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Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin-Advent of the Red Comet is a show in the Mobile Suit Gundam series, which deals with the origin of the eponymous Mobile Suits and also features an advent calendar or something idk I wasn't paying attention.

The story provides an insight into the early days of the One Year War and, more importantly, the myriad events that preceded that war. Specifically, it's a story about the man who would become Char, his early days as the world's most competent shota, and how he managed to work his way up the rankings of a military whose top brass hated him and would ... kill him on sight, were it not for his impregnable disguise of sunglasses followed by sports goggles.

Gundam, from what I've managed to experience of the main series and this OVA, suffers from an issue that I find myself hard-pressed to really succinctly explain. The shortest explanation is this: the writing in Gundam is just a little bit too good. The long explanation is as follows:

The Gundam series tends to center around really high quality character studies. Every character in the show is clearly fleshed out and fully formed, and I generally find myself hard pressed to look at any one character and say "I don't like that one. The lore of the series is intricate, as war stories tend to be, but a very good job has been done in establishing what is happening, and why it is that I'm supposed to care. Let that be the main takeaway of this review: I really like the writing of this show, and frankly of this entire series. However, when the writing is of this sort of high quality, it has a tendency to make missteps and weirdness look all the more stark, in comparison. I tear things to shreds, when I like them, and boy howdy did the shredder come out in full force.

Having a really smart and really consistent plot throughout your OVA only makes it all the more asinine that a major part of it hinges on Char running into a boy his exact age who looks exactly like him, who was already set to be fast-tracked into officer position of the Zeon army and who manages to get in close with the Zabis despite looking LITERALLY EXACTLY like the kid they've wanted dead for years.

Having nuanced, fleshed out and genuinely likable characters in the middle of a terrible war only makes it feel more like a slap in the face when the man you give me to try and sell the horrors of Operation: British is Dozle. Fucking Dozle. The wacky woo-hoo screamy cry-boy who immediately proceeds to scream and cry about it the exact same way he's been screaming and crying about everything for the entire show, because he's the resident scenery chewer and his presence is supposed to be a joke. It also kind of makes it a double slap, when you consider that Dozle was probably one of the goodest eggs in this series, and yet you have him be the forefront of the Very Bad Thing What Zeon Did and he just suddenly is like "heck yeah. Unprecedented war-crimes, fam, let's go."

I reiterate, though. I'm mad, because this OVA made me give enough of a shit about it to get mad at it. I still would genuinely recommend this series to someone who's already into the Gundam series, and really would like to get that extra nugget of hot lore to bring the nugget tray to completion. Watch it with less of a critical eye than I do, for your own sake. It'll probably be one of the all time greats, that way.

Chargeman Ken is the anime equivalent of that one kid in high school who threw together his book report in five minutes on a book we all knew he didn't really read or understand.

The show stars Ken, during his failed child acting phase before he moved on and became famous on the Street Fighter circuit. Living in that curiously 60's-70's era of sci-fi where everyone lives in glass bubbles and reality itself lowered its framerate to increase computing power, he's just your ordinary jumpsuit wearing future boy. But when Bubble City is threatened by the forces of Vague Geometric Shapes Loosely Gathered Together to Look ... Like Easily Animated Aliens, Ken goes into his secret identity. That is to say, he puts on a helmet, and then his jumpsuit gets a "V" printed on it. You know. "V," for "Chargeman," obviously.

Episodes of CK are five minutes long, and going back to the book report analogy, it's pretty easy to see where the wordcount was padded. The smoothest animation is in the once-an-episode transformation sequence, which still dedicates half its runtime to a static image of Ken the cameraman rapidly zoomed in and out on "dramatically." Ken's weapon of choice is a laser gun which, conveniently for the animators, has no recoil and is being held by the steadiest hand in the West. Fight scenes are an ironic joy to watch, being half composed of static shots of Ken with his gun way too close to his face, and half of shots of purple triangle tentacle things getting a little bit glowy and popping off-screen.

