Zankyou no Terror

Zankyou no Terror, or Resonance in Terror, is a great series.  It’s short, only 11 episodes, but for this particular series, that’s the perfect length.  The story follows two young men who are terrorists.  They call themselves Sphinx and begin the series setting bombs in highly visible places.  They always announce that a new bomb has been set and seem to enjoy taunting the police about their next crime.

Along with each bomb that Sphinx is setting in various places in Tokyo, Sphinx contacts the police before the bomb goes off with riddles to solve.  If the police can solve the riddles, they can locate the bombs and prevent them from going off.  Sphinx and their riddles come to the attention of a very smart, but semi-disgraced police detective called Shibazaki.

The two young men that make up Sphinx actually have no names except Nine and Twelve, and they are the main characters in this series.   At the first bombing, a young girl named Lisa is trapped in the building.  Since Twelve had previously run into Lisa and liked her, Sphinx give her the option of joining them as an accomplice or dying in the bombing, and Lisa chooses to live. 

At first Lisa is horrified to be an accomplice in the bombings, but later she runs away from her bad home situation and Nine and Twelve take her in.  She accepts them and becomes part of their group.  Even though Nine isn’t happy about involving another person in what they are doing, he and Twelve both end up rescuing Lisa at various points in the series.

It turns out that Nine and Twelve were part of an experiment, taken as orphans and subjected to all kinds of brain-washing and medical experiments intended to produce super-humans.  Twenty-six children were taken and experimented on, and 3 survived the experiments.  Nine and Twelve escaped, and a girl named Five was taken by the Americans when the experiments were discovered and shut down.   

Nine and Twelve are using their terrorist attacks to gain the attention of the police, with their final goal being to bring to light the experiments on the children, and also to bring to light that the Japanese government is secretly producing atomic bombs.   They even detonate an atomic bomb to make their point.  Of course, this final goal isn’t revealed until the final episode.  However, Nine and Twelve are very careful with their bombing attacks, so that on one dies and few people are hurt.  Property damage tends to be fairly extensive though.

Nine and Twelve’s plan works at first, and Shibazaki is beginning to figure them out, until Five, as an agent of the Americans, enters the picture to help capture them.  Five has their level of intelligence, but she doesn’t care if anyone dies, as long as she beats Nine, her eternal rival.   Nine and Twelve end up having to actually stop their own bombs and also stop Five’s planted bombing in order to protect lives.

The interactions between the characters are really good in this series.  The series is intense in places, often a race against time and a struggle to see who can out-plot who.  It’s paced perfectly though, and the music is totally outstanding, as expected of music by Yoko Kano.  It’s also a tragic series, because the three surviving children are living on sufferance.  The experiments done on Nine, Twelve and Five mean that they won’t live long, and they’ve only outlived their companion children because all three have a goal they intend to accomplish before they die.  So of course, they don’t survive the series – which I hate.   Lisa and Shibazaki survive and Shibazaki helps them achieve their final goal.  So despite the deaths of Nine, Twelve and Five, I enjoyed the series very much and recommend it.

Otogizoushi

Otogizoushi is a story in two parts.  The first half of the story takes place in Heian era Japan, and the second half in modern day Japan.  The main character in the story is a young girl named Minamoto no Hikaru.  Her family is involved in the doings of the Court, and the Court requests that her brother Raikou take on a mission for them. Because her brother is ill, Hikaru takes his place on a quest to save the Capital and the country. 

Hikaru, posing as Raikou, is joined on her quest by  a number of companions, including a loyal retainer named Tsuna, a warrior named Sadamitsu, an onmyouji named Urabe, and a young boy named Kintaro.  Their quests involve collecting five Magatamas, glowing stone/gems in the shape of curved teardrops.  These Magatama represent the five elements (metal, earth, water fire, wood), and used correctly they will save the Capital and the country, which is increasingly in the throes of drought and starvation.  The Magatamas are scattered in different places among different enemies, so recovering each one is a small quest in itself. 

During her missions, Hikaru’s brother Raikou dies.  Once again at home, she mourns him by playing her flute, and attracts the attention of a court dancer named Mansairaku.  During the story, Mansairaku comes to care for her and Hikaru falls in love with him.

When all the Magatamas are collected, Hikaru-tachi learn from Urabe that Abe no Seimei, the great court onmyouji, is planning to use the Magatama to destroy the Capital and country, not save it.  Urabe dies bringing them this information, and the companions set out to stop Abe no Seimei.  They discover they must first battle their way to where he is casting the spell.

