No I mean, putting it in the OP is kind of hilarious, when the tone of the OP is super serious. I guess they didn't really know what they were doing though, because the music in the OP doesn't even know what genre it wants to be in!
Well, I had fun but I see your point, it was like "do you remember what was this about, right?" I found it charming, specially the intro. It´s pretty clear it can't go anywhere without introducing new spirits.
I'm pretty sure they put Kurumi there for fanservice
Madhouse is a big studio with a long history, and while they have some good talent (the Hunter x Hunter adaptation seems to prove that), they've lost a lot of their best people in the last few years, and they're just as capable of putting out bad work as any other studio.
In general, the quality of work that any one studio puts out varies hugely from show to show and as such can't really be used as a way to easily gauge whether or not you'll like the show. This is a general rule, of course, and exceptions do apply but for the most part I recommend examining the actual staff behind the shows you enjoy. Looking at what they're working on will serve as a better guide.
Aha, I see, thanks for explaining me this. It was weird because since HxH got rebooted I didn't remember a combat scene so flat and lacking of... dunno, style? credibility? I can't put my finger on how to call it, but I didn't enjoy it at all. Will put more attention in the names.
I love Jojo. Everything is so heightened. Jotaro can't just be rebellious, strong, and cool. He has to disrespect everyone, attract all the girls, and be built like a truck. Holly's not just a doting parent, she laughs off every insult Jotaro throws her way, and is elated by every tiny complement. When a villain is dishonorable, they are absolute scum, and exult in their own evil. That blend of exaggeration and sincerity makes it feel like myth, or a great pulp adventure.
David Productions understands this, and they're really outdoing themselves in Stardust Crusaders. The battles are more dynamic, the hits land even harder. I liked the fight with Kakyoin in this episode, not just because it looked pretty cool, but it did a lot more to draw out Jotaro's character than its OVA counterpart.
Oh yeah, I should probably actually give my impressions of the Knights of Sidonia. As has been brought up recently, it's much easier to criticise than to praise and so perhaps the nicest thing I can say about this episode was the background art was great. I just wish it was in a better series.
I'll knock the easiest one out first - the CG characters do not look good. At all. The mechs, fine, but the people, no. I don't think there's too much to say about this as it's rather obvious but everyone looks like very poorly animated dolls. It's ugly.
My problem with the series, however, is the writing. The concept of "humanity (in an enclosed location) being in a state of war with an outside threat for decades/hundreds/thousands of years", a story ideas that appeared in numerous sci-fi works, has gotten so stale and overplayed that we've even had an anime that features the same concept quite recently, Gargantia. As firehawk has recently pointed out, there's nothing inherently good or bad about re-using common ideas, but I'd hope that when you're working with a familiar concept you try and bring a new twist or new angle to it. That's not what they do here, instead you manage to have students attend FutureSpace Japanese Highschool and the Protagonist is a Mysterious Transfer Student with Special Abilities and he pilots the Prototype/Old version of the main robot.
The one, potentially, interesting idea that this series features is the existence of humans who are neither male or female, but are instead Third Gender. Picking up on Firehawk's comment about this, this whole story element is at best lazy and at worst potentially offensive. I wont go into this topic too deeply, because I'm really not well versed in the complex field of sexuality and gender identity, but I can tell you that issues that surround these subjects are extremely complicated and important in peoples lives. In Sidonia our Protagonists meats a character who is neither male nor female and literally the only thing this character says is that their gender doesn't matter as they can adapt to either women or men and breed successfully with either. Not only is that a really weird, expository comment to make but it robs the whole of idea of any weight or meaning because if it's literally as simple as a 'flip of the switch' then there's no consequence to it. It feels like the writer saw They Were Eleven and thought that the idea was interesting so they'd jam it into their story, but without any of the political, social, or personal identity questions that were raised in They Were Eleven.
Yeah, talk about cleaning backlog but keep adding stuff, that'll work great...
Anyway, I was curious and wow it´s hilarious, that first episode was great, I really liked the situationes, the face expressions, the whole idea of being Yakuza's boss son, even the animation is fantastic.
