Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is the second Fullmetal Alchemist series.  I almost didn’t watch it because I liked the first series so well.  I’m incredibly glad I did watch it, since I think I ended up liking this second series better.  From what I can tell, the first Fullmetal Alchemist series ran ahead of the manga, so rather than do filler arcs and wait on the manga, they diverged and created their own story line.  This second series on the other hand, follows the manga. So the first roughly 7-8 episodes of this series are the same as the first 2/3rds of the original series.  Then this series becomes its own.

The story here follows two young boys, Edward and Alphonse Elric.  These two are alchemists and can do magic.  Their father disappeared when they were young and their mother died, so they are on their own.  They find a teacher named Izumi to teach them what she knows of performing alchemy.  When they’ve learned as much as they want to from her, they go home and try to use alchemy to bring their mother back from the dead.  Human transmutation however is one of alchemy’s big taboos, mainly because alchemy works on the basis of equivalent exchange.  To create something you must use something of equal size or value. 

In the process of attempting to raise their mother, they open a GATE between the living and dead, and Ed loses a leg and arm to it.  Alphonse loses his whole body.  Ed manages to keep Al’s soul alive by binding it to some nearby armor, but Al’s body is lost.   So Al exists as a suit of armor and Ed has a metal (automail) arm and leg, which are provided for him and maintained by a neighbor girl named Winry and her grandmother.    Ed and Al begin a quest to find a fabled philosopher’s stone, with which it is rumored that great things can be done, including retrieving Al’s body and Ed’s arm and leg.

 

In order to gain access to military records regarding the philosopher’s stone, Ed tries out for and becomes a State Alchemist, known as the Fullmetal Alchemist.   This gives him access to records, but also makes him answerable to and order-able by the military.  There he falls under the supervision of a Colonel named Roy Mustang and his squad of soldiers.  Roy is also a powerful alchemist known as the Flame Alchemist, and he and his soldiers become Ed and Al’s allies along the way.  

Other allies Ed and Al gain as they go include people who start out as their foes for various reasons, often because they are also going after the philosopher’s stone.  Two of these are a prince and princess from the neighboring kingdom of Xing, Lin Yao and May Chang.  Another original foe and later ally is an Ishballan man named Scar.

As the story proceeds, Ed and Al begin running afoul of a group of artificially created humans called homunculi, who were created and are led by a shadowy figure known as Father.   As they go, Ed and Al discover that the main ingredients for creating philosopher’s stones are humans.  Once Ed and Al discover this, they stop trying for the philosopher’s stone, but are already deep into the battle with Father and the homunculi.  Father and his group are creating a massive transmutation circle out of the entire country of Amestris, so that the lives of the entire population can be used to create the ultimate philosopher’s stone and make Father the “perfect being”.  To do this, along with the entire population of Amestris, Father needs as human sacrifices strong alchemists who have attempted human transmutation and survived and opened the GATE.  These human sacrifices include Ed, Al, Izumi, Roy, and Ed and Al’s father Hohenheim.

In the end, the good guys prevail, although it’s a near thing with everyone working together at various points around Amestris, and Ed fighting Father in his new younger body.  In addition, Ed manages to retrieve Alphonse and his body from the other side, so Al is whole again.

This is the bare bones of a very complex story, and doesn’t do all the side stories and back stories justice.  And the music for it is pretty awesome also.   I really recommend you watch this one all the way through. 

Hanasaku Iroha

Hanasaku Iroha is a slice of life anime series.  It follows a 16 year old girl named Mastumae Ohana.  At the beginning of the series, Ohana’s mother has run off with her current boyfriend to escape his debt, abandoning Ohana.  Ohana has no choice but to leave her friends in Tokyo, including her best friend Kouichi who just confessed to her, and go live with her grandmother in the country. 

Ohana’s grandmother owns and runs a ryoukan, a traditional Japanese hot spring inn called the Kissuiso.  The Kissuiso dates back to the Taishou era and has been in the family for generations.  Ohana’s mother wanted nothing to do with the inn, so she left home early, leaving her brother to learn about running the inn from their mother.  Ohana’s grandmother is not welcoming when Ohana arrives, having disowned Ohana’s mother, but hires Ohana as a maid at the inn to allow her to earn her keep.  So Ohana embarks on a career working in a hot spring inn .

This is a coming of age anime series.  Ohana gets off to a rocky start with pretty much everyone at the inn.  Besides being a little bit irrepressible though, Ohana is very realistic and level headed due to having to take care of her extremely flighty mother all her life.  So Ohana decides to work at fixing herself and her relationships with the people around her, and to do her best to keep the inn running smoothly.  She bounces back from essentially everything thrown at her throughout the series.   

