Blue Seed TV 8/10

I may not know much but I know what I hate, and I didn't hate this. In fact I quite liked it. Considering how much I usually hate "demon" anime this one stands as one of the precious few good ones.

Dating back to the year of our Lord 1994 this 26 episode series harkens back to the days of yore where well produced, adult themed anime TV series were few and far between. This show is chock-a-block full of hand drawn and coloured goodness and maintains a near OAV level of quality throughout the series. There are some less then stellar backgrounds at times but the character designs are reasonably complex and have all the old-school goodness I'm so fond of. The music in the series is OK and I liked all the VAs, especially the main character Momiji who turns out to be one of Megumi Hayashibara's best sounding roles. She actually manages to sound girly and not as shrill as she is in other shows. The thing I HATED about this show was the fucking OP. I've NEVER liked this song and I never will. It's a horrible blight on an otherwise stellar outing.

The show is about a 15(?) year old girl named Momiji who is the Kushinada. The Kushinada has the ability to put plant demons known as Aragami into a long sleep with her blood if she is used as a human sacrifice. Of course she knows nothing of this until the Aragami start trying to catch her so they can kill her in a ceramic field that will nullify that power. During the first attack she meets Kusanagi, a half-human half-Aragami who has sworn to protect the Kushinada. Before this he had been protecting Momiji's twin sister Kaede, another Kushinada who has disappeared. Of course Momiji also didn't know she had a sister and ends up going to Tokyo to live with the anti-Aragami team T.A.C. to be protected.

It turns out that Kaede has teamed up with the king of the Aragami to turn Japan back into a primordial plant-filled land devoid of humans since humans, in general, suck. Momiji spends the first part of the series helping the T.A.C. defeat various Aragami that cause havoc in various places in Japan. We get a bunch of episodes introducing us to the T.A.C. team members and giving them some character development and they're all pretty entertaining. Momiji also falls for Kusanagi so we get some romance there that progresses as well.

The second half of the series is when Kaede and her band of bad guys start their master plan and each episode advances the story towards the final showdown with a Japan covered in giant plants, the Aragami betrayed by Kaede, and Tokyo about to be bombed into the stone age by the Americans' nuclear deterrent. The progression of the story here is very good, all of the episodes are interesting and each adds to the plot so none of them seems like filler.

I liked the writing in this show and the interesting mix of characters in the T.A.C. makes the slower episodes in the beginning of the series entertaining. This show is really great overall and if the OP wasn't so GOD AWFUL I'd give it a 10.