The Vision of Escaflowne
(26 episode series)

My first experience with this series actually came with the heavily edited version Fox Kids aired during the summer before my senior year of high school. As soon as I saw it I was interested in it, but soon afterwards Fox cancelled it, much to my disappointment at the time. I actually went looking for the series on DVD, but since Fox Kids had changed the name along with everything else, I didn't realize what I was actually looking for. As you can see, though, I eventually figured it out and I've finally gotten around to watching it the way it was supposed to be seen. The story is definitely better and makes a bit more sense, but I have to admit that I liked the Fox Kids opening better than the original one.

The setting of this show is kind of an anachronistic mix between a medieval fantasy land with dragons and a kind of steampunk world that uses technology that is seemingly out of place there. This is how they're able to have giant mechas in an otherwise non-technological setting, I guess. Actually it's kind of cool because the story lets itself touch on various aspects of how these things came to be, and a lot of it has to do with the main antagonist, Emperor Dornkirk of the Zaibach Empire. They also have a kind of natural levitating stone that many of the locals have used to harness the power of flight for everything from a small plane-sized craft up to floating castles.

The series itself focuses on a female protagonist, Hitomi Kanzaki from Japan. She was a mostly typical high school student (those sure do seem common in anime) up until the male lead, Van Fanel, king of Fanelia, appears in a pillar of light, followed shortly afterwards by a dragon. I say "mostly typical" because the series explains that she's always had something of a psychic gift, though until the series starts, this has been limited to tarot card readings. Shortly before Van shows up, she starts having full on visions. To make a long story short, she ends up being taken back with Van to his home planet, Gaea, on the surface of which can be seen both the moon and Earth, which the locals call the Mystic Moon. And if the dragon showing up wasn't weird and threatening enough, some furries show up and greet them.

At first there isn't a whole lot that happens, but soon Fanelia is invaded by invisible mechas, called guymelefs, from the Zaibach Empire. This also introduces us to Dilandau Albatou, a rather young and bloodthirsty antagonist who leads a special forces group called the Dragon Slayers on this attack. Fanelia falls and is burned to the ground, but Van and Hitomi escape. This actually provides much of the excitement and drama early on, as Van and Hitomi try to escape from Dilandau and the other Zaibach forces that have been sent after them by Emperor Dornkirk. Dornkirk has some kind of massive "fate" machine he is using for seemingly evil ends and he sees Van's guymelef Escaflowne as a threat due to its somewhat mystical nature. It's actually technologically inferior to Zaibach's guymelefs, which can shoot fire and use a liquid metal to form spikes and swords not unlike the T-1000 from Terminator 2. Van also isn't exactly the best fighter either, but Hitomi is able to help level the playing field with her psychic abilities, such as being able to see through the invisibility cloaks Dilandau and his forces use.

Once Van and Hitomi meet up with second male protagonist Allen Schezar, the story becomes much bigger, as there is now a fight on with the entirety of Gaea at risk. Not only is Zaibach seemingly bent on world conquest with a technologically superior military, but the planet itself is apparently at risk from the same technology that had destroyed Atlantis.

That's right, Atlantis was apparently behind the creation of Gaea, following the destruction of Atlantis itself. This is also why there's apparently so much going on with dimensional rifts on Gaea, as well as between Gaea and Earth. Van's mother was actually one of the decedents of the Atlantians, called Draconian by all the normal humans on Gaea due to the wings they sport and the seeming black magic of their technology and abilities to alter luck and fate. This means that Van himself, as well as his apparently turncoat brother, Folken Fanel, also sport wings.

I don’t think there's much more I can say about the story and the setting without just summarizing the entire series, so I'm going to stop while I'm ahead. I'll just say that it was a really interesting story that took place in an intriguing world. The pacing of the story itself was nice and even, never dragging to slow as it explained and set things up, or surrendering entirely to the action and battles that also took place.

The characters were also very interesting, and even though there are quite a few of them, they all tend to stand out on their own enough to be memorable. As you might guess, not all that many of them get developed much, but what development does take place is, for the most part, pretty good. Hitomi herself is a refreshingly different female protagonist in that while the male leads at times get pushy and want to exploit her powers more, will stand up for herself and refuse. She does tend to get kidnapped a lot, and can't really defend herself outside of her psychic abilities, but it's worth noting that she wasn't at the complete beck and call of the male leads either, especially since the visions she had took something of a toll on her.

Van and Allen are also somewhat interesting characters with complex backgrounds, though at times they seemed a little underdeveloped. Allen is basically the noble knight type, a natural leader who's easy to like. However, he hates his father for going off in search of the Mystic Valley of the Draconians and never returning, as soon afterwards his mother also died and left him and his sister alone. Then not long after that, his sister disappeared. This did serve to give him a connection to Van, however, as Van's mentor also finds Allen and mentors him. As for Van, he's somewhat different in that he doesn't like to fight, though he is soon hardened by having to do so.

The antagonists are also given somewhat interesting backgrounds, too, and even made not so completely evil. Take Van's borther, Folken. Not only did he defect to Zaibach when he was supposed to be doing the dragon hunt we later see Van go on in order to become king, but he also ends up leading the attack that would end up razing Fanelia to the ground. Van ends up hating his brother for good reason because of that and because of his continued efforts to capture Van along with Escaflowne. But it's also completely obvious that Folken still cares for his brother, and after Emperor Dornkirk shows what a cold bastard he is, Folken later comes over to his brother's side.

Then there's bloodthirsty Dilandau. He totally comes off as the stereotypical stuck up royal pain in the ass to go along with being a completely evil bastard who likes killing and destroying. But he also has an interesting background, and even before we learn it, the series actually manages to paint him in a semi-sympathetic light by having him go through a mental breakdown following the wholesale slaughter of his Dragon Slayer squad by Van. And then we find out "he" is actually Allen's lost sister, who was turned into the bloodthirsty Dilandau by Dornkirk's scientists through cruel experimentation. It also kind of complicates things when this is revealed to Allen.

Hell, even Emperor Dornkirk is given some ambiguity to his character, even though he's easily still one of the most evil of the main characters. It's strongly hinted at that he's actually Isaac Newton, resurrected on Gaea through sheer force of will alone upon his death on Earth. When he first appears in Zaibach, it's basically a third world country, and he helps them to become a world power through his scientific knowledge. So basically he's a Hitler analogue, but unlike Hitler he isn't after world domination so much as he actually wants to create a peaceful world where everyone can be granted their wishes. Unfortunately, he's so obsessed with the Atlantian technology to make this happen that he no longer cares about human life, and will kill anyone who gets in his way. His conquering of other kingdoms is solely aimed at getting what he needs for the machine he's built, but that doesn't change the fact Zaibach has devastated so much of Geaa.

What it comes down to is that everyone is given believable motivations for what they are doing during the story.

That being said, this series isn't without its own weaknesses. The first one is kind of understandable in that while the pace wasn't exactly all that fast, they didn't want to slow things down too much. This resulted in a lot of things happening solely for the benefit of the story. Right off the bat, there's no explanation for how or why Van and the dragon ended up on Earth, or most of the other times they're conveniently transported somewhere by a beam of light. Then there are things like Dilandau/ Celena ending up where he/she need to be so Allen can see the change take place to know that Dilandau is actually his sister, right before being conveniently beamed back to Zaibach.

