And now for something completely different…..a school-based anime. Here comes another one, just like the other one.
Welcome to school! This is Haroniwa Academy, also known as Sandbox Academy. Medaka Kurokami is elected Student Council President, despite her being a first-year student, with 98% of the vote. She institutes a suggestion box, dubbed the “Medaka Box“, for her fellow academy students to make suggestions and requests. Together with her childhood friend Zenkichi Hitoyoshi, (spikey head at the far right) Medaka is determined to address any kind of request by the students, from finding lost dogs to cleaning up club buildings and even fixing personalities. During the course of the series, Kouki Akune (that luscious manly hunk at the left) and Mogana Kikaijima (glasses girl) are also recruited by Medaka to become part of the Student Council. (the dorky-looking dude is Misogi Kumagawa, VP of the student council).
Oh, keep in mind that the shot of Medaka does NOT do her justice. She is certainly the most boobilicious character to come down the pike in the last 20 minutes. I HIGHLY recommend episodes 5 and 6, as they take place at a swimming pool. Roll your tongue back inside, prole!
The first season (yes, there is a second season, which just started) looks at how Medaka tries to answer all the problems that are presented to her, reforming those who need to be reformed (like Kikajima, who is a money-grubber) and giving opportunities to others to improve or at least not be as big a pain. However, the season-ending arc has her running afoul of Myouri Unzen. (more…)
What one finds so interesting about this show is that it could tie into “Accel World”, so it may be recommended to see “Accel” first or at least the two of them together.
It is the future (it’s ALWAYS the future, don’t let the garb fool you). Now, it is the year 2022 and the Virtual Reality Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (VRMMORPGLSMFTOMGTTYL), “Sword Art Online” (SAO), is released. With the Nerve Gear, a virtual reality Helmet that stimulates the user’s five senses via their brain, players can experience and control their in-game characters with their minds.
On November 6, 2022, all the players log in for the first time, but since only 10,000 copies of the game were distributed, this is all who can join on, and it’s one game per console (damn that Nintendo!) Our hero, Kirigaya Kazuto (known by his handle of Kirito) is not only a beta tester for the game, but is also known as a beater (beta tester and cheater). He shows the ropes to some of the newbies, but when it’s time for dinner, he, and others, subsequently discovers that they are unable to log out. They are then informed by Kayaba Akihiko, the creator of SAO, that if they wish to be free and log out of the game, they must reach the top floor of the game’s tower and defeat the final boss, a mere 100 levels away.
Some players are against this and try to forcibly eject. This causes microwaves in the helmet to cook the brain and they die. And if their avatars die in the game, their bodies will also die in the real world. You want out? Beat the game. (more…)
It is the future. (Well, it’s always the future, isn’t it?) In the year 2046, Neuro-synchronization, a technology system that allows humans to manipulate their five senses, has become widespread to the point where people can access the Internet and enter virtual worlds through a device known as a Neuro-Linker (you can’t see it in the picture, but it looks like a neck collar, but it only spans around the back from jugular to jugular). Haruyuki “Haru” Arita (that short, fat boy, right in the center) has low-self-esteem due to constant bullying. To escape the torment of real life, he logs in to the school’s virtual world network where he plays squash alone and always gets the highest score.
One day, he logs on to find his high score has been topped (and by a huge margin). He is then asked to meet the person who did this. It is the Student Council Vice-President “Kuroyukihime” (just behind Haru), who is smart, beautiful, popular and elegant, everything he is not. She offers him access to a very secret program, Brain Burst, which is a virtual reality massive multi-player online game. You have a character that you make better by winning one-on-one battles. This Brain Burst program slows time (although it appears frozen in the real world) to play this game and to potentially manipulate your real time surroundings.
Brain Burst also carries with it a painful price to pay: lose all your points and not only do you lose the Brain Burst program, you lose all memory of it plus you can never install it again. Kuroyukihime wants Haru’s help as she wishes to reach the highest achievable level, which is level 10, and meet the creator of Brain Burst in order to learn its true purpose, but in order to do that, she must defeat the other level 9 users who are known as “The Six Kings of Pure Color,” the leaders of the six most powerful factions in the Brain Burst world. Haru agrees to help Kuroyukihime to repay her as well as overcome his own weaknesses. (more…)
I had planned on doing this review some time back, when this show reached 52 episodes, but it is now another three months beyond that, but better late than never…although I bet all the tasty hors d’oeuvres have been devoured, as I came late. Again.
