Thought #1: An exact cross between Yu Yu Hakusho and Naruto, doesn’t have the extra-long duels of the latter but compensates for it with the great abundance of rather long duels which was the serious disappointment in the former. A tournament where people fight in 5 on 5 teams with each fight taking an episode and 6 matches required to get to the end can take more than 30 episodes this way, which makes one really wish to fastforward the thing even faster. Not particularily surprising, seeing as this series was released between the two and probably represents an important evolutionary step in martial action series.
Thought #2: One of the rare shows that has the hero happily in love since the very first episodes, and has a mother which acts as a mentor, which combination, I believe, is unique to this series. Anime characters tend to have dead mothers, no on-screen mothers or embarrassing mothers of varying types. This one’s not only young and sexy but also pretty dangerous and rather motherly.
Thought #3: The key animators seem to change between episodes, and key animation is rather disappointing in general in some of them, which is not good.
Thought #4: Not as bad as I worried it would be, though, quite enjoyable if you have a fastforward button. If you don’t, you have to be a real fan.
Thought #5: This was probably the last major series before the philosophy of fighting for adrenaline took over martial action genre completely - in here that shows up only near the end and only episodically. These guys still fight for something important, like protecting people, values and objects. This has been sorely missing lately.
Final word: Once again, watch it to the end first before deciding whether to burn it on the media for keeping or not. If you can’t like it enough to see it to the end, probably you don’t need it in your archives anyway.
Post a Comment