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Samurai 7... and then a bunch more text

humour: 1 mecha: 1 romance: 1 violence: 8 angst: 3 magic: 5 cute: 1 fanservice: 1 yuri: 1 yaoi: 1 ecchi: 1 wierd: 3 humour: 10 mecha: 5 romance: 3 violence: 1 angst: 7 magic: 4 cute: 8 fanservice: 2 yuri: 5 yaoi: 7 ecchi: 9 wierd: 8 Samurai!!! Swords!!! And Mecha!!!............ wait, that didn’t sound right.... but yes it's true, Samurai 7 has incorporated these 3 very popular themes into an incredible mix with slick animation and battle scenes. The story begins with representatives of a village entering a city, trying to find Samurai who will help them fight off bandits that attack them and steal their yearly harvest of rice. With nothing to offer the Samurai but rice, they must find a band of skilled samurai, all willing and able to fight off the bandits before this year’s harvest. Following this as an introduction, we also see major plot twists and surprises throughout the course of the series which will hit the viewers time and t...

Berserk

Do you want a break from cutesy and sparkly anime? Then pick up Berserk- one of the bloodiest and most violent series you could hope to come across! The story follows Guts, a mercenary, born from a corpse and bearing a mysterious scar on his neck. After losing a fight to the mysterious Griffith, he is enlisted into the Band of the Hawk, a powerful mercenary group who aim to realise Griffith’s ambition of becoming the King of Midland. Caught up in the midst of war between Midland and Chudor, Guts begins to learn about the importance of comradeship and the meaning behind his scar and the crimson Behelit belonging to Griffith, which is said to be a link to the underworld. Berserk does not fail to disappoint by any means. Based upon a 1990s manga which is still continuing, the series runs across twenty six episodes and covers the first two arcs of the manga and leaves you wanting more. The animation is beautiful and true to the traditional anime style, despite the fact that it was infa...

Ergo Proxy

Ergo Proxy is an anime with a fairly complicated storyline primarily about things I cannot describe since they have intense spoiler value. I wish I could go into more detail, but it would spoil the way the series presents itself, and with a production this well done, first impressions really are important. And the first impression should really come from the first episode, not me. The nature of the anime changes drastically several times as the characters discover more about themselves and their place in the world, and these changes are quite drastic, so much so that you might find yourself only liking some parts of this series. It starts off presenting a static dystopian world like a version of (the game) Fallout's Vault 101 if it was designed by Apple in all its sci-fi glory, then goes on to show the problems with a completely static society, and the robots that inhabit it with us, some other ways of maintaining such a closed system and finally the destruction of it. The world infl...

Chobits

So, How exactly do you turn a girl on? The wrong answer to this question can be found in the early episodes of Chobits, a heavily moe lightly romance anime featuring our generic protagonist, this time called Hideki, and a computer he found in the trash, called Chi (because this is initially the only sound she makes), that is also a nubile young girl (since all personal computers are in this universe attractive versions of the opposite sex), devoid of programming/intelligence. Hideki spends the first half of the anime bringing up Chi as a father would a daughter, or as my housemate put it; "Teaching her to be less cute". The second half of the anime is spent working out why she has any emotions at all, which becomes the plot, finding out what a Chobits is, and dealing with the vastly more sensible relationship between Hideki and a coworker called Yumi. This anime is like an airline sugar sachet covered with half baked philosophy sprinkles. It's very, very cute and quite clam...

Black Lagoon

Black lagoon is all about action. This is like every single action movie you've ever seen mixed together and Japanned (Japanned is a verb who's real definition has nothing to do with how I intend to use the word). The story follows a standard Japanese salary man, who gets kidnapped by pirates whilst transporting an important data disk for his company. The company disowns him in order to erase all evidence of the disk and his life becomes forfeit after his kidnappers realise they can't ransom him. Luckily, the pirates take a liking to him after he successfully torpedoes a flying helicopter. He becomes a pirate himself, and we're invited to experience the world of piracy in the south china seas. Black lagoon features some of the deadliest women in anime, as well as fresh takes on a few stereotypes you'll recognise from other action films, and a pretty much non stop flow of bullets, explosions, chases and of course, a little character development here and there. The Animation is ambitio...

