Batman/Superman Public Enemies

Recently I’ve decided to watch some of the direct to DVD movies that DC Comics has been putting out. I watched “Justice League: The New Frontier” and enjoyed it. So I figured I’d try out “Superman/Batman: Public Enemies.”

Let’s say I was very underwhelmed by this movie. The first hurdle I had to get over, and this one was tough, was the character designs. Everyone looked like they were made out of balloon animals. Screw the kryptonite, all Lex Luthor needed was a needle to poke Superman with. It seemed like every character’s muscles looked like tubes of brightly colored rubber. Power Girl’s design was especially bad. She reminded me of some kind of creepy rubber action figure that stares at you weird.

The plot wasn’t impressive at all. They had two storylines going on at the same time, which isn’t a problem if there is enough time to develop them. Unfortunately the running time was only 67 minutes, so instead of maybe one really well hashed out story, we got two subpar stories.

There were a few good points. The pointless battle between our protagonists and a small army of DC’s mostly popular and powerful villains was awesome, and well animated despite feeling very shoved into the movie. Well, to me that was the movie, and the stuff around that scene was the stuff that was shoved in. That part did make the rest of this subpar movie worth watching.

The voice cast is what makes me really sad about this movie. They had Kevin Conroy, Tim Daily, and Clancy Brown, three actors who I will forever associate with their DC characters, reprising these roles in such a sad attempt at a movie. I really wished that if they were going to get this trio back they would have made a better attempt at the script so that they would have had something better to work with.

Then there’s Levar “Geordi ‘Reading Rainbow’ La Forge” Burton to voice Black Lightening for ONE FRIGGIN’ LINE! That was it! The character was on screen for at least 10-15 minutes. I wasn’t expecting a speech on “How only you can save the Planet”, but more than one line of dialogue!

All in all, I’m not very impressed so far with the DC DVD movies, but I’m not going to give up just yet!”Justice League: The New Frontier” was pretty darn entertaining.  I’m going to go through 3 more of them this week, starting with “Crisis on Two Earths”, then “Wonder Woman” and finish it up with “Green Lantern: First Flight”.

I want to find happiness

I’m not sure exactly when manga started being published by companies in the United States.  My earliest manga purchases were the paperback size Mixx Manga of Sailor Moon, and the big flopped Magic Knight Rayearths.  The latter of which was surprisingly expensive even then – 14.95 per volume.  Yet I bought them.  I started into anime and manga fandom in the middle of my high school years and remember there only being a shelf of books to consider buying.  Thankfully over the years, the selection has grown to such an extent that I couldn’t possibly keep up with all the titles I want to keep up on, let alone new ones.  I’ve still managed to amass what I’d like to think is a pretty impressive collection.

There was a time early in my fandom when I was able to keep abreast of all CLAMP releases, and one that stood out was Clover with its weird tissue paper-like dust covers.  The volumes I own are in decent condition, but those covers tear so easily.  They’re pretty, but ultimately impractical, so I was glad to see an omnibus edition collecting all of Clover into one convenient volume.  Of course, I purchased it, and re-read the entire thing, and it surprised me.

A quick synopsis: Kazuhiko, a retired military officer, is requested to go on a final mission for his former commander.  He is to escort a girl, Sue to Fairy Park.  Along the way they are intercepted by the military of an opposing country, but eventually they reach their destination.

Now what really surprised me about it is that Clover annoys me terribly.  There are two giant reasons that it annoys me.  I appreciate the story being somewhat centered around a singer and the song that she co-writes with the girl, but the endless repetition of random song lyrics really got on my nerves, personally.  For me, it doesn’t help that I have absolutely no frame of reference for the tune of the song.  Without the tune, the lyrics have no rhythm and don’t add anything to the story besides my annoyance.

The other reason is the art, or the lack thereof.  It’s old style CLAMP with loads of wispy hair and sharp pointy eyes, which isn’t a problem.  The problem for me is all the white space, and all the panels that look like they were simply photocopied badly and pasted into place.  I spent a little time reflecting on why this bothers me so much and the simple reason is that I feel cheated.  I buy manga for both story and art, but this one seems awfully light on the art.  With all the manga I read, I’ve really become used to the page being filled, with empty pages serving to emphasize an event.  Most of the pages being empty however, emphasizes nothing and merely irritates me.  It seems awfully lazy.

