mDuo13

In the past couple days, I've finished several things that have been plaguing me for weeks: a story for my creative writing class (to be posted after the class critiques it and I do the quickest edits), an essay for my English seminar, and Simoun. The latter was unfortunately not as good as I had hoped. As I previously mentioned, it is blessed with a great OP and a solid ED, but everything else about the show is rather mediocre. I managed to finish it, in part for completion's sake, though the show wasn't without redeeming moments occasionally, after pulling an all-nighter during which I wrote a combined total of about 14 pages essay and story (bringing the two to totals of 5 and 17, respectively). And so, with that and pretty much everything of the past season out of the way, it's out with the old and in with the new.

Before I start with what I'm up to this season, I should finish with last season. I've already discussed the endings of most of what I was watching, but there are a few more worth mentioning. Tytania had a few moments of ridiculous awesomeness before leading to the open-ended but still fairly satisfying ending I was expecting. Zoku Natsume Yuujinchou was, I guess, not quite as strong as the first season, but the two-episode last arc raised some interesting questions, brought back many of the series' recurring characters, and was generally still quite enjoyable. And as for Akikan... well, it was hard to top the epicsode that was episode 6, but the series had a pretty admirable ending including a villain voiced by Nakajima Megumi... and that alone was enough to cement my enjoyment of the final two episodes. In retrospect, Akikan really was one of the most fun anime I watched last season despite its ostensible atroctiy. I don't think that a show can be that "So Bad It's Good" by accident - which leads me to the conclusion that Akikan might actually be legitimately good by virtue of being so wholeheartedly bad.

So, with that out of the way, time for the spring season! Thus far, I have watched first episodes of 4 series, with 2 more waiting for me to watch them. Here's what I think of them:

• Basquash! - Animated by Macross Frontier studio Satelight with similar production qualities, this show has highly stylized visuals, a somewhat interesting science-fiction setting, basketball (!?), several seiyuu I like, at least one Nakagawa Shouko insert song, and completely excessive fanservice content. I'm not sure I'll like the series as a whole, but it has a lot of promising aspects.
• K-ON - Kyoto Animation's new series, an adaptation of a 4koma manga about girls restarting a high-school light music club. Everything from the animation to the pacing very distinctively KyoAni, which is fine with me. More importantly, the series has an unabashedly "fun" feel to it, and that bodes well. I also find the OP and ED - sung by the voice cast - pretty enjoyable and intriguingly animated. I'll be watching this one sans subtitles because it really was easy to follow that way.
• Pandora Hearts - This show, I'm watching purely because it has a Yuki Kajiura soundtrack. So far, that's been rather subdued, and the show itself is rather generic - but I know from the commercial that at least the music will get better as the plot picks up. And that's enough.
• Saki - Though Gonzo's animation here is rather lackluster - the ridiculously short skirts mostly just look ridiculous, and the effort put into each frame is not particularly substantial, plus there's some trademark Gonzo CG to really mess with things - the concept (girls play mahjong) is too good to pass up, and the show does a good job of playing up the hype. Also, I recognized voices from half the main cast - Ueda Kana, Kugimiya Rie, Fukuyama Jun - on first listen and recognized more upon researching them, so that's kinda cool.

The remaining two series, which I haven't watched yet, are Phantom ~Requiem for the Phantom~, BEE TRAIN's adaptation of a Nitroplus game, and Shangri-La, some sort of sci-fi-ish anime with Murata Range designs. The most notable series I have not, and do not intend, to follow, is Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, which I maintain is a completely unnecessary remake of a series that was great and still stands as one of the best examples of improving over the manga to which this new series is supposed to be closer.

So that about covers things for now... I may also be tackling (at long last) Metal Gear Solid 2 in the coming days, depending on how planning for my final projects works out... My fingers are crossed. Or, they were, but it was hard to type so I uncrossed them.