Ah! My Goddess

Ah! My Goddess is a romance/slice of life anime, and slow enough to be called seinen. The basic idea is that our protagonist Keiichi has a phone call diverted to Yggdrassil, which is a large set of organisations/computer which acts as something similar to god's secretarial service because he's been flagged as being really unfairly treated in life. As a result, a goddess named Belldandy (a textbook yamato nadeshiko) is sent to grant him one wish. Keiichi is immediately smitten with her and has the best idea in the world, ever. He wishes that Belldandy should stay by his side forever, and this becomes immediately, completely binding. If these names sound familiar, it's because all of the supernatural forces in Ah! My Goddess come from Norse mythology ("Belldandy" is the result of the inability to pronounce "Verdandis" in Japanese). The story then proceeds to describe what is widely considered the slowest relationship in anime. Luckily, Belldandy also grows to like Ke...

Gundam 00 - The Verdict

Like it or not, the Gundam franchise is one of the cornerstones of anime. The original series, for all its roughness and what nowadays would seem poor animation (but at the time was groundbreaking) sparked a phenomenon within Japan. Gundam is now worth 50 billion Yen, sells plastic models, DVDs and you can even do a degree in it! It was my introduction to anime, and I have never looked back. That aside this is a review for the latest series, which recently finished its run: Gundam 00 Pronounced “Gandamu Daburu Ō”. Spanning 50 episodes over 2 series, it features all the usual Gundam goodness, cool robots, teenage pilots and no direct good vs. evil. This brings me nicely to my first point about this series and Gundam as a whole. The ambiguity of good and evil in these series is one of there greatest strengths. It allows you to empathise with almost every character and often the characters initially introduced are not the her...

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex

If there is one name that is synonymous with 80’s manga it is Masamune Shirow. A prolific author bringing to us some of the most famous and loved manga ever published. His best known work however is Ghost in the Shell (GitS), a futuristic cyber dystopia where humans can replace body parts to become part cyborgs and the world is driven by “the net”. As in all his manga the protagonist is female. Her name; Major Motoko Kusanagi, a full cyborg whose only link to her human past his her brain and ghost both encased inside her cyborg body. This is not however a review for the Ghost in the Shell, manga or anime film. It is a review for the spin off anime series, which, although he had no input in writing was involved in character design and production. The spinoff is called Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (SAC). The first thing I should point out is that if you haven’t either read the manga or watched the film you will probably not know who the characters ...

Zombie-Loan

There is a shōnen monthly manga produced by square enix (Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy series) called GFantasy. This is a manga focusing on supernatural series. Perhaps the best known is Higurashi no Naku Koro ni (When they cry) which the society recently watched during its weekly showings (Autumn term 2008). Zombie-Loan is an anime based on a manga from this magazine. Although the manga series is ongoing and well into its 10th volume the anime was made into a 11 Episode adaptation covering early arcs. It follows the story of Michiru Kita a young girl who posses "Shinigami Eyes", these allow her to see how close a person is to death dependant on the colour of a ring around their neck. She is your typical nervous and walked over high schooler until one day on forgetting to fetch the correct cake bar for her "friends" she walks into two boys Chika Akatsuki and Shito Tachibana. These two were in an accident and are considered "wierd" by the rest of the ...

Biohunter

There is a virus in the world, the 'Demon Virus'. Those infected lose their humanity and take on monstrous forms and hunt others for food. Two university professors are the Biohunters it is their job to find and deal with these people. However there is more to one of them than meets the eye . . . Genre: Horror (well it tries) Length: a film (not too long) violence: fairly high and bloody romance: some sex: . . . . . . .in the first 5 miniutes I was partially convinced that this was meant to be a hentai. The tone improves from there but not by much. language: none that I noticed overall impression: Not good, not even entertaining except to jeer at, if given the option between biohunter and no anime. spend your time staring at a wall, unless you are with a crowd of people and can heckle. The plot is quite frankly uninspired and contains no interesting plot twists whatsoever, it is in fact entirly predictable. There are far too many unneccesary scenes of gratutious nudity and/or...