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The Spring 2009 Anime Preview Guide

One more review:

After all the complaining I've done recently about spring anime series which try too hard to be cool, the thought occured to me while watching the opening scene of Sengoku Basara that perhaps here's an example of a series which knows how to seize "coolness" right from the start. Indeed, at one point a major character mentions how cool he is. The tone of this show, with Samurai who are all obsessed with pride and showing off, and sometimes speak in English, reminded me of Samurai Champloo. Numerous warlords boast of how they intend to prevail during the current civil war, demonstrating that nobody has an ethical superiority over anybody else. The series seemed to give a fairly realistic look at feudal Japanese politics and warfare. The downside was that I was having a hard time keeping track of all the warring factions, who led them and who their star fighters were. I wish the story was being explained better; for instance, how does the "woodpecker strategy" work? I'm uncomfortable with the common practice of dividing soldiers into a handful of heroes versus common grunts whose only purpose is to demonstrate how awesome the stars are by being cut down by them en masse. I don't really see why the guy who fights with two spears is any better, morally speaking, than anybody else. An attempt to inject some comedy into the story during the second half seemed odd. For all the coolness early on, I was feeling rather ambivalent at the end. I'm not really detecting a riveting plot taking shape, just magically enhanced duels in which nobody of any importance wins or loses. Perhaps if this is only 13 episodes long I wouldn't mind committing to it, otherwise I'm not so sure.

SO... no more reviews?

Quote:

Hatsukoi Limited is this season's piece of high-grade eyecandy, where the girls are doe-eyed and desirable, yet lack the banality of the erogame world (the source material is, in fact, a manga) and the soft-colored backgrounds are an artistic work in their own right.

I find the comment about erogames weird after the praise for Nitro+ in the Phantom review. Most eroge are pure crap, but like you should be aware there is some good ones that deserve an anime adaption. Just because most eroge, like most of anime and manga, are crap is not enough of a reason to bash them in an unrelated review.

I find the comment about erogames weird after the praise for Nitro+ in the Phantom review. Most eroge are pure crap, but like you should be aware there is some good ones that deserve an anime adaption. Just because most eroge, like most of anime and manga, are crap is not enough of a reason to bash them in an unrelated review.

Actually, I hope 07-Ghost isn't all that similar to Code Geass, because I'm not a big fan of CG. It was the uniforms, and the setting of aristocratic young officers serving an "empire", which set off the CG alarm in my head. However, although the Ghost manga may have preceded CG's airing on TV, I wouldn't be surprised if the makers of the Ghost anime don't modify it to be more like the wildly popular CG.

I can't speak about the rest, but I would add that Phantom of Inferno, like a number of other games, had a non-pornographic release on DVD and on PS2 in Japan, which is probably a fairly good sign in terms of the quality of its story.

A lot of H-games/"dating sims" get non-ero releases at some point. It says nothing about quality, only that the creators think they can milk more money out of it by releasing an all-ages version. I think most visual novels that get turned into anime also have all-ages releases of the games. Not coincidentally, you can find many of the game re-releases coming out around the same time the anime airs.

I would tend to say that Santos and Kimlinger let their anti-erogame bias affect the neutrality of their reviews, while Martin does not.

0utf0xZer0 wrote:

I would tend to say that Santos and Kimlinger let their anti-erogame bias affect the neutrality of their reviews, while Martin does not.

Maybe I'm grasping but I thought reviews were, by their nature, subjective.

If any of the reviewers had any vendetta against anything, it'd be a little more visible, wouldn't you think?

I get the impression ANN might be a little more accepting of personal opinions in reviews than I am.

I'll accept that my interpretation doesn't really work for the genre as a whole, it was a mistake on my part and you are right to point it out, but then the question would be: why do the creators think an all-ages version would be successful without the porn? The exact reason will vary, but there has to be one.

I think there are many pornographic games out there that couldn't possibly have an all-ages release, or at least not a very successful one, because...frankly, all the appeal they have is nudity and sex. In the case of something like Kanon, for instance, all-ages releases actually make some sense because there is more to the story than that.

In this particular case, the story doesn't really follow the transparent, straightforward structure of a dating sim though, which was another one of my points, and the two specific all-ages releases I've referred to (DVD: 2001-2002 PS2: 2003) didn't coincide with either the current anime adaptation (2009) nor with the previous OVA (2004), but then again you could always argue they were already planning something behind the scenes.