Shaman King, Sword Art Online, and Space Brothers

I’ve been checking out a bunch of new AND old anime and this week I watched 3. These won’t be super in-depth reviews, since I haven’t finished all of them, but these posts will be more like a “check out this new anime and let’s watch these together” kind of thing.

SHAMAN KING

This is the oldest shounen/shonen of the bunch. A typical shonen is an anime that is geared towards young boys, but shonen animes are my favorite (which is why I love One Piece, Bleach and Naruto along with the rest of the horde).

Taken from Wiki:

Manta Oyamada, a shrimpy, studious, yet cowardly, middle-school student from Tokyo, attempts a shortcut one night through the graveyard to get home after a late night of cram school. While travelling through it, he encounters Yoh Asakura and his “companions”: a graveyard filled with ghosts. Yoh reveals himself to be a shaman, a medium between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Yoh also demonstrates shamans’ ability to unite with ghosts to achieve a shared goal. Quickly after meeting one another, Yoh and Manta become best friends while Yoh uses his shamanic abilities to help them out through various tasks.
The Shaman Fight is a battle held once every 500 years between competing shamans to choose a winner who will become the highly sought-after “Shaman King”, one who is able to contact the Great Spirit (the spirit that every soul will eventually go back to). The winner gains the ability to reshape the world in any way they want.

The Shaman King manga was serialized in 1998, and the anime began airing in 2003, which tells you that it’s OLD. Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed watching this and have gotten to episode 49 out of the total 64. I always enjoy shonen with a relatively small number of episodes because

1. They tend to be better-written
2. The fillers don’t ruin an otherwise perfectly good plot arc
3. They give you a good chunk of story in a relatively short amount of time

Shaman King embodies all of those qualities, but it’s not perfect. For example, some of its humor in the latter episodes include a team member Chocolove (whose seiyuu sounds suspiciously like Naruto) making semantics/pronunciation related jokes (the equivalent of an English Pun). Of course, this is a little hard to get into especially if you don’t watch a lot of anime and Japanese isn’t your first language. Despite this, the characters are easy to sympathize with, and they’re pretty well-developed considering they’re a bunch of shrimpy grade schoolers.

The art is a bit outdated, so prepare yourself for it if you plan to watch this anime. Some themes also tend to get repetitive, since I think the audience they’re targeting must be middle-school aged. Still, this anime remains a strong contender for best shonen even in 2012, so if you’re into shonen like I am, check it out.

Story: 8/10
Art: 6/10
Music: 6/10

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SPACE BROTHERS

I only started watching this anime, and I already love it.

From Wiki:

Space Brothers(宇宙兄弟 Uchū Kyōdai^?) is a Japanese manga series by Chūya Koyama serialized in Weekly Morning. It has been nominated twice for the Manga Taishō, in 2009 and 2010.In 2011, it won the award for best general manga at the 56th Shogakukan Manga Awards^[3] and at the Kodansha Manga Award (shared with Chica Umino’s March Comes in Like a Lion). An anime adaptation by A-1 Pictures began airing in Japan from April 1, 2012. It was adapted into a live action film that premiered on May 5, 2012.
The story follows two brothers, Mutta and Hibito Nanba, who, in the summer of 2006, discovered a UFO which flew to the moon. In 2025, as Hibito has managed to become an astronaut set to go to the moon, Mutta has not been so successful in achieving his dream of going to Mars. That is, until he is accepted to join an astronaut training program.

This is not a shonen, but I was surprised to find myself riveted to this anime. I don’t usually like stories with uber specific storylines or themes, since I sometimes feel this creates a limited avenue for storytelling, but that is absolutely not the case with Space Brothers. Even the star of the anime, a 32-year old burnout called Nanba Mutta, is the star simply because he is the least special, most ordinary, most nondescript human being you could meet. That alone already makes this anime seem like it’s going to bore you out of your mind, but it doesn’t. The art isn’t anything amazing either, but what this anime has in spades (that I couldn’t quite put my finger on at the start) is heart. After watching each episode you feel like you just shared in the personal growth that Nanba Mutta achieves, which makes him the best kind of protagonist - a relatable, imperfect human who never stops dreaming and improving.

