When I told my friends that a Disgaea anime was in the works a while back, they (okay, I only told one friend, so he) said that it's going to suck. Well, I just saw the first episode. It does suck in some aspects. However, cute loli Flonne being cute and loli, and hot loli Etna being all, um, hot and loli with a bunch of penguins as well as the intrisic silliness of Disgaea makes this show watchable, and fun. Right now, I think of it as a "guilty pleasure"…

Let's start with the opening: it's mediocre. The song is okay, but the animation is rather bad. In fact, it wasn't really animated at all. It felt like the Soul Society arc Bleach opening: pretty awesome with static characters moving around (in this case, Flonne and Etna) with some minor asskicking footage. The first thing I noticed though was that the CG and the bold, solid hand-drawn art of the game/show don't go together very well. The action also seemed kind of lackluster. In fact, they seemed dull compared to even the lowest-budget Bleach fights animated by Korean sweatshops. Of course, I could just be spoiled by action series like Samurai 7, so I watched on.

Nope. The fights suck. This is actually really appearant in the first fight scene: destroyed scenery do not get… destroyed. When someone was punched through three pillars, they still stood undamaged. It was as if they animated it without changing the background: they just added dust clouds when the character passed through the pillar. On a related note, the animation really, really sucks when it comes to portraying depth.

Now, we could say that they're being faithful to the game—in a stereotypical Japanese console SRPG characters do just get slapped over static backgrounds, and they move in very limited, two-dimenional ways as if they were cardboard cutouts. But that's an established artistic choice. It's clear that in the anime they tried to make this a real, fluidly moving three-dimensional world and just failed. These characters don't really lend themselves to a work like this anyway. Which brings me to the next point:

The characters and dialogue are awesome. One of the best things about Disgaea (I actually have not played it yet, but I did play La Pucelle Tactics and am playing through Phantom Brave now) is its character design. The bold, flat look works marvelously in the game, since most of the drama unfold via text and splashes and snapshots of the characters performing exaggerated gestures. It doesn't work very well when they have to move a lot, but it isn't too bad. The best parts of the show were points where the characters were simply conversing with each other without moving too much—going into a 5-frame cycle of a stereotypical anime "emote" doesn't count as moving—or when they are just standing there posing for battle. In other words, when the game translates well to the show: it works.

It seems that they switched the plot around a bit, which may keep the fans of the game in suspence or just make them hate the show. Gordon shows up in the first episode, and it was almost surreal. Sadly, the random humor wasn't too funny—this may have to do with the fact that I saw this right after watching episode 57 of Yakitate! Japan, and was already jaded by random hilarity—though there were a few good moments. Flonne shows up in episode 1, before Etna, actually. Flonne makes me happy, because she is just so adorably cute, especially when she wields an anti-aircraft missile launcher. The two (and by the next episode, three) main characters can pretty much carry the show.

The ending pretty much blowed. The song was below-average, and the animation was… um… Flash-made motion tweening. While the opening wasn't too animated, it did have an overwhelming number of awesome drawings of the main characters. But the ending was just boring.

Overall? It's fun, and it's cute, and it's got two of the best loli-girls in anime/gaming history. I will definitely keep watching it, though it'll be at a lower priority than some shows that I need to finish first. Maybe it'll tank in an episode or two, but as of now it's not too bad, once I ignore the bad animation and just focus on the characters themselves. Good thing it has the characters and the wacky plot to carry it though.

As far as game-based anime goes, though, Disgaea is one of the best I've seen. It's infinitely better than the Ragnarok Online anime, at the very least.

If you’re not familiar with Mai Otome: it is a show about lesbians endowed with amazingly obscene amounts of firepower and charged with the duty of protecting their masters. So, basically, it’s got maids, high-powered combat, lesbians, swords, and, um, lesbians. This show’s universe runs on the rule of “every problem can be solved given sufficient violence and/or lesbian sex”.

Its more action packed episodes (i.e., the last few episodes) are also great Exalted source material. The final episodes did Exalted vs. extra mass combat rather well.

