Introduction

Well I’ll be dedicating the blog to reviewing anime and perhaps the odd light novel I happen to read.  Those who have read the Sword Art Online novels can probably tell I’m a fan.  We enough of that because I won’t be reviewing SAO any time soon, at least not until the green light another season.

So, the idea of making a blog for me to review anime and such has been on my mind for quite some time now, I just never got the chance to do it.  Now time is still an issue, but hell I figure I can make time for it now, especially since I decided to write a review on an anime that I felt really needed one, and was a little under rated.

Now I will do the best I can do review anime without spoiling it, but one you see the SPOILER tag, proceed at your own risk, but even then I’ll try to keep spoilers to a minimum.  At the end of each review I will post a score out of 10 that I think the anime deserves, though sometimes I’ll be harsh, and others I’ll probably be lenient on, what can I say, sometimes I’m just a sucker for certain types of anime.

Seeing as I hope we all get along for some time I figure I should write out a few things about myself in relation to anime.

I started actively watching anime in 2008, for some of you that may not seem like a long time, but I’ve seen a great deal in that amount of time, and if you would like to request a review on any of them I’d be happy to try and give it a go.  My list is at about 400 anime.  It gets difficult to increase when you’re just watching new anime season to season, and I can’t really find time to hunt for anime myself, so if you find any interesting ones, be sure to recommend them to me.  Anyhow, I keep a record of the anime I watch on an Excel Spread sheet, though sometimes I get a little too lazy to update it, and it’s just under 400 anime with over 100 days, worth of anime watched, which has sort of got me a little proud of it (no this list does not contain hentai, if you don’t know what that is you’re better off not knowing.)  Not everything I’ve seen is on that list as it’s been a long 5 years and I’ve only recently formed this list, it actually took me over the course of 2 days to finish it, between finding the anime names and looking up the details on it.  Anyways I’ll be putting it up on Google docs and posting the link at the bottom when I’m done here.

Continuing on, there are many types of anime I watch, most of them include romance, comedy, slice of life, supernatural, psychological, harems.  I’m sure there are more, but I can’t remember all the different genres at this moment, but those would be the main ones.  I fall easily into the hype of an anime, but I will call it out if it doesn't meet my expectations.  Though mechas… never really got into those, so I rarely watch those sorts (sorry gundams,) now in saying that, I’ll watch pretty much anything that meets my criteria of either looking like it has a decent plot, or it has some nice artwork.  Though, I will tend to stay away from sports anime (might be due to my negative outlook on sports, geez I’m forming a pretty bad image aren’t I.)  Now moving along, anime holds a special place in my heart, it has gotten me through some pretty rough times in my life, though I would rather not share those, I just wanted to emphasize, if possible, the importance anime holds for me.

Alright, so I’ll talk about the blog now.  I generally want to keep these reviews short so sometimes I’ll skip on unnecessary information and provide links to where you can view what I generally skipped over (it’ll most likely be from Wikipedia or another wiki).  I wouldn’t want to keep you guys too long so generally I’ll keep my posts 1-2 word document pages in length, single spaced.  Well now that that’s over I’d like to end this post here with that link I promised earlier.

Oh and PS, my grammar, not the best, it will fluctuate from ok to downright horrible sometimes, feel free to Grammar Nazi it.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnihfN7NXrktdGthMXp4ZkNZN1RPRnlxNW5xZ2dwWWc&usp=sharing

White Album Review

Alright, so I just recently finished watching White Album, two seasons consisting of 13 episodes each.  By the time I finished watching the anime, I had the feeling that I just finished watching an anime mix of Tari Tari, School Days (minus the beheading,) and Kanon, with a small hint of Durarara!! (If you haven’t watched those, they’re pretty decent, though School Days has a bad reputation, I still think it’s worth one watch through.)

Stay with me here and I’ll try to do this with as few spoilers as I can.

Throughout the anime, the protagonist, Touya, Fujii, is constantly troubled by how little time he gets to spend with his girlfriend Yuki, Morikawa due to her job as an idol.  This provides Touya with a lot of room for his infidelity.  Touya himself is a good guy, though sometimes he’s fairly rough around the edges, especially towards Haruka Kawashima, his childhood friend.

Yuki Morikawa is the main heroine for the anime.  She is sweet, gentle, trusting, and fairly obedient and aspires to become an idol.  In the anime, she is only made aware of one case of infidelity conducted by Touya with her co-worker Rina Ogata

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I’m sort of bored with Character Introductions so if you want to read the rest you can go to Wikipedia.

So like most anime based on a Visual Novel it starts out with the bases behind the whole anime, which seems to be Yuki wanting to become an idol, it proceeds to cycle through the heroine introductions then goes through to solve their particular situations.  While this happens, the main plot slowly develops in the background which happens to be the situation around Yuki.  The anime comes with easy to tell plot devices, which to me was a good selling point as I’m one of those audience members that likes to guess at what is going to happen down the road.

*** PLEASE STOP HERE IF YOU WISH TO AVOID SPOILERS***

Now for problems I had with the anime.  I enjoyed watching it overall, but I’m not picky on what I watch when it comes to anime, as long as it has one of two requirements, either a good plot or good artwork.  I really wanted the infidelity between Touya and Yuki’s manager to be leaked out to Yuki, but the plotline leading up to that is quickly quashed due to a certain character’s stupidity and quick thinking on the part of an acquaintance of Touya.  Though late in the game, this does assist in furthering the plot.  Another problem I had was, no one openly said how Haruka’s brother died.  All that’s given to us is a flashback, a lie, and an open guess.

Alright, let us get off that topic now and onto things I liked.  Throughout the anime frequently found myself feeling a multitude of emotions, sometimes hate for Touya, pity for Yuki, sorrow, confusion, and happiness.  Now I’m not one to cry for an anime but the death of Touya’s father hit me pretty hard, though it didn’t seem like a big deal to the characters.  Next are the characters, I loved how the anime connected them all together.  It made for an entertaining show when you realize just what the hell is going on.

Overall I enjoyed my experience watching this anime, and thinking back on it, the episodes ended with quite the amount of suspense, but I marathoned it so I wasn’t quite as affected by that.  I would definitely say that this anime is worth the watch if you’re into the whole daily life romance sort of anime.  I also enjoyed that it wasn’t about high school students for the most part, as that’s what most anime seems to be directed to nowadays.

My rating for this anime: 7.5/10