Sora’s arc gets into full swing by finally putting the axe to Haru and Nao’s relationship by having Haru sexually assault Nao in his desperation to rid his mind of his sister, er scratching where it itches (you can find any number of euphemisms here), unsurprisingly causing her to break things off.  After Sora gets a fever and Haru cleans the seat off her body, Sora stand stand it no more and finally seduces Haru and they get it on, and their relationship improves.  In fact, it improves so much that Nao and (especially) Kozue, who caught Haru reading up some books about incest, become concerned that there is more going on.  After Haru leaves his cell at school, the pair go to Haru’s house, only to find Haru, er,  sticking his sausage into Sora’s basket

In the conclusion, both Kozue and Nao confront Haru, with Kozue basically saying that she was mistaken about him and will never talk to him again.  Nao is more open to hearing what Haru has to say.  Haru and Sora end up getting into a fight and Sora runs away.  Haru thinks she’s run to the lake behind the temple, as there is a legend one can “restart” your life in it.  After nearly drowning, Haru decides to stay with Sora, and the pair move away to another city.  All they do is leave the others with a text message that they’ve left for overseas.  Nao is willing to give them a chance because they love each other.

I guess this arc went about as well as one could expect.  Shows involving this topic usually tend to result in either the pair throwing themselves off a bridge or moving out of town in the end.  There are countries (like France, among others) where the act of incest isn’t criminalized (though there is no country where they could actually get married), though the show doesn’t say where they went.  In fact, I actually think it’s technically legal in Japan (though frowned upon, though I don’t know where it’s not).  So if they want a future where it’s legal, they have some choices.  Still might need to hide the fact though.

I’m glad we finally saw more of Kozue, though I wish it was in better circumstances than her giving nasty faces all the time after walking in on Haru and Sora.  It’d been nice for her to have her own arc, but oh well I guess.  One of the few beefs I had with the final arc is that it didn’t give much time for Haru and Sora’s relationship to develop.  I guess one could argue that it was being developed all along during the series, but things still seemed to happen in rather quick succession.

Overall for this series, I’m not necessarily a fan of the rebooting every 2 and 3 episodes because it makes the series less, well, episodic.  Things from one arc don’t necessarily impact things in another arc, so it’s not like watching Akira’s arc is necessary when watching Nao’s arc or something.  One can just Watch episodes 1 and 2 and then skip to 7, then 10, 11, and 12 if you wanted just Sora’s story without missing anything.  It just makes the series feel disjointed.

And while I understand that the sex scenes were supposed to highlight Haru’s intimacy, shows can still get the point across without it, and much of what was in this show was purely gratuitous, I thought.  Sora and Nao’s arcs may be the only arcs where the sex scenes are actually important; Nao’s because Sora catching them  is an important story element, and Sora’s because it puts an exclamation point on what they’re doing.

I think there were some good elements.  Some of the arcs – especially Akira’s – I thought were very good.  However, there are just some things – the reboot nature and the sex scenes, makes this have pretty limited rewatch value, for me in the end. Decent little show, but it could have done a lot a lot better.  The rebooting was certainly unique in a sense, as it was done much like a visual novel, but I think the show would have been better with out it.

Nao’s arc ends when Sora goes from angry to depressed when she sees Nao give Haru mouth-to-mouth CPR after he almost drowns in the ocean.  Sora ultimately tries to run away, but Nao finds her in the bus station.  Sora spills her feelings out to Nao about being afraid of being forgotten by Haru when the bus station is hit by lightning, catching on fire with Sora’s stuffed bear in it.  Nao risks her life to save the bear, as it’s Sora’s sole remaining memento of her mother, and this finally softens Sora up towards Nao.

As expected, Sora’s arc starts up where episode 8 started up, the difference being that Haru decides to tell Sora in episode 8, but is hesitant to in episode 10.  Sora tries to use the fact that Haru doesn’t want to tell her about Nao to her advantage, sometimes working (in getting Haru to walk with her to school) and sometimes not (unable to prevent one of Haru’s dates with Nao).  However, one night he catches Sora getting off…over him.

