Last time, I covered the bigger picture surrounding Katawa Shoujo, namely visual novels and eroge, and touched on the themes and impressions I got. This time, I plan to take a closer look at the plot and characters. I’ll also be peppering this profusely with nitpicks and gripes.

I should warn you, while I will be refraining from divulging any true spoilers, I will be assuming you’re not worried about me mentioning details that either occur very early in the game or won’t be surprises at all if you’re following along. If this were a review of The Sixth Sense, I would mention him getting shot (happens near the beginning) but not the bit about him being dead.

As a product of volunteers, the overall quality of Katawa Shoujo is impressive. There are some wonderful CGs to behold and the artwork is always pleasing. The music, too, is usually pretty good, and there are enough tracks that it hardly ever seems too repetitive, unless of course you play for hours and hours on end. Sound effects are always perfectly adequate but admittedly they aren’t used too terribly much.

While characters have many varied poses, expressions, and even a few outfits usually, the stories are long enough that you really start to wish there were a few more. Maybe it is also because the CGs, while always good, are few and far between. Sure, there are usually a dozen or more for each story, but when each story has easily 4-6 hours of text, you’ll feel like the CGs are spread thin.

The fact that it was a group effort does show, though the coordination is great. The team seems to have been careful to keep consistency of outfit designs, locales, and other details, despite having so many different artists contribute. And honestly, it was kinda neat to see so many different takes on the same characters. Each artist kept it within the feel of the game, but still undeniably their personal style. This is a totally different effect when coming from commercial ventures, which, while still employing a team of artists, almost universally slavishly adhere to a single style. I’m not saying one is better than the other, though, just different approaches, although Katawa Shoujo’s might be more out of necessity.

Honestly, though, the biggest problems aren’t with the artwork, but with the consistency of writing. My guess is that a different writer mostly wrote and handled a single girl’s story. There seems to be plenty of editing, and I don’t think I saw but maybe one or two possible goofs in the text. The different places and events and other things also overlap well, giving the world a persistent feeling even when exploring a new girl’s path, which is effectively an alternate timeline of sorts. It’s especially rewarding when you get to see several sides of an event or backstory (Shizune and Lilly especially).

Where the cracks show is comparing the various girls’ stories. There is a noticeable shift in writing style and, I’m afraid, quality, among them. Depending on which girl’s path you end up on first might have a big effect on your enjoyment. Which is a shame for the all important first impression, as it might mean the difference between you continuing to play or never feeling like it. It’s too bad, because some of the stories are quite good. None of them are outright bad, though… just noticeably inferior. It was frustrating going from a good one to a so-so one.

I’ll tackle each girl’s story next, and again I warn you that I may reveal some details here and there, but I promise it is never any surprises or really important bits. Still, you may want to stop here until you’ve played it yourself. You’ll also likely find it more interesting reading each one after playing that girl’s story yourself.

Now, in the order that I played them.

Emi

I admit, I’m a sucker for the cute ones. Emi reminds me a lot of an older Sakura from Card Captor Sakura. I was a sucker for Sakura and I’m a sucker for Emi. As soon as she bumps into you in the introductory part I was all about them twin-tails.

It helps that Emi is adorable, sometimes too much so. While she is a genki type (fitting of her appearance) she is usually very straight-forward and easy-go-lucky, instead of being airheaded or annoying, though she can be a bit plucky. Her cheerful demeanor is nicely contrasted with the hints dropped early on of her not having many close friends besides Rin. Her attitude of “no shame in having no legs” is refreshingly strong and confident, eschewing the typical female-is-weak trait. It also fits in logically with the later themes of her story about mortality and transience.

Emi’s story is one of the stronger ones, technically and structurally. Personalities, events, and dialog all fit together well and imply a good deal of thought was put into the planning and pre-writing. (I was a creative writing minor in college, so I was at least trained to notice these things.) There are also a good handful of interactive choices to be made, and you can end up on an alternate “bad” path, though there is even a very plausible way to reverse the course and get back on the “good” path without resorting to unnatural story tricks. None of the other stories, to my knowledge, manage to pull this off.

Emi lost her legs in an accident and must use prosthetics (she switches between blade-like running ones and more “natural” looking ones when trying to be casual). Her passion is running and as Hisao you are initially stuck running in the mornings with her by request of the nurse to strengthen your heart. It’s a little contrived, but not terribly, and the characters all help sell it well enough. It also provides a convenient plot device to get you and her together consistently and, more importantly perhaps, alone, since you run early in the morning when no one else is around.

Rin, another girl you can pursue, is Emi’s closest friend and lives in the dorm room across from her. I’ll have more to say about her in her section, but suffice to say she’s an enjoyable extra during Emi’s story, providing both frequent humor due to her general weirdness and also some occasionally lucid conversations. She thankfully never feels much like a third-wheel, another point in favor of the writer.

Overall, I quite enjoyed the consistency of the characters and the well presented themes. I’ve already covered the anal scene in my last post, so you have a taste of what I mean. This was the most “real” story, at least as could be expected from the genre and the premise of a school for disabled kids. It’s a good “first” story to get you really into the game. I thought maybe I was just lucky, but apparently Emi is frequently folks’ first so far as I’ve been able to see on the KS subreddit.

Shizune

My first time playing I was getting quite close to ending up on Shizune’s path, until I got side-tracked by Emi when she bumped into me, of course. Continuing, I decided to follow through with her since it would require the least amount of shifting my decisions during the introduction, which I had more-or-less chosen as I felt I would have really done.

Shizune is deaf and as such is followed around by her “better half” Misha who translates with sign language what everyone else is saying and also recites back to others what Shizune says. I was immediately intrigued because it felt like an interesting dynamic, and I was curious how they would pull off a heart-warming story where one of the primary leads cannot talk. Deafness is also one of those conditions with no outward qualities (unlike, say, Emi, who is missing legs), thus feeling less “alien” to the typical player. The motif of silence also has a lot of potential for both strong related themes and scenes.

Unfortunately, deafness is also a difficult problem from a technical writing standpoint. Having a primary character unable to contribute dialog except through a third character puts a lot of pressure on the writer, especially when as the other lead and player you cannot talk directly to her either. It also means it’s impossible to have very meaningful scenes with the two characters alone, as they cannot converse at all without Misha around. Not very romantic.

This issue seems to have driven a lot of the choices in the plot, but disappointingly to no exciting ends. In an effort to solve some of the big problems I just mentioned, our hero very quickly decides to learn sign language. Magically, he’s apparently able to pick up a lot in mere days. By like a week in he’s practically fluent enough to have full conversations. While I sympathize a bit with the author’s predicament, it still ends up being far too convenient and unbelievable.

It also doesn’t help that the plot meanders around, trying to figure out what it wants to do. It drags in lots of places, primarily due to having very few truly interesting scenes and too many slice-of-life slow character building. It’s not that they are bad, but things could have been significantly tightened up and more effectively delivered with some better planning. (And what the heck is with her family?!)

Misha also suffers from being under-developed. If she were more like a typical side-character it wouldn’t be so noticeable, but her translation necessitates her being in almost every scene. Suddenly she’s damn close to a primary character except not the focus. It felt like she got a ton of screen time (not a bad thing) but yet hardly much meaningful development. It’s especially frustrating, too, due to a very late reveal that comes out of nowhere but could have been foreshadowed better and woven in from the beginning for a much more interesting character. By the time this reveal comes we still don’t know all that much about her or why she is even at the school (she doesn’t seem to have any disability like the other students, though fans love to speculate). She mentions wanting to become a sign language teacher but she also mentions not knowing sign language at all until arriving and subsequently getting sat next to Shizune so… why did she originally come? (And don’t get me started on the sweatshirt she wears… you’ll know it when you see it.)

There is also an arbitrary rivalry between Shizune and Lilly, another of the girls you can pursue. Despite several scenes with the two and several more where Shizune is questioned on it, I still felt like I never got a good reason for it all. Especially distressing since Shizune’s so often very logical and purpose-driven, and an arbitrary hatred feels very out of place. It had the opposite effect of making me feel bad for Lilly and liking Shizune less. I would not find out some very important details about it until playing Lilly’s path, though they were nothing that couldn’t have also been revealed in Shizune’s story.

Shizune is also very difficult to figure out. She’s serious, highly competitive, and all about dedication and hard-work, but yet constantly is shown skipping classes, taking breaks, and goofing off with Misha and the player. So which is it? She can be a fascinating case study at times, with her never dwelling on the past, good or bad, and always approaching each task independently and with equal zeal.

But it’s just not a very heart-warming tale. There’s not enough intimacy, the single point of drama is too sudden, and the ending is too… er… friendly? Ultimately, I enjoyed it, I don’t mean to sound so harsh, but nevertheless it feels like the odd one out of the bunch, what with most of the stories being so heavy on the romance/drama. (But WTF is up with the one measly decision point? So much for being interactive…)

Hanako

I tried to avoid spoilers or much else before I played, choosing (as I usually do with things) to be as virgin as possible, my appetite whetted just enough to get me to download and install the game. Hanako’s name had already come up a lot, so her reputation preceded her just a bit.

I could tell immediately on my first play-through that a lot of Hanako’s appeal is due to her incredibly manipulative design, both character and story. Let’s take a look at what we know/notice about her, even in the first classroom scene of Act 1. She’s scarred, she’s impossibly skittish, and adorably meek/shy. The event, whatever it must have been, has left its mark on her body as well as her personality. A house fire perhaps? Likely killed her parents, too? I’m not spoiling anything, as she’ll tell you this outright as soon as you start on her path, and it’s not like it takes a rocket scientist to guess it either. Her timidity prevents her from making any close friends (besides for Lilly, which is actually quite clever: Lilly is blind to Hanako’s scars, in both ways). Combine this with her possibly orphaned background and, well…

All of this exploits, to an amazingly effective degree, the typical audience for this game: young sensitive male. White Knight syndrome, indeed. Coddle her, hug her, tell her it’ll be okay, make her feel loved, and extract one of those small, but oh-so-meaningful smiles. You’re not interested yet? Even my girlfriend, who gave this game a shot out of curiosity, was immediately drawn to Hanako, only reinforcing to me that Hanako’s appeal is universal.

And I was 100% correct.

Hanako’s story has zero surprises, but you won’t really care because you’ll be too caught up in it. The scenes that unfold seem to have no shame in pulling every heartstring they can, exploiting every weakness in you they can. And you’ll be a sucker for it every time. No amount of rationalizing it, as I am now, will change the fact that it works. Maybe too well. You win, Hanako.

Not that her story doesn’t still have some issues. There were times I felt the scenes were a bit rushed and other times too slow. You’ll also hardly learn a lot about her, what with her timid nature producing but a slooow trickle of personal details. I also think the writing could have benefited from being a bit bolder at times, instead of so cliché and predictable. Then again, the tried-and-true is just that, after all. It works, but I still felt just a little bit unsatisfied once the credits started rolling. I suppose it is a testament to the potential, had they had real funding behind this it could have been truly great.

As a final note about her story, I did appreciate how much more the supporting cast was utilized this time. Lilly makes for a good side-character for Hanako, and we even learn a bit about Lilly’s personality and family. So often in these stories it starts to feel like many of the characters introduced in Act 1 just kind of disappear once Act 2 begins. I know they have to focus on the main girl for that story but it can start to feel myopic at times. It wasn’t so bad this time around, though.

Rin

Rin is weird.

The internet loves her weirdness, but the internet is generally weird too. In Emi’s story, Rin provided a lot of nice comic relief and all, but… to pursue as a girlfriend? Could I get into her? I dunno…

Rin is subtle. I never really felt mushy over her (like Emi or Hanako) but, even so, the later parts of her story were surprisingly dramatic. I guess her strange behavior made me think they couldn’t possibly pull off a serious heart-wrenching tale. Like so much about her, it was more nuanced than that. Rin doesn’t overtly exploit you like Hanako, nor does she rely on Emi’s contrast of external vs. internal.

Rin is honest. She’s always herself, weird as that may be, but she wears no mask. She’s hard to figure out, but that’s because her story explores themes of identity, understanding yourself and others, and how others understand you. It’s about the limitations of our ability to understand ourselves and others. And not letting that hold you back. Really, it’s very good stuff. Important, too. And it was, more or less, pulled off well.

I was also curious how they would pull off the sex scenes with Rin, given that she is both weird (and kinda asexual almost?) but also missing arms. But they did it with skill and care, as always. It also managed to really shock me the first time, but not because of any gratuitous display or anything (they were tasteful as always). No, it’s more due to something right in plain sight: she has no arms and no hands. She cannot pleasure herself.

Imagine, for a moment, the frustration of never being able to properly channel lust and desire. You’re a cripple, so most guy’s are too intimidated by your obvious lack of arms and, worse, your alien ways of using your feet for everything. Imagine going through puberty and nearing 20 years old and not ever being able to embrace or satisfy that budding sexuality within you. Suddenly, her asexual vibe makes perfect sense, as she must surely suppress that side of her. Imagine what that does to one’s psyche and development with intimacy.

And so it was even more impactful when, throwing away inhibitions, she could be intimate with you, the player. She’s quite a different person. But it still fits with the theme of identity and “being okay with being yourself”. Sex is complicated and intimidating, such a naked act (figuratively and literally), where a lot of your very real desires are made embarrassingly clear to another human being. A lot of the joy of sex comes with being comfortable, able to focus on the moment and pleasures, rather than agonizing over fear or rejection.

Lilly

Elegant, kind, sweet, but boring. That was my first impression, at least. I appreciated her side-character status in Shizune and Hanako’s stories, especially where you get to see bits and pieces of her manipulative-but-means-well motherly side. How would she fare in the spotlight, though?

Lilly benefits well from being cute, less in that moe-way like Emi and more refined/demure/classically cute. It doesn’t hurt either that she’s easily the sexiest (it’s the neck, I’m such a sucker for the neck), which might explain her larger share of sex scenes. But the positives start running dry there, and have you noticed they are all a bit shallow?

