Legend of the Galactic Heroes: My Conquest is the Sea of Stars: Epic Right From the Start

Legend of the Galactic Heroes... Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu... Heldensagen vom Kosmosinsel (even though that translates to "Heroes of the Cosmos")... No matter how you say it, this is one of those anime that you've heard of, period. Whether it's because of its record as the longest OVA ever produced or simply the occasional talk of how epic & awesome it is, LOGH is one of those animes that is nearly-100% agreed to be a "masterpiece". But when you consider that the main 1988-1997 OVA series itself is 110 episodes long, not to mention that there are two side story OVA series (1998's A Hundred Billion Stars, A Hundred Billion Lights & 1999's Spiral Labyrinth) that add another 52 episodes, it's natural that many anime fans might be a good bit hesitant to get into a 162-episode epic like this. If only there was a production that was short enough yet very accessible for potential newcomers to watch... Oh wait, there is! The main OVA series started in December of 1988, but on February 6 of that same year the very first LOGH anime was released, and it's a 60-minute movie that not only makes a great entry point for newcomers but is actually the first piece of LOGH that should be watched at all. This is LOGH: Waga Yuku wa Hoshi no Taikai/My Conquest is the Sea of Stars.

In the 35th Century war has spread out to the infinite vastness of space. For the past 150 years the Galactic Empire has been fighting the Free Planets Alliance for control over the galaxy, and there looks to be no end in sight yet. Within the Galactic Empire a young man by the name of Reinhardt von Musel has been promoted to the rank of Admiral, a move that many higher-ups believe only happened because his older sister is the wife of the Kaiser of the entire Empire, giving Reinhardt the nickname "The Admiral in the Skirt". Within the FPA there is a Commodore called Yang Wen-Li, the "Hero of El-Facil", who currently is the strategic adviser of a FPA admiral, though Wen-Li's unconventional strategies are usually ignored. After a battle in the gaseous planet of Legmiza resulted in the destruction of a FPA fleet at the hands of Reinhardt, save for the flagship that Wen-Li was on due to his realization of Reinhardt's plan, the FPA decides that Legmiza was a fluke Empire victory and still decides to attack Iserlohn Tower, one of the Empire's strongholds. This battle will be the first true war confrontation between Reinhardt & Wen-Li, a confrontation that is only the beginning of everything.

Fuma no Kojirou: Fuma Hanran-hen: Apocalypse of the Fuma

This anime has since been re-reviewed in a more comprehensive & detailed manner, alongside the other OVAs in this series, via Retrospect in Retrograde, which you can read at this link.

I had hoped to get to this last week, but a series of illness & excessive allergies kept me from feeling comfy to even watch this... When watching anime "raw" you need to pay attention, and feeling unwell, coughing, etc. gets in the way of being able to do so properly. Anyway, I finally have gotten well enough to finish the Fuma no Kojirou saga, and after the nice improvement that was Seiken Sensou-hen, how does the last piece of the story work out?

Unlike Seiken Senou-hen, which came out a year after Yasha-hen, the last OVA, Fuma no Kojirou Saishushou: Fuma Hanran-hen/Kojirou of the Fuma The Last Chapter: Fuma Rebellion Chapter, didn't come out until November 21, 1992, about two years after Seiken Sensou-hen finished up. Also, Fuma Hanran-hen is a single 50-minute feature instead of a six-episode series, like the two OVAs before it. This is likely why the Japanese often consider the Kojirou anime a 13-episode series, with Fuma Hanran-hen simply being the last episode. Though there are ups & downs to this production, it still ends the series in a fairly concise way.

Fuma no Kojirou: Seiken Sensou-hen: A Much-Improved Second Act

This anime has since been re-reviewed in a more comprehensive & detailed manner, alongside the other OVAs in this series, via Retrospect in Retrograde, which you can read at this link.

Back in the first month of this blog's existence I reviewed as many anime adaptations of Masami Kurumada manga that wasn't called "Saint Seiya" as I could at the time, and I got close to doing them all. Since then I've reviewed what I had missed back then, including the Seiya movies & most recently with B't X Neo, but there was always something keeping me from doing it all: The rest of Fuma no Kojirou. In fact, the first OVA series based on what I called "Masami Kurumada's Fourth-Most-Well-Known Title", Fuma no Kojirou: Yasha-hen, was the very first Kurumada anime I ever reviewed. Due to a lack of English translation of any sort I had to watch it "raw", which looks to be a necessity if you're an English-speaking Kurumada fan, and though I had acknowledged that it was still enjoyable I also found it a little lacking compared to Kurumada's other major works. Then, last October, I mentioned that the rest of Kojirou was one of the "Twelve Anime I Want to Review... But Can't" due to me not having the second OVA series. Luckily, I did say that those titles were ones I couldn't review "Anytime Soon, at Least", because now I finally was able to get the second Kojirou OVA series! Does this series improve after an enjoyable-but-somewhat-lacking start?  Let's find out...

