Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann – Episode 27 (spoilers)

Simon is reunited with, Dai Gurren-Dan combines their power to create Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann. The Anti-Spiral also takes similiar form to fight and two galactic titans fight without holding anything back. They find out that long time ago, the Anti-Spiral were also Spiral beings, but they were afraid of their own powers and sealed them away to prevent the Spiral Nemesis. Simon, however, chooses freedom over living with limitations and will not give up until the Anti-Spiral is defeated. The Anti-Spiral attacks Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann with a power equal or greater than the Big Bang. Lord Genome, who’s body has been restored, sacrifises himself and transforms into a drill for Simon. Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann and the Anti-Spiral clash for the last time and Simon makes it through all the obstacles and finishes the Anti-Spiral with Lagann Impact. As his dying wish, the Anti-Spiral asks Simon to protect the universe from the Spiral Nemesis.

Dai Gurren-Dan returns to the Earth. Simon and Nia get married, but because Nia was created by the Anti-Spiral, she can’t exist without them and disappears. Simon passes the Core Drill on to Gimmy. Telling he’s only the digger and going through the holes is someone else’s job, Simon and Boota depart without looking back.

Some decades later, the Spiral beings have united. Spiral beings from various worlds have joined the Grapal squadron. Besides Kamina’s grave there is a tombstone with the ring Simon gave to Nia. Somewhere, there is a boy trying to drill a hole into a coconut. A man in a hooded cloak tells him to not to use too much force. The boy is able to make a hole and tells the man he’s amazing. The child and the old man watch Grapal squadron depart for the Cathedral Terra, the flagship that represent the Earth in conferences with other Spiral beings. The boy asks if he can go too and the old man says that surely one day he can meet Spiral beings from other worlds.

In a way I knew they would kill Nia somehow. However, the meaning of the scene in the beginning of the first episode wasn’t still fully explained. I believe it’s placed somewhere in the time-skip in the last episode. Wheter they’re going to make an OVA or something, to give us more details about that scene, is still unknown.

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After seeing the first episode of Gurren Lagann, it looked like it could turn out into something interesting. Somewhere around the fourth episode, I started thinking mayby Gurren Lagann isn’t all that special, but after the events of the eight episode, I knew I had underestimetad this anime. Before that, I was expecting something more typical like dragging on really slowly, but Gurren Lagann showed how many things can happen in a single episode and in a moment everything had changed.

Then Simon met Nia and the story progressed slowly for a couple of episodes until the 11th episode, where Simon’s fighting spirit was finally restored. After that episode, it felt like every episode surpassed the previous episode and the battle between Simon and Lord Genome was something completely amazing.

After the time-skip, the setting had changed a lot and some episodes are used to explain the new situation. The situation got bad to the point where it seems like all hope is lost, but Simon wouldn’t give up and saved the Earth from destruction. His battle wasn’t over yet and he had to save Nia and destroy the Anti-Spiral in order to liberate all the Spiral beings in the universe.

After Arc-Gurren-Lagann and Simon punching a hole into the time-space, I was certain there would be no way to do something more epic, but then Simon united with Hyper Galaxy Dai-Gurren, creating the Hyper Galaxy Gurren-Lagann. Even that wasn’t the final unification and Simon and Dai Gurren-Dan’s will to to defeat the Anti-Spiral gave birth to Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann. The final battle between colossal Ganmen that made galaxies look small was most definitely über-epic!

Now Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is over and I’m really sad that when I wake up next Sunday, I won’t see how Simon is going to surpass himself once again. I can’t really explain why Gurren Lagann is such an unbelieveably amazing anime. It’s simply perfect. Of course there are faults and I don’t believe that something can be absolutely perfect, but never have I seen something this close to perfection.

When Gurren Lagann began, many considered it great, but there were relatively few people who believed it would turn into something like this. I don’t really know what I believed then, I just had faith in Gurren Lagann and now that it’s over, I feel like every single of my hopes and expectations were not only fulfilled, but surpassed beyond my imagination.

