high school Archives - Page 4 of 9

Saekano after 6 episodes (dropped)

You can refer to my first post on Saenai Kanojo no Sodatekata here. Basically I thought the show had a bit of promise but didn’t want to wait every week for new episodes so I shelved it until it was complete and then some. 9 months later I finally settled down to watch the show, but…

As I said back then, I wanted to see what would happen when you added a third, ordinary character to a generic anime love triangle. The answer seems to be absolutely nothing. After episode 3 it seemed like best girl Megumi had won (or rather lost, since the hero Tomoya is so annoying), which was all good and nice, but then episode 6 rolls around and it’s all about Tomoya’s past, angsty non-relationship with Utaha-sempai? Where’d that come from? And who cares? It doesn’t matter any more. I thought best girl had won!

I hate those series where the author spends a little time building a relationship between A and B, then no, no, C has a chance too, no wait, D too, and round and round and round it goes. When I sign up for a harem I know it’s a harem, so I’m ready for that whole rigamarole (that’s why I avoid harems these days actually) but I was hoping for something a little less stale and hackneyed with Saekano. More fool me, I guess. Basically I dropped Saekano because it turned out to be a harem when I wasn’t looking for a harem.

There’s a second reason, though, which is the visual novel Tomoya and his group are going to be making. The story was revealed around episode 5 and TBH it’s bad. Really bad. It starts well but then turns into a yandere incestuous reincarnation romance with giant monsters? If it’s supposed to be a parody of something famous (Eva? Titan?) then sorry, it flew clean over my head. And hopefully landed in the garbage dump, there to stay forever. And the characters are just falling over themselves gushing with praise about how moving it is. Are you kidding me? I wouldn’t even let my dog poop on a story like that. No thanks.

To recap, I can’t support the romance because it’s not going the way I wanted it to. And just btw, Tomoya is a lot more annoying than I remember. That ‘noisy passionate otaku’ gimmick was funny the first few times I saw it, but now it’s played out. His brief moments of seriousness only making the yelling more obnoxious, because then his whole otaku persona just seems put-on and fake. Just be a normal guy, okay? There’s only one good character in the whole show and I think Megumi would be better off walking away from this whole stupid circle.

Right, so to recap the romance sucks and the game they’re making sucks, so there’s nothing for me root for in Saekano. If I had nothing else to watch I might finish it out of sheer inertia, but my backlog is HUGE and growing larger all the time. If an anime isn’t really knocking my socks off after 6 episodes I think I’m better off just reading summaries online and moving on to something else. Saekano is best left to people who like otaku romances that probably won’t ever go anywhere, the end.

Otouto Catcher Ore Pitcher de! volume 2 manga review

Well, things are certainly moving quickly. By the end of Otouto Catcher Ore Pitcher de! volume 2 the brothers have already become the main battery of the Hirataka high school baseball team and Koshien preliminaries have already began. The team went it expecting an easy win against their first opponent, but Ichiya quickly falls prey to the opponent’s mind games. By the time he snaps out of it Hirataka is already down 3-0. Is the team doomed to fail in its very first official game?

That would be an interesting twist, certainly. I rather doubt it though, simply because the bulk of volume 2 was spent introducing the rival team and the rival batter, Shinoi of Chouzan High. Hirataka is very conveniently destined to meet Chouzan right before the preliminary finals, so it’s unlikely that they’ll be knocked out before then. Plus most of the Hirataka team is made up of third years so this is their last tournament. If the team fails in the first match then author Shinji Tonaka will have to start over with an almost entirely new cast from volume 4. I have yet to meet a mangaka with that kind of guts, but who knows?

Apart from the introduction of Shinoi and the start of the tournament, nothing too exciting happened in volume 2. We were introduced to their eccentric team coach, one of those types who only gives cryptic advice instead of coming out to say what he means. The Touma brothers have also started working on a new pitch, since all Ichiya can throw right now are fastballs and sliders. Having Shinoi hit his pitch so easily has lit a fire under both brothers, though the results have yet to be felt.

