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Have you ever been truly passionate about something?

Blue Period is, before every thing, about passion. It may sound cliché but this is the best manga I've ever read about "following your dreams and make them come true" as generic-shounen as it may sound.

Yatora was an uninterested high school student until he found himself in love with art. The first few chapters are about him finding his passion and dealing with the doubt and problems that come with it, the later chapters are more focused on the process of creating art.

This manga is beautiful, from the first few chapters you can see how each character is ... drawn with a slightly different artstyle, reflecting the intricacies of each one of them. The artworks featured in the manga were all created by different artists and the colored pages are works of art on their own.

The story is a classic coming-of-age so the focus is clearly on character development, the main characters (as you can include Ryuji with Yatora) are amazingly portrayed and it's really interesting to see their hardships and how each one of them deal with it. The secondary characters are also nicely done, with each and everyone of them having a solid characterization and motivation.

I think this is not only the best manga currently being published but the best manga overall, never before a manga moved me to the point of tears and made me question myself if I've ever been passionate about something in my life.

I recommend this manga for everyone, don't be intimidated by the art thing, before reading Blue Period I wasn't interested in art at all, now I see myself going to museums every now and then.

I really can't praise Blue Period enough, if you are reading this review, go read this manga as soon as possible, it's truly one of the masterpieces of our time.

God, this anime is a mess, but in a good way.

Don't get me wrong, I won't give this anime a 10 and say it's a masterpiece, this anime is just awful, and I won't say it's fun because of the plain badness either.

Mars of Destruction reminded me of my middle school years, not only because it looked like a 12 year old wrote the script (and directed, and chose the soundtrack) but it made me remember the trends back then: gore, cute girls with guns, classical music, cheap superficial existentialism, etc.

Combine that with the early 2000's anime quality, which was, in my opinion, the ... worst animation quality in history of anime, a limbo between the nostalgic 90's pastel hand drawn classics and the polished 2010's computer assisted modern anime.

And to top it all: the direction is the worst I've ever seen, the classical music is awfully misplaced at random scenes (and cut off abruptly) and the voice acting is emotionless and horrible, but to be fair there is no voice work in the world that could've saved this anime from being a trainwreck.

On the brighter side, back to the middle school nostalgia, this anime reminded me of the stories and short movies I've made when I was 12. Influenced by the likes of Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni and Evangelion, I can easily imagine one of the storyboards I've written back then to look like this.

So there it is: Mars of Destruction is a product of its time, with all the cliches and quality the early 2000's had to offer, combined with an awful directing, misplaced classical music and terrible voice acting.

I do recommend this anime to everyone, this is the classic "go big or go home!" logic and ho boy, did they go big with this one.

SOME MINOR SPOILER AHEAD
A great underrated manga but definitely not for the romance manga (especially shoujo ones) lovers.

Don't be fooled by the romance tag, the manga focuses on two characters and their struggles in the academic field: Yuu Tomonaga, a genius that has faced the hardships of the backstage of the research field for the first time and Aoi Hirose, an equally genius highschool girl trying to conciliate her complicated family conditions and the dream of pursuing an academic career.

I think that "Yasashii" does a great job on showing the reality in the academic field and this might be the best manga on doing so. ... Professors stealing their students thesis, fight for a titular professor chair, research fund cuts, etc. Although there are some details that give right away that the author herself is not a scientist (I mean, that two-piece blackboard on the prep room is a joke and so is the whole sequence on which Tomonaga HACKS into his brother's PC).

There is romance though, but it's very underdeveloped. The main couple in particular is not very convincing as they lose the spotlight to the secondary couple AND to the main plot.

The art is pretty but forgettable and the character design is bland.

The only character that felt off to me was Kusakabe, she can be seen as the main character of the manga too, I hated her guts. The fujoshi was fine, every manga needs a comic relief right? And I really loved the Aoi character, even more than Tomonaga, she had the best character development by far. Touko is great too, really likeable character.

If this manga had ~3 more volumes and had it ended slightly differently, I'd have here a possible 10/10 contender.

First: keep in mind that the last romance anime I've seen (sans the Yuasa ones) was some 5 years ago, I'm not very keen on the genre as you can see. I've watched this anime because some guy said that this was the best romance anime he've ever seen, I hope I don't live enough to watch the worst.

Like every other VN adapted anime, White Album 2 suffers from some pacing problems, especially towards the end, but I don't blame the anime for it.

The story until the last episodes is your everyday happy-go-round highschool romcom, they tried introducing some musical drama to the plot but ... failed miserably, I mean: a rookie in guitar playing that after a week of training is soloing like a God? A prodigy multi-instrumentist that plays mediocre piano at best? And last but not least let's not forget the oh-so-natural talent for Setsuna to sing in autotune. C'mon production guys, you could've done it better.

The characters are really bland, really really bland. They only showed some backstory for one of the main heroines (and they've done it only on the last episodes), the other one was a literal selfish moeblob. The main character is the classic cliché VN harem protag: a righteous, earnest, honest boy but with average looks.

The OST is repetitive and mediocre, there are some moments that the anime tries really hard to get emotional by putting some sad music (with violins and piano obviously) and some character crying/angry, it doesn't work for me at least, and I cry very easily.

I didn't bother to watch White Album 1 so I don't know the context of some songs featured here (like the so called White Album song) but the music played on the anime was pretty bad. The melody was weak, lyrics were nonsense (yeah, I know they played a part on the plot, still bad though) and the singer is mediocre at best.

The seiyuu work here is plain bad, the serious tsundere has a serious tsundere voice and the moeblob has moeblob voice, what a surprise. I don't know why but it feels like a really cheap production anime hearing the character voices, the overly dramatic screams and the EEEEHHHHH contribute to this impression I had.

The character art is good though, but nothing to write home about. The direction and animation per se were plain and mediocre.

TL;DR: The story is not good, characters are bland, OST is forgettable when not annoying, seiyuu work is plain bad, art is decent. Would not recommend.