The six-episode Yasha-hen was released on VHS & LD from June to August of 1989, debuting literally two months after Saint Seiya TV ended, and a year after that finished the second OVA series, Fuma no Kojirou: Seiken Sensou-hen/Kojirou of the Fuma: Sacred Sword War Chapter, started its release, lasting from September to December of 1990 and lasting another six episodes. It features a few returning characters, has the same main staff & cast, and brings back NIGHT HAWKS for the theme songs, but it also brings with it a tighter story and an overall epic feel that Kurumada is so well known for.

[SPOILER WARNING FOR THE END OF YASHA-HEN... But that should be obvious]

Gundoh Musashi: The Anime Equivalent of The Room

During my college years I had to take two semesters of physics. For both semesters I had the same professor, and though he was a good teacher the thing I remember most about him was that the next class after taking an exam my physics professor would "torture" himself as payback for torturing his students with an exam. Granted, he knew what he was doing, but he still did some crazy things, like laying on a bed of nails, complete with having one of his students put a large cinder block on his chest, or even putting liquid nitrogen into his mouth before immediately spitting it out, and he would come out of it perfectly fine. Why do I bring this up? Well, after one year of doing this blog and reviewing 49 titles, I felt that review #50 should be something special... Something known to be absolutely horrible, yet never really given a review that covers the entire show with a complete lack of bias... Something that I had put on my future reviews list from the very beginning but was afraid to actually watch all of. And, trust me, it's tough not go into straight-up bashing when it comes to this show.

This is actually a letterboxed image from the DVD... 

This anime has many variations of its title: Gundoh/Way of the Gun Musashi (which is the name I use), Gun-doh Musashi, Musashi Gundoh, or, just simply, Musashi. This is truly one of those anime that come up once in a red moon (yes, a red moon), and shows anime fans just how bad something can be. M.D. Geist? That's simply the anime equivalent to the violent action movies Hollywood loved making back in the 80s. Apocalypse Zero? That's simply a homage/semi-parody of tokusatsu and shows just how violent having power suits can really be. Sure, people are quick to put titles like those on lists of absolute worst anime of all time, but more often than not that's simply because the people making those lists simply aren't into that kind of material, i.e. it's a matter of personal taste/subjectivity and not really an objective decision. Now, yes, reviews in an of themselves are subjective, and that's the point of reviews, but saying that stuff like Geist and Apocalypse Zero are the worst anime ever is really just parroting an exaggerated view. Now titles like Garzey's Wing & Panzer Dragoon, which feature problems that involve the actual production itself, are undeniably bad. Sure, some people might like them in a "So Bad it's Good" way, but that doesn't mean that titles like those are good by any means because their problems go into the actual production aspect and aren't simply a problem with the content. And Gundoh Musashi fits into the latter category... In fact, from a production standpoint it's probably the worst anime ever, and even though there are glimpses of a good show while you watch it, the negatives just overpower everything and make this an absolute joke to watch.

Naikaku Kenryoku Hanzai Kyousei Torishimarikan Zaizen Jotaro: Say His Name, Say His Name...

This next review is one that I have wanted to do since I started this blog, but since only seven episodes had been fansubbed  I wasn't able to properly review it. A few months back subtitle files for the remaining four episodes, taken from the bootleg DVDs, were released, but the raw videos that they go with were still impossible to get. Luckily, I found out recently that a batch containing every episode, including the raw videos for those last four, was released. Needless to say, I got those four episodes, and here it is: My review for an anime that, in my opinion, is horrifically underrated and incorrectly considered one of the worst anime in existence... Though those haters certainly had a valid reason for hating the show.

Naikaku Kenryoku Hanzai Kyousei Torishimarikan/Government Crime Investigation Agent Zaizen Jotaro debuted in the now-defunct Comic Bunch Magazine back in 2004 and ran until 2007, totaling 17 volumes. It was the creation of writer Ken Kitashiba, who has written other detective manga before and was apparently an actual police officer before that, and artist Yasuhiro Watanabe, who was once an assistant to Tetsuo Hara and has done mostly baseball manga. From July to September of 2006. Trans-Arts, TV Asahi, and Universal Pictures Japan (now known as Geneon Universal) created an 11-episode TV anime based on the manga. When the anime debuted it was summarily trashed and hated by the general non-Japanese anime community for being ridiculously unrealistic, having horrific animation, and it was generally considered to be nothing but a show to watch for Mystery Science Theater 3000-esque laughs. It must be stated, though, that seemingly 99% of these opinions came solely from watching the first episode and nothing more. I'll get into episode 1 in particular later in the review, but I must say that these reviews are mostly invalid due to them being based solely off of the first episode, as the rest of the show is in fact an fun, if not exactly realistic, journey into dirty politics & business and how a group of people aim to stop it.

