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Feb 9, 2012
Truthfully I'm not entirely sure why this gets as much hate as it does. Certainly it is bad, but as someone who has sat through many more things that were far worse and far, far longer I don't understand why the entire myanimelist community has banded together against it.
There is a simple fact that can't be ignored about this anime, and that is that it's only 19 minutes long, and really is basically just a pilot. As such it doesn't have the time to really develop anything, whether it be characters or plot. Yes it may fail at everything it sets out
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to do, but it only fails for 19 minutes. I know it's become universally accepted to rag on this, but seriously, something this irrelevant should just be ignored. It's not worthy of your hate, or your time. It may be the lowest rated series but is far from the worst thing out there. Just watch something like Odin, which accomplishes about as much as this, but is six times longer, and suddenly watching something that is as bad, but as short, as Mars of Destruction, doesn't seem so bad.
Basically the message here is, this is too short and too irrelevant to be as hated as it is. Remember, if you bothered to watch this, you are the only one to blame. You went out of your way to watch something that should be all rights be forgotten. If this is the worst thing you've seen, consider yourself lucky. You only suffered through something pointless and short. Something this forgettable just deserves to be ignored.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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Sep 30, 2011
Phantom Quest Corp is more or less average with little to offer, but is executed well enough to still be enjoyable. It's visuals are good, being well animated and colorful. It's looks are on par with most of the OVA's of the 90's that had decent budgets. Although it's looks are good, the character design is a bit bland. None of the designs particularly bad, but there's nothing to write home about either.
Story wise it's sufficient. Being only four episodes it doesn't have much time to tell much of a story arc, and it's very episodic. Each episode tells
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a simple story, that is enjoyable, but doesn't leave much impact. The series is a bit dependent on cliches. This doesn't detract a lot of the series, but don't expect anything new that will blow your mind.
The characters themselves are pretty stock and aren't developed much. This is forgivable considering that it only had four episodes to introduce them. Each character does have enough personality to make them interesting, but nothing good enough to stand out much. The best part of the series would be Rika Matsumoto's performance as the main character. She brings a lot of energy to the role, and makes it quite interesting. It's a shame that Pokemon is eating up all of her time, because it would be really nice to see her more often.
Overall Phantom Quest Corp doesn't have much to offer, but isn't something to avoid. It's not spectacular enough to seek out, but if you get the chance to give it a watch it's worth the time.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Sep 19, 2011
Shuusaku may be bad, but it's nothing compared to the absolute atrocity that is it's sequel Shuusaku replay. This is one of the most poorly made and stupid things I have ever seen. It's story is one of the most mind bogglingly retarded things I have ever encountered and it still enrages me whenever I think about it. Its put together so poorly that I'm certain half the staff just didn't bother showing up. And with all that even though it came out in 2000, after hentai started to actually look decent, it still isn't good as porn.
So my biggest complain
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is how it was put together. I swear to god, this series didn't have a writer or editor. The director probably just shat out enough story boards to make about half of an anime, and then just decided to go with it. And considering that Shuusaku doesn't start talking until halfway though the third episode for no discernible reason, I find the staff no showing up to be a perfectly valid explanation. Nothing in this series makes sense, and it's mostly because of the editing. Every transition between scenes is jarring. There isn't any sense of flow, things just occur without explanation or context. Plot points are introduced, forgotten about, remembered again and then never brought up again. Every problem is epitomized in a series of scenes in the beginning. After they retcon the first OVA as having maybe not happened or something, the tan character and the rich girl sneak into the kind of main character's room, breaking curfew. The teacher then comes in. The tan girl then is no longer wearing a skirt and instead has a towel around her waist, no explanation. She then asks main character girl to borrow a pair of her bloomers so she can go back to her room wearing something. Why doesn't she just wear her skirt? What happened to it? Tan girl is then in a shed with Shuusaku, and the teacher who is naked and has rope marks from bondage, giving Shuusaku the main character girl's bloomers that she was able to borrow. Wait how did she get there? When did she get there? Wasn't she in the other room... with the teacher? What's going on? Back to the room the teacher is there, fully clothed, tan girl is wearing the bloomers... and I'm left confused. A hentai who's plot is literally a gray guy rapes random girls shouldn't be this hard to follow.
