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Thoughts on Classroom of the Elite: It is crap.
The show is about a protagonist who is intentionally mediocre for some reason, and whose only personality trait is his willingness to not stand out... until his internal monologue at the end of the show reveals that that was all a lie, so we really never knew him at all. The other characters are a rude, snobbish, unlikeable girl, and an adorably cute girl with big boobs who is secretly a psychopath. Such great characters everyone!
The plot barely exists, but it follows the attempts of class 1-D (the "defective class in an elite meritocratic school) as they ... attempt to improve themselves to the point of becoming 1-A (the top-ranked class), and concludes with a survival test on a desert island.
Anyway, the show has a large number of faults which I just can't overlook:
Despite not being an ecchi show, the (underage) female characters are constantly objectified and shown either from ridiculous upskirt angles, or in some episodes the camera just focuses in on their boobs.
The plot itself is quite dull for large portions, with stakes being minimal and the only way drama is added is through out of nowhere asspulls about characters secretly having psychopathic tendencies or weird secrets that never really play into the plot after their introductions. For example: what does the revelation that Sakura used to be a model do for the plot? Nothing apart from give us a reason for the creepy stalker (the backstory still wasn;t relevant to that). Heck, it makes even less sense given that she is shy and awkward about wearing a swimsuit in public in later episodes despite having no problem wearing practically nothing during modelling jobs.

The show also pretentiously talks about irrelevant philosophy all the time, bringing in the tale of Icarus and Daeadalus as a metaphor for the main character several times (despite that making no sense), and constantly asks whether equality exists in this world (and constantly coming to the answer of "no", so why does this same point keep being brought up again and again?)

Anyway, apart from the pretentious , repetitious philosophising, the pedophilic ecchi, awful characters, and shameless objectification, the soundtrack also lacks any memorable pieces, and sometimes even uses awful dubstep when it isn't needed. Still the animation is really nice... yeah that's the only good thing I can say about the show, I'm just going to quit writing this review now, the show is bad. Really bad. Really, really, really bad.

It is mediocre.
The series is set in a world where Earth was destroyed, and in its place a clockwork planet was built by a mysterious individual called Wye for humanity to live on. Thousands of years later, the protagonist Naoto, a young clocksmith with unexplained superhuman hearing, has an ancient robot girl fall on him, and is the first person to fix her after 200 years. The robot girl pledges to be his slave, and joins him and a goup of elite clocksmiths to fix the damaged parts of their world and thwart terrorists and evil military conspiracies. Another character called Marie is introduced who ... gets Naoto into the organisation, and the two have a very interesting dynamic in which both are geniuses in their own ways, but their opposing ways of going about fixing problems makes it hard for them to get along.
The series has three main problems:
Problem 1. The protagonists: Naoto is a weirdo who is sexually attracted to clocks and clockwork robots, and only helps Marie in the hopes of finding more clock girls due to his own perversion.
Marie meanwhile constantly mocks Naoto's intelligence, and even attacks him for no clear reason in the penultimate episode. She doesn't even qualify as a tsundere here, since there's no romantic implications behind their friendship, she is just an awful person.
The robot girls also have nothing really unique or distinct about their personalities, and the series feels more like an attempt to sell off the writer's sexual fantasy than it does an attempt to actually deliver a quality story.
There's also the robot girl Anchor who we see murder a load of soldiers in one episode, then find out in a later episode that she was programmed not to harm humans... what!?
Problem 2. The villains: The first episodes set up one character as being the overarching bad guy, only to be forgotten about and replaced with an old guy who spends half of his time spouting pseudo-philosophical nonsense that makes no sense and falsely accusing the protagonist of impersonating Wye... Oh, and he murders all of his own completely loyal men for no clear reason in the penultimate episode, proving that he is the worst kind of villain: the stupid villain who does evil things just to show off how evil he is even in detriment to his own plan. In short: an idiot.
Problem 3. The set-up: The series sets up so much regarding Naoto's inexplicable to calculate some things to several decimal places and determine complex mechanical solutions to damage, but bizarre lack of knowledge about equally complex manners. That and his exceptional hearing meant that for ages they seemed to be implying that Naoto was either a robot or Wye himself... but he wasn't, all the set-up had no pay-off and made no sense in the end, with none of Naoto's gifts being explained at all.
Problem 4. The finale: Speaking of unexplained, it's explained that, in this otherwise completely sci-fi series without supernatural elements, the two completely normal human protagonists are somehow able to create clock pieces with the power of their minds in order to fix the planet. How they do it is never explained, nothing that happens in the finale makes any sense, it's all just stupid.
Aside from that it was a fun watch with decent animation, a lot of cool ideas that could really work well in other stories, some well written comedy scenes, and a nice soundtrack. 5/10

