Fall 2008 Season Start Overview (Sono me…dare no me?)

Author: nova

At last we have another season of anime starting and this time I don’t have work to interfere my watching schedules…is what I’d like to say, but sudden work that occupied me for the whole week is the reason why this post is as late as it is. But enough of the excuses and on to the topic. This season has a nice complement of interesting titles, of which I selected 8 to have my eyes peeled on. Now, I’ve grown bored of writing so much info on each show that this time around I decided to go with a bit more graphical way of presenting it. So I fired up Excel and composed this handy little spreadsheet.

For now my favorites out of the bunch are Kannagi and Chaos;HEAd, with Clannad AS, Gundam 00 2nd and ef -a tale of melodies coming close behind. Kannagi seems to continue the trend of idol-theme from Macross Frontier, which is clearly demonstrated in the groovy pop-ish OP song, and Nagi being as awesome as she is, I can hardly complain. Out of the season’s female leads I definitely have Nagi as no.1.

Another show I have a feeling that I’m going to dig is Chaos;HEAd. Based on a visual novel by nitroplus, the company famous for their fap-while-you-cry-styled games, and animated in nice detail by Madhouse, C;H features a neurotic and menacing atmosphere combined with a male lead who’s indeed a flawed person but not a total faggot like a certain someone. If C;H doesn’t fall into the typical traps of cute-girls-with-super-powers and harem settings, which I hardly think it will, we might have a winrar right here. Hot.

Yeah, I know she isn’t that big. But I’m not going to complain.

Some nice pre-release ad scans online attracted my attention to Akane-iro ni Somaru Saka. After the first two episodes I can say that we have the textbook eroge-adaptation right here. The only surprising thing about Akasaka is Kugimiya Rie not using her rotten bitch Shana Louise tsundere voice and it lead me to discover that she actually sounds quite nice this way. Otherwise Akasaka is the usual stuff that’s to be watched with most cognitive functions of the brain switched off.

For more game adaptations we have Clannad ~After Story~ which is essentially continuation to the first anime season aired last winter. 10 against 1 says that Clannad AS will be steady stream of quality from KyoAni and as such there really isn’t much to say about it. Also, baseball. In addition to Clannad we have ef-franchise making a return into anime business with ef ~a tale of melodies, which apparently will be focused on Mizuki and Yuuko this time over and chronologically appears to be taking place after the events of the first season of ef.

Toradora!, the new favorite of /a/ so the faggots can forget about Code Geass at last, isn’t on my watchlist but since it has been quite discussed show lately I thought it best to have a word about it. The show was ok for what I could tell, but Kugimiya Rie using her o-hay-i-think-i-have-heard-this-somewhere-before tsundere voice as a violent pseudo-loli was nothing but a big turn-off for me. Which is kinda waste, because the animation is very decent and the main male is quite GAR. But if not even beer can rid me of the headache Kugyuu’s voice causes me, it’s a lost case.

The second season of Gundam 00 started off just as intensive as it ended and seems to be 100% the same stuff as its predecessor. The only real complaint I have to present about it is the revival of Lockon. Seriously Sunrise, let the dead man lie (o hay is dat u Lelouch?) Ah, he was dead after all. All’s right with the world.

Lastly to the mud league. The biggest disappointment of the season was definitely Kyou no 5 no 2, which demonstrated terrible artistry, especially in comparison to the OVA from a few years back (yeah, comparing TV anime and OVA isn’t exactly fair but hell, they could have done a lot better). Overall Kn5n2 TV is ugly as sin and about as funny as cavity search which is an achievement in itself, because the same jokes in the manga and OVA managed to be quite amusing. Another show going into the meh-department is, not very surprisingly, GONZO’s latest brainfart in mecha business, Kurogane no Linebarrels. The mecha fights carried out in CG are quite nifty, but otherwise the show gathers a whole bunch of mecha clichés and compresses them all into a 25-minute long sequence of constant facepalm. The main male challenges Shinji as the most annoying piece of shit ever. EVAR.