Well, I guess Nao’s arc ended about as well as cold be expected.  It ended up Nao doing amazing for Sora that finally brought Sora around, and I guess it wasn’t anything too weird, though Nao and Sora were lucky not to get zapped by the lightning, just through the ground when it hit.  Otherwise…there isn’t that much to say really.  I think Nao saving Haru’s life perhaps started Sora coming around, but she was still too stubborn to go all the way until Nao saved her bear.

As for the start of Sora’s arc, Haru is obviously conflicted over Sora an his feelings for her, seeing his relationship with Nao as a way to finally get past his feelings, though Sora is doing everything she can to not make that easy.  And I’m not sure what Haru was crying for at the end when he caught Sora.  If he was crying over his guilt for his feelings for Sora or what. (that would be my guess).

I would say that finding out that Sora has those feelings for him, Haru is going to find it a lot more difficult to resist her temptations, though he was go through rejecting Sora almost completely first, before finally succumbing.

I was not planning on making this list because I missed the starting point, like last year…and this year I’m four days away from when the ‘moment’ posts are supposed to end. But hey, nothing says I can’t make one big post for all my favorite moments in anime for 2010! I watched even less [...]

And, to no one’s surprise, Sora did see Nao and Haru getting it on when they were last in town, and Sora sees it as Nao trying to steal Haru away – something she finally can’t hold in anymore when she catches them doing the deed again.  Though, Sora’s hatred for Nao still seems to go deeper than one would expect from her just seeing Nao and Haru getting it on, so I’m wondering if there is still more to it than that.  This arc looks like it will go for at least one more episode, so we’ll find out I guess.

I figure that, since Haru and Nao are trying to get Sora to forgive them, that’s the most likely final result for this arc, though Sora is pretty stubborn.  The way this episode went, I could also see Sora doing something rash like trying to throw herself of a bridge or something, but it doesn’t seem like this series would do that.  But then again, with us resetting for every arc, something like that could happen and then “reset” for the next arc.

As for trying to get Sora to “forgive” them (for what, really? It’s not their problem she’s jealous, really), I’m not sure just being nice to her is going to be enough, though I’m not sure what more they can really do.  Maybe someone will finally go off on Sora for being selfish or something and that will finally make her snap out of it.

The one girl we haven’t really seen anything of since the first episode, however, is Kuranaga, the class President, whom was one of the first girls Haru ran into in the first episode (I think Akira was first and she was second).  However, she is still hanging around in both the OP and second ED, so I’ll be surprised if we don’t see more of her.  Let’s say episode 9 is the last episode of Nao, that would give us 2 episodes each out of Sora and Kuranaga.  If what I’ve read is right about episode 7 being a shared episode between Nao and Sora, just like how episode 2 was shared between Akira and Kyou, then perhaps that means the final arc – and the winner – will ultimately be Kuranaga.

So…basically each arc is going to be it’s own alternate universe from now on?  Episode 5 rebooted from the start of episode 3 while episode 7 robooted from all the way back to the start of episode 2.  Which I guess begs the question, what were episodes 2 through 6 up until now?  Are those arcs just “hypotheticals?”  Do we get to see which arc is “correct” at the end, or is the last arc the “correct” one?

I realize this is playing out like a visual novel, but usually anime series are somewhat linear in nature, or else the final product we get at the end of the final episode isn’t the combined result of everything that came before it.  What affect, if any, do episodes 2 through 6 have on the end of the series, other than the knowledge we have gained from watching them?  Does this mean Kazu stays angry at her dad, despite episodes 3 and 4?  Does this mean Akira remains feeling unwanted, despite episodes 5 and 6?  It just feels cheap.

Episode 7 starts another arc with Nao.  Is this going to be another 2 episode arc, where everything is forgotten and gone after episode 8?  The pacing of this arc makes it seem like it’ll be done next episode.  Also, clearly Sora doesn’t like Nao, but why?  If I had to guess, she saw Nao and Haru having sex back when they were in the town before, and Sora is resentful of that.

In any case, we get to see another side of Akira from what we saw in Kazu’s arc, with her feeling lonely and unwanted, which I think makes this arc superior to Kazu’s.  While I think some good things happened in Kazu’s arc, I don’t feel like it was anything in comparison to what Akira was going through. And even though Nao’s arc isn’t finished, it feels a lot more forced to me than either Kazu or Akira’s arc.  Maybe it’ll get better in the next episode, but it already feels like the lowest of the 3 arcs we’ve seen so far.

