face in the windowpane's Anime
| My Collection | volume | |
| Clannad - Complete Collection | Hybrid DVD (I wanted to love this show. Really, I did. The animation is gorgeous, the comedy made me laugh as hard as anything else I've seen (anime or otherwise), and it's made by the same collborative team responsible for Kanon 2006, my favorite anime of all time. And yet... I don't care about the majority of the characters (and the ones I do care about get small amounts of screen time), I find the drama to be really weak and boring, and once the comedy started coming less often in the second half, I was struggling to make it through the rest of the set. It became a chore of waiting painfully for it to just end already. Everyone says that After Story is really great, so I'll see it eventually, but right now, thinking about Clannad makes me cringe.) | |
| Fullmetal Alchemist - The Complete First Season | Hybrid DVD (The first shonen anime that I've spent money on. Shonen usually doesn't appeal to me, but Fullmetal Alchemist packs in just the right amount of character development and drama for me to make an exception here. FMA is usually... well, not lighthearted, but not overly serious; yet, every so often, the show becomes intensely dark. These transitions are always unexpected, always feel natural, and always leave me feeling like I've been punched in the gut. The first half of this set suffered from some filler, but the show gets its act together by episode 13. I can't wait to get the second season set!) | |
| Ghost Hunt - The Complete Series [S.A.V.E. Edition] | Hybrid DVD (A solid supernatural horror series, as long as being scared is low on your list of priorities. This show is more creepy than scary, and even then, it isn't very creepy, save for the second-to-final arc. I loved the characters, but the case structure of the series made it so that there wasn't as much opportunity for character development as I would have liked, and that hurt the show enough for me to lower the rating from good to decent. Again, a solid show, and it does what it sets out to do. I think anybody interested in U.S. shows like Ghost Hunters and Ghost Adventures will end up loving this. Ultimately, though, I was a little disappointed.) | |
| Kanon - The Complete Collection [S.A.V.E.] | Hybrid DVD 1-4 (An incredible masterpiece. My favorite anime of all time. It's lighthearted yet depressing. Fluffy, yet deep. Funny, yet serious. To be honest, it's a bipolar show, but these opposing elements strengthen and balance each other quite well, making for amazing contrasts. I much prefer Kanon to the more popular and more loved Clannad, which everybody compares this to. The two shows are different enough that they shouldn't be directly compared, IMO.) | |
| Vision of Escaflowne - Complete Collection [Super Legends] | Hybrid DVD (As of this writing, the only mecha show (other than NGE) that I've seen. In theory, the blending of shonen and shojo elements is a brillant idea, and at times the show does pull it off. Somewhere about halfway through the series, however, things start falling apart for me. When the heroes reach a certain lost city, the story starts feeling rushed and unsatisfying, and the mix of shonen and shojo themes makes this show seem bloated, giving me a sense that it would've been better to just focus on one or the other. This problem probably came from the fact that the show was cut down by more than ten episodes, and the writers decided to tell the whole story in 26 episodes regardless. It's a shame.) | |
| When They Cry - Complete Set | Hybrid DVD 1-6 (The best psychological horror series I've seen, though at this time I haven't seen Paranoia Agent yet (somebody reprint PA, please). It's hard to describe this show without giving too much away, so I'll just say that if you like horror mixed with some cuteness, and don't mind a fair bit of repetition, you should definitely give this a shot. I hope the second season, Kai, gets a localization.) |