The only thing that I am not a big fan of, aside from giant fighting robot shows, is long-run shows. Rare is the show that can keep up both interest and plot over the course of a year, especially since you lurch from arc to arc. This show does not succeed all the time (there is a major lag in the middle) but it has kept my interest better than most.
Toriko is that criminal in the center (well, I call him that, as he wears that orange jumpsuit all the time; like Naruto, but with a far better personality). He is one of the four Gourmet Kings in this world that they live (the other two are shown up there: Coco is in black and Sunny has the rainbow hair). They specialize in the acquisition of rare ingredients and animals. Toriko’s dream: to find the most precious foods in the world and create the Ultimate Dinner Menu. As one of the most skilled hunters in the world, he is regularly hired by restaurants and the rich to seek out new ingredients and rare animals. A man with inhuman ability, he utilizes his incredible strength and knowledge of the animal kingdom to capture ferocious, evasive, and rare beasts to further his ultimate goal.
He is paired with a pretty decent chef, Komatsu, that weak looking guy under Sunny’s hair. Everything Toriko is, Komatsu is not. Komatsu is weak, timid, uncertain of himself and lacking confidence. But, in the kitchen, he is really good. Together, they go on a series of quests to make this world a better place for food and eating. (more…)
Seldom do you see a character who is so totally amoralistic and every time he gets his butt handed to him (which is like, oh, every episode), you know that he fully earned his come-uppance, but you also find yourself cheering him on. Kanta Mizuno (our garbed hero in the center) is easily one of the three greatest perverts in anime history, and that is saying a lot. He is a mercenary, a ‘hero for hire’ and his ability to complete his job, in the face of insurmountable obstacles, has earned him the reputation of being good at what he does. But he’s still a loathsome punk and nobody likes him. If they found him face down in the desert, they would go through his pockets for loose change, then roll him over so the sun could bake his butt but good!
Japan has been reduced to a vast wasteland (referred to as “The Great Kanto Desert”), where people scratch out a meager living. Some cataclysmic event has triggered this ‘nuclear summer’ (for want of a better term), as ruined cities and relics from another time can be found. Kanta tries to do his job in this cauldron of hopelessness, but he has two distractions.
The first is Junko Asagiri (the vixen on the left). Now, you can’t see it here, but she has enormous breasts that Desert Punk is always making lewd and crude reference to and drifting into his salacious fantasies about them. Junko is no fool and uses those sand dunes of hers to manipulate the Punk to do her bidding during missions, then absconds with the rewards, leaving him high and dry. (more…)
In the 1980s, Tommy Shaw released a popular song called “Girls with Guns”. Does anyone remember the song? Does anyone remember Tommy Shaw? Does anyone remember the 80s? Am I that old?
Anyway, “Upotte!” takes place at a school known as Seishou Academy. Unlike your average school, all the students are actually anthropomorphized guns, training to one day become a useful weapon, and is divided up into submachine guns (elementary school), assault rifles (middle school) and battle rifles (high school) classes. All students in Seishou train to shoot their target (literally) using live ammunition.
Our four middle-school heroines (Riflettes? Assaultines? Armamentrix? Can you be sexist towards a weapon?) are, from left to right, starting with the bun head, Sig, who is a Swiss SG 550. She is an excellent shot, but can be a bit diffident. The blonde is Ichiroku, a kind of leader, as the rest look up to her, but she would say otherwise. She is the American M16A4 assault rifle and is highly photogenic, appearing on the covers on numerous magazines.
The taupe-haired beauty, brandishing the weapon is Eru and is the lemon of the lot, despite her determined attitude. She is a British L85A1 assault rifle. Shy and clumsy, she has an unreliable nature and the habit of breaking a lot just like her namesake gun. (The brown-tressed girl with the blue ribbons is just a classmate or ‘background people’. Pay her no heed). The last is Funco, the main lead of this show. She is a BelgianFN FNC, who is often displeased to be nicknamed Funco. As the real FNC has a skeleton stock, she wears a thong instead of panties, much to her embarrassment and occasional anger. (more…)
One feature of animes is that they sometimes drop you right into a show, so you may spend the first episode or two playing catch-up to figure out what is REALLY going on here. “Black Rock Shooter” is that kind of show, as it takes you a bit of time to realize that we are dealing with the reality of two alternate, but connected, lands, but it focuses around Black Rock Shooter, a mysterious black haired girl who possesses a burning blue eye and a powerful cannon that can shoot rocks at high speed.