Though the end of episode 6 had a bit of a reverse Maury Povich feel (you are NOT the daughter!) and then another all-but-porn ending which, I guess if one doesn’t mind sex scenes mixed in with your anime is fine, but it makes it harder to respect a show as a drama with that much explicitness in it.  I can handle fan service, but this show seems to go way beyond even that.

Bah! So the writers either made Sora chicken out after stripping or they were leading us on, with her saying that she wanted to be “measured’ for a uniform. Though, there is still evidence that she has a BroCon, such as her getting jealous at Haru hanging out with other girls and the like.

It seems like the hints of Akira x Kazu were mainly from Kazu feeling obligated to take care of Akira.  Of course, we played through the arc of Kazu, Akira, and their father through episode 4, and it pretty much looks like that arc is complete, though not before Kazu and Haru appear to get it on.

Speaking of which, I think Yosuga no Sora is vying for show that can get the closest to being hentai without actually being hentai.  Not that these scenes are very common (we’ve basically had 2 in 4 episodes) but still.  I know it’s a fanservice thing, but I’d kind of like my show not suddenly interrupted with, as I said early, near-hentai scenes.

As for the show, many shows like this one always seem to have a lot of mystery surrounding everyone, but this one really hasn’t, other than maybe Haru and Sora’s past, which hasn’t really been touched upon since episode 1.  We had the Akira parents situation, but that’s now resolved, and half of that arc seemed like an excuse to get Haru and Kazu together.  It’s still relatively early, but this show seems to have been a bit of a disappointment.  The episodes aren’t bad per se, but…there just hasn’t seemed to have been very much to look forward to in the series.

Making a list of the new fall anime that I still have to write impressions for, I discovered that nine more needed covered – or slightly more than half – and I’d already taken the ones easy to talk about. I was on pace for the last impression posts written to be series review posts; clearly, something needed done, something drastic.

Like combining all 9 shows into one post and just write the most pertinent items for each show. Madness I know.

Arakawa Under the Bridge 2

Rating for episodes 1 to 4 – 12/12 Perfect

Anticipation Level: 5/5 Very High

The Shaft/Shinbou series following of a community of “interesting” people living under a bridge is back this season and I was equal parts excited and fearful at this prospect. I loved the first season and didn’t want a poorly done second season to drag the first season down but I really wanted to see the lovable cast of characters again and there were a few story threads that were not resolved that I’d like to see resolved. Imagine my relief when the second season picked right back up and immediately started to address the very story threads that I wanted see featured. Can we add mind reader to the list of Shinbou’s abilities? Maybe, but either way, the result has been I’ve been enjoying this season even more than the first season. Highly recommended.

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Hakuouki Hekketsuroku

Rating for episodes 1 to 4 – 5/12 C+

Anticipation Level: 1.5/5 Below Average to Low

Frankly, I was surprised that I finished the first season, Hakuouki: Shinsengumi Kitan, since it was never a really good show. I might have received it better if I didn’t have to rely on what I learned from Rurouni Kenshin about the history of Japan in the 1860’s to explain the story and the characters to me. So maybe it wasn’t entirely the show’s fault for being less than stellar. I decided to give the second season a chance because I actually kinda knew the characters now and there was always the chance that the story of the show would finally start making sense and it was, at least, different from everything else I was watching. And Hakuouki Hekketsuroku has been slightly better in it’s second season. Now it looks like the constraining factor is having Studio Deen doing it; once again proving that Studio Deen is the best third-rate anime company out there. Recommended only to those anime fans that absolutely love historical anime; reverse harem fans will be disappointed to find that the guys here have a tendency to die.

