Nick's Anime Update - June 10, 2007

Posted June 10th, 2007 by Nick

I had turned 28 on Friday and received volumes 1 and 4 of the Monster manga as gifts. I went ahead and bought volumes 2 and 3 of Monster to fill in the missing volumes and volumes 2-4 of Berserk to continue it (getting both series and a Haibane Renmei t-shirt from Robert's Anime Corner Store). Monster was one of my favorite anime at the beginning of last year, perhaps the best suspense-thriller anime I've seen yet and has very well developed characters (Heck, how many anime series feature a 30-something year old neurosurgeon as the main character?). With Berserk, I largely just wanted to continue on with the events in the manga after what is portrayed in the anime.

Now, onto the "what I've watched since the past update" part. This time, I'll just update if I have anything on my mind on each series.

Finished Watching

Rocket Girls - Episodes 6-12

The fansubs for this series were being released at a one-per-day rate for the past week for some reason. Let's see if I remember what happened... Oh yeah, Yukari gets stranded in space due to a collision with some kind of debris, but Matsuri comes up to rescue her. They go down together in the same craft, but they manage have a safe splashdown in the most unlikely of places. They splash down in a swimming pool. Not just that, but the swimming pool in Yukari's old school.

At least, this gave the space organization a chance to pick up another female teenager astronaut. This time, she's an honor student named Akane. She's not even to the physical level of Yukari, but she has the knowledge and intelligence to make up for that.

And to my complete surprise, it seems the series ended after episode 12! That really caught me by surprise, as that ending felt far too uncertain to leave the series on. I wonder if there will be more?

Update: Ok, so that ending was incredibly rushed! Now that I know what actually happened there (and I probably should rewatch the ending again), well, I'm still a bit disappointed, though I did enjoy the series. Yeah, it was so incredibly implausible, but heck, that was the fun. The series never took itself seriously (Sending teenage girls up into space as astronauts? Absurd? Yes! And the series knew it too!), but I do like how the writers took pains to not (completely) trivialize the dangers of space travel.

Currently Watching

Denno Coil - Episode 3

Darker Than BLACK - Episode 8

Claymore - Episode 10

Not another cliffhanger, at least. I've also hand a thought about why there's not male "Claymores" in the world, and this series actually showed that I nailed the reason.