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This is the best anime ever made.

Why?

Because it isn't anime.

There aren't any anime conventions in it. There is no anime soundtrack. There are no schoolgirls, no tsundere, no moe, no giant robots.

This is a TV show.

... Anyone can watch it and enjoy it.

It has a plot, but it's also episodic so you can just sit down and watch it.

It's about bounty hunters, something Sergio Leone made popular--and put to good use here.

The characters are well put together with distinctive personalities (and an Homage to Lupin). Bruce-lee-esque Spike that looks like he's out of a 70s action flick, a Tarantino Movie, and stole his wardrobe from Lupin. Jet, the sensible foil to Spike--cop turned bounty hunter. Faye Valentine, the typical scantily clad woman. But her gambling problem, poignant backstory, and the fact she's out of place in the "future" world rounds her out perfectly. You could argue that the comedic "Ed," a hacker child, is the least fitting out of the four, but honestly odd episodes like Mushroom Samba and when she searches for her father seem to redeem that. And finally there's Vicious, the cold hearted syndicate killer and perfect antagonist to Spike. His katana to Spike's guns.

The settings are our solar system in the near future, with creative takes on each planet/moon--everything is beautiful and fitting, like Mosques on Venus, a sprawling Mars, crater-ridden Earth. Nothing extravagant, but the backgrounds are always there, noticeable, and fitting for the story. Shootouts in cathedrals, homage to kung fu, Tarantino, Leone.

This is good because it's derivative of things that work. It has a great jazz soundtrack that doesn't fall prey to squeaky j-pop music and also matches the mood. The backstory is a simple one of the betrayal between men and women. The pacing is fast and uncluttered.

And the ending is satisfying.

This is also the only anime where the English dub is peerless and so much more fitting than the Japanese version.

Watch it in order, or just watch one episode.

If you have to buy just one anime for your collection, you can't go wrong with this--the replay value is excellent, like watching your favorite childhood action films on the weekends that you never get sick of.

This is the exception to anime, not the norm.

And something like this comes out every decade or two. It's impossible not to enjoy. If anime was more like this than the shit that's around now, it wouldn't be seen as a distraction for socially maladjusted shut-ins.

So, do you want an ending to the Higurashi saga that is enjoyable, makes sense, and isn't full of government conspiracy, retconning, and actually has a sense of paranoia and sadness to it?

Well, skip the first episode which is just stupidity meant to ligthen the mood after two seasons of bloodshed and loli murder.

What has been done is a rather fresh and melancholy take on the series that finally wraps up the "mystery" behind Hinamizawa in a series of very well plotted episodes that solely focus on Rika Furude being trapped in an alternate Hinamizawa where none of the events of Showa 58 happened ... and only has Hanyuu serve as a distant voice and guide to the choices she must make if she wants to return to "her" Hinamizawa, for being separated from the world she fought to win seems to be the only way she can fully appreciate her struggle.

There is no murder, no disembowelment, no coverups--just a rather touching exchange between Rika and Hanyuu, that and some rather nice solioqoys by "creepy adult Rika." It's all really well done and has a rather eerie vibe to it, regarding a choice Hanyuu forced her daughter to make, a choice Rika is forced to make as well--that and how Hanyuu forever altered Rika's (and Hinamizawa's) fate.

It all is mostly told through dialogue between the two main characters of this arc, so if you don't like to sit around and watch people talk, this probably isn't your thing and anyone expecting a bloodbath to end Hinamizawa, this isn't it, either. The entire story has been trimmed down to two characters, with everyone else just showing up briefly and not getting in the way.

What it is IS a surprisingly charming, touching, and equally creepy end to a rather lopsided run of anime that has been as impressive as of a letdown at times.

But sometimes it's all about how you finish.

And this is quite good.

The basic rule of anime is that if something is perfect the first go around, you will only fuck it up if you come back and make more of it. The second rule is that fans will watch it, regardless. The third rule is that message board fucktards will defend it like the honor of their dead mother who perished in a tragic incident involving a horse dong...

But I digress.

