Chi­hay­afuru

Mad­house have had their repu­ta­tion dragged through the dirt recently. As if the Mad­house X Mar­vel fiasco wasn’t bad enough, their fail­ure to cre­ate some­thing worth­while from Chaos;Head has been com­poun­ded by the qual­ity White Fox have achieved with Steins;Gate (even though the chief dir­ector on Steins;Gate is a Mad­house vet­eran, but whatever). With that tumul­tu­ous period out of the way, here comes their latest anime about chil­dren play­ing card games AARRGHHH OK not quite. Chi­hay­afuru is a josei manga about a clas­sic Japan­ese card game where you match cards to poems. I read a bit of the manga and it feels less josei and more a girlier ver­sion of Hikaru no Go, which isn’t really a bad thing. They’ve brought aboard the dir­ector of Nana and Chob­its aboard, so I’m quite look­ing for­ward to this. It’s nice to see Good Mad­house return.

Tamayura ~Hito­tose~

There was an OVA of Tamayura a few months ago and I avoided it like it was the latest issue of Bes­ti­al­ity Monthly. This is dir­ector Juni­chi Sato, guy who did Aria, try­ing to rep­lic­ate that feel­ing of ~heal­ing~ anime, involving a bunch of girls being insuf­fer­ably nice to each other while doing fuck all. I would prob­ably die if I tried watch­ing this, but good for you guys who like ~heal­ing~ anime. Your only prob­lem is Juni­chi Sato is dir­ect­ing a few anime this sea­son, so a giant robot/mutant space creature/something fuck­ing inter­est­ing might acci­dent­ally slip under his radar and into Tamayura.

Last Exile Fam: The Sil­ver Wing

Do I need to have seen the pre­vi­ous season?

No. This is going to be set in the same world but with dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters and new story

If I am to believe my own Top 30, the ori­ginal Last Exile is my 12th favour­ite anime of all time. So obvi­ously this para­graph should be noth­ing more than inco­her­ent fan­boy­ing at the pro­spect of a new sea­son, right? Well, not quite. You see, one of the best things about Last Exile was how com­plete it was. It covered every char­ac­ter, every aspect of the world, and explored the adven­ture from little kid with big dreams to world chan­ging hero. There was noth­ing that needed to be added. Gonzo return­ing to Last Exile strikes me more of a stu­dio des­per­ately scroun­ging through their back­log to find some­thing of theirs that is guar­an­teed to turn a profit. Now this obvi­ously isn’t entirely true, oth­er­wise they’d just stick to pump­ing out Strike Witches iter­a­tions over and over. They brought back most of the ori­ginal staff, and I have faith that those guys wouldn’t return to Last Exile without hav­ing a good story to tell us. The trailer looks good too, cap­tur­ing the fant­ast­ical adven­tur­ous ele­ment to the ori­ginal I liked so much. Well, it did, until that gen­eric J-Pop song star­ted play­ing. I know people like Maaya Sakamoto and the pro­spect of her warb­ling fills you with so much glee that your ears start melt­ing, but the ori­ginal Last Exile open­ing song is one of my favour­ite of all time. To have that replaced with gen­eric upbeat J-Pop is so… *le sigh* I’m just being nit­picky. I’ll remain upbeat about this new iter­a­tion for now. Cau­tious, but hopeful.

Phi Brain: God’s Puzzle

When I checked the Phi Brain ANN page, I was shocked to dis­cover how much the ori­ginal concept cre­ator, Hajime Yatate, had done. Every from Cow­boy Bebop to Code Geass to Mobile Suit Gun­dam to Votoms to Infin­ite Ryvius to Mai Hime to Esca­flowne to…and then it finally dawned on me that Hajime Yatate is simply the name given to that den of pure evil that is the Sun­rise board­room. Any­ways, Phi Brain is an ori­ginal anime by Sun­rise air­ing in NHK’s Edu­ca­tional TV sta­tion. That doesn’t means it will be simply edu­ca­tional fluff, the timeslot has pre­vi­ously held Den­nou Coil amongst other things. Sun­rise ori­ginal in timeslot that veers away from otaku pan­der­ing sounds like a good combo to me. Then why am I not more excited? Maybe it’s the unin­spir­ing trailer. Maybe because it’s Juni­chi Sato again, and I can’t help shake the feel­ing he’ll be con­cen­trat­ing more on his beloved ~heal­ing~ anime Tamayura then he will on Phi Brain.