For me, though, the biggest weakness of this series was the soap opera romance story. Basically Hitomi already likes a guy on Earth when she ends up being spirited away to Gaea. It also just so happens that Allen looks a lot like this guy, so she ends up having a crush on him. But then, Van is the male lead and the first guy from Gaea she ever met, and since they both end up saving each other's lives more than once, she also has a crush on him. So the series tries to make this dramatic by bouncing her between her love for each of these three guys, and I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at all of it. I can tell that this was a story element aimed at the teenaged girls in the audience, but in my opinion it rang false and actually hurt the story and the characters a bit. It was also completely obvious who she was going to end up deciding on.

Oh, and just in case the teenaged male demographic felt left out on the whole pointless fan service area, the show gave them this:

Not only are they furries, but they're twin sisters. I'm sure some people will like this, but I didn't. At least the bottom one there wasn't really into it. Eh, it's not like they end up being all that important anyway, aside from helping Folken to switch sides again.

Anyway, I can definitely say that for the most part I really like this series. It has something that can probably appeal to most anyone, and even though its age is showing a bit, it's still very enjoyable to watch. I would definitely recommend this series, especially if you can get into medieval fantasy stories. 8/10.

Voices of a Distant Star
(single episode OVA)

Unfortunately, while I kind of liked this OVA, there isn't a lot I can say about it, because there simply isn't a lot there. The OVA itself is only 25 minutes long, and much like Pale Cocoon, it left me wishing that there was more. It also leaves its protagonist with an uncertain fate that actually looks kind of bad for them.

The story is about a long-distance relationship between Mikako Nagamine and her boyfriend, Noboru Terao, and by "long-distance", I mean interplanetary and then interstellar. By some magic their cell phones' texting abilities are still able to reach out across this impossible distance to allow Mikako to talk to Noboru, though the texts only travel at the speed of light, meaning her messages, though sent out basically one right after the other, reach Earth at longer and longer spans of time apart. So for the most part the story focuses on this drama. In fact, the plot, which is about a war between humanity and an alien race known as the Tarsians is actually pretty much in the background. That's somewhat unfortunate, because there was so much there that I found interesting. Actually, while I like character drama, I feel that in this case too much emphasis was placed on it here, because while character drama can really add to a story, when it becomes the story itself it tends not to be as good or as interesting in my opinion.

There are some problems I have with the show aside from that misplaced focus, but for the most part this is detail oriented thanks to that misplaced focus. For instance, Mikako is 15 years old, but she was recruited by the United Nations Space Army to go fight aliens with giant mecha (called Tracers here). So basically this is one of those animes that Sky Crawlers was criticizing along with other shows, like Evangelion. Maybe there would have been some convoluted explanation for the UN using children as combat pilots as well, and maybe even the laughable use of giant humanoid mecha in space, but for me these are both weak points against shows like these. This is actually somewhat heightened by the fact Mikako doesn't wear a military uniform, but instead stays in the same skirted school uniform we see her in during the flashback that takes up most of the OVA.

As for the characters, well, again, there just isn't much to go off of. I mean, they're both sad at their separation, but that's about all we can get out of it other than that they both also undergo a little growth – Mikako is a little hardened by her combat experience and Noboru goes from being depressed because he initially flunked out of the Self-Defense Force and was thus separated from Mikako to working hard to get into it at the end of the OVA. He's also pretty much gotten over her by that point, or so it seems, and who can blame him?

This OVA was interesting enough to watch, but I can't help but feel a bit indifferent about it because there just isn't much there. Maybe if this had been a pilot to a fully-fledged show it might have been better, but that just isn't the case unfortunately, and it feels like the show ended without a resolution. And as for the character drama, well, I've seen this kind of stuff before and it really wasn't all that special on its own, so I just didn't really get emotionally involved at all. It isn't bad exactly, but it didn't impress me either. 6/10.

Yukikaze
(5 episode OVA)

This is one of the better shows I've watched. While it's superficially about humans fighting it out with aliens and flying cool airplanes that aren't very aerodynamic, it also touches on a few other things that are actually somewhat contemporary.

The most obvious one is how this conflict is treated on the home front. Initially, when a mysterious portal forms in Antarctica and some aliens (eventually called the JAM) randomly attack an Antarctic research base, people all over the world are shocked and the world rises up to respond against this new threat. The UN manages to pull together and coordinate a military response that successfully pushes the alien invaders back through their portal. A special military force is then assembled to take the fight to the other side of the portal, in order to keep the aliens from ever making it back to Earth, or so the story goes (and yeah, it's obvious where they were going with that, too). But after the war moves to the other side of the portal and is no longer obviously visible, people start pretending that the war never even existed, to the point that when an author writes a book about the ongoing war, it's popular and sells a lot of copies, because everyone says it's a well thought out science fiction novel. When some pilots from the other side of the portal briefly reappear on Earth, they're treated somewhat coldly by the naval force gathered to keep an eye on the portal, even though these pilots just saved a lot of their asses. In other words no one wants the conflict to be there anymore, so much so that they pretend it doesn't exist, and they shun any reminders that it does. Fortunately at least some of them manage to pull their heads out of their asses, but by then the JAM are stepping things up.

The other contemporary issue touched on is the introduction of AI controlled combat aircraft. Not everyone is sold on the idea, and in fact the weaknesses of AI-controlled aircraft are shown quite often. However, the series focuses on the idea of a pilot and an AI developing a kind of bond that makes the both of them together practically unbeatable. The suggestion seems to be that we shouldn't be afraid of technology, but rather than make it do everything itself, we should develop a kind of symbiotic relationship with it.

For me, though, the interesting part was the conflict with the JAM. They were tough to beat as it was, but during the part of the conflict that the OVA covers, they've developed some new strategies which made things a bit more interesting. Basically this involved the same old cliché of "conquered from within", because as we find out, the JAM have figured out how to imitate humans and their aircraft. This is also the point where things tend to get a bit confusing, because not only is it hard to find out who may have been replaced with an alien, but the show seems to skip around a bit and it almost feels like I missed something at a few points. In one instance it appears that the main character, Lt. Fukai, his friend, Maj. Bukhar, and the fighter they're flying in (Yukikaze) have been replaced by copies, since they are attacked and it appears beaten ... except they weren't, apparently.

There's plenty of action, and it's all quite visually interesting. They even managed not to go completely overboard with things like having impossible missile barrages ... at least until the end. The mad dash back to the portal so all the remaining humans can escape and close the portal behind them is naturally the biggest battle, but this is also where things tend to go way over the top, at least as far as the attacking JAM forces. Mostly this comes from the fact that the writers have essentially set the JAM up so that they are impossible to beat, because they have millions of these tiny aircraft that can literally swarm the human aircraft and rip them to shreds. Yet somehow the humans win, spontaneously developing some new laser weapons, just because, apparently. I'd say the ending is somewhat unsatisfying because of that, and because the short epilogue doesn't really do justice to the massive battle, it just sort of ends and wraps everything up quickly without telling us much.