In short, if you’re going to see just one anime in your life, it had better be Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. No, I take it back, if you’re going to live, you should at least see Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. I would that say I’ve understood the meaning of life; it is to watch Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is the best anime ever.

School Days (Spoilers)

When you think of harem-anime, you think of some guy living with bunch of pretty girls for no particular reason. The cast includes all kind of compulsory character types, such as tsundere, silent girl and so on. The plot is usually something stupid like saving the world from whatever is threatening it, the guy helping the girls to solve their personal issues or just having fun together with little or no story.

School Days is based on an eroge, so it can’t avoid having at least some harem-ish elements. The protagonist is an ordinary high school student, Makoto Itou. He is secretly having a crush on Kotonoha Katsura, a girl he travels to school with. Sekai Saionji, a girl who’s sitting next to Makoto helps him to get closer to Kotonoha. With Sekai as the matchmaker, Makoto and Kotonoha get to know each other and start dating. However, things ain’t that simple: by the end of the first episode Sekai kisses Makoto and acts as if nothing happened.

Following three paragrapsh contain major spoilers so skip them if you don’t wanna have the rest of the story spoiled.

The situation slowly gets worse and worse as Sekai, who is teaching Makoto how to be with girls lets him do whatever he wants. While Kotonoha, who’s really shy and restrained, won’t let Makoto do what he wants and Makoto, the man whose brains are located somewhere around his crotch decides to dump her and start dating with Sekai. Kotonoha is still claiming that she’s his girlfriend, but soon enough Makoto tells her it’s over.

Suddenly, dozens of girls who all have their eyes set on Makoto appear. At the school festival, Makoto cheats Sekai with one of his friends from middle school. Too bad for Makoto, Sekai finds this out and things get really complicated. Sekai doesn’t want to see him, but Makoto doesn’t really mind and is having sex with whoever is willing to do it with him. One day, Sekai comes back to school and tells Makoto that she’s pregnant. Everyone hears this and suddenly none of the girls want to be with Makoto. Except for Kotonoha who still believes that she’s Makoto’s girlfriend even after he told her it’s over and everything else that has happened. Makoto finally realizes what a jerk he has been and promises to never betray Kotonoha again.

Sekai doesn’t know that Kotonoha and Makoto are dating again and when she sees her at his door, she completely snaps. She asks Makoto for a private conversation. While she’s making tea for Makoto, she picks up a kitchen knife and kills him with it. After Kotonoha sees what’s happened, she invites Sekai to rooftop of the school, the place they would usually hang together in the beginning. Kotonoha tells Sekai that she knows she never got pregnant in the first place and just made it up to make Makoto her own. The girls try to kill each other, but Kotonoha is faster and cuts Sekai’s throat open with a saw. Kotonoha then opens her stomach to see that there was no bady inside her. With Makoto’s decapitated head with her, Kotonoha can finally be alone with her loved one.

Right… That was all certainly different from usual harem-animes. No matter how I look it, all the characters are really fucked up. Compared to usual heroic eroge protagonist, Makoto is definitely an anti-hero and THE enemy of all women. In a way I can understand him, but damn… you don’t have to cheat your girlfriend just because she doesn’t want to it with your after one or two dates. If School Days didn’t end the way it did, I would’ve totally hated the show.

Makoto’s girlfriends are no better. Sekai is almost as bad as Makoto. She’s always doing more than Kotonoha, so that Makoto would prefer her over Kotonoha. Like it was said in the last episode, she never thought of Kotonoha’s feelings. To Sekai, she was just a way to get closer to Makoto and point out her own good points. And Kotonoha is no better. She practically did nothing but claimed she still was Makoto’s girlfriend, when she saw Makoto cheating her with other girls. And after all that’s happened, she still doesn’t open her eyes and face the reality.