Un-Go

There’s a mis­nomer in anime fan­dom that says ‘because it is in Noit­am­ina, it will be good’ (mainly a line touted by myself, but shut up). Un-Go is an anime by Bones with the key staff from the ori­ginal Full Metal Alchem­ist, doing an adapt­a­tion of an old clas­sic novel with their own mod­ern take on it. I would be excited for this whether it was in Noit­am­ina or not. If any­thing, the fact it is in Noit­am­ina is irrit­at­ing because that means it’s stuck to 11 epis­odes. On the flip side, no Noit­am­ina would mean that these kinds of anime wouldn’t be pro­duced in the first place. Any­who, after a stum­bling start to the year with Fractale, Noit­am­ina have regained their strength some­what with No.6 and Bunny Drop, so I’m hop­ing they fin­ish this year off with a bang (espe­cially since 2012 gets instant flop status with Black Rock Shooter). Mind you, it’s the other Noit­am­ina show this sea­son I’m more inter­ested in…

Guilty Crown

Guilty Crown is like God came down and asked me what anime I want to see made (but only after he rejec­ted my pro­posal for a 24 epis­ode TV series by Stu­dio Rikka). A story by the two key guys at Code Geass, being dir­ec­ted by the man who dir­ec­ted Death Note, with anim­a­tion by Pro­duc­tion IG who, by the trailer, appear to be chan­nel­ling the work they did on Eden of the East. Awe­some mul­ti­plied by Glor­i­ous to the power of Fuck­win. Unless you are the kind of indi­vidual who prefers more down-to-earth series with sim­pler aims, you bor­ing sods. The only prob­lem is this is in Noit­am­ina, and there­fore restric­ted to that accursed 11 epis­odes again. Or maybe they’ll let Guilty Crown run for 2 cours, see­ing as they haven’t announced the second of winter’s Noit­am­ina duo yet. “Hey guys, instead of let­ting Guilty Crown run for 2 cours, let’s go against the entire philo­sophy of this timeslot and run Black Rock Shooter!” Yeah, I’m totally not bit­ter or anything.

Mirai Nikki

Mirai Nikki is an insanely pop­u­lar manga about a diary that you can write the future in and YANDERE YANDERE YANDERE. Yeah, the fact that it has a yandere in it is all I ever seem to hear about it. So, for all you Mirai Nikki manga fans, pre­pare to weep tears of rage as you dis­cover who is adapt­ing it: asread. An anim­a­tion stu­dio so shit they don’t even cap­it­al­ise their own name. Pre­vi­ously pro­du­cers of  Kiddy Girl And, the two Minami-ke sequels and both sea­sons Shuffle. Oh, and they brought back the dir­ector who did all those shows to adapt Mirai Nikki. Yes, the tears of you fan­boys are delight­ful, if it wasn’t for the fact I was actu­ally quite look­ing for­ward to this myself.

Bak­u­man Sea­son 2

Do I need to have seen the pre­vi­ous season?

Yes

[sigh] Bak­u­man. When mak­ing that pic­ture, I thought I would be oh so funny and scribble out that shitty female char­ac­ter. Then I real­ised I was prob­ably scrib­bling out the wrong char­ac­ter, and should take my paint­brush and sub­ject it’s digital ink all over Mashiro, the real reason I got sick of Bak­u­man. But then I might as well scribble out Tak­agi as well for adher­ing to Mashiro’s pratty ways. And then keep scrib­bling over the entire pic­ture until all that’s left is Nizuma. I might as well check out this new sea­son, in case some kind of mir­acle occurs and the Death Note cre­ator I once knew and loved actu­ally makes his appear­ance, but I might end up drop­ping it like an angry hedge­hog. That has diarrhoea. And is on fire.