As for the characters, none of them really stood out that much. Lt. Fukai and his plane, Yukikaze, are both stereotypically "mysterious". At points both of them come out a little, the plane even admitting to being afraid a couple of times, but for the most part they are stoic, pragmatic, and do pretty much whatever they want while getting away with all of it because they are just so awesome at killing aliens. Hell, they even figure out that the JAM are replacing humans for everyone so the plan we see come into fruition at the end of the OVA can be developed. Major Bukhar is supposed to be a kind of buddy commander to Fukai, I think, but they tend to go over the top with him. At one point he's actually pretty pathetic. It was just hard to like him at all because he tended to either be a whiny loser or a prick. Pretty much all the other characters were just kind of weird and until the end kind of hard to figure out.

Probably the most interesting "character" was the JAM. Their nature and purpose was always shrouded in mystery, and while the human characters made some guesses about them, the JAM are simply left as being the mysterious creatures (or creature) that they (or it) are. The idea that the entire planet and all of the JAM were in fact one single entity was especially intriguing to me, as was the idea that the war was just its way of studying humanity and testing itself.

Overall it's pretty fair to say that I was fairly impressed by this OVA. It's not perfect by any means, but it's still pretty good and I'd definitely recommend it. 9/10

Zipang
(26 episode series)

This series was both good and frustrating, frustrating mostly because of how it ended.

The story revolves around a modern Aegis destroyer named Mirai, which gets sucked back in time to just after the Battle of Midway. While in an American show the natural impulse would probably be to have the futuristic ship and crew get into the action (Final Countdown comes to mind), here they decide to try as far away from everything that they can because they're afraid not only of any unforeseen consequences to the timeline, but also of the implications of picking a side. Displaced from their own time, they have no allies, not even the Japanese, because as it is constantly pointed out, they aren't like the Imperial Japanese of this era. Unfortunately for them, they find themselves getting more and more drawn into the war thanks to finding and rescuing an Imperial Japanese officer, and they end up getting involved in some very big ways.

If you're thinking that this will be an epic adventure with awesome action scenes, well, prepare to be disappointed. This series definitely comes down on the cerebral side of things, making even the action scenes full of dialog, whether it's to agonize about having to kill in order to survive, or to philosophize about the future and politics. This isn't all bad, and in fact I found most of it to be quite interesting. The problem is that they went so fat with it that it made the action scenes stale and drawn out.

The series tends to focus on the Mirai's first officer, Lt. Comm. Kadomatsu, and the Imperial Officer he rescues from a crashed seas plane, Lt. Comm. Kusaka. Basically the crew decides to let Kusaka read through the ship's library to find out what he's in for, but as it turns out Kusaka is a pretty slick individual who ends up basically stabbing them in the back, though it's not entirely clear that this is what he intended. Kusaka is probably the most interesting and the most frustrating character of the series in that it's pretty hard to figure him out. Toward the end of the series he makes it clearer what his actual ambitions are, but things involving him tend to stay somewhat ambiguous.

I have to say that I also found the politics and discussion about time travel and its possible consequences pretty interesting, too. While I wish that there had been a bit more about how the Mirai managed to travel back in time and how they might get back, the series never really went there, focusing instead on the philosophy of time travel and how one might manage to inadvertently cause themselves to never have been born. Their agonizing over even the smallest bit of interference from them might cause them to fade out of existence like Marty McFly is thrown for a loop though toward the end of the series, when a crew member's father is run over and killed as a child. By the end of the series, though, the crew has pretty much decided that they are stuck in the past and are just trying to stay as far away from everybody as possible, for fear that the Mirai will be taken from them and used in the war. There's actually quite a bit of complexity that goes into making that decision, but it would make this review a lot longer if I tried to explain it all.

At the end of the series, there is still quite a bit going on, Kusaka's plans and actions still somewhat shrouded in mystery. And that leads me to the biggest disappointment of the series: it just ends. The last episode doesn't come off as a series finale so much as a season finale that ends on a cliff hanger. I know the real reason for this is because the manga hadn't been finished yet, but since there hasn't been any more news on this since about 2005 as far as I can tell, I'm more than a little frustrated by the fact that this series might go unfinished.

So while I would say that this is a pretty good anime to watch if you're into a more cerebral show that combines history and sci-fi, just know going in that the series is actually incomplete. 7/10.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica
(12 episode series)

Wow, this has to be about the only magical girl anime I've ever actually enjoyed, or at least to this extent. What does it say about me and my tastes that it's also hugely depressing and that, well, there are some similarities to Higurashi? ;)

I'll try not to spoil you too much, but you have to keep in mind that this is one of my reviews, and I tend to like to talk about the stuff I wished I'd known about going into a series. Speaking of which, I totally knew that this series would be a lot more serious and depressing than pretty much any other magical girl anime in existence thanks to another reviewer's brief commentary on this series, and in fact it's the only reason I bothered to watch this series, because as you know, magical girl anime is not a genre I typically watch unless I'm looking for some fan service or it's something that's making fun of the genre. In this case, this series is more like a deconstruction of the genre.

For the most part we follow Madoka Kaname, a 14 year old girl with a househusband father and a cutthroat businesswoman mother. You know, the average middle school student of the future, where schools look like glass cages (as they should). Like most teenagers, while she doesn't really have anything to complain about, she still wishes her life was different and more exciting. Since this is a show, naturally that's exactly what happens.



Actually the show starts us off right from its very opening with this weird South Park-ish magical world where all the fights take place, and in doing so it not only introduces us to the kind of weirdness seen above, but gives us a hint that this show isn't so much about magical girls taking skyscrapers to the face as it is about them getting worn out and suffering deadly consequences if they fail. Yup, that's right, in this show magical girls die and are not brought back to life. Oh, for the first couple of episodes the show tries to fake us out, in more ways than one. The first is by introducing Homura Akemi as a strange transfer student who comes off as a possible villain. It isn't until later that we learn the reason why she's so hostile toward Madoka and her friend Sayaka Miki. Of course by that time, we've already seen a magical girl die a horrific death by being eaten by the cutest witch/monster caterpillar ever.

And that's a big part of why I liked this series. It's kind of like Higarashi that way – it contrasts cuteness with horrific things happening. And this in turn contrasts this show with other magical girl shows, because while other shows of this type tend to play up how awesome it is to be a magical girl because they have flashy cloths, fight monsters, and save the world while balancing school and a social life, this one shows us what's being glossed over. These are children. Constant combat will wear down even adults who are mentally prepared for it, and the consequence of failure is death. Most of the drama in these shows is derived from the possibility that the magical girls might fail, but they always win in the end. It's even been brought to my attention that Sailor Moon actually died to push this even further, but she was still brought back to fight and defeat the bad guys in the end (as far as I know). That doesn't happen here.

