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Sep 22, 2014
Captain Earth Review 2.0: I Was Right Edition
This show had some incredible animation and a nice soundtrack, and more than enough likable characters, but an unmercifully dull story. Captain Earth is so boring that not even giant robot battles with aliens who feed on human lust can make it interesting. I last wrote a review when only 22 episodes were out, and I predicted the show would do nothing to change its boring nature. And I was right. In all fairness this is like predicting the sun will rise in the East. You could have done the same if you'd watched only 5 episodes. And
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here's why:
There is no rising action. The stakes are never upped. Normally to get people excited in a story like this you have to continually raise the stakes, make the conflict bigger, more dramatic, more important, or more personal to the characters. But it never happens. The action is a flat line. The exact same thing over and over again. There are momentary blips where it looks like the stakes are about to be upped, it's about to become ~personal~ for Daichi and company. And then it immediately resolves itself and all the tension goes out of the show again. Or sometimes it's never even addressed and it's like nobody even cares. Like there's this big revelation later that should have been a big deal for Daichi and he just kinda shrugs it off like "whatever." It's like even the characters can't be bothered to become emotionally invested in this dreck.
Let me give you a concrete example:
In episode 1 we get all this exposition dumped on us about how there's aliens trying to devour all human libido (just roll with it) and this will destroy humanity for reasons. And right away we're treated to this high stakes giant robot battle for human survival as these aliens attack the Earth.
Sounds like an exciting first episode, huh? And then they do it again about 10 more times.
Nobody dies or is seriously hurt in any of the fights, there's no real consequences. Our heroes eventually become so bored by the whole affair that they have to resort to anime teen romance to distract themselves and the audience, complete with beach and hot springs episodes. And remember, there's never any real change in the danger from episode 1. The stakes are never raised, but they never go down either. It's just that everybody becomes bored because of the monotony of it all, the only sense of danger in the show becomes a state of normalcy, so as a result everything becomes dull. When even the characters fighting for the survival of the human race start complaining about how boring their job is and prefer lounging by the pool, how are we as an audience supposed to feel any tension from the threat of extinction?
And the threat of extinction is the only card they have. Every time they bring up new shit it gets immediately discarded. The secret of Daichi's father? Pass, apparently not enough to get Daichi emotionally invested. What about all the Planetary Gears and the lives they lived as humans before awakening? They literally stopped caring after they woke up and they are never really visited again, they just become a bad guy of the weak and occasionally have a pointless battle that accomplishes nothing. Hana is about to be kidnapped? Again? Don't worry they prevented it. Or the guy just gave her back for no reason. Whatever. I guess it's too much to expect an exciting development that might change the dramatic tension. Even at the very end where it finally looked like the stakes had been raised, it all got resolved without issue.
And all this stale, flat action gets topped off with a heaping helping of convoluted scheming with some of the most unnecessarily complicated world building I've ever seen. Bones really outdid themselves this time, it makes Eureka 7 look straight forward and reasonable. I'm not saying it's impossible to follow or care about, I'm just saying if you took the time to work out which factions are allied with who, who works for what organization and what they're trying to do, and how any of this shit about livlasters, neoteny, ego blocks and so on works, you need a hobby. It didn't help that they crammed it full of nonsensical Shakespeare references. Yeah, I get it, the guy who wrote this shit really liked A Midsummer Night's Dream. I guess it's a step up from Romeo & Juliet, but why in the wide, wide world of sports would you use a farcical comedy as the literary basis for a science fiction action series? I'm not saying it can't work, but looking at Captain Earth, it clearly didn't work here.
TL;DR version: it looks pretty, but it's really boring and confusing. Waste of effort. Just like this review.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Sep 18, 2014
The fan service was lacking overall and there was a lot of CG for no reason, but I considered it a step up from the previous series.
I typically say to people that if they enjoy mahou shoujo and loli fan service they'll probably like Prisma Illya, but 2wei is where the world building starts picking up steam and the Fate/ references stop being benign cameos and start being important background info and foreshadowing.
Basically this is where stuff starts to get interesting for Prisma Illya, but emphasis on "starts to," because 2wei overall feels like an interlude to the real climax in 3rei. It does
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have a lot of great twists (mostly in the latter half) that are pretty rewarding though. So to that effect this first cour will probably give you some dramatic blue balls, since most of the major plot lines don't even really start 'til Bazette shows up late in the season.
If you don't like Type-Moon and are watching this for the little girls, then hold on to your butt or prepare to bail in this cour.