Just one question, does it get very annoying with the whole "promise" thing? I had "promises" for a life after Love Hina.
Rewatching this, it seems like they completely changed Oyuki's character between her first and later appearances. She basically let's Ataru throw her on a bed and is giggling about it while thinking about it later. Meanwhile, when she reappears in later episodes she's all about her friendship with Lum and Ataru seems completely irrelevant.
Reading the equivalent manga chapter now too, and she was basically the same there as in her first anime appearance (and in the manga she actually is the one who invites Ataru there too, rather than just happening to meet him). I guess this might be an effect of whenever the manga decided to actually make Lum a good girl, so they couldn't have one of her friends actually going after Ataru?
I love Kana Asumi. And knowing I'll be seeing her in another Shaft show only a few minutes from now is good to know. Marika was fun when she was playing up the rich girl personality and acting all polite, but once the gloves came off and she started speaking in that accent and the animation turned monochrome and she was enveloped in flame... I love anime characters who change to different accents, and doubly so when the subbers manage to properly convey those accents through the dialogue. That was pulled off wonderfully here.
edit: On a serious note, Knights of Sidonia looks really really boring. Having just gone through stuff like AoT, Gargantia, Majestic Prince and even in manga (stuff like Knight Run), I'm kinda worn out on this. I doubt the characters can lift it.
The one, potentially, interesting idea that this series features is the existence of humans who are neither male or female, but are instead Third Gender. Picking up on Firehawk's comment about this, this whole story element is at best lazy and at worst potentially offensive. I wont go into this topic too deeply, because I'm really not well versed in the complex field of sexuality and gender identity, but I can tell you that issues that surround these subjects are extremely complicated and important in peoples lives. In Sidonia our Protagonists meets a character who is neither male nor female and literally the only thing this character says is that their gender doesn't matter as they can adapt to either women or men and breed successfully with either. Not only is that a really weird, expository comment to make but it robs the whole of idea of any weight or meaning because if it's literally as simple as a 'flip of the switch' then there's no consequence to it. It feels like the writer saw They Were Eleven and thought that the idea was interesting so they'd jam it into their story, but without any of the political, social, or personal identity questions that were raised in They Were Eleven.
To play devil's advocate, one could suppose that the fact that she's so flippant with her exposition implies that gender isn't an issue in this particular universe. You could argue that humanity is so "advanced" that any issues surrounding gender have dealt with and the third gender is just "normalized" (what that means for actual trans people in this world, I have no idea).
But what gets me is that because she is essentially a cis-woman in all but name, they HAD to explain it lest the audience assume she's a woman. I mean, I assume the character also has a female voice actor as well to go with the character design. I just find that about as disingenuous as when the Mass Effect writers insisted that FemShep x Liara in ME1 was not a lesbian relationship, to the point where they essentially straightened FemShep out in ME2, before backpedalling and giving her a real lesbian love interest in ME3.
edit: On a serious note, Knights of Sidonia looks really really boring. Having just gone through stuff like AoT, Gargantia, Majestic Prince and even in manga (stuff like Knight Run), I'm kinda worn out on this. I doubt the characters can lift it.
To play devil's advocate, one could suppose that the fact that she's so flippant with her exposition implies that gender isn't an issue in this particular universe. You could argue that humanity is so "advanced" that any issues surrounding gender have dealt with and the third gender is just "normalized" (what that means for actual trans people in this world, I have no idea).
But what gets me is that because she is essentially a cis-woman in all but name, they HAD to explain it lest the audience assume she's a woman. I mean, I assume the character also has a female voice actor as well to go with the character design. I just find that about as disingenuous as when the Mass Effect writers insisted that FemShep x Liara in ME1 was not a lesbian relationship, to the point where they essentially straightened FemShep out in ME2, before backpedalling and giving her a real lesbian love interest in ME3.
Captain Earth looks and sounds better and even has better characters, although not by much. That alone disqualifies Sidonia from being anything better than Captain Earth, imho.
In fact, I cannot think of any reason why I would choose Sidonia over Earth (even knowing how Bones will most assuredly fuck up Earth in some way).