As with the last one with porn in uninteresting. It's a bit more graphic, but truthfully the first one had better porn. This does make the effort to make it hardcore, but it still ends up being boring. The first one at least had some dialogue during sex, this had nothing, making the sex scenes boring and repetitive, with the actual sex not being enough to carry them.
And then there is the ending... oh the ending. This is truly the stupidest thing I have ever seen. So after continued stupidity we finally get to the end where we get to the final reveal. The characters in the anime are actually characters in an h-game being played by someone outside the forth wall, and by giving him love they can make things right. God I hate this piece of crap.
Oddly enough despite this being in my top 25 worst things I have ever seen and having a definite rating of a 1, I still suggest this anime. For masochists who like seeing bad things it's worth watching. Almost every moment has something done so wrong you can't help but laugh. It's completely stupid, and one of the most ineptly made things out there. If you want to see what something made by people who are completely incompetent is like, watch this. But if you are looking for a decent hentai stay the hell away from it, pretty much anything is better.
Reviewer’s Rating: 1
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Sep 19, 2011
I've seen enough hentai, that at this point more or less nothing offends me. With that said Shuusaku is terrible and fail to accomplish anything it sets out to do. It fails as porn, it fails as an anime. Its story and characters are horrible and bland, and as porn it's far to soft core to provide anything of any interest. It attempts to play to fetishes, but fails to deliver anything of any interest, that can't just be obtained better elsewhere.
It's most glaring flaw is of course it's characters. The most vital part of any hentai is its characters.
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If porn is to be a vicarious sexual experience, it's rather vital to provide people who are actually interesting in some way. Even the shallowest of people would want to have sex with any of these characters because of their lack of personality. The cast consists of a character who lost her right to be considered a loli five years ago, doing her best to be the loli character; the rich girl, who I assume was supposed to refined or something; a girl who is tan, and apparently a whore because she has had sex, not that that plays any role in how she acts in the series; a girl whose primary character trait is that she has irritable bowel syndrome (nope, I'm not kidding); two girls I almost always forget exist; a teacher, who never actually acts as a teacher; and the protagonist/antagonist, I don't really know since there isn't really a main character. It would either be her, or maybe Shuusaku. Oh yeah, there's also him, a gray skinned janitor with a glowing yellow penis.
It's a minor complaint, but the glowing yellow penis is a problem. This OVA came out in 1999, when series began to become more hard core, and more genitals started being shown. I suppose there was some experimentation with censoring technique or something, but when it got here his penis is yellow. This ruin any chance of anything going on being taken seriously. It's hard to tell if you should be facepalming or laughing whenever it shows up, both of which will make it hard to fap, not that you'd really want to to this.
Shuusaku doesn't have anything interesting to offer pornographically. Animation wise is okay for it's time, and the character design is passable, but it's lacking in sexual content and what content is there is isn't particularly graphic. Most scenes are simply soft core porn with stupid dialogue explaining what's going on. Okay series, we'll take your word for it that that is anal sex, because it would be impossible to tell otherwise, good thing you told us. Mostly it's just bland uninspired sex scenes between a nasty gray dude and some girl you only want to see in a sex scene because it might mean she will be talking less.
Shuusaku goes for a darker tone, but doesn't execute it well. It consists exclusively of rape, which is par for the course I guess, and tries to incorporate scatological and urination fetishes. As I said nothing bothers me, so I won't complain about such fetishes being present in something. I will however complain about their execution, and Shuusaku doesn't do a very good job of this. This series has an irrational amount of enemas, but no actual scat. I really don't want to see it, but if you are going to include stuff like that, go all the way. People who aren't interested still won't be interested, and people who want to see geysers of shit shooting out of girls asses will be disappointed in the lack thereof. Don't stop halfway and please no one. Fundamentally it fails to be intense with any of its fetishes, and isn't interesting enough with them to make those who don't care about them interested in it.