The plot of each episode is perhaps the greatest treasure of this show. Again, each episode is five minutes long. None of the episodes are related to one another (at least, none of the ones I saw). Between those two facts, the thrust of each episode hits you like a sledgehammer. You'll turn on the episode, listen to the few seconds of Ken and those two other shrieking hellbeasts that follow him around as "comic support," and then suddenly-WHAM! Killer butterflies! WHAM! The Headless Horseman is real and he's got clones and ice powers! WHAM! We've discovered Chargeman Ken's weakness in the literal second episode and now we've covered the planet in eternal darkness. Sure hope Ken's superpowers can't be activated by being in contact with any sort of portable light like a match or something. It's the kind of demented storytelling that more surreal shows have to struggle to do on purpose, and here's Ken doing it before it was cool.

Chargeman Ken is awful. It is bizarrely, inexplicably bad. Somebody, some team of people in an office building somehwere, got paid to draw, score and produce this, and some other group of people greenlit it for publication. It's objectively one of the worst pieces of fully realized media I think I've ever seen, and it's *awesome.* Seriously. You're probably here because you've heard somebody clown on this thing, anyway, but if you've somehow managed to stumble across this review and never heard of the show, believe me when I say this: Chargeman Ken is an absolute dumpster fire of an anime, and you *have* to watch it.

Witch Hunter Robin is the story of a fifteen year old girl crushing on her presumably adult coworker while burning people alive in the name of black budget police work. The show seems to heavily prioritize mood over all else, with its restrained and realistic acting and reasonably (for anime, at least) grounded setting. However, it seems to do so at the expense of the story and characters, overall.

The story is unfocused. Plot points are routinely set up, given zero time to breathe, and then get unceremoniously dumped. A prime example is early on, when the show introduces the question of why Robin's powers seem ... to be unable to ever hit their target. I had thought that maybe the show was setting up how, like most teenage girls, Robin maybe had some unconscious qualms about lighting people on fire with her mind, and she would have to grow into the role of witch-hunter that was forced on her. Instead, it turns out that she just needs glasses, which is weird, because that's not how vision works. This is a problem that's shown off in episode one, questioned in the second, solved in the third, and no longer a problem by the fourth.

This is a recurring theme with just about every plot the show has. Half-hearted attempts are made to suggest that Robin has a hard time grasping idioms, because she's foreign, but at a frequency that makes me forget that that's even supposed to be a thing. Amon's relationship with his girlfriend consists of two scenes of them emphatically not having chemistry before Amon does the whole breakup by phone bit. The end of the show raises the stakes by introducing an army of mass-deployed black ops soldiers, only to render them completely irrelevant by making their one weakness "being in Robin's presence for more than ten seconds." And the very end of the show turns an established character into a rambling idiot, spouting some asinine screed about "the purity of the human race" that couldn't be any more stereotypically "this particular period of anime history" if it tried.

The muted performance of the characters, while a welcome sight in a genre marked by unfunny mugging, goes a bit too far. Characters all seem to have to make a conscious decision to show a genuine character trait, otherwise defaulting to low-key, neutral expression, no-emotion fact spewing that makes them seem like they're engaged in a constant contest of "who can look the coolest?" I found myself liking characters like Dojima and That One Guy on the Motorcycle that Doesn't Do Anything Important, because at least they knew how to crack a smile every now and again.

Overall, WHR is a well-presented, but otherwise vacuous series. If it was perhaps a bit longer, maybe some of these plot points could have actually been given the attention they deserved. As it stands, it strikes me as a show with too many ideas and no firm way to bridge them all together. Still, I was entertained, at least enough to finish it, so I could certainly say it had room to get worse.

Dragon Crisis isn't a show, so much as it's a series of tropes presented in something resembling chronological order. It stars Ryuuji, an everyday perfectly normal high school boy who's also one of the world's greatest magical artifact users and managed to single-handedly reverse several centuries of deteriorating dragon/human political relationships purely by virtue of being a Very Good Boy. Together with his crack team of anime woman stereotypes, he navigates the deadly, cutthroat world of black budget magical relic hunting, only to discover that the world of relationships... just might be a little bit tougher.

*canned laughter, theme song plays*

There is basically nothing original on ... display. A lot of big talk is made about dragons basically being evil and everybody hating them, despite the fact that A: the show's definition of "dragon" almost exclusively boils down to "cute anime girl, but she can grow wings and junk," and B: practically none of the dragons shown seem to have any issue whatsoever interacting with people, and vice versa. The show's magic system isn't any more complex than "here's a doodad that lets you shoot wind bullets and stuff." Not even the relationships are fleshed out; Rose's cutesy insistence that she loves Ryuuji is taken as basically canon from femtosecond one, and the other members of Ryuuji's "harem" hover around him for seemingly no other reason than that he is the protagonist of an anime, and also a Very Good Boy.