Like pretty much every magical girl show, there's a cute little magical animal companion, usually a cat. In this case it's kind of like a cat, but instead it's an alien named Kyubey and his job seems to be recruiting young girls into making contracts with him to fight and destroy witches. He'll even let the potential recruits tag along on missions with current Puella Magi to get a taste of what they're in for. Like any recruiter he plays up how awesome it is to be a magical girl, and he even promises to grant any wish the girls can think of in exchange for a life-long commitment to serve as a Pulla Magi. If that sounds like making a contract with the devil, well, they kind of gave that away by giving Kyubey beady red eyes. I don't care how cute and cat-like an alien is, you just can't trust a face like this:


God he's creepy....

In any case, though they witness the horrific death of a Puella Magi and are constantly being warned off by Homura that they are getting in way over their heads, Sayaka is guilt-tripped by a boy she likes into making a contract because he really liked playing violin and because of a crippling accident, he can't anymore. You can guess what he wish was? And since this show lives on being depressing, the little bastard doesn't end up hooking up with Sayaka, and she spirals into self-destruction, just so we can see exactly what witches are, and how horrible and alien Kyubey really is. Which to be fair, his being horrible has mostly to do with his being alien, what with completely lacking human emotions and anything resembling morality. Which just makes him all the creepier. Then, to depress us even more, we get to find out just how like Higarashi this show is by the revelation that Homura's magical power is time manipulation, and she's actually been going back in time multiple times in a so far fruitless effort to keep Makoda from becoming a Puella Magi and dying soon afterwards while fighting a hopeless battle against a really powerful witch. So, much like Rika Furude, Homura isn't exactly the pleasant moe blob she started out as anymore. The really fun part is that in one time loop she tried to warn them all, but seeing the ultimate fate of Puella Magi, one of the especially nice and friendly ones goes nuts and kills most of the rest of them.

The one let-down for me was kind of a big one in that the ending was pretty much a cheat. I have to admit that there isn't a whole lot they could have done because they'd essentially written themselves into a corner, but this is probably because the pacing had been set too slow for such a short series. Now, I'm not saying the show was boring, and to be fair, I tend to like it when a show takes its time, slowly unraveling everything for us, but when there were only 12 episodes to play around with, saving the resolution for the last episode kind of made it come off as very sudden and a cheat. I say cheat because the ending basically was a way for the show to have both a happy and a depressing ending, both resolving the series and leaving it unresolved. It could be that the creative staff is trying to hook us for another season, but at the same time there isn't a lot they can do without again cheating, the same way Code Geass did.

The characters in this show were for the most part kind of "meh." The focus is fairly limited, so we don’t get to learn all that much about anyone other than Madoka, Sayaka, and Homura. To be honest I didn't care much for Madoka. As was pointed out by Homura in the show, she's kind of selfish and honestly seems to be depressed about nothing. She has a loving, wealthy family, at least two close friends, and yet feels like something is missing in her life even before the whole magical girl thing comes up. So I found her kind of boring. Sayaka, honestly not a whole lot better. For me, Homura was the interesting one. She went through hell and was very versatile despite not having the kind of flashy powers the other Puella Magi had. Instead, she used her time manipulation power to steal guns that she hid in her own version of hammer space. She was also a very pragmatic character, and I dig that. The only other character I much cared for was ironically Kyubey. I thought he was written fairly well as far as the alien aspect of him. Much like the Borg from Star Trek, he honestly thinks he's doing these girls a favor, even if he's actually doing something quite horrible to them. He honestly doesn't understand why the things he does end up disturbing some of the girls he makes contracts with, because an alien probably wouldn't.

While the ending was kind of a let-down, I would still recommend that you check this series out, even if the whole magical girl thing isn't normally what you'd watch. If you stick it through to the third episode, this series will surprise you, hopefully to your enjoyment. 8/10.

/人◕ ‿‿ ◕人\

Oh, and just in case people are wondering, I'm actually all caught up now with what I've written over the past year or so. I am planning on doing more later, but for right now I've been concentrating a bit more on sci-fi movie reviews.

High School of the Dead: Drifters of the Dead
(single episode OVA)

Well, being the nerd that I am, I just had to watch this follow-up to the series. And this is going to be a short review, because there isn't all that much to say about it. You know how in the series review I mentioned that this could have been a serviceable zombie apocalypse story if it weren't for all the fan service and mood-swing-ish comedy? Yeah, the OVA has given up any pretense of doing even a semi-serious zombie story.

I guess the people who made this decided there just wasn't enough fan service yet, so they decided to throw in a beach episode for the hell of it, as this OVA is just an excuse to get everyone into bathing suits and to frolic together. Oh, that and since this is an OVA they finally drew in some nipples. Still, not much to write home about. Then, of course, there's the reinforced misogyny in the form of all the women pressuring the two male characters into searching for food, just so they have an excuse to play around on the beach and have fun. This is made even better by the fact that when the main protagonist (at least of the series), Takashi Komuro, fails to get anything, the same chick who was basically in charge of getting all the girls out of work gives him crap about it. The OVA tried to say this was funny, but I wasn't amused. But hey, there was fan service, so I guess I wasn't supposed to notice. Naturally the fat nerd character that the audience is no doubt supposed to identify with is the one who gets everyone food.


The expected demographic.

No one gets a chance to eat, though, as the perfect time has come for more fan service. This time, everyone gets to hallucinate so everyone has a chance to make out and/or have sex with each other. Everyone apparently sees their own ideal partner, with the nurse seeing her girlfriend, and the angry aggressive chick seeing her mom. Yeah... And if that wasn't fun enough, it's implied that Takashi made it with a zombie when he thought he was doing it with the psycho chick who got off on the violence during the series. At least they show him managing to keep several bikini-clad zombies at bay while still hallucinating that it's the group of women he's with.

Of course, this OVA just admits that it isn't even trying anymore by expositing all the "important" information at the beginning and end of the OVA, with the characters even hanging the lampshade about it. As you might guess, I'm not going to go easy on it. And before anyone asks why I bothered watching it – to make fun of it. It's not that I was expecting much out of it or anything, and as an added bonus it's only about 16 minutes long, about 3-4 minutes of which is the opening theme. I did kind of think there might be some semblance of story, though, kind of like the series, but nope. 1/10.

Great review on Mahou Shoujo Madoka★Magica. I, myself, finished the show couple of days ago and I mostly think the same way as you, on that matter. The show was really good. I don't know what you guys mean by a typical magic anime since I haven't watched that genre much, only Fate/Stay Night, if I remember correctly. But, yes, it was worth a while, nonetheless. I, also, didn't took much liking into it's characters other than, of course, our very own Kyuubey. Really loved his personality and character. I also think the same way as you about the show's ending. I think it was a bit rushed, well, what would you expect from a 12 episode series? I mean, Angel Beats had that same feeling, but, whatever... the show was worth it.

Also, epic review on Planetes. Much better than my own. Heh.

Thanks.

Moonlight Mile
Season 2: Touch Down
(14 episodes)

This series left me feeling frustrated, because while it definitely improved in terms of both writing and maturity, it still ended unresolved, and just as I was really starting to like it, too. Cuss words! You have no idea how much I hate it when a series does this.