Lilly’s story is pleasant but largely lacking in enough drama, aside from the occasional heart flutter (which rears its ugly head in other stories, too). The love that emerges almost seems to happen spontaneously, out of nowhere, and not even in a “love at first sight” way (no pun intended). Rather, they just sort of suddenly decide they love each other, madly even, in that lovey-dovey cutsey-wootsy way. It seems a bit out of character, too, for both of them.

And let’s talk about that surprising sex-drive of hers. I don’t for a minute think it is impossible for her to be a sex-kitten underneath. I’m practically a feminist, despite my penis. But if you’re going to make your female character a bit of a nymph, at least hint at it before hand? I won’t say she’s a “slut”, but it was a bit jarring given her proper and detached air leading up. Sure, you get hints that she can be a bit girlish and playful but that’s quite different.

Things happen quite quickly but it’s not all bad, just a bit cliché. Really, that’s her in a nutshell. There is still plenty of good stuff, though, especially due to the heavy use of secondary characters. You’ll learn a lot about her sister Akira, Hanako has a mini-arc of sorts that fits with her own story in a lot of ways, and there’s even some more interesting backstory involving Shizune and Lilly. But, again, this means I appreciated it more for it filling me in on the other side-characters than for Lilly in particular. In the end, she still works better as a side-character herself, I think.

Kenji

Though not one of the story girls, he is perhaps the most prominent secondary character (and, also, you can technically get the bad ending to the introduction if you fail to go down any of the girls’ story paths, and this counts as the “Kenji ending”).

Kenji is… well. How to put it. He’s too obviously comic relief. His obvious Harry Potter look and wild, random rants feel extremely out of place most of the time, interrupting the flow of the main story with all of the grace of a rhino. Worse, his scenes rarely have any significance outside of breaking up the serious stuff with his hijinks. Even then they feel too obviously trying.

I won’t lie, I chuckled many times (especially the scene where he takes his glasses off in Shizune’s story), but I still felt on the whole he was a glaring blemish on an otherwise carefully prepared surface. His tone, diction, and subject matter too often clashed with everything else, involving weirdness, obvious internet culture references, profanity, and so on, things that the game otherwise seemed keen to avoid in order to present itself as a more serious work (which I think is the right choice). He never failed to remind me that I was playing a game written by internet goons. That’s not good when you’re building atmosphere and a narrative world.

If they had just toned him down, or somehow written him more naturally into the scenes, maybe… oh well. I didn’t hate him, though. He was a lot of fun, but he did break the spell too often.

Final thoughts

This game, being a VN written specifically for and to an English audience, has managed to convert a lot of folks. Many report KS as being their first experience playing a VN. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but I think it is probably good on the whole.

More importantly, though, it is a serious attempt at dramatic fiction, and its odd premise and anime/internet roots help it attract an audience that may not be used to opening themselves up to “feels”. Reading through the weekly posts on the KS subreddit of guys who have been emotionally crushed by Emi’s story, brought to tears by Hanako's good ending, and so on, leaves me feeling conflicted. I so want to scoff and say “what a buncha fools” but… even so, I can’t help but sympathize with them. I know kinda where they are coming from, and I can imagine how someone not used to getting attached to a character and a narrative could be left such a wreck afterwards.

And yet, so many have been inspired, too. Inspired to run and get in shape (do it for her!), inspired to learn to like themselves better, to be more assertive with their life, or even just to better appreciate their own lives/girlfriends. Find friends, find love, but above all do. That’s really beautiful, more so than any of the words in the game.

Family, as far as relationships go, is in that strange limbo between loving and obligated. Most of your family you don’t get to choose (unfortunately), and despite differences there’s that ever present “bond” we see manifest at times. They fight and quarrel and love and take care. Well, usually.

It’s easy for things to get weird because of that obligation aspect. Your sister gets married or your cousin has kids. Suddenly, outside of your control, you have new family members. Now what? How should you feel about them? So many social conventions and expectations, cultural rules to navigate to even figure out how you’re supposed to act. And… what if the circumstances are unusual?

Daikichi’s grandfather dies and the family, many of whom have not seen each other in years, gather for the funeral services. It is there that most of them learn about Rin, their grandfather’s six year-old daughter. Yep, the old geezer had a child pretty late, and with a very young twenty-something mother to boot whose whereabouts are unknown. Most of the family is appalled and tension fills the proceedings over the obvious question of what to do with the girl. Send her off for adoption? One of them takes her in as an adoptive daughter? Try to find her real mother?

Usagi Drop deals with some fairly heavy subjects. Rin’s illegitimate status is very real; her existence is seen as a stain on the family, one that most of them wish to ignore completely. And yet, she is a real person, with feelings, not some lost hat. Daikichi, infuriated with everyone’s bickering and pettiness, impulsively decides to take her in with him.

The series does an amazing job of tugging your heartstrings with the little things. Early on, we see Daikichi attempt to abruptly adapt to being a father-figure. He’s lived alone thus far and is completely unprepared for taking care of Rin, beginning with what to do with her while he’s at work. Then what will she wear? Eat? So much of his routine is turned upside down. And let’s not forget that Rin is technically his aunt. What should she call him? Other people assume he’s her dad. It’s complicated, but touching to see them wrestle with these things.

Watching the two of them is by far the highlight of the series. Rin is cute, a little precocious, but still very much a kid. However, she’s never an annoying kid, which is a difficult line to walk successfully. Daikichi himself is a bit aloof and clumsy but means so well. As he reaches out to other coworkers and parents, trying to figure this all out, to be a proper guardian, you can’t help but to think about things too. About family, what it means to be a parent, and the sacrifices parents must make. What about single parents, like Daikichi? What about folks in a rocky marriage?

If you like subtle sweetness then you’ll be in for a treat. But don’t expect much in the way of drama or plot twists, this is almost strictly a character-driven series. It manages to avoid angst, instead delicately dealing with the serious topics. Even if you’re a jaded sumbitch it’d be hard not to spill your sympathies all over the place watching this. Anyone with kids of their own (or aspirations perhaps?) will be especially vulnerable.

By far the worst thing is its stunning lack of an ending. It just kind of stops. There is kind of a self-realization “climax” by Daikichi in the final episode, but, fitting the series’ subtle nature, it is more of a quiet acceptance about things. Even so, it will probably leave you aching for more. I know I was.

As of this writing, you can watch Usagi Dropfor free on Crunchyroll. Highly recommended!

Fantasy is a genre that rarely sees much innovation. It is the great irony that this area of fiction known for far-reaching adventures and fantastical imagination involving new races, creatures, magic, and cultures, could be so shackled by its own standard conventions. Combine that with the shackles of your standard tsundere-led slapstick harem anime and it’s nearly destined to be both frustrating and popular (which is also frustrating).

Zero no Tsukaima has zero heart. This is especially troubling because there’s so much about it that is good, it’s such a shame to see the potential wasted on being overly “safe” with a formulaic plot and structure. Truly, the corporate compromises seem to permeate every bit of it, and glaringly so. Yet there is much talent employed underneath the rigidly mechanical exterior.

A generous budget for a TV series gives you quite a polished and competent show, with lots of detailed backgrounds, locales, colorful characters, and plenty of flourishes and effects. But the animation is usually robotic and predictable, with utterly uninspiring cinematography that is perfectly adequate but no more. The music is usually fine and fitting but forgettable. The opening/ending animations are equally unsurprising and forgettable, you’ll skip them without a pang of guilt. The voice actors are all excellent but never any standouts. Sound effects are plenty and fitting. And the fantasy/harem genres are, well… exactly as you expect. Magic, swords, castles, princesses, dragons, and even elves. And then girls, lots of them, all eventually vying for the male lead in increasingly silly ways with more and more ridiculous hijinks as the writers keep trying to up the ante. And with four 12 episode seasons to write, things get especially strained by the end, I assure you. Oh, and lest we forget, the countless and overbearing fanservice and yet more fanservice.

Sigh.

I happen to be, in principle, a fan of fantasy. I have no problems with the genre as a whole, but even I will readily admit it has its obvious shortcomings, mostly to do with the impossible to avoid clichés. There’s just not really any way to be all that original in the genre. And as an obvious work of commercial appeal, ZnT is no different. It attempts nothing original, not even close. But… well… magic and elves are still fun! You’re starting to see why I said this was frustrating, yes?

Our story begins with Louise, a noble attending magic school, who is known as Louise the Zero because she always screws up spells and can never seem to make anything more than explosions happen, much to everyone else’s chagrin. But she’s proud and determined and attempts to ignore her many detractors. As second year students they get to perform a summoning ritual, where each budding wizard will be joined in a magical contract with a familiar. They do not get to actively choose but rather the magic and their personalities seem to influence what it will be. Most get some kind of random creature, like a fire-breathing salamander or an owl or even rarely a dragon. Louise gets a human boy, Saito Hiraga, who had been strolling through Tokyo one afternoon when a portal opened up and sucked him in, leaving him stranded in this strange world where he cannot understand anyone. A human is incredibly strange, though apparently not unheard of, as a big recurring theme of the show is the rare appearances of mystical “artifacts” their world has collected which all inevitably end up being things from our world. My favorite is the first one mentioned in the series, a “Staff of Destruction” which turns out to be a Vietnam-era rocket launcher.

More intriguing yet, and one the more interesting bits, is Saito’s newfound ability as Louise’s familiar. Upon his left hand appears strange runes that catch the eye of the senior faculty and which glow blue whenever he touches objects meant for war, instantly granting Saito the ability to know how to use whatever it is. For example, early on he grabs a sword and to his surprise immediately becomes adept at swordplay as soon as he lifts it. There are quite a few of these interesting little bits that, sadly, get overshadowed by the more conventional things.

And then there’s the boobs. Oh god. As a male who happens to be very fond of breasts, I can’t say I don’t appreciate seeing them, but the joke was worn out long before this series aired. It’s a fallback that gets fallen back on far too often and it never gets any less annoying. The amount of scoffing and eye-rolling I did, mostly as a result of the constant boob-pandering… ugh! Most of the time it wasn’t even clever or plausible, just blatant boob scenes because boobs. Worse, it so often killed the tension/emotion of what could have been otherwise good scenes.

Especially because when the scenes avoided the boobs and pratfalls they could be really good scenes. Louise is mostly a stock tsundere character but she does have her moments, usually in regards to her stubbornness about nobility and how that shapes her decisions and morality, which is nicely (and poignantly sometimes) contrasted with Saito’s casual disregard for caste systems given his modern world upbringing. It’s always a nice touch when he doesn’t bow to royalty (until Louise shoves his head down), not out of deliberate disrespect but because the very concept is foreign to him. When the two clash on these things there are some very real and stinging emotions.

And to its credit, the love that slowly simmers between the two leads is quite enjoyable at times. Sure, the writers throw misunderstandings and such at you constantly to grind the gears for awhile and it tries its hardest to satisfy the harem tropes with the rival girls, but it also never really gives you any indication that they aren’t meant to be. Louise grows on you, and some of the sweetest scenes between the two can be especially stirring and heartfelt. Perhaps it is merely artificially enhanced by all of the crap you have to put up with, what with the retarded fights and her being such a standoffish denier. But you probably won’t care during, you’ll just be awash with awws.

With four separate seasons aired, the series manages to cover quite a bit of material and story with plenty of plot twists and such to enjoy. Unfortunately, there are far too many times where it drags, spending consecutive entire episodes on trifles and filler in-between (and even sometimes during) major story arcs, almost exclusively to pander heavily to its harem roots with fanservice. Immediately it becomes apparent that ZnT is at its best, even perhaps including the comedy and fanservice, when it actually has a story to follow. The times where it languishes makes it all feel pointless and annoying. Fanservice isn’t inherently bad, but it doesn’t hold up entire episodes well, especially when the show proves time and time again that it can be better.

Worse, the genres start to conflict with each other, as ZnT cannot seem to decide what it wants to be. Does it want to be Love Hina in Hogwarts? Or Escaflowne with tits? So often the show seems to just be filling in the dots and checking off all of the usual fantasy/harem tropes with no soul. And yet, it can still be sweet, heartfelt, and dramatic. The heart-to-heart moments with the leads can give such a rush of feels. And the fantasy elements can be especially fun when the battles and spells break out. Again, it feels like the execs wanted it to stay conservative and marketable, but some on the staff wanted to do more bold things.

I can’t say I didn’t enjoy ZnT, but it’s a frustrating experience. There’s so much bad mixed with the good, but the good is still there, and overall I’d say I enjoyed it. The final season (which does, most thankfully, finish the story!) helped make up for a lot of things, as I felt it got markedly better. The story ends properly, there’s more focus on actual plot, without sacrificing the fun and humor and cute stuff. Plus, there finally seemed to be real progression in the characters. They seemed to have grown, they were quicker to stop the petty fights and silly misunderstandings, which are the bread-and-butter of harem love stories. And they showed maturity in their relationship, and it was greatly appreciated and satisfying, I must say. Still, it feels like it was extra satisfying more because it had been so annoying and dinky so often prior to that. Hard to tell!

I don’t regret watching ZnT, I’d even venture to say I liked it, but I sure as hell bitched about it all the way through. If you don’t spend much time on anime and want to stick to the truly worthwhile ones, don’t feel bad about skipping this one. But you could do a lot worse. If you can look past the usual flaws of watered-down assembly-line anime, especially when the glimmers of quality shine through occasionally, you’ll probably have a right good time.

So, installed Windows 8 yet? Maybe you’ve got a fancy MSDN subscription, or maybe you’re a TechNet chap. Or maybe you’re still running the Release Preview. How are you liking it so far? Personally, I’m quite pleased with it.

Did you install Windows 8 on a new/second drive separate from your original Windows 7 installation? Maybe you were like me, hoping to keep it as a backup, just in case. I know especially during those older releases like the Developer Preview last year I wanted some insurance, and wasn’t ready to switch fully. Even now, I have some programs I still run on Windows 7 that I haven’t moved over yet. So, I installed the RTM version of Windows 8 on a second drive.

Everything installed great and I’m loving it so far. Except I don’t get a choice during boot-up to choose my OS!

Windows 8, like past versions, has a boot loader program that starts first. We need to inform it of our second OS so that it knows to give us the choice. This is done with the BCDEdit.exe command line utility. Let’s get started!