My smaller complaint is the story.  The main story is linear, but it’s resolved in two volumes, leaving the other two volumes to fill in background.  I actually enjoy narrative that jumps the timeline of the story, so I didn’t mind this…much.  On a second reading however, it just seems like volumes three and four are filler created solely to fill up space.  The sad part is, I liked volume 3 more than the rest of the series.  It does the most to shed light on the entire world setting and general plot.  Plus the relationship between Ran and Ginsetsu is more interesting than any of the other relationships in any of the volumes.

Sadly, I have to say that I would not recommend buying the Clover omnibus, unless you happen to be a CLAMP completist.  Even then, I probably wouldn’t suggest it, simply because it’s so different from the works of CLAMP that I happen to be familiar with.  I will however, being looking forward to the Cardcaptor Sakura omnibuses with much glee.

Chibi Reviews: Suzaku of the Counterattack, Higurashi, and Black Butler

I’ve been reading a lot of manga lately, mostly because I can’t walk out of a store without at least 3 volumes, so I’ve been trimming down my stack to read by taking them to work with me and reading during my breaks.  Since I promised reviews of most of my last massive buying binge, I’m going to post some mini reviews, focusing on three aspects of each: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Code Geass: Suzaku of the Counterattack volume 1 manga by Atsuro Yomino, published by Bandai Entertainment

Synopsis: Code Geass told through the point of view of Suzaku Kururugi and without the mech suits.

the Good: The alternate telling of Code Geass from Suzaku’s perspective is interesting.

the Bad: It’s a little too unfamiliar.

the Ugly: It’s not all that memorable.

I didn’t actually buy this manga intentionally, it was included in a Code Geass DVD box set, which also had a soundtrack and drama CD.  I wish more box sets were that cool.

Higurashi: When They Cry (Abducted by Demons Arc I) story by Ryukishi07, art by Karin Suzuragi, published by Yen Press

Synopsis: Keiichi is really enjoying himself in his new hometown with his new friends, until he starts learning about the secret that everyone is hiding.

the Good: The color art is spectacular and the two page spread in this volume is one of the creepiest images I have ever seen.  I still get chills looking at it.

the Bad: The rest of the art was generic.

the Ugly: The harem seems awfully contrived.  I know this is derived from a game, but it still bothers me.

Black Butler, volume 1 story and art by Yana Toboso, published by Yen Press

Synopsis: Ciel Phantomhive’s butler Sebastian seems to be too good to be true or too perfect to be human…

the Good: There’s a good mix of seriousness and humor.

the Bad: I honestly can’t remember all that much of the plot in this volume.

the Ugly: The first chapter is completely different from the rest of the volume – reading it along nearly turned me off from the series altogether.

Unless otherwise stated, I personally buy all the manga that I review.

“I’m not special.”

I recently went on a manga buying binge, so there might be a lot of review posts coming from that.  I counted, and it looked like two-thirds of what I bought were first volumes.  So much for my self discipline and only keeping up with series I already had a lot of.  Darn those pesky manga publishers and their temptations.  For that matter, darn bookstores and their sometimes spotty selection as well.  Hm, that sounds like material for another post.

Today’s post won’t be about a first volume, rather I’m going to review the second and final volume of Beast Master.  For a refresher of what I thought of volume one, go here.

Yuiko really loves animals.  Unfortunately she gets too enthusiastic with her attentions, so animals don’t love her back.  Her animal loving ways do lead to her becoming friends with Leo Aoi, a scary looking transfer student who grew up in various wild places, like Africa.  Leo goes berserk when he sees blood and turns into a ruthless killer who scares himself, but Yuiko is able to get through to him and calm him down.

This volume was not quite as good as the first volume.  There’s a new arc introduced for a couple chapters wherein Leo is set to inherit a fortune once his birthday hits, and is consequently nearly killed by his jealous relatives.  Of course, Yuiko is thrown into the mix, but the interesting bit there is that Yuiko releases some of her own inner beast, shouting down Leo’s relatives as they tell him that he’s a freak and doesn’t deserve to live.  The whole “hey guess what? he’s rich!” thing just seems too cliche to me still.  Then Leo’s dad makes an appearance, just in time to whisk him away elsewhere so he’ll be safe from his relatives.  Yuiko attempts to convince Leo to go, and what happens after that is easily the best part of this volume.

