Shuffle!

Production Info

Episodes:	24
Genre:	Comedy, Drama
Aired:	07/07/05 – 01/05/06
Director:	Naoto Hosoda
Producertion:	asread

US Info

Licensee:	Funimation
Distributor:	Funimation

Scores

Story:	★★★★
Animation:	★★★★★
Music:	★★★★
Dub:	★★★★★
Overall:	★★★★

Shuffle! initially appears to be your standard harem anime series, though with a little twist.  You have the main male character, Rin Tsuchimi, which is actually an above-average male lead for a harem series due to the fact that, despite still being indecisive, he appears to be normal and otherwise someone you could actually see the female characters falling for normally.

Rin is surrounded by 4 girls(well, technically 5, but effectively his choice is between 4 of them): 2 from the human world, 1 from the world of the gods, and 1 from the world of the demons.  The two human girls are his close childhood friend Kaede and his tomboyish sempai Asa.  Then there is Sia, a goddess princess, and Nerine, a demon princess.  They all compete, at some level, and in different ways, for Rin’s attention throughout the series.

The first thing I should warn possible viewers about is that this series is very fan-service laden.  So much so that Funimation has decided to give it a TV-MA rating.

The first 11 episodes or so of the series is very much like a slice of life series.  Most of the show’s entertainment is being driven by the comedy caused from the girls all trying to get Rin’s attention and spend more time with him.  Some of this comedy is also derived from the fact that most of the other boys in the school are angry that Rin is spending too much time with either Kaede, Sia, or Nerine, and are routinely disrupting his life because of it.

Once the series enters it’s second half, it starts getting into the main character’s backgrounds, resulting in a darker and more serious turn in the series.  I find this half of the show to be the more interesting half, since we start dealing with actual issues and problems with the characters instead of just happily going around flashing panties, which is what mostly happens in the first half of the series.  The girl that Rin starts leaning towards becomes increasingly obvious as the 2nd half progresses, though the end result is still at least relatively in doubt until the end.

Overall, I thought the humorous first half of the show had enough humor to at least make it a decent watch, though if that was all that made up the show, the excessive fan service might have been too much for me.  As I noted before, what I think really carried the show was the darker, more dramatic second half.  Sure, there was still some comedy thrown in, but no where near as much as the first half of the series.

To some extent, once you’ve seen one harem show you’ve seen them all, but that’s true of many sub-genre’s as well.  I think there were several aspects that made Shuffle! unique, especially in it’s second half.  Again, I would rate Rin as an above-average male lead for a typical harem show because he seems like your average joe, and not necessarily a loser or a jerk, which is often the case of male lead in similar shows.  Also, while the characters are, just by the nature of the show, probably going to be a bit excessively enthusiastic about the male lead, I don’t think it was overdone.

The one big minus I have for this show is, once again, the fan service.  There is a good reason it was rated TV-MA, and much of the fan-service is pretty much needless and gratuitous.  I’m not sure what reason there was for it, other than to cater for a specific audiences.  Other shows have been made from ero-games without stooping to the level of fan-service that appears in Shuffle!.

On the technical aspects of the show, the animation is excellently done, I thought.  The music is good, though isn’t anything really to call home about.  One of the pleasant surprises in Funimatin’s release of the show, however, is the dub, with everyone’s dub (except perhaps Primula’s) being very well done.  I actually thought it was one of the better dubbed shows out there.

Overall, if you just don’t like harem shows, I’m not sure there is enough in Shuffle! to really make this show be an exception for you.  However, if you like harems, or at least don’t mind them, I think Shuffle! presents itself as one of the better examples out of that sub-genre, and it might be worth giving it a watch.  You might want to give it some time, though, since the better stuff is in the second half of the series.  I think I’ll give this show an overall rating of 4 stars.  The “story” rating is probably more like 3 1/2 stars, but I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt and round up to 4 stars.

ef – a tale of melodies

Production Info

Episodes:	12
Genre:	Drama
Aired:	10/6/08 – 12/22/08
Director:	Shin Oonuma
Production:	SHAFT

US Info

Licensee:	N/A
Distributor:	N/A

Scores

Story:	★★★★★
Animation:	★★★★★
Music:	★★★★★
Dub:	N/A
Overall:	★★★★★

ef – a tale of melodies is the 2nd part of the ef series – part sequel, part prequel, part spinoff – which focuses on two new stories, both of which can stand own their own, and yet are also intertwined with the stories of the first series.