Before we start, I need to give the Standard Disclaimer. I am not responsible for you messing up your computer. These steps worked on my machine, that is all I can guarantee. Modifying your boot settings incorrectly can make your computer unusable (temporarily!) so make sure everything looks right afterwards before you reboot and then can’t get back into your OS. That said, if you follow my directions it is unlikely that you’ll be unable to boot or anything, maybe just that the Windows 7 choice won’t work.

Here are the steps we’ll be performing. Power users may be fine with just reading these!

1. Start an administrator command prompt
2. bcdedit /copy {current} /d “Windows 7”
3. bcdedit /set {unique_id_given_in_step2} device partition=D: (replace D with letter of your other drive)
4. bcdedit /set {unique_id_given_in_step2} osdevice partition=D: (same, replace with correct drive letter)

Got that? No? That’s okay, we’ll go through them a bit more slowly and with more details.

1. Start an administrator command prompt (Start –> type “cmd” –> hold Ctrl+Shift and press Enter or right-click on cmd.exe and choose “Run as administrator”)
2. At the prompt, type “bcdedit” and hit enter. You’ll get a listing of your current boot configuration options. You probably only have one entry for Windows 8. It’ll list both the manager settings and the loader’s settings. Once we get the second entry added, you’ll see that it lists two loader settings, one for each OS.
3. We want to make a COPY of the current settings, rather than start from scratch. Fortunately, Windows 7 is similar enough that we likely won’t need to change much aside from the path. Execute the following command: bcdedit /copy {current} /d “Windows 7”
4. You should get a “successfully copied” message along with a big mess of letters and numbers. This is the unique identifier, and we’ll need it as a reference. I recommend you copy the entire thing, including the curly braces {}, by right-clicking and using the Mark command. Highlight the text and right-click again to copy. I know, it’s a little awkward. Also, remember you’ll need to right-click and click Paste, as the Ctrl+V shortcut won’t work in the command prompt.
5. We need to change the path to point to our other drive or partition. Typically, the Windows 8 entry will be pointing to C and we need it to point to D for Windows 7. You can find out by looking in Explorer now and seeing which letter is assigned to your other drive, the one with Windows 7 on it still. Once you know the drive letter, remember it for the next step.
6. Execute the following command: bcdedit /set {UNIQUE_ID_HERE} device partition=D: but replace the D after partition with whatever letter you determined above on step 5. I don’t know if it is required or not, but I also ran the same command a second time but using “osdevice” in place of “device”.

And that should be it! Restart your machine and you should now get a bright-blue screen to choose an OS. You can even use your mouse!

You can change other settings, like the number of seconds it waits and such, more easily through the standard Windows dialogs. Open your System Properties (Start->Control Panel->System) and click “Advanced system settings” on the left to bring up the old System Properties dialog. On the Advanced tab under Startup and Recovery, click Settings… and you should see all of the boot options there.

Hopefully everything went okay. Enjoy dual-booting!

Let’s get this out first thing: Nichijou is like the spiritual cousin of Azumanga Daioh. There, I said it. Comparing the two is not only unavoidable, in my opinion, it’s also a pretty big compliment. Because Azumanga Daioh was absolute gold. And Nichijou? Well… it’s definitely a precious metal, too.

So many stylistic similarities exist between the two shows it’s uncanny and I was shocked to find out that they have nothing production or origin-wise in common. Different manga artists, different animation teams, you name it and nothing matches. And yet, clearly, Nichijou just might be a second season of AzuDai, only with no returning cast.

Both series have that odd mix of slice-of-life and randomly-bizarre with their humor. They both flit about a bit episodically, even within episodes, with only a vague sense of plot. They both have an all-female school-age main cast. Nichijou might just be a bit more random and nonsensical, though - the hyperactive one of the two. AzuDai tended to go for the more awkward route. But it’s a close call.

Nichijou, translated as My Ordinary Life, follows three friends at school, a child prodigy (who goes by simply “professor”) and her self-made robot Nano (who, aside from a giant wind-up key on her back looks like a normal high-school age girl) that acts more like a care-giver, and lastly quite a number of secondary characters all mostly from the same school. In the second half of the series (episode 14 onward) Nano joins the school too and becomes friends with the main trio, trying to keep her robot nature a secret.

And that’s about it for story. Like I said, very little plot, basically just enough to connect characters and some vague passage of time. There are some slowly developed things, like Mio’s manga artist aspirations, Nano’s desires to be normal and fit in, or Misato’s crush on the weirdly formal and over-the-top Sasahara. Mainly, though, the series thrives in short vignettes, sometimes lasting mere seconds, others that last a third of an episode. Most are on the order of a few minutes and are separated by scene titles (again, just like AzuDai– sorry, can’t stop comparing!) and all which run the gamut of weird. Sometimes it’s simple gags, sometimes it’s nonsensical and pointless, and sometimes it’s heavily played up action. You really never know, but after awhile you get a feel for the kind of things they like to do. If after two or three episodes you don’t like it, don’t expect it to change. It’ll still continue to surprise you with weirdness but the style and delivery will be quite well known by then.

The animation, done by the always fantastic Kyoto Animation, is… interesting. Seemingly, it has a very plain, simply drawn style with an ever so slight de-saturated look. But, this is Kyoto Animation. When it needs to be, and even when it doesn’t, it surprises with fluid animation, crazy style changes, and dramatic angles and forced perspectives. The deceptively simple appearance belies the extreme attention to detail and quality. It’s certainly quite enjoyable, but still-frame screen captures won’t do it justice.

Nichijou is funny as hell and was a lot of fun to watch, but I don’t think it quite tops AzuDai. I don’t think I’m just being a slave to nostalgia, either. AzuDai focused a lot more on the main characters and by the end of it you really felt like you had gotten to know their many quirks and seen their friendship grow and solidify. If you paid attention, you saw the overarching plot that did exist through the passage of time: seasons, summer/winter uniforms, new school years, and so on. By the ending graduation, it was a sweet little stopping point to punctuate the end of a great series. Sure, it was random and weird along the way, but it was very human and had a lot of heart underneath. It’s not that Nichijou doesn’t also attempt this, and to some extent it does a fine enough job, but it tends to favor the random vignettes and other tangents more so. By the end you’ll also be treated to some subtle but sweet closures (sort of) and a similarly nice sentiment, but it fails to reach the deepness of AzuDai’s.

In a lot of ways, Nichijou is but a shadow to AzuDai, but it’s a big shadow to fill and a great one to be in. It can’t quite fill the shoes, but it does a helluva job attempting. It’s flaws, if you can call them that, stem primarily from just amping up the weird and random at the cost of character attachment. But either way, if you liked one you’ll definitely want to check out the other.

As of this writing, you can watch Nichijoufor free on Crunchyroll. Do give it a try!

If I could describe this series in one word it would be frustrating. On it's surface you'll be roped in, as I was, by the high production quality of the art, which is mostly a traditional anime style with an extra dose of daintiness over some stunningly gorgeous backgrounds. But then the nonsensical title will throw you way off (it translates, poorly, to Electric Wave Woman and Youthful Man). And so begins a long chain of clashing vibes.

Denpa Onna is a weird series. It seems like it tries very hard to be weird in order to... stand out, perhaps? It's difficult to tell, really, but you'll definitely be confused for at minimum the first three episodes. The story, initially at least, carries the weight of something both ponderous and of great import, but will largely leave you blinking and befuddled as it slowly settles into more typical slice-of-life fare. The characters will hastily try to avoid the usual tropes but in doing so leave you unable to figure any of them out, their motives obscured behind weirdness. The main question early on, "What's the deal with Erio? Is she an alien?" is crowded by similar questions about the rest of the characters. What's the deal with the aunt? Why does nobody point out how goofy Ryuuko acts? Why the hell is Maekawa always in strange costumes? What the hell is going on?

Makoto, our male lead, comes to live with his aunt for the school year. He’s surprised to find out that she has a daughter, Erio. His cousin, however, is more than a little odd, being soft-spoken, shy, and prone to wrapping herself up in a futon (to name just a few signs). She seems to have been quite sheltered and also thinks she’s been abducted and returned or possibly sent here by aliens. Meanwhile his aunt acts like nothing is out of the ordinary, preferring to act as if she were still young and not a parent. At school he meets several others, notably Ryuuko, a cheerful girl with a few quirks of her own, and then Maekawa, who seems to always be cosplaying random things while nobody seems to notice or care. Like I said, it’s weird, and the best description I ever heard that truly captures the essence of this show is “Autistic Girls Harem: The Anime”.

A large part of the weirdness may be due to the cultural differences between Americans and Japanese, but I hesitate to ascribe too much to that. I've seen my fair share of anime over the years, including some really bizarre stuff. This is different. To be sure, there is a lot of it that is standard Japanese weirdness to any anime veteran (such as the all-too-familiar incestuous themes). For all of the initial weirdness in the story, the bulk of it becomes a fairly standard yet enjoyable character-driven, vaguely relationship-oriented thing girded by a theme of adolescence. The characters never stop being odd, but much of the early confusion gives way to a meandering but comprehensible plot.

Despite its obsession with awkward character quirks and seemingly non sequitur scenes, the show has an uncanny ability to be lucid and poignant at times. The dialogue often strays into the philosophical and Makoto's inner monologue is frequently insightful, curious, and just... human. Believably so. And yet again we have something that's really weird about this anime! Typically, dialog is either clumsy and simplistic, something you put up with in lieu of some other better qualities about the show; or it is over the top hyperbole meant to heighten the dramatic effect, albeit artificially.

Makoto is a good lead. Unlike so many other male anime leads, he has a fairly strong personality and is written well. It helps that he is the anchor as well, being mostly as confused as the viewer is by all of the strangeness he is suddenly surrounded with. Unfortunately, after the initial getting accustomed to living with his aunt thing, the series doesn’t really know what else to do. Much of the plot takes a back seat to the character interactions, so don’t expect any ultimately fulfilling storyline. The focus is on exploring adolescence through the various events that do happen, though it is often subtle and meant to simmer for a bit as Makoto reflects on things through the monologues. It works and all, but like I said before it suffers from meandering around with no clear goals.

The other elephant in the room I've so far mostly skirted around is the obvious one: the girls in this show are cute. Really cute, in that way that only Dengenki stuff can be. Scenes often flirt with the viewer, coming very close to fan-service at times, and always seem to be toying with you. A conspicuous haze of sexual tension permeates most scenes, too, sometimes a bit unnervingly so (again, Japan's obsession with incest). As a guy, I can't say I didn't enjoy the visual teasing. Alluring shots of skin, close-ups of glossy lips, and the general harem-ness of the whole thing, all contribute to the charm of the show. Make sure you are prepared for a lot of adorableness. The whole "adolescent points" system seems to further this theme of sexual maturity and latent pubescence, even explicitly calling attention to it for the purposes of assigning a point value at the end of each episode. An interesting, though admittedly gimmicky, touch.

In the end, the most important question is whether I enjoyed it or not. Well, yes I did. Mostly. It's weird, but it's weirdness becomes fascinating in a way. It's frustrating but embarrassingly cute. The animation is mostly superb, the music is overall adequate though occasionally pretty good, the opening song is a bit grating on the ears vocally despite being otherwise good, and the ending song is unusual and will often catch you off guard thinking the episode isn't over yet. I certainly wouldn't recommend this to anyone new to anime, as it probably doesn't make for a very gentle initiation into the field. But to those that are prepared to look past (or look forward to) its eccentricities they will find something fairly gratifying. It won't be a classic, but it definitely left me thinking and smiling by the end.

This is a revised and expanded version of a review I previously wrote back in March here.

As far as pitches go, "guy finds out his younger sister is secretly an erogeotaku" is certainly one that piqued my initial interest. It's obvious wish-fulfillment to the target audience, but the show plays around with homages and parodies to other well-known anime franchises and styles frequently enough that the blatant pandering is actually part of its appeal. It thankfully always keeps winking at the viewer, as if to say it knows very well what it's doing, thank you.

The title translates to My Little Sister Can’t Be This Cute. Kyosuke’s sister, Kirino, is to him an obnoxious and a bit stuck-up girl who largely acts cold and hostile to him (yep, she’s your typical tsundere). She is fairly popular at school, though, and even works on the side as a model due to her good looks, and thus a lot of her friends are in the modeling biz, too.

One day, however, he finds a DVD case on the floor of a magical girl anime (a fictional series that becomes a sort of show-within-the show later, actually). He’s surprised to find it since he doesn’t know of anyone in the house that watches anything like it. He’s even more surprised when inside the case is not the actual show on the cover but an adult anime game. And so begins the changes as the two grow a bit closer, with him as her support, grudgingly at first and under threats.

The male lead is refreshingly likable, suffering neither from being whiny nor is he aggravatingly cocky-as-all-hell. In fact, he reminds me a lot of Hiroyuki, the male lead in the To Heart series (one of my old favorites). Unfortunately, this is also probably one of the series' biggest weaknesses, next to the plot, which this influences. The lack of any serious flaws in Kyosuke (much like Hiroyuki) means that the story kind of just ends up following him around as he does things for his sister and interacts with her new weird geek friends. He's often helpful, thoughtful, usually swallows his pride and does what's necessary, and generally is a good guy. This means he never really makes you want to rip your hair out in frustration, and the series generally steers clear of angst as a general rule, but it does mean that there's rarely much serious drama.

Then again, that might not be such a bad thing. As I said, the series' charm is its knowing wink at the viewer, its playfulness with the ideas of normalcy and social/self acceptance. It usually keeps things light and fun, but underneath is a nice moral of sorts on an issue that is probably all-too close to home for many in its intended audience, myself included.

Should one be ashamed of their hobbies and likes, especially if they seem ill-fitting? Saori, an anime group president of sorts, is exactly the type everyone imagines: nice, but a bit dorky and goofy. Kuroneko (she does not reveal her real name) is the other extreme, one who role-plays a new self of sorts even in reality, dressing in lolita cosplay. Then there is Kirino, who is struggling with trying to keep her two worlds separate. It’s an interesting idea but the focus is largely on the fun antics, humor, and cuteness to dwell too long on any deeper meaning. Which is kind of a shame because other than the premise this show doesn’t ever break any new ground. Very much the usual fare you are used to, albeit a very high quality one.

