Earth Girl Arjuna 55/100
Great animation and background music all wrapped up in a plot inspired by a Japanese environmentalist religious cult's propaganda. I spent much of my time trying to like the show and failing. Each episode plays out as a kind of moral parable as to why we humans, and the world, are so farked up. Mostly because we farked it up, ourselves, because we are bad baad baaad baaaad creatures who keep forgetting how innately connected we are to the world in ways that really don't work in reality, because they are pretty much the wishful thinking of the creator and/or the nutjob cult he was listening to when he came up with this. Because, otherwise, we wouldn't have farked things up. Then the series does something of a backflip within the last couple of episodes, explaining how bad the world's backlash to our activities really would be for people (and showing people dying in large numbers), and how it is alright for us all to be the way we are, because we are human. This from Kawamori Shouji, the man who brought us Macross, Escaflowne and Aquarion. Much of my time has been spent reciting curses against him and his progeny. They'll work about as well as his solutions to our environmental problems, I figures.
Myself; Youself 77/100
Pronouns is a series with humble ambitions that remains quite humble until the final few episodes, where it steps into another gear, entirely. Described by some reviewers as a 13 episode advertisement for the game, which wasn't exactly hopeful. If there was any fault with the series, though, it was that it tried to cover too many bases within its limited timeframe. 13 episodes were far too few for Pronouns, but I doubt it would have worked over 24-26. Contains Aoi, whose voice is destined to give one ear cancer. Voiced by Kaneda Tomoko, she plays the 17 year old Aoi with exactly the same pitch, and level of edge-of-sanity neurotic panic that she brought to us when playing Chiyo from Azumanga Daioh. Series also contains yanderes, allusions to incest, suicidal mürrisch kids and 11 year old girls with attractions to bear-like creatures.
Brigadoon - Marin and Melan 63/100
This series has no idea just what genre and kind of story it is trying to tell. I thought Gun x Sword was all over the place, but this one is on a whole new level, bouncing around like a manic-depressive ping pong ball. It's like the producers were given the remit to create the most awesome series imaginable, then methodically make it as shite as possible, bit by bit by bit.
I mean, this is a show about an orphaned girl (Marin) whose life goes from bad to worse (like A Series of Unfortunate Events): Her adoptive parents die (her Grandfather is dead at the start of the series, her Grandmother dies whilst they are on holiday) leaving her in the care of the residents of the impoverished rent-house she lives in; she faces a potential apocalypse via the mutual collapse between our world and that of Brigadoon which occurs every 100 years; is hunted down by creatures from Brigadoon (Monomakia) who need her to stop the mutual collapse, regardless of whether she goes willingly or dead (they only need her DNA) and have chosen the easy option of just killing her and dragging her body back; is blamed for the approaching destruction by her schoolfriends, their families and, ultimately, the law (on one occasion she gets beaten during a police interrogation); is stalked by a woman whose daughter was killed in the early stages of the mutual collapse; continually loses and reunites with Melan, the one being from Brigadoon who chooses to protect her, frequently leaving her to wander the streets of her hometown, alone, cold and starving; goes blind after an attack by the stalking woman and proceeds to die a multiple number of times.... There are moments when the atmosphere and style of this show bears an apocalyptic resemblance to SaiKano.
Of course, all this is ruined by the childish banality of the cat-monkey thingummy creatures who are, apparently, in charge of Brigadoon, including Lolo, who prances around like the animators had an accident with the green cel paint, and being about as welcome in any scene in which he appears, not really telling Marin (or Melan) what is going on, despite the fact that it would probably be to everyones' benefit if he did so; the Brigadoon parliament, where arguments between the cat-monkey thingy representatives are resolved with custard pie fights (I should point out that these cat-monkey things are all dressed in full bodysuits of differing colour that look like their skin, probably so you can tell them apart, but they are, in fact, just suits that they wear.... You never actually get to see what they look like underneath which, considering they're not only irritating characters who really don't belong in
this show, but also somewhat unnerving with their childish backstabbing and politics, increases their creepiness by a factor of ten); the world that exists between ours and Brigadoon, which is made almost entirely out of candy; the ocean of Marshmallow that Apollo 11 lands in (yes, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins are characters in this show.... they eat their way out of the ocean and spend much of the latter episodes as three strange, fat guys in a UFO they've pinched).... And the colour palette changes with these change of moods. Earth is cold and grey and Brigadoon is a gigantic rainbow monster, gouging out your eyes. I sighed more than once whilst watching Brigadoon. Mostly because it made me wonder
why I was watching it, so blutig often....
