What I just finished watching and what I thought about it 2 (USE SPOILER TAGS)

[vivafruit]

At 60+ pages, the old thread is getting a little impractical to browse through. Additionally, people are not using common sense when it comes to spoiler tags. As a result, I'd like to suggest this new thread in place of the old one (which would presumably be locked).

This thread idea is borrowed from anime-reactor.

* As the title suggests, the thread should be used to write down your thoughts on various anime that you have finished watching. Any length is fine.
* You can also respond to other people's posts, so long as you respect their opinion (use common sense!).
* Use spoiler tags for your spoilers. Also, please precede the spoiler tags with a visible indicator of what exactly is going to be spoiled if it wouldn't be obvious from the rest of your post. As vivafruit said, use common sense to decide whether or not you need to do this.
-Roxas

[sothis]

hmm, isnt that the same concepts as the old one though?

[vivafruit]

The only difference is the USE SPOILER TAGS in the title.

Anywho:

Baccano!

This ended up being a pleasant surprise. It's a cheerfully violent, at times hilarious romp set in the old bootlegging days of the 1920s. The plot is a bit too messy to make it a must-see, and the Suzuharu-styled episode scramble does little to help. However, as a whole the good pacing, great sense of humor and nice characters make it a worthwhile watch for those looking for something a little different.

***1/2

[Fireaxe]

I don't really know why the other thread was closed, but anyway I'm not letting my last post on it go to waste :D

Just finished ef - a tale of memories. Overall it wasn't bad, i liked the chihiro arc, but the Miyako one was really bland. The drawings/colours were quite nice, but there were too many flaws in the series to my liking.
I didn't like the animation style, sometimes it was totally off the tone of the conversations that were taking place. Dialogues were also pretty weird and felt "staged" at some point, especially when conversations by phone occurred. Finally, I hate it when "slice of life" animes use plot devices that make no sense whatsoever in reality...

how on earth could renji manage to find a SINGLE page of chihiro's diary 24 hours later? Also, these "I don't want to hurt you so let's break up" lines are getting quite old.... Nobody in his right mind would say anything like this in that situation.
But oh well, I liked the ending (even if the outcome was WAY too predictable) so I still give this show a 4/5. It's definitely a must to watch, but I really feel that it's overrated by a lot of people.

[vonpost]

I also just finished "Baccano!" and I must say I'm quite impressed.

I started out sceptic to the anime due to it's rather messy nature, and after seeing the first two episodes I just felt like it was a big soup which probably would keep on confusing me for the rest of the thirteen episodes.
However my opinion changed as I kept watching even though my sceptiscism and started to grasp the different stories.

It gives off this great mood (atleast that is what I felt) and even though the violence is rather heavy it still manages to keep this mood. This is what I liked especially much. The characters might be villains but most of them also gave me this "feel good"-feeling.

Accompanied with great music which really fits my style, fast paced action, awesome animation and a rather different plot Baccano! ends up being one of the best animes I have seen so far!

[Deus ex Digital Boy]

wow, new thread and so far the 2 shows being brought up are 2 of my absolute favorites! I'm glad you guys like Baccano! But Fireaxe, I think you completely missed out on what made ef so great. It wasn't just the romance but the message, the nnuances, the... well you didn't like the style but god if i didn't love it (SHAFT is my god)

anywho, major Escaflowne spoilers below

I have to say, Escaflowne ended up being a pretty big disappointement in my opinion. At first I was eally enjoying it - the sort of blend between shoujo and shounen goodies was neat, but more importantly it was very fast-paced and the actions scenes kicked. ass. There was a great sense of adventures, with the way the crew traveled about very quickly and the world it takes place in seemed very broad. All of the characters, while not particularly deep, were likeable as well.

Then somewhere around alfway through the show just fucked up. There was a point of unequivical awesome rigth around the halfway point - both Van and Dilandau were going through turmoil and everything rely seemed to be escalating to the next level. But then in the late teens the pacing just got totally out-of-wack. I guess it was because plot development was becoming more important but it lost a lot of the energy it had and there were certain parts (episode 18) that were plain horrible. But the worst part was wondering where te fuck was Dilandau! Dilandau was my favorite character, he was half the fun of the show and for around 7 episodes he wasn't even shown!

So around the early 20s things start to pick up again, but you don't get that solid climactic feeling. In the beginning, it had always felt tlike and adventure that was on it's way toward a forseeable goal, but at this point everyone was just kind of running around on their own agenda with some ambiguous plan towards what they were going to do at the end. But the series made one absolutely huge epic fail mistake at this point; making me hate almost ALL of the characters.

