Valkyria Chronicles is delivering Alicia moe, as promised. K-On is cute if insubstantial, balanced by a great ED. Mazinger is very Mazinger-y (completely non-apologetic hot-blooded big robot action, with extra over-the-top on the side.) Guin Saga has the best karate chop of the season. Saki isn't so much mahjongg with yuri as it is yuri with mahjongg. Heck, even the first episode of Ristorante Paradiso was charming, in kind of a "this will become a shoujo trainwreck later, but not before spawning 100 million yaoi doujinshi" way.

It's a good sign when one of the shows I'm least enthusiastic about is Hayate, which I still like; most of the problem here is that the first two episodes have been more or less straight from the manga, and played the story very straight (for Hayate, that is). So it may be more of a change in my reaction to it, as opposed to a degradation in actual quality. Either we'll see what it's got up its sleeve, or we'll get a LOT of Hinagiku romantic comedy; either way we're probably good.

Only three "misses" this season so far. Queen's Blade fails for being what it's supposed to be, which is "almost porn". Okay, tittilation is often more entertaining than what my old boss termed "the furry piston loop". Nothing, absolutely nothing at all, wrong with some fan service. But QB is close enough to porn that I might as well just watch porn - in a way, actual porn is more respectable. And as entertainment outside of porn, the sheer stupidity gives me a whanging headache. I just can't put up with it.

But it's not the dumbest new show I've seen, because there is also Sengoku Basara. A friend described it as "Capcom trying to make a Japanese Romance of the Three Kingdoms story", and in the first three minutes you're confronted with five or six outlandish characters, most with names I vaguely recall, posing dramatically and spouting nonsense. Except for the one who's riding a horse with handlebars and huge chrome tailpipes, who is spouting his nonsense in English... (No, it's just a horse. Not a robot horse, not some kind of steampunk autocheval. He has -pimped his horse-.)

It goes downhill from there.

The only thing that could possibly save the show (and it might yet) is Norio Wakamoto playing Nobunaga Oda. Wakamoto playing the most famous "bad guy" of Japanese history, in a show where the normal characters are so far over the top that they are, in fact, down near the bottom? I don't know if I could miss that if I wanted to!

Most of the good new shows deserve a post of their own, so I'll get around to that sometime. Also, there's stuff still on the "take a look at it" list, notably Eden of the East.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 02:56 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 480 words, total size 3 kb.