A Cyclops Who Likes Anime. A Shameful Cyclops

Sorry, except for a brief test (Nanoha vs the team) there’s no action in this episode. No, but there’s lots of talky-talky and walky-walky. The Gang gets new, upgraded devices with POWER LEVELS. They start at the base level, so they don’t get overwhelmed at first, and Hayate/Nanoha/Fate will gradually unlock the levels as they become better at using their shit.

Then it’s also revealed that Fate and Nanoha have limiters on both their weapons and themselves; because much like Space Marines post-Horus Heresy, it seems that the max magical rank of a squad is capped (the sum of all the magical abilities in the squad). One assumes that it’s for a similar reason (to keep the commander of the squad from attempting a military coup or becoming too powerful). Hayate’s been powered down four levels, and Nanoha and Fate are both down two levels; I guess that’s what you get when you want your friends in your squad and you’re all top-level mages. So it makes sense, but it sucks. I know there’s going to be an entire episode later on in the series where they’re getting their asses kicked, and they need their limiters released but it takes the FULL FUCKING EPISODE to get them released, and then at the end they’re given the go-ahead and then the episode ends. I will be VERY UNHAPPY with that episode.

BOTTOM LINE: If we’re considering this series on a 2:1 episode ratio with the past Nanoha’s, that would make this episode the second half of the second episode in both those other series. I’m pretty sure more happened in the second half of the second episodes of those series than this whole episode. Not terrible, or even bad, but worrying all the same. Come on guys, give us some ass-kicking or something!

On their way to the beastmen headquarters they encounter a group of beastmen hunters called the Black “Brethren” (they translated a Japanese word for family/siblings, so that’s probably not the name you’ll find everywhere, and I suspect they chose Brethren for alliteration purposes). It’s the older brother and his three sisters, who initially like Simon but then Kamina starts his shouting and they all go for him. Then they run into a 16-member Beastmen clan of uniting robots and blah blah blah. Story is whatever.

The real problem is the animation. The Gainax hammer dropped, hard. I’ve honestly never seen a studio less capable of masking their restricted animation budget. A focus on close-ups and long-distance shots, minimal mouth and face movements, and choppy animation for the rest of the episode is awful. Add that to the switch-up of directors, because apparently four years still wasn’t enough time for Gainax to line up a steady team for their next anime, and when you factor in the change to character design it ushers in you’ll be crying in no time. Next episode looks like it might pick up the animation off the floor and dust it off a little; I sure as hell hope so.

There is also a truly chilling moment where the mole that follows Simon around bites off its own ass and gives it to Simon and Kamina to eat. Raw. I’ll say that again: it bites off its own ass, with tail, and gives it to Simon and Kamina to eat. Seriously, what.

BOTTOM LINE: I may only have one eye but I have to wonder if the animation director at Gainax has any at all

This is simple; an episode based around Koizumi realizing that Otani is actually liked by a fair number of female students, and she’s worried about losing the bet. Then her friend’s boyfriend (that guy, not the tall guy but Otani’s friend) gets two Umibozu concert tickets. They both love that guy, and they’re the only ones, so they decide to go. Then there’s a thing with Otani’s ex-girlfriend who asks him to go to a party on the same day, but he chooses Koizumi. Probably they mean for it to be a sign that he likes her a lot already, even just as a friend, but I see it more as wanting to see a concert than go play basketball with some dudes for a few hours with your ex-girlfriend watching. But that’s just me. Anyway, at the end of the episode some guy (Haruka btw) comes up and hugs Koizumi and she’s like “what”.

BOTTOM LINE: What indeed, Koizumi. What indeed.

Kazuma continues on his path of awesomeness. There’s a showdown against his dad, who’s agreed to bring him back no matter what; his dad is supposedly the most powerful guy in the clan, and one of the 11 people in the history of the Kannagi family who’s been able to use some ability. It’s like a super attack or something. Too bad Kazuma can use a similar wind-type super ability, and wind summons faster so guess who wins~. After that he meets his brother outside his apartment, and hangs out for a while with him until he feels a wind user cut the apartment in half, where he gets the hell outta there. The building drops on Ayano but he’s not too worried about her because A) she’s “supposedly” super-powerful and B) she’s a bitch. For real.

