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Fruits Basket was one of the first animes I had ever watched. I was having an argument with one of my online MAL buddies and we were debating whether Fruits Basket was a good show. I personally loved Fruits Basket from the characters to the shoujo-esque plot, but my friend told me that it was the worst show he's watched. Wow. Most terrible? That's harsh, but whatever opinions are opinions and I'm willing to share mine.

A girl named Tohru loses her mother in a car accident and with no money or family relatives, she decides to live on her own. She finds a house in ... the woods, and discovers that a family is living there. (Yuki, Kyo, and Shigure) But each member of this family has a curse that when they are hugged by the opposite gender they would turn into an animal based on the chinese zodiac. Unrealistic? Most likely, but hey anime is a form of entertainment and as long as it entertains then the anime is doing its job right. While the animal transformation thing might be the only thing that strikes this shoujo anime different from the rest, it's the execution, the characters, and the relationships of the characters that bring this show out to differentiate itself from the rest.

The show is quite funny and cute with some plot elements that are usually to shoujo animes and mangas. The slapstick comedy was either a hit or a miss and seeing how I saw Fruits Basket a longggg time ago I remember finding it funny, not outrageously funny, but enough to crack a smile on my face. Though I consider the drama parts to be the most redeeming parts of the show. Seriously, I cried at the ending of Fruits Basket and episode nine or so. And let me tell you that's it hard for an anime to make me cry.

Personally, I found the characters to be the best part of this show. Even the side character are enjoyable and help move the plot along, while having background stories of their own. But since there are so many characters. I'm only going to describe the three main ones shortly. Tohru, the female lead character. A bit too nice and cheerful, but that's what makes people like her. She helps all the main characters get over their troubles. A goody-two-shoes you can say. Yuki, the popular boy at school. He is friends with Tohru and there is even a Yuki fan club running around the school. His chinese zodiac sign is the mouse. Kyo, the quick tempered boy who always jumps to conclusions. Starts off as a rouge character, but begins to develop feeling for Tohru as the series goes on. Sure, the characters might be so simple that they can be described in one sentence phrases, but it's the way they interact with one another that brings each person's charms out. Like the way Kyo interacts with Yuki is amusing and the way Kyo interacts with Tohru is heartwarming and touching.

You might say the characters are cliched. Well, I find characters to be a very open topic, since one person could really like a character and another person could find them horribly awful. I found Fruits Basket to have amazing characters. Probably the most debated character is Tohru, since people complain how can she be so sunshine and rainbows after losing her home and her parents. But hey, I liked Tohru. I know she's not for everyone, but I found her cheerful attitude really likeable. I know it's not realistic and such, but I found Tohru to be a fine main character that brings her positive attitude to everyone else in the cast. And boy oh boy it feels like the majority of this cast need someone like her. No, most anime characters need a character like her. Tohru just has that aspect of her that makes her so friendly and positive. Quoting my friend's review on Fruits Basket... (pakxenon's anime review for Fruits Basket on animenfo.com)

"With a mother lost to an accident and forced out of her home due to unwanted disturbance during renovations, she found her way into the Sohma family, and thus her wacky adventures begin! Going to school, janitoring for a job, and doing most of the housework for the Sohma's is just the few things that she does out of her good will. I will caution, however, that SOME people might find her too goody-two-shoes or whatever. If you don't like those kinds of characters, I don't recommend this :P."

Hmmm. People might complain how the atmosphere of the show is ruined by the characters trying to be "seemingly happy but actually loldeep." I thought the atmosphere was fine and I particularly prefer shows to have this kind of atmosphere. I think the creators were trying to manage the show to be a light hearted comedy with some hints of loldeepplot. Like if it was all deep I probably wouldn't have liked it as much, but with what I think engaging characters to draw me in. Which, characters are again widely debatable. I think Fruits Basket does a wonderful job at doing. And plus having a comic silly side of the show builds connection and like for the characters.

