The fall season is finally over, just as the year is almost through.  It’s certainly been an interesting season, filled with ups and downs.  I thought that I might as well end the season right through tiny reviews of what I’ve been watching, along with reasons why I may have not finished up something.  Please note that this will contain shows I did not do Initial Impressions posts on, and that this will be much less-detailed than other posts.

(Note: before we begin, I am sorry to say that I will be omitting Guilty Crown from this; I will be doing a Final Impression of it at the end of next season, but right now I am working on catching up to it.  It has been a rather busy fall on my end and some things fell by the wayside)

C³ – CubexCursedxCurious (Dropped: episode 5)

Oh, the first thing I looked at on this site.  Quite nostalgic, don’t you think?  It’s such a shame that I just could not bring myself to like this show in the slightest.

C³ suffers from a multitude of problems that make it rather aggravating to watch.  Those majors problems include the characters and plot.  From the five episodes I watched, it never gave me any real reason to care about these moe meatbags being abused (and abusing others).  Fear remains one of the most annoying anime characters I have ever encountered, with her actions being indicative of her status as a cursed item but still being a pain to watch; she is a selfish brat.  The other characters did not fare as well, being skin-deep and annoying to the point of me actively wishing pain upon them.  The plot itself is also in shambles, trying too hard to be a supernatural action title with random bits of awkward fanservice thrown in there.  It was not pleasant to watch.

The art and animation in C³ was bright and colorful, and I have to give major props to Silver Link for employing decent animation tricks and cheating well where it needed to.  The techniques employed in terms of showcasing random scenes in different sorts of artistic effects do not work as well as I hope they would, but are still welcome variety.  The music is rather unnoticeable.  It’s there, somewhere; it is only used to add to the scenes and not much else.  It does not help that the opening and ending are rather generic and forgettable.

Overall, is C³ worth your time beyond three episodes?  To be perfectly honest, I dropped the show after episode four and it took me eight weeks to get through episode five.  I guess if this show is your thing, you have every right to ignore this section (as you may have already watched it) but it’s nothing worth noting.  Feel free to pass this one up.

Initial impression: Try (fans of the premise), Skip
Final impression: Skip

Mirai Nikki (Future Diary) (Continuing; episode 12)

Mirai Nikki, you grimdark little bugger.  This is easily the most popular show of this past season, which is not surprising due to a premise that anime fans eat up (it also helps that the manga was super-popular).  I initially praised this show entirely, but boy, as it went along, its problems reared their ugly heads.

The biggest problem here is our protagonist, Yukiteru.  I initially thought that after he’s been thrown into life-threatening situation after life-threatening situation, he would either completely lose his mind or man up.  He has done neither of these, settling instead on being as whiny and useless as possible.  Yes, the circumstances are crazy, but he remains naive to a rather massive fault, being betrayed constantly due to his inability to doubt anybody besides Yuno.  This makes the show painful to watch at points, simply because his character is not worth sympathizing with.  Yuno has also fallen from grace as well, becoming more of a campy psycho than a creepy yandere.  Despite this, she still remains entertaining to watch, not really being sure what she will do next.

The plot itself has become rather formulaic, as mentioned in my Initial Impressions on the show.  Usually, we’re treated to lighthearted slice-of-life antics at the beginning of an arc, some tension, and then everything going straight to hell.  It is still an interesting formula, however, as the main two protagonists flounder their way from one crazy situation to the next.  It’s a shame that the art and animation could not keep up, succumbing to looking absolutely terrible from a distance and using cheats during several action scenes.  The score also remains rather terrible outside of the opening and ending, making this show feel slightly campy.

I still like Mirai Nikki and look forward to watching it every week, don’t get me wrong, but it has its faults that might turn some viewers off.

Initial impression: Watch
Current impression: Watch (if thoroughly intrigued), Try (all others)

Ben-To (Completed)

Ah, yes, the first of the shows that I did not cover in an article yet.  To summarize my initial thoughts on Ben-To: this show is dumb.  It’s an over-the-top brawler about fighting for discount bento boxes at supermarkets.  Hijinks and fisticuffs ensue.