Mashiro-iro Sym­phony

Once upon a time, an anim­a­tion stu­dio with grand ambi­tions formed and tried to recap­ture the pop­ular­ity of Cow­boy Bebop, by mak­ing Samurai Champloo. Champloo was a pile of fun, ingenu­ity, wit and sheer unbridled cool­ness, and one of my favour­ite anime of all time. That was 2004. In the fol­low­ing years they tried to keep up this ambi­tious high qual­ity, with anime like Ergo Proxy and Michiko to Hatchin. After 2008 though, they dis­covered this method wasn’t earn­ing them enough money, so they gave up all pre­tence of qual­ity and pumped out Sac­red Black­smith, a banal and dull fantasy show with the only redeem­ing factor being how hot the female char­ac­ters were. After­wards they adap­ted The World God Only Knows, an otaku in-joke pander­fest manga with aspir­a­tions of  par­ody but was really just another bland harem. After­wards they made House of Five Leaves, a laid-back samurai anime for Noit­am­ina, but it sold fuck all so they made another TWGOK. Next sea­son, they’re doing Mashiro-iro Sym­phony, an adapt­a­tion of a visual novel by the man who also wrote Akane Iro Ni Somaru Saka. You are dead to me Manglobe.

Mobile Suit Gun­dam Age

Do I need to have seen the pre­vi­ous seasons?

No. This is a totally new story, world and characters

This latest Gun­dam doesn’t have the Gun­dam fan­base out there too happy. This is largely because…well no, it’s entirely because of the rather child­ish char­ac­ter designs. Appar­ently hav­ing a 14 year old Gun­dam pilot actu­ally look­ing like a 14 year old boy is license to lose your shit. I couldn’t really care what the char­ac­ters look like, but that’s mainly because I’m not a Gun­dam fan. Mind you, I can see where both sides are com­ing from. From the dir­ector of Ser­gent Frog movies, to the story being penned by the cre­ator of Ina­zuma 11, to help from the anim­a­tion stu­dio and staff who made Dan­ball Senki, Gun­dam Age has a younger audi­ence set firmly in its cross hairs. DVD/BD exclus­ive Unicorn/IGLOO and fujioshi-bait Seed/00 have obvi­ously not done much to bring in the younger gen­er­a­tion. I’m cer­tainly inter­ested in see­ing what a Gun­dam with a younger skew while try­ing to retain the shows largely ser­i­ous tone looks like, but I can’t say I’m boun­cing in my seat in anti­cip­a­tion either. It is 50 epis­odes long though, and I always like see­ing big ambi­tious mecha anime. I just wish it wasn’t always more bloody Gundam.

Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai

Pre­dic­tion time! ‘I don’t have many friends’ will be touted as a a poten­tial hit by cer­tain light novel fans, while large swathes of the more elit­ist audi­ence will remain scep­tical. How­ever, once the first epis­ode airs, the more adven­tur­ous of anime fans will check it out and declare that, apart from a few kinks, ‘I don’t have many friends’ is a qual­ity title about the loneli­ness of high teen­age life and the anxi­ety and desire to fit in. Soon every­one jumps on the band­wagon, only for little things to start going wrong. As the anime pro­ceeds bey­ond the first novel mater­ial, the ori­ginal intent of the story starts to get lost. New female char­ac­ters are intro­duced, and each one becomes less inter­ested in being friends and more about want­ing the male lead’s juicy man­piece. Soon the show starts intro­du­cing beach and hot spring epis­odes, lean­ing fur­ther and fur­ther into fanser­vice harem. The male lead starts acci­dent­ally undress­ing the female char­ac­ters while fall­ing onto them. Each char­ac­ter falls fur­ther away from what makes them unique and delve into cliche and ste­reo­type, until finally the anime ends with some crow­barred attempt at con­flict, no res­ol­u­tion and pos­sibly some cen­sored nud­ity. Call me back at Christ­mas when I’ve been proven correct.

C³

Wait! Before you go run­ning off at the sight of Yet Another Shana Clone, take a look at the trailer. The anim­a­tion is from Sil­ver Link, whose pre­vi­ous out­ings have only been the Baka to Test series. Not exactly world beat­ing mater­ial, but the anim­a­tion style was cer­tainly ima­gin­at­ive. Sil­ver Link are a spin-off from Shaft, with the dir­ector of Natsu no Arashi and ef, so they’re a stu­dio will­ing to actu­ally use what anim­a­tion is cap­able of doing. The other inter­est­ing fact is the guy in charge of the script also wrote the script for 8 epis­odes of Cow­boy Bebop of all things, as well as plenty of other qual­ity series like Hare Guu and Big Win­dup under his belt. Obvi­ously you have to remind your­self that, yes, this is another Shana clone, and bears all the annoy­ing fan-pandering near-pedo tropes that such a series often has. I read the first chapter of the manga, and it included an acci­dental fall­ing onto child­hood friends boobs. That all said, keep your eyes on this. Just in case.