The humor is also very subtle and not in-your-face, which the art complements perfectly.

Another thing I love about this anime is the MUSIC.

From the intro, outro, and all throughout each episode you get the distinct feeling that whoever directed the episodes put a lot of emphasis on timing the music justright. Which makes a lot of sense, considering this doesn’t have any flashy fights, effects, or anything to take away from each conversation. The music usually consists of woodwinds, orchestra, or piano themes, which are always in movies about space and starry skies. There is also the occasional punk-rock intro, which fits Nanba Mutta’s personality.

I wasn’t surprised to find out that Space Brothers is now a live-action film, because it’s the kind of anime that translates really well into human acting, so much that you forget it’s an anime and sometimes feel like you’re watching a really well-done dramedy.

Story: 9/10
Art: 8/10
Music: 9/10

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SWORD ART ONLINE

Sword Art Online (ソードアート・オンライン Sōdo Āto Onrain^?) is a Japanese light novel series by Reki Kawahara, with illustrations by Abec. It has been adapted into three manga, an anime and a video game.
In the year 2022, the Virtual reality Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (VRMMORPG), Sword Art Online (SAO), is released. With the Nerve Gear, a virtual reality helmet that stimulates the user’s five senses via their brain, players can experience and control their in-game characters with their minds.
On November 6, 2022, all the players log in for the first time, and subsequently discover that they are unable to log out. They are then informed by Kayaba Akihiko, the creator of SAO, that if they wish to be free, they must reach the 100th floor of the game’s tower and defeat the final boss. However, if their avatars die in-game, their bodies will also die in the real world. The story follows Kirito, a skilled player who is determined to beat the game. As the game progresses, Kirito eventually befriends a female player named Asuna who becomes his partner and lover. After the duo discover the identity of Kayaba’s avatar in SAO, they confront and defeat him, freeing themselves and the other players from the game.

I just started watching this anime as well, and I love it, despite my misgivings about the latest story arc. I have currently watched up to episode 18, and am waiting with the rest of the world for the next installment.

First thing you notice when you watch this anime is that the art is ridiculously good.

The anime works around a concept that hits surprisingly close to home because MMORPG’s are currently very popular in real life, so it’s not illogical to assume that the next step in gaming is to actually BE your pixelized avatar and do all the role playing yourself, inside your own virtual body. Think of it as a cross between the Matrix, Surrogates, Sims, and Ragnarok all at once.

Also because the anime is about a virtual fantasy world, the art is amazing, and never lazy.

Fight scenes aren’t as flashy as you might expect, even with all the nice sparkly effects, so don’t expect something along the lines of Bleach or Naruto where every scene is a big drawn-out fight. Just like MMORPG’s aren’t always about fighting the bosses on every level, this anime takes advantage of the gamer’s natural tendency to want to explore strange new worlds and discover new things rather than get into confrontations all the time.

It’s still roughly categorized as a shonen, but it’s also a coming of age and growing up story, so you get a lot of blushing girls, crushes on senpais, romantic themes and the occasional boob-level shot. Nothing as in your face as Fairy Tail or High School of The Dead boob shots, though.

Back to my storyline complaint. So here you have a perfectly good premise, amazing art, pretty good pacing, and you decide to introduce an incestous theme. That’s right, in the latest arc, the protagonist Kirito has a weird underlying incest subplot with his sibling, Suguha (who is actually his cousin). This may seem a little less weird when you know that in Japan, marriage between first cousins is permitted, but it is still unnecessarily gross in my opinion. Also, there’s no real incest in the arc, but it’s implied enough to make you uncomfortable.

However, nothing has yet developed to make that uncomfortable feeling turn into disgust in my case, so I’m willing to give it a chance, especially since the rest of it is so good.

Story: 7/10
Art: 9/10
Music: 8/10

Check back for more anime reviews! Ja ne!








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