Fedra reviews Soul Eater

Fedranime reviews

Soul Eater

You might be wondering why I didn’t post a video game review on Tuesday. Simply put, I realized that I am probably not the best person to review video games as I only have Nintendo games and not a lot of them are that current. On a completely different note, TOONAMI IS COMING BACK THIS SATURDAY!!!!!! In honor of this occasion I am going to review one of my favorite anime, Soul Eater.

Soul Eater is an anime based on a manga by Atsushi Okubo and is animated by studio Bones, one of my favorite animation studios. The story follows three teenagers Maka, Black*Star (seriously they spell it like that, and one of my favorite anime characters Death the Kidd. They all are students at the DWMA/Shibuusen headed by lord death himself, Shinigami-sama, also he’s Kidd’s father. It is there job to protect the world from the resurrection of a kishin, a being of pure madness. To do this they must feed their weapons 99 human souls and 1 witch soul to turn them into a Death Scythe, a weapon used by Shinigami-sama. Did I mention that their weapons are specially gifted humans who can turn into different weapons? Thus Maka teams up with Soul, a scythe. Black*Star teams up with Tsubaki, a shadow (really she can transform into different ninja weapons like chain scythes and shurikans but allows him to control his shadow later), and Kidd teams up with Liz and Patty, dual pistols. If you aren’t lured in by this baddasery than let me show you some more.

This series is really good. One of my favorite parts is the soundtrack. Honestly this is what really first brought me in in the first few minutes. The first opening theme, soul resonance by T.M revolution, was amazing. It had really cool animation as well as nice sort of punk/gothic sound to it. That also brings up the animation, as this is Bones it is really good. While it is a bit cartoony compared to Bones’ other work like Brotherhood, its still really good, especially considering the crappy quality and drawings the manga started out as. A lot of the buildings have a gothic architecture look, and it is really apparent in Italy and Shibuusen. I also really love how Soul’s personal soul room looks. If you were a fan of the show twin peaks you definitely are going to enjoy every scene with the red devil and the soul room. This series also has one of the coolest and evilest villains in all of anime, Medusa. Seriously this women gives friggen Father a run for his money in terms of evilness. I hate to do this but I’m going to have to reveal a few spoilers. There is this one character named Chrona who was a weapon that lives in its (Chrona’s gender hasn’t been revealed yet) blood, which is black, called the demon sword Ragnarok that slowly drains Chrona’s sanity when he’s activated. Also Ragnarok is a bit of a jerk. Also Chrona is Medusa’s child. Lending to this series long history of nightmare fuel, Ragnarok wasn’t originally in Chrona’s body and Chrona has been shown to have Ragnarok inside it since about it was 4. Think about that for a moment well I check to see if Lanipator has updated. And he has not. Did you figure out how the two became an insanely screaming sin against God? If you didn’t, Medusa drained Chrona of its original blood, melted Ragnarok down in sword form, mixed him with black blood, put the blood into the body of her own child ALL IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE. No I’m not making this up, she is the female anime equivalent of DR. INSANEO! And on that cheery not, the characters are really good. Maka’s father, Spirit is a death scythe and a bit of an adulterer. Then again he did marry Maka’s mom at about 18 so what did you expect. Also a lot of the death scythes, like Marie and Justin ARE JUST AWESOME, I mean Marie can transform into a hammer and Justin is a freakin GUILOTEIN! Also, Shinigami is amazing! When your first introduced to him he has this weird personality, a voice that makes Choppers Japanese seiyuu sound bearable and this weird gag move called the reaper chop were he hits someone over the head with his hand that always look like geometric foam fingers. Then the kishin shows up he reveals that he only looks stupid because his original Lovecraftian form scared his students, his voice drops down to Alucard-level sexy and he breaks kishins face with the reaper chop. This was honestly one of the most hilarious moments in the series and one of my personal favorites. And on that note here’s all of the crap Soul Eater has.

I’m just going to go for the big one here, the ending. This was a series that was in dire need of some filler but never used it. Around the middle of the lost Island ark the anime got ahead of the manga and was forced to draw it’s own ending, similar to H.S.O.T.D. or Fullmetal Alchemist. Some of the changes were all right, such as more Chrona development about the struggle with Medusa as his mom and Mifune living, but the ending was crap. Heck, the actual manga isn’t over and it has things like a new death scythe and the book of Eibon ark that I just love. Though there is talk about Bones redoing Soul Eater and getting it right, after all it is the spiritual successor to Fullmetal Alchemist, so this problem will be fixed with better animation and a reason to not have filler. There are a few nitpicks, mostly Blair’s over abundance of fanservice, but this is just the main one that a lot of the fans hate.