Kyoukai Senjou No Hori­zon

Between Gun­dam Age, Phi Brain and this, Sun­rise sure are busy this sea­son. Mind you, they’re really only Sun­rise in name, with none of the usual Sun­rise staff appar­ently work­ing on this. It’s based off a light novel, but with stuff like giant robots and fight scenes and fantasy set­ting, I star­ted to get my hopes up. Then the trailer included bouncy boobs, absurdly large spiral twin tails, and a curi­ous lack of noses. Wor­ried, I checked the staff list and found the series was being dir­ec­ted by the people behind Drago­naut, Saki and Strike Witches. The cast of prats who pro­duced Gonzo’s dying breaths! Argh nooooo, fuck these guys and their pho­bia of anim­at­ing noses!

Inva­sion?! Squid Girl

Do I need to have seen the pre­vi­ous season?

Yes. It hasn’t got much of a plot, but it will assume you already know the characters

I’ve seen in sea­son pre­views that people like to have a little whine about sequels to shows they’ve never seen before. Which always struck me as a bit of a silly com­plaint. Unless the show is ridicu­lously long to get through, why don’t you just watch the first sea­son before the new ver­sion? You only have the right to com­plain about sequels when you’ve seen the pre­vi­ous sea­son of unam­bi­tious trivial anthro­po­morph­ised  moeblob anime and know how crap it is. Ah shucks, I’m jok­ing. I like Squid Girl. It’s noth­ing spe­cial, but it has a good sense of comedic tim­ing de geso~

Kimi to Boku

JC Staff doing an anime about cute boys doing cute things…wait, what? What is this mad­ness!?! Talk about crazy new ideas. How­ever, from check­ing out the manga, in real­ity this is less a gender­swapped Azu­manga and more a gen­eric shoujo with the bland etern­ally nice/shy female lead removed. It really was incred­ibly bland, but then I’ve been well doc­u­mented to dis­like shojo so take that with a pinch of salt. Dir­ector isn’t half bad, hav­ing pre­vi­ously done Elfen Lied and Sound of the Sky (Sora no Woto for you wee­aboos out there), so I guess if bland shojo is your thing then you might as well check this out.

Per­sona 4 The Animation

And the award to the most styl­ish anime trailer I have ever seen in my 3 years of sea­son pre­view­ing goes to. Wow, does that ever look awe­some. Per­sona 4 is based off a rather pop­u­lar video game by the same name. No mat­ter how many people try to assure me that the game has a great story, the words ‘video game adapt­a­tion’ send warn­ing lights flash­ing every­where. Asides from often paper-thin plot­lines, try­ing to adapt the unique story-telling envir­on­ment in video games to anime is a daunt­ing and dif­fi­cult task, one that often requires ignor­ing parts of the source mater­ial, much to the annoy­ance of the fans. So upon whom has this task of adapt­ing this most daunt­ing of games fallen on? Seiji Kishi, pre­vi­ous dir­ector of Angel Beats, Sun­red, Kam­is­ama Dolls and Seto no Hanayome. Now many people don’t like Kishi for his total ignor­ance of tone, but to my ADD addled mind, it’s some­thing I’ve never really minded in his works. I per­son­ally like him, but I think he’s bet­ter suited for com­ed­ies, where his leap­ing between tones is best used for humour. That said, the trailer should show that the man also has a keen sense of style. Give him a game that is already styl­ish game to adapt and we have one of the most inter­est­ing anime of the season.