That's it, I'm out.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Mar 27, 2014
A note about my scores is at the end, past the dotted line.
Fate/Zero occupies a curious position within its own franchise. It is not a position which was intended by its creators, I believe, but came about as result of its own popularity. This position is that despite being a prequel to the flagship title Fate/Stay Night, it has become widely popular outside Type-Moon's dedicated fanbase and has even served as the induction into the Fate franchise for many new fans.
So I guess this is a review for those new fans whose first taste of Fate (or Type-Moon in general) is Fate/Zero, mainly because I've
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been noticing more and more people picking up the Fate series in anticipation of Ufotable's remake of Fate/Stay Night later this year. Mainly I'm just going to talk about Fate/Zero in relation to Fate/Stay Night without trying to spoil anything in particular.
The first thing I should get out of the way is that Fate/Zero is not typical for the Fate series. It is far grittier, far gloomier, and far more serious in tone than Fate/Stay Night. For all of F/SN's grim parts, it's still at heart the adaptation of an eroge and is full of romcom shenanigans. If Fate/Zero is your only exposure to the Fate franchise, you are going to get the wrong idea about the rest of the franchise. If you go into F/SN expecting something as serious as Fate/Zero, you will be disappointed. That disappointment won't just be whiplash from the tone, it's pretty much guaranteed because of all the spoilers.
The next major thing is that Fate/Zero spoils a lot of the content of Fate/Stay Night. Now, F/SN is a pretty old story at this point and its sheer popularity has caused people who haven't seen it to gain knowledge of some of the more famous twists just through cultural osmosis, but Fate/Zero spoils things for new fans that they aren't even aware are spoilers. This means people introduced to Fate through F/Z are pretty much guaranteed not to like F/SN very much. The change in tone is cause enough for many people to reject it, but the story will be less compelling as well because all the twists and secrets were spoiled in the prequel. This is because F/Z was written as a prequel to F/SN rather than F/SN being a sequel to F/Z. In other words: F/Z was made for people who've already read F/SN while still being accessible to people who haven't.
A lot of effort was put into making F/Z accessible to people as its own story, and I think that's a good thing, but it's also had the unintended effect of making F/SN less accessible. There's a tendency for people to compare the two series with F/SN being seen as the lesser, and I think it's just depressing. Fate/Zero is a good series, I enjoyed watching it and I feel like it does credit to the Fate franchise, but I think it also makes for a poor introduction to the franchise despite all that. Being more serious and gritty than F/SN doesn't make it better, focusing on action and drama instead of romance doesn't make it better. For all its grit and tragedy, it's still only a prequel series to F/SN, so I can only ever think of it as F/SN's popular kid brother.
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I felt the story of F/Z was paced a bit awkwardly, which is nothing new for the Fate franchise. A huge clusterfuck battle early on and then things drag out into cat and mouse shenanigans.
As for art, I'm not a fan of the filters and CGI, but the animation was gloriously fluid. Overall a very pretty anime to look at.
Outstanding OST and voice acting.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Feb 4, 2014
I'm going to address a common misconception about Bleach's most popular arc: Soul Society.
To begin with, it is often mistakenly referred to as Bleach's first arc. It is actually the second arc. The first arc consists of Ichigo learning the ropes and meeting the Job Squad™, which consists of Oirhime, Chad, and Uryu. This arc is variously called the First Karakura Arc or Karakura Adventures Arc, but I prefer the term Ghostbusters Arc since it's more to the point about it's appeal. This is the only truly good arc in Bleach, and it's not even that good. The main thing that it has that
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no other arc has is the potential to be really interesting. Back during Ghostbusters Arc, much of the Bleach universe was unknown and mysterious, there was so much potential in practically every direction. This leads me to the second major misconception people have about the Soul Society Arc.
The Soul Society Arc is not good. It is responsible for killing almost every bit of potential the series had. Soul Society Arc firmly set Bleach on the fast track to mediocrity. So let's do this: it dumped loads of new characters onto the readers, thereby shoving the established characters to the margins, completely shelved the Hollow vs Shinigami dynamic for Ghost Samurai Politics, created the utterly incomprehensible Soul Society setting which is so rife with plot holes and nonsense that it seems as substantial as a desert mirage, and it changed the series to focus almost exclusively on 1v1 duels between characters with ideological differences, like every other Battle Shounen ever created. Everything was ruined in this arc: the setting, the characters, even the fights. The last bit of good choreography was Ichigo vs Kenpachi, from that moment fights became more and more reliant on spamming special attacks (read: giant, panel-obscuring beams of energy).