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Hyakka Ryouran Samurai Girls

Rating for episodes 1 to 4 – 7/12 B

Anticipation Level: 1.5/5 Below Average to Low

Samurai Girls takes place in one of the most interesting settings of all new anime this season – an alternative history Japan where the Shogunate never fell and also did not lose WW2 because the Shogunate had the help of “Master Samurai,” people of extraordinary talent and battle prowess. Samurai Girls also has one of this season’s most interesting artistic styles.  It’s a shame that this setting and style is going to be, apparently, wasted on a boring fan service romantic comedy. Our hero is your typical generic young high school/college aged boy who has a female friend from childhood that’s clingy towards him, to us it’s obvious she wants to be his girlfriend, and gets thrown into a situation where a multitude of woman will fall for him. Seen it done many times already and done much better. Check out this season’s Sora No Otoshimono for just one better example. Even the fan service element is incredibly weak in comparison to other shows airing right now; seeing it included makes the show feel awkward and should just be removed. In it’s favor, Samurai Girls, does feature the vocal work of both Rie Kugimiya (who I’ve been really missing lately) and Yuu Kobayashi. It’s hard to recommend this to anyone other than Kugimiya and Kobayashi fans; if the story was a little better or if there was more fighting than I’d recommend it to people looking for that but right now it’s just not there.

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Kuragehime

Rating for episodes 1 to 3 – 11.5/12 Near Perfect

Anticipation Level: 4.5/5 High

The best way I can praise Kuragehime, aka Jellyfish Princess, is to say that it’s so good that I’m not angry at Brain’s Base (the animators) for doing it when they could be doing a third season of either Natsume Yuujinchou or Spice and Wolf or a second season of Baccano. It’s that good. The most striking thing about the anime is it’s storytelling; it’s so effortlessly perfect that it’s nearly invisible to the viewer without scrutiny. No “hey, it’s time for an info-dump,” or “hey, it’s time to the character’s back-story,” or “hey, don’t question this completely illogical turn-of-events, we need to get the plot moving,” or “hey, just accept these 1D cliché characters, there’s no time to flesh them out,” or “hey, don’t complain, these 2D characters are better than those cliché characters.” It doesn’t matter the show is about a group of adult female nerds and a flashy male cross-dresser, by almost everyone possible marker, Kuragehime is one of the best anime of the season and a definite must-watch for anyone who likens themselves an anime fan. I especially recommend it to those pessimists out there that believe anime is just becoming a vehicle to peddle moe junk.

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Shinrei Tantei Yakumo

Rating for episodes 1 to 5 – 7/12 B

Anticipation Level: 2/5 Below Average

I was set to really like this; I normally can’t get enough of anime that feature the supernatural, which is why I was able to enjoy Occult Academy as much as I was able to do, but Shinrei Tantei Yakumo left me cold. Five episodes in and I’m still waiting for Yakumo, the physic detective, to get an interesting supernatural case. I’ve been having trouble staying awake through the episodes and when I do, the show leaves no impression on me later. At least with Occult Academy, it was interesting and entertaining, even if it didn’t quite make sense. It’s hard to really dislike a show that leaves no impression which means I probably, really, should drop the score lower (to better reflect it’s quality) and drop it all-together (since I’m not even going to remember watching it later). Why couldn’t they just make Ghost Hunt 2?

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Star Driver

Rating for episodes 1 to 5 – 9/12 A-

Anticipation Level: 3/5 Average to Medium

Star Driver appears to be what happens when the people at Bones decide to create a new anime series at 4 AM after spending a long day animating other shows and then going out for a night of drinking and using other recreational drugs. It’s entertaining, well-drawn, exciting, unique and nearly incomprehensible. It might make sense at some later point but right now I don’t let it bother me since it doesn’t look like it’ll go the route of X’amd: Lost Memories, the last Bones original show. A measure of how odd this show is having the 20-something aged school nurse being into high school boys to the point of her having a book full of pictures of male students that she likes and having posters of young men on her wall at school and it didn’t even bother me. Recommended for those looking for something different with the jury still out on the merits of the plot/story.

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The World God Only Knows

Rating for episodes 1 to 5 – 8/12 B+

Anticipation Level: 2.5/5 Average

The story to TWGOK – obsessive visual novel playing H.S. boy tasked with getting “real girls” to fall in love with him – was never going to a great, compelling story but Manglobe, the animators in charge of adapting into an anime, are doing really good with squeezing every bit of entertainment out of the source material. If the entire series was as good as episode 4, it could have been one of the top shows and top comedies of the season but the episodes that focus on the girls that need “captured” by the main character just aren’t as interesting. Worth a look but don’t expect too much.

