So, we are in the second season of “Infinite Stratos”. For those who may have forgotten, in this future world, there are these power suits (not really giant fighting robots; more like body enhancement armor). The trick is, only girls can use them…..until Ichika Orimura shows up as the only male who has ever been able to make it work. However, his training and understanding of the suit is well behind the curve and he is in catch-up mode for such a long time, he should change his name to “Heinz 57”.

The second season carries on with both his training to defeat the evil forces out there and his romantic encounters with the evil forces down here (the rest of the squad). They are beset by an anti-IS group called Phantom Task, whose main goal is to destroy all the IS units, but to also take Ichika into custody. I mean, a guy who can pilot this equipment is really rare, and he just needs to be taken out of the mix, so our plans of world domination can be fully employed.

Oh, I guess I should introduce the rest of the players, following behind Ichika:

Houki Shinonono
Cecilia Alcott
Huang Lingyin
Charlotte Dunois
Laura Bodewig (more…)

Welcome to Sakurashin, a town where humans and youkai co-exist in peace and harmony. The premise of “Yozakura Quartet” is how to maintain the peace with such a divergent amount of folks.

The ‘quartet’ portion of the title involves the four people (and that is good, as a quartet IS four people) who run an office called Hiizumi Life Counseling Office, where their job is to help and protect the townspeople, regardless of their background or origin. The four folks are:

Hime Yarizakura, (dead center with that massive scarf). Although sixteen, she is the mayor of this town, which she inherited from her grandmother, and has supernatural powers. She is loved by all (so you KNOW it’s a fantasy. Who really loves their elected officials?)

Akina Hiizumi (the guy in the black shirt to Hime’s right). He is eighteen and is the only human in this office. He can do ‘tuning’, an ability that can send back the youkai to their world and cut off their connection to the human world. (more…)

I can’t really remember a biking anime. The closest I got was an ending arc for “Honey and Clover” when one of the students went on a biking journey of Japan. “Yowamushi Pedal” is more focused than that and with the same amount and caliber of fan service.

Let us meet Sakamichi Onoda (dead center; look at the size of his eyes!). To say he is an otaku is like saying the Pacific Ocean is a little wet. He has just entered Sohoku High School and plans to join the anime club. In middle school, Onoda did not have any friends with whom he could talk about otaku things and is hoping he can make such friends in the anime club, but he finds out it has been disbanded. In order to reestablish the club he tries to find 4 other people who would like to join. Yeah, good luck with that! (more…)

Of all the sports out there, baseball seems to be able to generate the best metaphors and symbolism in a reflection of life:
Clear the bases
Three strikes and you’re out
Caught looking
Batting 1.000

And animes pick up on this, as we can track how a person grows and matures under these arduous, unforgiving situations….for the most part.

“Ace of the Diamond” follows in the tradition, but it has problems when it fell into old tropes and clichés. But first, the plot:

Eijun Sawamura (big grin in center) is a fairly good pitcher, but he is erratic and lacks control. But he makes up for that with a zeal and passion that fires up everyone else and makes them help the team in the town of Nagano. He gets scouted by Rei Takashima for Seidou High, a perennial powerhouse in high school baseball. He is reluctant to leave his friends behind, but they all feel that he stands a better chance of reaching his dreams by going there than staying here. Win for us, as they send him off to his future. (more…)

As I have always commented, long-form shows have a real problem in that you have to keep the interest going. I have heard that the creator of “One Piece” has enough tales to make 1000 episodes. But are they good episodes? Or are you Mario Mendoza? Mario Mendoza was a major league player for eight years with three different teams and had a lifetime average of .215. He got into baseball, but didn’t do much after that. The third year of Toriko was also like that.

Now, the overall goal is the finding of GOD, the greatest single ingredient ever, and both the IGO and the Gourmet Corp are in battle over it. To this end, Toriko and the other Four Kings do these insane training exercises and activities to help hone their understanding about the true food and what it can do. Sadly, we got to a point where it became the Dragon Ball Z Syndrome.

After some rather arduous training quests, the Gourmet Corp sent out these four hideous beasts that only the Four Kings could battle and condensed the world’s population into a ‘safe zone’ (think about the entire world’s population moved into the United States). These four battles eventually merged into one massive battle that gobbled up loads of episodes, as they battled and battled and battled to seemingly no genuine conclusion. When Komatsu helps turn the tide and the Kings were victorious, it was time for the Food Olympics (for wont of a better term), a competition held every four years to see who is the best chef in the world. But it is a combination of Iron Chef and the Iron Man Triathlon. (more…)

Although ostensibly a school romantic comedy, it is the setting that makes it a bit different from your regular school animes.

