Autumn 2010 – First Impressions (Hakuouki Hekketsuroku & Kuragehime)

At long fecking last!  It’s the last of these ‘First Impressions’ posts (for another season at least).  To wrap up the Autumn season its time for the fashionably late Noitamina show Kuragehime and the just plain late Hakuouki Hekketsuroku.

Hakuouki Hekketsuroku (Hakuouki S2)

Sequel time then – I’ll be watching this since I managed to stick out S1 in spite of its awful pacing and irritatingly passive female lead…..because it was pretty and I am shallow 😛 This episode manages to quickly recap the events of S1 (just as well since I had basically forgotten most of it) and get the plot moving in a pretty active direction (maybe all that tedious setup from S1 is finally paying off!?). The characters are still very shallow, but I do like them – Chizuru still needs an awful lot of work though, the girl is so pitifully useless it’s really quite annoying; sometimes I think the series would be better off without her (although then it would essentially be BL instead of reverse harem…..actually I quite like that idea).

Animation quality is of the same standard as S1 – DEEN do a surprisingly good job with this series in terms of direction and design; it’s still very pretty. Characters get a costume upgrade and haircuts for this season, and I really like the new character designs – yay for bishie eyecandy!  Cast is all back so no complaints about the voice acting. New OP is a surprisingly upbeat number which I hope heralds a bit more action for this season (animation seems to hint that Chizuru may actually do something other than whine and need saving!), and the ED is a nice ballad.

Overall a fairly promising start, I will be watching regardless but it would be nice if this show could deliver something interesting in addition to the bishie eyecandy (but won’t get my hopes up too far).

 

Kuragehime

Looks like the Noitamina timeslot can chalk up another hit, this first episode of Kuragehime was brilliant – its got just the right amount of comedy, character drama and quirkiness. I was slightly concerned that this would be just another ‘otaku show’ with a run of the mill Trap fired in for the craic, but Kuragehime has excellent scripting and the characters seem to have more to them than just their lol!quirk obsession. I particularly liked the Trap, in that he doesn’t really seem to care if everyone knows he’s cross-dressing – that kind of lax attitude and complete lack of shame/embarrassment is something of a rarity and a nice change considering the amount of Traps in anime recently. I’m very much looking forward to the rest of this show – if they keep the writing as snappy as it was in this first episode, this series will be an absolute gem.

On the production front, the animation is as solid as you would expect from Brains Base. The character designs are interesting and quite stylised – its nice to see something a bit different from the standard. Great cast on board – Kana Hanazawa seems to be everywhere these days and I can’t profess to be a fan of her brand of squeakiness, but she does a good job as Tsukimi. I loved the OP – great song, but the animation of all these parodies of Hollywood classics put a huge smile on my face. The ED has very simple animation, but again great song.

So a very solid opening episode for Kuragehime – I’m very pleased it turned out so well since this was one of the shows I was particularly looking forward to. Hopefully it will continue to be as fun for the rest of its run.