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.

Nodame Cantabile Paris Chapter was one of the shows that I was looking forward to most this season. Of course, after finishing the first season over the summer, I found and read the manga in my newfound rabid fanaticism for the series. I thought that the story concluded at a pretty good point in the first season, even though it was clear that it wasn’t finished. However, in reading the manga, I’d set up some expectations for the next season.

First of all, it’s very good. If it’s your first time finding out about Nodame and Chiaki’s adventures in Europe, it’s excellent. The problems come only if you’ve read the manga and notice the enormous chunks that are cut out of the anime in order to fit it into 11 episodes. If they had two seasons to work with, I think it would have been much better.

The things that are missing from Paris Chapter are the depth of the side characters and the music. Yes, the story is about Chiaki and Nodame, but the first season had a lot of really well developed side characters like Mine, Masumi, and various members of A Orchestra and RS Orchestra. By the end of Paris Chapter, the only side characters that matter are Kuroki and Tanya. Characters like Rui and Jean Donnadieu that had lengthy arcs were really diminished and shunted aside.

The music also took a hit because of the shorter run. The first season had a few minutes of music performance almost every episode. This is important, because it’s a series that’s about classical music and it’s the one part of the story that you can’t experience in manga form. Listening to the pieces and learning about them was really interesting and this was almost nonexistent in Paris Chapter until the last few episodes.

The problem is most evident in Chiaki’s competition. His last piece was completely cut and Jean Donnadieu is just there to be a guy that Chiaki beats. The last few episodes of Paris Chapter remedies these problems and I wish that the entire thing was as well done as the Nodame’s recital arc. With another twelve or thirteen episodes, even with various arcs cut, we would have time for music and exploring other characters.

None of this ruins Paris Chapter. It’s still more Nodame Cantabile, which is awesome, and it didn’t make me convulse with rage or anything. It’s just unfortunate that it seemed to be hamstrung by a short run.