S2 has been confirmed... maybe trap Kirito won't be as bad but I'm sure that will probably not be the case.
http://www.swordart-online.net/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0Ghr_rbJmQ
So, the first season is actually just part one... great. I would have prefered this ending to another season to be honest - Not everything has to be resolved.
Imho it kind of derailed with the last episode. Not only the forced drama with his wife but also how he let himself get baited like that.
Without the second half in sight there is not really a point in actually watching this right now if you havn't already.
If Norway had Adult Swim this show would probably have aired there. Produced by the Dead Snow/Hansel & Gretel guy you can guess where it dabbles in. I would have wished for a stronger Twin Peaks vibe but it looks like if anything that would be in S2 (if that ever happens).
This show is way better than you would expect from a promotion tool for someone's 3D avatar. Except for one episode the gags are fun and Miss Monochrome has to go through quite some suffering but get's a wonderful christmas miracle in the end.
Despite my initial low expectations for the show it turned out to be my favorite of the 1-cours this season. It's just really comfy to watch. There is hardly any drama in the show and the cast including the various spirits were great. Too bad nobody is translating the manga because I would totally continue. If you're going to give it a try I recommend watching past the first two episodes because they weren't the best.
Sound of the Sky (aka So-Ra-No-Wo-To) is set in a future where neighbouring countries are at war and humanity has lost technical advances due to previous conflict. There we follow a little girl called Kanata who joins the army in order to learn to play her bugle. Obviously the platoon she joins is all-girls... You figure where it goes :)!
As apparent by the similar character designs to K-ON the show is mainly slice of life without much threat from the military conflict. Most of the episodes deal with each of the girls past demons but the on-going war comes knocking at their door towards the end. While the conclusion is rather predictable, it's done quite well. I guess what makes the show work so well besides the fact that you can't hate these girls in their oversized uniforms is the setting and the pretty background art. If I found something weird than it's the fact that the key song in the show is a rendition of "Amazing Grace".
As someone who actually stuck with the show I can confirm aswell that this is what you call a train-wreck.
While from the production side of view it's alright... the plot is simply horrendous (and so are most of the characters). Keep in mind the show has only elven episodes but even with that it doesn't manage to tell a straight story and frankly has at least three episodes I would call mostly boring filler. It isn't just the occasional plot-hole but it had me constantly scratching my head or my face greeting the palms of my hands. The pacing was awful and no one was acting remotely realistic. What's even worse is that the last episode is the worst of the bunch.
What on paper sounds just plain terrible turned out to be a fun little LN adaptation. It wears it's intentions on the sleeve and has it's fun with all the possible tropes and references in the medium. I can't say that I was always eager to watch the next episode but I had my fun with them. Unfortunatley the last two episode were a bit overly dramatic for nothing really which was a bit of a bummer. If you're looking for a comedy that is celebrating "Otaku" culture this one fits the bill.
The show is a collection of three short stories. Unfortunatley they're not very good except for the last one and are plagued by a low budget.
#1 Yotsuya Kaidan: The first one is a retelling of a classic kabuki play through the eyes of the author. It's a bit slow for my taste but adds some live action towards the end to etablish the curse around it.
#2 Tenshu Monogatari: This one is not really horror but a fantastical love story of a human falling in love with a god. It suffers even more from the low budget than #1 but has the better story.
#3 Bake Neko: The predecessor for the show "Mononoke". It's about a cat that turned into a Mononoke and haunts a certain Clan on a wedding day. It's miles above the previous two and told in a wonderful ricepaper artstyle.
Since you have to get through some supbar outputs for the good one I can't praise this as a whole.
This show can be quite fun if you're not expecting much. It plays out the same jokes on the character's tropes in every episode again but that gets mixed up with the insane multiple choice questions our MC gets from God. I could have done without the sometimes excessive fanservice though. The ending is also rather meh but hey, ten episodes are not much to work with.
Highly enjoyable but extremely low brow comedy where the overlords of the underworld end up being cute animals once they're summoned to earth. While the episodes themselves are only ten minutes long the stories usually take two of them to complete anyways.
