As you can probably tell, I recently watched Pale Cocoon and although in terms of the story I did not think it was the best thing out there, I do appreciate the art!

When I first heard about this series, I was interested in watching it, but just sort of forgot about it when it aired. Luckily yesterday I decided to finally give it a proper chance and became instantly engrossed. It took a serious topic and made it into an 11 episode series and made it something entertaining to watch. That in itself is very difficult to accomplish, but Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 managed to pull on all the right heart strings and came out with a series that was a near masterpiece.

It tells the story of if Tokyo were to be hit by an 8.0 earthquake and focuses mostly on young girl named Mirai and her younger brother Yuuki. Before the event happened, Mirai was a very selfish and cellphone obsessed girl who would look out for nobody but herself, but when the earthquake happens and she is left to take care of her brother alone to get home, so she has to find somehow a place in herself where she can soften up to others to help her get through it all.

I think this is more of a show that holds a greater impact in Japan, in the sense that when you see “monumental” places like Tokyo Tower and the bridge they were talking about throughout and the name escapes me completely collapse before your eyes. I would at least think that makes a bigger impact because I heard that for example, with the film 2012, people in the US actually liked it and it was hard for them to watch certain scenes like mentioned before, but I guess that still is not the best comparison. Well my point was that despite that, I still felt like this series hit home and I managed to catch myself crying through many scenes. It had some very good character development throughout and despite what say may say with it being boring in parts, I was very interested throughout. The production values were obviously very high as the animation was definitely top notch. Admittedly, the weakest part of the series was probably in the middle, but after episode 6-7, the rest of the series was still pretty incredible at showing the harsh realities of losing everything.

There is only a handful of series that I am able to say that I really marathoned or I just could not wait till the next episode was released and this was one of them. I have been a bit at loss of words to in what to say when I started to try to write this review, but I hope the fact that I felt this was an amazing series came across. Thinking about my top ten list of 2009, I would probably put it near number four if I were to rethink my list. By keeping in mind that this is a series that will probably leave you on the edge of your seat and that it will be an emotional ride, I do recommend this series. I recommend to watch it all at once for the main reason that once the first episode comes to a finish, the only thing you will want to do is watch the next.

Nothing like a good commercial holiday if I do say so myself. Considering I have not posted much in a while, I decided to go with the easy way out of that by making this post. I’ve also added my top five favourite romance animes that are not necessarily the most well done of all I have seen, but really represent love the best. So whether you plan on doing something fun today or just pretending it this day does not exist, I still wish you all the best. So to conclude, here is my list of top 5 romance animes:

5. Tokyo Marble Chocolate

4. True Tears

3. Clannad

2. Princess Tutu

1. Ouran High School Host Club

I am 11 episodes into the series and I do not understand what the big fuss is about this series. To describe my feelings towards this series in the simplest way; its boring.

When I first decided to watch this series I sort of forgot that this was a show by Gonzo and when I recalled this fact once more, I started to somewhat understand why I am not liking this anime. I have never been much of a fan of Gonzo productions because they are always very boring and even if they might give you thousands of action scenes throughout they almost always do not know how to portray these scenes in an entertaining way. And they use these dull action scenes to cover up the fact that they do not really have much of a plot behind their episodes.

From a friend I learned that the character designs are by Murata who has a very peculiar look to his designs, but actually make them very beautiful. The character designs are probably the best part of the series, but just as Gonzo loves to do, there is still a lot of CG animation being used very frequently.  This CG is also by no means seamless and instead gives the show an uglier look than it could have been. I at least like the opening in all this, just because I actually like the song and it manages to give off the expectation that this series could have been good.

In terms of the characters, I once again wander in the bin of boring. Lavie should be interesting, but every time she shows more than one side to her they just prevent it from further being discussed and she drops that attitude behind to go back to her figurative one dimensional self. An example of this is when she was showing tons of dislike and jealousy towards Al and just wanted to go home, but one episode later all was forgiven and her real home was not even a thought on her mind. Al is adorable so I do not mind too much whatever she does and from what I can tell at the end of episode 11, she is finally going to become more interesting. Claus is just the true definition of boring, he means nothing to me and I can never feel much sympathy for him. The only character I actually really like is Dio, who is by far the most entertaining and funniest aspect of this series. I approve of him at least.

I am going to finish this series because I feel like it is only right this far in and with episode 11 showing some sort of promise towards the plot, the show may become better from now till the end. I still do not see why so many love this series, so to the fans I hope you can explain to me what I am missing out on while watching this.

To set the mood x)

Well with the month of love in the air, I figured it would be cool to make a list of eight mangas that I like that I think people should check out this month if they are in the mood to read some good romance mangas. Of course, most of my choices for recommendations are pretty obvious, but sometimes people ignore the obvious series. Sometime within this week I also plan to make my list of Animes to watch to celebrate the month. Why eight you may ask? Well I figured why not. So I hope you somewhat like the recommendations! (and yes, they are in some sort of order) Read the rest of this entry »