Oh, and did we mention he's a high school student? That's *very* important to his character. They spend literal *minutes* delving into Ryuuji's school life. He has friends there. They contribute to the plot. Really.

I struggle to find an avenue by which this show is meant to appeal. Am I supposed to want to know more about the world, why dragons all seem to be anime YA protagonists instead of... you know, dragons? Am I supposed to like the five minutes of fight scenes, where a collection of characters with generic pretty light attacks fart around until Ryuuji and Rose bust out the canned animation "we can do this because we love each other" maneuver? Am I supposed to enjoy the blistering comedy that happens when a bunch of women flagrantly violate the personal space and boundaries of a Very Good Boy? It shall forever remain a mystery.

In short, Dragon Crisis is the anime equivalent of a junk drawer. It contains a bunch of worn-out things that could be usable, if they weren't so lifeless and disorganized. It gets a solid "meh" from me.

It would appear that "supernatural turn-of-the-century period piece" is it's own subgenre, one that I find myself naturally gravitating towards. When I first started watching Baccano, the first thing I found myself asking was how they intended to make a premise about a cabal of immortal gangsters engaging throughout the show's entire runtime. Luckily, there's a full enough cast of characters and enough crazy happenings to ensure that, somehow, immortal gangsters only form one part of the show's entire mythos.

Quite a few things about the show stand out, in terms of quality. The animation is slick and detailed when it needs to be. The characters ... all have a good dynamic that generally doesn't either wear out its welcome or become too much to keep track of. Those two things are a tall order because A: there are a lot of people in the cast to keep track of, and B: at least two of those cast members are Isaac and Miria. A pair of inept, Chaotic Good thieves bumbling their way through crimes with the sort of high energy "mug for the camera" attitude indicative of anime humor is the sort of thing that could get real old, real fast. It's a testament to the writing on display that I not only found the two of them charming, I even found myself chuckling at a few of the more subtle jokes.

That having been said, it seems like a few things had to be rushed, to get the story done in one season. The episode explaining the mechanics of how immortality works is serviceable enough, but the rule for killing an immortal is written in almost like it was some afterthought and explained like it's a mechanic in the world's dreariest game of make-believe. The story introduces characters in the first episode that I *think* were meant to act as a framing device/the audience's point of reference, but by the end I'm pretty sure they're just forgotten about entirely. Also, without spoiling, it was a bit disappointing at the end, when two characters were revealed not to be genuinely good people by not even thinking about doing certain things, but they were, in fact... idiots? Idiots with amnesia? I dunno. It's the closing stinger of the series, so they don't bother explaining.

Overall, Baccano is really good. As a self-contained story, it really works. If you're a fan of Prohibition era gunfights, a colorful cast of people with vaguely American sounding names, and young children getting their heads blown off with shotguns, this is the show for you.

Sometimes I pick up an anime because of its interesting elevator pitch. Sometimes I pick up an anime because of its history and general positive reception amongst the fanbase. And sometimes I pick up an anime for literally no other reason than "the opening theme song slaps." This is one where the last reason influenced my anime decisions. I'm just going to put it up front, as emphatically as I please: the opening theme song is amazing and I hum it to myself constantly. With that little bit of silliness out of the way, here is the rest of the review.

How Heavy Are the Dumbbells ... you Lift (hereby shortened to Dumbbells, because I'm not a masochist) is a show that combines light-hearted character interactions, good humor and informative segments about proper weight lifting technique. Did I mention the show's central theme is weight training? It's an odd duck. The oddness of this duck is the show's central appeal. You really get the impression that the writers cared about fitness and strength training, and that sort of passion becomes very infectious, even to someone like me who only has a passing acquaintance with athleticism. Additionally, Dumbbells has a light sense of humor that *should* have been annoying, but actually managed to make me laugh quite a few times. It's all based around catty teenagers and people making a big deal about basic weight lifting moves. Maybe it was because I was watching the dub, which had the dual advantage of good voice actors and good localization. Maybe I was just in too good of a mood because of the theme song.