If you haven't seen this anime, and you like romance, fantasy, steampunk, well developed and written characters, action, and stunning animation, and you haven't seen this show, then you need to watch it ASAP.
The story is about a human soldier who fought in a mysterious war against the gods 500 years before the series started, only to be frozen in ice and awoken centuries later to a world in which humanity has died out and been replaced by fairies, trolls, and animal people. Our hero Willem is placed in charge of biological weapons called Leprechauns, who are girls made using necromancy to wield weapons that ... allow them to fight the monsters that ravage the world's surface.
As far as lead characters go, Willem is an exceptionally well written anime protagonist, being wracked by survivor's guilt and a host of mental insecurities from his time in the war, and having countless flaws where his principals prevent him from doing the morally right thing in spite of his better judgement. He feels lie a real, conflicted human who has been through hell and is just trying to find happiness. The same can be said for Ctholly, the main heroine who is a leprechaun undergoing
a gradual loss of her memories for reasons I can't spoil. Ctholly is a fascinating character whose struggle to retain her personality and identity leads to the viewer completely understanding and empathising with her right to the end of the story. I don’t think I have ever felt as emotionally invested in the main characters of an anime before as I have with these two, and watching them grow as people and gradually organically fall in love as the story progresses more than makes up for the show’s slow pacing (though there are instances where that does drag a bit).
Word of warning: the show is a somewhat Shakespearian tragedy, winding towards an epic but emotionally devastating conclusion that I was utterly unprepared for.
The show’s biggest problems are its pacing and its somewhat varying tone. The slow-pace and inconsistent stakes between episodes makes it quite boring and frustrating to watch during the first seven-ish episodes, and the failed attempts at comedy and (very occasionally) fanservice detract from the otherwise serious and emotionally driven plot. To talk about any of the other issues I have with the show would be to spoil major plot details, and I don’t want to do that because you need to experience this show for yourself.
The animation however is superb, particularly regarding the action sequences in the later part of the series and the CGI used for metal surfaces on the airships, all of which were stunningly designed with Last Exile-level intricacy.
In short, the show has excellent world-building, relatable and fascinating characters, stunning visual presentation, superb action sequences, a beautiful soundtrack, and was just excellent at drawing me in and getting me invested in its protagonists. It doesn’t start off great, but if you stick with it, it will reward you with one of the greatest action romance stories ever put to television, period, let alone anime and it’s one of the best anime I have ever seen. 9/10, highly recommended.

As a character-driven fantasy drama, it was really good. The hero, a weirdo named Natsuki Subaru, was transported from our world by an evil and as-yet unseen witch named Satella, and pulled into a videogame-like world in which every time he dies, he gets brought back to life at a point in the past he has already lived through. While he's there, he gets saved by half-elf girl named Emelia and brought back to her benefactor's mansion to discover that she's one of several girls chosen to compete to lead their kingdom. The story is extremely interesting, especially since it deals with the psychological impact ... of everything Subaru goes through, sometimes in painstaking detail, and all of the characters are either extremely well fleshed out, or deliberately shrouded in mystery in order to hook the viewer in and keep them watching. The action sequences are breathtaking, and all of the villains and monsters are memorable for different reasons (especially the series's main antagonist Betelgeuse Romanee-Conti, who's probably what would happen if The Joker and Judge Frollo had a kid, then force-fed the kid tons and tons of cocaine). The character of Rem was also beautifully written, and the way they dealt with her unrequited feelings for Subaru was quite heartbreakingly relatable and realistic, especially given the way she has to react to Natsuki's responses. They also gave us a seriously badass old guy called Wilhelm Van Astrea, who at one point cuts himself out of a giant flying whale that had eaten him and was still ready to keep fighting the Witch's cult and various monsters. I love badass characters like him. Sadly the music within the series was mostly quite forgettable (with a few absolutely stunning exceptions), but the first opening theme and second ending theme were just beautiful. The series also was able to add quite a decent amount of comedy into the earlier episodes which offset its harsher moments quite nicely. With that said, some of the earlier episodes did have some quite basic animation issues in terms of proportions at some points, as well as Subaru cutting his had in one place, then being seen in the next scene bleeding from a different part of his had. If those seem like nit-picks, they probably are, because the series just is that good that it's hard to find too much fault in it. My only issue is that its creators have strongly implied that there won't be a second season, which means I'll need to read the books it's based on in order to find out what happens next, because the story is clearly very far from finished where the anime ends. 9/10