People talk about how Hueco Mundo ruined Bleach, how Arrancars ruined Bleach, how Karakura 2: Aizen Boogaloo ruined Bleach, how Fullbrings ruined bleach, and so on, but everything they hate can be traced back to Soul Society. It all started with that arc. Soul Society is what shifted the focus from the small group to the huge Shinigami organization of the Gotei 13 and their associated politics. Soul Society is what created this bizarre afterlife where people still have bodies and blood and there are noble families (ghost families?) and power struggles, and complicated tiers for power and organization--never mind that Shinigami were originally billed as hollow exterminators and afterlife guides.
Shinigami are basically just samurai with super powers, so fights became 1v1 duels. Everybody wears the same uniform with slight variations, all the buildings are white washed against mostly clear skies. It turned Bleach boring, offensively visually boring. Kubo's a wonderful costume designer, but Soul Society killed that aspect of the manga with those god-awful stark black Shihakusho on 80% of the cast. I started to relish Orihime, Chad, and Uryu showing up because at least they looked different and had a different power set, even if they were all disappointingly weak and irrelevant.
Lastly, the tone. Bleach had a town-level setting. Ichigo's motivations made sense, the threats were immediate, and all the characters introduced were still relevant if only by the general threat that the hollows made on the whole town. Soul Society completely removes the story from Karakura, alienates the existing characters and setting, making them totally irrelevant to what is happening. And that's pretty much how it continues on from there. Arrancar's show up, but apparently even they don't want to hang around in Karakura town for every long because soon everybody leaves and goes to Hueco Mundo: land of white sand and white buildings and bad guys in white clothes. And by the time we get back Kubo pulls the cruelest joke of all by swtiching out Karakura with a decoy town, he literally did the Blazing Saddles thing, but with a straight face. A chance for Karakura to be relevant as setting again, and we get a fucking decoy town. Bravo, Kubo.
Bleach is a big sack of shit. The only redeeming thing about the anime adaptation is the soundtrack, which is far better than it has any right to be. My advice is to download the entire OST and listen to it while reading the manga. You will enjoy the story much more without the shitty production values, obnoxious voice acting, and interminable filler arcs that make this anime unwatchable.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Feb 4, 2014
Bible Black is exceptional hentai, this is readily apparent to anybody with eyes by dint of its clearly superior production values even against stuff that comes out today. People also like to praise Bible Black for its story, though in truth its story is not really all that interesting.
The main reason I keep coming back to Bible Black and the reason I recommend it so highly is because it is probably the best animated futanari porn in existence. There are other examples of futa porn that I like, Space Pirate Sarah has some good scenes, as does the Viper series, but Bible Black has
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more futa scenes than the rest put together and has them in above average quality. There is a serious dearth of quality animated futa porn (which I hope Futa-bu's immanent adaptation will ameliorate) which is why Bible Black remains such a staple among hentai connoisseurs.
I wouldn't say that Bible Black is the Citizen Kane of futa porn, it's more like The Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon of futa porn. At the end of the day you could talk about the story as being stimulating and interesting, but that's not why you watched it. You can gawk at the great production values, which are certainly impressive and still hold up to this day, but even that's not really the appeal. It's the content, that essential genre component that it brought into your awareness, exploding onto the scene, opening up the horizon of what could be. So even if stuff comes later with better stories or better production values, it still seems lesser, because it wasn't the primordial first. That's what Bible Black is to futa porn.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Jan 28, 2014
Quite possibly my favorite manga series, SZS is a masterpiece of satire, social commentary, and fiendishly twisted romance.
The artwork is done in Kumeta's gorgeous abstract style. Solid darks and whites in flat planes and intricate geometric patterns. Kumeta demonstrates a genius for character design, taking the concept of the silhouette to its most extreme by actually portraying his characters as silhouettes when it suits him. This plays into the fact that they are all references and satires to various manga character tropes, effectively shadows cast by other characters that came before them, yet visually distinct and instantly recognizable, boiled down to a simple geometric
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conglomerate.
SZS's humor is a biting satire of contemporary Japan, everything from rampant commercialism and media sensationalism to the closer to home commentary about manga conventions and life as an artist. SZS is never satisfied with merely referencing these issues, there is always an opinion associated with them, often with an almost Socratic dialogue taking place between Nozomu and his students. SZS relishes in exploring social issues in an unusual light, something done brilliantly with the immigrant character Maria, whose view of everything from commercial waste to lolicons was markedly different and elicited surprise from various characters.