The animation is amazingly fluid and consistently high quality and a joy to behold in 720p if you can. The background incidental music is appropriate and works, but like most soundtracks it's awfully forgettable. Thankfully the intro and ending songs plus several inserts are much better and usually quite good, if you like modern anime JPop fare.

Overall I enjoyed it a lot, despite its limited scope. It has so many extra little polishes that make you happy: how the intro changes slightly each episode to fit different themes, the various ending artworks and styles mimicked, jargon used, and so on. It's easy to look past the meandering semi-episodic plot and somewhat weak final episode.

I'm certainly hoping for a continuation!

This is a revised and expanded version of a review I wrote back in November of last year here.

As a medium, anime sits nestled between two potentially very powerful qualities. As half art, in the traditional sense, it can choose to venture into the highly symbolic, expressive, and deeply meaningful. As half cartoon, it can exploit visual short-hands and exaggerations to great economy. Anime, as a class of media, has many sub-genres, but even taken as a whole most animes tend to follow a lot of the same "rules" (tropes, really). When used correctly, one can get a lot of enjoyment as they set us up for expectations and either meet them or not.

TWGOK exists among the best of them, not because of anything profound it has to say or anything truly game changing. Instead, it chooses to meet every single one of your expectations about anime, never really straying from the tried-and-true, but it does so with such simple expertise. It is the Bruce Springsteen of anime. When so many other series fail in this area or that, this is a refreshing bit of pure joy that leaves you completely satisfied.

The plot unfolds quite naturally. Our hero likes playing dating sims. Since this is anime, where everything is larger than life, naturally he considers himself the god among dating sim gamers. His arrogance, naturally, leads to him carelessly accepting a challenge. This challenge ends up being a contract with the god of the underworld to retrieve escaped souls (of course). And, naturally, these souls choose to hide and make themselves difficult to retrieve, thus setting us up for a monster-of-the-week. Annnnd, naturally, they choose to hide exclusively in the empty areas of young girls' hearts, who are all about his age and attending his school. Naturally, the only way to get them out for capture is to fill that emptiness with something else (love, duh), thus forcing him to face a literal real life dating sim challenge each time. Did I mention he must do this with the aid of a klutzy-but-means-well demon-girl side-kick? Who moves in with him claiming to be an illegitimate daughter of his father's, much to his mother's chagrin? I know I mentioned this was an anime...

It's all so predictable to even a casual anime watcher, and yet the delivery is so organic and well done that you don't care, heck you even like it. As I said, it meets all of your expectations about anime expertly. Some might complain and want something more experimental, bold, or different. This is not the show for their adventurous appetites.

The animation is stunningly good for a TV series, fluid and sweet to the eyes. The music is competent, the opening theme is fun to watch all on its own (I never once skipped it, even when marathoning episodes back-to-back), and the voice acting is pitch perfect, every character has precisely the voice you expect, all acted superbly.

So where does it fall down? Is this truly the perfection of anime? Has it no flaws? Of course it does.

Probably the number one issue is its predictability. I argue that it is done so well you won't care, but nevertheless it does not try anything new. You will likely never be surprised, no twists and turns, no heavy drama or character stories, no real poignant epiphanies about life and what it means to be human, and for every challenge posed to our hero you already know he will prevail and will easily anticipate how.

But, again, I think there is something to be said for a show that, while not courageous, does what it does so well.

As of this writing, you can watch both seasons of TWGOKfor free on Crunchyroll.

This is a slightly revised version of a review I wrote back in April here.

Got a friend who’s not into anime but you kinda wanna show them something to change that? Well, you could always show them School Days and then you wouldn’t have a friend anymore to worry about.

I’m sure you all have seen Spinal Tap. If you haven’t, there’s a very famous scene (and line) from one of the fictional band members talking about his amps: “These go to eleven.” He was referring to volume. School Days has a knob, too, only it goes to 12 and it’s about crazy. Each episode flicks that knob one more notch to the max until you get to the end and…

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

How are you? I’m doing okay, just calming down finally after repeated fits of rage while watching this series. I have a lot to say, though admittedly I’ll be basically just restating, less eloquently, what the THEM anime gang already said about this show. It’s less plagiarism and more the fact that they know what’s what and you should really just be reading their reviews instead of mine.

School Days is a troll series.

It effectively rick rolls you as you watch, dialing up the crazy with each episode. You will continually think it can’t get worse and then it does. Again and again. Until the last episode when it ends with what is symbolically a big middle finger.

Oh, by the way: spoiler warning! I’m not going to try to give away all of the specifics or assume you’ve seen it already, but it’s damn hard to talk about this show without getting into the details. And you know what? I’m not going to feel sorry for “ruining” it for you; it’s better if you skip it entirely anyway.

It begins rather simply, the first episode is a setup to a fairly formulaic love triangle that will probably leave you yawning. They try to mix it up by starting immediately with a confession (even titling the episode as such), but there is a reason most don’t do this. Confessions are normally emotional high points, whereas this series downplays it and even skips the actual confession to show her talking to a friend about it afterwards. Okay, maybe they just want to get to their budding relationship and explore that instead. “Well, maybe it gets better,” you’ll think to yourself as you continue on.

Most of the characters are pulled straight from the usual archetypes with not a single attempt at originality. The male lead is a flustered idiot, the tomboy is a cliché friendly type, and the girl he has a crush on is an overplayed delicate type. The animation is perfectly adequate, occasionally attempting interesting angles and cinematography (although to varying degrees of success), but is otherwise flat and plain. The voice actors are notably a bit iffy, some are okay but others feel like its their first real gig, and most sound too old for their characters. The music is mostly forgettable MIDI fare, but there is some decent piano work thrown in and the intro/outros aren’t too bad.

But, if you’re like me, you’ve heard countless times what an M. Night Shyamalan twist it has, and it always manages to get mentioned in those lists of recommended anime titles. It’s reputation precedes it and it certainly looks solid on paper. It’s just too bad that it seems so boring and cheap. “Give it a chance!” you hear your brain tell you. How could the hype lie?

By three or so episodes in, though, you’ll start to get frustrated. I know I called Zero no Tsukaima frustrating but this quickly surpasses it. Makoto, the male lead, is annoying. It’s sometimes endearing to see him be such an eager beaver for his girlfriend (at first) but mostly he’s just wishy-washy and dumb. Sekai, the tomboy, is aggravating since it is so obvious she digs him but is bottling it up instead to help him court the other girl. And Kotonoha is just… well, she’s kinda shy but means well, I suppose. She tends to be the most sympathetic of the lot. This turns out to be more true than I could have ever anticipated.

You see, by about halfway through the series, you start to get the feeling that the entire point of this show is to see how much every other character can take a giant stinky shit on Kotonoha. She wants nothing more than to try to be a good girlfriend and learn how to handle a relationship, never having had one before. All the while, Makoto turns into a cold ass, Sekai betrays her by cheating with him, and the girls in her class continually pick on her in increasingly cruel ways.

Then the visual novel roots of the show start to seep in. You’ll get side characters given moments in the spotlight with the male lead if only to get their time in. As I’ve said before, most animes coming from VNs tend to suffer from trying to merge a lot of separate girls’ stories into one canonical storyline and it is almost always with awkward results for the girls not chosen as the main girl. Their love feels tacked on, obligatory, and worse it tends to contribute to a harem feel despite most VNs not portraying them that way. It becomes a game of “let’s see who falls in love with the lead next!”

Worse, Makoto is not a good guy. He’s clumsy and dumb at first but he increasingly becomes cruel and heartless and then outright depraved. I am not joking, either. A large focus for awhile seems to be watching him descend slowly into wickedness. It becomes harder and harder to believe these girls see anything desirable in him.

Never before have I seen such a despicable showcase of cruelty and douchebaggery. We all love sarcastic asshole characters, in fact it’s mostly the makeup of your average American sitcom. And who doesn’t love Dr. House, the king of all sarcastic assholes? But we love them because they say the sarcastic and mean things we all wish we could say sometimes, but don’t because this is real life where feelings get hurt and relationships ruined. It’s a nice escape to see such colorful characters crack lines at each other for 24 minutes. But it’s also carefully scripted humor. Makoto isn’t a funny asshole. He’s just callous and selfish to the detriment of all others. It’s not enjoyable to watch.

The bottom drops out in the last four episodes. At this point, Makoto has not only tossed aside Sekai in favor of other girls, he’s soon shacking up with damn near every girl you’ve seen in the series thus far, with absolutely no remorse and an uncaring insatiable desire for sex above all else. He is a coward who never truly breaks up with Kotonoha or Sekai and just kind of avoids them when he loses interest.

You will be screaming mad, if you are like me. You will think it cannot get any worse. But remember: I told you this series dials up the crazy. every. episode.

By the last episode, your eyes will be twitching, your veins about to pop, and you’ll be so confused and crazed with seething rage that you won’t know how to respond when the finale hits you like a ton of bricks. And then you realize they just trolled you.

School Days is a troll series. It is. It leads you, unsuspecting, down a seemingly innocuous path, slowly incorporating more and more ridiculous drama. So slowly that you tell yourself they are just building tension or other vague sounding screenwriting tricks. But it never stops getting crazier until it basically gives you a “fuck you” with the ending. Because a boat.

You know what? That’s pretty ballsy, in a way. It’s genius, but in that 4chan horrible kind of genius. It’s like the writers wanted to see how far they could take you and how far you’d stick around before pissing in your face.

Bravo, guys. Bravo. You win. I was School Days roll’d.

But wait! Did I just give a bad review?

You might have thought to yourself, “How come that Sean guy always seems to enjoy and recommend things in his reviews? Does he lack a critical bone in his body?” Well, Timmy, it's simple, really: I try not to watch shit.

I do a bit of research and feelin' around on the ‘net and with select friends before committing to even downloading(whoops!) streaming things these days. There was a time in the early aughts when I gobbled up at least half of what the fansubbers put out, regardless, and I have dozens of full series rotting on CDs that I never watched. I don't have the time, mainly, to devote like that anymore, and furthermore life is too short to spend watching dinky tripe.

And you know what? I had every chance to stop myself here. My wonderful, darling girlfriend of 8 years (!!) whom I cherish even said: "Don't bother, it's stupid." I brought up the show to a friend and his reply was to restate the show's title, trail off with a verbal ellipsis and then sigh heavily, and give me a "Well, about that…" look.

Sometimes consensus is a good thing to follow. It can help me navigate the sheer multitude of series to find the good ones. But, then again, let's not forget that consensus says Naruto, Bleach, and Full Metal Alchemist are the best things since sliced bread. Maybe they are, and maybe I'm just being a snob for snubbing them, but I'm okay with that. I see it as no loss and I have no interest in them anyway.

And furthermore, it's a good point: sometimes you shouldn't follow the consensus. School Days is consistently brought up, but they also bring up Clannad (maybe it's good but I still have no interest and cannot no matter how I try find any in me) and a number of years ago it was all about Kimi ga Nozomu Eien (which, granted, was not bad, just... not worth the hype it garnered).

I still think School Days is worth skipping, but… it succeeded in generating a lot of strong emotions in me. Not good ones, per se, but even so. Isn’t that the point of stories? This one was hardly satisfying but damn if it wasn’t effective. So, there’s that.

Should you watch this? I guess you just have to ask yourself one question: “How much do I hate myself?” There’s your answer.

As of this writing, you can watch School Daysfor free on Crunchyroll.

It’s series like this that give me a stark reminder: stop wasting time watching bad anime. With all of the junk released every year it is an even more important lesson to learn, lest I find myself missing out on stuff like Hanasaku Iroha. There is a long tail of anime, too, and the diamonds serve to remind me just how far behind 2^nd and 3^rd place are. Or perhaps it is precisely because of all of the junk out there that this shines so much more brightly.

Hanasaku Iroha, or “The Colors of Blooming”, concerns 16 year-old Ohana Matsumae as her life is uprooted from the familiar world of Tokyo and put into a small, country town of Yusonagi due to her mother’s typical careless whimsy. Ohana’s grandmother, whom her mom does not get along with and hasn’t seen for some time, runs an inn there named Kissuisō. A stern and strict matron, she hides no ounce of her displeasure at having Ohana dumped on her and puts her to work to earn her room and board. The usually carefree and cynical Ohana must learn discipline and, perhaps more importantly, to rely on others, having grown up learning not to rely on her mom. It’s a coming of age story (implied also by the title) more than anything, framed around a slice-of-life look into the staff of Kissuisō that Ohana must now learn to get along with.

Slice-of-life is an overused genre if only because its nature lends itself to lazy application to whatever one wants. Oh? It’s not quite action or heavy drama, just character building? Does nothing exciting really happen? Is the comedy, romance, and/or style too subtle? Then slice-of-life it is. And yet, it’s not fair that we use it as an “everything else” label when something doesn’t clearly fit the established clichés like rom-com, magical girl, or shounen fighting, or whatever.

Hanairo is much more than it first seems. It’s very much a character driven series, slowly building up relationships, but also showing real growth and progress. A lot happens. But it’s not a story about world domination or star-crossed lovers. It’s far more real and human, keeping a tight cap on many of the usual cartoony hallmarks of anime. No rainbow palette of hair colors, no overt fanservice, no sweat drops or pratfalls, giant band-aids or hammerspace. Instead we get a realism that is astonishing in its near-flawless execution, and this design decision permeates everything about the show. It’s not that you won’t still see big expressive eyes or guys scratching the back of their head and other hallmarks of anime, but you’ll find the few that are there are subdued.

I knew two things going into this series: it was cute and somebody on the internet wished they had started watching it sooner. (Both of those are fan art, by the way.) Beyond that, well… I wasn’t sure what to expect, really. And maybe that’s why I was especially surprised when it left me speechless.

