Shiki ep. 1: More Supernatural/Horror For Our Summer Season

It’s summer lets bring out the dark, moody, and in general try and make things a little less bright. We’ve got our demons in Kuroshitsuji II. Zombies in High School of the Dead. Right now it appears general occult and ghosties in Occult Academy. Why not throw in another supernatural/horror show? Of course I don’t mind because I eat this stuff up. Review time!

Pictured above is Megumi, a high fashioned girl stuck in a small “hick” town. The only thing she wants is to escape and have a glamourous life in the big city. Oh and the newer boy in town Yuuki too. He’s from the city after all so that’s probably a plus in her book.

The episode starts out with a search party looking for Megumi in the woods and we see her body lying on the ground. After the credits we rewind and get to experience Megumi and her everyday life before that opening scene occured. She’s really rather cute and gets angry at even old lady gossip. I enjoyed watching her parade angrily around town. Who hasn’t at one point thought while growing up that their life would be better off if they could just get to the big city? There has been a recently built European styled mansion in her town and she can’t wait for it’s residents to move in. Also imagining that they’ll think she is so cute and want to be her pseudo parents. We’re also introduced to other characters either by Megumi’s interactions with them or from the strange deaths that occur nearby.

Basically the beginning of this episode is leading up to Megumi stomping off to the mansion after it’s new owners have moved in. Megumi gets the strange feeling she is being watched and this is where our opening scene links back in. After finding Megumi she won’t eat and is getting frailer and frailer. It seems that something was done to her by someone (seems to be the blonde mother) from the mansion and shortly thereafter she passes away.

I loved the feeling this show gives off. The characters all seemed lovable in their own ways and really I liked Megumi a lot. I’m hoping she’s not actually dead. Hey, it’s a supernatural show is it could happen. The “creepier” scenes are done very well and what I can only imagine are the mother and daughter from the mansion never get their eyes shown. You don’t see them or it’s just blackness and that had a nice creepy effect.

I can’t wait for the next episode. So far another one of my summer favorites along with Kuroshitsuji II and High School of the Dead.

Occult Academy: I Am Not A Number I’m A Free Man

I have to admit that I wasn’t feeling Occult Academy at first. Maya was annoying me and I just got a weird vibe from the show trying to be arty with the style but silly at the same time. I couldn’t tell if the silliness was intentional or not either. About half way through it kept my attention better but I still hold final judgment until I see later episodes. Lets get on with this review! (Also this is a long in depth review because I’m really trying to get across why I felt the way I did.)

So the episode starts out with a man being chased by some red eyed moth creature. He’s working with some sort of supernatural organization and needs a teleport out of there fast. Opps too bad for him he’s dies. Presumably because of said moth creature. However this group has one more agent, number 6. (If you get this entry title you’re my hero. Also no I haven’t watched the remake.) This part of the show I found suspenseful and interesting.

Things then take a 180 turn from there. Now we’re following our main character Maya. A girl who hates the occult and feverishly denies it’s existence. Her father was the Principle of Occult Academy and has recently passed. Maya just seems pissed off and disagreeable the whole time she’s on screen. Now not to say I don’t like hard to deal with characters. So far Saya is one of my favorite characters from High School of the Dead. Something about Maya just rubs me wrong. So she arrives late to her fathers funeral and the one comical scene to arise from this is when the vice principle greets her crying and has a long snot drip coming from her nose. She sniffs it up and wipes it away with her hand. The same hand that she then uses to grab Maya’s luggage handle much to Maya’s disgust. (While this was amusing it is still on of the factors that leads to the wtf feeling I get from this show. What kind of show are you trying to be? Comedy? Serious?)

Now we’re at the funeral and the whole time Maya  is sitting on stage with a sour face and is tapping her foot. That is until the Vice Principle plays the Principle’s last message to his students. Oh great it’s an ancient spell that summons and evil spirit. Even during the message the Principle is like opps guess I read the wrong spell oh well going to bed now. I’m bothered by this the whole time I’m watching. I just keep thinking why in the hell didn’t he go back and record over it then? Fore-mentioned evil spirit takes over the Principles corpse and begins to scare all the lil kiddies present at his funeral. Oh yeah and for some unknown reason he drips green slime all over like he’s Slimer from Ghostbusters or something. Maya proceeds to throw the possessed corpse (Of her father!) back into the coffin after hitting it with a folding chair wrestling style and claims that this whole fiasco is staged.