Ninja Ryukenden: We Got Tekken But Not This?!

The Ninja Gaiden (literally "Ninja Side Story") series is definitely one the most notorious video game series ever, partially due to its insane difficulty. While the arcade original is mostly forgotten now the NES trilogy is infamous for being controller-throwing hard, the recent reboot series isn't any different (and some could argue is ever harder), and more than likely even the games on the Sega Game Gear, Master System (which is actually an original entry and not simply a higher-resolution port of the GG game), and Game Boy follow suit. One must also remember that the "Ninja Gaiden" name was only used in North America up until the Sega-developed entries, followed by the reboot series. In Japan the series was originally called Ninja Ryukenden/Legend of the Ninja Dragon Sword, and this is where this 50-minute OVA comes in. In November of 1991, months after Ninja Gaiden III came out, Studio Junio (a company known mostly for assisting in productions but made some of their own titles, and is now known as Studio Brain Trust) created an OVA loosely-based on the NES games. Watching this OVA makes me wonder why companies like ADV and CPM were seemingly happy with licensing sub-par game adaptations like Tekken, Samurai Shodown, & Panzer Dragoon while there were much, much better titles out there... Like Ninja Ryukenden.

Some time has passed since Ryu Hayabusa's second adventure where he defeated Jaquio once again and stopped the Evil God from being revived. Since then he has been running a Japanese item shop with Irene Lew, the woman he met during his first adventure, and maintains a friendship with Robert T. Sturgeon, a U.S. Army agent-turned-detective he met during his second adventure. When a man named Dr. Ned Friedman reveals that he discovered a cure for cancer without any side-effects, Ryu, Irene, Robert, Jeff (Robert's partner), and Sara (a reporter and Robert's girlfriend) all become involved in a scheme to create a new superhuman race and possibly even try to revive the Evil God once again.

Ring ni Kakero 1: Shadow: Toei Finally Takes This Series Seriously

This anime has since been re-reviewed in a more comprehensive & detailed manner, alongside the other seasons, via Retrospect in Retrograde, which you can read at this link.

Now I wasn't quite sure of what review to do today, especially since I didn't really have anything Christmas-y on my list of shows to review. Luckily, my CDJapan order of Ring ni Kakero 1: Shadow Volume 3 arrived much faster than I had planned on it arriving, so I decided to re-watch those first two DVDs I bought back in the late-summer/early-fall as well as watch this last DVD. And with that comes my holiday gift to all of you: A review of an anime that no one seemed to give a damn about this year!

Now when I say that no one gave a damn about this show this year, I mean ABSOLUTELY NO ONE! The idea of a third season of the Ring ni Kakero 1 anime was hinted at back in early 2009 when Masami Kurumada posted an image on his blog that showed a new song he was writing for something called "Ring ni Kakero 1: Sekai-hen". Nothing else would come from this until that December when Toei announced Ring ni Kakero 1: Shadow at Jump Festa 2010. The big change from that announcement would be that the anime would air on Animax's PPV service rather than TV Asahi, where the past two seasons originally aired. It would also debut in April 2010, about 4 years after Season 2 aired, and have two episodes made available for a limited time in April, May, and June, totaling 6 episodes, half the length of the previous seasons.

Fuma no Kojirou: Yasha-hen: Masami Kurumada's Take on Ninjas

This anime has since been re-reviewed in a more comprehensive & detailed manner, alongside the other OVAs in this series, via Retrospect in Retrograde, which you can read at this link.

With the reveal of a "Masami Kurumada Project" from Toei Animation looming over at Jump Festa 2011 this upcoming weekend I've decided to start taking a look at some of the anime adaptations of Masami Kurumada's mangas earlier than I had planned on doing. Let me say this right away, though: I most likely will not cover Saint Seiya. Seiya is Kurumada's most well-known creation, and even in North America that title has had penetration, though it admittedly has been very rocky; ADV's release of the anime only covered the first 60 episodes due to DiC only licensing that many episodes of the show, not to mention DiC's shame of an adaptation called Knights of the Zodiac giving Kurumada's works a horrible first impression in North America, and Viz's release of the manga, though completed early this year and a fine-enough release, is only going to get tougher to buy all of due to low sales. Still, Saint Seiya is a little too well-known to really cover in detail on this blog, not to mention that the anime is really long. Maybe in the future I'll give a look over at how hard of a time his works have had in North America, and that would mostly cover Saint Seiya, but that's for another time. For now, let's take a look at ninjas...

