Back to AshitaNoJonas's Profile AshitaNoJonas's Profile

David Production was hardly a household name in the otaku community a few years ago. However, everything changed when the fire nation attacked...I mean when they released their JoJo's Bizarre Adventure adaptation in 2012! While the budget was pretty low, David Production blew the community away with their attention to detail and loyalty to the source material and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 4: Diamond is Unbreakable is no exception to this.

JoJo Part 4 tells the story of Josuke Higashikata, Josephs's illegitimate son. In Josuke's home town Morioh someone used a magical bow and arrow to transform normal people into Stand users. This time we get ... to know a little bit more about the origin of the Stand abilities, which has something to do with these arrows. Of course, Josuke and his friends have to stop them.

Most of the time they just encounter random enemies, but later they try to find out the identity of a certain someone with an especially dangerous Stand who is living in Morioh, who is the main focus of the second half of this story arc. This person is committing gruesome murders for several years but was never caught, so it's up to JoJo and his pals to stop him.

The reason why this plot works so much better than Part 3's, is because it feels much more natural. In Stardust Crusader, the plot felt very video game-ish, but in Part 4 fighting Stand users is more of a daily routine and not part of a journey to save the world or something. Araki successfully mixed Part 3's semi-episodic structure with some slice-of-life elements. Since they never leave their hometown, there is also a lot of attention to the city Morioh itself, almost like the city is it's own character. I wouldn't go so far as call it "world building", but all these little things about Morioh + the recurring places definitely give this arc its own flavor and identity compared to the rest of JJBA.

Most enemies they fight turn into friends later on or are at least somewhat relevant for the plot later. This causes the team of allies to be very large, almost twice the size of Part 3's. However the last third of the show has very similar issues as Stardust Crusaders (TOO obvious monster of the week) and some episodes are obviously more exciting than others, but in the end, Part 4 feels much more tightly written than it's predecessor.

The characters are great in Diamond is unbreakable! Almost all of them are interesting and their interactions are super entertaining. Of the 4 JoJos that are introduced at this point, Part 4's main character Josuke is probably the most interesting. He is introduced as a polite delinquent, but he gets series when it comes to his hair: when someone insults it, the person gets his ass kicked! This is pretty much Josuke's thing. Joseph had his predicting thing, Jotaro his "yare yare daze" and Josuke has his hair thing. There is even a little flashback about why he is so sensitive about his hair in the first place. He doesn't use it as much as Joseph and Jotaro though and his tick is pretty much dropped later on and his flashback never received any further explanation, but it was still a nice touch.

The main villain of Part 4, Yoshikage Kira, is also great. He is not as "EPIC" as Dio, but he is very memorable in his own way. Unlike Dio, who was more of a cartoon villain (wants to take over the world etc) Kira just wants to commit murders without being disturbed by other people. He doesn't want world domination or anything like that, just a quiet and peaceful life. Unlike Dio or Kars, Kira feels like a person who could actually exist in real life, which makes him legitimately scary. The final battle against him was a little messy and the way he died was pretty anti-climatic, but I guess that made sense in this context and setting, since Kira is a more of a realistic villain. The fight was still exciting nonetheless and the way they used their Stands was pretty creative.

As you would expect from JoJo, the fights are awesome. The Stands are much more creative than in the previous story arc and they are used in very creative ways. You can really tell how much Araki improved the fighting mechanic in this arc. This is probably the most bizarre aspect of Part 4: melting bodies together, turning people into books or trapping people in a time loop; these are just a few examples of the crazy abilities. There were even new types of Stands introduced: automatic Stands and Stands that evolve into a more powerful form over time.

Sadly DiU is much less "GAR" and manly that the previous parts. The characters are also not nearly as buff anymore. This was around the time when the mangaka started to change up his art style. David Production chose to make the whole arc look more like the second half the DiU manga, instead of having this (admittedly awkward) transition from bulky to skinny.

Similar to the earlier seasons of JoJo, the animation looks very low-budget at times. However, David Production makes up for that with a unique art style, great use of color and lots of crazy effects. In the end, it's a very nice-looking anime, despite some derpy faces and low-quality character models here and there (they'll be probably fixing these things until the Bluy-Ray release anyway).

