Akikan: dropped. Mediocre animation, stupid premise, stupider plot, stupid characters, you get the picture.
KuroKami: Where did the great martial arts animation go? Entering ep. 4, it looks like a stupid and unnecessary fight is about to happen. There are obviously plots within plots going on, but my major problem is Kuro. She’s a ditz, until anything relevant to her purpose is the subject, then she’s serious. The whipsawing just doesn’t work for me. Also, she hasn’t really explained much about what the Contract between her and Keita means or why she did it. Keita got involved in her fights of his own accord, but it was strictly because he’s a guy who doesn’t like seeing a girl get the crap beaten out of her. He didn’t want to get involved in a secret war, and given her link to the deaths around him, he sure as hell doesn’t want to be around Kuro. Unfortunately, since she chose to save him through the Contract, her fighting abilities are seriously degraded because of his dislike. Kuro needs to fill Keita in on what she is, and how he’s affected by the Contract. During the meal would have been a good time, but they wasted hours and did nothing.
Druaga: Still holding up. The occasionally-sly sense of humor is still there, surprisingly. “Eleven minutes until avalanche.” Heh. It’s not high art, but it’s working. We now know more about why the king is acting strangely; most importantly we know what the stakes are. They’re not “suceed or die.” They’re “suceed and die.” Oops.
Asu no Yoichi: Woo! Episode 3 found the fanservice! It’s otherwise not worth mentioning, I’m just fast-forwarding through it. I might be so kind as to add framegrabs, or you could go here. (They’re kind of tame, though, and I note some screams of disappointment in comparison to the manga…) Yes, I am an episode behind, since I have to wait on fansubs.
Chrome Shelled Reigos: It was one episode and out. Good decision; it appears the random flashbacks continued. I think the first episode had three, all interwoven with the current timeframe.
Might be going back on hiatus; at the very least posting is going to remain slow.
If Bandai Entertainment is to be believed, Kurokami is a 20+ episode series; it’s damned hard to maintain that kind of quality in an action series over that many episodes, especially if you’re putting a full-fledged fight in every single episode, which Sunrise has done through the first four episodes (episode 5 too from the look of things). I’d like to see them take a breather from the frenetic action and give us a character- or exposition-focused episode every so often.
Well, it’s supposed to be an action series. I guess they’re determined to deliver the action.