The art remains great.  It’s clear, and there’s a lot of energy in it, which will keep me re-reading it over and over.  I will definitely be keeping a hopeful eye out, looking for more translated work from Kyousuke Motomi.

I was glad that another of his works was included in this volume, a short 4 chapter manga titled “Cactus Summer Surprise.”  I think I actually enjoyed the short manga more than the rest of the volume.

I still think it’s worth a buy, especially since the series is only two volumes.  That makes Beast Master a short and sweet addition to any manga collection.

A Sound Soul…

I’ve been taking advantage of Funimation’s streaming site to watch Soul Eater.  They’d been releasing episodes on a pretty regular schedule, so I’ve been able to watch the entire show subtitled, and hopefully help the American industry by doing just that.

Soul Eater is based on manga by Atsushi Okubo, which is being serialized in America by Yen Press.  The animation was done by Bones, and it premiered in Japan in April of 2008.  Currently as you might have guessed or known, the North American license is held by Funimation, who will be releasing the first box set of the anime next month.

From this point on, my review may contain some spoilers.  I promise it’s nothing major.

The basic premise of Soul Eater rests on the DWMA, a school for meisters and weapons.  They study and train to keep the big bad from returning to the world and wreaking havoc.  The secondary goal for some meisters is to make their weapons into a “Death Scythe,” or a weapon that Lord Death himself would use, by taking the souls of 99 Afreets (think evil demons) and 1 witch.

In the beginning of Soul Eater, you’re introduced to 3 teams.  Maka Albarn is a scythe meister, and Soul Eater Evans is her weapon.  They begin the series with their 99 Afreet souls, and are after a witch named Blair.  However, when they take Blair’s soul, they find that she wasn’t a witch and that all the work they’d done up to that point is now nullified.  The next team consists of Black*Star, a meister who’s training to be an assassin, and his weapon, Tsubaki, who has multiple forms.  They had a chance to get their Afreet and witch souls all in one go, but Black*Star passes his chance to instantly make Tsubaki into a Death Scythe.  The last team consists of Lord Death’s son, Death the Kid, and his weapons, Liz and Patty Thompson, who transform into guns.  Death the Kid’s purpose is to create his own weapons rather than let them be created for him, as Lord Death’s successor.

As Soul Eater will be a new release next month, I won’t be going much more into plot.  After some accidental research on wikipedia, I am aware that the anime takes a pretty drastic right-turn from the manga.  I’ve only read the first volume of the manga as it’s been available here, so I don’t have much of a frame of reference beyond that right now.

I personally found Soul Eater to be entertaining with a good cast of characters, and some eye-catching character and world designs.  It’s rather simple, but that also makes it easy to follow which is a plus for me, because I’m usually just looking for something entertaining when I watch anything.  It can be thought of as shonen anime with it’s themes of friendship and fighting.  I’ve been working to spread it around to some friends also, which means that I’ve watched some of the earliest episodes as many as five times, which means that I find it easily rewatchable.  That’s always good in my book.

My favorite part of Soul Eater is definitely the characters.  I think that Maka is one of the best female characters that I’ve come upon on anime recently.  She’s capable, smart, and fights beyond her own fear.  The boys in her class treat her as an equal rather than someone who constantly needs to be rescued.  Unfortunately she also falls into that tired anime trope – where are her parents?  Her father, Spirit is currently Death Scythe and stays by Lord Death’s side as his personal weapon, and her mother is completely absent.  There’s nothing said about the whereabouts of Maka’s mother until nearly the end of the series when Maka receives a post card from her.  I did think that the fact that Maka’s mother and father are going through a rather messy divorce while Maka lives on her own with Soul was weird.  Maka’s father is a deadbeat dad who’s going through a divorce because he can’t stop going to men’s clubs and flirting with pretty much any woman he sees, but he shouts his devotion for Maka every chance he gets.  Having a father that consistently threatened to embarass me in public does give me some sympathy for Maka and her plight, at least as far as her father goes.  Maka’s weapon, Soul Eater is obsessed with being “cool.”  There really isn’t much more to him than that.  Later on you’ll see Soul’s inner struggles in the form of a demon with a giant head and tiny body.  This gets to be pretty integral to the plot.