There’s usually at least one or two likeable characters in every anime, but School Days is different. You just can’t help but hate and despise these people. At times, some of the characters get really annoying and you just want them to disappear. School Days is really hard to enjoy, but that’s not the point. Instead, you should take it as a lesson. Love ain’t always that easy like seen in most harem-animes. Sometimes people get their feelings hurt by the ones they love and such. It wasn’t actually that fun to watch School Days, but I think it was still rather interesting and different anime. Certainly more tragic than animes in usualy which was kind of cool.

So if you’re looking for some mushy love-comedy harem-anime like Nagasarete Airantou or something like that, don’t watch School Days. It’s something competely different, but in a good way.

Potemayo – Episode 12 (spoilers)

The first half of the final episode is more flashbacks from Sunao’s childhood. Sunao, his mother and father are living on a small island with a man called Morio.

Sunao and Morio are playing together. Sunao’s father has taught him sumo wrestling, so that’s what they’ll be playing.

Because Sunao’s mother’s condition is getting worse they return to Japan for better medication. She spends the rest of her days in hospital watching flowers together with Sunao.

The flower bud on Potemayo has bloomed into a flower. She’s having hard time keeping her balance.

Guchuko is behaving strange and Kyo can’t figure out what’s wrong with her…

Grab some tissues, you’re going to need them.

For a while, I feared the worst, but I’m happy everything turned out well!

The yellow bird finds a seed on Potemayo’s head and pecks it making it fall. Sunao picks it up and throws it into a litter basket. Next morning, another strange creature appears!

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Of all the comedy animes I’ve seen, Potemayo is one of the most funniest. Compared to majority of humour in animes, the humour in Potemayo is very easy to get, because it usually relies on Potemayo and Guchuko’s cuteness and adorable ways of doing things. With verbal humour, you usually need to know something about the customs of the society the characters are living in or know something about the things the jokes are making fun of.

To give a very simple, though not funny, example would be: “What did a tomato say to his friend that got run over by a car? -What’s up, ketchup?” Alright, that joke was lame, but a person who doesn’t know what ketchup is made of won’t get the joke. Japanese society and culture are very different from western, so it’s no wonder it’s sometimes really hard to get all the jokes in animes for western fans. However, things like cuteness and such are universal and can be understood by anyone no matter where they come from.

With this much said, I truly hope there would be a second season to Potemayo. They came up with so many cute and funny things in these twelve episodes, but I believe they could do another 12 more episodes. Until then, finding something as funny and cute as Potemayo is probably going to be really difficult.

Top 16 Decided

The first round is over and two characters with the most votes in each block have advanced to the next round. So far no surprises, except Patchouli not making it to the next round. Oh well, there’s still the consolation competition and it seems like Patchouli could be the winner, though Remilia and Eirin are opponents not to be taken lightly.

I’ll write next report after the first round of consolation competition or Friday if Komachi is somehow able to win Patchouli. Not that I’m seriously believing that would happen. PoFV-characters aren’t very popular. Except for Aya, of course.

Princess Resurrection – Vol. 2

Princess Resurrection returns with a bunch new monsters to be slaughtered the bloody way. We meet some new characters: Hime’s little sister Sherwood and her android Francisca, who’s Flandre’s big sister, and Reiri Kamura, the sailor uniform wearing vampire. As usual Hiro gets killed every now and then and the girls are constantly picking on him.

So far there hasn’t been much story, but after reading two volumes, I think I like it that way. Instead of an intense story that is making progress in every chapter, every chapter in Princess Resurrection so far has been a stand alone-ish story that works just fine on it’s own. I also like it how there aren’t any strong male characters in the main cast and the girls do most of the fighting instead. Considering that Princess Resurrection is supposedly a shonen manga, such thing is quite rare, but certainly a refreshing change from the usual scenario where female characters just can’t do a thing to fight or defend themselves.