Higurashi is an adaptation of an independently released horror/mystery visual novel series. While those kind of games usually work in the way that you have multiple paths you can choose (and often have a "definitive" true end after you played through all of them) this one actually has an overarching mystery behind them. So instead of getting a "mixed" adaptation or only one of them you get them all.
The basic setup for the different arcs is always the same: Our protagnonists goof around in the town of Hinamizawa in your typical 'Slice-of-Life' manner until shit hits the fan on the night of the local Cotton Drifting Festival. By no later than then someone has lost all their marbles thanks to the curse of Oyashiro, smashing all their friends to a squishy red mass.
To keep the mystery flowing each of the arcs features variations within including who will be covered in blood at the end and in each of them you learn some new hints to what is happening. Most of the arcs also get an "answer arc" to them in which you see things from a different character's viewpoint covering more ground (although only two of them are present in the first season).
If you want to know the truth behind it all you will have to watch season 1 and 2 which leaves you at 50 episodes. From that point on everything is optional. Season 3 is 2/5th fanservice and 3/5th a new arc and season 4 is just an hour long action/gore fest that isn't really in the spirit of the first two seasons.
Now the reason why I watched the show is simply because I love horror and if you see recommendations within the genre it does not take long for Higurashi to pop up. It is however not exactly what I hoped for. Due to the repetitive nature it can sometimes be tedious, especially so the "The Disaster Awakening Chapter" arc in the second season. The early parts of every arc are also often really silly.
What it really does do well is building the mystery and changing the tone from cutsey to sinister.
The art itself hasn't really aged well and isn't detailed but the expressions of the maniacs are always great and I loved how the crazies sddenly et demon eyes. The sound design is OK and I guess has many taken from the game and no one can hate on an OST composed by Kenji Kawai.
The whole thing is flawed in my book but it is an interesting ride.
PS: I called the show just "Higurashi" but the full romaji name would be "Higurashi no Naku Koro ni" for the first season and the official english title is "When They Cry". If you were to translate it directly from the Japanese you would get something like "The Moment the Cicadas Cry" which sounds just as shit so yeeah, it's easier that way :)...
At first I was a bit sceptical since it's Karl playing Karl but if you liked "An Idiot Abroad" you will enjoy this aswell.
Attack on Titan (aka Shingeki no Kyojin in romaji) has proven to be one of the rare shows that sparks the attention from people who don't regulary watch seasonal anime. I mean, just look at the numbers on trakt alone: Two of the other more popular shows that started at the same time, Maou-sama and Gargantia don't even come close (less than a 100 watchers on the last episode). But not only that - even in the anime community itself it gained immense popularity and currently is still in the Top 10 on Myanimelist (kind of the western Facebook of anime). What is to take away from this is certainly that it seems to make for a good entry-level show but it's not one without flaws and I can't frankly understand why it gets that much praise (oh hello SAO!).
I first came into contact with it's manga because it ranked extremly high on Mangaupdates with some of the genre tags I browse. After reading the first 15 or so chapters I deceided to put it on hold. It didn't impress me and the art was everything but pretty (given that it was the authors first series and he didn't draw much before this). So when the show came around I saw potential for improvement given that the art could only get better plus action never suffers from being animated. This also means I had certain expectations and some of the early tension had been lost on me due to knowing some twists.
Now the story itself has plenty of shortcomings but is still entertaining. It starts out like your grimdark show about the struggle of mankind (in this case versus the titans) but it falls into the usual shonen trappings further down the road. I also find most of it's characters kind of stagnant in terms of developments and it's everything but subtle. The source material is still being published and is probably not even at the midpoint of which thr first season maybe adapted half of. This also means there isn't an ending yet. There is plenty of padding going around in the show and they added some filler to end it before the start of a new arc. I don't think the filler was all that bad but the padding put it's toll on it. Some episodes are extremly tedious to the point that nothing at all happened.