This season picks up right where the last one left off, though it was nice enough to do a "previously on..." montage just to refresh my memory. Just to refresh yours, this series follows two main characters, a Japanese man named Goro and an American named Lostman. The two of them climbed all of the world's highest peaks together and on the summit of Everest they decided that they both wanted to climb even higher, by going to the moon. They both did this in an extremely roundabout way, Goro becoming a notable construction worker and Lostman becoming a notable Naval pilot. So by the end of season 1, both were in orbit with plans to head to the moon – Goro through the International Space Agency's project being constructed from the International Space Station, and Lostman through a secret military base run by a secret branch of the US military. The other notable thing about the show is that it was basically an excuse for Goro to get laid every episode, and for use to see how good at drawing breasts Studio Hibari is. Which is to say that they're pretty good, but I think they should seek other reference material since most of them looked porn star fake. ;)

In any case, I was just interested enough to seek out the second season of this show, due largely in part to the unresolved storyline. Just as I suspected, the first season was just the set-up, but then the season titles probably should've tipped me off. The thing that took me by surprise, though, was that the second season was actually a lot better than the first. The writing was better, the story was more in depth, there was actually a little character development here and there, and best of all, the show even matured a little, so it wasn't basically Golden Boy in space. Oh, there was still fan service, but it was definitely cut back on, and it was to the show's benefit that it could concentrate more on the whole "going to the moon" storyline instead of just making weak excuses to get Goro laid.

There were still a few drawbacks, mainly coming from the insistence of the show that the vast majority of Americans are assholes. For instance, there was this Arab kid who helped to save Lostman as a POW back during the first season, and we get to see how he's doing in the US. While I could see the government giving him some grief being a recent immigrant from the MidEast and gathering up a bunch of rocket parts, not a lot else makes sense as far as the racism the kid faces from basically everyone. And really, at every point the show makes a point of showing Americans to be complete assholes, so that didn't earn it any points there. And while there are plenty of assholes in every country, and I've met my fair share of them from both the US and Canada, it's not nearly as bad as this show made it out to be. And this is coming from someone who tends to hate people in general. But there's plenty of anime that seems to have someone with an axe to grind when it comes to the US, so I try not to take it too personally.

The other major weak point of this series is actually the characters, though this is more a case of "too much" than any real lack of trying. The problem here was more that there were simply too many characters for any of them to get much of a chance to be more interesting than just some random extra with a name. While I like ensemble casts, this show only really got half-way with that. Unfortunately the show also picked up something of a spokesperson in the form of Maggy, a somewhat obnoxious young woman, at least in front of the camera. Apparently she's the host of a show that's all about selling the ISA's moon project to the public, and she just happened to take the form of an obnoxious, somewhat moe Japanese hostess despite not being Japanese. She even goes into space. Thankfully, the astronauts reacted the way most normal human beings would when exposed to moe.



Fortunately she gets better, for the most part. She's actually shown to be somewhat more normal when she's not on camera, and she even tones it down a couple of notches when she's in front of it not long after she gets into space. Of course this is also after she's revealed to be close to 30 and an aspiring journalist, so I guess they thought she should be a bit more serious to actually reflect that.

As for the story, big improvement over the first season, mostly because it's a lot more focused now. The ISA's heavily involved in colonizing the moon in order to exploit it. Just like in the movie Moon, they're after Helium-3 as a power source. So this multi-national project is named Project Nexus, and it's being pushed especially hard by the US. Since the last season, the ISA has been dropping crates full of supplies and building materials for the future moon base, and the first half of this season is mostly about building the Galileo, a large spaceship meant to take a dozen astronauts and even more supplies and building materials to the moon so they can start construction of the base. Naturally, pretty much everything that can go wrong does, and just as the new big ship is finished and the crew selected, a massive debris field messes the ISS up with everyone on it, and they lose several astronauts. They also mess up the space shuttle that is the only remaining means of getting back to Earth's surface, as the evac shuttles had been deployed earlier thanks to the most massive solar flare in recorded history. So, with the Galileo miraculously undamaged, everyone who's left (coincidentally 12) heads to the moon, including the obnoxious TV hostess.

Meanwhile, the other big element of the story is all the politicking going on. China isn't having any part in Project Nexus because they want to have control over the distribution of Helium-3. So to start things off, they launch what is initially believed to be an anti-satellite satellite, but what turns out to be two space fighters. Good thing the United States Space Force (*snicker*) already has its own fighters. Unfortunately for them, the Chinese space fighters are a fairly even match for them, which is why there's a ton of debris that messes up the ISS. Next China builds its own space station, and then quickly announces its existence in order to prevent the US from adding even more debris to Earth's orbit.

Unfortunately, while everything just kept building up, it became obvious in the last few episodes that most of these plot elements were going to go unresolved. And just as it was getting interesting, too. Hell, they'd even come full circle and actually showed what lead up to the opening scene of the series, though it didn't really make any more sense, unfortunately. Presumably since this series was based on a manga, they'd simply run out of material to adapt to screen, and had to stop. Or maybe the show just got non-renewed. Or both. But, just as with Zipang, whatever the reason this show had to just stop mid-stream like this, it's still disappointing. I suppose that's actually a mark in this show's favor, simply because it was interesting enough for me to actually care about what would happen next. This show was not only interesting, but it managed to hit some of the right notes in order to resonate with me during a few episodes. That pioneering feeling that goes with space exploration and all that, not to mention an episode that ripped off October Sky (they even called it "The Rocket Boys"). So I guess you could say this was something of a double-edged sword, and you should really be aware of that if you think this show sounds interesting and you decide to watch it.

Overall, this was a fairly decent series and I think it was worth the trouble I went through to find a fansub of season 2, since apparently no one has bothered to pick it up yet on this side of the Pacific. 8/10.

Shiki
(24 + 2 episode series)

This series was both good and somewhat disappointing. It was good in that it had an interesting story and somewhat interesting characters which kept me watching, but disappointing in how the majority of those characters reacted to what went on around them, as well as in how the series ultimately ended.

This story is a little like Higurashi in that it takes place in a small, geographically isolated village, and that a lot of bad things happen to good people. In this case, ironically enough (on purpose, no doubt), Sotoba is a quiet little village that is famous for having a certain type of tree that gets used a lot to make grave markers and coffins. Also like Higurashi, rather than taking place in modern day, it takes place at some point in the past, in this case the 1990's. That's about where the similarities end, though, aside from having some little children which turn out to be evil because of what happens to them. There are no time-loops or take-backs, though, just a lot of dead people.

This series has something of an ensemble cast, but focuses mainly on three characters: Natsuno, a high school boy who's also a prick, Dr. Ozaki, dean of the small hospital in Sotoba, and his friend since childhood, Seishin, a local junior priest who also writes novels on the side. The story starts soon after an old traditional mansion on one of the local hills was torn down and replaced with a western-style castle. No, really, a castle.


Nothing forbidding about this at all.

It was built by a family of rich outsiders, who also move in during the middle of the night, rather rudely awakening some people so they can ask directions. Still, all most people complain about is how the castle doesn't really fit in with the rest of the village, and how the new people pretty much keep to themselves and otherwise act so strangely.

