Patlabor: The New Files 9/10

First thing's first. Read this review for Patlabor TV. Done? Good.

Patlabor: The New Files is simply a continuation of the same with better quality animation and a couple of new songs. If you thought the Ingrams looked cool in the TV series well think again. They look REALLY cool now. Also this set of OAVs breaks the all time TV Series follow up OAV record as far as I'm concerned. 16 episodes beats Ranma 1/2, Urusei Yatsura and Orange Road. These shows were released from 1990-1992.

There are really 3 groups of stories. The first is a 4 episode arc that deals with the final showdown with the black Griffin that smashes through the new Zeros pretty quickly. I thought the creators really did a great job saving the 3rd Ingram's battle appearance until these last few episodes though the NA DVDs put these in sequentially but they were originally episodes 1, 3, 5, and 7.

The second group is the funnier, average case episodes very much in the vein of the TV series. A man in a bear suit holds hostage the studio where his children's show is being cancelled. The men of SV2 have to find a criminal in a bathhouse by getting a peek at his armpit. The maintenance squad goes to war with each other after the chief bans all their extra curricular activities. The team goes back into the tunnels and face off again with the giant white crocodile. Finally a dream episode where Noa and the team is a parody of Ultraman.

The last set are the best episodes, the kinda serious, kinda funny episodes that deal with the characters outside of their jobs that the series was kinda missing. Noa gets a toothache and we learn that maybe Asuma is more concerned for her welfare than average co-workers. Kanuka and Takeo (the other lady) go with the gang to a hot spring hotel and don't get along. Ota gets amnesia and thinks he killed all the guys in SV2. Noa, Asuma, Hiromi, and Shige find a kitten and it wreaks havoc. Finally Goto and Shinobu get stranded and have to spend a night together in a themed love hotel.

Of course the last two episodes I haven't mentioned yet get special treatment.

The final episode wraps the show up with a whimper rather than a bang though in this case it was the right choice. It's a day off the the SV2 and we see how each of member of the team spends their day. They've changed since we first met them but not necessarily in really obvious ways. At the end of the episode the peaceful ambience is shattered with a dispatch and we're left with only our imaginations as to what happens to the cast after we take our leave from their world for the last time. (The follow-up movies don't exist in my mind.)

Episode 14, Snow Rondo stands as my favourite anime episode of all time out of the thousands I have seen even 10 years after having seen it for the first time. Asuma gets an invitation to his 10th(?) high school reunion. Once there he meets the Madonna (not the singer) of his high school class that he had/has a thing for. He goes on a couple of dates with her but she mysteriously disappears each time only to reappear unexpectedly days(?) later. A red umbrella, a red balloon, a snowscape painting, and a mysterious snow along with a hauntingly beautiful score create a sombre tone to a story we never have quite explained to us. Some of what Asuma experiences is real, some a dream, we are only sure something odd is happening. This picture I suppose sums it up for me.


Best episode ever. I can assure you.

By the way, the last episode is titled "All Quiet at the Second Unit". Super duper highly recommended.

Tokyo Underground 5/10

What's with the Japanese and their fascination with underground cities? I liked Fraggle Rock as much as the next kid but c'mon. Tokyo Underground once again situates an adventure underground and I figure it's to save on background animation costs.

I like some technical parts of this show but not many. The character designs aren't among my favourites but they look OK and are pretty consistent throughout the 26 episode series from 2002. The backgrounds are pretty limited and not that impressive but then again caves are pretty boring. The music isn't anything special but I really like the end credits theme. The VAs are rather good and each character is quite distinct, I was surprised by this as the rest of the production seems a little on the non-distinct side.

The story here is pretty weak, a boy named Rumina meets a couple of girls running from someone who intends them harm. After being killed by the bad guys and resurrected by Ruri the Priestess of Life, Rumina gains wind powers. Whoo-hoo! The girls have escaped from The Underground, an old scientific research facility/ghetto for poor people. Ruri is recaptured after falling for Rumina and he, his geeky friend, and Ruri's bodyguard rush down into The Underground to save her. What follows is a rather uninspired trek through a series of dark and boring tunnels and towns and converting earlier enemies to the good team.

It's not entirely bad, between episodes 16 and 22 the story starts to get better and it raised my expectations for the ending. So much for those. The story ends with Ruri being rescued while all 12 or so main characters are facing certain doom and POOF! The 4 original members are in a field on the surface and WE NEVER FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS TO THE REST OF THE CAST!!!! WTF!?

For a retarded ending you get dropped to 5/10 from 7/10 before the last 4 episodes. Not recommended if you want the ending to MAKE SENSE!!!

