Bottle Fairies: You'd have to be on the same mental level as the bottle fairies to enjoy this show. For anyone above the age of three it just gets really boring. Fail.
Elf ban Kakyuusei: This series is just too simple for my tastes. A variety of girls all like this guy who's confident and good looking. They all struggle to get the courage up to confess to him, while he also struggles over which girl he should choose. Blah blah blah, underwear shots, lots of blushing, etc. Haganai also has these themes but due to the added layers of complexity it's a very compelling story. It isn't just people nerving up to confess to each other, they're also friends who think of things other than sex together as well. Everyone should just watch Haganai and ignore this primitive stuff. Fail.
E's Otherwise: Much like Black Cat, it's the story of a powerful boy who fights crime from the shadows. But this time apparently the corporation that hires him is the true bad guy and the story will eventually have him facing off against his former friends and allies. Well, whatever. I like stories about psychics, the combat seems fun, the art is good, and the protagonist is cool for getting a job just to provide his imouto with health care benefits. A strangely realistic setting, that. Pass.
Final Approach: Another story about a girl falling from the sky into a guy's lap, announcing to his astonishment that she's his fiancee. However, this time she isn't a retard, a newborn, an alien or an android, but a paratrooper from a military helicopter. It appears that Japan's national security has reached such a critical state due to the lack of voluntary childbirths that they've nationalized mating. (A solution I've proposed myself for this problem, and thoroughly support when I see it in other mediums suggested by other people.) He is a trial run for the program. It works like this -- The greatest supercomputer in Japan calculates, based on various unknown factors, who the best genetic pairings would be for the next generation of Japan. It then arranges those people to be married and have children. If you refuse to go along with the program you instead go to jail for failing your public duty to preserve the nation. It has matched the children young, age 17 for the boy and 15 for the girl, so that they can get to know each other before they actively marry and have kids, another good idea. It also means they don't fall in love with anyone else so their hearts can belong solely to the person they will live with for the rest of their life, clearing up the spiderwebs that have so sullied the mating experiences of the modern age. ((For most of human history, people only had one sexual/romantic partner in their entire lives, and it was meant to be this way, everything else is a perversion and a sin, which inevitably leads to misery and ruin.))
This boy is in luck, because the supercomputer has arranged for him an incredible girl on the genetic level. She's guaranteed to be the best stock the country has to offer, which is self evident just looking at her gorgeous face and body anyway. It's hard to say how he earned the right to share his genes with this perfect girl, but it appears he has a lot of latent potential of his own or the supercomputer wouldn't have chosen him as the exemplar of the pilot program.
So far this is basically my dream anime. A eugenics program combined with teenage arranged marriages with imprisonment for anyone who goes against it so that the next generation of Japanese is not only more numerous but far higher quality than ever before. This is the future I've always been hoping for. It completely eliminates the romantic love scene which is simply a swamp of immorality. It strengthens the genome instead of the current dysgenics which currently plagues the entire world. It preserves the Japanese nation, the greatest nation on Earth, and hopefully adds to its population such that it can go on to conquer the whole world (like the Japanese Empire originally hoped to do before losing World War II, it had sent millions of colonists to Korea, Manchuria, Taiwan, the Sakhalin islands, etc in an attempt to rapidly multiply its population while also taking all the resources necessary for this project by force from their weaker foes.)
The problem, however, is in the male lead. Inscrutably, he's somehow opposed to this public policy change, which is clearly the best political idea ever envisioned. He keeps objecting and objecting no matter how clearly they explain that this is for the best, not only for his own life but also for the country as a whole. He's so ardent that he shouldn't be forced into doing anything, when this beautiful girl is offering to sleep with him and even do all the household chores if he only goes along. What's his problem? How could he turn such a great girl down? Why doesn't he see that Japan really is in dire straits with only 1/2 the birth rate it needs just to stay alive? Doesn't he want to see the Rising Sun rise again over the Pacific and avenge their humiliating defeat at Iwo Jima????
If anything, the girl would normally be the one objecting here. ((However, even this isn't natural but simply a learned response. Girls never objected to arranged marriages in the past and happily went along with the prevalent system that ruled this world for thousands of years all across the world. Throughout all those thousands of years, birth rates never plummeted like they have today, nor was divorce ever a problem. IE, after thousands of years arranged marriages delivered nothing but succes to the human race, and after 100 years romantic marriage has delivered an existential crisis to the human race, so it's now beyond all debate which system was clearly superior between the two.)) I could see why she would doubt the veracity of a supercomputer when nothing outwardly says this guy is a 'good catch' compared to her beauty. But when a guy gets a once in a lifetime opportunity like this, a beautiful girl falling from the sky and announcing her eternal devotion to you, you'd have to be a fool to turn her down. I could see if he'd already promised his heart to someone else, but that isn't the case. They specifically came after him young to make sure that wouldn't happen. He has no excuse. He's being totally irrational here. Not 1 guy in a million would turn down an offer from a girl like this. And he's even willing to go to jail rather than marry her? What? So she's worse than prison to him? I hate this male lead. Talk about pearls before swine.