Shortly before their arrival, there had been a number of strange deaths which left an isolated part of the village, which is spread out over a valley, completely vacant. Then, soon after they arrived, the local moe blob who thinks she's destined for greater things, goes missing after approaching the castle and is found to be in a strange lethargic state. Soon afterwards, she dies. While I was hoping this would be a permanent death and the story would be done with her, this series is actually about vampires, as you might have guessed what with the castle and all that. It seems this "family" of vampires, the Kirishikis, has decided that Sotoba would make the perfect place make a safe haven for their kind, and soon set about feeding upon the locals. Unlike most vampire movies, it takes several feedings to kill a victim, who even then might not necessarily reawaken as a vampire. Pretty much all the other movie myths are shown to be right, though, and as an added bonus these vampires are not like the fangirl fap material that Anne Rice novels and the Twilight movies have made them into more recently.

So initially, no one knows what is going on, except of course that an unusual number of people seem to be getting sick and dying. Dr. Ozaki initially thinks he has some kind of epidemic on his hands, and gets pretty stressed out trying to figure out what it is and how to combat it all while trying to keep it a secret so people don’t panic and possibly spread it further. To complicate matters, the people who are sick insist they are simply fighting off a summer cold and refuse to be treated. This is because while a single feeding isn't enough to turn someone into a vampire, just being bitten means they can be hypnotized by the vampires to do and say whatever they wish. This actually made for a pretty gripping story, even though the audience is fully aware of what's going on even as the characters struggle against what they think is an epidemic of some kind. It actually takes a while for the bites to be seen, and even then these are taken to be insect bites and therefore a possible vector.

In the meantime, Natsuno has been getting the feeling that the moe blob who liked to dress like a slut and had a creepy stalker crush on him, is still stalking him from the bushes outside of his window. He reacts by hanging out at basically his only friend's house, sleeping over there at night to avoid feeling like he's being watched, and having strange dreams. Unfortunately for him his stalker follows him and takes her frustration out on his friend, who soon dies. I'd feel sorry for him and all, but he is an asshole and I never took a liking to him. I'm not sure if the audience was supposed to find him all "stoic" and therefore admirable, but I just thought he was a jerk. However, he is the first to figure out what's going on, since he basically witnesses his stalker come into the room and feed on his friend, though at first he thinks this is nothing but a dream. It also kind of comes back on him, too, because his family is from the city, so while Natsuno figures out what is happening and his best friend comes back to feed on him, his father undoes everything he does to try to protect himself.

While Natsuno is feeling watched, Seishin is likewise being stalked, but this time by a little girl who follows him out to his secret hideout in the woods, a small church. He at first thinks she's just a strange little girl, but she keeps dropping hints that she isn't quite normal and is actually much older than she says she is. She's also a fangirl for him, and has totally read all of his books.


Isn't she just the cutest little killer you ever saw?

While I think Seishin had an inkling (and who wouldn’t with eyes like that), he only really accepts it when Dr. Ozaki also starts to figure things out and asks his old friend to help him keep watch on a patient overnight, because he's convinced she's being fed upon. This is when both of them see a local woman who they both knew to be dead, hovering outside of the second story window of the patient's room, asking to be let in so she can feed. The two of them naturally resolve to save this woman, but the next night the vampires conduct an overt attack on the clinic, which unfortunately only Dr. Ozaki and Seishin are around to witness. They all attack the patient and kill her, but leave the doctor and the junior priest for now, basically telling them to back off or the same will happen to them. And this is where the two characters react differently. Seishin is a pacifist, so he elects to basically do nothing, and is disgusted at Ozaki for suggesting that they capture one of the vampires so he can conduct tests on them.

And really, this is where the show tries to get all moralistic and argue something that really doesn't make much sense to me. Basically, it tries to humanize the vampires by having them argue that they didn't exactly ask to be vampires, which is a valid point, but they then go on to argue that since they have to feed to stay alive, humans are no different than animals to them. This is not a valid argument, even though it's one that PETA tries to argue all the time. The difference is that humans are sentient beings, and animals are not. The vampires also refuse to seek any alternative solution which wouldn't require them killing human beings to feed. This makes them a threat, and frankly I don't have much sympathy for them, despite the show's best attempts to play up the tragedy of the vampires. It's true that some of them met tragic ends, and this is especially the case for the vampires who then go on to refuse to feed on anyone. But where I lose sympathy is when they try to use this tragedy as an excuse to kill others, who either stay dead, or are reborn into the same living hell.

Since both Natsuno and Dr. Ozaki have determined that they will try to fight the vampires, the vampires have decided to kill or otherwise punish the two of them. Natsuno is the most proactive and is actually recruiting some of the other students who agree with him, so they take him out first. Just to drive this home, they send his friend to do it, and while he initially doesn't seem like he can go through with it, despite threats from the other vampires against his family, he does go through with it. Luckily for Natsuno, he doesn't either die or turn into a normal vampire. Instead, he turns into a werewolf, though here a werewolf is basically what Blade is in that franchise – he has none of the weaknesses of the other vampires, and all of their strengths, or at least he would if he fed on humans. The Kirishikis also have a couple of werewolves in their employ, who basically have been doing all of the dirty work for them, so that plays out somewhat interestingly.

When it came to Dr. Ozaki, however, they decided to punish him by feeding on his wife. This was a rather stupid move on their part, because as it turns out, Dr. Ozaki is despicably pragmatic, so his reaction is to let them kill his wife, so he can them watch to see if she rises, and then conducts a series of experiments on her in order to figure out how to kill the vampires. So basically he tortures his own wife to death. And while the cold, calculating part of myself kind of agrees with what he did, I also agree with his friend Seishin, who was just disgusted at what he had done, and how unapologetic he was about it. But while Ozaki now fully knows what he's up against, he then goes on to do nothing. While he had all of this evidence he could have sent to the outside world while that was still possible, he didn't, so when he was finally bitten by one of the Kirishikis, he ends up destroying most of this evidence under her hypnotic control.

Really, things only came together at a point when I was just about to give up on this series out of disgust. And while the bad guys winning doesn't necessarily turn me off to a show by itself, in this case I was getting fed up because no one who knew what was going on was really doing anything about it. It was getting to a point that I felt that the people of this village deserved what was happening to them since they refused to do anything about it. Hell, Seishin actually goes to live with the Kirishikis, which is supposed to be him "accepting" them for what they were.

Thankfully, things finally happened. As it turned out, Natsuno had planned on this happening along with Dr. Ozaki, who manages to self-treat himself with a blood transfusion so he can free himself from the hypnosis he's under. He then fools his attacker into thinking he's still under her control, and convinces her into checking out a festival the village is throwing that night at the local temple. As it turns out, the shrine actually weakens her, and Ozaki uses this to out her in front of what's left of the village, who then resolve to kill all of the vampires in order to defend themselves. The odd thing here is that the doctor insists that they do this secretly, without involving the outside world. And this is where a lot more tragedy plays out.

