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Outlanders volume 2 manga review

All right! Volume 2 of our not-all-that-romantic space opera! If you need a quick summary of Outlanders story, I provided one a few days ago when I talked about volume 1 a few days ago. It’s the story of the unlikely rivalry->friendship->romance between an Earthling photographer and a scantily-clad alien invader princess. I’d like to add “hilarity ensues” but the body count is a little too high for that.

And it only gets higher as the alien forces launch an all-out assault on Earth. Europe in particular suffers catastrophic damage. But the day is saved thanks to Tetsuya’s boss Aki, who has uncovered the mystery behind the secrets of the world. Said mystery turns out to be magic. Witch magic, to precise. And Aki herself is the reincarnation of the witch Jilehr and she’s now helping Great Leader Neo repel the invaders and get revenge on the aliens for persecuting witches all those years ago.

I must say, that kind of shadow government isn’t really what I was expecting. I’m not quite sure what exactly what I was hoping for, but Witches! Magic! Reincarnation! wasn’t quite it. I guess I wanted the human race to fight back using its wits and resilience and maybe a super-weapon born from said wits and resilience. Magic is just a little too easy, you know? I dunno, I’ve kind of lost interest in that side of things now.

Meanwhile Tetsuya and Kahm continue their uneasy relationship, beginning with Tetsuya held captive on Kahm’s ship and ending with the two of them on the run in Germany after their ship is shot down. Along the way they meet a German girl named Raisa who is eager to turn Kahm into swiss cheese for killing her family, but is eventually persuaded by Tetsuya’s charming good looks to help them instead. It never fails – when it come to manga, no matter what kind of far flung location a Japanese man finds himself, the locals are quick to overcome any initial reluctance and then fall all over themselves to help. Manga is pure wish fulfillment. But you knew that already.

Anyway, by the end of volume 2 we’ve found out what exactly the problem is – the aliens lived on earth for a while, they left, the humans (who may or may not have been there all along) took over, and now the aliens want their property back. But the humans have squatters’ rights, basically, so they’re not letting go without a fight. Princess Kahm has proposed that Tetsuya marry her so the two races can live in peace. Tetsuya isn’t entirely adverse to the idea, but just then a few of Kahm’s lackey run into trouble and need to be saved. And that’s it for volume 2!

Outlanders is 8 volumes long in Japan and about the same in English, so we’re long way away from the ending. I have a feeling the number of casualties are going to be huge by the time the series is finally over. Tetsuya will probably end up saving the day somehow or the other (I told you, wish fulfillment, the day must be saved by the Japanese) and then we’ll see whether he gets the girl or not. I’m not in a rush to finish Outlanders, but maybe I should clear it off my plate quickly so I can watch Dungeon de Deai wo Motomeru. We’ll see.

Appleseed (2004) anime movie review

Well, well, what do we have here? A love story disguised as an action movie, eh? We’ll just see about tha– hmm… It’s not so bad… I guess. My Google-fu tells me there are at least 5 Appleseed movies or anime series out there, all loosely based on Masamune Shirow’s Appleseed manga wot I haven’t read and don’t plan to. This particular one I watched came out in 2004. I quite like the art style, which blends regular anime art with CG. It’s not a flawless mix, but it’s a very interesting effect that works well for a faux-gritty movie like Appleseed.

Story blurb: Plucked from the last battlefields of the final war, mercenary Deunan Knute finds herself pressed into duty with the ESWAT, defenders of the Utopian city of Olympus. But serpents beneath the peaceful surface of this apparent Garden of Eden, and new seeds of destruction have already been planted! Now it s up to Deunan and her former lover, the now-cyborg Briareos, to unravel a deadly web of plots that threaten to bring down Olympus from within!

Pros

– I was worried when they started off with all the technobabble and stuff, but the story is very easy to follow. It could honestly have been set in any kind of world, not necessarily this one.

– Everyone gets a happy ending and the bad guys get what they deserve.

– Apart from Hitomi, all the other voices in the English dub were very well done, so much so that I forgot I was watching a dub after a while, only to be smacked back into reality every time Hitomi opened her little mouth.

– As I said, I liked the art style. The music was good too.

Cons

– At almost 2 hours long, it’s a little on the lengthy side. It’s still very interesting, but some parts could have been shortened – like the ultimately pointless war scenes at the very beginning.

