I don’t think there’s any question based on the posting traffic on Animesuki that this was one of the more popular series of the winter season. And it’s no wonder – it certainly hit a lot of the checkpoints. Busty girls, flat-chested but genki loli, uber-kawaii necromancer. Zombies. Magical girls. […] Read more
I’ll admit it up front – there’s not a whole lot that’s original about Dragon Crisis. There’s nothing that’s going to change your life, or the way you think about anime. It doesn’t possess spectacular animation or background music. But in spite of all that, I rather liked it. I […] Read more
I’d say it takes a pretty cynical person not to feel at least a little something for “Letter Bee”. One of the things that’s appealed to me about this show from Day One is that it’s quite different from the overwhelming majority of anime. In short, the emotional palette of […] Read more
I already have a series review of Mitsudomoe season 1, of course, and it would be easy enough to repeat everything I said there in this one – the two seasons were consistent enough as to have felt almost contiguous. There were differences, however, and I loved Zouryouchou! enough that […] Read more
Some series take a while to grow on you – like Soredemo and Shiki. You can’t fully appreciate their charms right away, or the creative mix isn’t quite there out of the gate. Some series grab you immediately and won’t let go, like Cross Game. You know from the first […] Read more
There’s a tendency to let our feelings towards final episodes guide our feelings towards a series in general. But in reality, endings are only one episode of many – in this case one of 22. And while the ending is generally the most important episode, it’s also the hardest to […] Read more
I’ve said this before, but Soredemo is a series that elevated itself in my esteem as much as any I’ve watched for a while. It was on the edge for me whether I’d blog it after the first couple of episodes, but somewhere roundabout the third episode my resistance wore […] Read more
“I wonder what I should use for the murder weapon?” Well, that was altogether more interesting than it had any right to be. Since this was my first exposure to the omnibus format in anime form, I don’t know whether this kind of “digest” ending is typical – but it […] Read more
I think we’re pretty fortunate to have two pure comedies as good as Shinryaku Ika Musume and Soredemo in one season. Straight-ahead comedy is really difficult to pull off consistently, and this show was brilliant. It delivered a terrific batting average over the course of roughly 35 mini-episodes, and even […] Read more
What a fascinating and unexpected series Oreimo turned out to be. Alternately maddening and deliriously enjoyable but almost always addictive, it was one of the more interesting shows of 2010. I was expecting this to be an ecchi series, something along the lines of Kiss x Sis. As any one […] Read more