Category: Fantasy

Berserk Season 2, The Revenge of Fetus Baby!

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***This was our 2010 April Fool’s post***
(For actual Berserk Season 2 info go here)


BEWARE OF SPOILERS

hisuicon It is truly a shame when a classic anime is forgotten. The Berserk anime used to be praised up and down by the fan community; on everyone’s 10 top favorite anime lists. But the second season has gone largely undiscussed online which is a travesty. I hardly saw any fanfare on the Internet and only one or two episode blogs seem to have reviewed any of it. As I understood it, Berserk sells well for Dark Horse but I guess that is more among comics and graphic art fans than anime fans. I hope that after Narutaki and I do this review more people will go back and check out what they are missing. Berserk season two meets if not succeeds in surpassing the high bar of dark fantasy that the first season established.

narutaki Well, perhaps it is just because the follow up to the extremely popular first season was a long, long, long time coming. I think people just got tired of waiting and finally moved on, but they should really reconsider and come back to Berserk. Another worry that many could run into is whether or not a second installment like this can really live up to it’s predecessor. But much to our surprise, not only does the second season sport the high standards of the first but you have a great studio behind it, and some grand new editions that both come from the manga and are completely original.

hisuiconSeason two picks up right where season one left off. We have Skull Knight busting in and saving Guts and Casca on a horse that looks exactly like Fuunsaiki. After getting cleaned up Guts vows to take down the God Hand but first he has to go through a training arc. Guts gets swordsmanship lessons and life lessons from a most unusual source. I would say who his teacher is but I don’t want to ruin the surprise. Guts then has to enter a tournament to recruit new allies and friends to take down the dreaded God Hand and their sinister minions. But of course they have some laughs and make a few missteps along the way. All of this building up for the big showdown at the end, which ends on another cliffhanger.

narutaki Eventhough the series starts very much where it left off and moves right along from the manga, it’s nice to see their own touches here and there which get stronger as the show goes along. This was especially seen in the new cast and the return of some favorites. I never would have expected there to be an essentially zombie version of the Band of the Hawk. You might think that would destroy the impact of their beautiful-horrific destruction at the end of the first arc but the seance scene and then the later resurrection episodes are so spectacular that you’ll be happy to have them back. I also really liked the addition of Guts’s philosophical musings, it gave at introspective feel to some of the major twists.

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NYICFF 2010: Oblivion Island, Waiting for Cotton Gaiden.

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As a person who tends to be absent minded I get a certain amount of dread whenever I cannot find something and wonder if I have lost it forever. So I acutely understand the pain and loss of losing track of something precious. But I think that it a universal misfortune that everyone has faced at one time or another. Oblivion Island taps into this feeling while tying it into a fantasy adventure story that uses Japanese myth to tell a tale of friendship and the bonds of family.

I wasn’t very interested in Oblivion Island, but really I don’t know why that was. I had heard of the film, but not really gone out of my way to learn more about it. The real draw in the end was that it is by Production I.G. And considering the fact that you shouldn’t look the gift of a film festival in the mouth, I ended up with a ticket to the last-minute-added showing.

The opening scene is a young girl named Haruka being read a picture book while visiting her sickly mother in the hospital. The story is about foxes who take things which people no longer appreciate. We then fast forward to Haruka in her teens. Haruka notices that the mirror her mother gave her, who has since passed away, has disappeared. In trying to find the mirror she follows a fox named Teo back to his magical homeland. Teo decided to help her find her missing mirror so he can get rid of her before everyone else realizes he has let a human discover their world. But they soon realize that in the world of Oblivion Island the mirror has great power and its new owner will not give it up easily.

The plot is steadfastly simple, we are taken in by Haruka’s adorable child-self and the very relatable plight of looking for something that was once important only to find it has disappeared from neglect. The world of the Kitsune, who are really all kinds of strange looking creatures who just wear fox masks, is colorful and vibrate with life. The looming evil a foot, which doesn’t ever get a good grip on just what it is doing, adds some stunning machine and battle moments. As the teen Haruka encounters this strange otherworld, she regains not only lost items, but lost feelings and memories as well. However, as the story goes on the connected feeling from the beginning moments is neglected and you never truly feel the what is displayed, you merely see it.

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Unprecedented Game (aka Dazzle), It’s the pleasure of all men to be inconvenienced by beautiful women.

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This review is part on a little push I wanted to start on the blog. I wanted us to review more shojo anime. Not a lot of it gets made and I feel we hardly review it enough on the blog and I think all genres of anime and manga should be examined on the blog. How much this title counts is a matter of opinion. Unprecedented Game aka Hatenko Yugi aka Dazzle has an unusual history as a manga that makes classifying the anime a bit tricky. The manga started out in Square Enix’s shonen anthology GFantasy but after book 3 it switches to Ichijinsha’s shoujo magazine Comic Zero-Sum. But the most important thing we should get out of this is it is a story that can appeal to both genders quite well. It is a show with a nice mixture of seemingly hard to mix elements: action, romance, drama, comedy and horror. A pot luck that really blends well together.

Why is this called Dazzle in the TokyoPop release anyway? It gives absolutely no clue as to what the story might be. Maybe it refers to Rahzel’s magic powers? Baroqueheat’s tricks? Alzeid’s good looks? Well, whatever, still seems like a silly name. I also didn’t realize for a while that Dazzle and this anime were one in the same. I had watched a bit of this show sometime ago, found it amusing, and then promptly got distracted.

Rahzel’s life is turned upside down when her father throws her out of the house an declares that she must learn to fend for herself. Not long after leaving on her forced journey she meets a handsome albino named Alzeid. She vows that she will travel along side the dour man until she can inject some joy and adventure into his life. They are soon joined by Alzeid’s friend Baroqueheat from the military who falls in head over heals in lust with Rahzel.  They head out on the road using their spell casting and fighting skills to survive while taking odd jobs to make money. While most of their jobs start off simple they often take a sinister twist.

The format of the series is going to be love it or hate it with its episodic and roaming nature. Besides the first episode where characters meet, the order of the episodes is unimportant and could be random. However, the mystery solving slant of the show lends itself to the format and doesn’t feel particularly jarring. Though I had to laugh as a one point I realized it reminded me of Scooby-Doo, especially when they all of a sudden in a snowy area and have new winter outfits. The tone is more a mixture of Slayers and a little Kino’s Journey thrown in. There are plenty of laughs but ultimately they usually learn a sad secret or truth behind whatever it is they have stumbled upon.

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