While the series really wants the audience to feel for the vampires, with most of them I really can't, as I explained earlier. So really the only tragedy I feel comes from those who were recently turned into vampires and refuse to feed, but are killed along with the others anyway. There are also a number of people who were killed who didn't have to be, because some of the villagers get too overzealous and either didn't pay attention to Dr. Ozaki's explanation that people who were bitten don't turn into vampires unless they die and therefore kill anyone who is bitten by vampires as they attack them, or argue that the bitten are collaborators since they are acting under the direction of the vampires and therefore should be killed anyway, even though they are nothing more than victims. As the series is winding down, all the temple people end up being murdered as collaborators as well, because Seishin, who was a collaborator, hid in another part of the temple grounds and they knew nothing about it. So really, tragic all around, unlike all the vampires who convinced themselves that their friends and family along with every other living human being were all cattle and it was totally cool for them to kill them as such, only to have some of these "cattle" visit it back upon them now.

For me, the disappointing part comes from how the series ends, so if you don't want to be spoiled anymore than what this review has already given away, just skip the next paragraph.

Basically, the entire village is burnt to the ground, making the entire ordeal the villagers have gone through in order to wipe out the vampires to protect their village is all for nothing. While the outside world naturally gets brought into the area to put the fire out, the fire did succeed at destroying all evidence of the slaughter the villagers were carrying out, it also destroyed all the evidence Dr. Ozaki collected and any evidence they might have which the outside world might actually find useful, considering that vampires exist and all. Then there's the way the pre-teen vampire fangirl and the recently converted Seishin manage to escape during all the confusion with the fire. And that’s how the series ends. Hell of a note, isn't it?

When it comes to the characters, it's really a mixed bag. As I said, it's an ensemble, so there are a lot of characters the series follows. I find that this actually works somewhat against the series as it becomes difficult to keep all of them straight, let alone to remember all of their names. There are also some characters who only seem to exist so we can hate them and actually want them to die horrible deaths, which they do, twice. For me, though, the most interesting dynamic is in the character of Dr. Ozaki, because while he's more or less a good guy, he does some pretty horrible things, and to his own wife to boot. And while both Ozaki and Seishin have an interesting background which explains why each is the way they are as far as how others have expectations of them which lock them into lives neither of them wants, Seishin is a coward and frankly I found myself wishing bad things would happen to him.

Overall, I'd say that I did like this series, though. It was refreshing to see something with vampires that actually depicted them as monsters instead of as love interests for once. So while there were still aspects of the show I didn't like, I'd still recommend this one to others, even though it isn't exactly among my favorites. 7/10.

Durarara!!
(26 episode series)

Brought to you by the same company who brought you Baccano!, this is pretty much the same type of show, only not quite as scattershot in its storytelling. The opening titles even helpfully name all of the show's many characters for you, and show you relevant scenes from previous episodes it's going to pick up one or more of its many storylines from. The only catch was, for me at least, it was easier to keep track of the storylines than the characters, although part of that may be because when I watched this, I was on some pretty serious pain medication to help me recover from some surgery. Of course in Baccano! I could never keep track of all the characters either.

The story mostly follows Mikado Ryūgamine, seemingly an average high school student from the country who's just moved to Ikebukuro in Tokyo, Japan in order to attend an academy one of his childhood friends is at, along with a female dullahan named Celty Sturluson, who's in Japan looking for some head-I mean, her head, which was stolen from her some 20 years ago. She now exists in Ikebukuro as an urban legend – the black, headless rider who rides a black motorcycle at night with no light and no sound, except when it brays like a horse. There's also a cluster-frak of other characters, including some of who are larger than life, like the guy who can toss vending machines around like toys and punch a guy out of his clothes. There's also a group of four otaku (including on yoai fan girl) who seem to have not much else to do but sit around in a riced out van all day.

I'm not going to lie – when I started watching this show, while I got all the meta and referential humor in it, I just wasn't really interested in Mikado and his friends, or in his fish out of water story. It wasn't until the show focused more on Celty that I got more interested, though to be fair, a lot of the characters also had something to like about them. And while there is a story, this show seems to mainly be about having fun. Not that that's a bad thing, exactly.

The story itself was about how basically everyone had some secret about them and how everything intertwined together, mostly due to the effort of an information broker. He ended up in possession of Celty's head, and he had convinced herself that she and other dullahans were actually the same as valkyries from Norse mythology, or to but it another way, like a grim reaper. He was convinced that the only way to make Celty's head wake up so he could see what happened was to manipulate the many different parties in Ikebukuro into conflict. So then along the way we learned things about the different characters and about the different groups involved, such as the dollars gang and the yellow scarves gang, that were twists on what was initially told to the audience about them. The narrative tended to set all of this up and reveal it in a very round-about way, which I have to admit kept things fairly interesting to watch, though this could also be a bit frustrating. Thankfully only one episode went out of its way to tell its story out of chronological order. Of course a side-effect of having so much going on is that, like so many other anime, there was a wealth of expositionary narration just to explain everything to the audience. This was somewhat offset by making the narration from the limited perspective of some of the different characters, but I've never been a huge fan of narration.

As for the characters, they and the large amount of humor are pretty much what make this series. There are way too many characters for me to have any real hope of going into, so about the best I can tell you is that none of them were really bad in the sense that I wish they hadn't been in the series. There was a creepy woman who loved her brother in, you know, that way, and even a magnificent bastard who loved to manipulate everyone, nut no one I really hated. Actually most of them had a humorous side of them as part of the show basically just being about having fun with itself. Kind of like how Celty, essentially an invincible eldritch abomination, was afraid of some unusually aggressive motorcycle cops. Probably the only annoyance I got was from Mikado and the large-breasted high school girl he had a crush on, and how their little ... relationship was basically the same as every other socially awkward "romantic comedy" type thing you usually see in the moe crap that's been making up most of the anime coming out of Japan lately.

So while this was a fairly fun anime to watch in many ways, I wouldn't really count it among my favorites either. It's worth watching at least once, just for the fun of it, but I'm guessing only the more seasoned anime fans would like this one, because people who are new to anime probably wouldn't get a lot of the humor. 7/10.

Gasaraki
(25 episode series)

This is another military drama series, for the most part anyway, with a heavy focus on giant mecha. I can't help but reiterate how silly the idea of a giant humanoid robot being physically piloted is, despite all the technobabble explanations and excuses given for the "Tactical Armor system" in this series. They try to claim something like this would be as fast as any rapid armor by running, but as an engineer I can't really see that being the case with such a design. The other informed abilities, such as being highly maneuverable and the like are also pretty bullshit, simply because of the size of these machines and the fact that having a humanoid structure would actually tend to limit how well they can move around. And as if to prove my point, for the most part that's exactly how these TA's are presented – as lumbering giant robots, slowly and sluggishly moving around, except of course when the plot needs them to move around really fast so they can evade and take out traditional armor. I guess if there's one positive thing about this, though, it's that in this case the giant robots actually have their weapons built into them, instead of having ridiculously huge rifles or pistols they have to physically carry around in their robot hands.

Really the only reason I'm bothering to bitch so much about it is because of how much the story revolves around these giant robots and how supposedly awesome they are, even though the story itself really isn't about them. Instead, it follows protagonist Yushiro Gowa, member of the large family owned military industrial company Gowa Industries. He's being used as a tool to bring back some kind of ancient beast/weapon known as the title name drop, which he can apparently do by doing some kind of weird ancient traditional Japanese dance, or just by being pissed off enough. Initially the series tries to build up a lot or mystery about him, along with another test subject just like him named Miharu, who pulls double duty as the love interest. She's being used by an international mega-corporation called Symbol, which starts wars for fun and profit, apparently. Fortunately, both Yushiro and Miharu develop personalities as the series progresses, or I might not have made it through this series.