Besides Ohana’s mother, grandmother and uncle and his wife, the other characters in the series are the other employees of Kissuiso. These characters include the other maid, Nako, the head waitress, Tomoe, a jack of all trades handyman they call "Beanman", and the kitchen staff, who are the main cook, Renji, his assistant chef, Tooru, and a kitchen understudy, Minko.  Ohana, Minko and Nako room together.  The three of them also go to school with Yuina, the daughter and heiress of the Kissuiso’s rival inn, Fukuya.

The plot of this series is basically about everyday events as Ohana and the other characters interact.  Interspersed with everyone becoming comfortable with each other along the way, there are family squabbles and boyfriend rivalries and threats to the Kissuiso staying open.    Ohana is not the only character who grows as the series goes on – essentially all the characters do in some way or another.  

  

The characters in this series are easy to like and the story is interesting enough to keep me watching it.  I enjoyed pretty much everything about this series, the animation style, the music, the plot.  The only thing I was less than thrilled about was the ending.  In the end, the Kissuiso is closed and everyone scatters to various other lives.  It’s about relationships and moving on with your life.  They talk about re-opening the Kissuiso one day and everyone wants to help when that happens, but it’s a kind of “life goes on with us all separated” ending.  I like endings better where people stay together.   Other than that one thing though, I definitely recommend watching this series. 

MekakuCity Actors

I recently finished watching MekakuCity Actors.  I have to say, I liked this series, probably because I spent most of it wondering what was going on.  I’m fond of unique plot lines that have me guessing, and this one had that in spades.  Also, it’s just really bright, colorful and pretty much quirky all the way through.  So I liked it. 

The series starts out with two episodes that seem unrelated, and both of which leave you wondering what the hell is going on – and what is this series about?!  The third episode ties the first two together seamlessly and begins laying out the main characters and the plot line.  The main characters in this series are a group of seemingly unrelated kids who each have a special power related to their eyes.   They stick together in a group they call Mekakushi-dan, and watch out for each other.  When they find another kid with a power, they include him/her in their group. 

The members of Mekakushi-dan at the series start are: Kido, who is considered the commander and whose power is Concealing Eyes – the ability to hide herself and other people and things from view; Kano, whose power is Deceiving Eyes – the ability to cause people to see him and anything in contact with him as what he wishes them to see;  Seto, whose power is Stealing Eyes – the ability to read other people’s thoughts; and Marry, whose ability is Eye Contact – the ability to paralyze people when she makes eye contact.  Marry also has Combining Eyes – the ability to merge all the other abilities.  These initial Mekakushi-dan members are missing their original leader who died, Ayano.  Ayano’s ability is Favouring Eyes – which allows her to project the feelings of other and onto others.

 Other kids with powers who join Mekaushi-dan along the way include Momo, whose ability is Drawing Eyes – the ability to focus everyone’s attention on herself; Hibiya, whose ability is Eye Focusing – allowing him to see distant objects from an aerial view;  Shintaro, whose power is Retaining Eyes, allowing him to remember all the pasts, Honoha, whose power is Awakening Eyes – the ability to live in an ideal body instead of his frail one, but without his memory, and Takane whose power is  Opening Eyes – the power of immortality – and she spends the first half of the series as a computer program called Ene. 

Although the kids of Mekakushi-dan seem unrelated which each appearing to have a story, they’re actually all connected.   At the end of each episode, after the ED theme song, is a short vignette about a little monster who roams the earth searching for a place to live and for love and a family.  For most of the series these ending short stories seem totally unrelated to the story plot line, but in fact they are an integral part of the plot.  

The bottom-line plot of this series is actually pretty complex.  It goes like this:

The little monster turns out to be the heart of the plot.   She finds a man in her travels who accepts and loves her and they have a daughter named Shion together.   The nearby villagers don’t accept her and they capture and torture the man to find out where she is so they can kill her.  The little monster feels like the man and their daughter can never be happy while she exists, so she transports herself to a universe of unending torture so they can be free.  Over time Shion has a daughter of her own, named Marry.  Villagers still torment them both, and when Marry and Shion are killed and join the original little monster in her hell, the original little monster gives Marry her power, the power of combining all the powers, and Marry is released back into the everyday world.  She meets a boy who introduces her to the outside world and Marry begins to make friends. 

This Marry is the little girl Marry who is a members of Mekakushi-dan.  The powers that each member has are actually pieces of Marry’s power.  If a child dies on a certain date, they are transported to the other universe and return with a power which is a piece of Marry’s power.   Each of the members of Mekakushi-dan, with a piece of the total power, becomes a friend of Marry’s. 