TBH I wish the author would have delayed the start of the Koshien prelims by at least another volume. I haven’t got a good feel for the characters and their personalities just yet, and most of the Hirataka team is still just so much ink on paper. I don’t even know who bats when (Yoshi 3rd, Takaoka 4th, that’s it) or who defends what position. A little time spent developing the team by maybe focusing on training or the Touma brothers’ home life would have come in handy.

I can’t say I’m impressed by the baseball action I’ve seen so far either. It’s very boringly depicted. All pitchers adopt the same pose and then somehow the ball hits the bat/mitt and goes flying somewhere and it’s like whatever. Rather hard to follow and really hard to get into because you don’t know the main characters well enough to root for them to hit/strike someone out.

But it’s only volume 2 of Oto-Ore (the official abbreviation and much easier on the tongue than Otouto Catcher Ore Pitcher de!) so let’s keep reading and see how things develop, shall we?

Otouto Catcher Ore Pitcher de! volume 1 manga review

Mais oui, of course I’m still reading Japanese baseball manga. Ikkyuu-san was a bit of a failure, so I’m reading something more recent now. Otouto Catcher Ore Pitcher de! by Shinji Tonaka started running 2008 and up to 18 volumes and counting. I usually avoid ongoing series because then you get to the end and you’re like WHERE’S VOLUME 19?!! but every rule is meant to be broken once in a while.

The main characters are Ichiya Touma and his younger brother Yoshi. They were a feared pitcher-catcher combo in middle school, but their parents’ divorce forced them to split up. Two years later Ichiya returns from Mongolia to try and reform the Touma battery only to find out his brother Yoshi has turned into a fierce delinquent who absolutely hates baseball! Whatever happened to Yoshi? Will they ever play together again?

Uh, the series has 18 volumes so it’s safe to say the answer is “Yes.” I’ll avoid spoiling what happened to turn Yoshi bad, but by the end of volume 1 he’s slowly (very slowly) rediscovering his love for baseball and starting to (slightly) open up to his team mates.

Not much happens in the first volume since it’s mainly an introduction to the team as well as a chance to get the obligatory “Main character’s team takes on the strongest team in the prefecture” match out of the way. Almost all baseball manga series have at least one such battle, usually in the first 5 volumes or so. I won’t tell you the outcome of this one either. I can’t spoil everything all the time.

My impressions on Otouto Catcher Ore Pitcher de! after one volume? I’m not exactly raring to read the rest, but it’s a definite diamond in the rough. The chief attraction is the cheerful, silly, irrepressible personality of Ichiya, who regularly takes a licking from his brother Yoshi and comes back for more. His love for baseball and desire to keep pitching is also rather infectious. I hope they don’t turn him into the serious, angsty type before too long. There are too many such pitchers in baseball manga.

Apart from Ichiya, the other characters didn’t make much of an impression. To be honest I couldn’t even tell most of them apart, they all looked so similar. Most sports manga at least make an effort to give the main characters unique designs, but Ichiya and Yoshi look just like everyone else. I usually have to read their lines to try and figure out who said what. By the end of vol 1 I think I can recognize the Touma siblings on sight. The team captain has dark skin so I can tell him apart too. Everyone else is just so much ink on paper.

I don’t think too much of the baseball action so far. It hasn’t really been about the baseball anyway. More focus is on getting Yoshi to be the catcher so Ichiya can use his full strength pitching. Yoshi isn’t a particularly good catcher and Ichiya isn’t that good a pitcher, but both of them have been out of practice for 2 years so we can look forward to better things from them in later volumes.

I’ll be reading this slowly on and off and giving my thoughts here and there from time to time. Will I make it all the way to volume 18 or will Shinji Tonaka ruin the series long before that? Stay tuned to find out!