Ben-To

Ben-to is about…oh look, I’ll just copy­paste the synopsis

Satō goes to the super­mar­ket one day and dis­cov­ers a bento on sale at half price. Just as he reaches to grab it, he ends up on the floor uncon­scious. Satō has just entered the fierce, no-holds-barred “super­mar­ket sur­vival battle” for half-price bento

Yeah. It’s one of those non­sense school set­ting anime, like Baka to Test except without the prom­ise of at least some neat anim­a­tion. The stu­dio doing this are David Pro­duc­tion, whose pre­vi­ous works con­sist of Level E and Book of Ban­torra. Neither of which are bad, I’ll grant them that. But in neither case did I feel they were improved sig­ni­fic­antly by the anime ver­sion. Of course, I’m speak­ing out of my ass here, not hav­ing read the source mater­ial for Ban­torra or Level E, but whatever. I really have no idea what to make of this.

Fate/Zero

Do I need to have seen the pre­vi­ous season?

Prob­ably yes. It’s a non-canon pre­quel, but will prob­ably require know­ledge of the char­ac­ters to under­stand the import­ance of their actions.

Now this is a genu­inely inter­est­ing pro­ject. The Fate/Zero novel is essen­tially a piece of pro­fes­sional fan­fic­tion from the Fate/Stay Night uni­verse. Not that your aver­age fan­fic­tion writer could get their work adap­ted into an anime with anim­a­tion by ufot­able (Kara no Kyoukai) and music by Yuki Kaijura. It’s writ­ten by Gen Urabo­chi, the Nitro+ VN games writer and recently fam­ous for com­ing up with Madoka Magica. All this comes together in this one big budget pro­duc­tion Fate/Zero The Anime. So in anti­cip­a­tion for this, I star­ted watch­ing Fate/Stay Night and was shocked by how incom­pet­ent it was. I las­ted a measly 2 epis­odes. I’ll prob­ably still give Fate/Zero a whirl though. It’s meant to be a pre­quel of sorts, so you can prob­ably jump in with no know­ledge of the canon. Also, Urabo­chi is a much more suc­cinct and cap­able writer than nasu, the Fate/Stay Night writer, in my totally biased opin­ion, so I’d prefer to see his iter­a­tion of the story.

Work­ing’!!

Do I need to have seen the pre­vi­ous season?

Yes. Again, not much of a plot here, but it will assume you know the characters

Stop mak­ing sequels to anime I don’t like. Why don’t you make a sequel to this anime I like that has noth­ing to do with the cre­at­ors of anime that did get a sequel, and didn’t sell very well any­way etc. etc. Yeah, I don’t like Work­ing. Or Wag­naria, if we feel like reverse-weeabooing the name. Funny how the Amer­ican title sounds more wee­aboo than the Japan­ese title.

Maji de Watashi

Right, eroge com­pany is MinaSoft. Their only pre­vi­ous eroge turned anime was They Are My Noble Mas­ters, which I hon­estly thought wasn’t half bad. How about the anim­a­tion com­pany? Err, Maji de Wata­shi is made by Ler­che, whose pre­vi­ous pro­duc­tions include noth­ing else what­so­ever. Well huh, maybe this won’t be so bad after all. How about the dir­ector Keit­aro Moton­aga? Aha! Here we go. Dir­ector of Akane Iro Ni Somaru Saka, both TV series and OVA. Oh well, so much for that~

Shak­ugan no Shana III Final

Do I need to have seen the pre­vi­ous season?

Yes.

Well, at least JC Staff have stopped pre­tend­ing. Instead of simply releas­ing yet another batch of Shak­ugan no Shana clones, they’ve finally gone back and made the actual Shak­ugan no Shana. I notice they’re call­ing this Final. I won­der if that means that this will be the end of JC Staff pro­duced Shana clones and they’ll start innov­at­ing and pro­du­cing new and excitin-BWAHAHA ok I couldn’t keep a straight face typ­ing that.

Maken-ki

So, how many panty­shots did you count? I got 12. Pretty impress­ive for a trailer that’s less than 2 minutes long. Once you go bey­ond 3 in a trailer, that says all you need to know about the anime in question.

Hunter X Hunter Brotherhood

Do I need to have seen the pre­vi­ous season?

No. This is a totally new remake

Mad­house took a look at Bones remak­ing Full Metal Alchem­ist and though “hey, we can do that too”. Now if you had told me Mad­house were remak­ing a manga adapt­a­tion that never fin­ished, I would have leapt out of my chair and pro­claimed “CLAYMORE!?!”. But nope, that would be far too obvi­ous and make them far too much money. Instead they’re giv­ing the Broth­er­hood treat­ment to Hunter X Hunter. They didn’t even anim­ate the first sea­son to this. Oh well, at least it’s a remake, which means I can jump straight in. I tried watch­ing the ori­ginal TV series but I couldn’t get past the first episode.

