I am still at the point of organizing my thoughts for this thread; which means I am retaining the limits of yesterday’s post on this topic, just to keep it somewhat under control.
The new Anime season has started in Tokyo, which means Crunchyroll has some new shows, and new episodes of some old favorites available to watch online. Besides watching on your computer, they have apps that play episodes on both iPhone/iTouch/iPads and Android tablets/phones, and many other devices. I watch mine on my iTouch, Cruz Tablet (Android), and Roku box, but I haven’t installed the disk on my Wii yet. All the Apps and software are free, and while you need a premium membership to watch the episodes the same day they air in Tokyo, you can watch them free a week afterwords. You do have to sign up for a free account if you want to comment, post, or review anything, but to just watch you don’t even need that.
One of the new titles that looks like it could be interesting is Kore wa Zombie desu ka?, about a high school kid who is snuffed by a serial killer and wakes up as a zombie servant/bodyguard to the beautiful necromancer who brought him back to undead (I couldn’t exactly say back to life, now could I?). This one gets my vote as the silliest show of the new season, in a good way. In the opening episode we find out the dead protagonist is searching for his killer to stop him from killing others, and we meet a second magical girl who’s magical transformation sequence is short-circuited by the presence of zombie boy. She winds up naked, he ends up wearing the dress and wielding the magical chainsaw; between them, they can just about defeat the monsters she normally battles. Gosick takes place in Europe in 1924, the story of a Japanese exchange student and a brilliant girl who attends no classes but lives in the library reading all the books and solving mysteries that baffle officials. I found the first episode very interesting as to characters and story line, and the teacher urging the protagonist to study ghosts and alchemists was a nice twist, but there is nothing about this that locks it to that year. The costumes are mostly from the 1860’s or the 1940s depending on the character, but nobody actually wears anything from the 1920s, and a few of the comments were also temporally displaced. Despite the story being unbound to its time, I fully intend to watch this series to see where it goes next; the first episode drew me right in.
I am not sure that Rio Rainbow Gate is genre or not, but the Blackjack Dealer and Roulette spinner known as the Goddess of Victory does seem to have supernatural powers and Ninja skills, so I will be following it beyond the first episode as well. And then there is Dragon Crisis!, which so far is the most fun out of the set (except the set is only a single episode per series at this point). In the opening half hour our normal high school student is pulled out of his summer school class by a beautiful second cousin just returned from America so he can help her steal a mysterious case from the Yakuza. In the ensuing chase and gun battle the case is shot open, and out tumbles the girl of his dreams who promptly torches the bad guys; it seems she is a dragon with all a dragons powers. She also has a vocabulary of one word, that being the protagonists name. It appears she has been dreaming of him as well. I look forward to seeing where this one goes.
Finally, I should say that Beelzebub did not impress me, despite having a wacky origin story. There are just too many things to watch to spend time viewing something that did not grab me; perhaps if I hear good things about it later I will give it another shot.