Last time I said shonen manga are all about characters over the story and I still think it applies to Princess Resurrection. The new characters didn’t have enough focus on this book. Riza’s introduction was done really smoothly, but both Sherwood’s and Reiri’s introductions sort of lacked impact. I like the way Riza and Reiri consider themselves enemies, but I hear they are suggested to have feelings for each other later. I’m always interested in shoujo-ai and yuri, so that sounds good to me. As for Sherwood, you knew Princess Resurrection was missing a tsundere and a meganekko so that’s where Sherwood and Francisca come in. Well, saying that Sherwood is a tsundere would probably be stretching the term a bit too far, but let’s say at least that she’s the most tsundere-ish character so far. I’d like to see Sherwood around more, she only appeared in two of five chapters while Reiri has been constantly hanging around since since the chapter she made her debut in.

In short, if you liked the first volume of Princess Resurrection, you’ll probably like the second one as well.

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann – Episode 26 (spoilers)

Hyper Galaxy Gurren-Lagann’s transformation is complete and Simon proceeds to destroy the enemies. The enemies are unable to do damage and Simon destroys one of the big ships with Gurren Boomerang. However, the enemies have the power to manipulate probability to their favour and land an attack on Hyper Galaxy Gurren-Lagann. The Anti-Spiral appears again and explains that if the Spiral Beings were to evolve without limits, they would eventually make the universe collapse by becoming simply too powerful to exist. Simon suddenly realizes how fearsome his own powers are, but that doesn’t change the fact that Nia is still waiting for him. Knowing that, Simon decides to keep on fighting the enemy. He tries to attack, but the enemy warps away in Space-Time. By scanning more than just present for the enemies, they’re tracked down and destroyed by multiple beams and Hyper Galaxy Giga Drill Breaker.

When it seems like Gurren-Dan can finally warp to where Nia is, the Anti-Spiral attacks them by sending everyone into alternative realities. Simon is reunited with Kamina in a strange world where they’re thieves and Yoko is sent into world where she’s a bounty hunter. Meanwhile, the Anti-Spiral appears in person to Boota and Lord Genome, who are the only ones unaffected by his power. The spiral power within Boota results into instant evolution that turns him into human form. However, he is now affacted by Anti-Spiral’s psychological attack as well. The real Kamina appears within Simon’s illusionary world and with his help Simon is able to break the illusion. Simon and Kamina exchange few words before Simon returns to the real world. After Simon, everyone is able to break the illusion and return.

The Anti-Spiral is talking with Nia and decides to finish her off. Suddenly, Nia’s ring starts to glow and Gurren-Lagann appears from within it. The final battle is ready to begin!

To be honest, ever since I saw Kamina in the new opening video in the 17th episode, I was expecting him to appear again in a way or another. Instead of resurrecting him or something like that, he appeared within Simon’s and Yoko’s alternative realities. Simon has already become even more badass than Kamina, but seeing him again was fun. Kamina’s cool personality is still unrivaled.

So the Anti-Spiral has finally gained a concrete form. It sure makes fighting against it easier to comprehend. In the next episode, we’ll see exactly how epic the final battle between Simon and the Anti-Spiral is going to be. So far Gurren Lagann has been awesome and I sure have high expectations for the ending.

Potemayo – Episode 11

Tomari and Potemayo are gathering corn at Tomari’s grandpa’s farm. Somehow, Guchuko followed them and is stealing corn.

Potemayo and Tomari unite to set Guchuko right.

Tomari asks Potemayo to tell Guchuko she shouldn’t steal things, but Guchuko just ignores Potemayo. Tomari reminds Guchuko of how Kyo said that she shouldn’t steal things. Guchuko returns all the corn back. The way she takes the corn from her fourth-dimensional pants is cute.

Sunao comes to the farm as well. He compliments Potemayo on gathering the corn and the flower bud on her head grows bigger.

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We begin the second half with a little flashback from Sunao’s childhood when his mother was still alive. Back then, they would travel the world together on Sunao’s father’s researchs.

Of all the stories in Potemayo, this one is probably the most serious. Sunao is angry at his father because he wouldn’t come home for his mother’s birthday. They argue on the way back from school and Sunao pushes him for clinging so close. Mikan gets angry and tells Sunao he should apologize to his father. She runs home and Yasumi gives Sunao a slap on his face. On their way home, Sunao tells his father that he’s sorry and everything’s alright again.