Clearly after the endless hype, the teasing, the disinformation, the creators of Haruhi have managed to shit out three stunningly mediocre episodes of a 'sequal' [sic] to the original show that managed to be somewhat quirky, ... fresh, and a semi-original premise.

In short...

Kyon travels to the past and meets a pre-teen Haruhi and rapes her... erm he seems to be the 'seed' of the idea of her later dealings of the SOS brigade. Then there are two stunningly mediocre episodes that deal with deja vu and the end of summer, but just rehash the events in a different order and wind up reeking of Higurashi without the creepy aftertaste.

There's really nothing to this. There's nothing revealing, there's nothing entertaining, you're left to watch the episodes and wait for the punchline before realizing there isn't one and that waiting for the sequals [sic] was like waiting for your long lost lover to come back after a world trip only to realize she had fucked her brains out in Belgium and now has a family and doesn't remember you anymore.

Literally three episodes and nothing has happened. They're not particularly good episodes in terms of plot, characterization, or whatever. We're supposed to THINK that Haruhi scrawling some shit on a baseball field in alien letters is meaningful then having to listen to some space time psychobabble about time travel and feel all self-important to have understood SOME of it and pat ourselves on the back. Then watch an entire episode of high school kids doing lame-ass summer activities that would bore US if we did them, not mentioning watching someone ELSE do them--only to watch the same fucking thing again before being treated to a revelation that this is deja vu.

Based on the view-or-drop rule of shitty anime, I would have dropped this if this was the first three episodes. Even as a sequal [sic] that qualifies.

Is it shit?

Meh, maybe not totally.

But it's totally mediocre, boring, and probably proof positive of the grand plan of seeing if the loyal fanbois and girls would watch anything regardless of how brainless it was.

That and the anime industry never had an original idea in its existence.

ADDENDUM:

Okay, so I skimmed through two MORE "Endless Eight" episodes and have concluded that Haruhi 2 is shit. The simple fact that people would animate repetitive tripe is bad enough, the fact that people would WATCH it is even more painful in hopes that the anime will redeem itself. I'm sure that there are people out there who are being hopeful because this shit is a way of screening out who the REAL Haruhi fans are, like how your girlfriend cheats on you with a new guy each night to show you she loves you.

I don't care what future episodes bring. I don't care if I'll be having screaming, gushing orgasms when I watch them, the series has truly exceeded the dropworthy status and I just watched two more episodes because I, as an objective critic, have to. Yeah, right. I want the bandwidth I wasted back.

This is so terrible, with its subpar animation, and hopeless pursuit of an idiotic premise and lack of storyboard that my hatred of this show is spilling into my like of Haruhi 1.

Thank you and good night.

Proof that I will watch just about anything, or rather that I once had nothing better to do than watch this crap while waiting for Squidbillies to come on (Unknown Hinson fangirl).

In either case, there are few anime out there that evoke a visceral reaction like Naruto. Sure there is Inuyasha and you can get your eyes clawed out by yaoi fangirls for calling them closet lesbians, but no other anime has started a craze of shut ins wearing orange sweatsuits and headbands to school like Naruto.

See, a uniform code is not just for keeping Crips and Bloods from wearing gang colors to school.

Naruto ... is about a Ninja named Eddie. No, he's named Naruto. He lives in a village where some great Ninja master gave his life to entrap an alien parasite into a carrier queen, I mean a Demon Fox into a baby's body. That baby is Naruto, a completely useless ninja who can summon the great power of the fox within. Think of him like a impish Goku, or maybe Ichigo--I don't know. Anime that go on forever all blend in for me.

What is this all about, well it's the typical drawn out storyboard of characters growing up and becoming ninja. Doing Ninja missions (which are filler episodes) while the story dances around the plot that Sasuke is some talented Ninja with a traitor dick of a brother, some girl called Sakura, some short quiet Rei-clone of a girl whose name escapes me but I keep running into on gelbooru, and a sensei who loves kancho--but in the English dub the delightful Japanese pasttime of poking someone's asshole in a nonsexual way with your index finger is clearly unacceptable and heavily edited.