Team Susanoo, easily favorite one and good singing voice. Episode largely interesting with the various accessories added to seal their powers but a few scenes were on the boring side of sorts
the five preparing the auditorium for example, cleaning
.
I wonder if the ED suggests theyll be able to leave the school for trips. Disappointing bath scene since Susanoo wasnt in it.
Captain Earth looks and sounds better and even has better characters, although not by much. That alone disqualifies Sidonia from being anything better than Captain Earth, imho.
In fact, I cannot think of any reason why I would choose Sidonia over Earth (even knowing how Bones will most assuredly fuck up Earth in some way).
It looks and sounds better but does not have better characters. Also, I am just having a hard time getting over the shitty fast forward pacing of Captain Earth Episode 1.
Puella Magi Madoka Magica (henceforth referred to as Madoka Magica) is a magic girl anime following the story of Madoka and the magic girls she meets over the course of the story. The anime is pretty deceiving with it's first episode and OP. This is not for the faint of heart. This is actually quite the dark anime and some would probably call it tragic. As you go through the anime you learn what the magic girls truly have to give up in order to poses the power that they have.
In this world magic girls fight witches. Usually born from familiars (but there are.... other ways...) witches are powerful beings who kill humans with their curses. It is up to magic girls to traverse these dangerous areas witches have created to find and destroy them. If they are destroyed a Grief Seed is dropped and these can be used to purify ones Soul Gem. A Soul Gem has to be purified so the magic girls can use their magic in battle to the full extent if need be
(and for other obvious reasons)
.
There are several points during the show were the creators felt like they needed to show you just how dangerous and dark this world really is and promptly start to do some quite horrific crap. I was quite surprised by some of the early ones but after those I was able to infer what would happen next. Time travel is brought in at the tail end of the anime but it was pretty obvious in this regard too given how the early episodes played out.
Madoka - The title character. A very sweet girl who actually doesn't know the horrors of being a magic girl and really doesn't understand until about mid way into the show. I actually really liked Madoka and like some characters in the show said, she was too nice for her own good. However, if she wasn't the way she was we wouldn't have got the ending that we did.
Homura - She is actually the second most important character to the show rivaling that of Madoka although you wouldn't know that if you watched the earlier episodes. She has some pretty cool
Time Magic
that she uses greatly to her advantage. She's actually kind of a badass and her evolution of a character is greatly expounded upon in episode 10. Her arc is probably the strongest of all the characters in the show
Sayaka - Pretty much Madoka's best friend who just had the "luck" to become a magic girl before Madoka. Her story is more on the tragic side and I was legitimately sad by the end of her story. No tears but more of a "wow, this is a sucky situation". She is one of my favorite people in the show based on personality alone in the earlier episodes. The very ending to her story confused me a bit in episode 12 but we'll get to that.
Mami - Honestly, the most badass character of the show. She is actually quite the sweet girl. I wish we saw more episodes with her and saw her fight more because honestly her fight scenes were always the coolest to watch compared to everyone else. Her fights in the early episodes makes everyone else look comparably not as skilled and not as bad ass.
Kyoko - Last but not least we have this magic girl. Now while I don't think she was as cool as Homura or Mami, she was a skilled fighter in her own right. In the first episode we saw her I didn't really like her and by the end of her story I still didn't love her. However, they were able to redeem her character in such a short span of time that I came around to actually liking her. I just wish this show was just a bit longer to show
more of these last three characters because I feel they weren't around long enough to make their absence really felt. By the ending episodes you really weren't thinking about them.
Kyubey - This little F'er. Nothing else needs to be said about this thing other than I hated this thing throughout the series. Maybe that has more to do with the logic put behind the character but it still doesn't change the fact that these things basically have no soul.
I explained most of the story and plot in the summary but I wanted to expound upon what I liked and didn't like. At the end of the day what they did to characters to create this dark world I liked. It really did a great job at making the viewer engaged and react in certain ways. It did this all throughout the anime from
Mami's death to Sayaka turning into a witch to Kyoko dying with Sakaya trying to bring her back to even Madoka's final wish
. This anime wanted to put a void in you. I admired that it tried and I am sure for some it did create "the void".
