Gokigenyou

This will happen to you if you watch too much Maria-sama ga Miteru

After having a nice kraft dinner, I proceeded to finish the last few episodes of Maria-sama ga Miteru 4th Season (I don’t even know how to pronounce it). Hence, bring my marathon of the whole Maria-sama (excluding the Specials from the 4th season) to and end. In conclusion, despite the fact that this anime is shoujo anime, I found myself enjoying the series (maybe it is because this anime is shoujo anime, that everyone have a bit more character depth and that they don’t provide as much fanservice as other anime *cough*Saki*cough).

Even though this series have a huge yuri overtune, it wasn’t as bad as Saki, mostly because it is both backed by character depth, has a reason for their dependence for each other, and it is elegant. Obviously I would not fall for yuri that easily, but…they are so elegant. ヽ(´▽`)/

I remembered reading that this anime is very similar to ARIA (one of my favorite anime of all time, OF ALL TIME!), and in some degree it is true. Like ARIA, the pacing of this anime is quite slow, and that it will develop one problem and takes either the whole episode or two to, well, get over the issue, which usually is handled in a anti-climax way. But different from ARIA, Maria-sama seem to take every small issue, and exaggerate it, only to, again, end it with something simple. Though I did say that they like to exaggerate really small issues, the did it in an elegant way, keeping in tone of the anime, making it seems is if it was natural and not forced. In short, its another slow paced slice-of-life kind of anime, but just at lot more elegant.

The main focus of the whole series is around Yumi-chan (voiced by Ueda Kana ヽ(´▽`)/ ). She started off as a normal girl that had a hidden crush on her going-to-be onee-sama, Sachiko, then continued till her second year, where she was lifted to a high position from the student body. Of all the characters in the series, Yumi had the most character development, both her inner personality and the other’s view of her. Without watching development of Yumi, I think I would be quite surprised on how much Yumi actually changed by the end of the 4th season. And this reflects on one of the strengths of this series, the strong character depth and character development.

Yuri Overload [Victim: Saki]

I watched Saki because I needed some push for me to start learning Japanese Mahjong. While I did get that push by the end of the anime, I also got too much of something else: suggestive yuri.

I’m all for deepening of character relationship between the characters and of character background of the character, which they included seemed enough seeing how the anime had to balance the amount of gameplay and the amount of character background and development of them. Having those two in the anime would be good enough, and I would have finished the anime quite satisfied; yet, to attract and keep the audiences watching, they had to add ecchi and yuri overtone to almost all of the character interaction outside the game.

Gundam F91

As my Gundam Marathon continues, my next show was Mobile Suit Gundam F91, a movie that follows a new protagnist called Seabook Amo in his struggle to battle against the new forces of Crossbone Vanguard. As most reviews I read before have said that, because this anime was first written as a 50 episodes anime and was fitted into a movie, it was too fast, too rushed. With that mindset, I went into the anime prepared to be disappointed. Man, I was wrong.

While I was disappointed on the pacing, I found it more enjoyable than the other Gundam shows I have seen before (just finished ZZ Gundam, and had watched Char’s Counterattack). I personally found that, if they had expanded the storyline just a bit more, maybe to a 26 episode TV anime, it might have up there with Mobile Suit Gundam and Z Gundam.