Okay, so the characters in Fruits Basket have like enormous eyes that cover like 70% of their face. But I didn't find this distracting at all and some people might actually enjoy this style, just like how some people enjoy Clamp's noodly bodies. The drawings are typical 90s shoujo style. The manga started in 1999, so I'm assuming the anime wanted to keep it this style. I find animations the least important thing in a show, but one of the most important aspects for people to start a show. Like I remember not watching TTGL, because I thought the art was wanky. Until my friend suggested it to me years later and then I found TTGL to be on my top ten animes of all time. Again, the show is totally aimed towards people with double X chromosome, but I strangely enjoyed it and would admit that Fruits Basket was/still is one of my favorite shows. It could be my nostalgia kicking in, since it was one of my first animes, and everytime I watch an episode again I find myself bringing up all the memories of what got me into anime.

The OP and ED were perfect for this anime and fit the mood quite well. Well, of course the OP song is called, "For Fruits Basket." The background music was minimal, but very fitting, especially the music for all the dark scenes and keeping the atmosphere right. Yui Horie's voice for Tohru was very fitting. ilu Yui Horie. I thought Yuki sounded too feminine, but eh whatever.

Anyway, if you really didn't like Fruits Basket. You can always write a review for it. I find the best writings are the ones to point out flaws or are satirical in nature. That's why I like reading anime reviews that point out flaws than reviews that shower the show with praise, since it's so much easier and personally more fun to read those reviews and disagree or laugh. Since to me I find it boring to read a review that goes, "good animations, good characters, good blah blah." I actually pay more attention to the ones that have low scores.

Just a random sidenote: for example I really like Special A. (And if you like Fruits Basket you might like this show as well) I know it's not for everyone, but I really enjoyed it. And seeing someone review Special A and give it a low score is surprising for me. But it's not like I'm going to thumbs down the score, because of that. If it's a good piece of writing and points the flaws out and backs them up, then I'll actually thumb up the review, since this person is trying to prove his/her point and well the message got through to me. I'm not blindly gonna thumb up and thumb down reviews based on the score, which I feel like 70% of people do here on MAL. But instead reviews should be thumbed up and thumbed down based on the writing and the points.

Anyway, Fruits Basket is still one of my favorite animes of all time. The characters, in my opinion, are the best part of this show and if you watch the first few episodes and already hate like 80% of the cast, then this show is not for you. Which, isn't a bad thing, but it's just that you have different tastes than other people. I wish Studio Deen would make a second season or start making their recent animes this good again.

When Yumekui Merry started at the beginning of the Winter 11 season I felt it was going to be good show. It had an interesting art style, the characters were likable, and the production was done by JCStaff. An animation studio that I adore for making previous works such as Kaichou wa Maid-sama and the Index series. But something went wrong. Everything fell apart by the end. Plot holes, ruined characters, inconsistent art, and one of the worst finales I’ve seen in a long time. And, yes, I have seen a LOT of anime.

Animation wise, Yumekui Merry had an interesting approach during the dream ... segments for the first few episodes. I was really intrigued. The watercolor approach worked well for the series and the character designs were charming. The show was full of stills (meaning no movement or very minimal amounts kind of like a slideshow), but hey they were at least pretty stills. Sort of. Then the art lost all its style at the end. Gone were the interesting art choices and the art became inconsistent during the last few episodes. Misty’s face during the last episode comes to mind.

The OP/ED were good. The ED animations were nice. It had some dang midriff. I like me some midriff. The soundtrack was glaring. It was an awful strange choice to choose orchestra music for the more intense fight scenes. I don’t know... it felt really out of place. I mean come on. Why would you put bassoons in a fight scene? The voice acting was okay. Nothing to complain there. Merry's VA is totally new and it was her debut role. And Okamoto Nobuhiko always makes me go crazy as Yumeji. (Okamoto is personally one of my favorite voice actors, so I'm biased.)

