heavenly_pearl | Entries tagged with hetalia axis powers

Yay, the Yona of the Dawn (Akatsuki no Yona) manga has been licensed by Viz! I figured it was only a matter of time due to the success of the anime, but, wow, it's already up to nineteen volumes and still on-going? I didn't realize it was that long. Everyone's Getting Married also looks rather promising, being another josei title they'll be printing under the Shojo Beat banner. More josei is always welcome!

The summer anime season has (mostly) ended, so here's some final thoughts on the shows I watched:

My Love Story!! - Yep, I think this is another series that earns a Masterpiece ranking. I loved pretty much every single second of it. I still think that Rinko could have gotten a little more development, but she was fleshed out enough in the second half to satisfy me. Plus, it's just a really, really, really cute show!

Snow White With The Red Hair - For the past few seasons, there has usually been one really stand-out shoujo series (Akatsuki no Yona, My Love Story!!), and Snow White With The Red Hair is this season's. Shirayuki is a fantastic lead, and the romance between her and Prince Zen is really sweet and respectful. It also looks gorgeous as well. My one complaint is that there doesn't really seem much of an overreaching storyline so far, but that's okay. I'm looking forward to the next season anyway.

Rokka: Braves of the Six Flowers - You know, when I first read a summary of this series, I thought the whole "seventh Brave" thing was just a hook to get people interested. I figured that the identity of the seventh Brave would be figured out around the half-way point of the show, then they would continue on to fight the Demon Lord, with the traitor sometimes getting in the way.

But actually, the ENTIRE show is devoted to the mystery of the seventh Brave and they never get the chance to fight the Demon Lord at all! (At least this season. It's based on a series of light novels and ends in way that pretty much demands a continuation.)

I was kinda annoyed by that, actually, since the mystery just seemed to drag on and on and on to the point that by the end I didn't really care who the traitor was anymore.

Heroic Legend of Arslan - A fairly average war story anime. I enjoyed watching it -- and I'll definitely be back for the upcoming new season that was just announced -- but there's nothing really memorable about it, except for the ending song "One Light", which is absolutely gorgeous.

To-Love-Ru Darkness - Lots and lots of fanservice, skirting the line of outright porn. What else is there really to say about it? (But it was still pretty fun to watch, if only to see how far they could push things.)

Hetalia: The World Twinkle - Again, not much to mention. If you enjoyed the other seasons of anthropomophized countries being cute together, then you'll enjoy this season.

As for what I plan to watch in the new season... Well, there's a new season of Diabolik Lovers for some reason. I don't really WANT to watch it, but my sense of completeness will probably make me anyway. (I can at least hope the lead heroine might have grown a bit of a backbone...but she probably hasn't. Or maybe they'll add a nice, non-murderous romantic interest for her? ... Probably not.) At least a vampire anime is suitably Halloween-y, which I enjoy in October.

Other than that, I'd like to check out Beautiful Bones - Sakurako's Investigation -, The Perfect Insider, and Dance with Devils (an anime musical!) -- all also suitably Halloween-y. One-Punch Man isn't Halloween-y at all but seems to be getting a lot of early buzz, so I might check it out. Starmyu also kinda interests me, being about a bunch of hot guys trying to become an idol group, but Dance with Devils seems the more interesting "singing bishies" show, so I may skip it during simulcast and wait to watch it some other time. And I actually would like to watch the second season of Noragami, but I haven't watched the first season yet and for some reason Hulu has all of the dub episodes yet only two of the subtitled episodes. (Usually it's the other way around!) I'd really prefer to watch the subtitled version first, so I'm not sure what to do about that.

Current Mood: hungry

Now that the summer anime season is over (for the most part; The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan has a weird amount of episodes and will cross over into next season, although it's still the same cour), I'll give my thoughts on the shows I watched.

Continuing series

Sailor Moon Crystal - Love, love, love the second half of the series! A definite improvement on the somewhat mishandled first half, which was helped by not making any huge changes to the manga plotline. I still think the new musical version of this arc is my favorite, but a lot better than the old anime, with the nonsensical and badly-handled break-up and stupid attempts at a MotD plot when that kind of plotline doesn't really work with the arc. Just one more episode left! (Got my fingers crossed that a new season will be officially announced soon. I need the Dream arc animated!)

Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works - I wish they hadn't taken a break between the first and second halves of this show. I absolutely loved the first half, but by the time the second half started airing, I had forgotten a lot of what happened, so there were some definite moments of confusion on my part. (I get the feeling that it would have been helpful to be more familiar with the original VN during this part as well.) For the first time, I understand why sometimes there's a need for recap episodes. I would have benefitted from one at the start of this season! I was also disappointed by some of the things that happened to Rin and Saber and how they reacted to those things, which seemed out of character to me. I still enjoyed the show, though, and think it's one of the most gorgeously animated shows I've ever seen.

I Can't Understand What My Husband Is Saying - More of the same, really. Nothing much else to say, although I actually really liked the final episode. That was my favorite of the entire series.