Also, this series is part of the world in which Godannar, Gaogaigar and Betterman are set in. 'Nuff said.
iDOLM@STER Xenoglossia 79/100
The Idolmaster: Live For You OVA is closely based on the original game from which this series was spawned. And that OVA is a pile a dessicated goat droppings. However, this series has nothing to do with that, apart from the fact that the characters are the same. If you throw together characters from a series about Idol Singers trying to realise their potential with strangely sentient mecha from another dimension, used in a battle for world domination, the ultimate product has to be complete and utter fail, right?
I would be lying if I said that the Elevens thought highly of this series, but by handing this great steaming dollop of potential disaster over to the team who brought us the Mai series, we get a show about girls and their unnaturally close relationships with giant robots, followed by lots of betrayal, death and an all-too-quick resolution. They somehow managed to succeed in not failing. They even learnt their lesson from Mai-Hime: don't bring dead characters back to life for a Just Plain Stupid Copout Ending Bullshite. This show kept me entertained, but by no means would I describe it as anything other than skin-deep.
El Cazador de la Bruja 72/100
Most who know me would know I regard Bee Train as one of the Great Satans of the anime community. There really shouldn't be anything wrong with the shows they produce (Noir, Madlax, .hack//Everything, Avenger, Tsubasa Chronicle, Murder Princess, Popolocrois, Arc the Lad, Blade of the Immortal) but somehow, just somehow, they manage to drain the very life out of their creations, turning them into slow-moving slogfests, devoid of emotion and, sometimes, action, but filled with decent music and technically competent animation and character designs. Essentially, El Cazador is the third of their "girls with guns" trilogy that started with Noir and continued with Madlax. This is, of course, if you ignore Avenger, which was practically the same thing. And since it
is easy to ignore Avenger, I shan't use its name in this short review again.
There is a progression in this trilogy that Bee Train has created.... Noir was, by far, the best idea of the three, but it truly lived up to my aforementioned lack of life. The characters were boring and emotionally compacted. Madlax managed to fix some of the character issues by making them slightly more interesting, but placing them within a plot framework that was absurdly complicated and full of holes the size of the Chanel Tunnel. In El Cazador, all the characters are eccentric and interesting, but the plot is pure bollocks and, unlike the previous series, the story is over an episode earlier than usual, making episode 26 little more than an epilogue. The series also contains the Amigo Tacos running gag. I can't get the Amigo Tacos theme out of my head, now, the basteurds.
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS 70/100
The third and, so far, final season of the Nanoha series sees the plot finally progress from simple Magic Girl genre to Magic Girl Military storyline. I don't know why this had never been thought of, before. Probably because they thought the concept was absurd, or something. In the real world, magic girls would turn out more like Yume/Sora from the Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto series, rather than the Super-Powered Starlight Breaker To Your Face As A Means Of Befriending You kind of rampaging headcases Nanoha and Co. turn out to be. And funny as hell it is, too. Except that it isn't nearly that funny, as they drag an entire drab, boring plot out over the space of 26, rather than 13 (as with the two previous seasons) episodes. The only enemy that this highly stratified, albeit flawed from within, magical army faces is an
obviously psychotic loon and his bizarrely obedient (as in: we're doing horrible things to little kids, but the boss says that he's doing all this for the good of all, so we'll just play along, believing everything he says) fembot army. Oh farking yawn. Surely there has to be an enemy worth giving a shite about, somewhere out there in the universe. But no, apparently Jail Spaghetti.... I mean Scaglietti.... is the only villain the Time and Space Administration Bureau and the Saint Church give a shite about, at the moment. And he just about takes them down in an entirely predictable manner (they knew this was coming.... how about the proactive investigation into his hideout and cronies, etc, before things get to this point.... You know, the sort you're supposed to be good at), before they, slowly slowly slooooooowlyyyyyy, strike back, over the space of 7 episodes. This show needed 13 episodes, not 26. 26 just allowed the writers to get lazy and fill in the gaps with a cast of millions and support characters like Tea going mürrisch. Please.... How about a number of operations with the girls blasting star-destroying kamehamehas into the faces of multiple villains. That's all they had to do. At least then one would have been able to ignore the fact that I'm also watching Romeo x Juliet at the same time....
Watch this series, if you must. Just don't expect another Nanoha A's.
Gundam, Macross - gets freaking annoying. 
it is annoying that the characters are so young. but i watch it religiously. 70/100(?) well, thats what i think anyway. not as good as Skip Beat.