So as I mentioned, the giant robots play a big part in this series. We're shown the TA system being tested out by a small group of JSSDF officers in Japan, with everything being finished up just in time for a war to start in some made up Middle Eastern company run by a Castro wannabe. Basically the US picks a fight over what they believe to have been some kind of WMD test in this country, though everyone important to the narrative knows that this is actually the same kind of summoning that Yushiro Gowa was trying to do early in the series by doing his weird dance. This ends up turning into a UN sanctioned, NATO backed invasion of the small fake country of Belgistan. *snerk* Anyway, the Gowa family manages to arrange for their new TA's to make their debut in combat by going to this country, after the US-led invasion forces have been devastated by some other giant robots. These are Symbol's, which they call "Fakes", and they're doing basically the same thing Gowa is.

I'll say right up front that this is basically the most interesting part of the story for me, mostly because it's a fairly straight-up military drama with some mystery and intrigue thrown in for fun. While it's obvious that Gowa isn't on the up-and-up itself, Symbol is the big bad mega-corporation pulling the strings, with their fingers in basically everything. Symbol actually has US military assets, as well as military assets in other parts of the world, which they try to use to capture Yushiro. The Belgistan campaign is also where the JSSDF group that Yushiro is a part of has more of a role, which was nice because they were a fairly interesting group of characters. Yushiro and Miharu also come face to face here, first in combat, and then in secret as they try to meet up and escape capture by Symbol. This is also where Yushiro stops being a boring automaton, doing everything his family wants him to do.

Of course, Miharu ends up being recaptured so there aren't too many questions that actually get answered yet. The action then moves back to Japan, where there's a conspiracy to overthrow the Japanese government and install what certainly sounds like a fascist government led by a very old-fashioned douchebag. This guy only dresses traditionally, and carries a katana around with him, which he actually used to blind himself because he couldn't stand to look at modern Japan. Everything this guy said led me to believe he was another bad guy and that he was going to complicate life for Yushiro and our band of JSSDF heroes, and to be frank even though the story took another direction, I still view him as a bad guy, who really was no better than Symbol. Really the only difference is that Symbol wanted to take over the world (Of course!), ol' scar face only wanted to take over Japan and rule it with an iron fist based on the rigid, supposedly ancient ideals that the earlier fascist government made up to control its people back in the 1930s, all so he could get rid of the foreigners in Japan, basically, and to get the Japanese people to give up such decadence as personal wealth and self-determination. Oh yeah, later on, this guy gets made out to be a good guy, but at least before the half-way point of the series this was looking like a fairly interesting drama of sorts, even with the little jabs here and there at the US.

Things really looked up as the truth started to come out about Yushiro, and he grew a pair and ran off with Miharu, who had been captured in an attempt to infiltrate Gowa's research facilities. The two of them do make a good run, and find out the truth of their pasts, but this is actually where the story started to go downhill for me. Coincidentally, this is also where the series wasted a few episodes showing us a revised history of 11th century Japan, with many of the same characters as earlier incarnations of themselves. Naturally, they all looked exactly the same. This is also where the series really started to grind an axe against the US, which was apparently being a douche to Japan for no reason other than that apparently Symbol wanted to, for reasons which were never really explained beyond taking over the world. And supposedly everything started out with the USDA, being the evil entity that it is, lying through its teeth in an official report claiming that grain harvests were way down. This set in motion a convoluted plan that scar face was going to try to take advantage of to meet his aims, and to allow the series to show the US acting as a terrorist force to attack Japan, you know, because. Oh, and this is also the point that scar face and his plan is made out to be in the right, probably because this is someone's fantasy. After all, so much of this series devotes itself to being fan service to traditional Japanese ideals going back to ye olde days of the samurai and such, supposedly. Really the best part of this was the way scar face repeatedly whipped his katana out and used it as an allegory for pretty much whatever the hell he wanted in order to justify his ambitions.

Speaking of ambitions, the Gowa family was naturally involved in this plan, which would see it put in place as a powerful military industrial complex that was the real power, in the shadows, pulling the strings, because that sounds awesome to some people, I guess. This is also where Gasaraki comes in as the eldest son seizes power of the company and family from his father, and plans to use scar face's plan of domination to his own ends in true bad guy fashion.

Anyway, as you might expect, while the US was totally going to go to war with Japan for no reason, the President apparently saw the light (read: made a sane decision) and called everything off, including the embargo on grain exports it had put in place for no reason, which is what had started everything off to begin with. Why the US had it in for Japan or how a ban on exports to the rest of the world was somehow specifically a slap in the face to Japan is never explained, everything just kind of resolves itself. Scar face suddenly sees the light himself (impressive for a blind guy), and after calling off his own plan to hurt the US economically, he commits suicide, in the way you might expect a self-declared samurai to do.

This leaves bad guy Gowa to carry out his own fiendish plans, which involve the use and abuse of his annoying little sister to bring on Gasaraki and give him the ultimate power (TM). This is also where all that time wasted in medieval Japan comes to bite the series in the ass, because everything is resolved at the last minute and there is no real closure. I guess the fun part here was the obvious rip-off of the last couple of episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion through the use of abstract imagery and live action footage mixed in with still imagery. You know, the stuff NGE did to try to look cool after their animation budget had run out before the series had a chance to end.

When it came to characters, Yushiro was kind of interesting, at least once the series got going. He finally started to resent the way his family was treating him and finally resisted it, though in my opinion he should have been a bit more active than just trying to run away, and later on just basically yelling at his oldest brother for being an evil bastard. Miharu got the short end of the stick as far as development was concerned, because while she was also starting to resist due to the treatment she was getting from Symbol, after the pointless trip to medieval Japan she basically lost all of her personality and basically became a defenseless damsel in distress that Yushiro had to rescue. I was also somewhat disappointed when it came to that group of JSSDF officers Yushiro was initially assigned to, because they also seemed kind of interesting, and they really deserved some fleshing out and development that they didn't really get. Actually, for some pretty long stretches we didn't even get to see any of them, until the series just decided to focus on them as part of the larger story, which unfortunately was executed in a somewhat sloppy fashion. So overall there was a kind of blandness when it came to the characters, and between that and the story, which was somewhat interesting, I found myself somewhat bored watching this series at times, especially during the middle portion.

I guess if there's anything positive left to say about the series, it's that it tried to make all the sides fairly ambiguous, rather than making everyone just straight-up evil for no reason. That was left to the oldest Gowa brother, and for an earlier ancestor who did pretty much the same stuff back in medieval Japan. The downside is that while parts of this series were interesting, large portions of it were pretty boring for me, and it actually became something of a chore to watch. It picked up more toward the end of the series, mostly because it had to in order to resolve the story, but even there it was pretty lacking, and we never get to see the fallout of what happened over the course of the series. So really, overall this is an okay series, not especially bad, but definitely not very good either. 6/10.