Also involved with this group is Ayano’s father, who is a teacher.  He is killed with his wife in a landslide, but comes back with a piece of the power.  He is possessed by an evil being from the other universe, who is trying to collect all the various pieces of Marry’s power together (thus the various kids), in order to sacrifice them to grant Ayano’s father’s wish to bring his wife back to life.  If all the pieces of Marry’s power are together, that wish can be granted, but at the cost of the members lives.

Ayano figures this out and commits suicide, being transported to the other universe in order to prevent all the pieces of Marry from being collected.  The teacher/evil being then changes his plans and instead of granting Ayano’s father’s wish, he maneuvers Marry into a wish, that she can stay with her friends forever.   Each time Marry is threatened with losing her friends, she absorbs/combines their powers and resets the world again, allowing the evil being to keep living forever and keep collecting the kids with Marry’s powers.  Ayano, Shintaro and Honoha figure out these plans and thwart them.  In the end, Marry gets to stay with her friends and everyone survives except the evil being.

See?  Complex plot line.  It’s more than a little amazing that they get it all in in 12 episodes.  I suspect I’ll need to go watch the whole thing again to pick up all the nuances I missed the first time through.  It’s easier to pick up on things once you know basically what’s going on, but I do like a plot that keeps me guessing.    And the series is entertaining enough to be worth watching again.  

Karneval

Karneval is another short series, 13 episodes, that could easily have been a longer series.  It’s an adaption from a manga, and both the manga and the anime series are seriously gorgeous.  It’s worth watching just for how beautiful it is.  The basic setup of the series is fairly unique also, and the music is pretty good.  And although there appears to be plenty of back-story and plot involved, as you would expect from a manga adaption, some of it never gets explained.

Karneval’s two main characters are a young boy named Nai and a teenager named Gareki.  Nai is a child-like, naïve boy who is being held captive in a mansion at the start of the series.  Gareki is an untrusting, unfriendly teenager who has a way with mechanical things.  Gareki steals from the rich to make a living, and is in the process of robbing the mansion where Nai is being held when the series starts.  The two meet and although Gareki doesn’t like being around other people, he has a soft spot for Nai.  They end up traveling together.    

The mansion turns out to be owned by a Varuga.  Varuga are former humans who have been treated with animal/creature DNA and have become monsters as their human DNA is overwhelmed by the creature DNA.  They, and an organization named Kafka, are the bad guys in the series.  They are always causing some sort of trouble and needing to be fought.

Besides Nai and Gareki, the good guys are members of Circus.  Circus is a defense organization working for the government, that deals with cases involving the Varuga, and also comes in when the regular police/defense forces are inadequate.   They all wear a Circus ID bracelet that gives them powers or enhances their powers. The members of Circus also put on circus shows for the general public as an apology for scaring and/or hurting people as they perform their duties.  The members of Circus in the series include the personnel from two ships.  First Ship Captain is Tsukitachi, and his main fighters are Kiichi and Jiki.  Nai and Gareki are taken in by Second Ship.  Second Ship Captain is Hirato.  He and his fighters Yogi and Tsukumo watch out for Nai and Gareki throughout the series.

Nai doesn’t have many memories of his past except for being cared for by a man named Karoku.  He has been separated from Karoku and is searching for him, with only a bracelet, which happens to be a Circus ID bracelet, to help him find Karoku.  Gareki agrees to help him.  Along the way, you find out that Nai is a part human/part creature being himself.  The creature part is a little bunny-looking thing called a niji.  So Nai is a constructed person, but unlike the Varuga, his different DNA is co-existing.  That means he is actually a new species rather than either a human or a monster.   Nai fascinates a government doctor named Akari, who helps as well as studies him.

This is the bare bones of the plot and set-up.  The series has some short story arcs in it, but ends leaving a LOT unresolved.  Because of that, the ending is a little frustrating.  Perhaps they’ll make another season and continue it.    If you watch it though, enjoy the animation style and prepare to be left hanging.   

Knights of Sidonia

Sidonia no Kishi, or Knights of Sidonia, is a space opera.  It occurs in the far future and follows the inhabitants of a massive space ship, who are all that’s left of humanity after an alien race called the Gauna destroyed earth.   The ship is called Sidonia, and its inhabitants are essentially fleeing and fighting the Gauna as they go, with no real destination, just a drive to survive.   From the outside the ship looks like a long box embedded in a misshapen lump of clay. 

