Kazemakase Tsukikage Ran - samurai classics

After a while, I have a new review, but about older anime. Kazemakase Tsukikage Ran is a short series about  two women on the endless journey around the Japan. The story is episodic, only things that connects all episodes together are traveling, empty pockets and loads of sake (and of course two heroines).


There is no mainstream story, like I said before, the story is episodic, and tells about two women heroines - about Tsukikage Ran, a very skilled female samurai, who rather calls herself "mere beautiful drifter" instead of samurai, and she loves sake. The second one is Meow, female martial artist - master of the "Iron Cat Fist style" , and she's the one who tooks care of the paying for a sake, even though she's pretty much poor like Lady Ran. Together they travel from town to town on a whim, unwillingly (... sometimes willingly) encountering criminals, bandits and corrupted officials in each episode. Each episode contains action part, sake drinking part, and funny part. The setting of the story is about the end of 18th century, fights are not insane like in superpower animes, and it's in style of classic samurai movies from Japan. Even thought it's comedy, jokes itself are not as much funny as the characters themself.

Meow (left) and Lady Ran (right)

I would recommend this anime to anyone, who wants to take a rest of ecchi comedies and superpower cliche, or like samurai (or Japan) history. Since this anime was aired in the year 2000, the animation is not as perfect as newer ones, but it's no so bad as cause of giving up to watch this. The series wasn't awesome nor it was bad.


STORY:                   6/10
CHARACTERS:        7/10
ANIMATION:            6/10
OVERALL:               6/10

Bleach continues?

Ok, it looks like the story will finaly continue, today in the next-episode prewiew appeared a man named Ginjo, who plays big part in the upcoming continuation of the story. I can't say this for sure, but the next episode will be probably half-filler pointing to a main story. Everyone who was waiting not watching the fillers, let's celebrate, and be sure to see next weeks episode!

Ginjo

Bleach filler ends?

Finally, it seems that the side-story filler is ending today, or next week at most. I think after that there will be one or two more episodes with dumb stuff not related to currently airing filler, nor main-story, and after a long pause, the Bleach will continue after Aizen's imprisonment.

For those who don't read manga, I can only say that it's gonna be Legen.... wait for it ..... dary?! No, that's not the right word here, I think you'll just be suprised how this gonna turn out... I'm not gonna spoil you, just wait for it!

What do you think? How many "one-episode-dumb-fillers" until the main story continues? None, or five, or more? Guess in the comments :)

Koe de Oshigoto! - extreme embarassment

Have you ever played an eroge? No? You don't know what eroge is? Eroge is an abbreviation of Erotic Game, and you probably know by now, that the goal in the game is to hook up with girls...
Koe de Oshigoto! The Animation is about voice acting these games. Yeah, original theme for an anime, isn't it?

Koe de Oshigoto! The Animation

At first I thought it will be some kind of "hard-ecchi" with typical fan-service, story which presents nothing new and the whole anime will be just a copy of "Ecchi template" that 90% of ecchi anime uses. But I was wrong. Without a doubt, it is original, new, fresh, something that you haven't seen anywhere... Until now!


The story is about 16 years old Aoyagi Kanna. She's just ordinary high school girl, that is, until her older sister Yayoi offers her a job at her company, which makes eroge. Yayoi wants Kanna to become eroge seiyuu (seiyuu = voice actress). Kanna immediately refuses, but when she learns from her mother about Yayoi saving money for her studies, she decides to try her best as an eroge seiyuu and help Yayoi out. As she is just a young girl without experience with eroge, not to mention experience with boys, it will be difficult beginnings. Just imagine how embarassed can "pure" girl at this age get, when she has to say perverted stuff in front of people she knows...

I was suprised how much I enjoyed watching it. It's not like I enjoyed it because it is ecchi and there are lots of perverted phrases. I would say the main reason was that the whole idea is original. It's like unrailed train among trains on ecchi railway...

This OVA series has 2 episodes so far, and it is not complete yet. More episodes will be released, though I don't know when (yet).



STORY:                   8/10
CHARACTERS:        9/10
ANIMATION:            9/10
OVERALL:               9/10

Learn Chinese in 5 minutes

Few minutes ago, friend send me epic Chinese dictionary, with the title "Learn Chinese in 5 minutes" , after few lines, I couldn't laugh more. Althought, I think the "Vietnamese" would be more suited here, than the Chinese (You won't uderstant why, if you're not from the Czech Rep.), nothing changes the fact, it made me laugh out loud... I couldn't resist to share it... Here you go:

Usagi Drop - pure cuteness

Forget about fights, super-powers, panty-shots, big breasts and robots. Usagi Drop is real-life drama about rising a child, and addapting to a new life-style. Even though it doesn't seem to be a typical  theme for anime series, you'll find it interesting and funny. As I watched first episodes, I couldn't resist it's cuteness and  beautiful animation.