Anyway, I squealed throughout the last two episodes, and here is why, with a ton of spoilers.

First of all, I did not take any screenshots. Why? Because Anime On My Mind has about 100 screenshots of the last two episodes of Mai Otome, complete with awesome commentary. Seriously, that blog’s got all the great moments of the last 40 minutes of the show in a nice little slideshow format. Go read if you want a humorous review.

As for me, I’ll just make a list of all the things that make me happy.

Note that Mai Otome is the sort of sequel to Mai Hime. It is essentially 26 episodes of fanservice. The last two episodes are essentially the most fanservice-like fanservice ever.

• Lesbians.
• Incest, with an underage girl.
• Natsuki kicking ass with a motorcycle and a pistol.
• Flashback of Shizuru and Tomoe having lesbian sex involving pacifiers and baby rattles.
• Random forbidden land of the ancients actually being a sandship and showing up with the main characters to save the day. It’s a giant rock, and it moves, like a ship.
• Mai showing up and obliterating an army of extras in two seconds.
• Natsuki showing off her special attack: a beautiful giant cannon, and activating it with “load silver cartridge”.
• New characters being introduced and old characters brought back every five seconds as “deus ex machina to save the protagonist until she obtains ultimate power”.
• Naked incestous lesbian embrace which gives the main character her ultimate power: a better haircut.
• Every. Single. Character. In. The. Show. Facing. Off. A. Giant. Tornado.
• Utterly random and plot-holed filled deus ex machinas that I don’t mind because they reference the previous show (Mai Hime).
• Shiho (pictured above) getting an armor that has a skull on her crotch.
• Once again seeing Shizuru use a double-bladed chain-katana. Yes, a chain-polearm for her in the last show wasn’t enough. She now has two swords, both of which are katanas, and chain-swords. (Her weapons make my panties moist, and I’m not wearing any.)
• Akane returns… with CATGIRL ARMOR.
• The old woman transforming into a hot, young blonde with… two swords. Seriously: nanomachines do not only make you awesome and sword-wieldy, but they make you young and hot too.
• The two main characters having a final showdown in space, despite their lack of space-breathing appratus. Maybe they are Batman?
• The final showdown being settled by giant fucking swords and then a embrace between fellow lesbians, naked, upon reentry of a planet’s atmosphere. Because the extreme heat melts armor but not skin.
• Incest taboo problem solved! Daddy has amnesia! Daughter does not need to stay a virgin so she can wield ultimate power (semem, you see, dissolve nanomachines) can now fuck him all she wants!

Seriously, I love this show so much. So very much.

B.A.P., short for Beware and Prepare. It's a webcomic. It's drawn by a rabid fangirl. It's the epitomy of "Mary Sue" "journal" comics. I mean, the sole premise of the strip is that the artist lives in the same house as several Yu-Gi-Oh characters who happen to be cute males. But I like it? Why? I'm not really sure…

The art, it's cute. It's not the best art ever, but it's well-drawn. The characters are well defined with these adorable solid lines and pastel colors. Oh, yes, the strip has a lot of pastel colors. But it's a case of pastels used correctly! It's not sickly, and not being sick is always a good thing. Not many people—especially rabid fangirls—can use pastels correctly, but she did it.

What draws (ha!) me to the comic though is the random plot. The characters are stereotypical, and in fact with the exception of Doc Oct are actually more interesting in this comic than their original shows—okay, Yu-Gi-Oh kind of sucked, but that's not the point. The plot's… eh… non-existent, but what do exist are some kind of adorably cuteness and some pretty funny metahumor. The fact that she acknowledges that it's a fangirlish deal and makes fun of it makes the comic funny, as opposed to sad.

I suppose it's one of those weird little charming little comics that keeps you coming back for more—not weekly, but more like once a month. Kind of like one of those otherwise decent / bad anime shows that is so cute and mysteriously attractive that you keep coming back for it.

That, and rabid fangirls are awesome. Squee!