The first story is set several years in the past between the mysterious girl Yuuko Amamiya and Chihiro’s caretaker Yu Himura.  Suddenly Yuuko tries to befriend Himura while they’re in high school.  However, Himura realizes that Yuuko is the same girl he knew when he was growing up in the local orphanage. However, he resisted to befriend Yuuko because she reminded him too much of his little sister whom he lost in a major earthquake which had rocked the town.  Himura similarly tries giving Yuuko the cold shoulder  when they meet again in high school for much of the same reasons.  However, Yuuko’s insistence and evidence that Yuuko is being bullied by the other girls at school starts to pull Himura closer to her, only to reveal Yuuko’s terrible past.

The second story is set in what we end up learning to be a duplicate town of Otowa in Australia, which is actually where Chihiro lives with Himura and Renji, away from her sister Kei, who lives in the “real” Otowa with Hiro and Miyako in Japan.  Kei’s friend Mizuki is visiting this 2nd Otowa and staying with Renji, who is her cousin, over the break.  She soon runs into Renji’s neighbor Kuze and immediately starts to fall for him because of his beautiful violin playing.  However, while initially playing along with Mizuki, Kuze starts pushing her away because he has an apparently fatal and incurable illness.  However, Mizuki still insists on getting closer to him.

One of the best things about a tale of melodies as opposed to a tale of memories is that it seems more jointed.  What I mean is that a tale of memories could have pretty easily been two separate shows just because they were, seemingly, so unrelated.  However, the two stories in a tale of melodies are linked, at least in some ways, as well as giving a little back story to the two stories from memories as well.  I think in part because of this a tale of melodies does what I would have thought to be unthinkable before: top it’s predecessor, a tale of memories.

I think the Yuuko/Himura arc is the best arc out of the 4 covered in the two series, and while I think the Mizuki/Kuze arc is probably the weakest of the four, it’s still good enough to keep the show going.  Also, just like memories, melodies excels in keeping the stories going despite splitting time between the two of them in the bulk of the episodes.  Also, the fantastic technical aspect of the first series also remain in this series.

If you liked ef – a tale of memories, you’ll probably love ef – a tale of melodies. If you haven’t watched either and you don’t mind some drama-heavy shows, go ahead and check this out.

I’m going to start posting some new reviews and posting re-reviews of some of the older series I’ve already reviewed pretty soon again. I’ll be updating my review page format so that hopefully it will be done a little more efficiently. I still have a long way to go before converting all my percentage reviews over to 5-point reviews, and I still have several series that I need to review for the first time as well.

For series that I’ve already reviewed on the 5-point scale, I guess I’ll start converting them over to the new format one by one as well. One of the things that I want to try to start doing, and hopefully I can do it pretty effectively despite canceling Netflix, is to watch older series. However, since Funimation and Section23 have many of their series online, and some other series being on Crunchyroll, I hope I can see most of them. The big hole in that, however, are probably Media Blasters, Bandai, and Right Stuf since they don’t, that I’m aware of, have sites streaming their shows yet, and I’m not sure I’m comfortable enough quite yet to restart Netflix again just for those titles. I should have enough titles in the meantime to watch, though.

One last thing: while before, when I did a re-review, I just rewrote the old review post and wrote a post with a link to it, I think from now on, I’ll just write a brand new post. I’ll keep the old post, but the link from the Anime Reviews page will go to the new post, and I’ll put a link in the old post linking to the new one as well.

The Essentials

Name: True Tears
Genre: Romance, Drama, Comedy
Episodes: 13
Aired: January 5, 2008 – March 29, 2008
Based On: True Tears visual novel game by La’cryma
Director: Junji Nishimura
Produced By: P.A. Works, Bandai Visual
US Distribution By: Bandai Visual/Bandai Entertainment

Cast

Review

True Tears is about a boy named Shinichiro who is part of a love pentagon.  First, there is Hiromi, a childhood friend of Shinichiro who now lives with him and his parents after her father passed away the previous year.  However, Shinichiro’s mother seems cold to Hiromi for some reason.  Next, it’s yet another childhood friend of Shinichiro, Aiko, who runs a bakery after school, where Shinichiro and his friend Miyokichi spend much of their time.  However, despite Aiko’s crush on Shinichiro, she accepted being Miyokichi’s girlfriend after he confessed and Shinichiro urged her to accept.

