Little Busters (Season 1) - Review

The original five Little Busters (Image taken from: imgur.com)

Alright, this morning I caught up with Little Busters as I finished the second season and started onward into the second, which I'm currently on episode two of. The first series follows the high school life of the Little Busters led by Kyousuke (center) and how they train to be a baseball team after finding memebers while also facing general life hardships along the way. Riki (second from right to left) plays the role of recruiter for most of the series and also is the most kind of the male characters and as such assists the newly recruited members with solving their dilemmas as they come. Past that, the Little Busters laugh and have fun together, like any group of friends as well as practicing baseball as a team as Kyousuke had suggested at the beginning of the series.

Btooom! - Review

The main characters on the island in Btooom! (Image taken from: animereviews.co)

Here's my Btooom! review finally. I've put this down as a recommendation a couple times yet didn't have a review to tell you guys what it is, so here it is. Btooom! is a bit of a demented series in a sense. In the series a lazy adult guy whom lives with his parents still is obsessed with a strategic explosives player versus player game called Btoom. The twisted part comes in  the form of the creators of the video game creating a real setting for this game on a deserted island. Of course, the main guy gets sent to said island and meets his in-game wife, Himiko, on the island. The goal of the real-life Btooom is to get a total of seven chips, which are lodged in the participants hands and used as radar like in game. The problem is that the chip cannot be removed unless the person's heart stops or the limb is removed, thus the characters are set in a death game in order to try and escape the hell that they were forced into experiencing.

Fate Series - Review

The three main characters of Fate/Zero: Saber, Kiritsugu Emiya, and Irisviel von Einzbern (Image taken from: fanpop.com)

Alright, the Fate series was an utterly fantastic series in my opinion. The order or publications in comparison to the storyline order is probably the only negative I truly saw. Fate/Stay Night was put out first, but the two Fate/Zero seasons are prequels to Fate/Stay Night. Despite the reverse order, I watched Fate/Stay Night, and honestly it didn't really spoil Fate/Zero but rather assisted in understanding what was going on sooner. Anyways, the entire series focuses upon a Holy Grail War amongst mages whom have summoned partners (like Saber) whom represent heroes from history and are fighting each other for the Holy Grail, which is believed to be an all-powerful wish granter for the winner of the War. Of course there's a catch, and twists in the plot and whatnot, but that's the gist of the storyline, mages with powerful summoned partners fighting for a wish granting object.

Baka to Test - Review

The main characters of class F (Image taken from: deviantart.net)

As promised, I have a review for Baka to Test today. Baka to Test is very much a comedic anime with a little mix of romance, but very, very heavily lies on its comedy. The anime is about a school that separates classes by their grade level according to a test they give out. For example, all the A students are in class A, B students in class B, and so on. The story primarily follows class F and their struggles to try and work their way up in the class ladder. Each and every student at the school has a summoned being that can fight for them. As such, the way classes could move up the class ladder was by challenging and defeating the class above them. If the lower class wins, then they move up to the upper classroom while the loser moves down to the winner's former classroom. Each classroom has from high grade (class A) to low grade (class F) equipment for a classroom in general, thus, the higher one moved, the more advantage they had in their studies or just more comfort being in their classroom.

Angel Beats - Review

Fanart of the Afterlife Battlefront (Image taken from: fanpop.com)

Angel Beats is another rather feelsy anime I've watched. Honestly, this is the only anime I can really compare to the levels of feels of Clannad After Story, and even then, Clannad After Story is just too dang sad to truly compare the two. Anyways, Angel Beats is about a group of people of various ages, most being teens-young adults, that are in a world between the real world and the afterlife as they had something happen that they regret in the real world so they weren't able to pass on to the afterlife. The main group that's focused on in the anime is the ever name-changing Afterlife Battlefront, who fight the 'god' of their world, Angel. By the end of the series they come to terms with their lives and pass on, but the endings are extremely emotional, or at least to me.

Toradora! - Review

Aisaka Taiga and Takasu Ryuuji (Image taken from: anime-planet.com)

Alright, so, finally getting around to one of my absolute tops (though I don't really number them off...). Toradora is a school romance-comedy series following Ryuuji and Taiga as the main two with Ryuuji's friend, Kitamura Yuusaku, and Taiga's friend, Kushieda Minori as the two main-minor characters. A couple episodes in, another main-minor character comes in the form of Kawashima Ami. Anyways, when the series starts Ryuuji likes Minori and Taiga likes Yuusaku, so after Ryuuji accidently takes Taiga's bag home instead of his own, he finds out about Taiga's feelings, which he tries to even the ground by showing Taiga that he feels the same about a girl as she did for Kitamura, which Taiga finds out his feelings are for Minori. From there the two become friends primarily to help each other in getting closer to who they had had feelings for, but as most humans know, feelings can change over time. Naturally, drama ensues as Ryuuji doesn't know what to do, Taiga doesn't know what to do, and neither does Ami or Minori, so it just ends up being a confusing cluster for a bit that eventually works out by the end of the anime.