The plot is where everything falls apart though. You’re lead into the first episode with a dream demon who can survive in the human world. Wonderful. Our main character has the power to see what people will be dreaming the next night by making a circle with his fingers. Uh weird, but uh interesting. Throughout the first half it was really formulaic. I mean it was basically fight dream demons and send them back to the dreammmm world. It gets boring. So the anime studio then decides that during the second half the plot gets more of a direction, but loses all plans to keep a coherent plot. The ending was awful. Things are developed, but never really mentioned again. Kawanami's character, John Doe, and that one dude that got possessed by a dream demon. And some nonsensical things happen as well. (Yui playing her invisible trumpet comes to mind. What the heck? Why? Did she bump her head? Did she suddenly decide that she was in a band? Is she the one playing the dang bassoon. Dang it Yui. Dang it.)

Mistletine was a good evil villain. Her back story was basically that she likes to be evil and does evil things. Alright, that’s fine. There’s just one thing I have on her. And that is that Misty (Mistletine) has a severe case of ADD. She's fighting the heroes of the anime and then she just gets up and leaves them, so she can enjoy them next episode? What? Why? That makes no sense? Did she get bored? Did she get tired? No, it looked like she had enough energy to insult them. Why? Oh yeah. It’s not the last episode. We can’t have you guys finish each other off till the last episode. Silly me. That’s a perfectly reasonable answer.

Also the teacher (Who I can’t remember his name for some reason. And all I remember about him was that he wears the ugliest striped pants I’ve ever seen.) was kind of bleh. I do like his facially expressions though. They were hawt. Kawanami was the worst character in the series. She felt soooo tacked on. Was her only purpose in the story was so Isana could make friends? Isana has plenty of friends. She has Merry and she has her brother. Well, I guess that isn't much, but still. Kawanami was an anime-original character (same with stripped pants sensei and Misty) but she felt like she had no purpose in the plot. JCSTAFF WE NEED SOME FOCUS IF YOU ARE GOING TO INTRODUCE ANIME-ORIGINAL CHARACTERS.

I mean having an anime-original plot is fine if you do a good job with it. Having anime-original character is fine if you develop them well, but JCStaff didn't. Did JCStaff suddenly decide that the manga wasn’t good enough? If it wasn’t good enough, then why did they choose to adapt this series? I like John Doe. (John Doooooo) I seriously do. I like his name. I especially love how the other characters call him John Dooooo when his named is spelled John Doe. He was cool. Too bad he like totally disappeared, so the anime-original characters can appear.

I feel like there is so much wasted potential here, plot holes, useless anime-original characters, inconsistent art, and Yui playing her imaginary trumpet. I do feel that there are a few good parts in this show, but there are far too few in a sea of bleh. As in my case it’s very hard to recommend this anime. It might be good, maybe, after in taking some alcohol. But whatever. It’s done. JCStaff please do a good job on your next series. I don’t want to see no anime-original characters or plot, unless you can develop them properly, and I definitely don’t want to see your next main character play an imaginary trumpet.

* Nothing is as frustrating as writing a review twice; due to my laptop crashing down right when I click submit. Review is also on AnimeNfo.com

I see a lot of people raging about this series on the forums and the review section, so I'm here to give you my two cents.

Kyou, Koi wo Hajimemasu is a difficult OVA to recommend. For newcomers who have never read the manga will find the first episode (and probably the rest of the OVA) to be confusing. Why, you ask? Because the first episode starts at the first major climax of the manga. Which I believe in the manga starts at chapter 15, so all anime viewers would be missing 14 chapters of background content of the first episode. If you do want to ... watch the OVA be prepared to be completely mind blanked at some scenes.