Honestly there is no plot. Naruto is a loser, but he has a great power and a lot of the show is geared around how he takes a beating but when he unleashes that power, it is maximum. There's some effeminate snake ninja who plots to get revenge on the leaf village, molests Sasuke, gets pwnt only to return over and over again, there's Sakura being split whether to spread her legs for Sasuke or Naruto--but settling for some old woman instead.

This is your typical cliffhanger anime where you watch someone power up or prepare to unleash an ultimate technique for 20 minutes, then are forced to watch a filler episode before you see the obvious, with plot twists usually being mundane like "the ninja training exam has been hijacked, oh noes!" With that said, you'd think with over 200 episodes they could develop the characters, but strangely these kind of anime seem to be unable to do that--instead of relying on stock characters that don't really change over time (well, they can become more moody, evil, or slutty--but that isn't a dramatic and shattering change).

I just have to concede that I don't understand this. And I also have to concede that I don't like this. Good drama and fiction doesn't spread itself so thin, becoming hopelessly lost in itself.

Also, for the love of God, don't dress up as Naruto.

Just don't.

Do you like tits?

Do you like guro?

Do you want to see women and men get brutally murdered?

(remember, tho, it's only guro if it's women)

Well, this is as close to a guro anime you'll get in the mainstream. Lucy/Nyu is a diclonius, which is a pink-haired human female with horns and invisible arms called "vectors" that slice and dice shit into bloody puddles of guts.

Lucy gets pissed off because she's a diclonius queen, is being experimented on, and escapes a research facility after massacring an army of security guards and a cute secretary who is in the wrong place at the wrong time (remember the ... rule of guro?). Did I mention that Lucy does this stark naked, save for a Hannibal Lecter mask? The security guards finally whip out an AT rifle and slightly harm her.

She then washes up nude on shore and is discovered by Kohta, a boy who has met this monster in the past but has erased the memory. He instead prefers to live by himself in a big house with his cousin, whom he wants to fuck brainless (because incest adds to the fun).

The cast of characters in this anime are mostly total fuckers, or really good people who have really bad shit happen to them (in this case it's being gutted by invisible hands).

One example is the sweet and kind Nana (whose dismemberment at first is gruesome, but then for some reason becomes humorous--this show is just twisted that way). Bando is a special forces killer who likes to beat women more than Sean Connery, and yet in the cast of self absorbed backstabbers and monsters comes across as genuine and likeable by the end. There's career woman Shirakawa who lets Professor Kakuzawa murder lolis because she's in love with head researcher Kurama (one of the few sympathetic characters in the anime, a man who damned humanity because of his own weakness and love for his child).

The plot is rather simple. Diclonius are a mutation of the human race; super beings that plan on replacing humanity by force and having a natural killer instinct. Some secret institution is unsure whether they want to research or kill them (loli murder).

Most of it is told through the two faces of Lucy--the murderous and hateful creature that she really is and the childlike state she reverts to under stress, Nyu which is innocent and almost comical.

There is a full spectrum of sadism and examples of human cruelty that make you really question if Lucy is in the right, but then she goes off and murders innocent people by the dozens, and we're left to watch. Usually there's a juxtaposition of innocence and brutality, and this is where the anime really gets its kicks, extracting brutality out of a sweet and harmless situation gone horribly wrong.

Kidneys and guts go flying. The anime has a sadistic flavor and it eventually gets tiresome in its convoluted message of showing the many faces of cruelty and how it breeds more pain and hatred.

It tries its best to be dark and uncomfortable and the loaded gun of the diclonius persona sets up a tension of who will live and die. Like Higurashi, it does this with very sweet appearing moe/ecchi characters, so that further adds to the spectacle.

Still, it tries to carry itself through violence and gore to make up for a simplistic story and leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

Watched a few of these last night.

So, what is this about?

Middle school girls with bodies of able-bodied 20 year old women falling in love. Not with each other, or at least for now. It's all straight male-female puppy love first romance kitch. If you think you've seen it before, you probably have.