Hitomi turns into a spiteful bitch (who, until the very end of the goddamn series, doesn't learn the important message from ep 17). Allen, after being tricked into falling in love with Hitomi, never reverts to his cool, suave self and instead pecomes a permanent dickhole throughout the show. Van I didn't hate, but I really never felt anything much toward Van. He was entirely a one-track mind from start to finish, which made him cool and honerable for the first half, like Tony Jaa in The Protector, but at some point he jus seemed to be incredibly thickheaded, having to relearn the same peace message over and over.

The best side character, Millerna's fiancee, got almost now showtime, and Van's brother was pretty cool, though he doesn't get to be prominent until the end and then only for a couple episodes. The defining moment of my hatred for the characters though was when Dilandau triumphantly returns with the fucking awesome Jajuba (or whatever the hell his name was). When these guys were fighting Allen and Van during their reunion, I was BEGGING for him to kill Allen. And you know there's something wrong when you want the bad guys to win.

Of couse, had he, in fact, killed Allen, we wouldn't have gotten te dramatic irony of ZOMG Dilandau is Allen's sister. Oddly enough, I thought that part was really cool - wether freaky guy or fucked up girl, Dilandau is always a sexy beast, so I don't care. However, I thought that plot element could have been introduced in any number of better ways. It deffinitely should not have been thrown out there in the last couple of episodes. It's almost liek when we last saw Dilandau and the bad guys said some random foreshadowing things about him, it still hadn't been decided what was going to happen to him.

Some more things I didn't like - NOT ONE of the battles that took place after Dilandau's initial disappearance were as good as any beforehand. I was in awe of the creativity and intriguing styles of mech fight used early on, but later it just becomes your average hack'n'slash swordfighting. And oh. dear. god. the final battle was lame. Why? Because dilandau, who had always been an even match for Escaflowne, gets all of his limbs severed IMMEDIATELY only to be saved by Jackajuby and Allen. And I honestly didn't care much about Vanvs.Allen because the only reason I even remotely wanted Allen to live was so that I wouldn't have to see Celena/Dilly sad.

In addition, the romance between Hitomi and Van was WAY too rushed. I had always thought it was interesting how the male and female leads didn't begin romantically interested, but were building a bond of trust and I could sense that they would eventually hook up, but why did it hapen in the last 3 episodes and all-at-once?

In any event, at the very least the ending was pretty good - it would have been much much better if the HitomixVan pairing had been stronger, but juding the ending individualy it was pretty well done.

Overall, I wouldn't call it a bad show, but I would definitely say that it really threw itself off a building at some point. Once the adventure was gone, the fights got lame, and everyone became a bastard there wasn't much left but to end it before you had time to hate it too much

[littlekitty]

Just finished Kanon 2006...I thought it was cute and touching. Makoto was my favorite arc.

[Fireaxe]

Originally Posted by Deus ex Digital Boy

wow, new thread and so far the 2 shows being brought up are 2 of my absolute favorites! I'm glad you guys like Baccano! But Fireaxe, I think you completely missed out on what made ef so great. It wasn't just the romance but the message, the nnuances, the... well you didn't like the style but god if i didn't love it (SHAFT is my god)

Hehe this is exactly what these threads are for :p
It's not that I want to argue with you or anything, there was some really good stuff in ef, but it lacked originality. Maybe I was expecting too much from this, the fact that it's 22nd on ANN's list surprised me a bit.

There were some really strong moments, like the phone call in episode 10, but i felt most of them were spoiled by bad voice acting or sloppy animation. Again, I insist on that point, I loved the drawings but thought that the movements were way too weird looking.

I had the very same feeling when I watched Ergo Proxy. Those are 2 of the nicest animes there is (visually), I WANTED to love them both... but both series lost me when I got passed the 4-5th episode (for different reasons though).
Am I the only who didn't fall in love with this show or what? I mean, I gave it 4 out of 5, so yeah I liked it, but I do believe we're far from the masterpiece everyone's talking about. =(

[ForgottenSon]

Originally Posted by Fireaxe

Just finished ef - a tale of memories. Overall it wasn't bad, i liked the chihiro arc, but the Miyako one was really bland.

For me it's the opposite. While the Chihiro arc is interesting, particularly toward the end, the characters annoy the hell out of me a lot of the time. This is a large part the result of the voice actors, which sound too whiney to my ears.

The Hiro arc, on the other hand, while not as novel or quite as interesting, has held my attention far better due to more mature, likable characters.

I really like the animation as well, though I appreciate why some don't.

[ingrey]

I just watched 11 episodes of Prism Ark. I found it to be an entertaining heroism and romance anime. There is a good deal of fan service and the plot is pretty stereotypical, but if you're ok with that, it's a good time filler. Unfortunately, the subbing is terrible (the one I downloaded, anyway); there are tense mistakes in almost every sentence, along with some rather poor diction. On the plus side, the animation is vibrant and the characters models are decent. I'm also kind of partial to the beginning and end theme.