But this is the true nature of the OVA of Kyou, Koi. The OVA is suppose to cater to the manga readers and draw the anime watchers to read the manga. Which effectively worked for me again. (Since I dropped the manga and plan on reading it again for the second episode of the OVA.) How do I know this? Because the OVA was bundled with the ninth volume of the manga in Japan. So it was not set to sell to the mainstream audience, but only to the manga followers who continue to read and support the manga.

J.C. Staff is at the helm of animating Kyou, Koi. (J.C. Staff is also animating another shoujo alongside Kyou, Koi called Kaichou wa Maid-sama. But Kaichou wa Maid-sama gets a whole TV series to go through the manga.) The art is decent and stays true to the manga, which was a good thing. Obviously, J.C. Staff did not plan on having a big budget to animate this OVA, because it was just going to be an extra bundle to a manga volume. But I was surprised at the background art, which were drawn very well considering the small budget they had to use.

Soundtrack and voice acting wise, I thought were pretty good. Lots of piano/orchestra music fitting the shoujo setting of the anime. And Itou Kanae voices the main female lead in the OVA. Who is also know for doing Himamori Amu in Shugo Chara. Coming right from another shoujo is Namikawa Daisuke, who is fresh off the shoujo scene from voicing Kazehaya from Kimi ni Todoke. He voices the main male lead, but instead of playing a cheerful character like in Kimi ni Todoke, voices a rough serious character instead in Kyou, Koi.

Overall, I did enjoy this OVA, since it was literally a copy and paste of the manga. Except with added color, voice acting, animations, and background music. But again what makes this OVA so hard to recommend is because it was specifically made for the manga readers and will be a total loss for the anime only watchers. So here's to me hoping that J.C. Staff will do a full adaptation of the manga if they find out the OVA did well. But I'm not keeping my fingers crossed, since it seems to be such a small chance.

*Second episode of the OVA comes out bundled with the tenth volume of the manga, so expect that to not follow the time line of the first episode of the OVA.

After three years (of what seemed to be a long time of waiting) the second season of Suzumiya finally came out. What we weren't expecting was a troll from Kyoto Animations. But hey the message boards were extremely fun to go on when this show premiered.

What made this Suzumiya season so "special" was that there was no announcement about it. One day I was surfing the web and people were screaming all over the message boards. "OMG NEW SUZUMIYA." I laughed and quickly scrolled down, until someone told me it was actually true. I was like, "WTF KYOTO ANIMATIONS WHAT." And behold a new season ... of Suzumiya was brought to the face of the earth. Of course it was bundled with the first season, so sometimes you had to wait like a month for the next episode. But at least we got something, right?

Which brings us to Suzumiya's second season's problem; Endless eight, which is basically the same episode eight different times with OMG DIFFERENT CLOTHES, OMG DIFFERENT YUKATAS, OMG DIFFERENT SWIMSUITS, AND OMG NEW ANIMATIONS! What disappointed me was that Kyoto Animations didn't skimp out on the budget for these eight episodes (and I'm proud of them for that). But it makes me feel like it was a waste of money, just animating the same thing over and over again. When they could have spent their budget elsewhere. I also feel bad for the voice actors, since they had to actually record it eight different times. I thought Kyoto Animations would record their voices once and then be like, "Okay, you guys go take a break for seven weeks. We'll call you when we get bored of trolling everyone."

It was tedious to watch each week of Suzumiya's EE to see if something would change. At least there was the fun thing of going on the message boards to see everyone's reactions. There are the people who will love Suzumiya, no matter what crap Kyoto Animations gives us. Then there are the people who rage and rage and blame the world for this torture. There are also the intelligent spectators, who very carefully planned out how many more episodes were left and were like, "Kyoto Animations is doing this, so we can understand how Yuki feels." And there were the trolls, they were the most interesting to see. One of my favorites was this youtube video about how Endless Eight will never end with Hitler. And another one was someone putting the broadcasting information and listed Endless Eight until 2012. Oh, I also like Kyon-kun, denwaaaaaaaa~

The other six episodes are actually quality episodes, five of them being Sighs and one being just a one-episode arc. Nothing could beat the Endless Eight arc in discussion though. Kyoto Animations kept the animations high quality and they were able to hire the voice actors to repeat the same lines again and again.

