(note: this is a rather old review but always kinda liked it, and since i haven't done shit lately, any activity is good activity)
So you wake up one morning to find your crankin' hand has turned into some chick who's always dug you? Straight, lets roll with this XD I wont go further into the basic story because a: there's a dozen reviews already here and b: you can look the hell up in the story synopsis for that if you still need it crowbarred in.
The show has one of the more outlandish premises i've seen in a show that isn't centered around pure chaos(a`la Abenobashi). sure the original set up is straight out of left field but the show itself is well written, has very likable characters and can easily put a smile on the face of the most angsty of the broody-brood set. The show has a fairly long list of good points and only a few, that i could find, of bad points.
for the good, lets start with the most important: IT ENDS!!
I don't know why, but a good percentage of Ro-Co's(romantic comedy) leave you with an ending that's left open so as to not piss off too many fans who wanted a specific ending. this show is at least kind enough to give you an ending. is it completely obvious 10 minutes into episode 1 what that ending will be? yes, but that's not the point. this show thrives on its characters: put them in the sun and watch them shine. Takamizawa being one of the best of the supporting cast. He's obsessed with dolls and puppets and is the only person in this entire universe that can actually see the fact that there is a frikkin person on protag-Seiji's wrist, which really doesn't solidify your hope for mankind. Of course he originally thinks she's a puppet to begin with and tries to get it naked so he can see the serial code so he can try and get one himself.
After Taka, there's Seiji's neighbor's 10(i believe) year old daughter who's got a mad-on for him, as well as a girl from school who keeps trying to set up the perfect opportunities for them to hook up that always are explained in a way that reminded you of when the Coyote finished setting up a trap for the Roadrunner and would non-verbally exposit exactly what he wanted to happen before it's inevitable downfall. I gotta admit, these fantasy sequences are flat-out awesome and even come equipped with title and ending sequences to cement the fact that every one of these people are bat-shit insane.
the biggest problem i had with the show was that, no matter how awesome the characters are, the bulk of them just disappear after a certain moment. loli-fest drops off the earth after her centric episode half-way through the series and Taka Kaiser Soze's after some chick runs after him like a fool in love, but at least that one makes a little sense since it can just be said that they were off making nasty, cosplay-rific, pimply(that's pimple-e, not pimp-ly), oily whoopee. The sister character only shows up to scream 'boogadu-boogie' every now again, steal all of Seiji's money and say something to try and get him and Midori together. What made me furious the most is that the character of Midori's maid seemed like she would be an awesome character to put into the story some, i know it would be hard to do but it looked like they took so much time into giving her a personality to just toss it all in the wastebasket and go about their day.
the only other bad part was some of the music. i heard a trumpet's wah-wah waaaaaaah a few too many times and was glad there was no chase scenes cause you just KNOW that Yakety Sax would cue up. But, as for bad parts, that's about it.some of the sound bytes were archaic and they dropped some characters with no explanation. But the goods far out-way that and its hard to properly convey how well this show is put together. if you're a fan of sight gags, cute and/or odd story telling and rocoms, i suggest you check this show out some time.
The show was released in the U.S under the title. "Midori Days" due to Media Blasters wanting to sell their shows to more than weeaboos. It has one wonderful thing the original does not, Bloopers! An amazing addition to any show, the first time I ever saw that was in Berserk and oh god did i fall in love with that show(might go into it in a later review[i'm going to have to make a drinking game compiled of all the times i say that]). It should not be hard to find the entire series in a collection set on the cheap, so there's very few reasons not to find it
Showing posts with label anime review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anime review. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Dual Parallel! Trouble Adventures
You can sum up Dual in one sentence: 'It's Evangelion but not too far up it's own ass"
I know it's a flame-worthy summation, but it's true. It's a not-very-well-disguised clone of the series with some harem aspects. For christ's sake, the annoying, overbearing chick who's secretly into the protag even runs around in a red mech. You cant buy that kind of blatancy. But what does it have that NGE doesn't? Why a protag that you ACTUALLY like. Or, at the very least, you don't hate him for bitching and moaning every three seconds and masturbating to comatose girls!
(wow, didn't even get through the first paragraph without mentioning that. a new low)
Okay, now that i got that little bit out, story time!!