I presume the rest of the series will be him meeting all sorts of 'romantic' partners who will vie for him as opposed to the 'arranged' partner system, and ultimately prove that 'romantic' love is superior. As great a premise as this show has, I doubt it has the moral courage to actually endorse it. I believe that the whole thing has been set up so that it can be shot down and romantic love will win out in the end, somehow shattering the evil government program forever. But for now, by just bringing up this idea, this solution, and this topic to the wider public, the anime has done a real service to the whole world. Thank you, Final Approach. Thank you for finally speaking some common sense in this mad, broken world. Pass.
Fushigiboshi Futagohime: It's like Pretty Cure, but the age limit for watching it is 5, or maybe 3. The vocabulary is so simple it could be used to teach people the language from scratch. The art style is equally childish. The plot is childish. The characters are childish. The setting is even childish, a silly fairy tail land. I'm a fan of mahou shoujo stories, but there's a limit even for me. Fail.
Gakuen Alice: I love the Kansai dialect. It's just so mellifluous. It fits well with the gorgeous art to this story and our beautiful twin tailed heroine. If you asked me what the story was about, I couldn't tell you yet. Something about espers. It tries to be a comedy, but it isn't funny at all. I suppose it could be a romance story in the future. But nevermind that. Just listening and looking at this anime is sufficiently worthwhile. It appears the anime for this show aired in 2004-2005, while the manga just finished this July of 2013, so the anime isn't going to be of much help answering any plot related questions. However, nobody's translated the end of the manga yet into English, so there's really zero hope of following the plot at all. Like usual, the anime is acting solely as an advertisement for the much longer running manga. And like usual, the outside world is interested in anime more than manga, visual novels, or light novels. So like usual, we'll only get to see a tiny slice of this world before the door is shut in our face forever. The more you like the story and characters, the more it will hurt when the anime ends and you have no idea what ends up happening to them. Isn't this system grand? The day machine translation starts working is going to be a grand day for humanity. Pass.
Gakuen Utopia Manabi Straight: This is K-On meets avant garde. Cute girls at an all girls school do cute things together. The art and animation is also remarkably good, almost at the same level as the Kyoto Animation version. But the irrepressible urges of the creators led them to add in all sorts of random extra elements, like jetbikes, a dystopian future, claymation, and whatever else they feel like throwing in at random. I wasn't sure what to think of the 'creative license' taken by this story, but it was that very creativity and boldness that led them to have one of the characters (in truth, the voice actress of said character), sing a song a cappella near the end of the episode, which was startlingly beautiful. So long as the pretty aspects outweigh the weird aspects, I'm fine with continuing to watch this show. We'll just have to see which one wins out in the end. Pass.
Green Green: Ah, another lovely girl falls from the sky. Except this time she's warped in from the future (or is it the past? Both?), and the falling part is actually just the short distance from the interior of a bus to landing on him on the ground. Even so, the fall was enough to knock him unconscious, so I think it qualifies as a girl falling all the way from the sky, neh? Like Rikka from Da Capo III, this boy has actually earned the girl's love properly beforehand, it just happens to have been in a different life. She remembers, but he doesn't, so chaos ensues. I'm actually somewhat interested in this story of cursed lovers fated to always remain apart, but it's just not enough. When all the side characters are annoying, the main boy lead is only tolerable, and the show constantly puts ecchi nonsense front and center, you can feel your brain melting out of your nose. Fail.
Gungrave: This may have been the worst 'lost world' anime I've seen so far. I've never seen such a compilation of annoying tropes. Our hero's name is Brandon Heat, because he packs heat, get it? Get the pun? Cuz he wields guns, so he's Brandon Heat! Plus, he has a new name for his zombie form, how utterly awesome is this name, 'Beyond the Grave,' or, for friends, just 'Grave' will do. Oooooh. That's cool. Anything referencing death is like, super badass. Plus, this guy doesn't wield guns like just anyone, he wields two pistols at once, and he holds them sideways. And not just sideways, he fucking crosses his arms while shooting. For maximum accuracy, everyone knows wielding two pistols sideways cross-armed is the only way to go. The guy is a man of few words, because he's a zombie, I mean, a badass, and badasses never speak. Also, his face is veiled in shadow. How cool is that? Plus, he kills people for a living, except, because this is a dumb weaksauce show, none of them are actually people, they're all transformed monsters, so all the violence is okay and passes through the censorship rules. Isn't that badass? It also rips off Trigun but I guess since it's partially by the same guy as Trigun that's okay. If you want to watch an anime about guns, just watch Trigun. This, this is just a monstrosity that never should have been born. Fail.
Gunparade March: This story is so boring I could only watch it in minute by minute segments. The problem is just like Fafner. Inscrutable, non-sentient aliens have invaded the Earth and now our heroes must die fighting them in a hopeless rear guard action against overwhelming odds. They give me no reason to care about this fight. It's just a one sided hopeless slog, there's no conflicting visions between the two sides, there's no characterization of the cast (Remember, if your only choice is to fight or die, your characters have no choices and choices are the only characterization a character has.) Look at how great Madoka Magica was, because it revolved so much around the voluntary choices people made to become Magical Girls or not. No one forced them into it, no one had to do it, they made that sacrifice of their own free will, in return for something else, even more important to them. That's what drives characterization. Fighting for your life from imminent death by feral beasts tells me nothing. Nothing! Why don't bad artists learn from the good examples all around them and avoid at least the most elementary errors of bad writing anyone can foresee? Then I wouldn't have to watch such awful series for 23 minutes of my wasted life. Fail.
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