New Series

My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU TOO! - Technically a continuing series, but since I watched both seasons back to back, I'm counting it as a new one. Anyway, I LOVED the first season and thought it was hilarious, but the second season isn't quite as good, IMO. I mean, I still really liked it and all, but for most of this season the relationship between Hachimon, Yui, and Yukino was kind of strained, which put a damper on a lot of the humor I enjoyed from the first. Plus, the "cases" they work on aren't as fun and were way drawn out. Seriously, how many episodes did they spend on planning the Christmas event with those annoying people from the other school who just liked to talk and wouldn't make any actual decisions about anything? I just looked it up -- five. freakin'. episodes. Three episodes too many, if you ask me. One episode to establish how annoying those people were and one episode for somebody to stand up and tell them to start taking things seriously...that's all that was needed. (Okay, so Hachimon and the others learned a lot of good lessons during this arc, too, but still...five. freakin'. episodes.)

My love STORY!! - If I had to sum up this series in one word, it would be...ADORABLE! Seriously, it is impossible to watch an episode of this show and not end up grinning like an idiot by the end. It's just so sweet and fluffy and heartwarming and...well, adorable! I do wish that Yamato (the main female character) was a more developed character -- you can basically describe her in three phrases: really nice, likes to bake, and finds Takeo very, very sexy -- but other than that, I have no real complaints. (And since the show is continuing into next season with a second cour, maybe Yamato will get more development later on.) My favorite of the season!

Sound! Euphonium - This show makes me wish my sister and her husband were anime fans, because I think they would really like it, too. (They're both junior high/high school band directors.) I'm no band geek -- I was a choir nerd instead -- but the music talk comes across as being mostly realistic, and the characters look like they're actually playing the instruments correctly. Being a Kyoto Animation show, there's no real need to point out that the animation is gorgeous, but...well, the animation is GORGEOUS. I also quite enjoyed the characters. It ended in a great spot, but I definitely wouldn't mind if we got a second season of this!

The Disappearance of Yuki Nagato - This is an AU version of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, based on the movie The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya. I liked the original MoHS well enough, but I think I actually like this version more. Granted, the plotlines are nothing special -- the first few episodes are just your typical Christmas/Valentine cliche fests -- but the characters are more likeable, especially Haruhi Suzumiya herself, who loses her more...sociopathic qualities (like molesting poor Mikuru all the time, although she does do some boob-groping during the hot springs episodes) while still remaining mostly true to her original character. Plus, it's really fun to pick up the allusions made to the original series.

Amagi Brilliant Park - Technically, this was from a couple of seasons ago, but it never got picked up for legal simulcast for some reason. Crunchyroll finally got the rights this to it season, so I'm counting it as part of the summer season. Anyway, love, love, love this show! The humor was great, and again, Kyoto Animation, so it looked fantastic. Sure, it would have been nice to get a new season of Full Metal Panic (by the same author), but I loved ABP just as much as FMP, so I'm not complaining. (Okay, one complaint: When is CR going to get the rights to the 13th episode? From what I understand, it's not a necessary episode -- everything wrapped up nicely in Episode 12 -- but I still want to see it!)

So it was a pretty successful summer anime season! (And I haven't even watched the Heroic Age of Arslan yet. Never got around to it, but it's on my list.)

Not much has caught my eye next season, though. I definitely want to watch Snow White of the Red Hair (Akagami no Shirayuki-hime), and Rokka: Braves of the Six Flowers might be worth a shot, but that's about it aside from new seasons of series I've already watched before (Hetalia and To-LOVE-Ru). Oh, and I'm kinda interested in Gangsta., but I'm super on the fence. Might just wait until the end of the season and see what the general opinion is.

Current Mood: content

07. A manga/an anime you disliked enough to stop reading/watching

None. I'm a completist. If I start a series, I always finish it, unless there's some reason why I can't (like the company shuts down, or Netflix is missing discs, or the rest wasn't licensed.) However, there were definitely a couple of times I almost considered it.

For manga, it was Hot Gimmick. Even before I started it, I had a feeling I wouldn't like it based on all the reviews I had read about it, but I had like this morbid curiosity to see if Ryoki Tachibana (the main love interest) was really as horrible as everybody said he was. Besides, the series had been re-released in four affordable omnibus editions, and I'm always a sucker for those, so I decided to give it a try. Turns out that yes, Ryoki was as terrible as advertised (he's now tied with Akito from Fruits Basket as my least favorite manga character ever), but unlike FB, I didn't really care for any of the other characters either, and the plot was only mildly interesting when Ryoki wasn't around. (I pretty much hated every scene he appeared in -- that's how much I loathe him.) Still, I continued on, hoping that maybe Ryoki would at least become a little better by the end...but, yeah.

When it comes to anime, the one series that almost made me throw in the towel was Di Gi Charat, quite the accomplishment considering there was only one disc to watch. Each "episode" was only about three minutes long (excluding the OP and ED, which, if I remember correctly, they played for every episode, unlike the similar Hetalia, which wisely grouped the mini-episodes into longer episodes.), and by the end of the second episode, I wanted to eject the DVD and break it in half. (Stupidest. Anime. Ever.) Alas, it was rented from Netflix, and I certainly wasn't going to pay for a damaged disc, so somehow I forced myself to watch the rest of the remaining episodes. (Luckily, there were only fourteen more of them.) I...kinda regret that I did. -_- That's forty-eight minutes of my life I will never get back.

Current Mood: cranky

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Entries tagged with hetalia axis powers

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