Why does this exist? Don't get me wrong, transposing the characters of a serious action-horror series into a high school for a chibi comedy series might have worked if it was well written... but it wasn't. All we got were scenes and lines from the main series thrown into a high school context without much context. That's not funny, it's not even a joke. And it gets worse when the same "jokes" are repeated over and over, like the scene of Hange nearly getting her head chopped off. Did you laugh seeing it once? Well, you won't after the fifth freaking time!
Throwaway lines from the ... series, like Eren telling Mikasa that "I'm not your little brother and not some snot-nosed toddler" are also repeated several times throughout the series, and I just don't get why. They add nothing and feel really out-of place when added. Characters frequently have inconsistent personalities between scenes (especially Jean and Mikasa) as a result of the writers trying to combine the personalities of the original versions of the characters with the exaggerated weird personalities that the show is trying to give them.
With that said, the Dodgeball episode was hilarious, and I love how adorable they made chibi-Armin. The best episode by far though was the Halloween special, which combines so many insane ideas and ends with such a stupid nonsensical resolution that I couldn't help but laugh... But as I said, the laughs were rare and most of the jokes kept being repeated.
It also sucks that in this series, titans go to school just like humans (they eat people's lunch boxes instead of eating people), because it means that the school allowed Zoe Hange (one of their students) to kidnap and experiment on other students for science club. How would the parents feel about that?
In short, it's a mostly unfunny, endlessly repetitive series with only two (really) good episodes. Oh, and one where Jean falls in love with two vegetables. 3/10 not recommended.

Thoughts on "In Another World With My Smartphone" (some spoilers so be warned):
Just when isekai felt like it couldn't get any worse or more repetitive, the least original or interesting anime I have ever seen came along to prove to me that yes, it IS possible to be worse than Death March.
Once again the series follows a bland, personality-free guy from our world who is thrown into a video-game-like fantasy world with some quirk that makes him ridiculously overpowered to the point that there is never any real threat to him, and once again he assembles a large harem of women who all fall ... in love with him despite his complete lack of personality, goals, ideals, etc. What makes this show "different" is that in this show he has his smartphone with him, since he is allowed to keep it in the new world by God at the start of the series (yes, a bizarre adaptation of the Judeo-Christian God is a recurring character in this show)… Oh wait, having a smartphone in a parallel world and claiming that it’s a magical item is NOT an original concept for an isekai, since it was already done in Oda Nobuna No Yabou. Unlike Oda Nobuna however, which has stunning animation and a superb soundtrack, this series has bland visuals with mediocre to subpar animation (inexplicably by the former 1990’s action mega-studio Production Reed nonetheless) and no memorable pieces of music whatsoever. So, the premise is unoriginal, and the visual presentation is bland… and it only gets worse from there. Since the protagonist is the only person in his world (until the final episode) who is able to use every kind of magic in existence, there is never any tension and he never has to put any kind of effort into solving any of the problems in the show, making all of them feel boring and uninteresting. To make up for this, the show has one admittedly cool zombie arc in the middle that amps up the tension, but it just feels out of place in terms of tone, and after that arc amps up the stakes, the stakes quickly disappear afterwards when the story changes to a fanservicey beach-arc.
The show’s setting looks exactly like every single other isekai show lately in terms of building design and the existence of magical guilds (which are themselves not properly explained in this show), and there’s just no creativity in any of the character designs or background designs. Everything just looks like ~17th Cenury housing with medieval technology levels and bland costume designs.
Anyway, out of nowhere part way through the series, a robot waifu living on a flying garden is introduced seemingly just for the sake of adding awkward innuendos to the story, but the worst thing about it is that she looks exactly the same as Milinda from Heavy Object, right down to her hairstyle, colour-scheme and facial structure. The guys were so lazy that they couldn’t even be bothered to come up with a different girl design, and just copied someone else’s with minimal change at all. And speaking of copying other series, you know how in Type Moon, some characters have powers referred to as “Mystic Eyes” (e.g. Mystic Eyes of Death Perception, Mystic Eyes of Petrification, etc.) Well that was ripped off in this show, as one of the girls has the power of Mystic Eyes of Personality Perception (they even ripped off the word perception), a power which causes her to instantly fall in love with the protagonist.
The story itself is extremely slow-paced, with virtually nothing happening throughout most of the episodes, and when stuff with world-altering implications does get set up instead of focusing the story on those elements, all we get are distractions that focus on bringing the lead and the girls closer together, which is problematic for several reasons: All of the girls have exactly the same personality (even the girl who is set up as more shy than her sister at the start ends up acting exactly the same as her when the show ends). Some of the girls are underage, including the one who becomes his fiancée first, who is freaking 12 years old! But don’t worry about that, since we learn in the final episode that social norms from our world don’t apply in the fantasy world and that as soon as he turns 18 he can marry as many waifus as he wants since apparently polygamy is normal in that world too, and the woman who can see the future says that he will have 9 wives while the camera pans out to show all 9 of the show’s main female characters, some of whom are still children, which is gross! Oh, and you know how in SAO and Grimgar all of the characters go through emotional turmoil as a result of their transplantation and worry about the people they’ve left behind? Not in this show, the protagonist never once seems to care about his family or anyone at all special in the old world. Heck, we learn literally nothing bout who he was before going in the fantasy setting, and he has no personality built onto him by the end! Everything about this show is terrible even by the standard of bad isekais.
Then there’s the problem with the show’s theology. It’s made abundantly clear that God (singular) exists in the show, and is even a character… but then in the final episode, they introduce us to another character referred to as the “Goddess of love”, despite the previously stated monotheistic nature of the show’s universe. How can he be God (singular) if there are other gods? Why is her origin not explained at all? AAAAARGH!
It’s unoriginal, slow-paced, boring, forgettable, and apparently it’s getting a second season (at least according to a lot of the comments on the funimation page for the last episode).
Why is trash like this worthy of a second season, while great series like Trinity Blood and Deadman Wonderland get nothing? 0/10, not recommended unless you are a masochist.

