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| 2. Iodine
 
It's hard to find tournament fighting anime that actually bother
trying to be something more than rowdy fight-fests. So it's a real shame when
a show actually does the legwork to set up a plot with real dramatic potential,
and then promptly dissolves into round after round of video-game style dueling.
Admittedly, though, the battles in this show are still extremely entertaining.
Our heroes are Recca Hanabishi, your standard martial arts punk with otherworldly
origins, and his pack of bickering friends and allies, who all have fancy moves
and wrongs that need righting. Add some evil villains and lots of flamboyant contenders,
and the thing practically writes itself. There are some decidedly adult elements,
though, that should put the series off-limits for the younger set. The tone of
the show is also extremely aggressive and so glorifies violence and machismo,
it gets rather hard to stomach at times.
Animation
starts out great, with nicely integrated CGI and fun action scenes, but gets more
and more lackluster as the plot progresses. Designs are pretty standard, but keep
up well with the huge cast and their varied superpowers. The writing is very mixed,
and unfortunately includes several perverse attempts at humor that are in severly
rotten taste. There are some nicer, more personal interactions among Recca's cohorts,
but these are sadly rare and never solidify into anything meaningful. The villain,
Kurei, and Recca's love interest, Yanagi, do nothing more than what is required
of them. As far as dueling shows go, it's hard to find one quite as inventive
or consistently entertaining as this one, but expect little depth and less real
substance. |
| 1. Olmanek
Who wants some predictable tripe? Where the will to win almost
always overcomes the clearly stronger opponent? It starts off well enough, a bit
of an interesting story, turning friends against one another by use of magical
objects and of course the mystery surrounding the objects and the bringer of the
objects, but, once they encounter the 'bad guy' it's all down hill, well, no,
it goes down hill, then it appears to stay in a stasis field where nothing ever
changes, however, because this is a personal review, I'm still allowed to give
it 4 stars even though it's terrible, and for a simple reason, this is one of
the first series of anime I ever saw, and I loved it, I spent time waiting for
the episodes interested to see what would happen next, just because something
is wretched doesn't mean you won't like it, otherwise how would soap opera have
the following they do?
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