Patlabor TV 9/10

“In the labor criminal justice system there are two separate yet equally important groups: the special vehicles section, who combat labor crime, and the mechanics who maintain the patrol labours . These are their stories.” DONG DONG!

In the near future giant robots named labors will be created to replace construction and farming equipment. As often as someone goes nuts with a grain thresher, people will go nuts with these labors and the police will need a labor team to stop them. By the way, support your local police anti-thresher team, you don't want that shit in your neighbourhood.

Patlabor is an older show from the early '90s (1990) that really had a large production budget behind it and it shows. The character designs are all quite distinctive while not having to make everyone have crazy coloured and styled hair. The animation also maintains a really high level of quality throughout the 45 episodes with only a couple of exceptions. The backgrounds and music are pretty good and the first end theme is one of the best ever. Where this show shines is with the Japanese VAs without whom the show would fail miserably (as evidenced by the English dub), Ota and Captain Goto are particularly effective as the psycho cop and catatonic Section Captain respectively. I also must mention here that the Patlabor Ingram 3rd MG AV-98 is the coolest mech EVER! (a little above the Veritech from Robotech)

This show revolves around the daily working lives of the Special Vehicles Division 2. They're based in the middle of nowhere, they have a bad reputation of destructiveness on missions, and their team is made up of somewhat odd characters. Of course they also have the most advanced Patlabor in the world at their disposal so it balances things out. Kinda.

Noa the Ingram crazy newbie is the central character and the series typically focuses a little more on her situation than that of the others. She's not good at much but she's an excellent labor pilot and tends to be the one to save the day while insane officer Ota empties rounds into nearby buildings at the drop of a hat. The other members of the cast are in the command cars that direct the labors, drive the carriers that carry the labors into action, and in other roles such the maintenance team and the captains of Divisions 1 & 2.

Each of the characters gets some backstory and most get screen time in each episode but never to the detriment of the plot. The show is really about the team effort in fighting crime and once you get to know them after about 10 episodes their quirks and personalities really make otherwise boring missions really, really interesting and entertaining to watch.

This show has drama, character growth, some great comedy, and an overall plot that stretches throughout the series yet there are a large number of great filler shows to add a real sense of time passing through the series. There isn't much romance here and we don't see much of the cast outside of work but it's not that kind of show.

This show's true finale is in the OAV series that follows it but I can only think of a couple episodes of the 45 that weren't better than the best episode of most other series. Highly, highly recommended.

Grenadier 6/10

Dictionary.com defines "grenadier" as:

1. A member of the British Grenadier Guards, the first regiment of the royal household infantry.

2. A soldier who is a member of a special corps or regiment.

3. A soldier equipped with grenades.

If you equate "grenades" with "large breasts" that about sums up Grenadier. Of course grenadier is also French for pomegranate tree. Read into THAT what you will.

This show is relatively new so we get some very high quality animation and backgrounds throughout the 12 episodes. The music is pretty good at times but I didn't consider the opening or ending themes anything special. There's some cool western guitar music during the fight scenes that's worth listening for. I liked all of the character designs and appreciated the large breasts many of the female characters are endowed with. Yay boobies! Of course there's pretty limited fan-service here, it's more of the tease kind but whatever. The Japanese VAs were all good as always. This show aired in 2004-05.

The story revolves around Rushuna , the busty blonde heroine of the story and her new samurai friend Yajirou. She's got impressive "guns", she's got a cowboy hat, she's got a skimpy outfit, and she's armed with a gun she knows how to use. At first they just sort of meander around fighting the baddie of the week, of course the deal with Rushuna is that she's non-violent and doesn't kill her enemies but usually just breaks their weapons with her gunfire. At about episode 6 Rushuna gets a price put on her head by her queen, Tenchi. Yajirou has a previous beef with the queen, which is why he's been hanging around Rushuna, so they head out with a little girl they pick up and go to the capital to confront her. On the way they continue to fight the baddie of the week, arrive, find out there's a big conspiracy, then save the day. Pretty white bread eh?

Did I mention she Rushuna strips down and has a bath in EVERY episode? Did I mention she reloads her gun by flipping fresh rounds out from between her breasts? Did I mention she ends up wearing various skimpy outfits throughout the series? Did I mention she gets her clothes nearly ripped off in every fight? Well she does.

In this show the characters are great but the story isn't. Rushuna's a pacifist but she has the easiest time of it I've ever seen. She's also amazingly one-dimensional. We get some character development from Yajirou and the little girl but we never really get to know Rushuna and it leaves her as somewhat of a shallow ditz. I'm comparing the pacifism theme of this show to Trigun and I'm not impressed at all with Grenadier's inept handling of a plot device that Trigun handled so amazingly.