The characters are pretty good. *Pretty* good. They are good in the sense that their defining character quirks generally don't overpower their character, and are busted out for a laugh just enough times to avoid becoming stale and overdone. I think the one exception is Gina, who is a Russian actively trying to be Russian stereotypes because... comedy, I suppose. And then there were the tortured references to classic action movie stars that just started in the pit of "not funny" and sort of stayed there. And then there are the petty niggles, like how Hibiki went into weight training to lose weight, even though she literally has a fresh off the line generic anime lady body like every anime lady who's ever animed... a... lady... I don't know where I was going with that line.

Overall, whether Dumbbells is an objectively good show or one that just won me enough good will to want to be super charitable is irrelevant. I enjoyed it. I had fun watching this show. I would watch it again just for the weight lifting tutorials. Sometimes it's nice to turn off the critical thinking brain and just watch a thing that's fun, and this show absolutely provided.

xxxHolic is a show that I'm never sure I've spelled correctly. The most succinct way to describe it is as a collection of independent stories, centered around a psychically gifted young man and the owner of a magical problem solving shop. I choose to keep it vague, but honestly one doesn't need much more than that. There is no overarching story, per se: one could watch any episode out of order and the canon more or less stays intact. This does give the authors leeway to tell some interesting and fun to think about stories, but on the flip side it means that what you're ... going to get is a mixed bag. Personally speaking, I think two or three episodes of the show are *fantastic* in terms of writing and plot and remain my runaway favorite stand-alone stories, while other episodes come and go in the mind with nothing but a handful of beats to mark their passage.

The story is really at its best when the characters take a backseat to the supernatural elements in the show. A common thread in my runaway favorites is the fact that the... third party character (depending on your point of view, they're either clients or victims, but they all disappear after one episode) takes center stage. Yuuko serves a sufficiently good role as the guide through the show's mythology, but everyone else is kind of flat. I got real tired of Watanuki's three character traits really quickly. Watanuki loves Himawari. Watanuki hates Doumeki being in the same zip code when he's crushing on Himawari. Watanuki is the put upon straight-man to a drunkard and her two twee-children. They spend so much time setting up a theme and a mood with all these black smoke monsters and deep psycho-drama, only for Watanuki to screech and flop around bonelessly about something trivial.

Speaking of boneless, the art style's a bit weird. This is probably going to win an award for "most original comment in a review," but it's true. Characters would probably be normally proportioned, except that their arms and legs are stretched out to give everyone a beanpole, kinda Bayonetty sort of appearance to them. It works for the show, and complements the off-beat art style all the rest of its assets try to strive for. Plus, I mean, it works for Yuuko, who spends a good seventy-five percent of her run time laying down sensually like the protagonist on the cover of a tawdry romance novel. It leads to characters that are memorable and able to be picked out of a lineup. Most of them, at least. The third party characters are all women, and they tend to have that range of mediocre features that leads to them being kind of forgettable.

As I write this, it's been quite a few weeks since I watched xxxHolic. The fact that so many of these praises and criticisms still stick out in my head is a serious point in its favor. xxxHolic is a *memorable* show. Rules against synopses and spoilers mean that I can't tell you which episodes are my favorite. I also like being a jerk, like that. If you find the time to pick it up, I very much recommend it.

Spies with psychic powers in 1930's Manchuria is an example of a setting that a viewer will either be completely into or completely ambivalent about. I fully admit to being the former, and if the first seven words of this review got your attention, then Senkou no Night Raid might very well also be in your wheelhouse.

The plot plays rather fast and loose with history, while also going really far out of the way to assure us that the writing team did their homework. Having watched this show again with a friend, I found my recommendation soured a bit by the inclusion of long pre-episode ... history lessons over static images of maps. Certainly a fine addition if we were watching some kind of edutainment show, but had they all been cut, we likely could have gotten a whole other episode's worth of action and adventure from the saved footage and not lost anything in terms of context.

One of my personal favorite aspects of the show centers around the abilities of the cast. Telekinesis, teleportation, clairvoyance... each member of the cast has their own unique power, and each power works within well-established, easy to process limitations. As the series progresses, those limitations become a compelling part of the action. Characters don't tap into heretofore undiscovered wells of power to contrive their way out of danger, instead having to use the tools that are available to them to solve problems. I'm personally quite a fan of static power levels; it's a fairly reliable way to establish stakes and avoids the arms race spectacle of late-stage shonen.

