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Everthing must come to an end, today it was Star Driver.
While it was amazing at the beginning, it started slowly getting bad.

Story:
The setting itself is intruduced in a rather rushed way, but showed a lot of potential. Sadly, it went down to a "which boy will Wako choose?" and "Takuto beats down the Kiraboshi" without very much development.

Art:
I don´t have much to complain here. It was a bit too colorful in my opinion, but especially in the fighing scenes, you could see were all the graphic-work went.

Sound:
The soundtrack was maybe one of the most outstanding features of the anime; the tracks themselves felt good, ... and the insert songs were a great addition.

Characters:
Here it stars going downhill.
Most characters hardly change from your first impression. From my point of view, exept the love-triangle centering Wako, there is almost no character development at all. Most of the female characters even fell in love with Takuto or Sugata to a certain extent, at the very least they didn´t see them as enemies anymore.

Enjoyment:
Takuto comes. Takuto fights. Takuto saves the day.
That´s basicly what every episode was about.

With the sole exeption of Head, most of the Kiraboshi-members somehow didn´t take their goal serious, beeing all nice to Takuto or even becoming his friends outside of the fights. Until shortly before the end, no one got at least once the idea to fight him with more than one Cybody. It seems that defeating/killing him outside of a Cybody was never an option either as well, since nobody tried even once.

At the end of the story, you hardly feel like anything important happened since episode 2, because there is hardly any new plot-related information at all (ignoring a bunch of other love-relationships).

Overall:
I really liked Star Driver when it started, then it became a single sided "Takuto ownez them with some new/old technique or help from Sugata" - business with a featured "girl in love" theme. More background to everything Cybody-releated might have helped alot.

So here I finally am, the bad guy who is gonna compare the anime of "Umineko no Naku Koro ni" against the visual novel.

I was happily waiting for the release of the anime, since I really liked the first four novels. While I wasn´t expecting TOO much of the story of chapter 1, chapter 2 has underlined my bad feelings......

STORY:
Overall, they followed the story well. Some keyfacts where sadly left out, like some explanations from Beatrice. Still, nothing too important was left out, but of course, MANY other funny or interesting things are missing; but in the end, you can´t push a whole book or ... novel in a 24 - 26 episode anime.

ART:
When I saw the first pictures I thought "OMG WHAT´S THAT?", but after seeing it in action, it´s not so bad as I thought. Still, it can´t underline some characters like Eva and Beatrice very well, but I say more about that later.

SOUND:
I always like it when good music from a visual novel is used in the anime again. in Umineko, the recycled old music well and used many new tracks, too. Most of the time, the music is underlining the situation perfectly; but in chapter 1, it started to annoy me that 3 episodes ended with the same track in a row...

CHARACTERS:
And here we are, at the biggest weakness of this anime.
While the parents like Rudolph, Rosa and Eva where intruduced as very nice people in the start of the novel (what changed not so much later), here we got to see only their ugly sides from the start.

Evas "lovely" side was completely ignored, making her look like a b**** from the very start until now. Kyrie was nearly completely left out of the picture, even though she already played a good part in chapter 1 and 2, even though she may be the most interesting character out of the parents. The grand personality of Kinzo is nowhere to be seen, you see him crying most of the time. Maria´s creepyness is so exaggerated that it hurts. Jessica is only presented as a lovesick girl, but not the strong girl she really is.

About Battler, he´s not half as fun as he used to be in the novel, since he´s reduced to to the tragic hero that has to oppose the witch, even though in the original it wasn´t like that.

But the REAL annoyance is about Beatrice.
Her funny, easy to tease character is completely left out, showing only the "evil witch side" of her, but not the interesting character she really is. The somewhat "friendly rivalship" between her and Battler is completely left out, as well as the fact that Battler calls her "Beato" since near the start of chapter 2l.

Partly, the art-style may be at fault as well, I have trouble imagening a sulking or happily laughing Beatrice with the mostly "serious" style.

ENJOYMENT:
When you ignore that it is an anime to an existing story, it´s not bad, and I will still continue to watch it, since the really interesting stories are gonna start now.

OVERALL:
Even with the left out things of the story, it would be a great anime, if they only didn´t screw up the personalities of the characters so bad. Because they did, the story isn´t what it could be, especially because the relationship between Beatrice and Battler is totally different.

Like that, many potential was thrown away, what makes me quite sad. It might be a good anime in it´s own way, and I still have hope for the second half, but it is not the "Umineko no Naku Koro ni" it should have been.

First of all, I´m a german and this is my first english written preview, so please bear with me if I made some spelling-/grammar-mistakes^^

Just to have said it in advance, I finished all three .hack//G.U. games, so it´s not like I´m not familiar with the story itself. I had high expectations, but I sadly got dissappointed.

Story:
They tried to put the story of each game in 30 minute-parts. Since the games itself had a play-volume of 12-18 hours per game (don´t remember exactly and can´t check it because my PS2 is broken), you can guess how extremly it got cutted...

The arena battles that were essential ... in the games are only shown as flashbacks for around a minute. The story itself strays from the game after the last scene that belongs to "G.U. Rebirth". From here on, everything focuses at Atolis and Ovans story-parts; other characters that were involved with the story (like Sakaki) won´t appear.

Art:
They used the ingame-movie grafic for this movie. It looks cool and awesome in the action-scenes '(especially phase-battles), but terrible at the "chatting-scenes". And in the end, as a GC movie, it´s measured at Final Fantasy anyway, and here, .hack//G.U. trilogy can´t compare at all.


Sound:
After hearing the "Gentle Hands" remix of the trailer, I thought we get more cool remixes, but I hoped too much. Still, the music fits very well, esspecialy the fights.

Character:
My biggest part to complain about.
Most of the main-characters aren´t even shown, and the story focuses totally at Haseo, Atoli and Ovan.

Instead of the cool PKK style that Haseo had in the game, he only has that mad side shown in ".hack//roots", and seems like a little kid very often in the first half, Atoli isn´t even half as fun to watch since she has not much air-time in the first quarter, and Ovan´s calm attitude is nowhere to be found.

Enjoyment and Overall:
If you played through the games, even with that changes you´ll do nothing wrong with watching the movie at least once. If you never even played the game you may do better to ignore it, since they left so much out and made a speedrun through the story, so that it´s hardly understandable at times.

I only recommend this to fans of the ".hack//G.U." - Universe, the others will just ask "what the hell was that about?"