This show was OK as mindless eye candy but not much else. The jiggle and fan-service isn't even up to snuff as far as I'm concerned. I guess I'm kinda, sorta recommending this series but I feel Grenadier is a shadow of what it could be.

(Did I mention the final dual is between 2 big breasted gun-toting girls who flip bullets out from between their breasts? It's a sight to behold.)

NAME CHANGE!!!

I changed my blog's name so the words "anime" and "review" would be more promiment when doing internet searches.

Type "advent children rant" into Google. I'm so proud!

Jubei-Chan 2 (J2) 9/10

Back in the early days of the current anime boom a show was released about a young girl who was forced to transform into the reincarnation of a 300 year old samurai. It was goofy, it was silly, it was funny, it was sad at the end. Who knew they'd make a sequel?

These 13 episodes look great as most 2004 shows should. It's got great, colourful backgrounds and consistent animation throughout. The creators kept the same general character designs from the previous series which is good since they were really good and changing them would have amounted to blasphemy. (I'M LOOKING IN YOUR DIRECTION PATLABOR 2!) The music here borrows much from the previous series and maintains the continuity as well and I particularity liked the battle theme and the end credits theme. The VAs all come back from the previous series as far as I know and they're all great.

The story picks up a year(?) after the events of the previous series with Jubei living a normal life after discarding the lovely-eyepatch that turns her into Yagyu Jubei the Second, samurai kickbutt mistress. (For reference, her transformation turns Jubei into an adult version of herself dressed as a kunoichi with kick ass samurai skills.)

A new threat arrives on the scene as a group who split from the Yagyu clan and went to Siberia have returned for revenge. Also a little blonde girl Jubei's age, Freesia, shows up and starts living in her house and messing with Jubei's relationship with her father.

It turns out Freesia is the daughter of Yagyu Jubei and has come to claim the lovely-eyepatch for herself and defeat Jubei-chan. She has a blue spade eyepatch vs. Jubei's pink heart and transforms into an older version of herself as well to do battle.

The show deals mainly with Jubei's continued reluctance to fight, she wants a normal life and tries again and again to discard the eye-patch and abandon her super-powered alter-ego but keeps being put into situations where she can't help it.

I always felt sorry for Jubei, her mom died while her dad was away at work and it really messed her up. When she meets Freesia she seems to really open up for the first time only to be betrayed by her new defacto sister. This show has some really sad moments between Jubei and her dad, the lady ninja that looks like her deceased mom, and Freesia. Where the first series was more goofy this one is quite serious and it shows you more of Jubei's personality and delves a little deeper into her unhappiness. If you've seen the first series I highly recommend this second one. If you haven't I'd recommend watching both of them.

Dragon Quest VIII (GAME REVIEW) 9/10

Why so few reviews lately? I was playing an RPG of course, the first to hold my attention until the end since Tales of Symphonia. I'm at 130 hours and have finished the game with both endings so here's a review since this game shares many elements of an anime series.

On the technical side this game looks really good. The overworld is large and colorful and well detailed. The land has topography so it's not just a flat plain with mountains and rivers blocking your progress. There are plenty of trees and plants so when you're supposed to be in a forest it LOOKS like a forest. Throughout the game you get a taste of various climates as well, from desert to winter landscape. The world has time that passes and throughout the game day turns to night and vice-versa, this looks OK but there are problems if you watch the sun and moon with them fading away in the sky during a transition rather than disappearing beyond the horizon, the starfield used in the night sky is also kinda ugly and there's no real weather to speak of. One other small complaint is that the mountains are not to scale. While they look great in the distance they're quite short close up, oh well.

The towns and castles in the game look OK but the towns only contain the minimum required buildings, INN, Weapons Shop, Armor Shop, Item Shop, Bar, Church, and a couple houses. I understand the system limitation but I really prefer when the town LOOKS like it can support a pretty good population.

The dungeons are pretty forgettable overall with the majority of them being of the boring brown cave variety. I wish there was a little MORE variety there, chanhe the colour of the walls or something.

The monsters look great with alot of different animations. The problem here is the massive number of monster designs reused again and again with nothing but a pallette change and a name switch. The monsters all have horrible puns for names and are pretty much all terrible. I give some love to the classic monsters from the original Dragon Warrior (I don't know if ALL the DQ games have these monsters but I suspect so.)

