Character-wise, with the DLC, you get access to the whole cast and don’t have to jump through any hoops or waste any Plan space to unlock characters (although Uni, Ram, & Rom don’t become available until the last chapter). Story-wise there’s only some especially cringy moments in the 6th chapter or so. And as for the re-used assets… well, there’s still a ton of those.
The most notable improvement here over the previous games though is the revamped combat system:
Instead of having an EX Bar that the entire party has to use (and which has to be re-filled every time you enter an area), each character’s SP pool doubles as an EX Pool. Meaning now you can pull off multiple 3-bar EX attacks in a row. Even better, the game now tells you when an enemy you’re attacking happens to be weak/strong against an element and even specifies whether an attack you’re about to use is magical or physical.
Another new addition is an in-game achievement system. By doing things with each character like running, jumping, taking damage, switching in combat, using items in combat, and so forth, that character will get stat boosts and unlock character-specific Plans to further boost their stats or add new abilities (like a 5th combo slot).
Really, the only flaw with this entry (besides the localization and re-used assets) is that the DLC character Events are bugged to appear a chapter earlier than they should. So if you’re only able to get one of the three games, this would be the one to prioritize.
Chuuta Kokonose finds himself suddenly asked to become a member of the Space Police after being spontaneously transported onboard their orbital spacecraft. While hesitant at first, he changes his mind after finding out that his classmate is already a member and that the voice he’s always heard in his head happens to belong to a symbiotic alien.
A not particularly serious action comedy that bears something of a resemblance to a battle shounen. The style of humor leans toward slapstick and awkward situations/reactions.
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aniDB
Crunchyroll
Wikipedia
Tokio, a perennially late junior-high student, suddenly finds himself as the newest member of the Space-Time Administration Bureau after Calen makes a crash-landing in 2016 and picks him up on a whim. Their mission? To find the wacky ‘true history’ not recorded in history books.
This is the kind of show western morning/afternoon cartoons resemble, being episodic and featuring a light/silly form of comedy with a bit of mecha action.
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aniDB
Crunchyroll
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It shouldn’t be surprising, yet it is: This sequel is in almost all ways worse than the first Re;Birth.
The localization got worse (install the re-translation project modification to make it merely equally as bad), Nepgear is a far less engaging protagonist compared to Neptune, there’s a bunch of ecchi events straight out of an Agarest game, and the new themes are atrocious.
No, I don’t want to be constantly lectured about how piracy and cheating is bad in this game I bought… especially when said game just so happens to include cheat items in its paid DLC.
The only things this has going for it are giving the characters a couple extra combat abilities, Boss enemies not having any insane HP regeneration abilities, a Super EXP option which effectively eliminates level grinding (added by the DLC), and the somewhat large variety of possible endings.
Huh. I sort of regret putting off playing this for so long just because I knew it had a trash-tier localization and suspected it was extremely grindy.
It certainly has more than its share of issues (the awful localization, it is pretty grindy, the constantly re-used assets, mind-numbing/cringe-inducing plot developments, quite a number of auto-lose battles, a host of painful side-characters, tons of trap items to waste your limited resources on), and yet there’s just so much to collect while bap-bap-bapping away at enemies that I can’t help but enjoy playing it. Some advice:
Picking up the DLC Pack is well worth it for the two extra characters alone, as they make the early-mid game much less punishing due to being notably more powerful than the two you start with, and you should limit your Plan creations to unlocking and adding enemies to the 16mb dungeons (the ones that cost 100+ are DLC content and can be saved for a second playthrough), removing the damage cap, increasing the jump height, and unlocking two of the CPU Candidate characters (who cost 1024mb each).
Then on any potential NG+ playthroughs you can unlock the other character, the Colosseum, the DLC dungeons, and the highest level equipment (completely skipping all the weaker stuff, which is just a waste to unlock).
One final thing that may be worthwhile to be aware of, is that pressing the L1 button will skip attack/transformation animations.
