Nopy's Blog

I was planning on writing this post after I had finished watching all of the anime that I had started for the season, but due to me having a lack of time (and interest), I figure if I haven’t finished watching it by now, then it’s going to stay unwatched. That means that for this seasons wrap-up, I’ll only be covering the 3 series that I actually finished: Angel Beats, Arakawa Under the Bridge, and Mayoi Neko Overrun.

Angel Beats

I’ve heard a lot of people complain about Angel Beats from when the character designs were revealed up to the last episode of the anime. A lot of them were about how Angel Beats was just copying other anime, but you can say the same thing about almost any other series, so I just ignored those. When I started watching Angel Beats, I was expecting another drama-comedy with the theme centering around “rebirth”, just like its predecessors: Kanon, AIR, and Clannad.

My expectations were met, but I was a bit disappointed with the delivery. While previous Key works started out with comedy and slowly moved into drama, Angel Beats seemed to be mostly comedy with drama bits thrown in here and there. Otonashi’s reaction at the end of the last episode also made me go “wtf”. For the whole series he was a cool, level-headed guy similar to Yuuichi, Yukito, and Tomoya, then all of a sudden he just breaks down at the loss of his love. I know they wanted to show him as not being a perfect person and having some insecurities, but I thought they went too far with how they handled Otonashi.

Besides the delivery, and that last episode, I actually enjoyed most of Angel Beats. When the series focused on comedy, it made me laugh, and the action scenes were pretty cool. My favourite episode would have to be the one where Yui passes on. I loved the “this is how our lives would be if we were alive” scenes and I thought it was absolutely sweet how Hinata would visit Yui every day and eventually ask her to marry him.

One word to describe Angel Beats: pwahahaawwww (this is me laughing and crying at the same time).

Arakawa Under The Bridge

I was a bit sceptical when I first heard of Arakawa. All of the summaries that I read just said that it was about a guy that meets some people under a bridge and didn’t go further into the plot. What intrigued me though was reading about a character with a star for a face and another that’s always dressed as a kappa. I decided to give Arakawa a shot and I’m glad I did. For the most part, there isn’t really any continuous story, but the show is hilarious. Each of the characters in Arakawa is unique to the series and they all add their own flare to the anime.

Not only is the show funny, but it also has something that a lot of anime are lacking nowadays: character development. At first, Arakawa looks like one of those anime that you can watch in almost any order and still understand *cough* K-ON *cough*, but something happens in every episode that changes the characters’ view of the world, each other, or themselves, but only ever so slightly. The greatest change is with the main character, Kou, who first sees the residents of the Arakawa river bank as a bunch of crazy weirdos, but by the end of the first season, starts to view them as friends who he’s willing to fight for. When it comes to good anime, character development is a must, and Arakawa Under The Bridge delivers in that department.

One word to describe Arakawa Under The Bridge: wacky

Mayoi Neko Overrun!

OK, I admit that I started watching Mayoi Neko Overrun simply because I liked the character designs and artwork, but it wasn’t a total flop of an anime. I have started watching series like Akikan and Tayutama for the exact same reasons and ended up dropping those a few episodes in, but for some reason I continued to watch Mayoi Neko. I think the thing that kept me going was that I actually found the show to be funny. Two of the girls in the show, Fumino and Nozomi, are your typical harem members so I wasn’t too interested in them, but I loved Chise, a super-rich otaku girl with the same stature as Taiga. I thought that Chise, along with a male otaku character, made the show worth watching because of their crazy antics and stupid ideas. My favourite episode would have to be the one where they parodied a mecha anime and all of the girls were mech pilots. Besides the art and comedy though, Mayoi Neko doesn’t really have much else going for it. In contrast to Arakawa, there is very little character development, and any sign of a continuous plot doesn’t show up until near the very end of the series.

One word to describe Mayoi Neko Overrun: fanservice

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