Then he faces off against the wind user that’s been causin’ all the ruckus, who kind of looks like a zombified version of Kazuma, but we don’t get to see his face. He disappears pretty quickly, where Kazuma realizes that there was more than one of them and they stole his brother Ren.

BOTTOM LINE: BOUT TO GET TOUGH WIT DEM THUGZ

Kazuma (GOOD NAME JUST LIKE SCRYED) was a member of the Kannagi family, who is one of those really old, ancient-type families in Japan. The thing about this family is that they’re protected by fire spirits, and can use fire powers to BLOW SHIT UP and what have you. Kazuma, though, on his test against his cousin to see who would be the inheritor of the family (and get a wicked fire sword), sucked shit. Really badly. So his dad disowned him.

Four years later, he’s back, now a master of wind magic. And I do mean MASTER; he’s beatin’ dudes left and right for realious. He’s not even joking ok. Coincidentally, soon after he gets back, a branch family of the Kannagi clan gets slaughtered (well, three of their dudes anyway). Obviously, since the only one with a grudge against Kannagi is Kazuma, they go looking for him. He basically tells the two guys that came hey, sorry about your dudes, but fuck off. So they attack him and he beats the shit out of them pretty quickly and easily. But after he does that, someone else comes along and drops a shitload of steel beams and girders on them. When Ayano, the main branch successor, comes around and sees them dead (or probably dead anyway) she goes ballistic and attacks him, but even with her magic sword Branson or whatever it’s called she can’t really come close to dealing with his AWESOMENESS. So he says hey look it’s not me I’m going so cya bitch and flies away.

BOTTOM LINE: Pretty awesome so far. That’s one of the benefits of wind power, you can fly you fucking bitch!

While out hunting, Kamina, Simon and Yoko encounter the leader of the entire Eastern Division of Beastmen or…something. It was something like that for sure. He’s a badass, basically, and he has an Eva mech. Not exactly, of course, but let’s just say very similar. Him and Kamina’s mech fight it out but it’s pretty clear Kamina is getting his ass kicked. Simon digs them to safety just before being vaporized by a VERY GIANT laser. Before he can continue the attack, it gets too late and he has to head back to base (I assume because of planetary rotation and the like).

Simon is pulling a Shinji, and continues to do so until the fight the next day where he rushes to Kamina’s aid, who claims they can now “combine” and physically jams Simon’s mech onto the top of his mech’s body. And, it works (???), makes them much stronger, and now they start kicking ass. The enemy mech launches a missile attack and then gets outta dodge. Ron, their gay mechanic, then notices that Kamina’s mech has the return coordinates for the beastmen base and they set off to go there and beat em (Simon, Kamina, and Ron). Yoko decides to join in at the last second because she’s an indecisive bitch (like most women imho).

BOTTOM LINE: GAINAX IS GONNA FUCK UP JUST WAIT FOR IT

sorry in advance the images are so big, they only released a giant version but next time it won’t be giant (it will be smaller is what I’m saying)

Simon and Kamina learn about how Yoko’s village was forced to the surface and then these beastmen started fighting them (the one piloting the giant head robots). No one knows why they fight but fight they do. Every day, starting in the morning. Kamina and Simon help fight off the two from last episode, along with a giant one piloted by a Captain. While Simon realizes that his parents were killed in an earthquake caused by one of these faggots dropping to the planet, Kamina plans to make his way into the biggest robot and pilot it.

He eventually does, Simon & Co. are victorious over this day’s baddies, and Kamina learns the fate of his father.

BOTTOM LINE: The title for this show is so fucking nutty

YOU MOVED THE GRAVESTONES BUT YOU DIDN’T MOVE THE BODIES! In this case, one of the interred Saints is the Yoma in disguise, so Clare and the other two guys have a chop-socky with that Yoma bastard. Clare wins in the end, but uses too much of her Yoma power and starts transforming. She tells the big guy with the sword to kill her while she’s still human, then Raki, have I mentioned I hate his name and him, hugs Clare and gives this touching (I’m making a masturbatory gesture in the air here) soliloquy about how he’s been alone and he wants to be with her FOREVER, what’s with anime, it’s always FOREVER, do you fucking know how long forever is? I do, and the concept is almost more than one sane cyclopean mind can bear. Anyway, this halts the flow of yoma energy (yonergy) into Clare suddenly. Why? Who knows! But the title of the episode is Clare Awakens so I guess she’s awake now. Which is pretty amazing, considering how well she fought while asleep.

