Anime Sunday: Long Running Series’ Issues

This week for Anime Sunday I’m covering an topic I find amusing and disappointing at the same time. It’s Long Running Series’ Issues!

What do I mean long running series?: I mean any series that airs weekly (minus any holidays that would preclude them airing) and has been doing so for more than half a year. This may mean that they have been running since they first aired, or it’s just a full years worth of episodes. Either way they often run into the same problems, although the latter is less likely to have one of them.

Filler: As any diehard Anime fan will tell you, filler is the bane of all long running shows and is the reason why One Piece is consistently at the top in terms of suggestions. That isn’t to mean One Piece isn’t without it’s faults, but it doesn’t do filler anymore and those arcs it did were short and sweet and weren’t bad. One Piece has another issue entirely which is almost the complete opposite of filler, it has a Chapter to Episode ratio of 1:1 which leads to episodes taking things cut from the Manga which leads to a slowdown in terms of action and plot pacing which leads to people feeling it takes forever.

Animation Gaffs: Pictured above is one of the more well known animation gaffs from Naruto, a show which has tons of them. One Piece does as well, if you compare the Manga to the Anime the quality in backgrounds is generally very noticeably different with the Manga having much crisper and more quality backgrounds. Bleach when it aired had it’s shares of gaffs as well. Any Anime will probably have a gaff or two, but they aren’t nearly as frequent or bad as long running series.

That’s it for this week’s Anime Sunday? What are some of your favorite Animation Gaffs or most hated filler arcs? Leave a comment below!

 

Manga Monday: How Come It’s Not Out This Week? An Explanation

I’m back with an answer to a question I hear asked all the time in person and on the internet for this week’s Manga Monday! It’s all about why your favorite series are not out yet!

Golden Week: First off this is the one most people don’t understand, Golden Week is a series of Holidays that all take place in the space of a single week in Japan. Almost no one works and it’s essentially a week long break for just about everyone. So magazines and publications that are published weekly aren’t published that week. Golden Week takes place at the end of April and beginning of May.

(Insert Publisher Name)’s Annual Break: Lots of companies have a single week where they and their company take a break from their weekly publications. This isn’t any big issue and stuff hasn’t happened to your series, it just is a weekly break for the Mangaka (Manga authors/artists) who work themselves to the point of exhaustion the rest of the  year. 

Hiatuses: That all being said some series just aren’t being serialized at the moment anymore, but they aren’t axed either. Some notable series that this has happened to are Hunter x Hunter and D. Gray Man, who have been on Indefinite Hiatus for years as of this writing (I don’t count the one chapter that D. Gray Man had released earlier this year as being re-serialized.) Most times this is due to the poor health of the Mangaka. Other times it’s because their Mangaka need time to do some research or need to come up with so many new things to draw that they don’t have the time to keep being published while keeping their quality up. Bleach, Naruto, and One Piece have all done this before and are probably the easiest and most notable examples.

Axed?: It’s a slang term for being discontinued due to poor sales, it most frequently happens to series published by Shueisha because of their incredibly hard and difficult requirements for staying serialized. Things like Iron Knight, which I personally enjoyed, were axed due to being unpopular.

That’s it for this week’s Manga Monday! I hope that answers some questions you may have had!

Anime Sunday: Bleach (Anime Review Only)

 

Normally I’d refrain from doing a review for a series like this, except that I’d like to do one on an Adaptation that I think went wrong today. So here’s my review for the Anime adaptation of Bleach by Kubo Tite.

 

Story Synopsis: Ichigo Kurosaki is a teenager in Karakura Town who is gifted with the ability to see spirits and has his life changed by the sudden appearance of a girl named Rukia Kuchiki. Rukia is a Shinigami (A Japanese Death God)—one of many entrusted with the preservation of flow of souls between the World of the Living and the Soul Society (尸魂界（ソウル·ソサエティ） Sōru Sosaeti) from where she originates from by fighting Hollows, dangerous lost souls who consume other souls. When she is severely wounded defending Ichigo from a Hollow she is pursuing, Rukia transfers a part of her Spirit Pressure (霊圧 Reiatsu) energy to enable Ichigo to fight in her stead as a substitute Shinigami while she is forced to remain in the World of Living until she can recover her strength.

Plot: The stuff that sticks to the actual material of the manga is amazing, if sometimes long-winded. It wouldn’t be such a problem if the producers didn’t have to pull stuff out of their butts every time they had to go into filler seasons, and they didn’t do it at incredibly poor times in terms of the plot. That said I actually enjoyed the first season of filler, but the rest were atrociously bad.

Characters: In terms of character development, Bleach is somewhat lacking. I’ve seen the series likened to gateway drugs, in that they introduce people to the world of Anime, and they than go find better series to watch afterwards. It’s not a bad description of the process and I agree with it for the most part. I enjoy the myriad characters that the series introduces, although one takes evil plans to a freaking insane level of Deus Ex Machina, it seems. The author could possibly explain the reasoning behind that characters actions in the manga later on, but it’s looking extremely doubtful at this point.

Art: I enjoy the art style after the genre shift from Comedy/Gag series to full blown battle series, as I think it’s better suited to the tone of the series as a whole. Prior to that I think Ichigo looks like a complete dork and poor Orihime is just a stupid clutz in terms of looks.

Music: The one thing that saves this series is it’s amazing soundtracks and various opening and ending themes that it uses. My personal favorite opening theme is Rolling Star by YUI. My favorite insert song is Number One, which plays whenever Ichigo does something really bad ass.

Overall: If you are willing to skip all the filler seasons after the first one, you’ll enjoy the series much more. It’s still not the best series out there in the Shonen genre, One Piece takes that crown easily in my opinion, but it’s better than most.

For those who like: Epic Battle Scenes, Epic Music in their Epic Battle Scenes, Okay character development.

Not for those who don’t like: Any of the above, or terrible filler seasons interspersed often throughout the series.

Retro Game Friday: Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne [Spoilers for Reign of Chaos]

This week on Retro Game Friday I’m going to talk about one of my favorite all time PC/Mac games ever, Warcraft III The Frozen Throne.  Spoilers after the jump