The Demon King Piccolo arc comes to a close (though there is a lengthy bit of part-canon, part-filler still to come after it…) with the big rematch between Goku and the titular Demon King and once again it contains a lot of tropes that would become the norm once a Z gets added onto the anime’s title, but the first few episodes are filler-rific, so… it’s not all good (though that also rings a bell in terms of DBZ…). Let’s take a look then!
Continue reading
After the shocking cliffhanger (well, shocking at the time, Krillin being dead isn’t a big surprise as a show goes on…) we move on to the Demon King Piccolo arc, a story arc that has quite a few firsts that will become extremely commonplace as the show moves forward… plus the debut of Yajirobe! Who doesn’t like Yajirobe?! … Anyway, let’s take a look at the first ten episodes, shall we?
Continue reading
The second half of the 22nd Tenkaichi Tournament is full of great action and the central focus on Tenshinhan’s struggle with his morality is great, so while it still has moments of filler this is a far better experience. Plus that infamous cliffhanger ending! Let’s take a look…
Continue reading
Time to kick off a run of five chunks of original Dragon Ball that take us through to the end of Goku’s screentime as a child (not including the four Dragon Ball films I’ll tackle later, anyway… or Dragon Ball GT for that matter!) The 22nd Tenkaichi Tournament is where the series really starts focusing on action over comedy and thanks to massive blasts of energy still being rare there is a greater focus on hand-to-hand combat, too… at least in the later fights, sadly this arc is also mired with lots of filler that kills a lot of a pacing, especially in this first half. How badly does that effect things? Let’s find out!
Continue reading
The back half of S-CRY-ed is a far more entertaining experience than the first half, though once again I will say the show hasn’t aged well compared to my memory of it. Still as things escalate towards a finale the “enemy of the week” format is dropped entirely and it makes for a more interesting time, if nothing else. Let’s take a look!
Continue reading
As a bit of a break from long-running adaptations I saw S-CRY-ed had been added to Crunchyroll here in the UK a while ago and I remembered really enjoying the series when it aired on the ill-fated Anime Central channel many years ago, so I decided to give it a re-watch! I have to say the first half here takes a while to get going and me fourteen years later is now far more familiar with JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and therefore the similarity of the Alter powers seen here to the Stand powers from that are extremely apparent! Still, let’s have a look!
Continue reading
I will get round of covering all of JoJo’s at some point on this blog, including Stone Ocean in far more spoilery detail, but for now my spoiler-free (unless you’ve been avoiding the trailers, I guess) review of Stone Ocean’s first twelve episodes for Anime UK News can be found by clicking HERE.
Good fun, as the series always tends to be…
In terms of the “Sinners of the System” mini-films this was the big one, not just because it’s the longest but because it focuses on Shinya Kogami, the co-protagonist of the original Psycho-Pass and fan favourite, showing us how he goes from wandering mercenary back to Japan. It’s got the longest title, with “On the Other Side of Love and Hate” being the reason I dropped putting the titles in the thumbnails for these films… also it has the biggest scope out of the three stories and some really great animation, so let’s take a look to see if the story matches up to it!
Continue reading
The next mini-movie in the Psych-Pass: Sinners of the System run focuses on enforcer Teppei Sugo and the events that led him from an army man to “disgraced” enforcer as he mulls over an offer to join Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He never stood out as a character in the series, to the point where I can’t even remember him BEING in the original series, but this certainly did a good job of giving me a reason to care about him in the future! Let’s take a look…
Continue reading
One day on this blog I’ll get to write about how much I loved the original Psycho-Pass series. It blew me away and had me hooked for the whole thing, so much so that even though I didn’t really get on with 2, the movie or 3 to varying degrees I still eagerly watched each one in the hopes it might find its form again. Well, here we are, a Blu-ray release of three stand-alone films called “Sinners of the System”. Will any of these recapture the magic? Let’s find out over the next three weeks! “Case 01” is focused on Mika Shimotsuki before she took control of the main team and also shines more light on Inspector-turned-Enforcer Nobuchika Ginoza…
Continue reading
Hogan Reviews 