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I liked the first two seasons of Digimon as a kid, they were the only ones they aired here in Finland. After some years I matured and began looking down on them.

Let's face it, the idea that ENIAC, the world's second computer, was capable of twisting space-time and created parallel dimension where computer data took physical form and gained sentience on its own, and then interacted with human kids' emotions to reconfigure the data to combat monsters, was quite silly, and the show mostly served only commercial purposes. (This creation of the Digital World is explained in the Wonder Swan games relating to Digimon ... Adventure 02.) The plot of the first season also was quite nonexistent, fighting one big bad with world-domination fantasies after another.

Then, after many years they decided to air Digimon Tamers in the kids' weekday morning program slot. I hadn't seen it back on the good old years because I didn't know Japanese, didn't want to watch English dub and subs were not available, which was quite surprising, considering Digimon is, or once was, very popular franchise around the world. I started to watch it mostly for nostalgy. Digimon Tamers however turned out to be much more actual cyberpunk than kids' show.

Digimon Tamers' plot is built upon the concept of unintentionally created artificial intelligence. It is, too, a bit strange idea, especially given that it's creation is timed in 1984. But then again, Digimon Tamers officially is stated to take place in different universe, so we can assume some technology had advanced asynchronously. Or perhaps the same quantum phenomena that affected the creation of the Digital World played a role here. Anyway, the backstory is not fully explained in the show, there's a novel called Digimon Tamers 1984 which would be a good companion to watching it, but it hasn't been translated either to my knowledge.

Tamers is loyal to the original ideas of Digimon however, and the fact they made them believable, even if eccentric, is one of the things that make it so good. The childrens' ability to interact with the Digimon in unique ways and the fact the main character actually CREATES his own Digimon are justified with the concept of DigiGnomes - programs that were originally intended as a part of a children's toy, designed by a group of programmer students at University of Palo Alto in the 80's, until the project was cancelled.

The art of the physical world is decent, but when we get to the Digital World it's amazing, acidic. We have packets of garbage data running around deserts in coils, our physical world's information networks manifested in the sky as a huge shining globe with greatest data streams arranging around it like debris rings of a planet, and all your classical Digimon weirdness - mansions inside glass bubbles underwater and completely monochromatic old-skool town etc. The CGI and normal animation in this show are in perfect balance. Some evolution scenes (basically those from adult stage to perfect stage) aren't very cool, they could be much better, and that's about the only actual complaint.

I've always considered all incarnations of Digimon to have excellent soundtracks, and Tamers is not an exception. The second ending theme 'Days ~aijou to nichijou~' is so sweet and dreamy I have on many mornings after not sleeping the night (like was the case at the time when Tamers aired here on kids' mornings) listened to it on loop about ten times and got a really good feeling. After that it temporarily loses it's charm, but on the next morning it's restored. The opening 'The Biggest Dreamer' is really groovy too. Tamers has more futuristic and/or digital sounding BGM's than the other seasons, fitting it's themes and atmosphere perfectly. The first evolution sequence music, 'Evo' is probably the coolest Digimon evolution music ever, but the others send chills to the spine too. Try listening those in Youtube even if you don't plan to watch the series.

Characters are better developed than in any other Digimon incarnation, and some have relatively dark backgrounds. Our main hero is way far from typical shounen hothead with big ego and exaggerated goals and bad manners. He's what you'd call an artistic soul, and his development into a sort of knight on a white (though it's really red here...) horse is interesting. The Digimon also have distinquishable personalities that aren't paired with their owners' personalities in any typical - balancing opposites nor overly similar - fashion. We have serious adventuring group drama here where half of the 'people' just happen to be artificial intelligences gained physical creature-ish manifestation via quantum physics.