Lastly I want to talk about the romance of Fuura Kafuka and Itoshiki Nozomu, and the truly staggering amount of foreshadowing that went into setting up the last two chapters. SZS toys with the conventions of the harem sub-genre of romance manga, but little does the reader know just how insidiously Kumeta has undermined the notion of the harem or the traditional romance. Anyone familiar with the harem manga is familiar with the shipping wars that come with it: who will end up with the MC? Or will it be open-ended without the MC choosing, so as to appease all the fans? Or will it be the legendary, unattainable true harem-end? Kumeta's choice is none of these, instead he opts for a weapons-grade mind fuck that will force you to pour over the manga's earliest chapters to verify that he had indeed been planning this ending from the very beginning.
SZS is a manga that has to be read to understand why it is great, I cannot properly put it into words.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Jan 28, 2014
Coppelion can be summed up as disappointing.
This is because it has an alluring premise: a derelict city scarred by nuclear disaster, overrun by wilderness with a few human survivors scattered about. There's plenty interesting about a setting like this, and Go Hands does such a great job on the scenery porn that I am currently using a rotating cycle of background shots from the show as my wallpaper.
Unfortunately the characters who populate that setting are not interesting, nor is anything they do. The writing for this show is crap, plain and simple. Setting aside the issue of the Coppelion being teenage girls (standard anime
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conceit), the whole Coppelion project seems half-assed and directionless with no clear goals despite the apparently huge amount of time and money spent on developing these super humans. Ibara's unit stumbles blindly from one rescue to the next with no plan besides wandering the ruins of Tokyo with a magic Geiger counter that mysteriously led them to humans or sometimes to animals, as the plot required. Virtually every "mission" they acquire is something cobbled together at the moment, a response to some random survivor's plight. But I've watched shows with worse plots (or no real plot at all) and enjoyed them. What keeps that from happening here is a dearth of likable characters.
Let me start out by saying I liked the Coppelion girls at first. I liked Ibara's tough compassion and Aoi was adorable. Taeko didn't stand out much, but that ended up helping my opinion of her in the long run, since I came to greatly dislike both Ibara and Aoi by the end of the series. I found Ibara's compassion to be a very sympathetic trait in the beginning, when it was directed toward the truly pitiable and desperate, but it became grating as the series wore on and she indiscriminately bestowed compassion on even the most psychotic people she encountered. It just didn't sit right with me, it made her seem naive and a supremely bad judge of character. She is not a pacifist, she can't pull off the Jesus thing, so her compassion seems arbitrary and forced when it comes to sparing the lives of homicidal lunatics. Aoi is less a hypocrite and more useless baggage. Her shining moment of the series is running away from people who bullied her in school. I wish I was exaggerating here, but I'm not. To be sure the show tries to dress it up as something heroic, but Aoi is a hysterical coward to the very end. Taeko at the least shows some grit playing the mid wife, though most of it is skipped over in favor of Aoi and Ibara using non-lethal violence against homicidal lunatics.
And a word about these lunatics: even these characters are not satisfying because they are none of them committed to their goals. Virtually every antagonist except for the shadowy foreign waste disposal companies is redeemed by episode 13, and that whole subplot about the waste dumping was forgotten halfway through the season.
So nobody in this series is really interesting. They lack conviction. Not the antagonists or the protagonists. The people rescued either gratefully go along or die. I lost track of how many times a side character took off their mask dramatically and then had a tearful goodbye, I imagine their deaths were to make a point about being the only characters in the show with an ounce of conviction in their beliefs. And lord were there tears. Ibara's toughness is apparently only skin deep, because she cries almost every episode. She cries when a person she just met dies, she cries when a person she just met leaves the city, she cries because something vaguely sad was just told to her. Aoi is even more emotional, but on her it works and doesn't seem to conflict with any of her other traits. She's a hysterical coward, so crying over every little thing is practically her job description, it's honest of her.
The wishy-washy, directionless writing aside, the show is technically mediocre. The one redeeming factor is the art assets, which are fantastic. The animation is mediocre and the sound is poor. The music was forgettable, the main problem I had with the sound were the effects used for various weaponry, which were jarringly bad, and I'm nothing close to an expert on military weapons.
I wouldn't recommend this to anybody who's got better things to be doing. Backlog it for a particularly boring stretch of time off if you think I'm exaggerating.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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