The Fall 08 season has pretty much concluded and as such I have the pleasure and honor to present you my season overview. Overall this season was quite pleasant experience, putting aside a certain bitter disappointment but more on that later. Now, I firmly believe that a visual presentation always prevails over verbal when it comes to expressing such tiresome things as personal feelings on anime series and as such I have seen fit to re-utilize the presentation method I used in my disturbingly popular Winter 08 post.
As for Clannad After Story I think the 4koma I used last time is still in order.
That’s about my experience of the shows in the season that have mainly been within my scope. Now allow me to finish the visual presentation with another spreadsheet and then we’ll proceed to the verbal TL;DR.
First off let me go through Chaos;HEAd. Briefly said the show is shit and there is no reason why anyone should waste their time on it. Believe me, because I if anyone learned this the hard way. The first third of the series is decent and it does have its moments, but it degrades towards the end and passes the point at which the whole thing becomes simply too painful to watch.
A more decent show out there was Clannad After Story. The series has gone through notable change from a high school harem show into a rather gritty story of a guy struggling his way into the post-education life. There surely are people who’d rather see more wacky school happenings but I appreciate this development. I’m fed up with stories about high school kids probably because I’m jealous due to my HS life having been uneventful and boring shit and starving for university/working life-settings. When I watch Tomoya struggle on as he’s trying to balance his time and energy between work, ambition, love and handling the rather difficult relationship with his father, I can only think of my own impending graduation and thus facing similar circumstances in the future myself. This kind of mature story is always worth five years of generic harem shows. I am painfully aware that KyoAni is likely to introduce supernatural elements to the story but as it is right now, Clannad After Story is no doubt on a completely different level than its earlier Tomoya and Friends-style.
What about the other powerhouse show of the season, Gundam 00 2nd? Looks like Sunrise learned a thing or two about making sequels from Code Geass R2, because Gundam 00 2nd isn’t overshadowed by its predecessor one bit. I actually have very little to say about G00 2nd – in fact I could summarize it with just one phrase: “It just works.” Story and character development from the first season connect with the new storyline without leaving holes or unanswered questions and the whole thing is well mixed with sci-fi action that doesn’t lose its grip and go into simple dick-waving about whoever has the latest experimental over-powered super mechas à la CG R2 and lose all its strategic/tactical depth. The action in G00 2nd has a brain and although super-mechas are introduced by all sides at a steady pace, strategy never loses its value.
Calling Kannagi ingenious might be an overstatement but not by too much. I’ve rarely encountered as enjoyable and pleasant high-school slice-of-life story that doesn’t even include much notable romantic elements. The ex-Lucky Star director Yamamoto Yutaka as well as the seiyuu Sawashiro Miyuki and Tomatsu Haruka have well proved their worth – hopefully we’ll have the pleasure to see more of their performances in the future.
To Aru Majutsu no Index is still in the same position as it was at the mid-point of the season – the setting and characters are good, but something in the writing is lacking. Excess dialogue and lack of action greatly hinder the show’s potential and in these aspects it could actually learn from its otherwise inferior soulmate Shakugan no Shana. It appears that J.C. Staff is simply relying on the manga/novelfags to cover their back while they write up a story that only these two groups can fully understand. As it is such explanations as “the bad guy will evolve to level 6 when he kills exactly 20 000 Mikotos” only appear silly and make little sense to a casual viewer such as myself who has no knowledge on the source materials. What is this, an MMORPG? Hoping for a change in style is rather futile at this point – J.C. Staff is likely to go with this formula all the way to the end of the show rather than change the course midway through.
Thankfully another J.C. Staff show, Toradora!, is doing fine and proven itself to be a little more than your usual high school romance story. In fact I’m glad to see how subtle the romance-elements in Toradora! are. Sure Ryuuji and Taiga are struggling with their love interests but this is surprisingly kept in the background much of the time. Instead the characters are developed in more sophisticated ways of mutual interaction and story elements. Solid characters are the strongest point of Toradora!, not over-the-top emotional struggle and romance. I’m also impressed by the relationship of Taiga and Ryuuji, which hasn’t gone into Louise-Saito-like ridiculous “b-b-b-baka inu!“-style tsundere crap. Taiga is an angry little girl voiced by Kugyuu, sure, but she’s not an almighty bitch and Ryuuji hardly is a pushover male lead either.
Lastly something about Tytania. The show is overflowing with potential and to be honest I’d rather not get rough on a show that at least tries to be a serious space opera. However Tytania has a severe problem of lazy character animation which is painfully apparent in the abudant scenes following Fan Hyulick – at least the ones about Tytanian dukes are covered by dialogue that catches the viewer’s interest with its intense political maneuvering and plotting. But wherever Hyulick goes there are scenes about lame pirates, eye-wettingly bad chase scenes and the classic “outlaw gang on the run from evil empire” stuff that’s neither interesting or fun to watch as most of it is just boring babble. I signed up for Tytania to see amazing large-scale spaceship fleet battles but these have been almost entirely absent, maybe due to budget reasons. For now Tytania remains watchable solely thanks to the clever plotting within the Tytanian court – but otherwise it is poorly animated rather generic space story that has been explored in the Western media many, many times. One might call it the Legend of Galactic Heroes Lite but I think that’s nasty abuse of a great title.
That’s all from me for now. Have a great 2009.