My favorite character is Black*Star, who manages to be the complete opposite of what he should be.  He trains to be an assassin but his ego demands that he shout his presence to the world, especially when it’s detrimental to his mission.  Later in the series, he’s aware of this, but it does him no good, he usually thinks about it after he’s already shouted.  Black*Star is the “man who will transcend God,” and allows nothing to obstruct his path to greatness.  He has some great development over the course of the series.  One of the best things the writers did was to hand Black*Star a taste of defeat and the opportunity to overcome that.  His weapon is Tsubaki, who takes the form of multiple ninja tools, but mostly she’s a chain scythe.  She’s quiet and exceedingly polite, and the only person who can put up with Black*Star for any amount of time.  She offers him absolute support, constantly.  I don’t remember any point in the series where she doubts him verbally, although it doesn’t keep her from flat telling him when she thinks he’s done something wrong and needs to fix it.

Death the Kid is very nearly topples Black*Star from being my favorite character.  His obsession with symmetry is his major trait.  This obsession is so strong that it gets in the way of his battles, causing Kid to abandon his weapons, Liz and Patty in the middle of fights to go check that his toilet paper looks nice, or to make sure that painting in the foyer is lined up just right.  Good thing Liz and Patty are capable of fighting on their own, and some of the scenes where they switch between being the gun and being the wielder of the gun are some of the best action scenes.

I’m not going to go into the rest of the characters, because that would make this a ridiculously long post, and it’s pretty long already.  I did have some problems with this anime.  There’s obviously a structure for a large overarching plot, but the episodes themselves felt choppy to me, and didn’t really have much connection from one episode to the next.  You can pick up the series at nearly any point without missing out on much, which is both a strength and a weakness.  It’s a strength because that does make it more accessible to more viewers.  It’s a weakness because that takes away any kind of reason to watch all the episodes.  The first dozen or so episodes felt very disjointed to me, and that bothered me some while I was watching.  I did like the three seperate introduction episodes for the three main teams.  That was a good way to introduce the world, and the main players, and it didn’t take away from their particular character development by trying to mash the introduction in with the ongoing plot.

Once the plot got really rolling, it was good.  The pacing was nice, not speedy, but quick enough to keep me intrigued.  In the second half, though, there’s a lot of new characters introduced and lost in the shuffle of the greater plot.  There’s a big lack of character development that is understandable if you think of the episode limit, but it’s still a shame.  I would loved to have seen more of the other DWMA students, or the members of the opposing factions.

Personally, I would have liked to seen more character development overall.  I thought the characters were the best part of Soul Eater and some of my biggest problems with the anime stem from how characters were handled.  In particular, I didn’t much like most of Dr. Stein’s story – who I realize I have not mentioned up until this point.  I think this review is long enough already, so maybe I’ll go more into that in a seperate post.

I also would have loved more of the world.  There were tons of questions I had that I would love to have seen answered, like how does someone determine if they’re a meister or a weapon?  Is it hereditary?  Does it happen randomly, or can it be obtained with training?  What makes someone a witch?  Etc etc.  I imagine these questions may be answered in the manga, so I might keep up with it to see if that’s the case.

Overall, I enjoyed Soul Eater.  I’d recommend it to pretty much anybody.  I know that I showed it to some friends that haven’t watched much anime at all and they got a kick out of it, and the husband later thanked me for showing his wife an anime that had a good female character in it.

Claymore – Final Thoughts

I finished watching Claymore a few weeks ago.  I haven’t read the manga at all, but I did already know that there was some raging over the ending.  The impression I got is that the anime closed a door that the manga left open, and I can see how that would be irritating.

I found the ending irritating without even having read the manga.  I’m not going to spoil much of anything, because I think Claymore is still fairly new, and if you wanted to spoil it, you could go look it up elsewhere.  I will completely admit to being lazy.