It didn't do that to me though for whatever reason. Actually it was probably the ending of the show that prevented me from feeling the void. Because of Madoka basically
becoming a God and making a pretty crazy wish
, it reverberated throughout the story and world. Now because of this and the
alternate time lines created by Homura
it made the last few scenes very confusing on several levels.
With Madoka's
wish, soul gems no longer once tainted could turn people into witches. Therefore witches were replaced with wraiths. On top of this once a soul gem becomes too tainted it just shatters all the impurities and becomes pure again. This is explained after a scene in a different world thanks to Madoka where Sayaka still becomes a witch for whatever reason and is taken by Madoka up into a higher plane or whatever
. It was stuff like this at the end that made the show feel really inconsistent with it's planning at the end. This is a plot hole that Madoka Magica will have to deal with unless it gets retconned by a movie or second season.
The Music: The ED Full
All the music for the show was very appropriately placed. Going with the tone of deception some of the music was peppy and lighthearted with some of the darker and best tracks of the show being played when entering into the witches world. The best track of the show though is the one in the link above.
The Animation/Art:
As you can see in the above gif, this show had some pretty wonderful action scenes. Abstract art was used extremely well when going into the witches world/domain. It was one of the few instances where I felt the abstract art worked within the context of an anime. The faces and dead eyes bothered me throughout the entire show but it wasn't a detriment to my experience. It was just something that nagged on me at least once or twice an episode. But again that was just me. Otherwise the art and animation for the show was pretty fantastic.
While I have a few gripes with the show (especially the inconsistency with plot elements at the end), Madoka Magica is a pretty wonderful show that is easy to watch because of it's short episode span. The characters are easy to get attached to and it tells it's story in an easy enough manner for most people to understand. The ending in of itself wasn't bad, it was actually quite the satisfactory ending, but as I stated earlier because of magic and
time travel
it leaves some plot holes that shouldn't have been there after Madoka's
Wait does each girl have a key? But theres only one that works right? So are the other girls just going to pretend that the MC is their childhood friend/hero/random lame scenario. Why don't they just see which key opens the locket? Do all the girls suffer from memory loss or do they all jump on a person's dick when they see he has a locket?
Wait does each girl have a key? But theres only one that works right? So are the other girls just going to pretend that the MC is their childhood friend/hero/random lame scenario. Why don't they just see which key opens the locket? Do all the girls suffer from memory loss or do they all jump on a person's dick when they see he has a locket?
While I have a few gripes with the show (especially the inconsistency with plot elements at the end), Madoka Magica is a pretty wonderful show that is easy to watch because of it's short episode span. The characters are easy to get attached to and it tells it's story in an easy enough manner for most people to understand. The ending in of itself wasn't bad, it was actually quite the satisfactory ending, but as I stated earlier because of magic and
time travel
it leaves some plot holes that shouldn't have been there after Madoka's
This is all just off the top of my head so there's bound to mistakes since it's been years since I saw the show. I haven't seen the sequel movies but
I think the point is that Madoka's wish merely turned the world back into a sort of normal magical girl show. When you would normally turn into a witch, you merely just disappear. Sayaka still dies because she was always going to sacrifice herself to become a MG.
It looks and sounds better but does not have better characters. Also, I am just having a hard time getting over the shitty fast forward pacing of Captain Earth Episode 1.
I don't understand how you can not apply that same thing to Knights of Sidonia. You literally have:
Guy who has never been on the surface appears on surface --> Goes to surface --> Discovered and enrolled in surface academy because...reasons -> already the interest of 2 characters and rival of one due to later events --> fails miserably at a simulator because of the wrong unit type --> gets sent out on a mission anyway in the correct unit type (establishing rivalry) --> thrown into a life-or-death battle on what is supposed to be a regular trip
Just as many major things happen in the 25 minutes of Sidonia as it does in Captain Earth, except with maybe less past-to-present exposition. They're almost mirror images of each other. I daresay that Captain Earth at least fleshes out things a little better.