Clannad/Clannad After Story - Review

(Image taken from: anime-planet.com)

Since this is the most feelsy anime I've ever watched, I've decided to just write this review rather than suffering through a rewatch. The Clannad series is a dramaful anime following none other than the drama club of a high school. The second series is dominantly after the main heroines graduated,which then turns more into more of a dramaful romance between Okasaki Tomoya and Furukawa Nagisa. Of course there are comic relief characters to ease tensions as they come, but most of the focus is upon the romantics, what affects each person including not only Tomoya and Nagisa, but also their friends from high school: Kyou, Ryou, Tomoyo, and Youhei. While they help each other out from time to time, every hardship is a little different, thus different situations lead to different results in terms of the storyline.

Accel World - Review

Kuroyukihime and Haruyuki Arita (Image taken from: anime-planet.com)

Since I'm already tired tonight, this summary will be more to the point. Accel World takes place in a universe in which everyone has this necklace-computer thing and is on an online network at all times. Basically Kuroyukihime, the school's idol, and Haruyuki meet and Kuroyukihime suddenly takes an interest in this short pudgy boy, Haruyuki. Not too far into the series, Kuroyukihime transfers a program called Brain Burst to Haruyuki, which is later discovered as a fighting game between people with the program in addition to access to the 'Accelerated World' which lets someone slow and start time at will at the expense of their points within the Brain Burst fighting bracket. Essentially, if one player runs out of points, the program is automatically uninstalled and that person can never reinstall it.

Ano Natsu de Matteru (Waiting in the Summer) - Review

Takatsuki Ichika from AnoNatsu (Image taken from: anime-planet.com)

Okay, as I had said a few posts back, random reviews will gradually leak in, this marks the first review I haven't rewatched lately but am too lazy to rewatch at the time being. In all actuality, it's more that I'm busy catching up with animes having sequels this season than anything, but that's a different point. Anyways, AnoNatsu is about this alien girl, Ichika, who crash lands in Japan over Kirishima Kaito. Kaito of course forgets the incident for a while only to have it come back later. Ichika lives amongst Kaito and his peers as if she were just another human until late in the series when the intergalactic secuity authorities (forgetting what they were actually called) come to Earth looking to take Ichika back into space. In the time Ichika was on Earth, her and Kaito along with other friends made a movie together which they eventually show toward the end of the show.

Kokoro Connect - Review

The members of the Cultural Research Club [From left to right: Aoki, Yui, Taichi, Inaba, and Iori] (Image taken from: picky wallpapers.com)

Okay so, yesterday I completed my rewatch of all 17 Kokoro Connect episode and let me just say the series wasn't as good as I remember in the first half-ish, but it was much better in the second half. Kokoro Connect is about the five students above struggling against supernatural phenomenon caused by Heartseed. Some of the cases include: switching personalities (one's soul would exchange with another's and live in each other's bodies for some time) and emotion transmission, which basically made any of their thoughts possible to be transmitted to one or multiple other club members, regardless of distance/what the person actually says. Through those difficulties the club members face so much stress both between them and just amongst society as a whole. In each case, someone breaks down in some way, but eventually the members patch up the damage and return to be happy peers again.

Lucky Star - Review

The four main girls of Lucky Star [From left to right: Konata, Kagami, Miyuki, and Tsukasa] (Image taken from: photobucket.com)

Lucky Star was the first real slice of life/comedy hybrid anime I watched. The anime follows the daily life of the four girls above and any other peers they interact with. While it isn't jumping with action or utterly dramatic, the anime has several funny moments. The storyline (if there really is one) is quite vague in the sense that one episode may have no real lead into the next and so on and so forth. As such, the episodes often are just a daily look at the lives of four high school girl characters, what they go through, what they laugh about, what they talk about in general, and how they get along all around.