As you may know from earlier posts, I initially did not like Claymore much, but I kept watching it anyway.  As the series went on, I found myself gradually drawn into the story.  By episode 8, I was fully invested in the series.  I’ll readily admit that I still find the supporting cast more interesting than Claire, the main character.

The ending seemed rushed though.  There was no real resolution, and the big bad just shrugged and walked away.

Also, a petition for a second season of Claymore has been started by enterprising fans.  I went ahead and signed, figuring, hey it could be alright.  I’m not exactly sure where Claymore could go from it’s end, but it was an open ending.  The big bad could easily be the main villain again, and chaos can ensue.  I haven’t read the manga, and honestly I doubt I’ll get to it any time soon as I have plenty of manga I’m keeping up with already, and I tend to read shoujo slice of life drama/romance over action manga.

In conclusion, if you’d like to see a good action anime with women that kick ass, watch Claymore.  There’s plenty of action there, and pretty decent story to go along with it.  The ending is pretty meh though.

Wild Wild Rock

Recently I decided to sit down and finally watch all of Saiyuki Reload.  I’d had the set for some time, I just hadn’t watched it, which is the case with quite a few other series that I own.

Saiyuki Reload is a direct sequel to Saiyuki following the same basic plot. Sanzo and his party are journeying to India to halt the resurrection of Gyumaoh.  This plot is the basis for all the Saiyuki series, the only real difference is the major arcs that end up happening.

In Reload, there’s no real other plot for around half the series.  Which is entertaining to start with, but maybe I’ve been a little too conditioned into expecting a plot thread from start to finish.  Having no real plot until the last three discs still bothered me some, to the point that I paused my watching of the series for a while.  Once I started watching again, however, I was hooked.  The plot for the rest of this series is that good.  One member leaves the group, the group attempts to go on without him, they all snap at each other, and decide they’re going to retrieve him, if only to kill him for the trouble he’s caused.  There was some great group dynamics going on, and if you’d watched the series up to that point, you might be surprised that the three left actually got angry at each other.  Once the group gets back together they get trounced by the villain and Sanzo’s scripture is stolen.  This is also a very good plot point as it forces our heroes to stop and think about their strengths and so on.  Getting defeated so easily really causes a great deal of sudden doubt, and a blow to their confidence besides.

It didn’t necessarily have a good ending, since there were at least two threads left dangling.  Good thing there’s another sequel.  At this rate though, you have to wonder: will the Sanzo party ever get to India?

The animation is quite a bit different from Saiyuki.  There’s a completely different color palette used, and the character designs have changed, partly to reflect their progress on their journey.  For instance, Goku looks the same except his pants only go to his knees, and they’re torn.  Gojyo is no longer wearing those weird poofy pants.  Sanzo looks the same.  Hakkai’s shirt isn’t tucked in anymore, and appears to be longer.  The animation is more consistent than the animation in Saiyuki.  Overall it’s an improvement.

One other thing to note.  Saiyuki is/was an ADV release, and Saiyuki Reload is a Geneon release, meaning they have different voice casts.  Honestly the ADV dub of Saiyuki wasn’t all that good as it tended to leave explanation for the plot out in favor of juvenile humor, but I did like the voice cast.  I gave the Geneon cast half a chance and while I appreciated that they seemed to try to get voices that were as similar as possible, I really don’t like having the vocal cast change on something.  So watching any Saiyuki series, I stick with subs.

This series does work well as a standalone series.  There’s no real need to have watched Saiyuki before watching Saiyuki Reload.  You get a feel for the characters and their relationship to each other quite well in this series without much background.  There’s really no reference made back to any of the events in Saiyuki that I saw.  If you could, I’d rent it.  It’s an old Geneon release and even years after it was first released, I couldn’t find it for what anime fans today would think of as a reasonable price.  I ended up buying it at a con for around $70.  I don’t think anyone beyond a Saiyuki fangirl like myself would be willing to pay that price with many other series being available for less.

No Rewrite Necessary

In a way, I fooled myself into watching Murder Princess.  I’d seen it on the shelves of Best Buy, and took a look at it and decided it didn’t look worth my time.  So why did I watch it?

