End Autumn 2010 Anime Review

This Autumn season has many interesting anime that I have not seen in a while. I will be covering the review of the entire year later on as I need to gather info since it has been quite a while, particularly Winter and Spring seasons. All of my reviews do not include anime that I do not watch at all, for as far I can remember. I might do a separate review for OVAs, movies, and DVD/BD-only episodes that are released outside the year of the first TV broadcast of final regular episode.

The anime listed below are sorted by what's on my mind the most at the time of writing, and only lists what I had watched.

俺の妹がこんなに可愛いわけがない (There's no way my sister can be this cute)
Category: anime in an anime, otaku, slice of life, siblings
Episodes watched: 12 (completed)

Better known by it's unofficial shortened name of OreImo, this is one of the few anime for quite a while. Though I saw some points that could be improved on, this could be overlooked by everything else.

OreImo is about a middle school die-hard visual novel (rated 18 years and above) on sibling relationship and magic girl anime fan so secret that you couldn't even tell until her brother spotted an anime cover with an eroge disc inside lying around.

To make sure that this secret is not made known to anyone else, especially their father, she made him have "life counseling" sessions, which is just things like making him play her games or heading out to Akiba (Akihabara) to buy her stuff. The money to support her hobby comes from her job as a model.

The opening and ending animation changes with every episode, though the ending animation and song are completely different. There's animation for the opening, but the ending is (mostly) panning around an image of a character art with effects added. That same artwork appears in the background of the sponsor screen after the show, or posters included with the ending song album included with the video disc.

This anime has de-emphasized of the school life as, except for Kirino's close friends and Kyousuke's childhood friend, they don't really show much of what most school-going anime usually has. It's been reduced to nothing more than the place they meet..

There has been announced that there are additional 3 DVD-only episodes, with one being an alternate version of episode 12, but nothing else is known about them other than episode 11 being the determining factor.

Would like to see more of Kirino with black hair though.

とある魔術の禁書目録Ⅱ (A Certain Catalog of Forbidden Magic 2)
Category: Magic, high school, large school, futuristic, religion/cult, science research, several story arches
Episodes watched: 11 (ongoing)

Touma and Mikoto in the left-center. Their parents are seated across.

Picking up on where season 1 left off, this is about a guy with no magical abilities but a mysterious ability to block off or disable magic powers. It's got less of "have most of an episode spent on talking/fighting at the same place" and improvement on character design. The only time we see the characters in their winter uniform are in the cover art of the novel, the manga, and a flashback of the bank robbery scene about 1.5 years before the current timeline in Railgun.

It's spin-off based on the secondary characters (Misaka Mikoto and Shirai Kuroko), Railgun, however, still seems like a better title to watch. Though that takes about the same time frame and occasional appearance of Touma in there, we don't see the the same thing happening in both. Uiharu made an actual appearance in Index2, but not Saten. Though these two did make a brief appearance in Index season 1, more noticeably in both the 1st and 2nd opening.

There are about another 12 or so episodes extending into the Winter 2011 season, and there are rumors of a second Railgun season being made.

神のみぞ知るセカイ (The World God Only Knows)
Category: creatures from above, game addict, several story arches, odd character outfits, high school
Episodes watched: 4 (dropped)

Well, I'm not saying that I dropped this because I don't like it, but this anime seems to slip my mind completely due to the difficulty of being able to watch this and with anime like the two mentioned above that attracts more of my attention. I might watch this later, but I won't review it when I'm done with it except maybe as a brief insignificant tweet.

For the characters, well... I have forgotten their names by now. One is a (visual novel) game addict that he even plays them in the middle of lessons and prefers girls in his games over "three dimensional" ones. The male school uniform reminded me of a character of a movie I watch when I was younger, holding what is obviously a PSP (but calls it by a different name) he plays his games on. The female character is a deity of some sort from the sky or something that is assigned to him as part of their quest to remove the evil spirits residing in the hearts of girls. The only way to get it out is to have the girls to fall in love with him.

Opening animation reminded me of Eden of the East with how the background animation is done.

アマガミSS (Amagami SS)
(This is a 25-episode series as part of the Summer Anime lineup)
Category: several story arches, high school, story that goes around in circles, revolves around Christmas
Episodes Watched: 20 (dropped)

Opening for the latter half of the series

Well, yes, 20 is such a large number for me to drop this anime, but it seems to go very much along the same lines but with a different girl and a different perspective. The Sae story arc (episode 5-8) was a big shock as it suddenly has a narrator only for this arc and disappears again in the latter episodes.

Well, maybe my expectations was kind of high for me to drop this. I've seen TV drama that are more interesting to watch and this is nothing more than a big disappointment that looked as though it's following a template repeated several times. This could be inherited from the visual novel having several different routes leading to different endings, but who wants to watch the same thing 6 times in different ways? (I had watch through all 8 "Endless Eight" episodes of Suzumiya Haruhi [Spring 2009 renewal]) From the very beginning, I wanted to drop this since the 4th episode for having such a rushed ending, but continued on to see what the other arches are like. I don't know what's with the (covered) nudity of the featured girls in the ending too. The second opening was the only thing I liked for being a big improvement over the previous, though the part where the line "ハニかんで見つめあった 優しいキモチ溢れた" is being said keeps poping up in my mind.

えむえむっ！(MM!)
Category: story that goes around in circles, high school, club activities, crazy behavior, cross-dressing, revealing costumes, near-incest
Episodes Watched: about 4-5 (dropped)

This opening kind of tells you what the anime is like. Apart from minor changes to some scenes and some weird sound effects added to the music, it's not much different from the first opening.

Err... You can tell at a glance that this is not what I would like to watch.

FORTUNE ARTERIAL ～赤い約束～ (Fortune Arterial: Akai Yakusoku)
Category: large school, vampires
Episodes Watched: first few episodes (dropped)

I found this difficult to pick up with the strange setting and themes I found disturbing.