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To Aru Majutsu no Index II

Rating for episodes 1 to 4 – 6/12 B-

Anticipation Level: 2/5 Below Average

I have a hard time believing Index and Railgun come from the same person; they exist on two completely opposite planes of existence. It makes sense then that I have completely different reactions to the two series. Railgun is a great series and Index is not. The same problems that plagued the first Index appear again in Index 2; the characters are needlessly verbose with nothing interesting to say, stuff happens completely randomly or in a coincidentally nice way that leads to lazy storytelling and the characters aren’t likable (even Misaka is a pain here which is weird because she’s awesome in Railgun). I really should just drop this now but the opening suggests that all the characters from Railgun will make an appearance and I want to see them again.

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Yosuga no Sora

Rating for episodes 1 to 5 – 9/12 A-

Anticipation Level: 2/5 Below Average

Initially I didn’t like how Amagami SS was going the route of independent 4 episode arcs to cover each different path in the anime adaptation of the visual novel. It seemed like a cop-out but I’ve found in practice that it works nicely because the animators don’t have to make it look like the male main character can hang out with a half-dozen different girls at the same time. A side-effect of this novel structure is that it’s difficult to get tired of the show because the time investment for 4 episodes is much less than 26 or even 13 episodes. If I don’t like a particular match, I only to wait a couple of episodes and the focus will shift to a different match. Watching Amagami SS prepared me for the similarly constructed Yosuga no Sora. The pair also share scenes of rather explicit fan-service which I should mention to potential viewers. I’ve been on the fence about these scenes, they don’t add to my enjoyment of either series so they could clipped out but, at the same time, I like that they don’t censor it as a way to drive DVD sales. Neither of these shows, I realize, are especially great shows but the novel structure employed help ensure that I keep watching, at least for now. (This set-up also put my mind at ease about the brother-sister undertone the first episode had of Yosuga no Sora since if they do go that route, I can just elect to not watch those couple of episodes.)

Filed under: anime, first impressions

Aww already? And here I was hoping to see how the rest of the anime would pan out now that he chose a girl. Would he have changed his mind, saying he really likes someone else? Would there be a complete 180 turn on his feelings and go the incest route? Damn, too bad. It [...]

Pre-thoughts: I know this is another visual novel adaptation, but I’ve had pretty good luck with them, and this one looks like it could be a decent one, so I thought I would give it a shot.  It’s made by feel, who I don’t have much experience with. The only other show I’ve seen that they’ve done is the first ever series I blogged; Nagasarete Airantou.  I really don’t have many other thoughts on it other than that before I begin.

Series: Yosuga no Sora
Media: pwq Fansub – Episode 1

Geh, nothing says that a series is going to be great than every girl going mellow-mellow the literal instant they see the male protagonist.  I mean, really. He’s nothing that special.  Akira, the girl who knew Haru from before, I can understand, but everyone else just elicited a facepalm from me after a while. Speaking of Akira, she seems to have some hints of Yuri between herself and shrine maiden Kazu, though whether that’s real or just the show teasing, I guess we’ll find out.

Meanwhile, Sora appears to have a full-on brother-complex over Haru, despite the fact that she’s outwardly distant from him, which I think has just intensified due to the death of their parents.  This is brought to a head when she tells Haru that she thought he had run away after he didn’t answer any of her text messages while he was at school (he forgot his phone) and then later that night, she strips in front of Haru and asks him to have sex with her

While the two might have played house or doctor or whatever when they were little, Haru doesn’t seem to harbor any romantic feelings for Sora anymore, so she’s likely to get rebuffed.  That in turn is probably going to make their already rocky relationship worse, since she’ll probably take it as him rejecting her as a person and not just as a lover.

Also, I’m not sure when I’ve seen blatant female, well, masturbation on a supposedly non-hentai show before.  I knew this was an H-visual novel, but they often tone things down for TV, and while I”m sure this has, this is still one of the more explicit shows I’ve seen in quite a while.

As for the future of this show, I think the jury is still out. Hopefully the other characters will be fleshed out a bit better.  I don’t really expect all the characters to be explored in the first episode, but there is always a danger with a series like this that it’ll go more towards the mindless fanservice direction in stead of actually trying to tell a story.

Round two of sampling anything that sounds at least interesting and has “01″ in the filename. Unexpectedly, the fall season has a lot of anime and a nice lineup. Another five series: Musume Youkai Zakuro GIRLS WITH ANIMAL EARS! Youkai and humans try to get along by working together so a chosen few from both [...]