What struck me about this production initially was the animation.  The character designs were generic, but moved very well in this show.  The fight choreography always impressed me, and whenever they did fight, the animation was always there to back it up, something that is always necessary, even in something with as ridiculous of a premise as this.  It even decides to keep up its animation quality outside of the fights, never going off-model and looking fluid and polished.  There is the occasional usage of speedlines, but this production uses them rather sparingly.  The opening is well-animated and exciting (with the ending not being as good, but still looking polished).  Well done, David Productions.

As far as almost everything else in this production?  Rather stupid.  The characters are not very well-developed, the main villains are not introduced until around episode ten, with some semblance of a villain and plot forming around episodes five and six.  But that’s not the draw of Ben-To.  The plot is a gigantic mess of ideas and fanservice (mostly involving the thighs earlier on, making it a vast departure from many of its ilk), but the fighting is, admittedly, stupid fun.  The hijinks involving main character Sato and the rest of the cast are a mix of hilarity and perversion, and they work decently together, providing laughs nine times out of ten.  The music in this show is another saving grace, though, composed by Iwasaki Taku (Gurren Lagann, [C], Soul Eater).  To say the music perfectly fits the series is an understatement, and I thoroughly enjoy the score.

Overall, Ben-To is an average show that does not take itself seriously.  Not taking itself seriously gives the show much more merit than others in its genre, and makes it enjoyable to watch.  Be warned, though, as fans of well-developed characters and a cohesive plot need not apply.

Initial impression: Try, Skip (if looking for actual substance)
Final impression: Try, Skip (if looking for actual substance)

Kimi to Boku. (You and Me.) (Completed)

What’s that?  I completed a show I initially rated worse than a show I dropped?  And I’m talking to myself about it?  Shut up, voice in my head, and let me continue.

Now, I mentioned before that this show is definitely some of the same-old, same-old one experiences with the slice-of-life genre.  Sure, it attempted to instill a nostalgic feeling into the viewers at points, but at those moments, it instead decided to ruin them with more hijinks.

I said this before and I’ll say it again: if you like this type of show, you are either going to love it or have already watched it.  Regardless, I must admit that Kimi to Boku. has a fair number of problems with it.  The animation is one of the biggest offenders, being only very well-detailed when looking at the clips of cats it tends to play at points in the series.  These cats are also cutaways I understood in terms of thematic placement but still did not like, as it felt lazy.  The blatant CG on backgrounds on occasion was rather lazy, and it matched the laziness of the production altogether, hiding underneath a faded pastel look.  The opening used decent stylistic tricks but remained dull as dirt; the ending is dull as dirt; the score is dull as dirt; the character models and voice acting…you see where I’m going with this.

The plot and characters of this show also suffer the fate of being dull and uninteresting.  We seem to get more screentime of Yuki and Kaname than anybody else in the series, starving the other characters of necessary development.  Shu does not develop at all, but has the benefit of being the least annoying in the cast.  Chizuru, on the other hand, gets much more on-screen development after being introduced, but is still annoying and uninteresting.  Yuta is childish and annoying, and that’s pretty much his character.  Their hijinks are standard fare, with a school festival, an actual festival, and summer! episodes being par for the course.  It does not help that the pacing can be a bit wonky, making it harder to get through each episode.   The ending of the series is also a non-ending in and of itself, which puts the juiceless cherry on top of this dull sundae.

To be fair towards the ending, there is a second season of this show coming out in the spring.  However, after dealing with it this fall, I could not get myself to truly care about it.  It revels in the fact that it is a mediocre production, and I’d rather not deal with something that embraces not trying to be anything more.

Initial impression: Skip
Final impression: Skip

Chihayafuru (Continuing; episode 12)

If there truly was one show that was above the cut during this season, it’s Chihayafuru.  Halfway through it, I can say that it is much better than other shows airing at the same time and many other shows that aired this year.  I won’t give a full impression of this, as I would like to keep with the brief nature of this article, but bear with me.

The first few episodes of Chihayafuru are a flashback to when the main character, Chihaya, was a child.  She ends up discovering through this how exactly she feels about her close friends Taichi and Arata, and discovers her love for karuta (a game which Madhouse does a good job at intensifying, as the karuta itself seems rather boring).  It sounds rather mundane and like something that other anime have done in the past, but this show gives it a human edge, successfully executing its drama every time it comes up.  This show already demonstrates its mastery over our heartstrings, and it knows how to get the viewer pumped up during the dramatic karuta matches.  Despite these high points, however, the flashback nature of the first few episodes after seeing the present in the first might not go over so well with some viewers and the pacing of the first episode is a bit slow compared to the others.

