Now, I was not drawn to this anime by the cover of the first manga, which is rather provocative, but by a line I saw when they were advertising it: “Do you remember your first love? She remembers you!” “Ai Yori Aoshi” (“Bluer than Indigo”) tells the story of Kaoru Hanabishi (can you find him up there. I’ll wait a moment.)

He appears to be an average university student, but in reality, he’s the eldest son of Yūji Hanabishi, the head of the Hanabishi Zaibatsu, and was set to take over the zaibatsu (family-controlled business conglomerates) after his father retired. His mother, Kumi Honjō, and his father never married, making life difficult for both him and his mother. Kaoru’s father died when he was five years old. Since then, Yūji’s grandfather, Gen’ichiro Hanabishi, took Kaoru under his wing and began educating him for the eventual succession. Yet Kaoru never felt at home in the Hanabishi family and left to live alone in self-imposed exile after his mother died. Day by day he felt alone, thinking that he was living life with no reason pushing him on.

One day, he espies a young maiden in the Ikebukuro subway station (and, funny, we do not bump into any of the Durarara!! characters). She is very out of place, dressed in a kimono when there is no celebration afoot (and I am sure you can track HER down easily). She has broken the strap on her zori and Kaoru repairs it. She has come to Tokyo, looking for a long-lost love and he agrees to help her find him. Quel dommage, the address she has is a vacant lot and it starts to rain. Feeling for her, he takes her to his crappy student apartment and learns that she is Aoi Sakuraba. Not only does he know her, they were betrothed to be married, until he walked away from it all. (more…)

Be forewarned, this is the most disgusting show I have ever seen, and I saw “Elfin Lied”, but I’ll explain.

“Mysterious Girlfriend X” is about Akira Tsubaki, the guy to the left, who has transferred into this school. One of his classmates, Mikoto Urabe, the Veronica Lake-type, is an odd fish. She bursts out laughing one day, but no one pays her any heed. One day, she is sleeping in class and is awoken by Akira, but she leaves behind a puddle of drool. He decides to (are you ready for it?) take a little taste of it. What? A drool-licker? Ugh! Ugh, ugh, ugh, ugh, ugh! Who the crud licks people’s drool off their desk. Obviously, this was not done in the health class.

He falls ill (and no wonder! Why don’t you just lick her gums while you’re at it?) and she stops by to tell him he has ‘love sickness’. This now means that they are boyfriend and girlfriend, although she is physically and emotionally distant to him. SHE calls the shots here. And should he decide to hug her without warning or permission, she whips out a pair of scissors she keeps in the band of her panties and will scissor away that which needs to be snipped. After school, they walk along the same street until they come to the junction where they go their separate ways. Before they say good-bye, she offers him a fingerful of drool each day. The drool can transmit feelings, among other things, between the two of them.

It’s just that the drool is rather viscous, somewhere between honey and motor oil and it presented with such prominence. The fact he gloms onto it like it’s honey (or motor oil; he’s a weird bird to begin with) just adds to the unsettling nature of their relationship. (more…)

If Kyo is the cat who is Tohru holding? 0__0

I hate this…no wait, actually this is the greatest thing ever.

Seriously why couldn’t I stand this the first time around?

Ever go from hating to loving something? It happens to me a lot when I hear a song I dislike too many times and it grows on me, but rarely do I find this happening with television. However, Fruits Basket is an exception to this rule. It was one of the first anime I watched after my initial induction into anime. I’d decided that I wanted to watch something light hearted after watching a lot of shows with dark storylines. So I did a little research and Fruits Basket was a good choice. It was comedic and had romance, but there was also a really unique and fascinating story I could get into. People turning into animals when they hug the opposite sex? That’s so interesting!
So I started up good ol’ Netflix…and was really turned off by the show by the time I’d hit episode 3 or 4. By the end I was hating it. It was just THAT bad. Initially I gave the show a 3/10.

Now I give the show a 7/10.

