So, I finally have this blog caught up to the most current anime season, which it hasn’t been for almost more than a year already. SMH. I have my summer break to thank for that… well, what’s left of it anyway, since I was too busy attending summer classes to get some required credits for my next semester. Anyway, I’ll start out with these three and go on from that. As usual, I’ll be tackling their main stories and my thoughts on them halfway through the season, so expect it to be slightly spoilerish, I guess. All right, let’s get started.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
ACCEL WORLD
Haruyuki is your typical loser at school. He’s constantly bullied, not that athletic or smart, and has practically zero self-confidence in himself. The only thing he’s good at are video games, and in the timeline he lives in, video gaming has practically ascended to a whole new different level already. People in that particular future apparently have computers directly installed into their nervous systems, so they’re literally able to access the internet in the blink of an eye, anytime and anywhere.
Haruyuki uses this to his advantage to escape from his miserable life, constantly ditching class and racking up high scores on his favorite online game. His exceptional gaming skills are noticed by the aptly named Princess Snow Black (pictured above), a popular online gamer who introduces him to a special program called “Brain Burst”, which basically gives him the ability to “accelerate” his thoughts and body for a set period of time. During this time period, he retains his ability to think and move in his online avatar state while the rest of the world around him, including his real body itself, is frozen in time. This particular skill is pretty awesome, of course, due to all the things you can do with it.
Anyway, with great power comes great risk as well (you thought I was going to say responsibility, didn’t you?), as Haruyuki soon finds out that “Brain Burst” also acts something like a real-time RPG game, where other Brain Bursters like himself challenge each other to fights to level up. Losers in such fights pay the price, so to speak, by sacrificing online points they’ve accumulated within the program. Once these points run out, Brain Burst is forcibly uninstalled from their systems, and they lose all their abilities and memories connected to it.
This was a pretty interesting pickup for me this season, mostly because of its pretty cool premise. It’s your typical shounen show, filled with fights, lessons about friendship, never giving up, and all that jazz. The Brain Burst avatars all look real cool, and the fight scenes were just great. The only thing I have a gripe with here is the main character himself. The guy is like half of everyone’s sizes. I don’t mind him being short and fat, but at least make him look a little more realistic compared to the rest of the world he lives in. And this being a shounen show, you’d probably expect going into it that the main character’s going to attract most, if not all, of the girls. It happens of course, but I’m finding it really hard to buy that chicks are going crazy over this dude.
Despite my minor complaint with that, I found this show to be pretty enjoyable overall. It’s your classic tale of insecure boy growing a pair as he goes from one (online) adventure to another, and you can’t really go wrong with that. If you’ve played a RPG before, you’ll really get into the fights in this show, which are all pretty much how you would probably imagine yourself if you were in your own character’s shoes. This is a great watch from this season, but part of me is hoping that most of it will take place in the virtual world, because I find it pretty hard to stomach seeing Rollie Pollie Ollie on my screen for most of the time. But eh, I’ll probably get used to him I guess. Eventually.
Recommended Fansub Group: UTW
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
ACCHI KOCCHI (FROM HERE TO THERE)
There’s not much to say about this show except that it’s really, REALLY fun to watch. Well, for me it is anyway. As usual, if you’re not really into a bunch of kids just basically messing around with each other for 24 minutes, chances are this will be a real chore for you to watch. Literally nothing is going on here plot-wise.
A lot of people I know have a problem with shows like this, but I myself have a special place for them in my heart because they’re kind of like a guilty pleasure for me. For these shows, you basically just sit down, turn your brain off, and point and laugh. There’s a drawback to this show though, and that’s that most of its humor is primarily hit-and-miss. The puns and wordplay jokes may turn a lot of people off, but there’s also a lot of situational and slapstick humor on the side that can really win a person over.
The main draw in this show for me is Mayoi (the orange haired girl with Chinese buns in the pic), because she’s as big a troll as you can ever get. Seriously, a huge part of the laughs I get from this show come from her just trolling her friends (and getting beat up for it). Another one is Tsumiki (the blue-haired girl), who’s basically Konata from Lucky Star without her tonsils and with Kagami’s tsundere tendencies all balled up into one. If Mayoi’s the one who brings the lulz, Tsumiki’s the one who brings the HNNGGH factor into play. Watching her attempt and fail to express her feeling to her crush (the guy with glasses) is almost worthy enough of getting its own show altogether.
All of the characters in the show have great synergy with each other, so their stuff hasn’t gotten old for me going into 8 episodes for this season. Anyway, if you’ve watched some random slice-of-life shows before, give this one a shot as well. I can’t really vouch for other people’s tastes, but this one really hit the spot for me.
Recommended Fansub Group: Tsumiki
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
FATE/ZERO (SEASON 2)
This show doesn’t need that much introduction. Fuyuki City… 4th Holy Grail War… Heroic servants from legends past fighting each other to the death… Mages killing each other… blah, blah, blah. I don’t think I need to tell any of you guys either just how awesome this show is.
After taking almost over a month-long break from its first season, Fate/Zero hits the ground running after resuming from its season-ending cliff hanger and never looks back. This show has seriously done nothing but impress me ever since it started.
To be quite honest, I didn’t really give two shits about the Fate series before this show. Fate Stay Night was kinda blah to me back when I watched it a few years ago because I felt that it was pretty convoluted and rushed as a whole. I kinda blame myself for not even bothering to play the visual novel to give the whole story a fair shot, but seeing the anime itself didn’t really give me much incentive to do that.
The writing and storytelling in Fate/Zero really changed that for me, though, because of how it fleshed out its characters properly. I only picked the show up because of the hype surrounding it and the lavish praise its original novels got, and boy was I ever glad I did. It turned me into a fan of the Fate series. After this show is done, I’m probably going to rewatch the Fate Stay Night anime again with this new found appreciation for it in tow.
Well, with that sad little attempt at sharing a little personal history out of the way, let’s get back to business. Fate/Zero’s second season offers more of the same from its first part. There are a lot of secrets revealed, fates sealed, back stories told, and butts hurt (Oh, so very, very hurt). There hasn’t been that much action as of Episode 20 compared to the first part of the series, but it hasn’t lacked a dull moment so far despite that because of its great attention to storytelling detail. When you manage to make a full two flashback episodes really interesting, you know you’re doing something right.
If you’ve already watched Fate Stay Night before (which I think most of already have), it’s no big secret I guess how this show is going to end. Despite that, it’s impossible to look away from this show because of how much of our interest it’s managed to make us invest in it. By the time it’s over, I’m pretty positive that this anime series can possibly become one for the ages.
Recommended Fansub Group: Anyone who’s doing it, since they’re all using the same script anyway
____________________________________________________________________________________________