mdchan

Funny, adorable, and light-hearted?  Yep. Does it live up to the manga?  Not so much. Is it still worth your time if you're looking for something cute?  Definitely. Story Ryuichi Kashima and his toddler brother, Kotaro, suddenly find themselves in the care of an elderly woman who is the chairman of a school (middle school and high school) when their parents are killed in a plane crash.  The strict old woman also lost family in the plane crash, and takes in the brothers on the condition that Ryuichi has to work at the school's daycare facility for the kids of the teachers (who are... See full review

I had expected this to be another version of the first three episodes of Pokemon with some emphasis on Ho-oh, but it's most definitely not. How do I describe this...? Cliche.  I was pretty disappointed in this movie.  I watched it in the original Japanese with English subs, so I actually had to go look up some of the English names.  XD The Japanese voice acting is very well done, so my rating on "sound" is for that.  The intro song is the intro for the first season of Pokemon, and the Japanese ending song is very pretty.  In fact, the soundtrack is probably the only... See full review

Unless you enjoy constanty going "wtf is going on", my suggestion is to give this anime a pass.  Why are all the anime with large hype surrounding it pieces of crap, anyway? Now, I'm sure I'm going to get people screaming at me for saying that (as folks take any opinion as personal offense if it doesn't match their own opinion), but I gave it a chance.  If an anime fails to make sense within three episodes, I drop it because I'm not wasting my time on something which is never going to get better. And from what I read when I went digging, it doesn't. I'm not even going to break this... See full review

I'm going to preface by saying that this anime is not for everyone.  Those not too interested in time travel or quantum theory (things such as parallel worlds, divergence lines, chaos theory, ect) might have a hard time following it even though it does a fairly good job at going over the basics of what people need to know. However, for those interested in those things (or are interested in general), I'd highly recommend this.  It's not a "mindless" anime, but rather a thought-provoking one. Story In the year 2010, self-proclaimed "mad scientist" Okabe is attending a lecture... See full review

I know I'm going to get hate for this with how much hype this anime has, but to be honest, it's a crap show. Yes, I dropped the anime...if you want to shout at me for doing that, then kindly excuse yourself elsewhere.  I read summaries of the other episodes so that I can still talk about it without wasting 20+ minutes on each episode, so it's not like I'm only reviewing the few episodes I saw. In fact, I nearly dropped it in the first episode; it was that bad. Story PWP (Plot what plot)?  There is no story; An attempted harem which failed miserably, maybe. A new adventurer, named Bell, in a... See full review

I'm not sure where to start with this one.  It's only 11 episodes long, but the amount of emotions it can make someone feel can compete with the "full season" anime (25+ episodes). I'm going to try hard to avoid spoilers.  There's a section in the "Overall" heading at the end of this review where I have to touch on spoilers (though I put a lot of warnings before it, and even then I kept names and such out).  The rest is spoiler-free. Story Siblings Mirai and Yuuki, who were visiting a Robot Convention in Odaiba, suddenly find themselves in the midst of an earthquake... See full review

I suppose unlike some folks familiar with the studio and the writer, I came into this anime completely unaware of what I was walking into.  I had no expectations, and thought that this was going to be like NCIS. Oh boy, was I wrong.  It instead turned into something more along the lines of Criminal Minds, but on steroids. Story Akane Tsunemori is a new Inspector at the Public Safety Bureau's Criminal Investigation Division section 1, and her first day on the job puts her straight into the heat of the action and a case of a man whose "psycho pass", a way of measuring a person's... See full review

This one was tough, so before you start throwing rocks at me, hear me out.  If you can get past the first 5 episodes, then you'll probably find a good anime here.  However, before episode 6, it's so slow that I nearly dropped the anime twice (technically three times, as the very first time I watched it a couple years ago, I dropped it after the first episode). This anime is not for everyone; there are a few battles, but actually very little fighting with the exception of the climax of the season.  Well, there is fighting, but it's all done via strategy and words.  This isn't exactly... See full review

This is quite possibly one of the best anime I've seen in a long time.  Erased, aka "A City Without Me", is a gripping tale of friendship with murder and time travel thrown in the mix.  While I'm usually skeptical of time travel as a plot device, I feel this actually did it well. Story It opens up with Satoru Fujinuma, a 29-year-old failing manga artist who has taken a job at a pizza shop in order to pay the bills for his apartment.  When his mother comes to visit him, a case of an attempted kidnapping turns into something much greater when he recalls a kidnapping-murder case... See full review

I have to say, it's going to be extremely hard to try and keep this review as objective as possible considering certain events.  It will also be difficult to keep some spoilers out, but until the end (where I'll go over why I gave this the rating I did), I'll try to keep all spoilers to a minimum. Though it's one of the better "anime based off of a light novel" I've seen, it's still far from perfect due to a slew of unresolved and unexplained issues.  I would have given this anime a slightly higher overall rating (at least a "7") had at least one of those issues been... See full review