There is no twist, tho. There is no parallel universe. There are no giant robots. There are no dueling academies, aliens, spaceships, demons, futanari, or miko. There are also no harems, thankfully. What there is, is unrequited love, awkward moments, and lots of cameltoe, boob shots, and other ecchi scenarios with characters who ... look like adult women, but, um, aren't.

It's all pretty bland with the familiar situations of unrequited love, lost love, nerdy boys, shy girls with big tits, brother-sister incest, that kind of stuff. The animation is top notch. The characters and backgrounds are beautiful, especially during the Christmas episode.

But there are only a limited amount of times you can see a little girl drop kicking a big guy and laughing or two teenagers blushing about what to do next (put it in).

And that probably got out of your system a decade ago, or more than a decade for me.

The girls aren't very personable, either. They're flat characters with little distinguishing factors, save for the ecchi conventions: shy girl with big tits (Meguru), brother complex girl (Koyoi), aloof ravenhair (Yamamoto), ditz (Arihara) etc. Each has their own "unique" design, but that just amounts to hair color and breast size, not personality.

Strangely, the more engaging side arc was a love between Enomoto (a self-absorbed girl) who fell in love with a boy she called "kappa (imp) face." It actually felt genuine for a while, but then it was nothing more than a teenage romance, and immature at best. Two people see in each other more than what's on the surface. We all do that, but so what?

This is what happens when slice of life goes bad. The ecchi angle doesn't carry the series. There aren't any good story arcs.

It's just a slice of someone's mediocre life.

We've all been there, but most of us have forgotten it, because it wasn't that memorable.

This is a great guilty pleasure. Really.

If you've seen scanlations of the manga, this is essentially an expanded version of the 8 panel strip with real music and less raunchiness. (sorry, no Mio cameltoe or sensei boob grabs iin this one).

The plot is simple. Four girls start a keion (popular music) club.

The characters equally simple: Yui: klutz, goofy, lazy. Mio: shy, tsundere, moe. Ritsu: token tomboy. Mugi: token rich girl lesbo. Throw in bipolar sensei and painfully cute nee-chan and you have most of the cast.

With that said,. the characters are lovable, the animation style is very lively with evocative gestures (i.e. the ... characters don't just stand there and talk at each other, motionless), and everyone is so cute it'll either captivate you, give you cavities, or make you into a murderous psychopath.

There is no story. Does there have to be? It's a pure slice of life anime with humorous characters and scenarios. Nothing too original here. But it's funny to see the Japanese mention Jeff Beck or Hendrix, or that the girls' sensei is some death metal punk rocker.

There are original music pieces in the anime, and they actually make an effort to make it look and sound like they did their homework with the music, which sounds like typical bubblegum J-Pop. Thankfully it's not overdone, and comes across as endearing and neither bland or Kajiura-ish. No flourishing violins set to the backdrop of explosions and flying robots, thank god.

This is a simple anime, but it does all things well and comes across as very fun, harmless, and enjoyable.

And it's really hard not to love the characters.

A sad, short little anime about little precious things.

Yorito loves to photograph clouds. He seemingly lives a normal, if not dazed life. He vistis his sister, Aono in the hospital, who is suffering from an affliction that is never explained. He's friends with a sweet girl, Mana and her sister Koyori.

One morning, while waiting to see the sunrise, he meets a strangely familiar vampire girl, Matsuri.

This is an unusual vampire anime, for a variety of reasons. One being that it doesn't really focus on the vampirism as much as the immortality of the chracters and the pain it can cause them, and the inevitable loss ... of loved ones.

Matsuri is such a person. Both haunted and hunted for her vampire blood. This is a whimsical anime that has darker undertones that mostly deal with what happens when you try to make yourself happy at the cost of others.

Without giving too much away, none of the characters are what they seem, and as they begin to realize this, they have to make heartbreaking decisions--which ultimately leads to Yorito wanting to show Matsuri the sunrise.

