Category: Reviews

Slayers Rewatch Podcast: Spell #06

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Lina Inverse: Bandit Killer, Dragon Spooker, and Beautiful Sorceress. That’s right, we decided to revisit the classic 90’s fantasy comedy Slayers.

The show is a mixture of comedy and adventure that is both a parody and homage to the various worlds of fantasy and roleplaying. Lina, Gourry, Zelgadis, and Amelia are your stereotypical D&D adventuring party (albeit with a rather spell-casting heavy focus) killing monsters, hording treasure, fighting amongst themselves, and causing tremendous amounts of collateral damage which sometimes inadvertently save the world. And in the 90’s Megumi Hayashibara was the queen of anime voice actresses and one of her most iconic roles was Lina.

Back in the day not everyone liked Slayers but almost everyone had watched it and had an opinion about it. Now even with the two recent seasons in 2008 the series is distinctly seen as a product of the 90s.

We are recruiting adventures for our journey to discover if Slayers is still an enjoyable 90s romp or a cursed relic better buried in the stream of time. If you are a high enough level, you should rewatch Slayers with our party!

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The Birth of Kitaro: The God of All Yokai

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narutaki_icon_4040_round Having just recently finished Shigeru Mizuki’s Showa: A History of Japan, it seemed like a golden opportunity to sample his most enduring work Gegege no Kitaro. So when D+Q offered us a review copy of The Birth of Kitaro we jumped at the chance.

hisui_icon_4040_round If you have ever enjoyed Mushishi, Natsume Yuujinchou, Mononoke, xxxHolic, Kekkaishi, or Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan then you owe a great deal of thanks to Shigeru Mizuki. Much like Osamu Tezuka, Go Nagai, or Rumiko Takahashi he is an artist that has influenced countless titles in an unmistakable manner. Every manga and anime that has spirits, demons, ghouls, ghosts, gods, devils, or monsters has a touch of Gegege no Kitaro in it. In fact most of them are either borrowing heavily for the structure of Gegege no Kitaro or dipping into the cavalcade of mythical Japanese creatures that Shigeru Mizuki popularized. In fact most of them do both.

Yokai existed before Shigeru Mizuki started writing about them and would have been the topic of anime and manga even if he had never been born. They are an integral part of the Volksgeist of Japan. What Shigeru Mizuki did was put his own very particular take on the concept that has become just and much part of Japanese storytelling as the Yokai themselves.

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Slayers Rewatch Podcast: Spell #05

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Lina Inverse: Bandit Killer, Dragon Spooker, and Beautiful Sorceress. That’s right, we decided to revisit the classic 90’s fantasy comedy Slayers.

The show is a mixture of comedy and adventure that is both a parody and homage to the various worlds of fantasy and roleplaying. Lina, Gourry, Zelgadis, and Amelia are your stereotypical D&D adventuring party (albeit with a rather spell-casting heavy focus) killing monsters, hording treasure, fighting amongst themselves, and causing tremendous amounts of collateral damage which sometimes inadvertently save the world. And in the 90’s Megumi Hayashibara was the queen of anime voice actresses and one of her most iconic roles was Lina.

Back in the day not everyone liked Slayers but almost everyone had watched it and had an opinion about it. Now even with the two recent seasons in 2008 the series is distinctly seen as a product of the 90s.

We are recruiting adventures for our journey to discover if Slayers is still an enjoyable 90s romp or a cursed relic better buried in the stream of time. If you are a high enough level, you should rewatch Slayers with our party!

DOWNLOAD