Also, the Digimon aren't initially friends by default. Wouldn't you be surprised, confused if you just happened to encounter a talking battling mutating video game creature? Their slowly developing bonds are quite serious. And we get to explore the differences and similarities of humans and Digimon. At the beginning, most Digimon are guided by their basic instinct to battle, absorb the opponents data, convert it into utilizable form for self, and evolve, bestowed upon them by humans themselves. Neither is there any over-the-top world-saving premise - the characters become involved with it through pure chance, bit by bit, through their own choices.

Our main villain is, unlike the Digimon, an emotionless program. Originally created to keep the numbers of copies of data files in given limits, in order to prevent viruses from spreading themselves that way and collapsing the budding 80's Internet, he has now gained physical form too, and become what you could call an 'eco-fascist', calmly launching plans to reduce the numbers of humans after calculating there're too many of them for the planet to withstand. This is an interesting, thought-provoking concept really.

We don't have big bad guys who are bad just for the sake of it here. Sans the few rogue monsters in the beginning that serve only as ways to initiate character conflict, every villain has understandable motives for whatever they do, and most turn out good after some serious misunderstandings and political or religious differences crossing the border of two different worlds have been cleared. The question whether or not we are gods and masters of our creations is also explored in many episodes - even if our creations believe in gods completely of their own.

And the final battle is on par with Gurren Lagann's. No, I'm not kidding. They have many things in common in fact, as one Digimon's final form is like giant green dog-faced mecha, and both involve quantum physics you actually have to think a bit for them to make sense.

Overall, it's weird, trippy, cool and enjoyable to both children and adult science fiction fans. Not everyone is going to like it of course, mostly probably because it has lots of monster battles, the beginning is slow, and because some things of the backstory are left a bit obscure. Also some have called it Evangelion's child, which in turn has pissed off some fans of Evangelion, which I think is completely justified - indeed it doesn't go to same depths over same subjects. Some have called it a bad Evangelion-wannabe, but I don't think they have much in common. Both are good though, so let's not start an argument over this one.

If you watch Tamers expecting it to be like Evangelion, you're going to be disappointed and probably hate it. So don't do that. Tamers is worth liking it. It doesn't try to be a ripoff of ANYTHING, it's honestly completely its own kind of work.

There simply isn't anything like Digimon Tamers out there.

Well well.. here we have the most overrated, over-hyped show probably ever coming to existence. Soul Eater is much more those than Gurren-Lagann or One Piece, which are already more than you can comprehend. Both have their strong sides among all the weak however, but from Soul Eater I really didn't find any of such.

It's reasonable to say Soul Eater is practically Bleach x FLCL, neither of those I have been able to enjoy. I thought maybe two minuses equals plus here, but it didn't.

The story is as cliché as you can get. It's a combination of Pokémon-esque 'collect them all' and sports-shounen-esque seemingly incompetent ... main characters wanting desperately to become x. Then we have Al Capones and Jack the Rippers and such historical characters everyone knows thrown in, and they're really demons or something here, and that's supposed to be brilliant and original? Of course it's mostly intended to be parody, but who the hell wants to watch 51 episodes of parody out of exactly the same things? Length is definitely one of the most defective aspects in Soul Eater. It could have been ok compressed into a movie, really.

Art is the most horrifying I have seen in long time. Especially the opening animation. It's not cool, chilly, groovy, funky, thrilling or creepy, it's just ugly. The character's faces read 'please kill me'. The art of One Piece is on par with Mona Lisa when compared to this. I even got a nightmare where that freaky Sun hanged in the sky. Brrr..

It's been a while since I tried to watch this hangover puke of an anime, and I in fact no longer remember one single sequence of music! So... it's probably safe to say it wasn't exactly great either...

The characters were probably the strongest part of it, surprisingly enough. I guess if the show was captivating in the beginning and then descended mostly into absurd slapstick comedy, like One Piece, their quirky personalities and interactions could have stirred quite a few laughs here and there, and in the process you'd grow to like them. Now they were nothing but comedians on the stage, distant and empty shells, not symphaticizeable characters you'd want to watch 51 episodes, whatever they did during that time. If Soul Eater's plot is to be mocking and padody of shounen anime, then the character's are nothing but plot devices.

