Winter 2014 Anime Season Review, 5 of 5

Alright, finally, the end of the reviews for winter. Read on.

If you were hoping for a spiritual successor to Cowboy Bebop with Space Dandy, you were sorely disappointed. Dandy is nothing like Bebop. In fact, the series is more like a spoof of the genre. Dandy is a lazy goofball with a snarky robot and an equally lazy goofball cat-like-alien sidekick, going on bizarre adventures through space, often only tangentially related to their stated goal of finding previously undiscovered aliens. It’s got a much more western cartoonish feel than most eastern anime. Each episode feels completely disconnected from the previous one, and there is no attempt to tell any sort of overarching story. Comedy is the goal of this series. To that end it’s fairly decent. It’s not the most amazing comedy out there, but it’s fairly good. It was good enough that they already said another season is on the way this summer. The comedy can sometimes be very smart, and sometimes it can be very base with lots of perverted jokes. It’s a good enough series to get a check, but I can’t exactly say it’s a must see.

Saki – The Nationals is the third installment of the anime series covering an almost all-girl cast of mahjong players. Like every series in its genre, this show relies mainly on pumping tons of drama and energy into what is a normally fairly quiet and straightforward, analogue, game. Chihayafuru did this with the relationship drama and the super dramatic “camera” work around the taking of the cards. There was a series a while back where some kid lost his father over a shogi piece. Saki shies more towards pure imagination and the supernatural. Girls call on demonic powers, or angelic powers, or whatever kind of powers, to somehow cause certain tiles to congregate to them, or stay away from opponents, and that’s how they win. Unlike the Chihayafuru example, or that one anime whose name still escapes me, the supporting structure is the moe element. As I said, the cast has, I think, only one guy. I mean the entire cast! Unless you’re shipping a yuri relationship, of which there are several ships out there, there is no real relationship drama here. It is all about “cute girls being cute”. Like with Gundam Build Fighters, you’re probably gonna watch this show more for the supernatural imagined battles (sorta like Chunibyo), the characters themselves second.

It is a tournament style series, as in they are constantly in a tournament, save for flashbacks about how the other teams got into the tournament. In this regard the show can be both amazing and frustrating from a story standpoint as it gives so much depth of backstory to the non-main characters. We’re talking here about full multi-episode backstory for opposing teams that you know are gonna lose and be gone from the story before long anyway. The downside here is that you end up with so little screen time for the main characters you’re liable to forget who the show is about. Heck, one of the three iterations I mentioned? That was a spinoff series dedicated to one of the main character’s former friends who has now become a sorta rival. Basic point – if you’ve read the novels or manga (I forget which it has) and like the series, or have seen the prior series and liked those, you’ll have to watch this one too… and then wait to see if they get around to animating the rest of the tournament that the author hasn’t finished writing yet. If you like moe or old board games/card games/tile games turned into supernatural spectacle, you’ll want to see this series after watching the original season at least. Otherwise, it’s not much of a show to watch outside mindless entertainment.

You knew Nobunagun would be weird from the start. It’s a show about people imbued with the spirit of famous dead people fighting against aliens trying to invade the planet. The M.C has the soul of Nobunaga, and she is partnered with Jack the Ripper, Ghandhi, and even some more obscure figures. The series didn’t strike me as much of anything special. The setup is relatively unique in terms of the alien invasion and the means of countering it being the power of chosen people from history. But the story itself felt rather flat and not terribly interesting. The modern day person possessed by an ancient spirit angle has been done many times before, with Nobunaga particularly, so that didn’t help to change things up much. The twist involving Florence Nightingale and Jack the Ripper was extremely unique and works for the story, but again, didn’t feel all that special. The animation style is also unique, but nothing to write home about. It’s not a bad series and the story is solid, but it certainly strikes me as one of those shows you’ll have an easy time being indifferent to.

Wizard Barristers had tons of potential going in. The M.C is a legal prodigy gifted with magic, joining a law firm that defends other magic users. Magic users in society are discriminated against and suffer harshly under the institutional bias against them. The show could have done wonders with this kind of setup, particularly with the angle that the M.C was somehow more important than simply being a legal prodigy trying to get her mom out of jail. The writing staff however seemed to be too timid to explore the possibilities too much, though they did still manage an interesting story for an anime in which there are a group of magic users trying to use her as a vessel for Satan, only to find out she’s being protected from them by Satan. The animation in the early going looked fairly good too. But dear goodness what a catastrophic failure of an event episode 11 turned out to be. If you want at all to see this series, wait until the DVD release. Even if you only rent it somewhere and not buy it, that’s the only real hope, as that episode was a massive production failure. The animation was not even half done, the dialogue wasn’t synced to anything, the episode is unwatchable, which hurts even more as it is the episode when they finally revealed everything. How that episode made it to broadcast is beyond me and likely put the final nail in the coffin of what at one time might have had the potential to be a sleeper hit series of the season. It will now likely go down in history as one of the biggest fails in the last 5-10 years of anime, if not television as a whole. I don’t even know what kind of recommendation to give for this show.

Noragami is another trip into the land of deities. It’s a lot easier for Japan to make series like this because their mythology regarding deities is so vast. In this installment, the mythology is applied to modern day life as the gods fulfilling wishes made by humans and banishing “defilement”, the wickedness and evil that builds up over time, to the “other shore”. Of course there’s no way our M.C would be a big-shot, otherwise the story would be boring. No, he’s a broke, impoverished god no one remembers, trying to gain fame and power (and his own shrine) by fulfilling as many wishes as he can. The female lead almost died and was saved by our hapless deity, but as a result she now inadvertently and suddenly takes spirit form time to time, it looking to normal people as though she suddenly falls asleep out of nowhere.

The story follows multiple tracks. Explaining the mechanics of the world, Noragami’s past, his trying to tame his sword, the budding romance between him and the female lead… it is a rich and well-crafted story. The fights are interesting and well animated, and the characters are all interesting in their own ways. It is a very solid series.

All in all this season was what you expect from the winter anime season - not much good, not much terrible... just bland. The big sellers come merchandise and DVD/Blu-ray sales time will likely be Kill la Kill and Hamatora. My pick for the best series that ended this winter, and likely also a top seller, was Log Horizon. It technically started in the fall, but eh, details. Worst is probably gonna go to Wizard Barristers if for nothing other than that dreadful episode. Magical Academy will probably be down there too because of how badly that story was botched start to finish. Here's to what almost certainly will be a better spring season.