You see, Hanairo is beautiful. I had never heard of P.A. Works but their work (ha!) is nothing short of impressive. The art is phenomenally good, with sprawling, detailed, and gorgeous backgrounds. Inhabiting the world are characters lovingly crafted to be visually pleasing, recognizable, but not so pretty that the realistic sense is lost. Scenes are rarely static, with a plethora of angles, plenty of movement and dynamism, and an attention to detail that is jaw-dropping at times. Fortunately, I saw it all in HD and it was non-stop eye candy.

And yet they were not content with stopping there, as Hanairo boasts some fantastic voice actors along with an effective and above average score, complimented by a number of excellent opening, ending, and insert songs. Ohana especially is a stand-out, with a wonderful performance and an always delightful accent to her voice. But the rest of the cast, too, give their all, pulling off some very difficult emotional scenes with authentic and rousing results. The music is a mix of piano work and other instrumentals, usually quite good, and although it starts to get a bit repetitive after 20+ episodes it’s good enough that you probably won’t care. Thankfully they mix things up frequently with several insert songs. All are used expertly, timed well and fitting. Rounding it out, the sound effects are top notch, capturing every movement and foot step with nary a noticeable repeat or corner cut.

Above all, the design screams realism. Every step the characters take, every movement they make, their dress and hair, the backgrounds, the details, it all strives to build a consistent and believable world. And, for the most part, it works. Sometimes the CG is a little too obvious, but mostly there is so much to feast upon that the minor gripes really don’t matter.

I’ve been gushing, I know, but I can’t help it. It is ambitious and grand, and yet not, because for all of the spackle and shine the story itself is nothing new, per se. It’s subtle at times, and very human, but it’s also the same relationship problems and such you’ve seen before. And yet, it’s so believable and real you won’t care. It may not break new ground, but it does it so well. You can start to sort of see the cookie-cutter designs at first, with the tsundere type and the shy one and so on, but over time they reveal themselves to be far more nuanced. What it lacks in originality it makes up for completely with convincing characters and by delivering interactions you can get sucked into. Learning about their fears, their loves, and their goals and how it all works out… that’s the real focus and joy.

But even so, the grand showing with the big budget art, sound, and so on, hasn’t got a big budget story to drive it. Maybe it wouldn’t work with one. As it is, the writing and directing is usually tight and well done, with very little in the way of filler. But the reliance on characters over plot does mean that when it does tie up some of the early threads it feels a little lacking. After the initial bit of her getting accustomed and then the lingering question of her longtime friend she left in Tokyo and his feelings for her now that they are suddenly separated, things start to kind of meander. We get some more episodic looks into the other characters, which is appreciated and not really filler, but it does become noticeably weaker if only because it lacks a story arc to be working towards. Thankfully, things pick back up near the end and there is a quite satisfying finale.

I cannot speak highly enough of this series. I enjoyed it immensely and wish I, too, had watched it sooner. It isn’t for everybody, though, as the slow burn might not be exciting enough for some. The lack of many typical anime tropes also might not be to some’s liking. But if you let it, the characters will grow on you and I promise you’ll be in for a treat. It always left me with a big, dumb grin on my face. Perhaps because of its quality and mostly realistic approach, this could be a really good series to convince that friend or special someone to watch with you even if they “typically don’t like that anime stuff.” Sure, it’s got its anime/Japanese quirks like they all do, but it’s a refreshingly real and honest look at a group of people’s lives that the human story it has to tell overshadows the faults and peculiarities, if any.

As of this writing, you can watch Hanasaku Irohafor free on Crunchyroll. Be prepared for many feels, though (the good kind)!

Hey, internet. It’s time we had a chat. It’s about ponies. No, no, this isn’t some birds-and-the-bees talk where I show you that mrhands video. It’s about smaller ponies. Little ponies.

I’m sure you remember way back to 2010 (it seems so long ago!) when the world was still young, the Summer of Recovery (thanks, Joe!) was surely starting soon already underway, boys were boys, and girls were girls. How things have changed, huh? Now you can’t throw a rock without it smacking some effeminate schmuck with a Rainbow Dash plushie in the head. What has the world come to? What happened?

Well, ponies happened.

I still remember all those months and months I witnessed the sickness creeping into everything I loved on the internet. Pony macro images, brief mentions of RD, and Derpy Hooves on everything. Even if you did live under solid mineral aggregate, you probably still managed to get bludgeoned by ponies at some point. The fans of these ponies, they were everywhere, these…

Bronies.

Somewhere back in April of this year I finally gave in. I’d been planning on seeing what all the fuss was about for awhile. As a veteran of dozens of embarrassingly silly/dinky/girly animes over the years, I was not afraid at all of venturing forth into the land of ponies. (Fer chrissakes I’ve seen Bottle Fairy and was into Di Gi Charat in the very early aughts). Even so, the hype and overbearing fandom preceded it, giving me a lot of preconceived notions that I was attempting to discard in order to give the show its fair shot. Lucky for me, Netflix had recently added My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic to their streaming catalog, so I was able to watch legally, conveniently, and in high-def to boot.

And it was… good. Not the second coming of Christ, but just quite good. Really well written, the designs were carefully and thoughtfully done, and the execution and animation was a treat. It’s episodic and doesn’t exactly cater to marathon watching, so the girlfriend and I mostly just watched it in short 1-3 episode bursts every so often.

But there have already been several top notch essays on the show and bronydom that I won’t attempt to paraphrase here.

• Why bronies exist
• Why the show is good
• Why it is better than previous attempts

Of course, as soon as you mention twenty-something men liking a cartoon that has, at least historically (see above links on why this isn’t so much true anymore), catered to girls you can expect the inevitable butthurt outcry.

So, yeah, I like the show (Twilight Sparkle is best pony!), would even consider my self a fan… but a brony? Well… there is a bit of intra-fandom confusion over what the term even means. It is a portmanteau of “bro” and “pony”, so does it only apply to that pervasive twenty-something male bunch of fans? Or can the females use it, too? Should they exclusively use “pegasister”? It doesn’t roll off the tongue as much, it’s less well known, and it uses the more specific “pegasus”, one of three specific types of ponies in the show, instead of the generic term “pony”. Already this is getting too complicated, and we haven’t even covered whether brony should instead be relegated to the more serious uber-fans and not the casual ones like myself.

Additionally, the word carries a lot of baggage as it seems that there is a lot of hate directed to bronies. Not to the degree that, say, Chris-chan is hated but quite a bit more widespread. Some of it is understandable. Far too often and far too many of them can be a little… shall we say… obnoxious. But I don’t believe this is unique to bronies, rather a symptom of any fandom. They annoy me in much the same way Doctor Who fans do (which, before you brandish the pitchforks, is another show I hope to someday give a shot to see what the fuss is about). Hardcore fans, period, can be annoyingeven to fellow fans. As someone who has been a longtime fan of anime, believe me I know how annoying fellow fans can be. Bronies don’t even come close to the obnoxiousness otakus are capable of.

The term and fandom is so controversial it has become a game of sorts for fans to “out” famous (and I use that term loosely) folks as bronies. Notch (of Minecraft fame) and Gabe Newell (Valve head-honcho) are frequently cited as such in the geek community. More mainstream celebrities would be Lady Gaga and Seth Green. And I chose the verb “out” on purpose: to some, this is an embarrassing thing to admit (Notch, in particular, was frequently hesitant about it, especially after the initial backlash).

Any fandom that includes generous helpings of fan creations can get a little weird and exasperating to the outsider. All of the art (I’m convinced at least 25% of the whole of Deviant Art is MLP related), fan dubs, music videos, inspired music, and, yes, the fanfics and more fanfics. I’m not even going to go into the seedy Rule 34 underbelly. And then there are just the folks that are intellectually masturbating (thankfully, a good number of folks chimed in to say as much).

I don’t know. I find myself in an awkward position. Much like my experiences with Katawa Shoujo and its equally at times exasperating fandom, I’m sighing in face-palming frustration as often as I am sympathizing. I know where they are coming from, I understand their zeal and enthusiasm, but I’m also constantly wishing they’d maybe, I dunno, dial it back a notch? Jesus. It’s as if they invite hatred and criticism with their frequent obnoxiousness, but I also know that is entirely opinion and perspective — to them they are merely being typical fans, what’s the problem? I also don’t want them to feel like they should have to censor or hold back either. Like I said, I don’t know how to feel about it all. As much as it is exasperating, I anticipate having to frequently (but cautiously) defend them, if only because the show is undeserving of the hate and the fans are too easily mocked.

I’ve noticed this is a frequent position I take, one of moderation. My Little Pony, Katawa Shoujo, and anime in general. I rarely find myself going to the disturbing lengths some fans do and always feeling as though they are “giving the rest of us a bad name”. But are they? Is it really so pervasive? Or are they just a minority, albeit a vocal one? Isn’t this true of a lot of passions? Isn’t this just a symptom of nerdiness in general? Or am I just perpetuating an unfair knee-jerk assumption?

Or maybe I’ve just spent way too much time pondering ponies.

Once in a while, an anime series will get popular. Like, really popular. Often it is one of those never-ending serials like Naruto or Bleach, following in the footsteps of early sensations like Dragon Ball.

And then there is Haruhi.

The widespread adoration and near-universal acclaim the series has garnered since its inception baffles me. I mean, it’s not a bad series. It’s actually pretty good, above average even. But shit, it’s not that good, people! (I subscribe to the belief that it was merely lucky.) This is especially true given the shenanigans it has pulled over the years, but more on that later.

Getting past the hype, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is a solid series, well worth giving a chance, but it is hampered by a lack of direction and focus. Where it excels is having a quite clever premise and a solid group of purposefully archetypical characters with excellent voice actors balanced by a witty and sympathetic narrator as straight man.

The character designs are deliberate and effective, utilizing a lot of well-known and proven story writing tricks. They employ many clichés but knowingly so, even managing to more or less explain why through the story. The male lead is casual, detached, and frequently exasperated by the antics going on around him, providing amusing inner reactions and narration and performs admirably as an anchor for the viewer to relate to. Which is much appreciated because the rest of the cast includes: a stock moe ditzy klutz girl from the future, a seemingly dull and quiet book-nerd of few words actually an android from space, and an awfully polite and handsome fellow with secret ESP abilities. And then there’s Haruhi herself, a wildly unpredictable nutcase who’s subconscious just so happens, unbeknownst to her, to control reality and the world. If she imagines laser eye beams, it can actually suddenly happen.

In fact, it is her desire to meet someone from the future, an alien, and an esper, that seems to have manifested the very people she has come to associate with in her little SOS Brigade school club. And yet she has no idea this is the case, and the rest of the cast actively attempts to maintain her ignorance, fearing what could happen. You see, already her latent abilities to reshape the world are causing inter-dimensional trouble.

But don’t let all of that sci-fi mumbo-jumbo confuse you, because for the most part Haruhi disappointingly usually treats it as an excuse to do a lot of random… stuff. Episodic is an understatement.

The first season, which originally aired back in 2006, was half plot episodes and half random filler. Curiously to the rest of us, they made a big splash by airing them out of order. The plot episodes were in order but they were interspersed with the later (chronologically speaking) filler episodes in no particular order. This had the effect of seeing characters and developments you weren’t previously acquainted with and then later in a plot episode finally seeing them introduced. It was a gimmick, to be sure, but it made a lot of [virtual?] headlines for being a bold and unique approach and it also, in my opinion, sort of solved the problem of “how do we keep this interesting enough after the plot episodes finish”.

Because that’s where things start to falter. Once the meat of the story is over you’re left with a handful of random encounters and occasional two-part mini-stories. They are entertaining and fun, especially now that you are invested in the characters, but they wholly fail to move things forward in any meaningful way. And that’s a real shame, too, because like I said the premise (that sci-fi junk I mentioned before) is actually pretty damn interesting.

Haruhi boasts some, for its time, very good animation (courtesy once more of the ever impressive Kyoto Animation group) and the production all-around is solid. But you can’t help feeling like you got a half-story that abruptly ends right when things are getting really good.

Back in 2006, I remember sitting down to watch it with some college roommates, knowing little about what I was getting into, and us being in stitches with the first episode (which was actually a filler episode with the whole cast already introduced, none of whom we had any idea who were). This was the famous parody video the characters produce for their school culture festival, a sort of terrible b-movie mash-up of all sorts of anime genres from magical girl to fighting and so on. It managed to do a really good job of both parodying the various genres (with lots of subtle nods and in-jokes) and yet also capture the really shitty student video aspects: characters awkwardly standing/swaying, terrible lines and acting, unfortunate background things like cars driving by as they are filming, amateurish MIDI soundtrack, etc., all on top of a plot that leaps around with no sense of connection.

Six years later, I’ve since learned that Haruhi got a sort of second season, so I sat down to re-watch the whole thing with the new stuff. They re-aired the series in 2009, but this time in chronological order and with several new episodes in-between the original 2006 ones, effectively doubling the total number of episodes. Unfortunately, while not completely worthless, it was not worth the wait. The new episodes primarily make up two new arcs. One lasts five episodes and presents the events leading up to and during the filming of said culture festival video, which previously we’d only gotten hints at and then seen the aftermath.

And then there’s Endless Eight.

The name says it all, really. Eight of the new episodes all with the same title and devoted to a great, in theory, concept of a time loop. Due to Haruhi’s subconscious desire for summer not to end because she has so many things she wants to do before school starts up again, the characters find themselves in a sort of Groundhog’s Day situation of repeating the same last two weeks of summer before school. None of them know it, though, after it resets, but our narrator finds himself having strange feelings of deja-vu, remnants of past loops as they later surmise. Among them, only the android girl is aware of it all, though being an observer she never tells them, and instead plays along, each time, as they go through the same events and they, yet again, discover the loop and, yet again, fail to resolve it. It is a fascinating concept, especially for the implications on the android girl, as she reveals they have been doing this over 15,000 times, totaling nearly 600 years by her observation. (One can only imagine how unfathomably bored she must be!)

