Author, during a post about Netflix halting streaming of several anime titles, recalled that I had watched Kurau on there, and he's right. I had also watched Noein through the Netflix streaming service, and I ended picking up both series and their artboxes during one of Rightstuf's 25 DVDs for 100$ sales.

When I started an account at Netflix so that my girlfriend and I could watch Heroes1 via streaming to our TV2, I figured I could use Netflix to also watch older anime series that I had passed over when they were available on fansubs. As such, this has been a pretty successful venture, as there were quite a few series that I could watch (Such as Girl's High3 or Gankutsuou4) legally without having to worry about purchasing the entire series or even leave my house. Even more, I didn't mind that most of the anime available on Netflix stream were only available with English dub, which meant that I could play stuff in the background without having to pay much attention to it if I wanted.

I figured I'd eventually find the occasional gem this way, and though I'm not sure I'd consider it a diamond in the rough, Kurau: Phantom Memory did manage to keep me hooked and had me caring for the main protagonists throughout the run of the series. I had never heard of this 20045 series before, and I wasn't expecting much from Kurau when I added it to my Netflix Instant queue, which Netflix estimated my rating for it to be 2.6 of 5 stars, while the general populace rated it an average of 3.9. Turns out that the general populace is more accurate than what Netflix thought it would be for me. My own impressions might have been exaggerated due to my lower initial expectations, but I ended up quite enjoying this BONES series.

1. 1. BTW, the first season was definitely the best. We lost interest in the series in the middle of the third
2. 2. At first, via the XBox 360 we were borrowing from a friend. Now we use the Samsung BD-P2550 Blu-ray player to stream Netflix to the TV.
3. 3. Dropped this series after the first episode
4. 4. Watched to the end, but I am unsure how I feel about it. I the series was good, but not good enough to buy
5. 5. A year that was rather good for anime