The show centers around a boy named Kazuki Yotsuga, a regular dude(don't they all, though) who everyone at school laughs at because he keeps seeing these giant mechs fighting in the street. He sees this so frequently he's even started a little website where he chronicles what he sees. Well it all goes tails up for him when the school queen, Mitsuki Sanada shows an interest in the boy, telling him that she believes that he sees these things. More importantly her father believes him too. He has a theory about there being a parallel world with events and a time line similar to theirs, and that Kazuki has the unique ability to peer into it. Since this is an anime the Professor immediately straps the poor schmo into the deus ex teleporter he already had made up, complete with comfy chair and arm straps, and BAM!! Kazuki is now in the other world.
He soon meets up with the Mech he is always seeing in his psychotic episodes and, through serendipity and overly obvious plot devices, he ends up piloting it; defeating the generic mech it's pilot, now unconscious, was fighting. It is through here that young Kazuki learns that he is in the other world when he runs home to find that his parents have no idea who he is(NOT when he was piloting the mech he's seen so many times in his hallucinations that he's actually given it a name... which i am not even going to TRY and pronounce, let alone spell. i just started calling it "Harpsichord"). Eventually he is swept up by the Giant Mech Military, ran by this Earth's version of the loon who sent him there(just go with it), because he is the only male who has ever been able to pilot a mech, previously only women could for some reason. He soon runs into Mizuki, who decided to follow after him into the Chair of Spatial Impossibility shortly after he disappeared but got there a month earlier for some reason(SCIENCE!!!), and she turns out to be a mech warrior as well, along with the 'Rei' character of the story who is actually explained in the first appearance as an alien-clone-robot-thing.
you read that right, they ACTUALLY flat-out told you that she was a alien clone-robot-thing instead of making it painfully obvious but never even really alluded to in the bulk of the story. And she's a very interesting character, i always liked Tabula Rasa characters, their humor may be obvious(i.e. when looking for a character who ran away they tend to look in the trashcan for some reason) but they're always enjoyable and usually give me a smile.
And all this brings up a really important point, why the crap can only children pilot giant mechs of death? does puberty not compute with the OS or something? but at least this show altered that a bit, the pilot originally controlling Harpsichord was 23, so at least there was that.
After the establish the main cast the episodes went kinda basic, they met the Team Rocket-inspired villain who seems more concerned about the the spectacle of invading rather then the actual winning of the battle. The also have all the old songs of anime here: They go to school, everyone is jealous of/hating on the protag because the school queen is always hanging around him, everyone wants a piece of him, there's a stray dog somewhere along the line that the alien-clone-robot-tabula rasa-Priscilla: Queen of the Desert grows attached to. It doesn't really try to push any boundaries as a show, its more like the people who created the story were given a big box of what all anime before it did and was told to pick two good concepts to play with and three bad concepts to try and fix and to make a show out of those 5 things and they said 'to piss with that' and took the whole box and ran with it.
And, to me, that's not a bad thing. It's a good view if you're bored off your rocker and want to just enjoy yourself for 12 episodes. There's nothing really to take away from it in the end, but is that really a bad thing? Eva tried shoehorning some depth into itself near the end and it turned into one of the few shows that i stop watching before the last 4 eps.
The ending is one of the better ones out there, even though it has one of them open ends that damn near every harem show has, but this show's harem aspects-while predominant throughout the entirety of the story-was never more than a plot device... to me, at least. There was even a 'finale' episode after the story proper where they showed what happened after everything was righted and whatnot and everyone gets on with their lives and eventually setting up yet another open ending where they all try to go to space. What really pissed me off about this is that there was NO continuation of the story after that. I would have loved to see more of the show because it was the first non-toonami/adult swim anime that i ever really loved. Hell, the show even opened me up to the awesomeness that was once TechTv since I found it on the channel's Anime Unleashed block. The show will always be one of those few things I can watch over and over without getting bored of it. It is worth a viewing if you're wanting an amalgamation done right.
postscript: Found out later that it was done by the same guy who did Tenchi Muyo, one of the best harem anime ever done. too bad its had so many different people working on it it got rather confusing to figure out its continuity.
But that's another review
I know it's a flame-worthy summation, but it's true. It's a not-very-well-disguised clone of the series with some harem aspects. For christ's sake, the annoying, overbearing chick who's secretly into the protag even runs around in a red mech. You cant buy that kind of blatancy. But what does it have that NGE doesn't? Why a protag that you ACTUALLY like. Or, at the very least, you don't hate him for bitching and moaning every three seconds and masturbating to comatose girls!