One the shows biggest problem for me comes in terms of animation quality. There are good looking scenes and the 3D rendered high-speed slides through the city on their 3DMG always looked great... it's just that it was inconsistent to the max. Quite early you begin to notice copy pasta and the worst possible use of stillframes with narration or dialogue over it. This is done a lot in the industry and it isn't necessarily a bad thing but the way they do it in this is so in your face and frequent you just can't help it. There was some talk about them lacking animators and that they were apparently looking for more but that couldn't have been the only issue. Around the episodes that relied on it the most a new OP hit the show with plenty of quality animation so yeah... The level of detail also decreased towards the end whenever it wasn't a closeup or something in the focus.
I guess this sounds really negative but I still gave the show a 7... it is just frustrating to see this hyped to the heavens when it really is far from perfect. If you're looking for an action show, sure - give it a go. It's just nothing great. I'm sure there will be more coming down the road (there have been spin-off stories already) and I cannot wait to see the train-wreck the live action movie planned for 2014 will be.
R.I.P. Moe titan.
What is the C³'s club daily order of business? Eating cake, drinking tea, running gun blazing through the forest with airguns and well... having fun.
This marks the only show I picked up late in the season due to it's buzz. Unlike the expected "cute girls-show" Gainax added their own flavor to it. There was the potential of our protagonist Yura having hallucinations or being able to alter time (or create worlds of her own) but this is also one of the shows flaws. It tries to do too many things. The latter never really comes up again after it's been depicted. There is also some plotarmor in place (as far as getting hit goes) and some animation shortcuts (stillframes mostly).
What made me like this show so much was the rather edgy rise and fall of Yura. You just can't help but worry about the steps she takes and the show goes to some pretty dark places for it's style, heck - there could have been some kind shooting at one point. Just look at how much someone typed about her developement; http://tobiichi.wordpress.com/2013/09/20/in-defense-of-yura-yamato/ :o. I hope this isn't considered a spoiler but it all ends happy with everyone having fun again. Oddly enough it seems like they aired a more OVA like episode as number 13 so the true end is actually in the twelfth EP.
I have neither seen nor read Working!! but just from looking at it I belive S×S is a carbon copy of it. I wasn't really impressed by the show but at least they got away from the repetitive jokes they had in the earlier episodes. I would have wished for the Bunny to never been added but welp, there had to be something to make it implausible. Has at least one of the better endings of this season as most others have been dissapointing.
At it's core Kiniro Mosaic is your typical 4koma adaptation featuring cute girls doing cute things and if you don't like these kind of shows this won't change your mind (I'm usually not too fond of them either). The twist to this are the two blondes Alice and Karen who move to Japan to visit their Childhood friend so you get a good dose of Engrish in every episode. The show also starts and ends in an unique way so that's a plus. It's really too cute as to hate on it.
This is a show that time will forget. The presentation from Madhouse is done well with a matching art style and OST. Storywise it's a different beast. Except for a single off shoot episode it's told in arcs with little connection between them and you often feel like there is something missing. So by the time you get to the last episode it doesn't really matter as this doesn't feel like an overarching story. There are plenty of plotholes and Ai is "special" so this gets exploited for the ending (everyone else only got a wish granted by God on the day he left). The show is about one-third of the source material but I doubt that anyone will rush out to read that.
It was allright for a weekly 20 minutes but as a complete series it's not satisfying.
I don't have any strong feelings about Silver Spoon but I thought I'd give my two cents about it now that the first cour is over: It does what it sets out to do pretty well. Given that there are kids today that don't even know where their food comes from it's nice to see that something on the topic of agriculture can get an anime adaptation (helps that the mangaka wrote Fullmetal Alchemist though). One of the topics that the plot always seem to come back to is the breeding of live-stock and being able to eat it afterwards. I felt that this always got treated a bit one-sided. The Japanese way is always the right one so for example when the chickens are kept in tiny cages no one questions it. The only thing I wish for is that the second cour gets a better OP because the current one is kinda akward.
I'm gonna rate this one before the final episode airs next week: This show is really bad and I have no idea why I stuck with it...
