Animu that finished recently

So a bunch of anime I was watching finished their run.

Darker than BLACK: Gemini of the Meteor

The problem with DtB was that it ended with a bunch of questions and answering very few of them. The problem with DtB2 is that it didn’t answer any of the questions from the last season and added new ones and didn’t answer those either. It also removed most of the likeable characters or the parts of characters that were likeable. So yeah, the moral of the story is that you shouldn’t need a sidestory OVA to explain things that we were waiting for you to explain.

So Ra No Wo To

A.K.A. that show that looked like K-ON! but was superficially similar. At worst, it was some slice of life in a small European town. It had quite a few moments though, from moonshining to PTSD to the revelation of a post-apocalyptic wasteland right outside the borders. Not spectacular, but definitely not bad.

Hidamari Sketch x ☆☆☆

More Hidamari, more awesome. I was dreading what might happen if we threw in two more characters, but Nazuna and Nori filled out the cast pretty well. They weren’t exactly the Yuno and Miya clones I was expecting them to be. We’ve also got new relationship dynamics now that we have all the years filled out. Another highly enjoyable wideface season.

Kobato.

Not my kind of show, but I still watched it. It was alright, I guess, and it had its moments. I did not enjoy the random LOL CLAMP moments near the end of the show though. I probably wouldn’t have missed it if I dropped it. Oh well.

Nodame Cantabile Finale

Surprisingly not bad and pretty well paced, considering this is Chiaki Kon we’re talking about. Unfortunately, she also chose to stick to the manga pretty closely and that means we still got the terrible manga ending. That said, the ending’s probably the worst part of the season, which places it well ahead of Paris Chapter.

Hanamaru Kindergarten

This was a very fun little show and it looks like Gainax put way more effort into the show than they usually do. I liked pretty much all the characters in the show except for Anzu, which is kind of unfortunate because she’s around a lot. Hiiragi is the best character on the show, with Hinagiku and her Yakuza family coming up in second.

Ookamikakushi

Ryukishi07, I am disappoint.

Baka to Test to Shoukanju

I was expecting this to be something terrible like Seitokai no Ichizon, but it actually managed to be pretty entertaining. I guess the way the jokes are written are much more appealing to me than that show I mentioned before. It also gets points for actually using the convoluted battle system premise in an interesting fashion.

Kimi ni Todoke

This went down pretty much like I expected. It’s a really faithful adaptation of the manga and paced just right to reach exactly the right spot to end on. And it was great; easily the best show from Fall 2009. I’m looking forward to a second season in between checking if the next chapter is out yet.

Eden of the East: The King of Eden

This was kind of disappointing. Even though things definitely happened, it felt like nothing was happening at all. I’m aware that it’s really setup for the next movie, but as a movie, it was really, really weak. Just about the only good thing to come out of it is school food punishment’s light prayer single.

End of season: Eden of the East

Eden of the East had hype. Character designs by the mangaka of Honey and Clover. Directed and produced by the team that did Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. A pretty interesting premise that started out in the States. It was the show of the season before it had started.

The first episode was just as expected. We were all impressed with the English voices. We were all intrigued by the magical phone. We were still trying to dissect the setting. It really was a unique show. Not to mention the fantastic OP/ED, which I have tied for first this season on my own little scorecard. I’m not really a fan of the OP song, but it really fit the show and the animation that went along with it was excellent. I am in love with the ED song and the papercraft stuff was awesome. I am so glad that it introduced me to school food punishment.

Somewhere along the line though, it took a dive towards Code Geass. It started out in fairly serious business territory but stuff like Johnnies and the contrived game to save the country made it less so. The end of the series managed to give reason for some of the weirdness, though.

That’s not to say it was bad or even that it’s ironically good like Geass. There hasn’t been anything like R2 21 yet. Eden of the East is still entertaining and as far as I know, it’s remained internally consistent. Unless the two movies ruin it, it’s still a really interesting take on a post-9/11 world.