This is a small update covering four new series. There's still a lot of series that haven't premiered yet, or haven't been translated yet, that will have to be addressed in an additional post. This includes Haitai Nana, Backstage Idol, Aikatsu, Seitokai no Ichizon 2nd, Psycho Pass and Robotics;Notes. But who wants to wait that long when there's anime to talk about?
Teekyuu: Following the now standard model of extremely short, maybe five minute long anime episodes for 4-koma adaptions, Teekyuu doesn't seem any worse than any other. The problem is the entire model is terrible and nothing good can ever come from it. Morita-san was the best of these and even it was just mediocre. I don't know why this new format keeps on being used when it's so obviously bad.
Magi: Magi has a great start to what seems to be an extremely long journey. All the necessary elements have already been put in place -- outlaws and escaped slaves with nowhere else to go take on a series of labyrinths which no one has ever survived in order to make their fortunes. Everything makes sense. If these people could have lived normal lives, they definitely wouldn't have risked near certain death. But since they can't, they're going to be adventurers instead. Since they started at the very bottom of their lives, (one boy is stuck alone in a cave his whole life, another is poor and despised, and a third is a slave about to be shipped to work in deadly, debilitating underground mines), there's nowhere to go but up from here. I don't know. This is just such an optimistic, heartwarming tale. I really want to root for these guys. I want to see their adventures together. This series is totally working.
Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo: This story feels like an information dump fed directly into your brain. You are expected to remember an extremely complicated setting by just being told all about it in the first half of the episode. Everyone acts over the top because apparently that's funny, and everyone's an amazing genius because it's even funnier when smart people act stupidly. Lastly, the heroine appears naked to the delight of our male lead in the very first episode (with conveniently long hair obscuring all the good parts). I think this is a little too packaged and formulaic than it should be. But I will say a few things in favor of the series too -- the statement that this girl is pure white in terms of her soul isn't just evidenced by her inability to dress herself or wake up in time for school, or her lack of shame when being around a boy naked, but also by her purely happy manga which ends in just a few pages of boy meets girl, they fall in love at first sight, the boy confesses, the girl accepts, and they live happily ever after, the end. Only a pure soul could write such a story, or think that it was in any way interesting or important, or that it could ever exist outside of fantasy. That was really cleverly done.
In Magic the Gathering, the best way to support the flavor of a guild or faction isn't by putting long-winded quotes in italics. It's by having a mechanic that makes you play the card in a way that fits the personality/values of the guild. So for instance, a golgari mechanic will scavenge stuff from the graveyard to make the other creatures on your side, which still live, stronger. An Azorius mechanic, however, will arrest enemies and keep them mired in bureaucracy for a few turns before they can return to the fight. This is exactly what Sakurasou did when they showed off our heroine's manga. Not only are we told she is pure white in soul, it's shown mechanically that she really is, that this is how she thinks and looks at the world, even when no one else is around to observe it.
Also, the characters seem like decent human beings, which is always a plus. It's a huge improvement over K or Code:Breaker right there. Plus, the heroine is pretty -- as is the Osaka-jin voice actress childhood friend. ((Am I the only one who loves Osaka-jin accents or is this unanimous?)) I don't know how good this story will be in the end, but I'll continue watching for now.
Girls Und Panzer: Epic. Absolutely Epic! This first episode beat the socks off of Little Busters. I am absolutely certain this series will be ranked in my top 120 anime series by the end. Not only was this episode one of the best introductions to a world, and its characters, I've ever seen, stating hilarious matter-of-facts that are completely untrue of modern day Earth, but the fansubbers had a lot of fun with it and translated about one third of the lines into German instead of English. Since I know three languages, German, Japanese, and English, it was the best subtitling job ever. And since the title of the series itself was deliberately done in German by the Japanese, the subbers have every right to germanify everything else from there. I am so excited about their Panzerfahren (tank driving) club. This is the best idea for a show ever! I mean, really? What creative brilliance came up with this idea? I'd like to shake his hand.
It isn't just the awesome setting and plot, though. Many series find it very difficult, without giving characters over the top, impossible eccentricities, to give their characters any sense of identity. Some shows just give up and give every boy different hair colors, or every girl a different hair style, and leave it at that -- everything else about them is the exact same. But this series didn't make any of the characters stupid or silly, but still gave them absolutely rich, absolutely identifiable 'selves.' And it did it almost instantly, in the middle of introducing an entirely new world. It's just fantastic. Compare it to Shin Sekai Yori, where all the characters are impossible to distinguish from each other, which also gave the exact same excuse "But I'm introducing the setting! I can't do two things at once!" Well look at Girls Und Panzer and weep. The setting and the characters were both introduced and both rocked in one single episode.
This was the hidden gem of the fall season. I was so sure one, at least, would appear. And now it has arrived. If you're going to watch any series other than Little Busters this fall, make it Girls Und Panzer.
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