The soundtrack however was a bit less memorable than in previous parts, but I guess that's a matter of preference. I like how they remixed Jotaro's theme from Part 3 and the way they mixed up the opening theme in the last couple of episodes was really creative.

In conclusion, Part 4 has all the bizarre action, manly tears and likable characters that you would expect from this series and it even improves quite a bit on some of the flaws in Stardust Crusaders. How do I say this...? It's a bit crude, but...hehe...I got a boner!



Final rating:
Characters: 9/10
Story: 7/10
General production value: 7,5/10
Enjoyment: 10/10
Overall: 9/10

This anime sucks.

Tokyo Ghoul Root A has to be one of the worst adaptations and even one of the worst anime of all time. The first season was already rushed and they cut out some important stuff, but Root A is so poorly produced that the story made barely any sense. It's not bad because it's different from the manga, it's bad because it's just simply not well written at all. Apparently, the mangaka of TG even wrote a script for Root A, but the people at Studio Pierrot were like "nah fuck this shit" and just made up their own storyline.

So Root A ... is basically about Kaneki leaving his friends and joining the Aogiri tree. Everything beyond that is really hard to summarize, simply because of how random and disjointed everything is. Root A is a bizarre mish-mash between canon scenes from the manga and anime original scenes. Obviously, they cut out A LOT of content from the manga (even more than in season 1) and they also made lots of unnecessary changes, which creates dozens of plot holes.

Here is an example: there is a scene where Kaneki fights some random dude. It's not explained who that is or why they even fight. The scene has literally no context and explanation whatsoever. WHY? Even in an anime like DBZ, the characters always fight for a reason, for example, some villain threatening the world. You can't just put in a scene like this without telling the audience who that even is.

When Tokyo Ghoul Root A isn't busy with being one gigantic plothole, it's simply boring. There are many dialogues about things that the viewer already knows. It's nice to see how the ghoul investigators came to their conclusions, but just repeating the things we already saw is just not very interesting. Also there focused too much on these ghoul investigators, instead of the ghouls themselves. Heck, the protagonist Kaneki barely appears in this season. These issues however are also present in the manga to some extent.

On top of that TG Root A is very "edgy" in a way that it never uses violence in a meaningful way. It's just gory for the sake of being gory. This makes it very hard to take the story seriously, especially since the characters all act as if they belong more in a high school shounen anime, instead of a seinen. It's like Hellsing Ultimate, except not fun to watch and with much more BS attached to it.

Is there anything good about it? Well, the music was okay and some fight scenes are nicely animated. It did have a few nice scenes, like Touka and Kaneki's friend having a talk. But these are pretty rare. Most of the time it's just random edgy bullshit.

Final Rating:
Story: 1/10
Characters: 2/10
Animation and Art: 5,5/10
Music: 6/10
Overall: 3/10

Episode of Nami is one of those One Piece movies that don't tell an original story but instead retell an arc from the series with updated visuals and music. Most of these movies aren't that great, since they try to cram way too much content in a single movie (like the Alabasta movie for example).

This movie however is a bit different. The Arlong Park arc wasn't that long, it actually has the perfect length to be adapted into this kind of movie. It's not rushed at all and they are no important scenes missing. 

On top of that it's a fan favorite arc and for many fans ... the turning point of the series (for good reasons). If you've seen One Piece, then you probably already know what this arc is all about: we get to know Nami's past, how the fishmen exploited Nami, and of course Luffy and the gang beating up the fish guys at the end.

The most important part of this arc - Nami's childhood flashback - is still perfectly intact and it's as emotional as ever. The fast pacing is only very noticeable in the fight scenes at the end, especially when Sanji and Zoro fought Arlong's minions and defeated them in about 2 minutes. At least they didn't skip too many scenes, so unlike the Alabasta movie everything still makes sense, it just happens way faster than in the anime.