But the potential is wasted, so very wasted. So much could be explored with the loop, attempts to resolve it, and, more so, on developing the android character. Instead, you are treated to eight fucking episodes of the same damn thing. I’m not kidding. It is the same dialog, same events, every. fucking. time. What really kills me is that they actually re-animate the whole thing, using new angles, outfits, scene composition, you name it, with no footage that I could tell being re-used. The dialog is also re-recorded and varies ever so slightly. Maybe he says it different this time because he was sitting and then stands up in the middle, giving a little grunt as he stands to the middle of the delivery. But it is the same line. Each time they discuss the loop and each time they fail to break out. And you get another episode of the same thing. And again. And again. It is infuriating how much they could have had progression each time. Perhaps have him slightly more and more aware of the loop sooner, which they kind of sort of do temporarily and then backpedal on. But no. It’s just a repeat each time. Kudos for consistency and re-animating and re-recording and all that. But my god. Why? When the fans only get a handful of new episodes as part of this “season two”, why waste the majority of them on this pointlessness? I won’t spoil the eventual resolution outright, but I’ll just go ahead and tell you it’s dumb and anti-climactic. Maybe the pointless repetition could have sort of redeemed itself with a satisfying finish. But no, there is none of that. You can probably tell I’m a bit bitter, but it is because I effectively spent 3 hours watching the same episode.

Whew.

Anyway, despite these glaring problems, I still enjoyed the series, and the omake stuff is weird and random and kinda fun, but ultimately there is little satisfying and lasting with Haruhi. Its problems don’t outweigh its good points but even so you’ll be wishing, just as I am, that they had spent more time on a concrete and satisfying story. As it stands, the first six plot episodes remain the high point, followed by twenty or so episodes of… other stuff. Oh well.

As of this writing, you can watch both seasons of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, including both omake series, for free on Crunchyroll.

Addendum

Having now seen the movie, I felt I should say a bit more. The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya is a fantastic bookend to the TV series and it only proves to me that the premise is wonderfully clever with loads of potential. It also makes it all the more infuriating: why the hell did they so often squander it?

As I said above, the first six plot episodes are great, followed by what amounts to filler and more filler briefly interrupted in the middle by an excruciating series of repeat episodes. Then the movie, which takes place chronologically right after the series ends, once again finds the reigns and gallops full-speed through over two and a half hours of meaty plot.

I’d always thought that Yuki, the android girl, was severely under utilized and, worse, under developed. The Endless Eight further cemented that in my mind, as I thought she could be a fascinating vessel for story exploration. And without spoiling anything, the movie takes the cue and finds just the potential I knew was there all along. It’s moving and dramatic and it even serves to push our dear narrator to make a firm decision about the events that he so far has just let happen to him as a passive complainer.

I dare say the movie just about fully redeems the whole series including the Endless Eight fiasco. But it also makes the lame decisions in the middle stand out ever the more!

Unfortunately, Crunchyroll doesn’t carry it (do they carry any movies?) so you’re on your own.

Android has an file system browser app. Windows Phone and iOS do not.

Some sing the praises and many wish for the other two to implement a similar built-in app. Often they denigrate Microsoft and Apple’s decision to hide it, for phones and tablets certainly still have file systems. Why remove functionality? Especially something as veteran as the humble file system browser?

For as far back as most tech-savvy folks can remember there has always been some incarnation of the file system browser. In fact, the very metaphor of files and folders has remained largely unchanged for nearly three decades. The nostalgia and comfort associated with such a familiar concept cannot be understated.

But the only reason we’ve been working with file systems up until now was largely due to the complexity problem.

For a long time computers were dumb and slow. Only in the last few years has modern computer hardware gotten to the point where an average, budget build from Walmart will still probably be vastly more power than any typical home user will really need. When was the last time (outside of gaming) you worried about “minimum system requirements”? Oh sure, the market for boutique-style powerful graphics cards, 7.1 audio, and beefy six or eight core CPUs still exists, but it is (and, arguably, always was) largely relegated to the shrinking enthusiast market (aka “PC gamers” and, more distantly, video editors and other heavy multimedia stuff).

I should know. I have been building and constructing Frankenstein computers since I was a teen. And I still find myself reading Tom’s Hardware benchmarks and the like. But even I have found that after building my last computer, it has so much more power than even I need. Other than possibly upgrading the graphics card in the next year or two to keep up with games, I can’t foresee needing more power any time soon for the things I typically do.

We’ve also wrestled with the fact that writing good software is hard. It takes skilled technical folk many man-hours to complete. We have an entire profession and college track. As computers have gotten more powerful, so too have the lines of code grown exponentially. Doom was developed by a handful of folks at id for a minimal budget compared to today’s multi-million dollar projects with credits at the end as long as most Hollywood movies.

Writing a complicated automatic file system wasn’t high on programmers’ lists, of which there were few anyway, when all this desktop stuff began.

That isn’t to say that file systems aren’t complicated. They were and still are today. But they are also kind of a minimal requirement. The OS has to have a standardized way of accessing long-term permanent storage to do the types of useful things we expect. Exposing that underlying requirement as a sort of office file cabinet, with folders and documents, was a pretty ingenious metaphor for helping someone wrap their heads around bits being written to and read from magnetic platters.

But this is a skeuomorph that has grown long in the tooth. It was a metaphor needed only because we chose to expose this necessary underlying system to the user in the first place. Sure, we had our reasons of time and manpower being limited as previously stated, but regardless here it was. The metaphor also quickly broke down under even common situations. Take the classic mistake most rookies cannot be faulted for making:

1. “Open” a file in Notepad – okay, this is kind of like taking a document out of the file cabinet and putting it on your physical desk (in this case, the similar desktop metaphor)
2. “Edit” that file – so, like, write on it with a pen or pencil, or possibly use the typewriter on said desk to make changes
3. “Close” the file – put it back in the file cabinet
4. ?? But wait, Notepad is asking if I want save or discard the changes? What? I already edited it!

Here we have the mental disconnect. What is actually an in-memory copy that needs to be flushed to disk, overwriting the previous copy, doesn’t fit the mental model.

You see file systems, actually, are a really technical feature that is confusing to anyone with only a basic understanding of computers. And unfortunately, the file system lives on and begs them to learn its idiosyncrasies to this day.

But why should they have to learn it?

I have a basic understanding of how a car works, but I also know that even my limited knowledge on the matter is not required to be a good driver. My car, which is several years old even, lets me know when to do the basic stuff so I don’t have to understand why oil is needed for an engine or how it can get dirty. I just know to take it to somebody when the lil’ maintenance indicator says to.

To be sure, there are many reasons why knowing better is useful, I am not discounting that, and it is true for more than just cars and computers.

What I’m really getting at, though, are barriers to entry.

As developers of software, we exist as the “experts” who understand the ins-and-outs and can even write the instructions to control these mechanical wonders. We can morph them from glorified calculators into useful devices for the layman.

As developers, it is our duty to make computers accessible.

I don’t think we are morally obligated, per se, but rather that duty drives our professional existence. The company that makes things the most useful and accessible is typically going to be the more successful one, which in turn means money to pay more and better developers. Companies that don’t, well… they are in danger of losing customers to competition.

This is an incredibly simplistic reduction, I admit.

At any rate, I see things like the hoary file system as being ripe for change. Better that we avoid it and make learning it unnecessary. This may involve hiding it entirely, as two major mobile operating systems have done.

But hiding it or replacing it is hard work for us. It requires a lot more design and thinking and coding, because either way we still need a file system in there somewhere, only now further abstracted from the user’s point of view. This, however, relieves them of needing to learn about it in order to make use of their device. It brings us one step closer to making computer devices that much more accessible to people like your mom who have neither the time nor desire to learn.

In fact, one of the most beneficial things about the recent mobile craze has been forcing us, both application and operating system developers, to think about removing a lot of those relics of the past. Think about some things most modern mobile phones try to hide from you:

• The file system
• RAM
• Multi-tasking
• Boot/startup and shutdown

Save for Android (and even it only really tosses you a bone with that app pictured above), they try to hide the fact that there is an underlying file system. No worrying about folders, organizing files, or what have you. All of that work is, ideally, meant to be handled automatically by the OS or the individual apps themselves.

Memory and multi-tasking are abstracted by automatic suspending and resuming of apps, moving away from our long-held concept of application “windows” that require manual moving around and closing/minimizing/maximizing. Indeed, virtual memory already was a step in this direction on the desktop, to help share limited memory by harvesting memory from applications that are idle or currently unused instead of telling users “Sorry, you can’t open Word right now, try closing IE and RealPlayer first to free up RAM!” And all of this was already an improvement over DOS’s model of “You better hope this all fits into 640KB, buddy!”

Even the whole power management thing, where devices tend to favor “always-on” approach while still being efficient on batteries instead of assuming a constant never-ending power source from a wall socket. This has driven the way we write apps (push notifications, background refreshing and syncing, occasionally connected approach to data sources) and driven CPU designs to be dramatically smarter with automatic clock speed adjustment. No more actively telling Windows to “sleep” (which, again, we had started towards with explicit laptop support for sleeping on lid close somewhere around the time of Windows XP), the whole OS and CPU just kind of intelligently and quickly switch between dramatically different power states.

Of course, the challenge is always in the implementation. And while the goals may be simple, we can certainly argue and disagree as to the efficacy and success the various mobile operating systems have had so far. It will be a difficult road, but I think abandoning things like a file system browser will be ultimately for the best. However, it will require something even better in its place.

Is this what we would get if Christopher Nolan attempted a magical girl anime? It is heavily influenced by its pedigree and yet it stops to ask itself constantly “How would this actually work?” It manages to make dark and gritty a genre well known for its colorful sparkles and obnoxiously sweet exterior. Although you wouldn't know it by looking at it.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica follows in the footsteps of many decades of genre-defining work, most notably the epitome of magical girl anime Card Captor Sakura. CCS itself was merely an attempt to coalesce the genre into a pure and effective form, learning from past pioneers like Sailor Moon and using CLAMP’s industry experience as a launch pad. Let’s run through the checklist:

1. Protagonist is a young girl, Madoka, who does not have powers at first
2. Must fight evil beings, in this case “witches”
3. The girls transform before fighting
4. Transformed they wear cute outfits (lots of skirts, frills, ribbons, etc.)
5. Involves working as a team with other majokka
6. Talking cutesy animal sidekick, in this case “Kyubei”
7. Keep their magic identities secret from classmates and family
8. Use magical artifacts to transform and/or fight, in this case “soul gems”

Yep, we’ve definitely got a magical girl series here.

But I believe the strong comparisons and obvious genre-fulfillment to be more than intentional. Many have described Madoka Magica as a deconstruction of the genre. This is possible only by first setting up the pieces in the traditional fashion before turning the whole thing on its head. Along the way, the show will attempt a dark spin on the conventions by asking how this might, given a future where certain beings exist, actually work, usually always to grim results. Where it shines is in its continual cleverness in answering these questions and revealing them in dramatic and sometimes subtle ways. It is a show that sports a deceivingly cutesy exterior and isn’t afraid to shock you with violence and death (though not in a juvenile/gimmicky way like, say, Elfen Lied).

A lot could be spoiled about the plot, which I will attempt to refrain from doing here, but suffice to say there are several twists and revelations along the way. The show is kept tight, mostly, at only twelve episodes, and while it sometimes struggles with pacing here and there (especially the first half) it never suffers from outright filler. This is much appreciated, too, as it has a lot of world-building potential and little time to show it.

While it is about magical girls, there is a distinct lack of some of the usual staples. Transformations are usually quick with little fanfare, never stopping the action to watch a 30-second transformation while everyone else waits patiently. The girls also usually fight with real weapons like guns, swords, and so on. They live harsh lives full of violence and solitude that goes unrecognized and unappreciated since their identities are kept secret from regular people, even their families (if they have any left). They become unable to live normal, care-free lives, instead bound by their need to fight every night, forsaking their social lives and sanity in some cases. It isn't even a question of duty or justice or anything noble, in fact some of the girls are distinctly not nice, but rather the witches they fight drop seeds that replenish the magical power necessary for them to survive. Some even become viciously territorial as a result. Did I mention this was a very dark take on the genre?

The animation quality is a mix of stupendous and good, mostly split between the environments and characters. Backgrounds are vast, detailed, pristine, and futuristic. Special effects are also top-notch. Characters themselves, however, tend to be a little iffy at times, with a very desaturated and almost sketchy feel. They fit the genre by being simpler and cutesy but they also feel a bit out of place inside the impeccable cityscapes and especially when the action starts.

Of special mention are the “labyrinths” where the witches dwell and the girls must venture into to battle evil. They involve mixed media and a whole lotta LSD-powered imagination which is frantic and confusing but also just incredibly eye-catching and unique, for they are rarely the same twice. In fact, battles themselves are usually full of cool and imaginative choreography. Suffice to say, the series as a whole, especially the action, is quite a visceral treat, even with the occasionally dodgy character animation. And it would be remiss of me not to mention that Yuki Kajiura provides her typical evocative score. The only complaint here is that if you’ve heard her work before (Noir, .hack//Sign, Tsubasa Chronicleand more)  this won’t be anything new, but while her style is always distinct and the same it is still always very good.

If it has any major weaknesses at all it would have to be the characters. Many of them are awfully stock cliché archetypes, and while several do end up redeeming themselves later on it is usually too little too late. Worst of all is Madoka herself who spends the entire show basically useless and feeling sorry for herself and everyone else. I get that it is sort of required given that the major plot question for the series is “Will Madoka become a magical girl?” and so it has to wait until the end to resolve that big question, but it still means she spends eleven episodes basically as an annoying crybaby. Beyond her plot uselessness despite being the focal point (literally, even), fundamentally she lacks an interesting personality. She’s got no skills, no concrete desires or dreams, not even any male characters to be smitten by or slowly grow close to (see also: Yukito and Syaoran, respectively, from CCS). This is all especially disconcerting as it isn’t like this problem hasn’t been solved/avoided before in many works prior, even within the genre.

I enjoyed Madoka Magica a lot and really got a kick out of its clever take on the genre, but even so if magical girl isn’t your thing you probably won’t be won over solely by its savvy spin. Despite the “deconstruction” it does to the genre it is still, ultimately, very much a magical girl anime, though certainly a very different and distinct one all the same. So adjust your expectations accordingly. It is a shame there aren't more stand-outs like this, for good or bad, as I enjoy seeing fresh takes especially in genres saturated with clones.