In case you don’t know, recently orphaned Tohru Honda is living on her own in the woods until she finds herself in the house of the Sohma family. This family possesses an ancient curse- whenever they hug a member of the opposite sex they turn into a member of the Chinese zodiac. Tohru is given the opportunity to live with the Sohma family as their housekeeper. Soon she befriends the two handsome students who live there. (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…)

Now, when you get into supernatural, paranormal, other-worldly shows, you tend to run into the same folks. Much like going to the local anime convention year after year, it’s more or less the usual suspects. So, it’s always zombies, werewolves, vampires and ghosts. When this show came around, I treated this with a bit of scorn. I mean, a Neko Guy? Or are you trying to save a few yen using a cut-your-hair-at-home system? And she’s a zombie? Well, how……original.

OK, back to the front.

Chihiro Furuya is the cat guy with a keen interest in zombies, collecting zombie-related videogames, film and manga, and even to the point of desiring to “kiss a zombie girl”. Did I say “keen”? This guy is an otaku when it comes to this passion. Following the death of his pet cat, Bābu, he attempts to revive it using an old manuscript, which describes the process of creating a potion for resurrection. Now, his grandfather, who suffers from terrible dementia, seems to have some knowledge of this, but getting him in rare lucid moments is, well, rare to have him really explain things, as he may have written this back in his youth.

At this time, Furuya encounters a girl named Rea Sanka, who has run away from home. Now, Daddy Dearest is like the 8^th richest man in all of the Far East and has a major fetish about Sanka. No one is allowed to get close to her, so, no friends, no folks over, no parties, no nothing. In fact, on her birthday, daddy takes nude shots of her, as he has for all these years. They aren’t pervy per se, not like some Playboy photo shoot, but it’s creepy nonetheless, as Sanka has grown into a fine woman.

Wanting to die and leave her miserable world all behind, she attempts to commit suicide and drinks a sample of the “resurrection” potion which is created from the poisonous Hydrangea macrophylla flower, although this fails to kill her. Following an argument with her father, she falls from a cliff by accident and dies; a terrible chest wound the cause of her demise (as you can see by her scar). (more…)

Now, I have a problem with gender-bender shows. I sometimes feel it is a way to do some kind of psycho-sexual profiling to determine that you would much prefer the company of goats because I happen to like this or that or the other thing. (Don’t laugh; I allowed myself to get one of these profiles in a class and the examiner felt I had the potential to be a molester or rapist. I certainly didn’t get a lot of dates after that!)

I was drawn to this show (which translates out to “The Maidens Are Falling for Me”; also known as “Otoboku”) because I really liked the initial idea:

Mizuho Miyanokouji is your typical male anime dweeb: nothing too flashy, but nothing too interesting. His grandfather passed away and made both a stipulation and provisions in his will for our young charge to attend and graduate from Seio Academy, as Mizuho’s own mother graduated from this very institution. This is great, as this guy would have problems getting back into grade school.

However, complications arise (and you ALL saw this coming). In the intervening years, the academy has now become a girls-only school. Determined to get an education, he decides to cross-dress. Now, he has a natural disposition to looking androgynous, so it makes the transitions a bit easier, although one of his female friends, Mariya Mikado, who also attends the academy, assists in these matters. (Mizuho is the perplexed one in the center; Mariya is winking at us).

Sion Jujo, another classmate, tumbles pretty quick to the fact as to what is going on, but decides to remain silent (she is just off Mizuho’s right shoulder). Now, there is nothing prurient in all of this. It’s not like they are engaging in illicit activities in hiding the truth. I think it is done more to put one over on the teachers. (more…)

The Japanese title for this is…(take a deep breath…) “Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai”, which means “I Have Few Friends”, but we know it better as “Haganai”. Look, it’s another school-based anime! How original! And we have a new transfer student! Doubly original! And he’s having troulbes fitting it! We hit the trifecta!