That having been said, the plot does shift around between dry and awkward, at times. The low power level means that conflicts are smaller and more intimate in scale, but many of them wind up feeling like distractions. The final villain of the series sort of comes and goes with a minimum of fanfare, and while I can certainly remember facets of the show's ending, months after the fact, most of the series tends to occupy this valley of forgetfulness where things certainly happened, I just can't remember them.

Overall, Senkou no Night Raid is a show that I, personally, enjoyed quite a bit. Personality matrices being what they are, someone on this site will inevitably feel the same, so if you are a fan of spy shows, light supernatural elements and historical set-pieces, it will succeed in being a worthy way to spend an afternoon.

This is an anime I picked up from the library one day, on the notion that a two-disc box set could be knocked out in no time, and on the whole I found I rather liked the show, with a handful of caveats.

The characters run the gamut from "not offensive" to "is also on the show." That Dalian, resident plucky sidekick, manages to have a personality largely through catty insults and being easily bribed by sweets is a testament to the lack of sophistication on offer. Even the main character tends to fall into a vacuum of "main character," from which no discernible personality emerges ... that isn't at the whim of the plot. Honestly, the most interesting episode, in terms of character, is probably the one featuring the Libricide officer, who's relationship with his do-nothing plucky sidekick is the sort of abusive I'm sure could be written by fanfic writers as being code for some kind of dom-sub thing, but that could just be me.

So, the characters are uninspired. The plot is okay. The idea of magical books that in some backfirey way grant the wishes of the innocent and not so innocent is the kind of thing that lends itself to interesting plots. By the exact same token, however, giving the main characters seemingly unlimited access to a whole library of magic books means that any threat or problem, once sufficiently established, usually goes away as fast as it shows up. When the once-an-episode "pull books out of the sidekick's chest cavity" canned animation plays and Huey reads a passage from the "shoot indiscriminate plot-erasing lasers" book, the story tends to lose any sense of stakes.

Overall, it's a serviceable anime, if relatively bland. Coming from the same studio that brought us Evangelion and Gurren Lagan, I suppose a part of me was expecting a show with a bit more bite, but it's not a bad way to eat up a portion of time, generally.

Ergo Proxy is a prime example of a bookshelf anime, one of those thoughtful and conversation provoking pieces you keep lying around in order to convince people that you don't just consume the medium for gratuitous explosions or attractive large-eyed girls in bikinis. The plot seems at first to be taking a page completely out of the script to Blade Runner, but quickly evolves into its own strange beast, centered around themes of personal identity, suffering and the destiny of one's birth, all tinged with an undercurrent of Gnosticism that the writers absolutely don't want you to forget exists. Perhaps it was just a feature ... of my particular version, but at the end of each episode I was usually greeted with a wall of text laboriously explaining what arcane literary or religious reference formed the centerpiece of the day's events, which smacks almost entirely of writers being in an awful hurry to convince their audience how much smarter they are than the average person. It's inclusion felt like an insult, especially on the one or two times I actually *was* smart enough to figure it out without having to get the truncated Wikipedia article about it.

The characters are interesting, and the art style is nice. Between the lighting bordering on non-existent and the man with the faded dark red jumpsuit being the most colorful thing on screen, the one thing I can say it commits to is a style. They expertly sell the idea of a dark and dying world; even the brighter pockets of life amidst the show's universe still carry that deliberate undertone of darkness, just out of the line of sight of the average person. It's unpleasant to look at, sometimes, and certainly not easy on the eyes, but not in any way that doesn't make perfect sense in context. It's not supposed to be pretty.

Ultimately, I'm glad I watched the show, and I'm glad it exists. It's certainly deeper than your average shonen punchfest, but if I had to put a finger on my one niggle with it, it's that Ergo Proxy is never as deep as it wants you to think it is. It's the show for that kind of half-intellectual, the kind who thinks that owning old books is the only prerequisite for being well-read, and who couldn't find a way to make a philosophy work without designing some massive fantasy world in which it's the only viable worldview. Still, at least it's an interesting fantasy world, with some nice set-pieces and stories.