Sidonia is led by woman commander, Captain Kobayashi, and a Council of Immortals who exist in containers.  Kobayashi is also immortal.  They have led the ship through a long series of wars and were nearly destroyed during the last, Fourth Defensive War.  Having lost most of the population at that time, as well as most of the food supplies, humans took to cloning to restore the population.  The remaining fighters after that War became immortal, started cloning, and developed the ability to photosynthesize in people.  Thus the current humans need very little food, being able to live as long as they have sunlight to photosynthesize. 

At the time of the story, the inhabitants of the ship have been free of Gauna interference for most of the lives of the current generation and now they are coming under attack again and fighters who have only trained must learn to fight for real.   

The main character in the series is a boy names Tanikaze Nagate.  He has been hidden deep in Sidonia and raised by his “grandfather” who taught him to fight the Gauna from the time he could walk.  He comes to the surface and is found by the rest of Sidonia about the time they have to begin fighting the Gauna again, and Nagate is really good at it thanks to his training.  He is also the only human who cannot photosynthesize and must eat to survive. 

Later in the series it comes out that Nagate is the clone of Sidonia’s greatest fighter, who didn’t want to be cloned  and so stole Nagate as a baby and disappeared with him to raise him as a fighter.   Kobayashi and the other immortals know who Nagate is and send him out repeatedly to face the Gauna, and not just because he’s so good at it.  It turns out the Nagate himself is immortal, and he continues to get fatally wounded in battle and to survive it. 

The other main characters in the series are mostly the fighters Nagate’s age.  These include Shinatose Izana, Hoshijiro Shizuka, Midorikawa Yuhata and Kunato Norio.  Yuhata has an amazing skill for battle tactics and although she wishes to become a pilot, she is promoted to commander and develops and leads the battle strategies.   Izana and Shizuka are both pilots who have feelings for Nagate.  Izana is also a hermaphrodite and Nagate’s best friend, as well as having feelings for him and being jealous of Shizuka.  

Shizuka and Nagate like each other.  He rescues her in one battle and then in the next battle Shizuka is killed by the Gauna in a battle, and then Gauna in her shape appear as the Gauna use her DNA to create them.  One Gauna form of Shizuka is taken back to Sidonia by Nagate to be studied, and it seems to remember and respond to him.

Kunato is heir to one of Sidonia’s heavy industries and a pilot who thinks he’s better than he is.  He’s so jealous of Nagate’s abilities that he sabotages a mission he’s leading in order to destroy Nagate, and directly causes Shizuka’s death.  Nagate is the only one who knows this but doesn’t tell anyone, preferring to fight Gauna rather than his fellow pilots.  Kunato cracks when Shizuka’s Guana forms appear and spends the rest of the series hiding in his home.

This series is awesome.  It’s one of those series that I hate was so short – 11 episodes – but the good news is that there will probably be another season.  There is so much they can do with this series it would be a shame to end it here.

I liked pretty much everything about this series.  The animation style took me an episode to begin liking, but I like it a lot now.  The Opening theme song is awesome, and even though the plot is not unique, the characters and situations make it really watchable.  And best of all, although this is a mecha series, the mecha is almost beside the point.  They have fast-paced battles using the mecha, but other than that they spend almost no time focusing on it, which is one of the reasons this series is so watchable.  I’m delighted that they will have another season.  

Scryed

I’m struggling to decide what to post about today.  I’m watching some great new series, but almost never post about a series until it’s done.  That’s because the ending often makes or breaks the series, from my perspective.

Maybe I’ll go with Scryed, or s-Cry-ed if you prefer.  This story takes place in the future when some sort of geological disaster (the Great Uprising) has fractured an area of the earth near Tokyo.  That area is now known as the Lost Ground.  After the Great Uprising, people began being born with the ability to deconstruct and reshape material with only their mental power.  These people became known as “Alters”.  There are two groups of Alters in this series.  One is the Native Alters who go their own way using their power for their own purposes, and who all live in the Lost Ground.  The other group of Alters makes up the members of HOLY, a special task force of HOLD, the government police force.

The story centers around two Alters, a Native Alter named Kazuma and a HOLY Alter named Ryuhou.  These two meet early on, detest each other on sight and spend a good portion of the series trying to annihilate each other.

The story plot starts out with HOLY and HOLD capturing any native Alters they run across and sending them to the mainland for their own good and to get them out of the way.  Along the way it’s determined that the native alters who are being captured are being “refined” by the mainland and used as the puppets of the government.    During story background it’s also discovered that the Great Uprising was caused by a similar phenomenon in an alternate universe in which everyone is an Alter.  Both Kazuma and Ryuhou seem to be able to access this alternate universe when they use their powers fully.  In one of their many battles Kazuma and Ryuhou break through to the alternate universe and cause another geological uprising to occur.  The government becomes aware of the alternate universe and decides to use its power for themselves, using their ‘refined’ Alters. 