The animation is something worth noting, too, with the art matching the elegance and energy of the animation.  Even when it goes into standard anime-face nonsense, the animation is as fluid as can be, and the CG cards are integrated very well into the action.  The art is distinctively jousei/shoujo, but it is definitely aesthetically pleasing.  The music is a mix of heartfelt orchestral ballads and some traditional instrumentation, which I enjoyed quite thoroughly and cannot wait to hear more of.

Overall, Chihayafuru hooked me right from the start and continues to draw me along its path.  Go watch this show right now.

Initial impression: Watch
Current impression: Watch

UN-GO (Completed)

Anybody who follows my much-less-professional/much-more-personal Twitter account will know that I have been watching UN-GO this season and thoroughly enjoying this show.  Now, this article is not going to be explain my fanboyish tendencies with this series, but will just describe the show in general.

The first few episodes of this show definitely intrigued me, with it being a detective show that’s actually not one.  In fact, the cases being solved follow a formula every episode of Inga being asked to interrogate after Shinjuro figures out the case.  What ends up being much more interesting yet glossed over in these first few episodes are the levels of government conspiracy.  Most of Shinjuro’s deductions get covered up by the governing force at work, which is something that is not covered until later in the series.  Much more prominent is the attention to detail in the background of each case, which aid in world-building, giving the world these stories take place in much m0re rich and alive.  While the detective stories early on are not all that great, the ones later on definitely get more intense, especially when a wrong deduction sets Shinjuro back.

The art in this show might turn some people off due to the long faces in the character designs, but I personally found the designs aesthetically-pleasing.  Much less debatable in terms of quality is the animation, which makes the series have decent eye candy to go along with the great world-building.  The quality of the animation is fully expressed in the opening and ending, which also feature some fantastic songs.  The actual score for this show is also masterfully done, combining heavy amounts of dissonance with some standard instrumentation, along with electronica and acoustic guitar.  It’s enjoyable and different.

Overall, I will admit that watching UN-GO week to week was not as fulfilling as watching it all at once.  Watching these cases with a lot of time in between made me unable to really notice the finer details.  However, marathoning the show recently got me to notice the finer details.  The last three episodes of the series are easily the most suspenseful, fulfilling episodes, thanks to incorporating all of the seemingly disconnected cases into one satisfying conclusion.  Despite its problems, UN-GO is worth a look.

Initial impression: Try
Final impression: Try

Mawaru Penguindrum (Completed)

Okay, this is holdover from the summer season, but trust me, this show is worth any look someone might give it.  Mawaru Penguindrum is one of the most unique anime experiences to come along in awhile, and one of the best shows of the year.

I will admit that Penguindrum is a hard show to get into.  Its first few episodes are more fanservice-comedy oriented, rife in foreshadowing and stock footage.  The acting is a tad cheesy, but it fits these first few episodes.  The set-up is interesting and the animation is good, with really pretty character designs.  The music is also suitably memorable and well-composed, with many props given to Hashimoto Yukari for the score.  The plot at the beginning, though, as said before, is a comedy rife with fanservice elements and are very light-hearted and somewhat directionless.

Penguindrum then goes in a psychological, metaphorical, and twisted direction, to make it unlike anything else out there.

Without spoiling anything about the show, Penguindrum deals heavily with touchy subjects and psychological states, as well as the acceptance and denial of fate in a way similar to that of Greek and Roman tragedy.  It is a shocking, beautiful, touching, and occasionally horrifying look into the consciousness of several characters and the terrible fates surrounding them.  It’s the show I’m commenting on the least in this article simply because it needs to be seen to be believed.  It suffers from overconvolution at points and a slow start, definitely not being for those who like a very clear, concise plot.  However, it remains one of the best titles to come out in 2011, proving that Kunihiko Ikuhara is worthy of any praise he gets.

Initial impression: Try
Final impression: Watch

Now, with the new season starting up next week, there’s no rest for the wicked!  Until then, I hope you all have a fantastic start to the 2012.  See you on the other side.

Remember, there is still some time to enter in the GA Geijutsuka Art Design volume 1 giveaway!