In addition: In terms of characters, Captain Earth's protagonist when he was younger has more charisma than the rest of Earth's cast but infinitely more than the entire of Sidonia's cast.
I don't understand how you can not apply that same thing to Knights of Sidonia. You literally have:
Guy who has never been on the surface appears on surface --> Goes to surface --> Discovered and enrolled in surface academy because...reasons -> already the interest of 2 characters and rival of one due to later events --> fails miserably at a simulator because of the wrong unit type --> gets sent out on a mission anyway in the correct unit type (establishing rivalry) --> thrown into a life-or-death battle on what is supposed to be a regular trip
Just as many major things happen in the 25 minutes of Sidonia as it does in Captain Earth, except with maybe less past-to-present exposition. They're almost mirror images of each other. I daresay that Captain Earth at least fleshes out things a little better.
I'm not saying Earth is league's better in storytelling or anything. You can draw comparisons though. Sidonia even had its
"council" with some sort of ulterior motive
to go up with Bones' love of conspiracy-laden shadow organizations.
edit: To sum up, both shows are potential turds but I'm going to have more faith in the prettier looking one. I haven't read the manga of Sidonia, however, so if the source material is good, Sidonia might have more potential (assuming a faithful adaptation).
This is all just off the top of my head so there's bound to mistakes since it's been years since I saw the show. I haven't seen the sequel movies but
I think the point is that Madoka's wish merely turned the world back into a sort of normal magical girl show. When you would normally turn into a witch, you merely just disappear. Sayaka still dies because she was always going to sacrifice herself to become a MG.
it shows Homura in the scene after talking about her soul gem and how magic girls when the impurities become too much the souls gem just shatters the impurity into cube like grief seeds but the soul gem remains intact. Then the camera pans to Homura's Soul Gem and it has a whole bunch of these impure cubes that she gives to the Kyubey. So Sayaka shouldn't have disappeared anyways. That's the giant plot hole I was referring to.
I don't understand how you can not apply that same thing to Knights of Sidonia. You literally have:
Guy who has never been on the surface appears on surface --> Goes to surface --> Discovered and enrolled in surface academy because...reasons -> already the interest of 2 characters and rival of one due to later events --> fails miserably at a simulator because of the wrong unit type --> gets sent out on a mission anyway in the correct unit type (establishing rivalry) --> thrown into a life-or-death battle on what is supposed to be a regular trip
Just as many major things happen in the 25 minutes of Sidonia as it does in Captain Earth, except with maybe less past-to-present exposition. They're almost mirror images of each other. I daresay that Captain Earth at least fleshes out things a little better.
In addition: In terms of characters, Captain Earth's protagonist when he was younger has more charisma than the rest of Earth's cast but infinitely more than the entire of Sidonia's cast.
Actually the more I have thought about it, the more Knights of Sidonia has suffered from compression Syndrome, though I don't think it is as bad as Captain Earth. Though more and more the horror of these shows being 2 sides of the same evil coin is arsing.
I'm not saying Earth is league's better in storytelling or anything. You can draw comparisons though. Sidonia even had its
"council" with some sort of ulterior motive
to go up with Bones' love of conspiracy-laden shadow organizations.
edit: To sum up, both shows are potential turds but I'm going to have more faith in the prettier looking one. I haven't read the manga of Sidonia, however, so if the source material is good, Sidonia might have more potential (assuming a faithful adaptation).
Yes, it has "promises" to stop a train, a triangle and stuff that potentially will ruin it for me along the way. But this show is hilarious, I can't stop watching.
I have somewhat of an idea what's going on, but mostly I'm watching this first episode for Ene. Kana Asumi's the best, and playing a sassy AI is just the tip of the iceberg. I love the animation, too. Nisekoi feels somewhat restrained, but this allows Shaft a chance to go as ambiguous and symbolism-y as they want. And that's the kind of Shaft I like the most. While I don't know what the odds of them doing another series Pani Poni/Zetsubou style are, this modern Shaft is pretty good, for what I expect from them. This world and these characters are intriguing enough.
