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Angel Sanctuary can best be described by the fact that for a good portion of it, you're watching it with your eyebrows raised. This is due to the fact that Angel Sanctuary is an incest story. To most of us who actually have sisters and are not reading nasty doujins, this is an absurd and revolting concept.

However, the concept here is taken very seriously and from a realistic perspective. Unlike most of the incest fanservice and occurances you'll find in anime, in Angel Sanctuary it is not assumed to be a normal engagement for the sake of some weird fantasy. In fact, how abnormal and ... wrong it is is fully addressed.

The story seems to be the manifesto of someone who has had incestuous feelings and has thought long and hard about it, about how despite it being wrong, it would make people that have those feelings happy to indulge in them.

The setting takes on a bastardized version of the war between Biblical angels and demons, the war against God, etc, still going on in present day Tokyo where a rebel Angel lies dormant in a seemingly human shell. It portrays the demons as the good guys, the angels as the bad guys. It says, "I know that for loving my sister, I belong in Hell, but I'd rather be there than in Heaven without my sister."

Angel Sanctuary is very short, at best a mediocre watch, at worst an advertisement for a manga I've never read. If you're curious about the ideas on incest, that's the most you'll get out of it. The intrigue of this peculiar topic alone is what got this anime a score of 5. The angel-demon setting could be pulled off better.

An anime of 48 minutes long does not at all have time to focus on characters or story, so I won't really rag on it for that. Instead I'll rag on it for other things, such as being a movie of 48 minutes. That is hardly two episodes. What could possibly be accomplished in this length of time? Well, there is one thing...

The movie should showcase incredible visual stimuli. That's all it can really be expected to do, and yet, Blood: The Last Vampire falls quite incredibly short. Sure, the art is different, and ok, maybe the settings are pretty good. It almost looks ... western. But my main complaint with it is that in this art style, everyone, all the people in it, are inescapably ugly. Saya is referred to as beautiful towards the end, and my girlfriend and I looked at each other and were like, "Really?" We thought she was disgustingly nasty.

My advice is to not bother with this. Simply look into the spinoff series, Blood+. The two are absolutely nothing alike, but Blood+ is hardcore and epic; whereas, Blood: the Last Vampire is patheticly short, ugly, and downright boring.

School Days is a gem of it's genre because it manages to be epic in twelve episodes, a feat very few school life stories accomplish. Yes, epic. No, not quite like the works of Homer, but epic in a way that when it ends, you are left staring at your protagonists in shock and awe, feeling that they have come a long way, and that the melodrama and intensity of their story is at hand.

If you hadn't figured it out already, School Days is a romance drama about a guy who cheats. Because it's a story about cheating, it's very sexual and very ecchi. But ... even if you're not into the fan service, School Days makes you truly empathize with the girl(s) who are affected by our main character's dishonorable sexual exploits. You will also witness the results of being with a guy who cheats on his girlfriend with you.

The story is quite good and the characters are quite serious and somewhat developed considering the short length. Each character is quite changed by the end. Furthermore, the only overly loud comedic relief character (an archetype which severely irritates me personally) is a guy friend of the main character who does not often make extended appearances. The main mains include the perverted, cheating guy, his shy and timid girlfriend, and his spunky, outgoing "friend," and a few other less important girls to make up the harem.

Without spoiling, the ending is hardcore. Many people will not like it because they are sissies who are such fanboys and fangirls that they can't recognize what makes for a dramatic story; however, those among us that are as hardcore as the ending of this show will be impressed.

Don't pass this off as a generic school life anime. It is epic.

There is an alarming number of people in the online anime community who hail this series as one of the best series in not only the horror/suspense/mystery genre, but in all of anime itself. For the life of me, I cannot discern where people get these feelings from. Higurashi is one of the most over rated series I've ever watched.

90% of the reason Higurashi is so terrible results directly due to the fact that the series is basically the same premise retold over and over again, a little different each time, in each 4-6 episode arc. It becomes a chore to watch it after you ... realize it's going to start over and retell a similar story in the second arc. But it goes beyond that, once you realize it's not even the same story. It's an entirely new story that has little to do with what you just watched before it.

Higurashi attempts to be a mystery, yet fails miserably. A mystery requires consistancy, something Higurashi lacks entirely. What happens in each arc is not the same as what happened in the arc before it. Imagine a story that retells itself again and again, each time showing you different perspectives of the same story, letting you in on different key knowledge that you may have lacked in the last arc, that you might come to understand and solve the mystery over time: This is what Higurashi SHOULD have been. But it's not. Each arc tells the story differently, to the degree that you are confused by what has actually happened and what events are relevant to what is currently going on. Things happen so differently that what is actually going on is indecipherable, leaving Higurashi little more than imagery of cute little girls turning psychotic in various situations that tell no complete story. Higurashi is utterly confusing and incomprehensible. The true mystery becomes, "Why does this have nothing to do with what I watched in the last arc?" not, "Why are strange murders happening every year at the same time."

The only thing propelling you to watch more of Higurashi is faith that it will eventually explain everythng to you. But it will not. Without giving any spoilers, Higurashi throws entirely new concepts at you at the end which bring about more questions than answers. At the end of the 26 episodes, one feels entirely cheated, as though an enormous amount of time has been wasted. One goes on web forums and complains of this, only to be told by fervent lolicons that, "You have to watch the second series before judging it. It explains all." But one is left looking at another 20-something episode long series and feeling not very optimistic, ready to watch something worthwhile, something that is not Higurashi. I don't waste my time watching an entire season with very little redeemable about it to conclude that I need to watch the second season. I just cut my losses and move on.

The characters aren't even likeable. There is a stupid male protagonist that is often referred to as bright even though he consistently does the stupidest things known to man (horror protagonist syndrome) and everyone else is a generic little girl. Oh, and there's a detective. In one arc he's a nice guy. In another he's a terrible douchebag. Again, no consistency.

Higurashi will appeal to certain groups of people: Lolicons, people that like stuff just because it is weird and confusing, and people that like anything with blood and graphicness in it. Unless you fit that bill, I cannot comprehend what you would like about Higurashi. The only good thing I can say about it is that there are parts of it that are a bit creepy. But it's even a bad suspense story, as each time the suspense builds up, the story retells itself in a new arc and drops all the suspense.

Ignore the hype. Unless you like little girls, pass on this one.