Kaga Rin

The story begins, when Daikichi's (man in his 30's) grandfather dies at the age of  79 years. At this time, no one in his family had the slightest idea about old man's secret. He had a daughter, 6 years old Rin. The family is schocked and embarassed about him having a child at such age, and no one knows what to do with this situation. Daikichi is disgusted by the thought of giving Rin away to adoption, or worse - to an orphanage. So he decides to take care of her himself. As he is single, and has no idea how to rise a kid, the difficult journey lies before him. Buying clothes, looking for a kindergarden and then school, not to mention difficult conversations between two generations.  Daikichi  is nor father or brother, and tries his best to get along with Rin. He even talk to his superiors to degrade him from a manager to a lower post, with fixed working hours, so he have time to take care of his new daughter. As time passes, they get along pretty well, and Daikichi decides to contact her mother...

Daikichi and Rin

The animation itself is really beutifull, and character desing is cute, and will be like a magnet to your eyes.

Even thought it's drama, there's plenty of funny scenes, which will make you smile. The theme of Usagi Drop is not quite the "my teritory", because it's 100% reality based story, but after just two episodes, I realized that it's pretty good. The series has 11 episodes, and finished this week. I would recommend it to older watchers, who can understand the diffiulty of this situation.

Now let's get to the rankings:

STORY:                    8/10
CHARACTERS:         9/10
ANIMATION:           10/10
OVERALL:               9/10

My top 5 characters

Before I start reviewing some anime series, I would like to present you with my TOP male and female characters, so you got to know a little about me as anime fan.

The female TOP 5:

1. Revy    (Black Lagoon)
2. Aisaka Taiga    (Toradora!)
3. Kaname Chidori    (Full Metal Panic!)
4. Lucy    (Elfen Lied)
5. Louise Francoise Le Blanc De La Valliere    (Zero no Tsukaima)

Yeah, you got it right - I like TSUNDERE :)

Revy (Black Lagoon)

The male TOP 5:

1. Harima Kenji   (School Rumble)
2. Sagara Sousuke    (Full Metal Panic!)
3. Lelouch vi Britania   (Code Geass)
4. Mugen    (Samurai Champloo)
5. Bacchi-gu    (Green Green)

Well, in the male TOP  it wasn't very easy to choose, since the 4th and 5th place had about 10 candidates :)

Harima Kenji (School Rumble)

That would be all for now, you can comment you TOP 5's :) See ya later.

Blog update

Good afternoon everyone, today I made some updates in my blog...

Generaly, i was playing with design : adding some background, logo , etc. which took technicaly no time, but since I wanted to make a menu under the header logo, I had to spend quite time playing with it. The biggest problem is, that Google is somehow 15 years behind other blog sites. Yeah, it's right - Google's blog doesn't have any "categories" for your posts , nor supports creating your own menu with categories, only thing you can do with it, is to make "pages" which are something else , but can be displayed as "menu" under the header - BUT the pages itself, can contain only some text , pictures or so... I didn't want to spend much time trying if it can hadle any scripts or not (i think it can't), so I had to create my own menu (hope you like it) with my own   "fake categories" using TAGS. After I finished, I encoutered another problems : At first ,  I placed my menu into a widget under the header. You want to know what happened? This widget is not as wide as the header logo, so it was displaced about 40 pixels to the right, and I could't do anything about this. So i told myselft: "Screw some shitty widget, let's make it right into the theme's html script." After few minutes of  browsing  and searching through CSS/HTML code of this theme, I finaly got a grasp of how it works, and found the line i was looking for (don't worry, there will be another problem coming up). I placed my menu here , and had to make links using tag search. Unfortunatelly, I had to upload graphic parts of my menu to my own external FTP , since I haven't found some ftp-like client here, which would allow me to upload graphic contents for the design of my blog. But using it externaly from my ftp was the best, fastest and most comfortable solution I came up at the time.

 I hope Google will improve their tools, so the blogs will be much easier to handle by users, who doesn't have much (or any) experience with HTML / CSS . Good luck .

Dota - U can't touch this!

Here's the first videoclip i ever made, it's not something extra, to be honest, I was just testing Fraps software and Windows movie maker (not really the best software). I tried my best to make funny clip, so I hope you at least smiled :)

Hello everyone!

My friend made a blog about a month ago, so I decided to make my own too. I'm ZeO (this nickname came up from my former  nickname Zealot, which was apparently too long for my friends, so they somehow started to call me ZeO instead...) and I'm a boy living in the Czech Republic , a small country with  beautiful women and the best Beer (yeah, big fat B!) in the world... Anyway, I don't think anyone cares about introductions, so let's skip it and check what will this blog be about.

I'm gonna write (and review) about Anime, Games, Japan, Otaku-culture, some interesting personal stories, and other curiosities which I find interesting to publish. I will also present videos ( AMV - anime music video, GMV - game music video, funny clips, etc. which have something to do with Anime and (or) Games) and also my own videos and drawings (don't expect it very often - I don't have that much time).

If you're an Otaku, or you just like Anime, Games, Japan and similar stuff, be sure to follow me. I hope you will enjoy reading this blog !