– Part of the story seems kinda stupid, like why would humans have a giant tank full of a killer virus just floating above the city? You’d think it would at least occur to someone that hey, maybe we should develop an antidote to this thing just in case, you know?

– Appleseed is a story of love lost and regained and the hope that humanity carries within them, etc etc that sort of thing, so honestly the action felt out of place much of the time. It almost felt like the writers/director had one story they wanted to tell, but then every 15 minutes it would be like “Quick! The audience is falling asleep!” and they would throw in some lengthy action sequence out of desperation.

– Speaking of action scenes, the last one was entirely too long. Once the bad guys had been rumbled and it was obvious that Appleseed is an idealistic kind of movie, the fortresses obviously had no chance of taking down humanity while Deunan was around, so why spend 15 minutes pretending they do? IMO they should have had Deunan face off against the giant robots first, THEN had the showdown with the bad guys, but that’s just me.

Final thoughts

Appleseed will probably disappoint anyone looking for a gritty, futuristic, hardcore kind of action movie. It only pretends to be one, but inside it’s a mushy-wushy I Love You, You Love Me, We’re a Happy Family kind of movie. I liked it, myself, even though the story is rather below-average and contains a number of unexplained points (like if Deunan was there when Dr. Gilliam was killed, why didn’t the killers take her into custody and confiscate everything she possessed, etc). Did I like it enough to watch the sequel (Ex Machina)? Not really, no. But still, it’s a decent enough movie and worth at least a watch if you like romantic action movies.

The Irregular at Magic High School – How NOT to write a series about an overpowered main character

Happy New Year! Out with the old, in with the new! Which is why I did my best to finish watching The Irregular at Magic High School before the end of the year. Didn’t want to drag something like that along with me into the new year. Thanks to the regulars at Animesuki Forums, I’ve been given lots of suggestions for good, clean anime to watch this year, so there’s no need to hang on to stuff that’s not working.

So how was the final arc of Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei? Do I need to say it? It was bad. Really bad. The problem with this show, as with many light novel adaptations, is that the writers focused too much on adapting the light novel and not enough on actually creating a good anime. You know how whenever a book is turned into a movie the fans come out of the woodwork screaming about how X was left out and Y was changed, this director is the worst in the world, and so on and so forth? I’ve been guilty of it myself, but that doesn’t mean all changes are necessarily wrong. Sometimes there’s plenty of room for improvement in the original material.

The other problem with the arc was the same one all along: the enemies are really dumb and really weak. It seemed all along that the aim of the evil Great Asia Alliance was the Magic Thesis Competition, but then it turns out that they were actually after the Kanto Magic Headquarters all along.

If that’s the case, why pick a time of the year when security is relatively tight because of the competition? Why pick a date when the most powerful high school students in the country will be gathered a short distance away from your target? And why bother attacking the competition center and other parts of the city instead of throwing your full firepower at your target from the start?

Actually there are a ton of questions left over from that arc. I suspect they wasted far too much time animating unnecessary scenes from the LN (e.g. anything with Honoka, anything with Naotsugu/Shuu, anything with Iso-whatshisname and his girlfriend, the scene with Jiro Marshall, the stuff with the girl that wants revenge, anything with that Zhou-sensei guy since nothing came of it, a hundred other scenes) just to please the fans instead of focusing on telling a logical, coherent story. That’s why the last arc seems so rushed and nonsensical… is the most benign explanation I can come up with.

In the end the day is finally saved by (guess who?) Shiba Tatsuya, dressed to kill in a Venom suit that requires him to thump his crotch repeatedly to fly. Regular watchers of Japanese media might know this already, but the Japanese have funny ideas about what is ‘cool’ and what isn’t. Anyway, Tatsuya eventually blows up the port of Zhenhai and probably the whole city of Ningbo along with it and that’s the end of the evil Chinese invaders, any resemblance to living figures is completely coincidental heh heh heh.

Since Shiba was going to save the day all along and we knew it from the start, why did the writer bother building up the rest of the characters? The cast was entirely too large. If you needed a few students to defend the defenseless, you could have just stuck with Leo, Erika, Saegusa and Watanabe, making room for tighter storytelling and less time-wasting. After all they only really exist to make Tatsuya look good by taking lots of time and effort to do what he can do in a flash. Oh, and to get injured by being stupid just so Tatsuya can show off his l33t healing skills.