I saw a trailer for Murder Princess on a disc of Claymore, and somehow got most of the story confused.  I blame myself mostly and the trailer a little bit.  I’m gonna say it was about 80/20.  In the trailer, I thought it showed the potential story of a runaway princess who runs into a bounty hunter with body switching.  Which is, in fact, correct.  However, I also thought the bounty hunter was male, which was incorrect.

It would have made the thankfully short series a lot more entertaining.

The basic premise is that there’s a kingdom under attack and the princess flees after the king is killed.  She runs into a bounty hunter and manages to push them both off a cliff, with the stress of imminent death  resulting in their souls switching bodies.

I really found just one thing likable about this anime.  When the bounty hunter is in the princess’s body she still kicks a lot of ass while wearing a dress.  I personally love the concept of the female warrior that manages to still be feminine, like Saber in Fate/Stay Night.  Admittedly my idea of “staying feminine” is really just more realistic wardrobe.  I happen to think that armor, dresses, and swords make for great visuals.

I’m going to try not to spoil too much of the plot.  Suffice it to say, the overall story is stupid and the characters are horrible.  The princess is only too happy to relieve herself of responsibility to her people, placing that burden firmly on the shoulders of the bounty hunter.  The bounty hunter half-heartedly threatened to just leave and then changed her mind in the amount of time it takes to read this sentence.  I thought the implied romance between the female characters was laughable and the villain was no surprise at all.  There was also a great opportunity for an incredibly awkward love triangle.  However the writers apparently didn’t see that opportunity or chose not to do anything with it giving preference to the implied love between the main female characters.

The character designs for the girls and the rest of the main cast (the old man and the two minions) don’t even mesh.  It looks like a mashup of two completely different anime.  I tend to be very visually oriented, so that really hampered the anime for me.  I’d love to say if the character designs were more consistent, it would have improved the anime greatly, but honestly it wouldn’t have made a difference.

There was a conclusive ending however, with the girls going on to live happily ever after, maybe.  By that time, I had ceased caring.

So if you like anime with girls that kick ass, I’d suggest Claymore.  If you’re still somewhat interested in Murder Princess I’d suggest not necessarily buying it, I believe Funimation has it on their streaming video site.  I’d recommend watching at least the first episode or two before making any kind of purchase decision.

Disclosure: I provided the anime for this review by buying it.

Way of the Samurai Seven

I’m going to start this particular review with an apology for my horrible title.  I like to try to think of possibly clever titles that still relate to what I’m setting out to review, but I’ve got nothing better for this post.  That said, I’m going to be reviewing Samurai 7, a 26 episode anime series by Gonzo and released in the States by FUNimation.  I decided to review this partly because all the votes on my current poll are for ‘shounen action’ and partly because I’d written what I think was a good review for it previously which I deleted out of laziness.

Samurai 7 is something of an update to Akira Kurosawa’s classic the Seven Samurai.  I personally haven’t seen the Seven Samurai, which I plan to remedy soon, but I believe the basic story is this: a small village is set upon by bandits for most of their crops.  Given a deadline the villagers decide to hire samurai to defend their village from the bandits.  The storyline of Samurai 7 is the same, except for major advances in technology, such as there’s mass mechanization, and samurai apparently used to operate mechs.  Which is something I found pretty confusing.  I understand wanting to stick with the overall story, but the technological advances made no real sense to me being side by side with what appeared to be a vassal and overlord society.

The anime begins with the village, showing the visit it receives from the bandits, and the decision the villagers make to hire samurai.  They send out their priestess, Kirara and one of the villagers, Rikichi to go hire the samurai.  Once Kirara and Rikichi meet Kambei and Katsushiro, they begin gathering their group to take on the bandits.

I’m not really going to go into much more of the story than that.  Samurai 7 is definitely an anime worth watching.

My favorite character is Katsushiro, the young idealist samurai.  When you first meet him in the anime, he’s a samurai in name only, having never killed anyone.  He begs for the chance to be in the group of samurai defending Kanna village, and it’s only after having gathered four other samurai that Kambei relents and let’s Katsushiro join the group.  From that point on, Katsushiro is forced to mature and grow, through the battles he ends up fighting and more importantly through his thwarted affection for Kirara.  He ends up leaving the group to fight on his own, eventually returning to them and being one of the only samurai to survive the conflict.