Hikaru manages to get to him and confront him, only to find out that he is none other than Mainsairaku, the man she loves.  No matter what she says to him, he will not stop his spell, believing that the Capital must be destroyed.  Hikaru cannot bring herself to kill him, so when he completes the spell, she begins playing her flute and walks into the center of the spell.  Mansairaku embraces her, she drops the flute and it breaks the Magatama of fire, ending the spell.  Hikaru and Mansairaku are engulfed in the spell’s remains and disappear.  Only Sadamitsu and Kintaro survive the battles and destruction.

The second half of the story finds Hikaru as a high-school girl who happens to also be the landlady of an apartment building.  She wears the broken piece of the magatama on a necklace around her neck as a family heirloom, of course not knowing what it is. Her companions from the Heian era are reincarnated also as boarders and friends in this age.  Hikaru’s brother, Raikou, has been missing for a year and she begins to start looking for him, with her all friends adding their various talents to help her. 

Weird occurrences begin happening around her and a mysterious man, who is Mansairaku, shows up and alternately leads her into trouble and gets her out of trouble.  Hikaru doesn’t recognize him, but occasionally feels like she knows him.  Mansairaku apparently has lived all those years since the broken spell, waiting for Hikaru to be reborn so that they can together make right the balance that was messed up by the broken Magatama, and prevent the unbalanced forces from once again destroying Tokyo.  Hikaru and her friends, with Mansairaku’s help, manage to fix everything, Raikou comes home and Mansairaku finally is able to end his life and disappears.

So.  This was an interesting story and kept me watching, but I seriously didn’t like the ending – either ending.  Of course, being a “happily-ever-after” person, I wouldn’t like the fact that Hikaru and Mansairaku never do get to be together.    And I didn’t like the fact that he so badly betrayed her in the first half of the series after acting like she was important to him.  The premise was interesting though and I suppose I’m glad I watched it. 

Shion no Ou

Shion no Ou is another series built around a game, this time around the game of Shogi. The main character in the series is a junior-high girl named Shion, and she is a shogi player.

Shion has an odd history.  She comes from a family of shogi players, and when she was 5 years old, her parents were murdered.   Shion was found with no memories of what happened, unable to speak and holding a bloody shogi piece, the king.  (thus the title, Shion’s king).  Shion is adopted and raised by a neighbor family, the head of which is also a professional shogi player.  So Shion grows up communicating by writing on a tablet and learning to play shogi despite her history.  Her parent’s murder was never solved and both Shion and the police involved in the case are still trying to solve it.  Shion is pretty sure it was a shogi player who did it, which is part of the reason she plays.

 

The characters in the story include other shogi players and masters, Shion’s adopted family, and the police involved in the case.   The shogi players who are Shion’s rivals and sometimes friends are Saori and Ayumi.  Ayumi has a secret, in that he is actually a male shogi player, but he pretends to be a girl and plays in the female league to earn money to help care for his sickly mother.  The top shogi master is a player named Hani Makoto, referred to by most people as Meijin.  A number of plot elements revolve around Meijin, including a rivalry with his younger brother Satoru, who plays shogi, but not professionally. 

The plot line of this series surrounds the game of shogi.  Shion qualifies as a professional shogi player at the series start, and because she’s very good, she begins to be stalked and threatened.  The plot follows her progression as Shion and her friends strive to advance in their standings and play in tournaments.  It also follows Shion’s attempts to find her parents killers and as she gets closer, her slowly remembering what happened that night. 

A large part of the series involves an unrestricted shogi tournament being held, which allows males to play females and non-professionals to play professionals.  The plot advances through the games of this tournament.  Along the way the police are working to solve the murders too and building a case against the murderer with the help and interaction of the various shogi players. 

In the final game of the tournament, Shion plays Meijin.  He works to unnerve her and as the game progresses she remembers the night her parents were murdered.  It was Meijin himself who murdered them.  He apparently removes anyone who could threaten his position as Japan’s top shogi player.  When Shion remembers and beats him at shogi, she regains her lost voice and the police arrest Meijin for the murder of her parents.  

Although as a rule I’m not fond of series built around games, this one doesn’t go overboard into the game of shogi itself, so it’s very watchable.  In addition, the side story of the police unraveling the mystery surrounding Shion’s parent’s murder is interesting in itself and keeps you guessing throughout the series.  Also the series music is really gorgeous.  I recommend watching this series.     

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.