From here we’ll skip ahead. The Slimer Principle escapes the coffin and goes flying off leaving Maya to locate him. Now things start to get interesting. We meet some other characters like Maya’s childhood friend Ami, the school mechanic named Smiles (hell yeah!), and other members of our ragtag spirit hunting group. During all the above happening Maya is very knowledgeable about what is going on. Which at the time pissed me off because I was like how can a girl who hates the super natural know so much about it?!? From Ami though we discover that Maya once loved the supernatural. They used to do all sorts of supernatural games together.

Our thrown together group is hunting the spirit when one girl in the party gets possessed. It’s not at all clear why this happens beside the fact that maybe they wanted to bring back the “oh know her glasses fell off and she can’t see anything” joke. I foresee this joke happening throughout the series a lot though I pray it doesn’t. After this Maya finds her father sitting in a room decorated for Christmas. It’s nice and cozy and there’s a roaring fire. He tells her that yes it really was all staged and he knew she wouldn’t visit unless she thought he was dead. They have a touching moment and Maya cries on him. She then gets up and starts to walk away from him to leave the room. When the principle stands up we see that dun dun dun he has sharp pointy claw nails and isn’t really the Principle but the Slimer Principle! Of course we knew this all along but I love twisted stuff like that. Apparently Maya also knew all along and suddenly has an axe. The only way to kill the creature is to cut off the host bodies head. Bye Bye daddie’s head! All the “blood” is green because remember he’s Slimer but these scenes are still excellently made and have a great feel.

Maya now gets some redeeming back story. Once again we’re shown how much she used to love the supernatural and she goes to visit her dad in his study. While trying to get him to interact with her he smacks child her in the face sending Maya to the ground. He has become obsessed with the supernatural and no longer cares about his family. Maya and her mother leave him and he goes to build his Occult Academy never once trying to contact them. Discovering all of this I now forgive Maya’s earlier behavior toward her dead father.

After all of this and a little more Maya is on the school roof. We get clips from other characters like the Vice Principle who seems she may not actually be such a great person but one of our shows evil characters set out to do evil things. And when the clock tower’s bell rings a bright light shines down from the clouds and a naked boy wearing swimming goggles descends in front of a freaked out Maya. It’s number 6! He finally gets tied back in at the end of the episode and we’re done.

So yeah in the end I like the episode and no not just because of the naked man. Come on what do you think of me? I hope the show sheds it pointless silliness. I wouldn’t mind if it was actually funny but it’s just stupid. When the show took itself seriously I enjoyed it. I’ll continue to watch for now and hope it gets better.

Also random notes…

• The live-action kids in the ending have some scary eyebrows.
• The show takes place in the year 1999 and one of the first things we’re greeted to is a news report about will the world end. Y2k anyone?
• The opening makes a point (in my opinion) to linger on the year 2012 and then quickly count down to the year 1999. So maybe we’re dealing with a have to stop the end of the world and the only way to do it is destroy this school show.

Kuroshitsuji II: Watch it Now or Fail

This will probably be the hardest anime first episode to talk about this summer season because it was so incredibly awesome and I have to try and not give everything away. Before I get into it though I will say I’m a bad person and just finished Kuroshitsuji yesterday. I was on episode 16 forever and since the new season started I buckled down and finished it along with the OVA. I think it helped though because the show was still fresh for me so I felt this first episode even more.

Alois Goal: to be even more shotaesque than Ciel so you love him more. Shorter shorts. Knee highs. Bows on his boots.