All in all, this is easily one of my favorite anime and if I made a top 10 list of most awesome anime characters, Kidd, Free, and Stein would all be up there. The ending was still bad and the ending credits left even more plot holes then if 4kids took over, but that’s what the manga’s for. If you want to stay more faithfully to the story I would read the manga though personally I like both. That’s the end of this Fedranime review, and don’t forget to leave a request in the comments. Catch you later.

Fedra reviews H.S.O.T.D.

Fedranime reviews

High school of the dead

Interesting fact about myself. I’m deathly afraid of horror movies and yet I pride myself on not getting scared by horror anime. I first noticed this when I was watching Hellsing Ultimate and my only thought on seeing Seras defeat her mortal enemy Zorin Blitz was by slaughtering her army, punching her in the throat several times, biting off her fingers, and then cheese grating her face against a wall. My only thought during this was “COOL! That’s what you get when you mess with Dracula’s servant!” After a while I figured if it was impossible for me to be scared if it was anime. High school of the dead immediately changed that opinion.

High school of the dead is an anime based off the manga by Daisuke and Shoji Sato and animated by Studio Madhouse, one of my favorite animators. The story follows Takashi, Rei, Saeko, Saya, and Kohta and one nurse as they try to survive in a Japan were undead civilians who they call  “Them” are appearing. Obviously they aren’t familiar with the word “Zombie” even though there are numerous references to zombie movies. The plot is basically about them all trying to survive, find out what caused the zombies (I will be calling them that for the rest of the review) to appear and find other survivors.

I haven’t really watched that much of H.S.O.T.D. so far, in fact right now I’m about halfway through episode 2, but it’s really good. The animation is just incredible, as to be expected from madhouse. This is also about the only time that CGI has worked in an anime in my opinion. Sorry One Piece, it just make the Thousand Sunny look really weird and sloppy. This is also an amazingly heart wrenching anime. In the first episode there were these 2 girls running away holding fingers from the zombies saying, “Oh unnamed character #1 were such great friends/sisters! Let’s use the power of friendship to save our self from the zombies!” Originally I thought, “Alright start the count down. They’re both going to be trapped and be symbolically dragged apart from each other screaming the other characters name until the zombies are done with them.” I then watched as the zombies came up the stairs and grabbed one of them. She then asked the other for help to which she then responded “LET GO OF ME!” and kicked her down the stairs only for the zombies to then be right behind her. This was easily on of the best scenes in the episode and left me emotionally satisfied as the sense of horror came across me. There’s also a scene where Takashi’s best friend gets bitten and slowly becomes a zombie forcing him to put him down. With scenes like this I really like this anime!

Unfortunately, there are a few problems. I’m just going to address the main one here, the fanservice. In anime there usually is mild fanservice and generally doesn’t make a big fuss about it. H.S.O.T.D. takes that principle and runs it’s face against a wall. Honestly, sometimes I’m not sure if they added this in the anime to kind of make fun of the fanservice in horror movies or if this was in the manga I never read. It really gets confusing when the school nurse, who oddly enough looks like Elesa from Pokémon, when the producers thought it was a good idea to have her make a sound affect every time she even takes a step. That also brings up my next problem, the school nurse. In first 5 minutes on screen with dialogue a student bravely sacrifices his life for her saying she needs to get help to which she then says, “Who are you?” You died in vane man. You died in vane. Aside from that there’s just a few issues like the profanity and how Kohta was able to turn a nail gun into an Uzi in about 5 seconds but it’s still pretty good.

All in all, High school of the dead is still very good. The animation is awesome, it has a very good dub, the soundtrack is really memorable and most of the characters are likeable. One thing I really like is the way the work in references to other horror works. In fact until I just looked up his name, I found out Kohta’s last name is Hirano, Kohta Hirano made Hellsing, one of my favorite anime. I can definitely recommend this to anyone who loves horror anime. That’s it for this edition of Fedranime reviews. Catch you later.