Shingeki no Kyojin (Attack on Titan) - Review

The three military branches' icons in SnK [From right to left: the Garrison: troops stationed for defense within the walls, the Military Police: stationed in inner wall to protect king, keep order, and collect taxes, and finally the Recon Corps: those who venture outside the walls in hopes of researching and eventually overcoming the titans. (Image take from: imgur.com)

Just yesterday the first season of Shingeki no Kyojin, or Attack on Titan, ended. While there was no definite announcement in the anime itself that a second season was imminent, I am 99.9% sure a second season will come as they left it off in the last episode, and, well, I've read ahead on the manga, but that's a different point. Anyways, Attack on Titan is about humans, whom built extremely tall walls and live inside them, on the verge of extinction due to the human devouring monsters outside the walls called titans. Titans are several times larger than humans and as such, much stronger and faster in almost all cases. As such, the humans live in fear of those titans and resort to living life within the walls, trapped from the outside world. A young man, Eren Jaeger, along with a girl he'd saved while young, Mikasa Ackerman, witness their mother (not really Mikasa's mom but still..) being devoured by a titan. Even prior to witnessing that, Eren saw the Recon Corp members as heroes, but after being thrown to despair, Eren put his foot down and set out to get to the Recon Corp. Through his trainee years, Eren is faced with a few conflicts, even one that revealed to him, along with every other human who lived through the titans breaking through the walls a second time, that humans could transform into titans, or at least Eren could. From that point on, Eren is questioned to be a friend or enemy, and questions run around about whether he was the only human with such an ability.

Danganronpa - Review

All the students of Hope's Peak Academy and Monobear (Image taken from: entravity.com)

Danganronpa was a rather.... twisted anime in a sense. The story basically is about a school for talented students that is turned into a killing spree. With the help of the mastermind behind it all, Hope's Peak became the site for a game of despair. The objective is fairly simple: kill a classmate without your other classmates catching you as the murderer. If you are caught as guilty during the class trial, you are punished with death, if you are not caught, you are set free and all of your classmates killed off instead. The series circles around that idea with several murder cases arising and being solved until closer to the end. At the end, Monobear, the self-proclaimed principal and apparent mastermind throughout the series, supposes that if the students figure out the entire case surrounding this game of despair, they'll be let out.

Free! - Review

The main swimmers in Free! (Image taken from: geekosystem.com)

So, I didn't get to posting this review yesterday, but since I have a late start this morning, I have time now. Anyways, as the picture might suggest (along with the caption), Free is an anime about competitive swimming and what it means to the five pictured guys above. Most of the storyline follows the drama between Haruka, Makoto, Nagisa (far left three in above picture) and Rin (far right in above picture). What happened was the four swam in a relay while they were younger and won, and therefore share that memory, but Rin left to train in Australia to follow his father's dream of being an Olympic swimmer. Eventually, Rin returned to Japan, but went to a different high school with a more elite swimming team than the other three guys' school. In fact, Haruka, Makoto, and Nagisa are the three that started to swimming club at their school, which Rei (second from right to left) eventually joined so the team could officially travel and compete.

The World God Only Knows (Goddesses Arc) - Review

Keima voicing his opinions of reality (Image taken from: photobucket.com)

Today marks the third anime that I was following this season that has ended. The anime ending today is TWGOK: Goddesses Arc. As this anime is the third season of the TWGOK series, this summary will sum up the entire series in a general view. The anime begins with a somewhat careless gamer guy, Katsuragi Keima, whom starts out just going about being antisocial and insisting his games' worlds are better than the real world. Speaking of his game worlds, Keima plays galge, and lots of it. If you don't know what galge is... here: (Link: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=what+is+galge%3F). But anyways, a demon, Elsie, shows up one day to disrupt Keima's peaceful gamer life by saying there are loose souls trapped inside the souls of these girls at his school. As for how to release the loose souls to be captured, Keima had to make them fall in love, much like how his galge works, just in reality. Once the souls are released and caught, the girls completely forget about the whole affair with Keima, thus leaving him able to move along easier than if they remembered. The first two seasons work off that going through multiple girls and multiple routes, if you will. The third and latest season is basically the same thing just most of the girls he "conquered" (as Keima words it) in the first and second seasons remember their time with Keima and also now have goddesses living inside them as hosts, which as you could probably guess, are fully unleashed by falling in love again, or getting love from the one they love, whom happens to be Keima to all of them. Unfortunately, a rouge demon organization, Vintage, is trying to wipe out the goddesses and take over hell, so Keima must work quickly and carefully to unleash each goddess in order to fight back against the threat from Vintage.