Next episode is going to be the last. It’s a shame good animes like Potemayo run only for twelve episodes and some not-so-great animes drag on for over twenty episodes. Guess it can’t be helped. I wish the last episode will be great.

Losing to Rinnosuke…

Since this isn’t a moe tournament, but one to decide the most popular Touhou character, I can see why Rinnosuke is in there. I sure didn’t expect him to win anyone though, but he went ahead and won Hina Kagiyama. The new characters of Mountain of Faith were mostly quite good with Nitori, Suwako and Momiji being the most interesting, but the rest of them, Aki sisters, Kanako and Sanae, weren’t that exciting. I’d say Hina would be an average character, but that wasn’t enough to defeat Rinnosuke this time.

Also, I can’t believe Patchouli lost already! And the difference between her and Marisa was only eight votes. I should’ve campaigned more to help her win! I don’t really mind Cirno winning though. Well, at least Nitori is guaranteed to go to the next round. Heck, some have even speculated that she’s going to win the whole tournament and I wouldn’t be that surprised if she did. Of all MoF-characters, she is easily the most popular and you just can’t resist her rainwear-moe. I also voted for Letty, mainly because I’m madly in love with her theme song from PCB, but I can say for sure that she won’t go to the next round.

Lucky Star – Episode 24

The school is having a culture festival and Patty decides that they should do a cheerleading performance as the opening for the festival. They practice the dance from the OP and as a service for the watchers, full version of that dance is shown. Akira also gets to appear in the main show.

The final episode had and yet had not the air of a final episode. First of all, it doesn’t end with graduation, which probably means that KyoAni probably left room for second season or OVA(s) on purpose. The quality of animation was better than usual, but it’s like that with all the final episodes. The rest of the episode wasn’t really that special. A couple of obvious references to Haruhi and the same kind of idle humour that Lucky Star is 99,9% of time.

I was kind of expecting something more. After two really great episodes, this episode just didn’t really feel any special at all and my final opinion on Lucky Star would’ve been more positive had it ended after last episode.

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So, it’s over, at least for now. After all the crazy hype of how Lucky Star would be the moest and funniest anime like ever, it was mostly disappointing though I should’ve known better to not believe the hype, like I did. There were some really great moments, but that’s the problem: they were only moments. If you make an anime with 24 episodes, you have to have more than one great moment in every third or fourth episode. Had Lucky Star been, say, 12 episodes long, there wouldn’t be some many dull episodes.

The shameless Haruhi advertising was funny for once or twice, but when it got really obvious (Konata and co. going to see Aya Hirano’s concert, the Haruhi-themed cosplay cafe and etc.) it became more of an annoyance than a joy. Refering to your older works is fun and all, but please know the difference between crafty little self-homages and flashy declarations of self-conceit.

In short, Lucky Star was decent, but not exactly very good or anything. There were some great loveable characters like Tsukasa and Minami, some wonderful moments, but far too much dull idling and boring episodes with no remarkable highlights. My expectations were much, much higher and I’m still sort of disappointed with this anime. Still I don’t regret having watched Lucky Star, which is probably the most important thing.

Yes, even though watching Lucky Star felt like a chore from time to time, for the sake of some really great moments and the two episodes before the last one, I can raise my fist up in the air and proclaim “Having watched Lucky Star, I have not one regret!”

Touhou Seimoe 2007

First there was Loli Battle, then SaiGAR and now Seimoe, the tournament to decide the most popular Touhou character. When I first got into the series through Immaterial and Missing Power, Touhou wasn’t very popular in the English-speaking anime community. Nowadays it’s hard to avoid bumping into Touhou related material in anime communities and image boards.

Anyways, this seems like a fun competition and the voting hasn’t been made insanely bothersome, so why not vote for your favourite character every day? Of the characters in the first round, my vote goes for Suika. None of these characters are my favourites though. The characters I’m rooting for would be Patchouli, Youmu and Nitori, though I don’t really believe one of them would win the tournament.