I don't know how I would feel if I was to marathon the entire show at once. I'd probably fall asleep or just stop watching the show overall. I guess this new season of Suzumiya was meant to be taken in slowly, instead of all at once, which most anime watchers tend to do. Since I was watching it while it aired, I was able to break away from watching it continuously and be able to discuss it with everyone online. (MyAnimeList forums were especially fun to visit during this time.)

Would I re-watch this? Ummm ...... no. I could barely make it through the first time. Would I tell my friends to watch this? Ummmm no ...... unless they were die-hard Suzumiya fans. It's very hard to recommend this, but for all you masochist out there I would tell you to watch all of Endless Eight twice, no three times. And everyone else can watch the first episode of Endless Eight, a random episode in between (I recommend the fifth repeat, since Izumi is wearing a speedo. lololololol!), and the last episode. So eight episodes all together for the whole series. Hey, that's almost as long as Endless Eight.

This was bad. Really bad. If you look at it from first impressions or that cute picture on the top left of MAL's page, then this anime would look like it would be some super cute show with six sparkling young girls that are all inspired to be super pop princesses. Eh. Dig a little deeper and you'll see that this was all nonsense fluff that had the potential to be good, but didn't utilize it.

The animations were average. Character designs are cute if you just look at them from snapshots, but go inside a little further and watch the anime and you'll see that ... sometimes it's just messed up; with eyes in awkward positions at moments and the facial features deformed at some spots it makes you even wonder what the animation producers were thinking when they released this upon the world. Because they aren't beautiful idols anymore that's for sure! Also for an anime it didn't feel like an animation when it was just a bunch of still shots. Felt like I was watching a slideshow with moving mouths instead. For an anime about music, the LoveDols didn't have that many good songs. Maybe the ED song was a bit catchy, but that doesn't redeem the entire series. I mean Full Moon wo Sagashite had good music and that anime turned out to be a success. What happened to Lovely Idol that causes it to be a massive failure?

The story is flat out boring. It's about a bunch of teenage girls that want to become singers, because we all know that every girl wants to become a singer when they grow up. It's kind of funny how the audience are all grown up men. Does that mean that they suck at singing and can only win in looks? Is that what all singers are based upon nowadays? I shouldn't think harder than I should for such a failure anime like this. The story gets off-topic a lot. And I mean a LOT. From cooking, hide and seek, making dog sounds, wearing swimsuits, talking about boring stuff that are unrelated to singing whatsoever. The show was like 75% filler besides the first two and the last two episodes. Those moments were dull and so were the singing parts, so Lovely Idol really going for it at all.

And now we're at the characters. Oh, good characters can save a miserable train wreck like this, can't it? I mean all the characters look beautiful. Unfortunately, the characters themselves were very poorly developed. Most of the girls had no background story and had no reason for singing whatsoever. The main female had a motive, but her motive was downright silly. "I sing for revenge." Ha, that made me laugh when I first heard it. Not even the manager had any character development. Instead of dramatic characters we get annoying whiny characters that want to sing just for fame and fortune. That's fine and all, but do they have to be so annoying at times?

What could have been a good show turned out to be a failure; a miserable laughable failure. I guess it's somewhat entertaining to watch this wreck unfold. I couldn't stand this show after episode three and I don't know how I managed to get through the other nine episodes. I guess this anime would only appeal to young girls who like cute things or want to become singers themselves. Because you know, little girls only care about other cute girls and shiny lip gloss. Wait. That's offensive to little girls. I bet even they would find this show lackluster and boring. For a show about singing this anime is horrible, even Hannah Montana is more fun to watch than this.

*This review is also on my AnimeNfo.net if you want to check any more of my reviews.