World’s First Love Sea­son 2

Do I need to have seen the pre­vi­ous season?

Yes.

Hey girls, isn’t rape ador­able~! For­cing your­self onto a weaker indi­vidual is totally OK because they can’t con­trol their emo­tions, and it’s OK so long as the receiver enjoys it in the end. That’s what true love is all about! Right....... >.>

Lupin III Thing

Do I need to have seen the pre­vi­ous seasons?

No. Every Lupin III spe­cial is writ­ten to be access­ible to newcomers

There were some people say­ing this would be a new Lupin III reboot TV series. It’s not, stop get­ting your hopes up. It’s just another one of those spe­cials Lupin III has every year. There were some other rumours going around that it would be headed up by a com­bin­a­tion of Takashi Koike (the Red­line dir­ector) and some Gainax folks, but again that’s just more wish­ful think­ing rather than being based off any con­crete evid­ence. I am a Lupin III fan, but the pro­spect of a new spe­cial doesn’t fill me with delight when there’s still 30-odd spe­cials and the TV series I’ve yet to watch. While the good thing about the Lupin III fran­chise is that every one of these spe­cials are made to be instantly approach­able, the bad thing is that which ones are good and which aren’t are total crap­shoots. Wait until reviews of this come out before you think about jump­ing in. For now, just go watch Castle of Cagliostro.

Busou Shinki Moon Angel

Do you have a fet­ish for 6 inch high young teen­age girls with robot joints wear­ing one-piece swim­suits? Well Japan has the car­toon for you! Oh Strike Witches, look what you’ve wrought.

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Battle Spir­its: Her­oes, Digi­mon Xros Wars – Toki wo Kakeru Shounen Hunter-tachi and Cross Fight B-Daman. I’m includ­ing them simply for com­ple­tions sake. Yeah I know some of you folk out there like Digi­mon and are prob­ably watching/watched Xros Wars. But I know fuck all about the fran­chise, so you’re bet­ter off search­ing else­where for inform­a­tion on it.

Movies

Nor­mally I devote a measly single para­graph to movies, but this year I want to give some of these a bit more lipser­vice. Remem­ber, while there are anime movies com­ing out in Japan this sea­son, the rest of the world won’t see these until they come out on DVD/BD. With that in mind, I’m cov­er­ing the anime movies that are com­ing out on DVD/BD over the next 3 months.

Towa no Quon

This has been out for a while now, but nobody has subbed the blas­ted thing yet. Towa no Quon is a movie series in the same vein as Break Blade. 6 epis­odes, each 50 minutes long and get­ting a the­at­rical release before being released on home video. Like Break Blade (and Kara no Kyokai before it) these are beau­ti­fully anim­ated big budget pro­duc­tions. It’s anim­ated by Bones and dir­ec­ted by Umanosuke Iida, who passed away before he could see the movie reach the big screen. Shame, he was a really tal­en­ted guy, work­ing on Cow­boy Bebop to The Big O to Hell­sing to 08th MS Team. Admit­tedly a lot of the trailer and from what I’ve been hear­ing about it sounds awfully gen­eric, but deliver tried and true con­cepts with enough flair and care and you’ll have a qual­ity pro­duc­tions. Now we just need someone to sub the blas­ted thing…

Mar­dock Scramble First Com­pres­sion

Mar­dock Scramble is another one of these movie series pro­jects. 3 movies long, it’s an adapt­a­tion of a novel by the same name.  It is all right, but delves into the unin­ten­tion­ally hil­ari­ous and stu­pid more than once. How­ever the novel it’s been based off has got­ten many rave reviews, so maybe I’ll turn out to be in the minor­ity on this one.

There’s also Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha com­ing out on the 9th Decem­ber, but that has got­ten awful reviews so far, so I’m not par­tic­u­larly look­ing for­ward to that. There’s Fafner Heaven and Earth com­ing out on 21st Septem­ber. So hur­rah for that massive Fafner fan­base that exists out there…somewhere.

Finally here is the summary picture of the upcoming fall season :

Don't forget leave behind your own opinion.