Mato Kuroi is starting school and tries to befriend Yomi Takanashi, who is also new to the school. However, there is a problem and that is Kagari Izuriha, a friend of Yomi who is using an accident to make Yomi her emotional slave, preventing her from having friends and being cruel to anyone Yomi brings into the house.
They are connected by this very strange and depressing book “The Little Bird of Many Colors”, which acts as a metaphor for things that happen and occur, but it’s very obvious. What you learn is that the land of Black Rock Shooter is where the black persona and dark emotions of the people in the normal world go to fight it out. (more…)
Many times I have found myself starting an anime and thinking ‘hey this show is great!’ but then it drags on… and on… and on….. until it just becomes boring, repetitive and flat out sucks. Well this is exactly what happened with this season’s Accel World.
Accel World deals with the rare MMORPG/virtual reality genre and had a ‘unique’ protagonist. At the start, I couldn’t wait for the following week to see the next episode, everything was just new fresh and exciting, at episode 12 (the perfect time for a conclusion) I was starting to get a little tired of the characters and now.. episode 22 I’m sick and tired of pretty much everything. The VR game which is the foundation for the show makes no more logical sense at this point. The majority of the characters are overly shallow, fickle and just plain stupid.
The only character who is even remotely worth giving any credit to is Kuroyukihime. (Xtra pic @ bottom of post *wink*), while she has extremely bad taste in guys (ie. liking Haru), she is intelligent, levelheaded and popular (not blonde popular but… ‘irie’ popular) all while still maintaining a certain level of complexity. If they spent anywhere as much of an effort on the other characters as they did on her, I personally think the show would be much better than the compilation of sniveling, estrogen overdosed buffoons that we have currently.
I am not a big fan of ‘historical’ anime, as they always seem to play fast and loose with the rules. Modern sensibilities, placed on a different era, sometimes equal a show that just doesn’t make it, either as anime or history.
“Shigurui” plays out more like a Kurosawa film, akin to “Rashomon” or “Yojimbo”, but the level of mayhem and violence places it within the realm of “Gantz” or “Deadman Wonderland”.
The story begins in 1629, as we are seeing a tournament between, perhaps, two of the country’s best swordsmen. However, they are using real swords and not wooden practice ones, so this will be a fight to the death.
The two men participating, Fujiki Gennosuke (who has one arm) and Irako Seigen (who is blind) not only have a history, but each has a history together. The show is a flashback as to how these two ended up here and in their current physical situation.
It all begins at the Kogen dojo, where Gennosuke is the star pupil and Seigen is the brash upstart who puts Gennosuke in his place. Kogan Iwamoto, the head of the dojo is, for most of the year, mentally unbalanced and is slowly rotting away, but for a brief period once a year, he becomes lucid and coherent and makes decisions that affect the dojo for the next year.
Seigen, blinded by his arrogance, carries on an affair with Lady Iku, who is looking for something away from Iwamoto. Well, the sensei finds out, which leads to their physical travails and both are sent packing. However, years later, Seigen comes back, seeing revenge by brutalizing the students of the dojo in savage ways. (more…)
Synopsis Every day life is harsh for high school student Kenichi Shirihama. Known as the “Olympic Punching Bag” Kenichi has to sneak in and out of school every day to avoid being ejected from the planet by angry martial art thugs, and members of the schools most notorious gang Ragnarok. While at school, he meets a new student named Miu Furinji, who offers to help him seek out the martial arts training he needs to take care of his ever growing problem of foes.
Weak Knees The weakest kid is school also happens to be the most naïve in school. Kenichi is a kid with many names, none of which are good for marketing value. The story starts off in a somewhat typical Anime fashion that gives viewers a prequel type of buffer for the first few episodes. The series itself doesn’t really have anything of special significance plot or action wise until around the 10th episode. However, Kenichi is also a comedy with plenty of ecchi that TMS Entertainment figures will keep people watching until the story picks-up some traction.
Kenichi takes a play from the popular 1984 Karate Kid movie where Mr. Miyagi offers to train Daniel Larusso after being beaten up by local high school bullies. This sets the foundation for the first half of the 50 episode series. After being bullied by the local karate club members, Kenichi gets the opportunity to train from six martial arts masters who all specialize in different styles ranging from Judo to Muay Thai boxing. (more…)