The first episode was allright and there seemed to be plenty of people who played the games so it had to have something good. It only got worse. The first apparent flaw is the art and animation: Apart from Monobear the designs are ugly and it looks cheap. It also takes many of the game elements straight into the anime (and these look even worse). The characters are flat since this is basicly a "let's play" with scenes cut out, there are 15 students afterall. There are also no attempts of presenting realistic behaviour among the students. Doesn't matter if they're psychopaths or not they just get along. The classroom trials where they have to deceide on a curlpit after a murder are basicly a twist party. Since you're not playing you get the clues presented which often feels like an asspull (and there are many of those). This weeks episode aswell as the previous one were not even trying anymore. They expect you to accept even more bullshit than the recent Sword Art Online. It's not worth anyones time. If you're remotely interested either check out a playthrough on YouTube or play one of the games but I can't tell you if they're any better.
As ManiacB said: This is very much one of the many ways they milked the Fate-franchise so if you have not seen the previous efforts I'd say check those out first because just watching this will not satisfy you.
The show itself is a weird mix between magical girl comedy, more Fate-style battles and fanservice. The art varies in quality but the fights themselves are done good enough (Silver Link is no Ufotable though) and sometimes they seem to be padding the scenes a bit. It really is a lot better than one would expect but I could have done without the Yuri and the fanservices scenes as these are freaking little girls (there are steamy^2 scenes and imouto). The second part is supposed to be superior to the first so I'll be looking forward to this.
I was avoiding this when it aired because I got the impression this was an Otaku-b8 loli show but dancing gifs of Dekomori somehow got me looking into it again (yup). While it's topic certainly is Otaku friendly it wasn't really exploitive. Instead it's a suprisingly fun story about growing up and keeping your imagination alive. It wades of to melodrama towards the end but that's to be expected. I'm looking forward to the movie and S2.
Being cut short to only 10 episodes this is basically advertisement for the Manga which is slowly progressing itself and not legally up to date or fully scanlated (30/50 chapters). The typcal Shonen-Quest is still at an early stage and we only got hints about the battle for a new king. The show itself is O.K. at best but doesn't bring anything new. I almost dropped it after the first two episodes. The thing is that it can be entertaining and look good but it often has bad designs or even cheap looking "monsters" (kids anime style) and the fanservice was annoying too unless you find huge cans classy... I don't see this being popular outside of it's airtime.
Too bad this show got the Firefly treatment... canned after six episodes and aired out of order. Sucks for Tim Minear... The show itself might not have been perfect but is surprisingly gruesome, has some interesting characters and is not as "profiling" heavy as Criminal Minds. It does however overuse the stick of Rebecca's past and has a tendency to go a bit over the top so some of the incidents are unintentionally comic.
A story about a traveling merchant named Lawrence who one day meets a harvest deity in the form of a "wolf woman" called Holo which travels along with him to the north in search of her former hometown. While I've always heard that it is supposed to be an economics driven show it isn't really that accurate. The plot might be driven by it but the story itself is about the relationship of Lawrence and Holo. Unfortunately they seem to have forgotten about that in the second season which sees them seemingly part ways or meeting a fur trader which steals too much screentime. Since a third season never got made it would have been better to adapt the ending instead of this more filler stuff.
Given the praise I've always heard I was a bit disappointed. These voices might come from the male fans of Holo like this guy http://www.fabricerequin.com/post/category/project-holo/ who visited tons of places with a cardboard cutout of his waifu...
I never quite understood why Comedy Bang! Bang! was such a popular Podcast (same goes for Paul F. Tompkins). The time investment in relation to actual funny things never quite worked for me. The TV show is kind similar... the main motiviation comes from his guests but I have to give him credit for actually doing some original things that justify it being a TV show and not just talking silly things.
Looks promising! With writers from hit shows like Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Dexter, New Girl, Parks and Rec and American Horror Story seems to me everyone here will be watching :)?
http://www.sundancechannel.com/blog/2013/05/sundance-channel-greenlights-the-writers-room-premiering-july-29th
Never exceeds at anything and has some meh plotting and episodes inbetween. That said, it's not all bad and still entertaining to watch.
Let down of the season! Not recommended.
(I've already posted my thoughts on multiple episode pages if anyone needs more reasoning)
Pretty entertaining series but is a bit heavy with the melo-drama. You could always foretell that after a certain period of "happy-times" something would come up to get everyone crying.