This was the worst isekai anime I have ever seen. The show is about an overworked video game programmer who falls asleep after an exhausting day at work and suddenly wakes up in a video game-like fantasy world where he has been summoned by an unknown person (to be a hero against the forces of the Demon Lord who threatens the kingdom - that part's not important to the plot at all). The show’s (cliché) premise and edgy title imply that the series will be dark and full of action, but instead the show is extremely slow paced, features almost no action of any kind, ... and instead focuses on our hero Satou’s travels around the world with his ever growing harem of slave girls with no distinct personalities… Yeah…
The problems with the show start in the second episode, in which Satou starts as a powerless Level 1 player threatened by an army of Lizard Men, only to be saved by a nonsense Deus Ex Machina meteor shower that somewhow jumps his level and wealth up immensely and make him overpowered to the point of nothing that happens in the show really mattering. Every time he encounters a problem, all he does is increase his skill levels and suddenly he can do anything and beat any problem, i.e. there is no tension at any point in the series since he doesn’t need to strategise or plan anything and is never in real danger. Satou also has a consistent love interest throughout the show named Zena (his pseudo-harem being made up of slaves he bought to rescue from abusive masters), who despite being the only interesting character in the show (since all of the slave girls have the same hyper-devoted personality and Satou has no personality) is constantly shafted for screen time so that the other slave girls can be sexualised to disturbing levels (which are even more disturbing when you realise that Satou is 29 and some of these girls are as young as 11).
Fortunately, Satou himself never once actually engages in paedophilic behaviour, but unfortunately despite the fact that the show goe out of its way to show the blossoming romance between him and Zena, it’s impossible to ship that romance since despite specifically talking about places he wants to take her he visits and is serviced by two brothels during the course of the series (and don’t you dare say that he didn’t actually sleep with those prostitutes, since we see that his skill box has several “sexual skills” added to it after one of his visits. So, Satou is unfaithful to his not-quite-girlfriend, overpowered, and has no personality… oh, and he looks suspiciously like Kitiro from Sword Art Online because the character designers were lazy.
To make matters worse, what few action scenes the show has are extremely underwhelming visually, as is the rest of the animation. The battles with the Undead King’s minions during the arc where the elf princess was kidnapped could have been visually stunning, but instead the animation looked cheap and lacked anything in terms of visual effects or dynamic camera movements. This is a real shame because the studio that made this, Silver Link, actually have made some superbly animated action sequences in Fate/Kaleid, and the studio that assisted in the animation, Studio Connect, are known for having almost exclusively made action-based anime… so, everything in this series seems to come down to laziness, both in the writing and in the animation.