As of this writing, you can watch Puella Magi Madoka Magicafor free on Crunchyroll. (It’s even in glorious 1080p if you’re a premium member!)

Never has there been a series that set out to be as pointless and pandering as Lucky Star. It has the slice-of-life comedy of four school age girls approach like Azumanga Daioh and Nichijou, albeit favoring the mundane and otaku over the awkward, random, and nonsense of the other two. And while it does what it does extremely well, its one-dimensional approach prevents it from ever being more than just a giant 20+ episode in-joke.

On its surface, Lucky Star seems hardly original or interesting. It’s about four girls (plus several more supporting cast, many that only appear in the second half onwards) in school and has little in the way of plot beyond the notable passage of time. It is drawn in a very simple and slightly SD cutesy girl style with little attempt at realism. While Kyoto Animation does, as always, a really good job at consistency and movement, it is still nothing to be impressed with overall. Really, the whole thing just seems kinda mundane.

Worse, the first episode further cements this by spending practically half the episode, easily ten minutes or so, talking about different desserts, how to best eat them, and other trifles. Seriously, why is there such a cult following for this thing?

Well, if you give it a chance and you’re in the right target demographic you’ll see why. The number of subtle/explicit references to other anime, life as a gamer/anime fan, songs, you name it, plus the occasional note on random bits of life, are what drive everything in this show. Its humor is understated and subtle and its appeal is niche at best since to get a lot of the references you have to already be fairly well versed in both anime and even things outside it like gaming, MMOs, and other tangential fandoms and internet culture. I’ll also point out that KyoAni stuff, in particular, is especially referenced a lot (Haruhi most frequently, Full Metal Panic! occasionally). But if you do get all that then the whole thing is one long smile as they poke fun at the genres and terms and so on. It’s less about cackling belly laugh humor and more about small “that’s so true” grins.

Outside of all the in-jokes, as good as they are, the characters (primarily the main four) actually manage to do a really good job of being likable and real. Sure they kind of start off with some very obvious archetypes (which even Konata loves to point out), but they manage to be very consistent and very well acted, such that you’ll really grow attached to them. They manage to make the inane conversations fun and interesting simply because of their strong individual personalities. This is probably the main reason the show works as well as it does, and the constant nods to the otaku culture become merely the icing on the cake.

Konata is the obvious Mary Sue otaku stand-in who spends all her time reading manga, watching anime, and playing games, and spouts most of the in-jokes and internet references. Miyuki is smart, attractive, mature, wealthy, sweet, but also a little clumsy and afraid of simple things like dentists. She frequently goes on extended Wikipedia-like explanations of all sorts of random trivia and facts. Tsukasa is ditzy, sleeps a lot, can never focus on her studies/homework (worse than Konata even), and is not good at sports or really anything, but means well. Kagami, her twin sister (fraternal, though), is the opposite: a dedicated student, good at sports, responsible, and level-headed (and she’s easily my favorite), but she has a habit of being too serious and difficult to approach.

Its episodic and incredibly meandering approach (why do they even bother titling the episodes?) means it is, at least for me, difficult to marathon watch and is best consumed in small 1-3 episode bunches. But it does mean you can pretty much re-watch them in any order you want since the occasional new character introductions (which you won’t need if you are re-watching) is all that you might miss.

Refreshingly, the show manages to avoid the cheap and easy sources of humor like “accidental” nudity in bathhouses, dressing rooms, and other sexually-driven oopsies that so often plague a lot of anime. It even, occasionally, manages some sweeter and more meaningful/touching moments, though admittedly these are rare and often punctuated with gags.

If you get the references and you’re down with its strange subtle humor then you will undoubtedly devour the whole thing and enjoy it quite well. There is certainly little else like it out there that I’ve seen. For everybody else, though, you’ll probably wonder what the point is and move on. I have to say, as much as I personally enjoyed it, I can only recommend it to those select few it seems to be specifically designed for.

As of this writing, you can watch Lucky Starfor free on Crunchyroll.

The tiger and dragon stand together as equals. Thus does this too-often generic feeling rom-com begin. While funny and sweet and dramatic at times it feels held back by a lot of typically dumb decisions and watered-down commercial appeal. Even so, there is still a lot to like. A fun diversion, if a bit forgettable in the end.

Toradora! derives its name from the two lead characters, Ryuuji and Taiga. Ryuuji’s name contains the root symbol “ryu” which means dragon (think of the “shoryuken” or “dragon punch” from the Street Fighter games) and Taiga’s name… well… just say it out loud: tye-guh. Tiger. Yep. They symbolize fierce and individual predators who typically live solitary lives as a result. This choice of naming is more than just symbolic as it precisely sets up the initial archetypes. Both, for different reasons, are rather “troubled” socially.

Ryuuji’s problem is genetic: his face frightens people and they immediately assume he’s a punk ruffian. This is despite the fact that he is actually a rather kind-hearted, responsible, if shy guy (probably as a result of being shunned so automatically). He also even has a bit of an obsessive-compulsiveness about cleanliness and order. Both of these traits drive a lot of the early comedic moments, although disappointingly the scary-face bit becomes largely forgotten after only a few episodes. Taiga, on the other hand, is a short, child-like, adorable lolita with an incredibly aggressive and intimidating attitude. She attracts a lot of attention due to her looks and yet is quick to anger and bouts of violence, earning her the nickname “The Palm-Top Tiger”.

Of special mention: as a character, Taiga seems to be specifically bred as the most advanced and pure tsundere girl that science ever created. She’s also voiced by Rie Kugimiya, a veteran if there ever was of tsundere characters (Nagi, Shana, Louise), who at this point knows how to perform the role terrifyingly well. I gotta say, though, it’s impressive and effective, and she’s probably one of the more likable tsundere girls in the end, mostly because she eventually makes real emotional progress as a character.

From the very beginning the show sets up the inevitable coupling and it is basically a matter of wading through 25 episodes to see how they end up together. There are few surprises along the way and not any you cannot figure out several episodes prior. The rest of the bunch is rounded out by the usual friends-of-the-leads, a good-natured popular and smart glasses wearing dude and a bubbly and effervescent out-going girl. Did I mention that each of the leads is secretly in love with the other lead’s best friend? In fact, most of the series is spent with the two helping each other with strategies to get hooked up with their respective friends once they figure out they have compatible I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine goals.

Much of the series is spent going through the usual misunderstandings and complications and it seems like neither will ever be able to win the heart of their desire. All the way we learn a lot about the two plus their friends, as each is usually given an arc of their own to be developed. Laughs and antics are had, tears and blushing are frequent, and the whole thing kind of rides a rollercoaster between pretty good and bad/dumb. Some of the drama feels artificial and obtuse (this would mostly be Ryuuji’s friend, Yuusaku), sometimes it is confusing and poorly executed (mostly the stuff involving Taiga’s family), sometimes it is undermined by the comedy (lots, especially early on, involving Minori the girl Ryuuji secretly likes). And yet, other times, it manages to be subtle, mature, and clever, like the slow and surprising development of Ami’s character. And then there are the times it really shines, thankfully typically involving the two leads and Ryuuji’s family.

Despite its predictableness and unoriginality (especially in a lot of the supporting cast), there is still a lot to like here. When it’s good, it tends to be pretty damn good, but it too often gets wobbly and can’t maintain its perch. Often it feels like it is trying too hard to cover all of the bases and be marketable, and it is usually those clichés that frustrate the most. Additionally, I felt that for the majority of the show, the two leads felt way too much like really good siblings. I certainly would have liked to have seen more romantic gestures or hints earlier on, but even with the semi-rushed-romance near the end there is plenty of really good development of trust and intimacy (albeit in a more family kind of way).

As far as technical things go, the animation is competent and mostly pretty good, your typical above-average TV quality. Openings/endings tend to be a little on the meh side, though the endings fair a bit better. Background music is kind of a refreshing boopy electronica at times and I kinda liked it, and it fit the playful feel of the show, but it is still mostly forgettable.

Maybe it is just me, but it seems like the older I get the more easily I tear up. Even this sometimes-dinky series managed to get me welled up a few times. There are some really touching moments and, especially the last arc, some really dramatic highs. But, then there’s the ending. No spoilers, of course, but… seriously, what? It’s not a bad ending, it actually manages to wrap things up and resolve almost everything, which is more than can be said for a lot of shows. But seriously, what? What the hell is up with that last episode?

Overall, I’d say this still manages to be a pretty good little show, above average even, and with a proper resolution it won’t leave you feeling like you wasted your time. Then again, it suffers from a lot of been-there-done-that as it seems to not want to venture very far from the beaten path. Easy to watch, easy to enjoy, but it probably won’t become one of your all-time-top favorites.

As of this writing, you can watch the first six episodes of Toradora!for free on Crunchyroll. (The remainder is only available for premium users. Since it was only just recently added, it is possible they will make it fully available sometime in the future.)

It’s Glee meets Japanese animation, or perhaps who put K-On! in my Hanasaku Iroha? Three girls and two guys, for various reasons, come together to form a choir club and along the way learn a lot about life, dreams, aspirations, but most of all music and friendship. Yes, it is that kind of show.

While music plays a big part, the series primarily concerns itself with the characters. Sure, they go to a music-focused school, they form their choir club, there is a lot of singing and discussions about music, concerts, events, and so on. But even being front and center the music aspects manage to remain secondary to the personal lives and growth of the main cast. It’s slice-of-life and some mild drama with music as part of the setting more than the theme. With a nod to realism, you’ll find no rainbow-palette of hair colors or over-the-top slapstick. Light on humor, almost devoid (unfortunately!) of romance, it steers clear of angst, and it never exploits eroticism.

So, then what is it about? Well, I’ve already pretty much told you. Some students form a club and things sort of happen. It’s subdued and subtle drama, not slow, for in thirteen episodes they cover a lot of time and ground with practically zero filler. Even so, it’s less about the events themselves as it is the personal epiphanies that take place. Most of the main cast get their mini-arc to deal with and overcome some personal problem, but there is a lot of overlap and it manages to juggle things around fairly well, even foreshadowing in many cases. Wakana must come to terms with her recently deceased mother; Sawa faces opposition to her dream of becoming a jockey from both her father and genetics (she is too tall/heavy, most jockeys being practically midgets as you know); Konatsu must overcome her nervousness when performing, the guilt of a past embarrassing screw-up hanging over her; Taichi and Wien well… they are the guys so their stories are a bit less emphasized. Taichi is trying to become a professional badminton player despite being in a school where he is the sole member of the badminton club, and Wien is trying to catch up on Japanese culture having moved away at a young age to Austria for twelve years.

For those curious about the name, I can summarize with my limited understanding of Japanese. The name Tari Tari sounds a little silly to us but that is only because it is playing with a very well-known Japanese language construct, in this case a specific verb conjugation form, –tari. Much like in English we conjugate verbs with –ed to mean past tense, Japanese has these too only their suffixes go much further. At least in modern Japanese, –tari is used when listing activities in an incomplete list. By incomplete I mean kind of how we understand e.g. versus i.e., where e.g. is more like “for example” and implies just some examples not all, where as i.e. usually means “in other words” and seeks to rephrase or clarify and thus implies a complete list. So each episode’s title is usually in this form, listing some activities, all verbs with the –tari ending (they even colorfully highlight tari), so episode one is “Running and Inviting” or “Tobidashittari Sasottari”. With the exception of the final episode they always list two, thus Tari Tari.

The comparison to HanaIro (which I reviewed previously) is especially apt since they are both original works (that is, not adaptations of existing manga) by P.A. Works, and you can readily tell. Following HanaIro, Tari Tari is even more astoundingly gorgeous, with impeccably presented environments with flawless detail. Characters are similarly animated extremely well. Despite being such a low-key slice-of-life show it still manages to impress with lots of little details everywhere. Seriously, you will not see a better looking serialized show.

And yet, there was something that always felt lacking about the animation. In fact, it was at the root of the whole thing, something that felt lacking all throughout the show. And this is despite having so many strengths: a stunning animation budget, visually-appealing (read: cute) characters, a strong classical soundtrack with some decent insert songs, a very talented voice cast, and a tightly written and subtle-yet-dramatic script dealing with some very touching issues. “Heartwarming” is the best single-word description I can think of. So why, in the end, did I feel so underwhelmed?

I think it is because Tari Tari is too good. The environments are so flawless they can often feel a bit sterile and synthetic. The characters are so impeccable and cute they can feel like dolls without enough variations, which is the real bedrock and strength of anime in its ability to exaggerate emotions and information concisely and visually. Because they strive for realism, it is absent so many of the anime shorthands (think of the many sound effects, visual cues like piku anger marks or squiggly depressed lines, sweat drops, and so on). The stories are human and dramatic while still low-key but they get wrapped up and resolved almost too neatly in the end. With only a half-season to try to show five characters plus some secondaries (the Vice Principal and Wakana’s mother), the show feels a bit detached since it can never focus on one character and truly get into their head.

Am I really complaining that there weren’t enough bad things, be they technical or plot conflict? I think I am. But that’s the spice of a good story. With all of the polish and pizazz they forgot to add enough spice, leading to a really good looking dish with a somewhat bland flavor. If you head into this expecting just a simple semi-sweet story then you’ll not be disappointed. After all, there’s still so much it gets right and does really well.

As of this writing, you can watch Tari Tarifor free on Crunchyroll. (Premium users get it in 1080p, too!)

Instead of my usual droning thousand word essay I’ve bundled several shorter reviews this time. Mostly because these shows weren’t really deserving of a full review.

Papa no Iukoto wo Kikinasai! (or, roughly, Listen To What Your Father Says!) is surprisingly decent given that on first look it seems to be yet another onerous fanservice-heavy dinky harem show. Which, it still is, mind you. It wants to be a meaningful story about family, too, and it does stick to its guns to tell that story. But it undermines itself with the gratuitous boobs, panties, and sexual fetishizing. Worse, the sisters are all cringingly underage (14 and 10). Thankfully the male lead is overwhelmingly kind and non-lecherous. The story it does tell is actually pretty good, but it can’t make up its mind what it wants to be, and in so doing kinda falls short on both.