Not one of the best movies out there for this franchise.  From beginning to end, it was slightly confusing with the amount of characters I felt was dumped on the viewer at once (not to mention terms and groups).  I also felt that it was too easy to identify the culprit. Story Nothing special.  Someone we don't know who is playing karuta is murdered in his home by an unknown person while the television station broadcasting karuta receives a bomb threat while Kogoro is there to have a consultation with a client (which of course means that Ran and the kids are there, and since it's in Kyoto... See full review

I stumbled upon this due to a GIF of two people fighting with swords, found the character's name, looked it up, and then found this anime. I have a LOT of complaints for this anime, though up until around episode 8, it's pretty good.  Then, it crashed and burned in a rocky pit of "WTF is even going on?". Story What story?  The majority of this seemed to be the story of a third character (a prostitute from the first episode) rather than anything else. There are people with what we would call "super powers" called "Twilights" or "Dogtags" who apparently... See full review

I picked this anime up because it was an anime with a sports feel, except it had a twist:  The "sport" was a Quiz Bowl. I'm always looking for anime which break the "norm", and though the concept of this anime certainly did so in focusing on quizzes and knowledge over physical prowess like most sports anime, the execution wasn't quite up to par. Story The plot follows Shiki Koshiyama, a shy bookworm boy who doesn't have an athletic bone in his body and has never felt he belonged in a club due to that.  After entering high school and being selected at random to participate... See full review

The Sanzo party is back, and the anime is actually following the manga from what I recall. Now, it has been quite a while since I read the manga past Reload volume 9 (where it stopped being printed in the US due to Tokyopop going out of business), but I do remember some of the things in it. Story Genjo Sanzo, Hakkai, Goku, and Gojyo have finally arrived in India in their journey west.  They're surprised to find out that many shops don't accept their Golden Credit card, and get a bit of culture shock on top of a few minor incidents... ...at least, until a familiar yet unfamiliar face shows up as... See full review

I'd really rather review the manga, but let's just say that after what I saw in the anime and then read the manga, I had two words for this series: F****d up. If someone had told me that this would have gruesome scenes, gore, and disturbing images, I wouldn't have even started to watch it.  As it was, I tried to look past those to find the story underneath...and in doing so, will probably be getting very little sleep with the disturbing concepts and images. Why nobody tagged this with HORROR as a genre, I have no freaking clue, but I really wish they had.  Same with hints of LOLI.  If any... See full review

A friend suggested this anime to me when I told them that I didn't really enjoy Log Horizon, and that I wasn't really thrilled with how SAO wound up.  They said it was more "realistic", but told me nothing else. When I read the summary for it, nothing was given away...though I had my misgivings when I saw that it was only 12 episodes long.  However, I found that I enjoyed it, and am hoping for a second season...and going as far as to look into the light novels the anime was based off of. Plot A group of young adults to adults find themselves in a fantasy world (Grimgar) with no... See full review

I stumbled upon this when browsing through some Danganronpa discussions (as the game this anime was based off of was made by Spike Chunsoft, the same company). This has an interesting premise, but...wow, what a letdown. So, this is the area where I usually break an anime down into the categories ("Story/Plot", "Characters", and "Overall"), but there's just so little to go off of that I'm going to have to break the format of my own reviews for this one. The reason? Each "episode" is only about five mintues long. Yes, you heard right; excluding the intro song... See full review

I'm going to start by saying that, though I'm aware of the VN (Visual Novel game), I hadn't played it.  That said, I did play the others and went back to play the first one after watching this anime. I'm also going to point out that I saw the anime subbed (my own preference), and if you've only seen the dub, you might want to check out the subbed version because it's a real treat (there are many well known voice actors). The majority of the review will be spoiler-free, but I'm unfortunately going to have to go into spoilers at the end because some of my major issues with the anime include some big... See full review

I'm a little late to the party with this review, but I did finally manage to find more than the first 8 minutes of the movie.  Actually, I had completely forgotten about it up until recently since it takes so long from the time of release to someone being able to sub it. Let's jump right in. Story The movie opens up with action and a chase scene, as some data has been stolen from some unknown location.  Considering that we see the Akai and Rei/Amuro chasing the criminal (merely referred to as "that woman" for the time being), it isn't hard to deduce where the data came from. The... See full review

I read the beginning of some reviews before I watched this, but even so, I was surprised at how little character development there was.  Slice-of-life anime doesn't necessarily have to have a "plot", per say...most of that "plot" is in day to day antics that the characters get up to. However,  I was quite surprised that not only was there no plot, but there was little to no character development.  The characters were fairly flat and remained the same throughout the series. That said, it was cute and charming. Plot There really is no plot.  The story revolves... See full review