Furthermore, during the Undead King arc, Satou cheats his way through the challenges with the help of a teleporting-powered plant loli, so any and all excitement you might feel about him having to find a way through to the top of the monster and challenge infested tower is dashed immediately by a lazy get-out-of-trouble-free-card deus ex machina.
To make matters worse, the Demon Lord who is set up from the start never even features, and the entire series builds towards an unbearable anti-climax that I won’t spoil for anyone insane enough to want to watch the show (but involves saving a forest from a noble that wants to shop it down), we never find out anything about why the events of the series are taking place, and there are so many cringy moments of underage fanservice that it made me almost want to gouge my eyes out.

In the end, what starts as a cliché but promising fantasy series gradually waters down into a boring tensionless “cute girls doing cute things” series with no character development or plot of any kind. It. Is. Terrible. 0/10, not recommended.

Thoughts on Fate/Extra Last Encore:
It was by far and a way the worst Fate franchise anime series ever made. Firstly: the story. It's difficult to try to summarise the show without spoiling huge details but it starts off with the protagonist (named Hakuno) who feels only hatred and has no memories of his past. He lives in a digital world that is somehow on the moon, and in episode 1 he gets stabbed and nearly murdered by Shinji Matou from the main series during a school murder-contest to see which students will get to participate in the next Holy Grail War, surviving long enough to ... find the sword of Nero Saber, whom he summons to fight for him after a sudden thousand-year timeskip. Hakuno and Nero have to fight various masters and servants in order to make their way to the Holy Grail.
The series has countless major flaws which made it almost impossible to enjoy. Firstly, the protagonist himself is extremely boring. He claims to only feel hatred for all those around him (and this is further reinforced by the plot twist regarding his identity), but his actions never support this and instead he just acts like a normal guy all the time. None of his internalised conflict ever shows itself, and this makes all of his monologues sound like pretentious nonsense.
This is worsened by the fact that the story is filled with weird flashbacks, memories, and hallucination scenes which make it extremely hard to follow. Rin Tohsaka (she's in this series too) has a tendency to disappear for an episode or two at a time without explanation, then reappear once again without explanation. Speaking of without explanation, Rin in this series wields Gae Bolg and has an extremely Scathach-like costume, but we never learn why or how she came to be infused with Scthach's appearance or weapon. What they do with her in the final episode also makes no sense, since Rin and Rani's conflict could apparently have easily been avoided if Rin had just done what she did for Hakuno before a certain too-spoilery-to-talk-about event happened. It is also never explained how Alice knew about the monster at the end of her sanctum when it didn't exist until [spoiler] turned into it.
Needless to say, plotholes are rife throughout the show, though I will admit that a lot of them probably come from the fact that the show has such a short episode count, so writer Kinoko Nasu had to cram as much story as he could into a very short time, and in so doing cut major corners.
The only truly great episodes in the series are the ones featuring Alice (Nursery Rhyme), but I admit that I mainly love those so much becasue of the stunning experimental animation styles used.
Regarding the rest of the animation, the show is a mixed bag. The 2D work is flat-up astonishing, but it's often superimposed with terrible, cheap-looking CGI that ruins the visual aesthetic.
Another problem is how a large number of the enemy servants are built up to look like major threats in the trailer and at the start of their arcs, only to be easily defeated anticlimactically by Saber every single time with no real variation. The battles themselves often feel like they waste a lot of potentially amazing weapons, such as the entire fleet of ghost ships that Francis Drake's noble phantasm summons, all of which do basically nothing and are never utilised during the aerial battle.

It really did feel like a lot of "cool factor" was missing due to the lack of other masters and servants throughout the Moon Cell Sanctums aside from the floor masters and Hakuno as well, since all of the fights were either one-on one or two-on-two with very little in the way of interference or unexpected developments, and most of them felt underwhelming as a result when compared to the epic scale of the battles in the recent Fate/Apocrypha.

In summary then, Fate/Extra Last Encore is a boring, pretentious, VERY confusing, plot-hole filled show with terrible characterisation, a lead who is overpowered to the point of destroying tension, and some of the most underwhelming battles I have ever seen in anime. 3/10, not recommended (apart from the Nursery Rhyme arc).