The main character’s older sister has recently gotten married to a man with two girls of his own, both each from two past marriages, and she also has her own daughter. These newly weds go off on a trip/honeymoon and are presumed dead when the plane goes missing. To prevent the family from splitting the now parentless trio up, our lead steps up to take in the girls and be their guardian, despite being a poor college student living in a small apartment. It sounds better as a premise than the actual execution, given that I’ve left out all of the dinkier details, but to its credit it does follow this narrative with little side-tracking and even mostly concludes things on a positive note.

The animation is fairly good (particularly the backgrounds and scenery) although the characters and overall style can be a little iffy sometimes (and way too rosy). Intro/Outro are above average though, and the voice acting is generally fine, although the male lead is meh and Yui Horie is miscast as the monotone Raika. It takes a couple episodes to get going but manages to be enjoyable despite undermining its core drama every step of the way, but even so it’s far from bad. If you want a better and fanservice-less family story, I suggest Usagi Drop. If you want better harem/fanservice, take your pick ‘cuz there’s dozens and dozens without all of that “story junk” to get in the way. Speaking of fanservice…

Chuu-Bra!! is a bizarre hybrid of cheesecake and candid discussion. In a nutshell, main character girl is basically an underwear nerd: she loves learning about different kinds of panties/bras and seeing the new designs. Her grandmother was a professional designer and her step-brother has followed that path too. Of course, it’s a very odd hobby to have so get ready for lots of hijinks as everyone misunderstands why she wears such brazen styles (she’s testing her brother’s designs out) and keeps looking at other girls and wanting to critique them.

The fanservice is heavy, to say the least, with tons and tons of lurid groping and oops-I-tripped-pantyshots. And yet, despite the weird and obvious pandering premise, it spends a lot of time telling a serious story of her finding friends, starting an Underwear Club, and educating lots of women (and even a few guys) on the finer points of wearing bras, selecting styles, and so on. Realistically, even, lots of girls have never thought about it much, are too embarrassed to ask their moms, and so there’s a lot of talk about how to get a good fit for different bust sizes and when to start wearing a bra, etc. It’s surprising how they manage to pull off both ecchi and education, but, bafflingly so, it works.

The animation quality is inconsistent but mostly good, although in its favor it is colorful and dynamic with lots of movement, cartoonish comedy, and interesting angles (and not just the dozens of times they’re angling to show panties). It never quite manages to be impressive, though, and always feels a little too cheap and too limp in its execution. Still, I did enjoy it for what it was, and at only twelve episodes it doesn’t drag on or anything. But, like Papa-Kiki, the serious story it seems to want to tell so badly keeps getting undermined by the fanservice it seems obligated to produce, as if it doesn’t think anyone would stick around for the drama/story bits without a little loli-cakes every now and then. In retrospect, I think both shows might be just a tad insulting to the viewer in that way, or maybe they just see no problem with shamelessly mixing drama and cliché fanservice. Speaking of fanservice (yes, again)…

Recorder and Randsell is easy to digest given that each episode is a mere three minutes. This, coupled with its incredibly dumb plot/premise, means it will probably be a not-so-satisfying hour and a half or so should you decide to watch it. Basically, the two main characters are siblings. The girl is a high-schooler who looks like a ten year-old and her younger brother is a fifth-grader who looks like he’s in his twenties. And that is the entire joke, punctuated too often with pedophile/predator punch lines to end the episode.

The animation is passable with plenty of the usual fanservice, and it did occasionally elicit a chuckle from me. One of its [few] redeeming qualities is the all-star cast of veteran VAs. Rie Kugimiya (Shana, Louis, Taiga) is the sister, Aya Hirano (Haruhi, Konata, and others) plays her friend, and Takahiro Sakurai (Cloud Strife and tons others, including the step-brother in Chuu-Bra!! above) plays their creepy jobless neighbor. Don’t expect it to get anywhere, resolve anything, or amount to much more than a way to pass the time with some really dumb humor. Still, sometimes dumb humor can be funny and enjoyable. If it weren’t so short I’d say don’t waste your time.

As of this writing, Crunchyroll has Papa-Kiki, Chuu-Bra!!, and RecoRan streamable for free.

Within the first few minutes I knew this would be something good. You ever notice that? When a show strides in and gives you that wink and he’s just so… confident and sexy… and… uh, we’re talking about a twelve episode anime series, right? Yes. Well. If it were anthropomorphized it would be a strapping young man with poise and purpose and your knees would buckle, man. Friggin’ buckle.

A Dark Rabbit Has Seven Lives is both incredible and shallow, a one-inch deep pool of pure, concentrated awesome that I lapped up quickly but was left sorely wanting after it’s brief passage. But I’ll get to that.

First off, the show is oozing style and shine, with “grandiose” as its driving theme. Everything is hyper-stylized: a vibrant and colorful palette; swelling musical crescendos; extreme contrasts of light and shadow; dramatic shots of eyes; sound effects that dot every swing, leap, and crash; the girls are cutesy, blushing, teary-eyed; the men are tall, eagle-eyed, and bold; everyone has impossible hair; everyone talks in ridiculous hyperbole, accentuated with pretentious physical stances and flourishes. Backdrops include an oversized golden moon, cosmic scenescapes, and dark otherworldly places. Giant freaky monsters, vampires, occult magic, love, passion, loyalty, and honor. Nothing is remotely realistic. Everything uses the medium to its extreme. It puts the awe back into awesome.

And I enjoyed the ever-loving shit out of this show.

Now, not everyone is going to agree with me on this one. And I understand. My review is going to sound quite glowing and enamored. But let me provide a bit of background on my tastes as they were shaping so many years ago.

I grew up getting into this stuff via the scraps to be found at my local movie rental. It was a small Southern town, which meant it didn’t stock much, but every now and then if you hunted you could find a VHS of something. Akira, Ninja Scroll, these were fairly easy, but also so many other one-offs whose names and stories I’ve long, long since forgotten.

Old 80s and 90s anime, especially the kind that made it here to the states, tended to be really dark, violent, and super-natural/sci-fi. “Japanime” was “cartoons for adults” and so they loved to push the blood, sex, and guns like this was some really hardcore shit. Much of it, you can imagine, was over-the-top, stylized, and ridiculous. And I loved every bit of it. It was so foreign and different and exciting. It appealed to me on so many levels.

Those days, however, are over, and I’ve grown into liking very different things in my anime, but a bit of nostalgia exists in me even today for that certain old-school flavor.

Admittedly, this show is not old-school. It is polished and modern and plagued with commercialized adaptation clichés. But there is a certain feel to it, that throws realism to the wind and embraces the over-the-top to tell a tale of epic proportions.

Though a bit late, a little summary is in order. Boy meets girl. Little girl is sad and lonely and boy offers to be friends and they play and grow close. Girl offers to make a pact with boy. This confuses him, especially when she reveals she’s an ancient vampire, and then bites him, making him immortal and her protector. Some shit goes down and the girl is taken by other demonic forces and sealed away. They wipe his memory. Nine years pass. Boy is now in high school and a normal guy but keeps having dreams of those times and can’t figure out why they seem so real and familiar. While saving a strange girl on the way home from school, he gets run over by a truck and dies. Except he can see his body get up and his head is still talking. He heals and comes back and is baffled. But then he remembers the pact and the girl. What follows is a tale of love, magic, fighting, and intrigue as the show’s plot grows thicker and thicker.

And it will start to overwhelm you. There seems to be no end to the threads and with only eleven episodes you end up with a lot of loose ends that never get resolved. Considering the many and still-ongoing novels it's based on, it’s no surprise, but damn does it need a continuation! It’s practically a teaser as it is.

Which brings me to the big problem with this show. Yeah, I know, I’ve been talking it up so much so far, and I stand by that still, but I’m fully prepared to bitch about the warts too. It’s not just too short, it’s too much to try to tell in so few episodes. And the entire thing is just one big cliché that, while immensely enjoyable, it does absolutely nothing new. All of the characters are one-dimensional archetypes. You’ve seen every bit of this before elsewhere, but, still, so few do it so well as this. Earlier I said it was a shallow pool of concentrated awesome. Too few episodes, too many loose ends, too much cliché, and too little depth. I don’t think any of these are deal breakers, though, but it means if you don’t absolutely love it by the second episode, expect it to just get more annoying as it fails to resolve anything and keeps introducing more and more interesting things that never get explained or fully utilized. Smoking guns litter the place.

I also said there were eleven episodes. There’s actually a twelfth but it is a throw-away filler episode, which I was not happy about. Especially given that the final arc felt extremely rushed and the “ending” was so obviously not an ending, why waste one of the few episodes on a god damn bath house comedy episode? Argh!

You see, this show tries to do way too much. It has everything: a love triangle, vampires, magic, fighting, dashing men, cutesy girls, monsters, comedy, and even occasional ecchi, panty shots, and fanservice, too. But this is way more than any show can really handle. So it feels shallow as it tries to juggle several genres simultaneously with only a small number of episodes.

But you know what? None of that really stopped me from enjoying the hell out of this thing. It’s cliché, too short, but damn if it doesn’t just throw all the cards in and just go hog-wild. The confidence of execution and style, its desire to be over-the-top, epic, and extreme, it just works. For me, at least. I loved it. It was fist-pumpingly good. But, yeah, don’t expect answers, meaningful character development, or anything like that.

As of this writing, you can watch A Dark Rabbit Has Seven Livesfor free on Crunchyroll.

On an impulse, guy tastes the new girl’s drool on her desk after she slept through class. Several days later he develops flu-like symptoms that won’t go away only to find, as said girl will later tell him, that he is having withdrawal symptoms. She gives him some of her spit and he’s cured. Thus our story of two unlikely love-birds begins.

I don’t normally begin with a story synopsis, but in this case the premise, I felt, was more than eye-catching to lead with. And I wasn’t exaggerating on any of it. That’s the entire first episode, basically. In fact, as it follows, he becomes quite obsessed with her and asks her out and they become a couple. All the while she, basically daily like a ritual/routine thing, sticks a finger in her mouth, gets it good and wet with spit, and lets him suck it off her finger. They animate this (and the sound effects) with a little too much focus and deliberateness to make it anything but eye-twitchingly uncomfortable.

Okay, let me back up a bit. You see, she’s a new transfer student and hasn’t made friends and he feels kinda bad for her. Granted it is mostly self-ostracizing since she is quite anti-social, more than a little strange, and sleeps through lunch/study-hall, etc., so she never really bonds with anyone as a result. But he sits next to her and can’t let it go. One afternoon he comes back to class to retrieve his bag and finds her still asleep at her desk, long after class has ended. He wakes her to tell her school is over and to go home and she does. After she leaves, he sees the large pool of drool on her desk from when she was sleeping. Well, you know what happens after that.

Make no mistake, the girl is quite weird and mysterious as the title suggests. Her anti-social behavior and, as later revealed, other strange quirks (the… scissors) make for a character that is bound to either frustrate or fascinate viewers. For me, she was definitely the highlight of the show and one of the main reasons I kept watching despite all of the cringe-worthy drool/spit stuff (which there is a lot of). It also helps that she has a shockingly down-to-earth and real sounding voice actress (for whom this appears to be her debut role) who really sells the weirdness-comes-naturally aspect.

Thankfully the two have a really interesting dynamic of a relationship that you get to watch unfold and develop. There’s more to the spit-swapping I haven’t revealed yet: it can transfer thoughts, emotions, and even, as we later find out, physical abnormalities. Say she gets her knee scuffed and gives him spit, his knee will suddenly also be scuffed. If she is particularly happy, the spit will contain that elated feeling and pass to him. And vice versa, too. It can also transfer thoughts/memories. And it even seems to physically contain them. If she stores spit for him for later (yes, this happens), it’ll still have the properties from when she made it.

And it is this transferring that allows for a really peculiar yet charming and engrossing relationship. As she even bluntly states, they share a special bond through the spit. Whenever other guys approach her, he’s feeling inadequate as a boyfriend, all of that usual relationship drama, the spit and emotional connection serves to underline what is special about the two of them. And even more so because the transferring thing doesn’t work with just anybody. He alone is also the one she exposes all of her weirdness to and seems to implicitly trust.

So yeah. That’s the show in a nutshell. If you can get past the spit then it actually manages to be an intriguing and interesting relationship drama with bits and pieces of comedy and surreal along the way. The characters are also refreshingly pretty good as they manage not to be just your standard archetypes with the mild exception of the male lead. He is your typical bumbling nervous nice guy but he occasionally displays an assertive and honest streak that shows he could be more than that. But far too often they still employ the usual artificial “misunderstanding” drama created solely by his aggravating stupidity. The handful of side characters are pretty decent but we don’t get to see enough of them.

Outside of the bizarre spit premise and the good batch of characters, there’s not much else to be had here. It’s a character-driven show that with only a half-season of thirteen episodes still manages to feel slow, though in a more laidback way than a bad way. It fails to have much of an ending and we get only scraps of progress since it likes to drag things out a bit too much. But they’re a cute couple, and it’s fun to watch them get closer.

There are a fair number of panty-shots and a general sexual overtone throughout, mostly due to the constant finger sucking and mouth fixation stuff, but also because of the adolescent youth angle. The spit thing, while unnerving, does help explore an aspect of relationships that I find fascinating. So often the difficulty with couples is in communication and really knowing what the other is thinking and feeling. Well, this show serves up a bizarre way of solving that problem unique to these two. Often, given her weirdness, she will not tell him or admit things but instead just let him feel it for himself by giving him some of her spit. I know, it’s weird, and more than a little WTF, but… it still kinda works. It’s neat seeing how this changes the dynamic and brings them closer.

With a good budget and animation quality and a nice distinguishing style it’s not a bad watch at all. It desperately needs a second season, though. Still, it’s a bit slow and doesn’t end up delivering as much as I would have liked, but it’s certainly different. You’re not likely to see another romance drama thing with a twist like this, but it didn’t end up being different or special enough once you get past the spit gimmick.

As of this writing, you can watch Mysterious Girlfriend Xfor free on Crunchyroll.