“Silver Spoon” tells the story of Yugo Hachiken (the guy in glasses). He comes from Sapporo, but had no real idea what he wants to become. He also wanted to get away from a demanding father and a slacker brother, so he enrolls in Ezo Agricultural High School. He is the only one there without a goal, a purpose or a reason to be at this school, as everyone else is involved in some aspect of agriculture (dairy, livestock, horse racing, cheese making and the like).

He becomes tops in the class overall, as he excels in the regular stuff (math, history, writing), but he bites mightily when it comes to the other aspects of the school, like the agricultural part. I hope he didn’t miss that ‘agricultural’ is part of the school’s name. His other classmates are: (more…)

“High School DxD – New” is the second season of this show. There were so many loose ends left at the end of the first season, the only real question was “When is season two coming out?” Now it has, and we continue on with both training and fighting.

Let us recap the cast, for those who may have forgotten:

Issea Hyodo is a demon, smack dab in the middle.
To his right is the president of the Occult Research Club, Rias Gremory
The three lovelies above are Akeno Himejima, Koneko Toujou and Asia Argento.
(There is another guy, Yuto Kiba, that’s him to the far right, with his marvelous new sword).

Now, with the battle between demons, fallen angels and angels still raging, the Church decides to send out its own minions, those two spandex-clad femme fatales, Irina Shido and Xenovia. (more…)

Another show with a monstrapatious title, this is “Watashi ga Motenai no wa dō Kangaetemo Omaera ga Warui!”, also known as “WataMote” and for those of you not fluent in Japanese, we’ll call it “No Matter How I Look at It, It’s You Guys’ Fault I’m Not Popular!”

It revolves around Tomoko Kuroki, as she is going to be a first-year in high school. Having conquered dating Sims games, she believes, to the very fiber of her being, that she will be fiercely popular. She painfully discovers this is far from the truth as she winds up being an unsociable loner and is forced to take a long hard look at herself for the first time in years.

I had a very difficult time with this show, as I was never really certain if it was a comedy (as she makes all these horrible mistakes and missteps in trying to break out of the jail she has put herself in) or a tragedy (as we kind of see a slide into insanity, as she is unable to cope or understand what is going wrong with her life). All of her attempts meet with failure and there is honestly no one she can turn to for guidance, help, a shoulder to cry on, or perhaps something from the local WacDonald’s to nosh upon. (more…)

This is a classic fake-out show, in that you think you are going in one direction, and then get yanked into another, oblique, area.

“The Devil is a Part-Timer” tells the tale of Dark Lord Satan, ruler of Enta Isla. It is not enough that he rules with an iron fist and a steel will; he must have it all, so he basically shoves in all the chips and does a massive four-front war on the neighbouring lands for total and complete world domination! (Enter dramatic music here.)

Initially, he gains the upper hand, as no one was fully prepared for such an onslaught. However, the tides of war turn against him and not only are his armies driven back, his own land gets invaded by all four of the lands he hoped to subdue. Rather than suffer the ignominy of defeat and the humiliation of capture, he takes his trusted general Alciel and jump through a dimensional portal. But be assured, he will return to exact his terrible vengeance and terrible it will be. However, they land in Sazazuka, Japan, to discover that this is a land of little magic and the once towering figure of Dark Lord Satan (massive biceps, eight-pack abs, thighs that could crush your skull) is now a twenty-something guy who looks a bit of a wiener. He is just another citizen of Japan and has to live as a mortal. (more…)

Life in Japan must be tough, as all kinds of weirdness happen to the point where the odd is the norm. We are in the future (same as it ever was) and for the past 30 years, there have been these ‘spacequakes’. The original one claimed the lives of at least 150 million people. Since then, smaller spacequakes plague the world on an irregular basis.

Shido Itsuka, a seemingly ordinary high schooler (the guy with the tie) comes across a mysterious girl at Ground Zero of a spacequake, Tohka Yatogami (purple at the far right) and learns she is one of the “Spirits” who are the real cause of these spacequakes that occur whenever they manifest themselves into the world. He also learns that his sister Kotori (the red demon at the left end) is the captain of the airship Fraxinus, crewed by the organization Ratatoskr, and is recruited to make use of his mysterious ability to seal the Spirits’ powers, thus stopping them from being a threat to mankind. However, there is a catch: to seal a Spirit, he must make her fall in love with him and kiss her. Not just any kiss, but the Kiss of True Love, Ariel….I mean….never mind. (more…)