And before you ask: Yes, the famous walk to the Arlong park is still in this movie. It's only 1 minute long instead of 2 and the music "Overtaken" was replaced with "Luffy's Fierce Attack". But just the fact that they left this scene in (it wasn't even in the manga!), showed how much care Toei put into this (which is something that I can't say about most One Piece related things).

Not only did they improve the overall visual quality, but since this is an OVA it's also much more violent than the TV series. The scenes where Bellemere gets shot or when Enzo is attacked by the fishmen are way more graphic than their TV counterpart. This really makes the fishmen's actions seem much more shocking and overall really adds to the epicness of this OVA. 

This is a must-watch for every One Piece fan. 

Yugioh 1999 is hardly a movie at all since it's only half an hour long. So it's pretty much just a 30-minute commercial for the manga and/or card game. As a Yugioh fan I still got some sort of enjoyment out of this, so let's start with the story of this so-called movie:

A little boy named Shougo Aoyama finds a powerful card called Red-Eyes Black Dragon, but he is too scared to actually "fight" (aka play a card game), so he just doesn't use the card at all. Kaiba wants to have the card, so he invites Yugi, Shogo, and some other duelists to a ... tournament. Wow, what a creative plot! Since Shougo doesn't want to fight, Yugi borrows his card and battles Kaiba instead. The first half of the movie is pretty much Shougo whining over the card and the second half Yugi and Kaiba playing Duel Monsters.

Sounds pretty terrible, right? So why am I rating this a 6/10? Before I start with the positives, I want to mention some flaws in the plot. It's just so ridiculous how everyone is overreacting over this dumb card. Yeah, it's Yugioh, but even in the show, they don't react like this. On top of that, they mention in the movie that Red-Eyes is the second most powerful card, right after Blue-Eyes White Dragon. So I thought to myself "well the Dark Magician probably wasn't introduced at this point". But guess what: the Dark Magician actually appears in this movie! So shouldn't Shogo's Red-Eyes be the third strongest? Also, Shougo himself is pretty annoying and not memorable at all.

The duel between Yugi and Kaiba was pretty sweet. I mean it's nothing you haven't seen before, but "Yugi vs Kaiba" is just a pretty safe bet, so it should appeal to most of the audience. The monster design looks especially nice. In fact, the whole movie looks pretty pleasant. Just from the coloring, you can tell it's based on the 1998 version (season 0), but the character design looks more like the Pegasus arc and onward. Also, Kaiba finally has his brown hair instead of green one. So the style looks like a mix between Season 0 and Duel Monsters. The music was good too. It had a very video game-ish feel to it, which I found very fitting. I especially liked the remix of Yugi's transformation theme.

I really like how they actually use Kaiba's proto-type Duel Disk, which was introduced in the Pegasus arc and only used there. It makes no sense that it appears in this movie, but hey it's a nice touch. Also, Rex Raptor, who hasn't been introduced at this point makes a small cameo ;)

If I actually went to the cinema to see this, I'd probably be very disappointed, but as a fan of the franchise who just discovered this obscure movie on the internet, I found this to be an alright experience.

Since Claymore is one of those anime that doesn't adapt the whole manga and has an anime original ending; I never really bothered to watch it. The premise looked cool, but I didn't want to be disappointed. Now that I've finally finished it; here are my personal thoughts on it:

Claymore's setting can be described as Dark Fantasy; it's very grim, there's virtually no comedy or fanservice; it's violent and a lot of people die. So first of all, what is this anime about: Claymores are half-monster girls (not as sexy as it sounds) who defeat actual monsters ("Yoma") with their giant swords. But since ... there are part monsters themselves, they might turn into "awakened beings" who are even more dangerous than normal monsters. The main characters are a young woman named Clare, who seeks revenge for a beloved person from her past and her sidekick Raki who doesn't really do anything, except whine.

Probably the first thing that you'll notice, is that 95% of the characters are female. What, a fighting shounen with females who aren't weak? Exactly. I have to be honest here if it wasn't for the strong women in Claymore; this show wouldn't have that much identity. That's a pretty poor statement, but I still really appreciate the author's decision, since action anime with girls are still pretty rare.