Kamisama no Inai Nichiyoubi (Sunday Without God) - Review

Ai Astin looking out a window (Image taken from: imageshack.us)

So, today marked the first ending of one of the animes I've been following this season while it aired in Japan. Sunday Without God takes place in a... different world. Honestly, I'll most likely fail to clearly explain this, but here I go. In a very short sum-up, the dead live and gravekeepers must assist the dead to truly pass on, otherwise the dead walk amongst the living. The anime follows a 12-year old (and eventually 13) gravekeeper, Ai Astin, whom initially begins in a village where Hambart Hampnie wipes out the people who are living there. The twist? All those villagers were dead, and the very person who shot them to make them "temporarily past on" (<-- my take) is revealed as Ai's father. And that's only the first arc. After Ai moves along, she visits an organized city of the dead alongside Kiriko Zubreska and meets the princess of the city, Ulla. In the final arc, Ai is caught by a school that basically locks its students in as they have no active enrollment, thus they force it upon the kids they can catch. After a bit there, Ai and the rest of her classmates escape with help from Alis, their classmate who had been trying to escape somehow in the first place. After they all escape, Alis and Ai end up travelling together and wind up in Alis's past world trying to free his past classmates from a temporal loop. And that is the final arc, it ends after that.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica/Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica - Review

The five main girls in PMMM [From left to right: Sakura Kyoko, Sayaka Miki, Tomoe Mami, Akemi Homura, Kaname Madoka] (Image taken from: shoshosein.info)

PMMM is a magical girl anime, similarly to Sailor Moon, but has an entirely different twist. In Madoka Magica, there's more of a dark twist in the sense that magical girls are made basically by agreeing to put their soul in a gem and fighting against illusionary creatures in order to cleanse their souls. The anime starts out with the main-main girl, Kaname Madoka, essentially clueless about the illusionary world with the creatures, but Madoka along with her friend, Sayaka Miki, witness this world alongside Tomoe Mami, whom was already a magical girl. At school, another magical girl, Akemi Homura, transfers into Madoka and Miki's class and warn them (more so Madoka) of just how dangerous and miserable it is to be a magical girl. After some time, Miki decided to form a contract with Kyubey to become a magical girl herself to fight against the illusions despite knowing virtually nothing about the background behind what being a magical girl entitled. The rest of the series follows the struggle of the five girls: Kyoko, Miki, Mami, Homura, and Madoka, as they all question what being a magical girl is or suffer under what they must do to live on as a magical girl.

Sword Art Online - Review

Elucidator [Kirito's black sword] and Lambient Light [Asuna's rapier] (Picture taken from theanimegallery.com)

Sword Art Online takes place in the year 2022, a year in with virtual reality gaming has become a norm. In the anime, VR gamers are enjoying the release of the next big game: Sword Art Online. The game seems to be a very normal game on the surface, being a hack and slash, kill monsters and level up type of game. Unfortunately, for the gamers whom logged into SAO, there was no log out button as Kirito and his new in-game friend Klein discover when Klein tries to log out. Moments later all players that were online were moved to an arena in which the creator of SAO, Kayaba Akihiko, informs them that every single one of the players was in a death game. They all were trapped inside the game unless someone climbed the levels and beat the game. The catch is that if one dies in the game, the VR console fries their brain, and they also die in real life. Along with a skilled partner-player, Yuuki Asuna, and her guild, Knights of Blood Oath, Kirito aims to beat the game, whether or not people truly had his back.

Guilty Crown - Review

~~~WARNING: THIS MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS SOME MAY NOT WISH TO KNOW OF.~~~

Ouma Shu drawing a void (Picture taken from: animequotes.net)

This morning I finished an anime called Guilty Crown. The story follows a teenage guy, Ouma Shu, who starts out as a lazy high school student in Japan which is controlled by GHQ forces after the 'Lost Christmas' incident. GHQ uses the apocalyptic 'Lost Christmas' incident as a guise to subjugate the Japanese who are believed to be carrying the Apocalypse virus. Instead of tracking specific suspects, GHQ would wipe out entire cities of Japanese citizens at a time. Shu, who seemingly seemed to be on the outside of the chaos with GHQ, comes across an idol named Yuzuriha Inori from the group Egoist in the show. Shortly after meeting Inori, Shu is brought into the havoc between the Undertakers rebellion group, which Inori is a member of, and GHQ. In the first skirmish, Inori winds up injecting Shu with a void genome, which allows Shu to essentially pull a person's heart out in the form of a weapon or tool to fight. Throughout the series, Shu faces several conflicts in which he must utilize his void abilities in order to assist the Undertakers which he joined after being led into the organization by Inori and the leader, Tsutsugami Gai.