(wow, didn't even get through the first paragraph without mentioning that. a new low)
Okay, now that i got that little bit out, story time!!
The show centers around a boy named Kazuki Yotsuga, a regular dude(don't they all, though) who everyone at school laughs at because he keeps seeing these giant mechs fighting in the street. He sees this so frequently he's even started a little website where he chronicles what he sees. Well it all goes tails up for him when the school queen, Mitsuki Sanada shows an interest in the boy, telling him that she believes that he sees these things. More importantly her father believes him too. He has a theory about there being a parallel world with events and a time line similar to theirs, and that Kazuki has the unique ability to peer into it. Since this is an anime the Professor immediately straps the poor schmo into the deus ex teleporter he already had made up, complete with comfy chair and arm straps, and BAM!! Kazuki is now in the other world.
He soon meets up with the Mech he is always seeing in his psychotic episodes and, through serendipity and overly obvious plot devices, he ends up piloting it; defeating the generic mech it's pilot, now unconscious, was fighting. It is through here that young Kazuki learns that he is in the other world when he runs home to find that his parents have no idea who he is(NOT when he was piloting the mech he's seen so many times in his hallucinations that he's actually given it a name... which i am not even going to TRY and pronounce, let alone spell. i just started calling it "Harpsichord"). Eventually he is swept up by the Giant Mech Military, ran by this Earth's version of the loon who sent him there(just go with it), because he is the only male who has ever been able to pilot a mech, previously only women could for some reason. He soon runs into Mizuki, who decided to follow after him into the Chair of Spatial Impossibility shortly after he disappeared but got there a month earlier for some reason(SCIENCE!!!), and she turns out to be a mech warrior as well, along with the 'Rei' character of the story who is actually explained in the first appearance as an alien-clone-robot-thing.
you read that right, they ACTUALLY flat-out told you that she was a alien clone-robot-thing instead of making it painfully obvious but never even really alluded to in the bulk of the story. And she's a very interesting character, i always liked Tabula Rasa characters, their humor may be obvious(i.e. when looking for a character who ran away they tend to look in the trashcan for some reason) but they're always enjoyable and usually give me a smile.
And all this brings up a really important point, why the crap can only children pilot giant mechs of death? does puberty not compute with the OS or something? but at least this show altered that a bit, the pilot originally controlling Harpsichord was 23, so at least there was that.
After the establish the main cast the episodes went kinda basic, they met the Team Rocket-inspired villain who seems more concerned about the the spectacle of invading rather then the actual winning of the battle. The also have all the old songs of anime here: They go to school, everyone is jealous of/hating on the protag because the school queen is always hanging around him, everyone wants a piece of him, there's a stray dog somewhere along the line that the alien-clone-robot-tabula rasa-Priscilla: Queen of the Desert grows attached to. It doesn't really try to push any boundaries as a show, its more like the people who created the story were given a big box of what all anime before it did and was told to pick two good concepts to play with and three bad concepts to try and fix and to make a show out of those 5 things and they said 'to piss with that' and took the whole box and ran with it.
And, to me, that's not a bad thing. It's a good view if you're bored off your rocker and want to just enjoy yourself for 12 episodes. There's nothing really to take away from it in the end, but is that really a bad thing? Eva tried shoehorning some depth into itself near the end and it turned into one of the few shows that i stop watching before the last 4 eps.
The ending is one of the better ones out there, even though it has one of them open ends that damn near every harem show has, but this show's harem aspects-while predominant throughout the entirety of the story-was never more than a plot device... to me, at least. There was even a 'finale' episode after the story proper where they showed what happened after everything was righted and whatnot and everyone gets on with their lives and eventually setting up yet another open ending where they all try to go to space. What really pissed me off about this is that there was NO continuation of the story after that. I would have loved to see more of the show because it was the first non-toonami/adult swim anime that i ever really loved. Hell, the show even opened me up to the awesomeness that was once TechTv since I found it on the channel's Anime Unleashed block. The show will always be one of those few things I can watch over and over without getting bored of it. It is worth a viewing if you're wanting an amalgamation done right.
postscript: Found out later that it was done by the same guy who did Tenchi Muyo, one of the best harem anime ever done. too bad its had so many different people working on it it got rather confusing to figure out its continuity.
But that's another review
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