I didn't like the number of character deaths though. Too many characters die 2-3 episodes after they're introduced, which made it hard to like any of them (except for Clare). The fact that most characters look the same didn't really help (same clothing/armor and very similar hair and faces).

This show had an interesting art style and I really liked the atmosphere in Claymore, it felt really dark and edgy. The music was decent too and there are a few tracks that really stood out. Animations are good too, the action scenes usually look fluid.

The ending was by far the worst aspect of this anime. It wasn't satisfying at all and felt like there was so much left (which it was since the anime only adapts 40% of the manga). But what this anime adapt was pretty good and for the most, I felt very entertained. After you finished this show, you either want to quickly read the manga, because this anime made you a Claymore fan and you want to see the real ending or you're just disappointed and want to never touch Claymore ever again because of the ending(in my case it was the former ^^).

Only a few minutes into this OVA and there is already a scene where dogs are brutally murdered... yup this is without a doubt a story written by Hirohiko Araki! If you're a fan of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, you may already know Baoh from JJBA Allstar Battle, because he was a DLC character in this game.

The plot is pretty straightforward and without many twists: this anime is about a young man who has the so-called Baoh parasite in his body. This allows him to transform into some sort of monster that looks like it's straight from Thundercats. He escapes from a facility and meets a ... girl with physic powers on his way. They encounter a lot of bad guys that Baoh has to slaughter and in end, he fights a strong enemy, so they bring some shounen elements into the mix too.

This OVA is pretty gory, so if you like to see a monster killing people and melting their faces, then Baoh Raihouska might be for you. Like I said the plot isn't really all that special and since this anime is only 47 minutes long, there isn't much character development. The action was good and the art style was nice to look at (it doesn't really resemble JoJo's Bizarre Adventure though). Some things bothered me though: the girl's physic power really didn't add anything to the plot at all. Why did she even have a special power in the first place? It felt really random. Also, the ending was kind of weird too. Overall Baoh Raihousha is no masterpiece, but for what it is, it's definately pretty enjoyable.

This Cashman OVA is based on a short story (3 chapters long) by Akira Toriyama. It's about an alien (who is actually part of Frieza's race!) who happens to crash on earth. He can't go back to his home planet, because he's out of fuel and his spaceship uses gold as fuel. And since gold is insanely expensive on earth, he has to make a lot of money now. Therefore he becomes Cashman, a superhero who charges money for saving the day. He takes over the identity of a policeman he accidentally killed and now he has to deal with strong enemies and an annoying ... girlfriend. The premise is pretty cool, it's a typical silly Toriyama plot. Too bad this OVA doesn't do the manga justice, they changed too much and cut a lot of stuff out (which is weird, since the manga is already super short). In the manga Cashman has multiple fights, but in the anime, he only fight once. Overall this OVA isn't terrible by any means, but they should have just made it 10-15 minutes longer and just adapt the whole thing. If you like Akira Toriyama's style and you want to see a Frieza-looking dude fight some bad guys, then you might get some enjoyment out of this.

Yugioh (also known as Yugioh Season 0) is pretty much a prequel to Yugioh Duel Monsters. It's about a shy little boy named Yugi who finds a mysterious Egyptian artifact, which is possessed by a Pharaoh spirit. He is kind of a geek and obsessed with games and toys. Eventually, he and his friends will encounter many bad guys and the Pharaoh always takes over Yugi's body to challenge them to deadly games. Unlike later seasons of Yugioh (which concentrate 100% on the card game) the very first story arc has only very few card duels, but a lot of other interesting methods of battling ... instead (that usually consist of asspulls though).
The story is pretty basic, but I always thought that the whole Egypt thing in Yugioh is kind of unique. The atmosphere is very different from the rest of the series, probably because it's from a different animation studio than Duel Monsters, so the characters look and sound different. Also, the last duel in this anime and the first episode of Duel Monsters kinda overlap, so the transition from Season 0 to DM might be awkward.

TL;DR:
If you never watched Yugioh, you should start with this one and continue with Duel Monsters. If you already know Yugioh, it might be cool for you to see how the plot actually begins or just to see Yugioh in a different style.