Thoughts on the First volume:
It was decent.
The story is about a teenage boy named Kazuki Hoshino who goes to school one day to find that a new transfer student named Aya Ontonashi has arrived, who declares war on him. That evening, she is found dead. The main character then discovers that his entire class have been reliving the same day (2nd of March) over and over again 27,000 times. Only Maria and sometimes Kazuki remember and at the end of the day, someone always dies.
The story is morally complex and has very well written and realistic characters, and the psychological taxation of the situation ... is not ignored. Imagery is well described and the book's true villains are revealed through some genuinely great plot twists. With that said, the book is far from flawless. After the first plot twist is revealed, the book's focus shifts to the necessity of one girl needing to accept her inevitable death in order to end the horror of the Repeating Classroom... The ending of the book ruins this and any tension involved for reasons I won't spoil. The ending also inexplicably undoes the removal of certain characters from existence, ruining all of the tragedy and horror that had been built up and making some of the more horrific deaths seem like pointless edge-fests. Also, while the rest of the characters are really interesting and well written, the main character just isn't. We learn nothing about his life and history or his personality beyond that he has a crush on another character (a girl named Mogi). I honestly think that Mogi herself would have actually been a far better main character due to her history and importance with what was going on, and her mentally unstable personality. Our lead by contrast is just a bland self-insert, and it almost made certain scenes boring.
I also don't understand why the book never even tries to show us how the parents and teachers are affected by the pseudo-time-looping that's going on, since apparently only the classroom and a few nearby areas actually go through the loop. We never even see our main characters interact with their families. Since it's established that time isn't really looping, it also makes no sense that the appropriate amount of time doesn't appear to have passed in the real world after the Repeating Classroom ends.
We also learn nothing about why the mysterious "O" (the true main villain) is so interested in Kazuki or why he put all of the other characters through the horrific events of the novel for so long despite himself getting bored of them. Aya also tells Kazuki a bizarre amount of things that she realistically wouldn't if she actually believed that he was lying, and to make matters worse, her reason for believing that he was lying make no sense:

Basically her goal was to find out who was behind the Repeating Classroom by finding out who remembered her real name from the previous time loop. The problem here is that no villain with a brain would ever tell her her real name in the first place, because that would give away everything. Instead of considering that he might remember for the same reasons she does, she instead assumes that he's a complete moron. This makes her entire plan to reveal her enemy feel incompetent, and counteracts every other attempt to make Aya come across as being ultra-intelligent.

So, overall the book is plot-hole ridden and shamefully edgy but has a lot of intrigue and a well put together mystery with mostly satisfying reveals, with only a few cop-outs. 6/10, recommended.

It was stunning. The film is about a boy and a girl who keep waking up in each other's bodies and having to deal with one another's lives, before the girl's entire rural town gets blown up by a meteorite heading to earth. The animation (by a studio called CoMix Wave) is wonderful, the soundtrack beautiful, and the film manages to avoid some major plot-holes through the genius idea of having the protagonists memories fade like a dream when they shift back to their original bodies. This is also the only time I've seen the concept of body swapping in anime used in a non-disturbing ... non-sexualised way, instead treating the characters, their relationships, friendships and dramas completely seriously.

The issue that lets the film down is that it seems very unrealistic that neither of the main characters realised for the majority of the film's runtime that there was a time displacement between their bodyswaps, given the fast paced development in technology, the way that the dates and days of the week didn't match up, etc. That seems like a nitpick, but given that this would imply that Taki somehow forgot that he and everyone else in Japan saw a beautiful comet suddenly split in half and smash up a town, the issue kind of seems like a huge one if you stop and think about its implications.

Despite this major plot hole however, the film still keeps up the appropriate levels of tension and drama without seeming forced, and the plot is perfectly paced, being just slow enough for the viewer to get to know and fully understand its leads while being just fast enough to not get boring. To that end, it's a lot like Empire of Corpses, another utterly beautiful recent anime movie that (unlike this one) didn't receive nearly enough attention.

The version that I watched was Anime Limited's English dub, since that was what came on the DVD I ordered, and... the dub was mixed. Most of the voice acting was fine, though not entirely convincing, and Michael Sinterniklaas really didn't sound like he was putting any effort into delivering a convincing performance at all as the lead role Taki. The real issue with the dub however is that for some bizarre reason, Anime Limited decided that they would provide English language versions of many of the original version's songs, all of which sound vastly inferior to the original movie's soundtrack. So yeah, DON'T WATCH THE DUB.

Overall 8/10 Highly recommended [BUT NOT THE DUB!]