All of the characters are superficially silly but genuine. Each has their own personality and are generally likeable for they all have a motivation for their actions, even if they seem cruel on the outside--with the exception of Matsuri, whose kindness and sweetness actually hides a selfish act she's hoping she can get redemption for. The music is light and airy, and fitting, and there's good use of skies and bright colors to emphasize the fleeting and precious mortal world.

There are two "DVD" specials that accompany it, one being a fanservice filler episode and the other being a prequel to the events of the story--and the meeting of the two main characters.

This is a sad little romance that tries its best to smile through the pain, and one of those sweet anime that can't do much wrong.

What's to say? This anime tries to take itself seriously.

But it can't. Because the characters have such massively large jugs that it's like a professor trying to lecture on the role of genocide in 20th century geopolitics while dressed in garters and a pink thong.

Jin is the main character. He and his buddy want to go into space. But then Jin's dad, a shuttle pilot, knocks back a few and kills the entire crew of a shuttle. Or maybe some geese do it. I dunno.

Jin's buddy, and most of earth, understandably hates him for this. Because he surived this crash (he was saved by ... a dragon or something) which killed the crew and his loli sister. Jin then becomes chased by a girl who turns into a dragon, finds himself a very manly and totally not gay dragon called Gio (and takes this totally not gay and manly dragon from his buddy who now hates him). This all happens very fast and inexplicably and you're left wondering how and why he is now flying around in a manly dragon chasing after the least endowed female lead in the show.

But back to the premise: you have these Dragonauts. People who have these totally not gay relationships with same sex human avatars which turn into giant dragons that like shoot missiles and stuff. (Except for the loli, she has a butler dragon)

There are bad guys led by Garnet MacLaine, perhaps the most memorable anime character in memory (redundant?) because her massive tits and ass are BOTH hanging out and jiggling to their own pre-ordained and separate centres of rotation.

It's hypnotic.

Garnet wants to take the dragons for her own organization, because they can't make a bond with them the way Jin did. But mostly she just jiggles about.

I couldn't watch this. There's not a shred of originality or premise in the first few episodes. Just giant tits and mecha dragons.

So what is this?

It's not entirely absurdist or self indulgent. It's just a very weird coming of age story set about a centerpiece character, Haruhi. Whatever the hell the title means is irrelevant, this anime is very enjoyable even if it doesn't seem to make sense at first.

It's not helped by the fact that the episodes were aired out of order--something that has beeen rectified by the american subbers. Whether the idea to show an anime completely out of order was brilliant or a fucktard idea, I'll forego the details.

Haruhi can do stuff. On the surface she's an overenergetic school girl, who suddenly finds herself ... surrounded by increasingly improbable characters--from time traveling agents, to androids, to espers and the like. The main character, tho, isn't the titular one, but Kyon. Kyon is Sisyphus. The show makes no effort in hiding this, it would have been better if it had, but whatever.

Kyon narrates the story of Haruhi and the increasingly complex events surrounding her through a rather odd (read normal) perspective since it is soon revealed that time and space are relative elements and a some great realization (central to the plot) has essentially changed the nature of the universe, all of it seems centered around Haruhi--and this is something the main characters are aware of, but act on in different ways, whether through intervention, guidance, observation, or whatnot.

It mostly works, with episodes ranging from a baseball game, to a school concert to a Sisyphean ordeal of a space heater, to core elements of the plot. In its out of order original Japanese version most of the events sort of take you by surprise, something that the show in proper order doesn't seem to accomplish. The characters are entertaining and well put together. Haruhi remains 'real' and vulnerable without stooping to the usual babbling anime girl stereotype.

Kyon is the obvious, unwilling protagonist, but manages to escape the typical shortfalls of an anime male lead mostly by his ironic grasp of the reality presented to him. There are others, mostly moe Mikuru and Yuki (but the latter having redeeming moments, but often existing for advancing the plot).

Overall this is an overhyped but well done anime that despite having a jumbled plot manages to make sense of it all in the end. It falls victim to hype, but is good enough to stand on its own. The endearing characters and overall production elevate it above average.

Choose to watch it in whatever order you want.