Some people say 'if you have ever liked One Piece, you'll love Soul Eater'. Well, here's the big difference: I still watch One Piece at 400+ episodes, because it's much more than just comedy! The characters have had development. Series totally without character development are rarely interesting to me.

Overall, I didn't find anything to grap onto. This show just fails in everything it tries - in parodying, in having watchable action, in having any kind of adventure spirit, in having any kind of creepy atmosphere, in having any new interesting ideas. Of course five episodes is too little to say what it'd have been in long run, but these five were just huge turn-off.

The first episode most notably was such: its humor was your very typical 'BOOBIES!! PANTSU!!' stuff and really nothing else. I wouldn't, in fact, even be surprised if, after the point where I dropped it, it would mostly descend back into that, and still many people would find it funny and original and give it these 10's and five stars.

Of course it's only my personal opinion that it's not funny, but I consider it a FACT that it's a REALLY BAD move to make THE FIRST episode in such way, IF the show later develops into more original and honestly amusing stuff. I considered dropping it after the first episode out of pure facepalm, and eventually dropped it just out of boredom and feeling of total detachedness.

I decided to make some sort of review of this since there didn't seem to be many negative ones previously. The first thing I want to say here is that Hunter x Hunter, the other popular work from the same author, is one of my favorite anime series for half a decade. I therefore had very high expectations for Yu Yu Hakusho. Hell, I'd even have been able to say I liked it even if it was a Dragonball clone. But it was something much worse...

The story is quite trivial most of the time; it gets somewhat good during the last 25 or so eps, ... but it's not worth watching all those battles before it which don't relate to it any way. The few individual story arcs before that are extremely simplistic, if not nonexistent. Mainly you get the feelling that the author came up with them in 5 seconds in order to give some cause for the action.

It's a series from the early 90's, so the art isn't very cool. You'd think that when the series is just pointless action, they'd at least make the action look good? Well, you're wrong. They've not used even those flash and sketcy-line techniques they used on Dragonball at roughly the same time period.

There's no musical scores you'd remember afterwards. Unlike some people, I find several anime series to have music you want to listen discretely from watching the series. But YYH is definitely not one of those, so it's music is well below average.

The main characters are, besides Kurama, unsympathetic slow-witted tough guys. The bad guys mostly lack any personality, their motive to attack the main cast is mainly just because they're bad, and you forget them immediately after they get slaughtered - the shaggy story arcs mostly don't intersect in any way, so you never hear anything about them from any character (and if you ask me, that's one of the defining marks of a bad series). Some of the characters develop at the end - but again, it's nothing exceptional, and just goddamn not worth watching those never-ending mindless bloodbath battles!

So, the battles are long and dull, with exceptionally random power-ups or mutations. There's no adventuring, just tournaments or premised quests to go to some place to beat up some guys. There's little drama, and most characters remain one-dimensional. Unlike in Hunter x Hunter, the superpowers are pure raw power without any strategical element to them. There are only few fighting female characters, most are just cheergals. To me, there wasn't simply anything enjoyable or inspiring in anything.

Overall, it's not the worst series out there (to me the worst are those that try to be something but fail epicly), it just doesn't have anything to say. It's the most generic, mediocre shounen action series probably ever made, and you could watch it if you have absolutely nothing else to do, but don't expect anything.

If you want to watch a fighting series, watch Dragonball - there's some meaning to the fights, there's some plot in between them, and the action is mostly cool.

If you want to watch a quality shounen series which revolves around sympathetic and unforgettable characters, which is mainly adventure and not tournament, which has a good plot and only short battles right on the hot spots of the plot, or want to have a glimpse of that genius of Yoshihiro Togashi they talk out there, watch Hunter x Hunter.

Naruto is fine too.