The main characters and NPCs were designed by the dude who did Dragonball and Chrono Trigger so they look pretty good mostly but there are only about 25 NPC deisgns and they're reused again and again WITHOUT A PALETTE CHANGE! This may have been cute on the NES or Gameboy but c'mon. Only the bunny girls are different colours and they're all still blonde. The main characters are quite good with the weapon and shield equipped visible on them and you can switch your party order to have different main characters to control in the overworld (though keep in mind the leader takes more damage in fights). Like most newer fully 3D rpgs there are some alternate costumes for the main characters but are limited to one for the main character after the end of the game and several provocative outfits for the busty jiggling female Jessica. Since I don't usually care for anything other than slinky outfits for my female character(s) this is OK as her outfits are actually benificial in battle and are a follows; Bunny Girl, Dancer, Bikini, Black Lingere, Sailor Moon. Yay!

The battles are remicent of the original Dragon Warrior as well. The turn based wait system harkens back to yesteryear when games couldn't handle multiple timers calculating everyone's attack frequency separately. While I like this, fans of the newer active battle systems in games such as the Final Fantasy series will go crazy with the whole, pick your moves and wait to see if the enemy kills you by the end of the turn. You also have precious few methods of increasing the number of actions you get in a turn while the enemies can get up to 3! The fights are in 3D with the same character models as the overworld and when selecting your turn actions the view is from the team's perspective facing the monsters as in the old Dragon Warrior. The fights have the standard attacks, special attacks and magic spells but the menus drove me nuts. There's no memory option that saves your last selection in battle so if you want to use Falcon Slash again and again you've got to move the cursor to "abilities" each turn then select Falson Slash. The "abilities" and "spells" menus save the last position but not the "items" menu which you use CONSTANTLY in the later stages of the game.

The story for Dragon Quest VIII is pretty standard. The hero is a knight at a castle and one day a magic staff kept there is stolen and the castle is placed under a curse. The hero and his king (turned into a monster) and the princess (turned into a horse) head off to find the culprit and lift the curse. The hero has a buddy named Yangus and along the way meets the redheaded, large breasted Jessica and the womanizing, gambling Templar knight Angelo. The story is quite linear with the party being hearded throughout the world a town at a time as the monsters get harder to kill. There's a little backtracking at times but the ability to warp between places you've been before reduces the annoyance factor. As the game progresses the mystery behind the curse is revealed and the world must be saved from the evil god dude. There are few boss fights in this game but HUNDREDS of overworld fights. Have fun with those.

I wish there had been more variety in the monsters, NPC's and dungeon designs and I would have liked more boss fights but I otherwise found this game really fun. I can see why the Japanese LOVE Dragon Quest so much since it doesn't add a fruity new battle system with every game and keeps the story simple and doesn't have crap like...well like the crap Final Fantasy seems to keep coming up with. Recommended

Stellvia 9/10

I wonder at times why most space shows are populated with high school students. What was the last show that featured a predominantly adult cast? Macross? I suppose Galaxy Railways but it's still the exception rather than the rule.

Stellvia consists of 26 episodes from 2003 with the whole CG spaceships, scanned and computer coloured animation and high quality production values. Other than the OBVIOUS Star Trek Generations ripoff near the end of the series it all looks great. I really like the character designs in this show which is always a plus. The music was OK and I found the opening theme particularly catchy. The voice actors were good, as usual, and I really liked the main character Shima's VA.

This show is ALOT like Battle Athletes Victory in my opinion. (This is a good thing.) Shima Katase is a 15 year old who's just entered a school in the orbiting space station Stellvia where young people are trained in various technical fields in order to contribute to The Great Mission. This mission is to support a system of planetary barriers generated by the various space stations throughout the solar system in order to protect them from an incoming blast from a distant supernova. Shima starts out shy and nervous and has alot of problems in school but she makes a bunch of friends and begins to show some genius. The shockwave arrives halfway through the series, after that some aliens show up and alert humanity to a new threat. There's a Star Trek Generations style space pink thing a comin' and once again everybody's got to work together to save the day.

This show has some really great characters. The girls consist of: Shima, the spazzy girl, the quiet angry girl and the smart regal girl. The guys consist of the loud guy, the vain guy, the quiet guy, and the ... other guy. Since they're so different they get into some pretty funny situations and allow the show to be really hilarious at times, while being serious at other times. There are also tons of supporting characters and some of them even have sub-plots that add some nice depth to the series.

I reckon Shima is a little too whiny considering she's so great at everything later in the series but she doesn't cry all the time like the main character in Battle Athletes Victory so I can overlook alot of that.

This show has an overall nice feel to it. The universe is in danger but there's not much doubt as to the outcome, the story is more about Shima as she grows up and her relationships with her friends. Highly recommended, especially if you likes Battle Athletes Victory.