Specifically, one particularly nasty government guy and Alter himself, Mujo Kyuoji, decides he wants to be most powerful, supreme overlord of the universe and kidnaps Kazuma’s Alter friend Kanami to help him achieve that end.  Kazuma and Ryuhou work together to defeat him and free Kanami, all the time despising each other.

This series has a good-sized cast of characters.  Many of these are HOLY Alter users whose various skills are showcased, but then who are killed off along the way. Both Ryuhou’s closest friend among the HOLY Alters, Scheris, and Kazuma’s closest friend, Kimishima, are also killed.  Several other characters are pivotal to the plot besides Kazuma, Ryuhou and Kanami.  These include Mimori, a non-Alter childhood friend of Ryuhou’s, and Tachibana, a HOLY Alter who begins helping Mimori and the native Alters.  These five actually survive the series so that’s something.

I liked the basic story and the concept of this anime series, but I really hate the whole, testosterone-filled, I-must-be-the-strongest-and-defeat-you mentality.  Even after they worked together and even though they have friends in common, Ryuhou and Kazuma cannot stop trying to kill each other.  In fact the series ends with them fighting and Kanami and Mimori waiting for them to come back.  If not for that, and the fairly high death toll, I would have liked this series much better.         

Tokyo Ravens

Tokyo Ravens is an anime series that was adapted from a manga which was adapted from a light novel series.  The series is about magic users, in particular two cousins, Harutora and Natsume, from a powerful onmyouji clan, the Tsuchimikado.  Natsume is the next heir in line to be clan head and is a powerful magic user with the ability to call and use a magic dragon.  She’s socially awkward and doesn’t make friends easily and through a weird clan tradition, is required to present herself as a male (you find out why later).  Haratoru starts out the series basically magic-less.  He's been raised by a side branch of the family, but he's out-going and has lots of friends.   Harutora and Natsume have known each other since they were very young.

At the start of the series, Natsume comes home for a visit from her magic (onmyouji) school, and she and Harutora and his friends foil a plot to use forbidden magic.  One of Harutora’s friends dies in the process and so he asks Natsume to make him her shikigami (magic servant), and allow him to serve and protect her.  Natsume has been hoping for this ever since Harutora told her when they were children that he would protect her.  Since Natsume needs the protection and since becoming her servant will allow Harutora access to magic, Natsume makes him her shikigami.  Natsume, Harutora and friends return to the onmyouji school in Tokyo.

The politics in this series are basically like this:  The onmyouji school where the kids are training is a power unto itself and does it’s best to protect the various kids.  Trying to grab Natsume (and the reason she needs a protector) are the members of the Twin Horn Syndicate, a group who is waiting for the re-incarnation of Tsuchimikado Yakou (an extraordinarily powerful onmyouji from the past).  The Tsuchimikado heir is said to be that reincarnation, so they want Natsume.  The Onmyouji Agency, a large force intended to police magic use and fight evil magic users (including 12 magically powerful “divine generals”), is ostensibly helping to protect Natsume, but really want her for the same reasons the Twin Horn Syndicate does.  Powerful onmyouji’s from the Souma and Kurahashi families who are working with or within the Onmyouji Agency also want to get hold of Yakou’s reincarnation.  So Natsume and Harutora-tachi are up against nearly everyone who’s not within their circle of friends, as well as a few who are.

The story here is fairly predictable.  Harutoru levels up time and again when he needs to, and in the end it turns out that Harutora is the re-incarnated heir to the clan rather than Natsume.  His clan sealed his powers and hid him from the people trying to take control of his re-incarnated self, putting Natsume out there as a decoy and requiring her to pretend to be a male to make the deception hold.  Late in the series, in the process of Harutora discovering all this and in the battles ensuing between the various groups, Natsume is killed.  Harutora, who loves her and is remembering his past life as Yakou, then uses forbidden magic that was perfected by Yakou to bring her back to life.  He and his own magical servants then take off.    

So although the main characters essentially all survive the series, at the end they are spread out and recovering, with Harutora on the run due to use of forbidden magic and all the various people after him for his power. 


I’m not sure why I watched this one all the way through other than it was interesting enough to keep me watching.  The animation style is good and the music is decent.  Parts of it are pretty derivative though, so you won’t find anything unique here, plot-wise.  It’s watchable though, and some of the characters are quite interesting.  Plus there’s no major character death, so I give it marks for that.  All in all, pretty decent.