So what about it's story. A good story can keep us interested in what's going on and possibly distract us from the yellow penis that takes us out of the action whenever anything happens. Shuusaku also fails in this aspect. There really is no story or coherent narrative to this series. There is a gray janitor, he blackmails girls using photographs that would be in all ways impossible to obtain, and then rapes them. That's really it. There is no flow to it, and each sex scene/new victim seems to come out of no where. It all ends with the [pro/an]tagonist informing him that she is putting an end to his evil ways, she has called the cops and they're on their way, and with all that evidence on his computer he will be put away. One would think that he would have a contingency for just this kind of thing, but no it really never occurred to him that one of the girls he raped, might inform the authorities, and maybe using evidence of your crimes to blackmail the victims isn't the best idea in the world. Thus he runs away and is hit by a car. What a stupid and anticlimactic ending.
Shuusaku really has no positive aspects, as porn it's uninteresting, as a story it's complete garbage, and as something awesomely bad it has little to offer. The yellow penis is kind of funny, but it's not worth watching just to see. Overall it's neither good or bad enough to warrant watching. Just bland and pointless.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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Sep 19, 2011
I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Detective Conan. At it's core it's a very clever and fun show, with writing that is both amazingly good and amazingly bad. It offers some of the most creative and interesting murder mysteries available anywhere, that are always amazing in how much insane bullshit they pull off. I've been keeping up with the series, and it's well over 600 episodes at this point. Sadly it's not able to keep up in quality, and all the promise of it's earlier episodes is slowly fading away. For quite a while now it's ran
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out of good ideas, and all that's left are it's annoying cliches. It's a show that does so much right, but still fails on many aspects.
As the series grows longer and longer it gets more and more dependent on various cliches that grow old very, very quickly. One of it's greatest flaws is it's padding. Each episode is dragged out far longer than it needs to be, by adding constant exposition (usually given by Sonoko, who has at this point has almost been completely devolved into an exposition machine. I feel that she is used far too much, and it seems that lately she is being used to solve mysteries far more often than the great Sleeping Kogoro... but I digress). All padding hurts, and this series has some really deep hurting. Recently almost half of every episode consists of useless exposition about the suspects/victim or constant repetition of information regarding cases that we already knew.
Sadly having seen far too much of the series certain patterns begin to emerge, and it becomes hard to take the series serious anymore. At this point it's almost devolved into a drinking game, where I see how many cliches I can spot in a single episode. Almost always you can figure out who the victim will be with a few minutes of them being introduced. Each victim is always the biggest douche bag of the group, and the show puts far too much effort in to making them seem as such. I understand why a story would paint a victim as a jerk, but it destroys any sense of suspense and dramatic tension when you can tell that they are just going to die as soon as they are introduced. A victim who is actually sympathetic does have us emotionally involved in finding the culprit, not indifferent because the dead person was a poorly written asshole whose death doesn't really deserve justice. Also the trend of making the motivation being that the victim was somehow responsible for the death of someone who is in one way or another related to the murderer is really getting old, especially when we only find out about it when they are revealed as the murderer.
Additionally I have some other complaints, the biggest and most infuriating one being Kaitou Kid. When he was introduced early in the series, he was possibly one of the coolest characters in all of anime. He was Lupin, minus all the terrible bullshit that plagued that franchise. I was in love, I wanted to see him show up as much as possible, and wanted a great rivalry to develop. This sadly never came. Instead Kaitou Kid became AWOL for roughly two hundred episodes, and then whenever he showed up the episode would be inevitably terrible. Once Sonoko's uncle shows up, all hope is lost. Kaitou Kid can never be cool again, the character is pretty much ruined, which saddens me to no end. I suppose I should have given up hope early on, when in a special they had pre-Conanized Shinichi matching whits with Kid. This could have been interesting, and set the stages for their rivalry, except for the fact that it's COMPLETELY NONCANON. Kaitou Kid became Kaitou Kid when he was introduced, before that he was just a normal... well weird high school student, but not a thief. He began his life of crime after Shinichi shrunk, thus making that entire special not fit into the series in any was, and since it was terrible anyway, it marked Kaitou Kid's slow and tragic death.
My last complaint is one that I know is pointless, but I still feels need to be made. A series with this long a run, and with no real end in sight will obviously have it's main love story go no where. The problem is that they keep trying to make it a central plot element, but we know nothing will happen. If it were kept in the background this wouldn't bother me, but when something we know will go nowhere become a primary focus I can't help but be annoyed. The series keeps trying to make up care, but because we know it will never go anywhere I can't help but care. There is no tension, I know what will happen, and it will be an anticlimactic cop out.