This is a tough one to review without giving away any major spoilers and characters.  Thus, this review might be a little shorter than my normal reviews. I can say that I certainly wasn't expecting this, but in a good way.  There were plot twists and turns all over the place, and I found it much more enjoyable than the official yearly movies have been for the past couple years. Plot Two men in another country hire a hitman in Japan to take out a target unknown to the audience.  There have been some background news cases about bombs, and someone who was given the task to drive a truck... See full review

When I first started to watch this, I didn't really know what to expect.  I wasn't sure what sort of slice-of-life values were going to be in it, and what it was going to focus on and teach.  Of course, the name being what it was, I thought it would have to do with udon; I wasn't completely off base in that, but there was much more to this than udon. Family, growing up, and finding one's place in the world even at the age of 30 was what was presented when I watched it. Plot 30-year-old Souta Tawara, a web designer who had moved to Tokyo, comes back to his hometown in Kagawa after his... See full review

When I heard that the mangaka who did Rave Master had created another manga, I immediately checked it out...which, of course, led me to the anime version, as well. Fairy Tail is unique, yet repetitive.  I'm going to try to be as unbiased as I can in this review, but I'm afraid some of my love for the series will leak through. Story It starts out with a girl named Lucy Heartfilia who wishes to join the infamous Fairy Tail guild...and gets even more incredible from there. Really, I can't go into details on the story without spoiling the entire thing, as even though each arc seems independent of... See full review

Fairy Tail is so large they had to divide it into two "series" and then list the episode numbers as if they never did so. But I digress. I loved Fairy Tail when it first came out.  I felt that it wasn't a one-man show for a shounen manga/anime (though, Natsu does often fight the "bosses", there were exceptions such as the Galuna Arc), and that everyone was just as strong as the protagonist...and some members of the guild were even stronger. Yea, there were still some fanservice moments, but it really wasn't that bad. Then, Series Two (2014) comes out, and the entire thing... See full review

A really bad rendition of Natsume Yuujinchou meets Pokemon?  I'll be honest...The only reason I watch this (and am currently watching season two) is because of Komasan (and Komajiro). Also, since I'm being honest, I really don't like what the dub did to a lot of the catch phrases (such as Komasan).  In the original version, he says "monge", and ends his sentences with "-zura" (along with Komajiro); he also sounds cute and innocent.  The dub, however, made him sound like someone from the southern USA rather than the countryside of Japan, and redid his catch phrase to... See full review

The second Inuyasha movie, yet the last one I've gotten around to reviewing.  The first time I watched it, I found it interesting (particularly as the series hadn't concluded yet, and it was difficult to find later chapters of the manga at that time as well). However, re-watching it, there are so many questionable plot holes in the beginning that it's hard to even tell where to start. Plot The movie opens up with the gang fighting Naraku and supposedly defeating him.  Miroku's Kazaana even disappears, so the group splits up to take care of unfinished business (Sango with Kohaku, Miroku... See full review

Ah, the first Inuyasha movie...I went back and watched it to write a review on it, and it hadn't lost much of any of the things I loved about it the first time around.  All in all, it's my favorite of the four movies despite one section I really dislike. Plot The movie takes place sometime after episode 54, as Inuyasha has the Bakuryuha (Backlash Wave), and Rin is traveling with Sesshoumaru. When the Shikon Jewel was shattered, it woke up the powerful demon Menomaru, who is the son of a powerful youkai (Hyouga) defeated by Inuyasha's father 200 years ago. Now, Menomaru seeks revenge for his... See full review

This movie feels like it's really just an extremely long filler episode...but not in a bad way.  There aren't many parts which made me facepalm or shake my head at inconsistencies, and is a huge step up from the third movie. Not that it's without faults, but it's entertaining enough to watch again. Plot The mysterious island, Hourai, only appears once every fifty years.  A group of kids are seen unable to leave the island with the exception of the youngest, who meets up with Inuyasha and the group. Inuyasha had come across the ones who had prevented the children from leaving the island... See full review

I know I'm going to get a lot of flak for this review, but it has to be done. A bit of background before I have other Digimon fans screaming at me:  I love Digimon; I grew up with Digimon.  Digimon Adventure was on the list of "Saturday morning cartoons" I got up to see, and even though the dub heavily edited it (not that I knew it at the time), I loved it. Zero Two has dozens of plot holes, neglected character development, and the dub included silly lines which attempted to lighten the dark mood, but I still enjoyed it the first time it aired.  Season Three/Tamers was one of my... See full review

This movie was half enjoyable, half not.  Most of the time, towards the end, I'd be facepalming about three or four times because of how stubborn everyone was being.  I'll try not to reveal any spoilers as per usual, but there were some glaring inconsistencies with the movie (which I watched for the first time after re-watching the series). Let's start with the basics, then I'll get into why I'm not giving this movie a high rating. Story A sword called the Sounga has somehow made its way to the Higurashi shrine, and was being taken to be "aired out" by Kagome's family.  It's... See full review