For those who don’t know the first episode of season 2 starts out with a new kid, Alois Trancy, and his butler, Claude Faustus. Though many people seem to hate Alois and say he’s too bratty. I see a crazy as all hell kid whose past experiences affected him differently than the way Ciel was able to deal with his. (I was also probably not as bothered by the pair starting the episode because of what I’d already read about the episode. More on that soon.) One of the first scenes we see with Alois is him getting out of a bed naked with bruises. Oh yeah there’s an older man naked in the bed too. I think I’d be pretty crazy if something like that was happening to me on a regular basis. Of course from that one scene I can’t say for sure it is but that’s pretty good motivation for someone to make a contract with a demon right? Through out our time with Alois and Claude we see how horrible/crazy Alois is. He does the so called “bratty” things like unbuttoning the shit that Claude just buttoned for him and purposely spilling a glass of wine. Oh but the craziness is there in the extreme. After Claude dresses him he decides to have a high pitched crazy laugh fest while rolling around on his bed for no reason. Oh yeah and stabs his maid’s eye out with his fingers because she looked him in the eye. He also goes quite quickly from I’m a laughing little brat to I’m pissed off and crazy. One of the many examples is when he’s delighted about the changes Claude has made to the dinning room and suddenly his facial expression changes and he’s calling his upcoming dinner guests bastards. Claude on he other hand doesn’t seem to have that much personality like many people are saying but he also doesn’t get much screen time. He does preform awesome butler feats like any good demon butler should and they are very entertaining.

Now I’ll tell you why I can like these characters. Though I didn’t mind knowing you may not want to read further ahead if you want this to be a surprise. I’m not going to spoil the whole episode but I will talk about one of it’s most awesome factors…

Hopefully you’re not reading this if you don’t want to know. Plus I had to right something before I said…Sebastian shows up! That’s right our favorite demon butler shows up and has a mini butler showdown with Claude. Of course he manages to call Alois a brat and is overall his awesome self. That’s not even everything that makes this episode great.

If your a fan of Kuroshitsuji then this first episode should hook you right back in. I’m looking forward to episode 2!

Highschool of The Dead: Anime and Zombies Done Right

Well, I’m a little behind the times. Actually quite a bit behind consider yesterday I used to finish two anime series that ended in early ’09 yesterday. Today I decided to watch the first episode of Highschool of the Dead though. Now I’m sure everyone’s already heard great things about this series but here it goes again.

First off I thought the animation was great! And yes there is tons of “fan service” with bouncing boobs and panty shots. I might vary from other girls in the fact that that doesn’t bother me. For some reason I especially like it in this show because it’s kind of funny in contrast to all the violence happening with the fan-service.

Also as you’ve probably heard there are many cliched ideas and scenes in the first episode but they pull it off so well it doesn’t even matter.

So far I love the main male character. I can’t tell his personality exactly but he doesn’t seem to be your “hero” hero type. Not to say he’s a coward just a angry highschooler with some problems. From the end of the episode it doesn’t even seem like he minds that he’s kind of gotten the girl he’s liked since childhood because he threatened to leave her alone after smashing in her zombie boyfriends brains. What a dick but we love it. Otherwise people wouldn’t like Death Note or Code Geass. Maybe that’s mostly girls who like those characters though because my male friends are always going on about how they hate those characters. We don’t really get introduced to the rest of the main cast yet but it does appear they all show up in one small clip or another.

*Had to come back and add that there’s even a Muse-esque song used toward the end of the episode. Think 28 weeks later. Or any recent trailer lately for that matter. Even Day & Knight used a Muse song…*

The only thing I have left to say is go watch it if you haven’t and I hope it keeps being great! Also any guys out there want to tell me if they like asshole main male charters?

I feel like I should buy figures from this show now…

Nendoroid’s Need a Home Too!

Today I received Good Smile Company’s Japanese Life Set A and Japanese Life Set B.

I only own a few nendoroids. In fact I just sold Kaito and have Len up for sale now. That’ll only leave me with Sebastian. My hope when I purchased these was that the sets would also fit figmas because they’re the figure type I collect the most and I love to have accessories to pose them around. Sadly the rooms are too small for figmas. The accessories within the room could be used with figmas though. You’d just have to play in some other sort of household room.

The sets are nice though. Putting it together was a little confusing at first due to the plastic connection pieces and the fact that I tried to put the wall on upside down…from what I can tell though it looks like sets of all types can be hooked together. The instructions showed how to hook another room on top of the already built ones. I guess I’ll have to give it a try once I get the school rooms. The details are nice within the rooms and you can hang up the stickers to add a more lived in feel. Personally I like how well made the accessories like the pillows and food items where made. There is a dresser in set A. It is well made but it doesn’t open up.

If you collect nendoroids I suggest collecting the sets to have a place where your nendoroids can have fun and look cute.