I've been downloading first episodes of things via the great convenience of Anime-Direct.com, and will now deliver some of my thoughts.
Note that I didn't even bother reading up on what the anime was about before I watched them. I just went for some of the newer releases (although I did go more for ones I didn't recognise at all). Which is why a lot of them, frankly, suck.
Tactical RoarIt saddens me when a concept that shows a little bit of originality finds itself irreperably mired in amongst the depths of anime cliché. In the world of
Tactical Roar, a giant and apparently permanent cyclone known as the 'Great Roar' has formed over the Pacific Ocean. With air travel rendered either impossible or extremely problematic over a significant radius, naval transport has undergone a second golden age. However with modern day shipping comes modern day pirates, to the extent that any civilian cruiser or yacht requires armed support ships. The show follows a single such ship (which seems either to be an AEGIS cruiser or a really souped-up destroyer...nevermind) and her crew in this environment.
Now, think about it. They could do anything with a setup like that, right? They could make something akin to
Nadesico or
Vandread, only based on the sea rather than in space. But no, here we get archetypal bilge (an appropriately nautical word, I feel) that within moments completely smothers any possibility of its interesting setting making any sort of a rescue.
I feel I can best demonstrate said bilge by aid of the following questions:
* Why is the crew of this ship entirely composed of females?
* If the ship does have an all-female crew, why would one male engineer suddenly be assigned to it?
* Surely no uniform can be tight enough to reveal THAT?
...and so on.
It's a pity really. I'm still waiting for a good naval warship anime. The only other one I've known of is
Zipang! (which has an equally interesting scenario: modern American-built Japanese warship and crew get accidentally sent back in time to the height of the WW2 Pacific War, and all the consequences that one can imagine from that. However the show is low-budget, poor character designs, and largely consists of a bunch of very-similar-looking men giving long speeches to each other about honour, comradery, and the like).
Oh well. Moving on.
Kage Kara Mamoru!Normal, geeky guy with big glasses.
Pink-haired, ditsy childhood friend.
Pink-haired girl always getting into trouble.
Geeky guy is secretly an uber-sly ninja tasked with protecting pink-haired girl.
Basically, some of the ninja bits were kind of badass, but the majority of it is very, very blah. I actually did glance at the synopsis for this one while it was downloading, and hoped we might get at least a little bit of a
Full Metal Panic!-style dynamic in there somewhere, or perhaps a "Imagine
Love Hina...but make Keitaro a ninja!" type of madness. Shame all we get instead is two airheads, and one Obligatory Grouchy Friend of the girl who blatently fancies the main guy in all her confrontational ways. As I said, a couple of the ninja bits were badass (the guy is surprisingly competant at it), but that's all of maybe 20 seconds total in the one episode.
Oh, and apparently in the next episode, Obligatory Ronin Girl appears for a ninja vs. samurai showdown.
Still, at least they tried.
RECThis is the only one thus far that I've gone back and downloaded more episodes for (and not, you know, immediately deleted from my computer
). Convenient then that the episodes are only 12 minutes long, and as such their .mkv files are only 60-70mb.
The main guy, Shomaru, is waiting outside a cinema for his date, but has been stood up. About to throw the tickets away, he is convinced not to waste them by this random strange girl named Aka - who, turning out to be a voice actress in training - spends the entire (English) film mumbling the subtitles to herself. So on and so forth, they part ways. Later that night her flat is burned down and, since she knows no one else in the area, he lets her stay the night.
The first episode actually ends with them having sex (or rather, them having sex and then her not being there in the morning). This at least eliminated the series from having the typical "Will They Won't They" dynamic, which is always a nice change and provides some interest as to how the story will run from therein.
To briefly dip into the second episode (since they are half length, after all), Shomaru works in a marketing firm, and he's just had a project accepted for the first time (an advert for some leaf-like snacks featuring a bizarre looking half-cat/half-tree mascot). Auditions are held to provide a voice for the mascot, and so she turns up again.
An odd note is that Aka's aspiration is to be like Audrey Hepburn (nevermind that it's kind of difficult to do that as only a voice actress...). This is a theme that permeates various parts of the anime - she quotes Hepburn lines frequently, there are random shots of her in classic Hepburn apparel in the opening title sequence, and all the episodes are named after Hepburn movies (the first four being Roman Holiday, Sabrina Fair, Wait Until Dark, and Breakfast At Tiffany's). As I say, it's kind of an odd theme to include, but it's kind of cool too.
The animation is good (and not sub-par like, for example,
Tactical Roar), and there are little bits of humour interspersed throughout (Shomaru reminds me just the littlest bit of Hideki from
Chobits). I don't know exactly how many episodes there are going to be, but there aren't going to be many. ANN quotes 9, but I don't know if that's Total or So Far - but just think about that. That's 4.5 normal episodes. How can you
not just download a couple to give it a look? And with file sizes so small this series can provide some quick and easy anime entertainment in those aimless moments that we all have.
I'm one to talk. I've been doing all this when I should have been essay writing. Well...bah.
More to come in the near future, including
Noein and whatever else I happen to click on.