With all that said, Detective Conan is a very good series. For the first few hundred episodes it is amazing and does do many things right. It starts to fall apart after the Vermouth plot arc, which is by far the best part of the show. I won't give any spoilers, because it's something that really needs to be seen, but I do have to make the observation that a certain other character is the actual main character, and after that plot arc it becomes clear that Conan has little impact on the real plot of the show. The change in quality starts around when the animation style starts to change. When it made the switch to digital animation, it started to look worse and it's quality started to make a gradual slide in the negative direction.
What the series does right (when it's not having the god damn kids going on another fucking camping trip. Seriously how many times are they going to have the plot of Professor Agasa goes on a camping trip with the kids, some sort of even causes them to be in someone's house, someone gets murdered and the kids are annoying for forty minutes. For Christ's sake the kid's have seen more dead bodies than most coroners are going to see over the course of their career... but anyway), it does very right. As mentioned before when it bothers to have a plot it tends to be pretty good, at least through the Vermouth plot arc. After that it starts becoming a bit predictable, but still interesting. Oddly enough the thing I like the most about the series is it's side characters.
Although I find the primary love story to be completely pointless and annoying the other love subplots are almost always entertaining. The Satou and Takagi love arc is one of my favorite pairings in all of anime, and it actually develops over time. Whenever a “Metropolitan Police Love Story” episode showed up I would always get excited because those never disappointed. Also Kazuha and Heiji are characters I always have fun with. Primarily this is because Kazuha is played by Yuko Miyamura and anything with her doing a Kansai accent is automatically amazing. The fact that the series insists on having their relationship never go anywhere is rather frustrating, but it shows up rarely enough to never get annoying. Truthfully I that Heiji had his own spinoff series, it certain would be better that the Kaitou Kid one, that just serves to put even more nails into a coffin that at this point has more sharp steel than wood left.
Overall Detective Conan is a series that is very much worth watching, but not worth keeping up with. My suggestion is get up to the Vermouth plot arc and then keep going until you start to get annoyed. Once it starts getting old, it doesn't get any better and just ages rapidly from there. The series will probably go another decade or so, but it most likely won't get any better. It's a series that has ran out material. The material it had was amazing, but there are only so many murders you can pull off with a combination of locked rooms, fishing line and packing tape. It set up a good formula at the beginning, but once Sleeping Kogoro stopped being the primary method of solving crimes, it lost it's magic.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Jun 5, 2011
To Heart is easily one of the blandest things I have ever had the misfortune of sitting through. It's complete lack of substance or anything interesting was very frustrating, especially considering that deep down it definitely had some potential that it just never bothered fostering. It was fundamentally boring and had very little to offer over all.
That isn't to say, though, that it did everything wrong. I am willing to give it some credit, as there were some things that I did like about it. The general ascetic of the series was rather nice, having a interesting art style that looked
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very pretty and a really good musical score that would have done a great job of emphasizing the emotion of scenes if there were any emotion to be found there. It definitely tried to create situations where one would feel emotion and have a warm and fuzzy feeling, but although I give it an A for effort in that category, it gets a very predominant F in execution. This failure is caused by two things, first the complete blandness of the characters, especially the main character, and second the complete lack of any sort of story, focus or point.
The main character Hiroyuki is easily one of the least interesting characters I have ever encountered. To make matters worse on top of having no personality what so ever he still manages to be a dick, which just adds an additional level of annoyance to his pointless existence. He has absolutely no chemistry between any of the girls who he arbitrarily hangs out with, demonstrating that he had about the chemical potential of helium. He truly has no character and this is demonstrated in the sad excuse for what could be called a story this series has.
To Heart has no plot. It has no story. It has no focus. It has no point. If I were pressed I would have to say it's about some guy with no personality hanging out with girls with no personality, for no reason. Truthfully I can't explain why Hiroyuki spends time with most of these characters. He generally seems distant and uninterested in almost everything that is going on, but will still get involved with random people. His time with these girls feels forced and arbitrary, and the only reason they wouldn't be called plot contrivances is because the isn't a plot.
