21 May, 2013

Majikoi-Oh! Samurai Girls comes exploding out of the gate with an action packed first episode. Class 2-F and 2-S of Kawakami Academy are settling their differences in a massive battle (using prop weapons that don’t kill but still hurt a whole lot). Yamato Naoe is 2-F’s tactician, and has prepared a number of strategies for dealing with his opponents,...

18 May, 2013

With a title like Loups=Garous staring out at you, the first thing you’ll want to know about is the werewolves. Are they nice and big and hairy? Do they howl at the moon, fangs dripping gore? All mighty good questions. But wait a sec, we’d better fill you in on the story, hadn’t we? It’s set in a post-apocalyptic future where humanity...

13 May, 2013

  “I’m sure you’ll love it, it’s just like…” One of the easiest ways to recommend a show to anyone is to cite something it resembles. More even perhaps than western TV, anime is built on the reuse and reinvention of ideas, each one tweaked and modified into new shapes. The shonen battle show, the romantic comedy, the...

11 May, 2013

The city of Stern Bild has individuals with great power, called NEXT, a number of whom dress up as superheroes and fight the bad guys, on the prime time TV show “Hero TV”. It’s a fresh take on the superhero genre and we really enjoyed the first volume released (see our review here). The last volume left us with the revelation of a NEXT calling himself...

5 May, 2013

Hardly have we had time to unbuckle our swashes after Part 1 of Bodacious Space Pirates, than Part 2 comes sailing over the horizon. Just to remind you, the central character, Marika, is a schoolgirl by day, pirate by night (and weekends and holidays, obviously), plying her trade on the space ship Bentenmaru among the frontier planets of a vast galactic empire....

23 Apr, 2013

King of Thorn begins promising the world, or at least the end of one. Humanity is riddled with an epidemic of the Medusa virus, so called because it turns people to stone. As it happens, Venus Gate, a pharmaceutical company, has been preparing underground cryogenic chambers for just such an eventuality. But, as each chamber can only hold 120 people, many are...

17 Apr, 2013

Vampire Princess Miyu is a 26 episode anime based on the OVA and manga of the same name.  The titular princess is a shinma (demons who prey upon troubled people) and also a Guardian.  As Guardian she is chosen to track down and send rogue shinma back into the Darkness.  However, it is not entirely clear exactly who she is guarding, because she appears to...

16 Apr, 2013

Character is the heart of any story. In some ways, it’s even more important than plot, because when the characters are good enough you’ll be happy to follow them no matter where the plot takes you. Slice-of-life shows are the very epitome of this – the best remain engaging despite the fact that barely anything happens. Why do I make this point...

9 Apr, 2013

Shakugan no Shana has an incredibly tangled backstory, and, sorry, we really can’t face going through it all again. So if you’re interested, please check out our recent review of Season 2, Part 1, where we laid the whole thing out for you… Okay, done that? Great. In which case, you’ve probably noticed that we weren’t all that...

1 Apr, 2013

“Ready Go!” for some totally bonkers Japanese humour. In this nutty high school comedy, meek Ryoshi declares his love for the feisty Ryoko Okami (the Okami-san of the title), and as a result gets drawn into her work for the Otogi Academy Bank. Officially known as the Otogi Academy Mutual Student Aid Association, this secretive group performs favours for its...