I found the main female character, Kirara really irritating.  She immediately imprints upon Kambei and thinks only of him throughout the entire series.  She seems to reciprocate Katsushiro’s feelings, but you find out that it’s a kind of twist, and she’s really just thinking of Kambei.  The worst thing she does in my opinion is to push Katsushiro into his own private hell, only to later reveal, hey, she’s still all about Kambei.  The only good thing out of all this quasi-relationship drama is that Kambei does nothing to encourage her feelings, either of the times she confesses.  If he had encouraged and reciprocated, I would have ended up hating this series.  Kirara is also fairly useless.  She can’t fight, she puts herself in danger constantly, and spends entire episodes second guessing herself, and delaying the very important mission to gather defenders for her village.

Despite Kirara, however, this is an enjoyable anime in my opinion.  I would recommend buying it, especially if you happen to be a fan of samurai anime, or anime with swords.  There is a lot of good swordfights.  The animation itself is good also, except for  episode 7 where the quality takes a sudden and drastic dip.  Suffice to say, I hated that episode for the simple fact that I think the animation in that episode is terrible.  Luckily, it’s only one episode, and it’s over pretty quickly.

Well, I don’t think this is quite as good as that review I deleted, but it’s close.   Next up, I think I may just review the last book I read.

Quick disclaimer: the anime in this review was provided by the author.

I wouldn’t go on a field trip with you for anything

I’ve had some cause to regret my decision to watch all the anime I have in my binder from cover to cover.  The order that I put anime in was pretty random and I have a giant chunk of Naruto to be watching in the middle.  I’ll admit that I wasn’t exactly looking forward to rewatching Saiyuki, as I labored under the impression that it wouldn’t stand up to the more recent anime I had been watching.

I was wrong.  I still enjoy Saiyuki mightily, and I’m glad it’s still in my collection.  It’s one of the few anime I own that I have watched multiple times, some of the others being Trigun, Magic Knight Rayearth, and D. N. Angel.  I suppose that in itself may tell you something of what I prefer to watch: anime that has lots of action, humor, and characters that essentially don’t change much.

Which sums up Saiyuki pretty well.  The Sanzo party does not get along throughout the entire series (and by series, I’m only referring to Saiyuki itself, not the latter seasons Reload and Reload Gunlock).  Sanzo himself is unflinchly direct to everyone, declaring that ‘anyone that gets in the way of my mission, I will kill.’  Every time they’re in the car, Goku and Gojyo fight in the back, while Hakkai laughs and makes a sarcastic comment about it being peaceful and Sanzo eventually gets angry enough to threaten to shoot the both of them.  In an episode where an enemy sent a fake Goku, the others knew he was fake because the fake didn’t declare immediately that he was hungry.

After some anime where the entire season is comprised of the hero constantly second-guessing themself and wavering on every decision, Sanzo’s directness is refreshing.  He doesn’t waver, he doesn’t second guess.  If he sees someone in his way, he simply takes them out and keeps on his way.  I like that.  I tend to get annoyed with wishy-washy characters, because really, how hard is it to just make a freaking decision and go by it?

I’ll admit that the beginning animation is a little painful to watch, as there looks to be LOTS of photoshopping, but as the seasons progress, the animation takes off and really improves.  By the end of the series the animation is superb and special effects actually add to the story rather than distracting from it.  I can see what will become echoes of later series in the animation in Saiyuki.  Although, Studio Pierrot also does Naruto and Bleach, the consistency of quality unfortunately does not stay the same as Saiyuki, which is rather unfortunate.  It’s not a very fair comparison though, given the length of Saiyuki compared to the lengths of Bleach and Naruto, both of which run much, much longer, and therefore probably have different costs associated with them.  However, that is beside my point.

Saiyuki is pretty much the way I’d imagine any ‘extended field trip’ for any four people that knew each other would go.  Everyone would shortly get on everyone else’s nerves, and do the same thing, time after time after time.  I don’t find that repetition boring at all, although I imagine that kind of storytelling isn’t for everyone.

Now to sit back and watch Saiyuki Reload!  I still need to buy Reload Gunlock sometime :\  Maybe after I’m done watching everything I have now..

The anime in this review is provided by the author.