Summer 2013 Anime Season Review - Part Two of Three

Time for round two of my Summer 2013 Anime Season Wrap-Up. As a reminder, there’s one more session tomorrow before I do up a preview for the Fall season. So, let’s get to it.

I’m not sure what to make of Danganronpa. I have a fundamental problem with shows like this that tout cerebral calculations as a central component of the lead characters, but in which the puzzles are easily solved with minimal thought by the viewer, or in any meaningful way. To put it another way, you can’t base a story like this around the difficulty of the puzzle, when the puzzle is an eight piece jigsaw puzzle. I had the same issue with Umineko – Battler’s attempt at disproving a positive. Plus in general I’m not a big gore fan, so the routine murders, coupled with the lack of any reasonable explanation for them, and the campy as hell attempt at humorous and ironic deaths lacked any appeal whatsoever.

There is no feeling of investment in the mystery of any of the majority of character’s backgrounds, mainly because the show is not nearly long enough for you to learn much about any given character before they’re dead. That seems to be the problem with the murder mysteries themselves; they’re all committed and resolved in very short order, so there wasn’t much mystery in the first place. It makes the routine of the murders little more than very obvious window dressing. Even to so-called rules introduced at the start were easily forgotten early on, and only brought up when they hung a lantern on the fact that they weren’t going to be followed anyway.

A good quarter to a third of the characters were complete bastards whose presence itself ruined the show. And though I understand from a literary and storytelling standpoint why they had to be there, it didn’t make the story any easier to bear (pun completely intended).  I don’t mind gore, but it should at least be attached to a well thought out broader story. I don’t even know if to call it gore since you don’t ever see any of the actual acts, and instead of blood we get pink paint splatters, so even gore fans would likely be disappointed. All in all I’d say Danganronpa ranks near the bottom of this season’s shows. I heard nice things leading up to it, but the show just isn’t that compelling.  It’s one of those shows I end up watching to the end because I want to see how it ends and it’s not completely void of appeal.

Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Ilya is probably another of those big anime from this past season. I’ve never had a very good sense of how popular it is or might be, in part because the fan base around that whole universe of works can be quite rabid at times, and at times very unforgiving. It is a very good show. It manages to both mock and live up to all the tropes of the magical girl genre. The fight scenes are exquisitely done and do really great justice to the Fate/ Stay series as a whole. They also did great justice to the source managa. And best of all, it got a second season to animate the original manga’s sequel. They set up for it nicely, not leaving much of the story unfulfilled within the season, but leaving enough of a cliffhanger to setup that next season. I definitely rank it top five. A nice knowledge of the Type-Moon universe would be useful, but in general it’s not explicitly needed, so don’t let that stop you from enjoying it. You will miss out a lot of inside jokes if you lack this familiarity, but the story itself is fairly well self-contained so that it’s not a big problem. Only real disappointment was that it is only ten episodes long, which happened to another of my favorites from this season.

Blood Lad was a show I didn’t pay much attention to preseason. It almost snuck up on me – I came close to missing the first episode. An otaku vampire dedicates himself to retuning a ghost girl to life, maybe just so he can suck her blood or maybe because he actually likes her. There’s a good bit of intertwining storylines involving said vampire’s family, the girl’s family, etc. It’s a little weird. The story itself is relatively original, despite its components not being so much so (taking lemons and not making lemonade, so to speak). Yet it doesn’t quite strike the right chord of that top tier show it seems to have the potential to be when just looking at its parts. The puns and fourth wall stuff is hilarious though – I about lost it when he set up to fire that Kamehameha Wave. Still a top five show, but I was expecting it to be a clear number one or two at first. And it doesn’t help that it was the other show that only went ten episodes. You should definitely watch it, because it is an entertaining romance action-adventure comedy, and hope that season two comes out relatively soon.

High School DxD New suffers from the same general problem I think afflicted Seikon no Qwaser and Queen’s Blade. I think the creators and the writers wanted to write a hentai but accidentally stumbled on a halfway decent story and just didn’t know how to handle it when it came to actually making the anime. DxD has a huge amount of potential with its story. A kid is killed by a fallen angel, brought back to life as a demon in service to the sister of the ruler of Hell, engrossed in a power struggle between the angels in Heaven, the devils in Hell, the fallen angels on earth, and then the dragons who have the power to fight all three sides. The show should be an amazing epic. But they spend so much time on the ridiculous main character who is impossibly perverted, surrounded by women who could stand for him to be more perverse. To then have his power increase in response to how perverted he can be, the show has an untenable setup given that it is an anime and not actually hentai. In small doses the antics of the show would be nice flavoring. But as delivered, it’s like saying, “I like sugar with my coffee, so I’ll dump a literal pound of sugar in my cup of coffee”.

DxD is functionally better than Seikon no Qwaser and Queen’s Blade, but this second season seemed to be trying to get closer to that lower rung on the ladder. And again, as I said, it forces the actual story into the background. If you’re looking for a guilty pleasure I don’t even think I can recommend watching this right now on Funimation or Hulu. You’re better off waiting to buy the Blu-ray/DVD of the season where it isn’t censored. Or I don’t know, maybe the censorship will help you keep focused on what story they do spend any time on. A decent, maybe even very good broader story waiting in the wings, and the animation quality are even decent, but the presentation and delivery are terrible due to too much reliance on the fan service and eechi stuff.

Hyperdimension Neptunia is close to DxD, possibly on that lower bar I mentioned before. Although it doesn’t have any directly explicit visuals, there is a big tone of innuendo and suggestive dialogue. It is a show full of double entendre. However, I don’t know how much of a story there is supposed to be either. It’s as if there is a character missing that would tie everything in the show together to focus the story in some way. It presents itself as a supernatural/fantasy slice-of-life show where you’re just so happening to see the lives of four queens and their family and friends. But it starts off with a pointless “training” quest, a strange and simplistic plot by Team Rocket level baddies, a typical magical girl series brainwashing undone by the power of friendship, and then a super powerful final boss beaten again by the power of friendship. The final boss setup seems like it was haphazardly, or just far too conveniently, placed there for the sake of that effect of tying things together, but it’s only just barely enough to cover it. If you’re looking for a show with magical girl transformations, lots of women with large breasts, some lolis thrown in for extra flavor, and a lack of any male characters or a real story, then you’re set. If not… you can put this one on the backburner.

Fantasia Doll is another show I didn’t know what to make of up to the very last episode. I think it may be lost in its delivery. The setup from the first episode made it seem like some Yu-Gi-Oh type show – battle card games. The summons being thinking, tangible, beings was a little twist (at least more so than semi-intelligent animals). Some of the events that subsequently transpire make the show seem as though it’s meant to be a more sober, serious story about secret organizations that actually have some sort of real plan to do real damage. At most other points it seemed like this show was meant to fit in more in line with the likes of Pretty Cure. I don’t know if it’s a kid’s show that occasionally takes on a more serious tone, or a more grown up show that too often takes on a childish tone. As a result there are times I felt like, “okay, this is at least watchable” and other times I felt like, “this is pretty terrible”.  The ending was also patently childish. It was far too clean and sanitized even for a happy ending. So, I’ll say this; rank order everything you want to watch from the summer season, and place this towards the end of the list. The animation is average, the soundtrack is below average, and the story is average at best. If you get around to it then it’s a light watch not demanding much thought or engagement. If you don’t get to it, then you didn’t miss much. I’m kinda surprised I didn’t outright drop it.

So, that does it for today. Tomorrow I will complete my reviews and reveal my choice for number one show of the season (you might be a little surprised by my pick). Check back tomorrow.