Fuma no Kojirou, or Kojirou of the Fuma when translated, is easily best described as "Masami Kurumada's fourth-most-well-known title". It doesn't have anywhere near the same popularity as Saint Seiya, Ring ni Kakero, or B't X, but at the same time it isn't one of his one-shots or canceled titles. In fact, the manga's original run in Weekly Shonen Jump from early 1982 to late 1983 gave the title a total of ten volumes. Back in 1982 this title was highly anticipated, as Ring ni Kakero was a giant hit for Weekly Shonen Jump, and Shueisha in general. Before that title Weekly Shonen Jump didn't exactly have a "mega-hit". Also, before 1977 Jump's biggest name was Go Nagai's Harenchi Gakuen, and that was only because the title was so "dirty" that the PTA was trying to kill it off! Finally, though Jump legend Kochikame debuted in 1976 and is still running in the magazine to this day, the title didn't seem to become the legend it would be right away. Anyway, after creating such a popular manga, Kurumada's next work was definitely going to be looked at with high regard.

Next Senki Ehrgeiz: The First Late-Night Mech Anime?

This anime has since been re-reviewed in a more comprehensive & detailed manner via Retrospect in Retrograde, which you can read at this link.

Today I'm going to talk about Ehrgeiz... No, not that Ehrgeiz!  I really can't talk too much about this show using the name AnimeVillage.com/Bandai Entertainment used. Yes, it is part of the full title, but when said alone most people are going to think about Square's collaboration with Namco that led to the title infamously known as "that fighting game that has Final Fantasy VII characters in it". And to make it all the more confusing, both this anime and that game came out in the very same year!

Next Senki/Record of Next War Ehrgeiz, translated as Ehrgeiz: The Next War in its North American release, is one of the early examples of late-night anime, which got their big start in 1997. The animation budget is low, as were most of them at that time, it's mostly obscure now, as a fair number of them also are, and the story isn't anything amazingly special... But I can't help but really enjoy this title.

In the future the people of Earth start expanding into space by creating the "Next" colonies. Years later Next would rebel, forming the Next Government and starting a war with the Earth Government. This prompted both sides into modifying their MVs/Metal Vehicles, the giant mechs of this title, for battle use. In the meantime, a third force appeared in the form of Terra, who rebelled against Earth and wanted peace to return. Throughout all of this, Next started experimenting and created S.A.C (System of Absolutely Conscience [ah, Engrish]), or "S" for short, an MV-like being that broke free and escaped from Next. All the meanwhile, a small batch of unknown outlaws make their living pilfering weapons & rations from any nearby ships that come by their home of Next 7, a colony which was ravaged during the war.

The Roots of Japanese Anime: Man, Anime Was Weird Before Astro Boy...

Tetsuwan Atom, a.k.a. Astro Boy, is generally considered the first "modern-day" anime. Before it, anime wasn't really made for television and there really wasn't anything done in a similar style before it. It's easy to argue that if Astro Boy wasn't made we might not have gotten titles like Tetsujin 28, Dororo, the original Cyborg 009 anime, and, if you want to push it somewhat, any other anime made for television, regardless of whether it was adapted from a manga or was an original creation. In fact, most of what you could call "anime" before then was mainly made for advertising or propaganda purposes. Zakka Films, who seem to have died out already, gave North America a small piece of that vague era of anime back in 2008 with their only DVD release "The Roots of Japanese Anime Until the End of WII with 8 Ground-Breaking Films". Well, I certainly can't say that the title doesn't tell you what you get from this.

Zakka Films treats this release not as a piece of entertainment, which is how anime is generally treated nowadays, but rather as a piece of researched history. Along with the DVD itself you get an eleven-page booklet that not only talks about each feature with some nice historic detail but also a prologue that explains the origins of Japanese animation. It's really an interesting read and makes an excellent compliment to the DVD. The features themselves are shown in chronological order and are dated from 1930 to 1942. Also, with exception to the last feature, none of them go beyond 15 minutes in length. But the most interesting thing about these features is that some of them are, without a shadow of a doubt, some of the downright weirdest anime you can buy in North America.