Fedra reviews Blazblue

Fedranime reviews

Blazblue Continuum Shift

Hello I am Fedra the bloodedge. As many of you know, I really like anime. If you didn’t know, well screw you. I’m a huge fan of many other reviewers such as Nostalgia Critic, Linkara, and the Spoony Experiment. So after a while I thought of making my own reviews of anime and video games that I like.  So what better way to start something new than with something I really like, Blazblue Continuum Shift for the Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation.

 

Blazblue is a fighting game by AKSYS games, best known for their previous work on

Guilty Gear series. I’m just going to come out and say this, I really love this game. It has a good story, the characters are amazing and actually have depth and goals, and the fighting is beautifully orchestrated. So lets dive in and see what the story is.

The game begins with an amazing anime style opening that I just have to watch every time I start up the game. We also are given an introduction to the backstory and the main characters. If you never played Calamity Trigger which came before this like me, this is going to be a godsend because you will be lost without it. Apparently there was this thing called the black beast which went around and terrorized everyone. Then these guys called the 6 heroes showed up (Half of which you can play as) and killed it. Unfortunately the beast created a substance called seithr which can kill people over time, forcing humanity to relocate to the tops of mountains. A few years later we get our protagonist, Ragna the Bloodedge (seem familiar) who wants to overthrow the government in charge of the cities because we need a plot.

Now, Blazblue has multiple story campaigns, each one for different characters such as Ragna, Jin, and Noel. Each one has a true ending, and bad ending, and unfortunately, a gag ending. While the true and bad endings are really good, the gag endings are a bit weird though I will address that later. Each one is very good and allows you to actually get a feel for the characters. For example I originally hated Carl Clover because he is weak, has bad attacks, a stupid drive, and relies mostly on his doll to attack for him. After finishing his story campaign, I still hate him for those reasons but I have SOME respect for him. In my opinion, the best story campaigns are Bang’s and Taokaka”s (Don’t ask)

Now lets move onto the important part. The combat. The combat is really good. The characters each have their own unique fighting styles and can pull of cool finishing moves. There’s also a trick were if you use their taunt at the beginning of the battle they have enough energy to pull of their strongest finisher right at the start. Personally I really like using Makoto, Valkenhyme, and Bang in my fights for multiple reasons. Bang is incredibly powerful and it’s just cool to see the amount of ham this guy’s personality is made of.  Valkenhyne is just a badass battle butler who can transform into a werewolf. And Makoto has incredibly strong attacks and is the fastest character in the game. Also, this is the game for button mashers. Right at the beginning of each match you can choose to go into stylish mode which basically means if you hit the B button enough times and randomly press the arrow pad you can use their strongest attacks.

Now comes the part that I really don’t like, what is wrong with the game. One of the most glaring issues I have with the game is the gag endings. When I was playing through Ragna’s campaign there came the choice of either sleeping or training. Unaware of the effects I chose sleeping. What happened can only be described as trippy since it involves Ragna getting flattened by Tager, who then explodes on him, being chased by Jin, Terumi, Cal, and Arakune, and finally being traded to them for a tuna. At the time I was not aware of the gag endings so I was just thinking “What the crap?” all the way through. However some of the gag endings, such as Bang or Carl’s are actually quite good and sometimes touching. Of course this brings up my next issue, the characters. One of the ones who really creeps me out is Jin Kisaragi, Ragna’s brother. I’m not sure if it’s just an intense rivalry or something else but every time the two show up in a scene together it’s essentially just Jin yelling out “WAHAHAHA! AT LAST DEAR BROTHER! WE MEET AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME FOR THE LAST TIME! IMA STAB YOU WITH MUH ICE KATANA!” This might seem weird, but Jin is not my least favorite character, no that is reserved for someone else, who I hate to my entire core. PLATINUUM THE FRACKING TRINITY, as shown on the right. She is essentially EVERY anime I hate, Sailor Moon, Arcanna Heart, and Fracking Mermaid Melody all rolled into an annoying body that I can’t wait to beat the crap out of! Heck, her pupils are FRACKING HEARTS! Do you also want to stave her head in in versus mode because I would so join you in that!

All in all, despite all of the bad parts of the game, it’s still very good. It’s not perfect but it’s always fun to play and most of the characters are likeable. I cannot recommend this game higher, go out and buy it if you have a 3DS or PlayStation. That’s it for the first edition of Fedranime reviews. Catch you later.