BOTTOM LINE: LET MY CYCLOPS PHYSIQUE FILL YOUR VISION *FLEX*

Oh god. I am not going to explain all the shit about this series, that’s for damn sure. It’s by Gainax, and it’s early morning as you can see from the screencaps. Surprisingly, these two things don’t make the series shit…yet. It still has excellent animation, a competent story (or premise, I suppose you’d say at this point), and hasn’t had multiple, drastic stylistic changes yet. That all comes later. For now it’s awesome.

Simon, Kamina, and Yoko are the three main characters. Simon and Kamina are from the same underground village, where they don’t believe in the surface and spend all day digging to expand how large their village is. They’re both orphans and are taken care of by the village elder, although Kamina is a sassy dude and is always flouting authority. Yoko is from a neighboring village; the other two didn’t know about other villages before the episode began. Simon especially is great at digging, and finds a key to something. Then a face. Before you know it, he’s piloting some kind of big-head robot while fighting against a big-headed monster. That’s all there is to it, really. Oh, and lots of explosions. I expect both the quantity and quality to go down in coming episodes.

BOTTOM LINE: Before the Gainax Curse sets in, it’s quite enjoyable. A very cool action series which will suck with enough meddling I’m sure. But I know if anyone can do it, it’s Gainax! Good luck guys!!

Lucky Star has been getting a pretty good buzz from Japan lately, so I thought, to really fully cover this thing, and give it the coverage it so obviously deserves, I’ll kind of watch the episode and write what I’m thinking at any particular time when the need arises. That way you get an UP TO THE MINUTE description.

It’s been almost 6 minutes and already I want to kill myself. It combines Quentin Tarantino’s love affair of pointless masturbatory dialog with an utter lack of writing ability. It is boring as shit, and if it doesn’t get better soon I may go haywire.

At seven minutes in, seven whole fucking minutes, they have not ONCE, outside of the opening twenty seconds or so, talked about anything other than food. It’s all been about how they eat different foods. ALL of it. This might not be so bad if there was comedy mixed in but…imagine listening to completely dull people talking about how they eat. With no embellishment, anecdotes or attempts at humor. That’s what this has been. For seven minutes, -20 seconds, -intro.

Ok second half, finally we’ve gotten to fucking SOMETHING. Too bad it’s so tongue-in-cheek with the dating sim terminologies and etc supplied by the main character, who plays a lot of video games and watches manga OH BOY, A CUTE CHICK THAT IS AN OTAKU AND KNOWS ALL THE TERMS AND REFERS TO THE CHARACTERS IN THOSE TERMS OH BOY THIS IS CLEARLY NOT DESIGNED TO PANDER EXACTLY TO THE PATHETIC MALE DEMOGRAPHIC. I know almost all anime is, I know that, but even the most cliche-ridden, horrible fagfests try to hide it to some degree. This is almost sickening.

HOLY FUCK, ~18 minutes in and they’re talking about food AGAIN, the same shit as before, except there was a girl who was sick so they’re asking her now. I really want to die.

The best part is the end, where they have a Lucky Channel feature, thankfully not including any of the characters in the main show and instead starring some idol and just some normal looking guy in a school uniform. A postcard is mailed in asking how much idols make, and the idol goes from being happy and cheerful like they all are to talking normally and scratching herself and letting fly the problems with being any kind of child star. It’s actually pretty funny.

The ED mostly the group bickering over which Karaoke song to pick, and then the main character picks a few and she sings a little bit of the song. It’s some 70s anime song or something. Fuck I don’t know.

BOTTOM LINE: Seriously, what the fuck? What the fuck is this supposed to be? It reminds me of Pani Poni Dash, only less manic and desperate but equally as overrated. It has one more episode.