The whole thing is muddled even further by the characters lacking any clear, defining attacks. “Everyone can use magic” just makes everyone interchangeable. To the end I still had no clear idea what Saegusa’s magic really was (something about smells?) or what, if anything, glasses girl could do in battle, or what made Kirihara any different from Leo.

…Not that it matters since Tatsuya beats them all anyway, but this was one area where they could have taken a leaf from the better sort of shounen fighting manga. A smaller cast with more clearly-defined roles and abilities would have gone a long way towards making the show easier to enjoy.

Well, that was that. I was warned that The Irregular at Magic High School was rather bad. I refused to listen and I got what I deserved. I’ve seen worse, of course, but I tend to like high-school series and I tend to like fighting series and I tend to like magic series, but when you put them all together and get a complete mess like this? Sad. And this is one area where “the light novel is better!” excuse doesn’t cut it, because the anime did nothing to suggest that or generate any interest in the source material. It didn’t leave any mysteries about what would happen next either (Tatsuya will continue to dominate everyone forever) so I think I’m done here. On to better things!

Up to episode 18 of The Irregular at Magic High School (spoiler warning)

I kept watching out of sheer inertia, ‘cos I was too lazy to start anything else. That doesn’t mean The Irregular at Magic High School has improved much over the first 6 episodes. The second arc was a slight improvement over the first, but not enough to move the series into “good territory.”

Last time I mentioned that the large number of characters hurts the series, and all the second arc did was add even more inconsequential characters who get a little attention for a few minutes and then vanish into the ether again. Honoka, for example. We get that she has a crush on Tatsuya, but… so? Erika’s brother appears, then disappears. And apparently his name is “Kentsugu” and he’s dating Mari, but didn’t Mari refer to her boyfriend as “Shu” in an early episode? Well, whatever.

In any case, a series about an overpowered hero is only good if he has someone to really show that power against. The more competent the bad guys, the better the main character looks when he overcomes them. When they’re Saturday morning cartoon villains like in this show, then it’s just like shooting fish in a barrel. I even start feeling sorry for the poor suckers.

The first arc was a laughable affair, with some of the stupidest terrorists I’ve ever seen in my life. So you want to break into the school and steal their secrets? Why do it in broad daylight when nearly all the students are present? Why not go in at night when there’s only security and maybe a few stragglers to dispose of? And once their attack on the school failed, why would they all stay huddled together in one building waiting to be taken out by anyone who cared to do it? Why not disperse and regroup later? Since they were so dumb, Tatsuya gets no points for taking them out.

But that was just the introduction, right? The subs even call it the “Orientation” arc. Then the Nine School Competition begins, which is pretty much the Olympics for magicians. And there’s a shadowy group of triad members plotting to take down our hero’s school, will they succeed? And what is Tatsuya going to do about ~~Suzaku~~ a super-powerful rival by name of Ichijou Masaki?

Yeah, well, he basically kicks everybody’s asses like he always does. That Ichijou guy was an overrated one-trick pony anyway. The only reason we know he’s supposed to be good is because the story says so. All he does is put some magic circles in the air, then Tatsuya jumps around all kung-fu like and stuff and then eventually beats Ichijou by snapping his fingers. …This post contains spoilers, btw.

The “fight” with the triad guys is even more pathetic, so much so it doesn’t deserve a description. He basically shoots them all from 1000 meters away after toying with them for a bit. “Nobody threatens my little sister and lives!” Good for you, Tatsuya, good for you.

So… not much has happened since the series started except the whole world is being forced to recognize just how strong and manly and intelligent and unbeatable and wonderful and [insert 200 other superlative adjectives here] Tatsuya is. Whether you like The Irregular at Magic High School or not will depend largely on how much you like Tatsuya and enjoy watching his bored-looking efforts.

Personally I’m on the fence. I can’t say I like him, but I don’t hate him either. His characterization is a bit inconsistent though. Sometimes he says “I have no emotions except siscon love” but then he goes ahead and shows all kinds of emotions anyway, from amusement to annoyance to embarrassment to shock and surprise, so what exactly does he mean by he has no emotions? Luckily the writers aren’t skilled enough to make me care about getting to the bottom of his personality. I just wish someone strong enough to push him to the limit would show up before the series ended.

I’m going to place my final hopes on the third and last arc. Another 8 episodes and we’ll talk again.