Dropped Shokugeki no Soma and ISUCA after 5 minutes

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable–if anything is excellent or praiseworthy–think about such things. (Philippians 4:8)

I am far behind in my anime-watching and I don’t want to fall behind even further, so I like to at least try the first episode of each anime in each season so I know what to come back to later and what to drop. The season before the last was a bit of a wash, since I only found Saekano worth pursuing (even though I didn’t actually pursue it and it’s still on my “to watch” list). The last season I didn’t try that many shows, and of those I tried only Dungeon de Deai wo Motomeru showed much promise, and even that was nothing special.

This weekend I started grabbing episodes of both this and last season, and I’ve come up with some promising series to try a little more of later. I came up with others that I wasn’t too hot on, but might check out another episode of in the near future. And then there were the disappointments, Shokugeki no Soma and ISUCA.

Shokugeki no Soma – I like hot-blooded shounen comedy series as much as the next person, so I was rather looking forward to this one. First the scene where the girl had a “foodgasm” or whatever they call it after eating the fried rice was like Umm… seriously? =_= Then after that there’s a scene that shows her being sexually violated by peanut butter-covered squid tentacles, I was like DELETE! DELETE! DELETE! Disgusting and unfunny. I don’t watch anime to have my mind and eyeballs polluted.

ISUCA – Dropped even faster than Shokugeki no Soma. If you’ve watched it, you probably know why. The first 5 seconds show a naked woman latching on to a young man on the street. Then I dunno, some ribs come out of her and she turns into a monster or something bizarre like that DELETE! DELETE! The nudity is bad enough, but I really hate horror series. Really, really. If I’d bothered to read the description I probably wouldn’t have bothered to try it in the first place.

So those two shows are definitely out of the running. I’ll watch a second episode of the shows that seemed interesting and then line up those I want to watch later on. Obviously I’m going to wait till they’re complete because I hate following shows on a weekly basis, but at least I’ll have some good things to look forward to in the near future.

Tonari no Seki-kun anime review

Tonari no Seki-kun is an episodic 24-episode anime about a girl named Yokoi and the inventive boy named Seki who sits by her in class and constantly distracts her with his games. And I don’t mean Nintendo games either, this is far more interesting than that. In episode one he builds an intricate domino setup using more erasers than any schoolboy should normally possess. In several other episodes he plays his own unique versions of chess, shogi and go.

In the early episodes Yokoi always trying to stay aloof from his games and focus on her lessons, only to find herself drawn in against herself. By the end of the show she is an active participant more often than not and seems to get into the games more than Seki himself does. It’s a convincing little bit of character development, where Yokoi learns to be a little less uptight and more playful and imaginative. Or you could look at it negatively and say she has been infected with Seki’s lack of seriousness and has lost sight of what she really goes to school for etc etc but I’m going to look at the bright side for once.

Because the games Seki plays vary with the episode, episode quality tends to go up and down as well. Some of them, like the robot family and the shogi pieces, show up a couple of times so they stick in the mind easily. Others are pretty forgettable and are a yawn to sit through even though each episode is only about 13 minutes long. I’d list some examples, but I’ve forgotten them. The funny episodes are funny, the heartwarming episodes are heartwarming and the boring ones are just meh. At least they’re over soon.

The ending theme is funky, the opening theme is catchy and the background music doesn’t get in the way. The art is rather simplistic compared to other contemporary shows and there isn’t much animation to speak of, but it’s not a very ‘action’ kind of show so it isn’t that noticeable. There’s almost no objectionable content in this show except in the feverish imaginings of one side character who only shows up once or twice. It never made me laugh or cry, but it was an above-average show in general. The endless inventiveness of Seki always kept me on my toes, at least.

I recommend you do like I did and watch just an episode or two a day to keep things fresh. Otherwise Yokoi can get a bit annoying as she just keeps panicking and won’t shut up. A good but not great show.