Spring 2010 Anime at a Glance

[A Black Falcon]

So I started watching El Cazador De La Bruja, from a few years ago. I've seen the first three episodes so far and will continue. It's one that I have had the entire series of sitting around since it came out pretty much, but just had never gotten around to watching... well, I finally started it, and it's good. It feels very much like Bee Train's other "girls with guns" series that preceded it, Noir (a fantastic show and a favorite of mine) and Madlax (only seen the first four episodes, seemed alright but nowhere remotely as good as Noir... or El Cazador, probably, I would now say...). Nadie is very much unlike Madlax or Mirelle, she's kind of silly and hasn't yet actually killed people (much?). This show definitely doesn't have the bleak tone of Noir, where the main characters were really pretty awful people (they were assassins... Nadie is a bounty hunter.). Not that Nadie is entirely different, she isn't; it IS basically the third series on the theme, after all. Oh, the other main character (all three series have two main characters, both female) is different, she has ... um, magic or psychic powers, or something like that. There were elements of that in the previous series, but not done quite like this.


... Overall is it better than Noir so far? No. For one thing, just like Madlax, it doesn't have Noir's awesome style of music. Noir and another Bee Train series, .hack//Sign (the first season) have very a similar, and really good, music style; it's too bad that the other .hack series, Madlax, and El Cazador don't use it. I do think El Cazador has a few bits of it in the soundtrack here and there, but it's not much.

Alternately they could have gone with a latin-inspired music theme, the series IS set in the Hispanic part of the Americas somewhere, but they don't do that either, unfortunately. Ah well... At least the location is reasonably well done. Anime has come a long way, compared to how ridiculously inaccurate many series used to be. :)


... As for stuff from this year, Ichiban Ushiro no Daimao's plot really doesn't make much sense, and the series has been going a little downhill I think. I'll probably mostly finish it just to see how in the world they end this thing... I'm guessing that the "Gods" are some kind of computer systems. Will the main character guy (I forget anyones' names) actually destroy them because of how he's convinced that they are causing more injustice than they stop? What happens then? And if he didn't give the red haired girl that item, why does he remember doing so... or was that someone else who looks like her or something? (Yes, lots of generic anime situations here...)

Oh yeah, and though I finished Shin Koihime Musou, I just can't get myself to watch the new, current season of the show now. Maybe sometime. It's just so stupid...

Also, I think Fairy Tail is getting into the arc where the series starts to get a bit less interesting, the Tower of Paradise arc... the first of several arcs where Natsu finally becomes the generic shonen hero, in that he saves the day in the end, etc, etc. The plot starts to get much more complex too. Ah well...