The girls themselves are also completely bland, and seems to have no rhyme or reason to their inclusion in the series. The first is a practitioner of black magic, in that she stands around in a dark room, wearing a witch's hat and lights candles. Apparently she did cast some sort of “spell” during the episode she was “relevant” in, but it had no clear effect. Her most predominant “personality trait” is that she talks really quietly. Then there is the martial arts girl. Her “story” is that she is the sole member of a martial arts club, that broke off from normal martial arts clubs because she want to practice some sort of “extreme” martial arts. Personally I have no idea how her style was different from a normal style, it wasn't explained or shown as being different, but since she went through the trouble of starting a completely superfluous club, it must have been completely impossible to do it in a normal club. This ends up reminding me of Hitohira, and anything that remind me of that terrible show automatically adds another level of annoyance to the giant pile. Oddly enough she was one of the more interesting side characters of the series, but was still largely pointless. Also there was the girl who was described as having “nothing interesting about her.” Normally I would complain about her being bland, but it seems the series is at least being honest and already doing that for me.
At this point we start getting into characters that really just don't belong in the series, even though it's hard to properly say what does belong in the series. The next monster of the week girl is a psychic. I was willing to buy to occult girl because it was clear that she was just pretending to be magical, but no she apparently really is psychic. In normal To Heart fashion someone takes interest in her for absolutely no reason, and she gets an episode devoted to her in all her bland splendor. She is easily the most boring character of the series, but at least she seems to have a love interest other than Hiroyuki, so I'm willing to give her credit there. The fact that she has an interest in something not completely inert at least shows the potential for chemistry, I guess that would make her more along the lines of Xenon.
The next character who has absolutely no right to be in the series, also coincides with To Heart pretending it might have a plot. This character is Multi, one of the more famous of the series, and she is an android. In a series with no scifi elements, and no indications that this is a futuristic setting, they suddenly throw in an android. Her sudden introduction completely baffled me and I'm still trying to justify her addition to the “story.” With her comes the closest thing to a plot the series has. Multi is a maid robot sent to the school to be tested on her functionality. Why they would send her to a school makes no sense. In order to create a false sense of drama, another robot is also introduced, and the robot that performs better of a two week period will be used as the model for future robots. At the end of the two week period the series attempts to pull at the audience's heart strings by having her leave, and the main characters throw her something like a going away party. This of course failed to make me care because a character who was introduced an episode ago having to leave a bunch of people I don't give a shit about isn't exactly going to move me. Also during this “arc” the series tries to get all philosophical, discussing what defines a person with consideration to artificial intelligence. You know, what almost every other anime ever make has done... better. And, spoiler alert, Multi comes back for “more testing” not that that really matters since this happens near the end of the series and she has about three lines after this.
The last “plot arc” has to do with the other main characters who I haven't talked about yet, mostly because I was too busy complaining. In addition to the bland douche that is Hiroyuki, there are three other main characters, who were to my surprise not bad. They are Shiho, the energetic one who actually seems to have a personality, Akari, who is still bland but fleshed out and nice enough for me to at least care about her, and Masashi, the token male friend who whenever he shows up, I cry a little on the inside that he isn't the main character. It's these characters that make the show almost watchable, and truthfully if the show were about Masashi and Shiho and Hiroyuki never existed I would probably like this series. But no, Hiroyuki has to be the main character, and thus has to be everyone's love interest. The last two episodes are devoted to a Christmas part, or more accurately the planning there of. During this it is made clear that Shiho does in fact like Hiroyuki, but Akari has first dibs being childhood friends and all. Shiho is indecisive and steps aside for Akari to to starting dating Hiroyuki. Yeah if you were expecting and romantic end, stop, it ends with nothing happening.
In the end To Heart is just far, far too bland. Nothing happens and the characters are boring and unlikable. During each episode you end up bored out of your mind, and then you realize that you're only about seven minutes in, and when they episode is three fourths of the way through you realize that nothing has happened yet. Although there were signs of a potential for something that might have been okay, that seed never got planted. Its good art style, music, voice acting and the handful of decent characters prevent it from being one of the worst things I've seen, but blandness and lack of anything positive prevent it from being decent. The only reason to watch this is for it's historical relevance.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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