Thursday, May 24, 2012

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.

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