Finally, there is Noe.  Noe is seen as a rather strange girl at school, about whom there are many rumors (such as her ability to curse people).  She has been encouraging one of the chickens which are kept at the school, Raigomaru, to fly.  However, Raigomaru is suddenly killed by a racoon, and so Noe sees Shinichiro as her new object of affection, wanting to see him “fly.”  She also says that she’s given her tears away, and only someone very close can give her her tears back.

Shinichiro himself isn’t sure what he thinks of all this, and tries to spend his time writing picture books in hopes of eventually being accepted into an art school.

The good things about this series include the fact that I thought it was, overall, very well written and thought out.  There were several points of drama including all three of the main females, and all of them were executed in a way that made the story entertaining and dramatic.  There were plenty of good plot twists, and they were often twists that one knew something was wrong, but didn’t know exactly what until the show pulled the twist on you.  Others have noted that, this also seems to be one of the few “pure” love-triangle/rectangle/pentagon/moreagon shows where the entire show is just…normal.  No supernatural goings on.  No wild outlandish happenings.  Just people trying to figure out what they want to do.  I think that, almost more than anything else, explains why this show excelled so much.

On top of the story is added some of the best consistent animation quality I think I’ve seen anywhere.  Sometimes a series will start out strong with animation and then the quality will drop, but the animation in True Tears was flabbergasting (I was trying to find a word to go beyond mere “amazing”) all the way through.  And just to pile on, the music was very good as well.

If there is a weakness, and some people could argue that this isn’t really a weakness, is that some things are left unsaid.  What happens to the “primary loser” at the end of the show?  Or hell, for the winners at that?  I think there is still a lot of uncertainty left about many things when the show ends, but then again, one can say that that’s real life as well.

Overall, if you’re one who likes these romance so-called harem shows, and don’t mind that this is a really down-to-earth version of one, then I definitely think that you’d like True Tears.

Scores

Story: 5/5
Animation: 5/5
Music: 5/5
English Dubs: N/A

Overall: 5/5

First Watched: January 2008; August 2009
Do I Own: Yes
Do I Recommend: Yes

This is just a note saying that I’ve re-scored my review for The Place Promised in Our Early Days as part of my project to switch my scoring system from the old percentage system to the new 5-point system.

You can see the full review here.

The new scores for this series are:

Animation: 5/5
Story: 4/5
Music: 5/5
Dub: 4/5

Overall: 4/5

The Essentials

Name: Someday’s Dreamers: Summer Skies
Genre: Romance, Drama
Episodes: 12
Aired: July 2, 2008 – September 24, 2008
Based On: Someday’s Dreamers: Summer Skies manga by Norie Yamada
Director: Osamu Kobayashi
Produced By: Hal Film Maker
US Distribution By: Not Licensed

Cast

Review

Someday’s Dreamers: Summer Skies is about a girl, Sora Suzuki, who travels to Tokyo from Hokkaido to train as a mage.  She soon runs into a boy, Midorikawa, who is also attending mage training because his father was a mage (unbeknownst to him until recently), despite the fact that he can’t seem to do any magic himself at all.

The series progresses – slowly – as Sora learns more about the world, helping Midorikawa come to grips with his magical power along the way and creating a romance between the two along the way.  However, unknown to Midorikawa, Sora has a special reason why she wants to train as a mage.

This series, if viewed from very high, may not be all that bad a work, but once you start watching the episodes, several problems immediately start to show themselves.  First, the pacing, as a alluded to above, is slow.  Very slow.  Painfully slow.  I usually have a problem when doing episode reviews of having my reviews be too long and having too many screenshots.  This series presented me with the opposite problem: so little happened that I struggled to even write about what was going on.

While the development that did happen in the first 3/4 of the series of so is pretty good (however much of it there was), the last quarter of the series took a turn which turned the entire series on it’s head, and not necessarily in a good way.  Some people may like the twist at the end, but I found it needless and counterproductive.

This is all on top of the fact that the animation isn’t all that good.  The character animations look somewhat cheap, and the background animation doesn’t really impress either once one realizes that they’re essentially photoshopped real life photos.  If one likes really slow Dramas with romance thrown in, then you might like this, but this show might be a bit too slow for most people.

Scores

Story: 2/5
Animation: 2/5
Music: 4/5
English Dubs: N/A

Overall: 2/5

First Watched: July – September 2008
Do I Own: No
Do I Recommend: No