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.

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.