Kannagi

Kannagi just gets better with each episode. It’s not like that there are any revolutionary new things done here, but what is done is done well and with just the right amount of self-mockery. I guess it also helps that Jin is a rather believable male protagonist, the minor characters can deliver some comedy on their own and, of course, that Nagi and Tsugumi are just fun to watch.

True Tears & Minami-ke Okawari

True Tears

Surely the standard harem setting of three school girls being or becoming more or less emotional attached to the male lead isn’t something to write home about, but if it has to be this kind of show True Tears is one example of how it’s done right. The artwork is pretty and the animation of high quality. The scenario is interesting and promises a lot of character development and, maybe the most important factor, the characters themselves are quite likeable, have a well framed background and are (anime-wise) believable. A nice bonus is that they try to liven up the surrounding of the characters by adding lots of NPCs, but sadly the CG-parts don’t really do the trick it because those just don’t look right. And last but not least I really like the SD-characters-outro (SD for the win!).
Altogether a pretty nice watch.

Minami-ke Okawari

Well, so far Minami-ke Okawari isn’t as good as I hoped for but also isn’t as bad as I feared. The animation and character design is of course something to get used to, but their quality doesn’t seem to differ very much from the first season. Good points are more teddy bear involved punishment, the usage of grey for everything Chiaki isn’t thinking about, the appearance of the !s, the keeping of all the seiyuus, the Haruka banchou revival, the strange but interesting intro and many, many more stuff. Bad is the advanced use of (humour-unrelated) fanservice, the lacking of Sensei and Ninomiya-kun and of the warning at the start of an episode, the ugly outro, some other minor things and that the whole thing isn’t as funny as the first season was (so far).
Surely a good and enjoyable series to this point, but it will take a bit more to reach its precursor.

Spice and Wolf & H2O – Footprints in the Sand

Spice and Wolf

Although I don’t know yet what should think about the characters of Spice and Wolf I like what I’ve seen so far. The show accomplishes to emit a nice medieval atmosphere, its music fits well to this atmosphere, the animation and the character design looks good and the ending song has some nice engrish to offer. Lawrence’s more or less normal behavior toward the naked Holo was a nice change compared to the behavior most of other male anime characters would show. He definitely earned some brownie points here. On a negative note it was rather bad how they handled the display of Holo’s nudity. Not that I expected or wished to see more, but even if it’s sometimes quite silly how the “naughty bits” are hidden in other works it’s still better than just leave them out when their could be seen normally. I think they could have easily worked with Holo’s long hair and tail here. But oh well, it isn’t that of a problem after all.
Wonder in which way the story will develop now. Guess the last scene with Chloe indicates that Holo might still be important in some way for the village because the priests seem to have noticed her disappearance quite quickly.

H2O – Footprints in the Sand

H2O is a rather mediocre series so far. First of all I found Takuma’s blindness to be not very authentic illustrated. Okay, I don’t know much about the behavior of blind people nor do I know how it should be translated in anime behavior, but it just felt wrong. Furthermore the characters seem to be rather shallow and their design is not appealing enough to compensate for this drawback. In fact the only reason for me to continue watching this show at the moment is because I’d like to know how the class rep was able to create this fascistic-like system in her class (and I would complain either to see her and her two thugs getting the beating they deserve). Maybe it gets better before I lose the little interest that is left, but I’m not very hopeful.

Halftime for Shakugan no Shana Second

It’s not like the first half of Shana’s second season was completely uninteresting, but it’s far from what the first season accomplished. Nearly to zero fighting scenes, no love-rivaling between Shana and Kazumi (not even some hiding behind poles from the later), no visual antagonist plotting and too less Shana-Yuji interaction make this all a rather sad experience so far. Hecates addition to Yuji’s class might turn out to be some neat story element later on, but for now it only made this second season a rather bad school harem. But there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel now with the worst endured and my hopes are still up that the second half will have some of the old Shana feeling to it again, so that this little sentence will be more than true:

Halftime for Myself;Yourself

Like predicted Myself; Yourself turned out to be solid entertainment, nothing more but also nothing less. The partly revealing of past incidents and the interaction of the characters is interesting so far, but the development of the main plot could be speeded up a little while the rapprochement between Sana and Nanaka was a bit rushed. This could have been stretched more over the past filler episodes in order to give a better idea about how deep Nanaka was hurt by whatever Sana did (assumed that he really did something wrong or she thinks he did. At least I guess that is to be the crux of this story). It’s a bit sad that till now the (obviously) filler character Hinako got the most character development. I don’t say that I dislike her, in fact it’s the other way around, but I’m pretty sure that she won’t be of any real importance for the further dealing with the issues of the five friend’s past and thus she just eats up precious screentime. It’s somehow the same for Aoi, who might be a bit more important but I just like her less.

Some recollection of what was shown so far about the past events:

– As Sana departs with the train Shousuke tries to shout something to him, but the words can’t be heard. Shousuke looks serious, but isn’t in panic, so maybe he tried to tell Sana about the deeper feelings one of the girls (Nanaka?) has for him.

– Sana is startled by the view of a bloody knife. Combined with his reluctance to take off the bulky watch around his wrist I guess he attempted suicide at some time, but nothing else points in this direction so far (beside the daily calls of his mother, which could be interpreted as worries about some possible relapse, but can also be normal interest in what her son does). If this should turn out to be true I think they shouldn’t have put both clues in one episode to make it less obviously.

– At the time Nanaka is asked by Sana to play something on a violin she panics and gets a flashback of huge flames. Shouri seems to know about what happened and convinces Sana to drop this idea. The present Nanaka wasn’t shown playing violin so far, so she seems like she has lost her will to play through whatever happened at that time.

Clannad & Myself; Yourself

Clannad

I’m already set for Clannad just because it is made by KyoAni. Might not be the best reason, but it’s sufficient for me and so far the animation quality is as good as expected. The first episode introduced Tomoya, the male protagonist, who isn’t sarcastic for a change but seems to be rather uninterested in to annoyed by his daily life routine. Even so he behaves normal on the outside and soon gets in contact with a bunch of girls from his school, who with no doubt each should have a more or less mysterious problem to come by. The obligatory male side-kick loser rounds the character set up. So while the main plot should be nothing spectacularly new the individually backstories of the characters might be quite interesting, although similarities with Kanon are to be expected.

Myself; Yourself

Myself; Yourself seems to be standard harem drama so far with a 16-year old boy, Sana, coming back to town after a five year long detour. He left with a tearful goodbye at that time (which was nearly sickly sweet). Now meeting his old friends again he gets to know how they, uh, developed from that time and everybody is happy about their reunion. Everybody, except one of his female friends, who he doesn’t recognize at first and promptly gets smacked by…
As been said, so far pretty generic, but the intro is quite interesting and if the animation quality keeps on the level of the first episode this could turn out to be solid entertainment. Aoi’s voice could be some octaves deeper though, but it’s nice to notice that I’m not too old yet to hear such high frequencies (although sometimes that might be blessing as it seems).

Tokimeki Memorial Catch Up

With only a few series that I watch this season and no particular interest (and inspiration) to blog about any of them regularly so far I have finally some time left to spend on those series that I always wanted to start or lost track of somewhere in-between. Well, first series I was able to catch up is Tokimeki Memorial (up to episode 21 now). The last few episodes finally succeeded in delivering some (harem-comedy level) drama and were quite compiling. Watching them in a row also helped to hold the tension up I guess. But of course one of the major flaws of harem shows strikes again: the indecisive male lead, here personalized through Riku Aoba. By not making some clear statements and without the ability to decline any girl proposal even once Riku puts his three love interests through quite some harsh times. Fortunately their suffering is rather well portrayed this time which gives all of them much more depth in character and shows the consequences of such a weak minded male lead. And his “solution” of the problem was laughable at best from my point of view. But leaving this aside (nothing else was to be expected after all) I can say that Tokimeki luckily became a rather interesting and enjoyable anime again.