OK, let’s put the snarkiness aside. Kodaka Hasegawa (the guy in the middle) is a recent transfer student to St. Chronica’s Academy, a Catholic high school. As with every other school he has ever attended, he finds it difficult to make friends there because of his naturally-blond hair (inherited from his deceased English mother) and fierce-looking eyes, which make him look threatening.

While doing something on campus, Kodaka comes across the equally solitary and highly abrasive Yozora Mikazuki (the one to his right) while she converses with her imaginary friend, Tomo. Realizing that neither of them have any friends or social skills, they decide that the best way to improve their situation is to form a club, The Neighbor’s Club, intended to make friends and learn social skills.

They slowly start to acquire members, as these folks are also social misfits for one reason or another:

Sena Kashiwazaki, that busty blonde up there. She has a double whammy: she is rich and her mother is the school’s head teacher, so there is a seething arrogance about her and no one wants to be her friend.
(more…)

Animes have been known for pushing the envelope, and this one is no exception, except that it is so thoroughly honest about one man’s perversion. But when you dress like that, well, what did you REALLY expect? I mean, did you really expect that outfit to contain all your feminine charms? Did you honestly expect that a man who wears panties on his head is not going to blow a gasket or two? Adding to this is the Naïve Factor and this show serves it up with two hot, heaping scoops.

Oh, for those who don’t know, the Naïve Factor is that the woman in question has absolutely NO IDEA that they are sexy. For guys, you have read the comments that accompany the photos in any girly magazine or see the picture and she is totally amazed that she possesses the prodigious protuberances, as if she had never noticed them before! Yeah, it’s kinda like that in the show.

Tomoki Sakurai (that Chibi, panty-on-head wearing guy in the center) is a teenage guy whose motto is “Peace and quiet is the best”, but he finds it difficult when he has to put up with Sohara Mitsuki, his next door neighbor with a killer karate chop (not seen up there); Eishiro Sugata, an eccentric pseudo-scientist bent on discovering the “New World” (not seen either); and Mikako Satsukitane, a sadistic Student Council President (also not seen).

One day, while he was witnessing a strange anomaly in the sky, an UMA (Unidentified Mysterious Animal) crash-lands nearby. Tomoki discovers what fell from the sky is a winged female humanoid named Ikaros, (white wings to the right) who soon declares herself to be Tomoki’s servant. From then on, more creatures known as “Angeloids” arrive, and with this, he finds himself losing his peace and quiet, but at the same time finds pleasant things the Angeloids bring him. (more…)

Finally doing a review again. I really need to stop rambling so that I can get to more of these.
I love myanimelist.net. I really do. It’s the best place to figure out where to begin when you’re trying to diverge from “mainstream” anime. Being that the site aims to catalogue every anime in existence, I’m bound to come across a lot of junk. But then there are those anime I find that are real gems. Yosuga no Sora is one of those gems.

Twins Sora and Haru have just lost both their parents. The first scene of the show opens with the two of them sitting across from each other on a train. Sora and Haru quickly move into a quaint little town and get to know all of the other young teenagers who live there. The short series, concluding at 12 episodes, follows 4 story arcs each at 3 episodes. Each arc involves Haru befriending and later developing a sexual relationship with a different girl.

Obviously, this show is famous for its incest content, which does not even happen until the final story arc. I always hear “Oh it’s not as taboo in Japan but still considered wrong”. Granted, it is only anime but at the time I was watching this I’d only seen around 10 anime and of these 4 of them (the other 3 being Elfen Lied, Kaze no Stigma, and Fruits Basket) had paired off family members! That’s nearly half! Clearly this is a popular issue in Japan.

I really didn’t know what to expect upon watching the first episode but by the end of it I was not only entertained but very interested in seeing what happened next. At first glance, Yosuga no Sora can be written off as an ecchi, sometimes labeled as “soft hentai”, but with eye catching visuals, an enchanting, mystical setting, and surprisingly well-developed characters those terms just wouldn’t do the show any justice. (more…)