"Attack on Titan" Review

Hello, out there.  If you couldn't already guess from the picture (or the title), today I will be reviewing Attack on Titan, one of the biggest smash-hit anime I've ever seen.

In a strange new (possibly future) world, mankind has been eaten and hunted to the brink of extinction.  By what, you ask?  By creatures like our little friend I have pictured here-the Titans.  These colossal humanoid creatures are nigh-indestructible, unpredictable and hungry for human flesh.

The final vestiges of humanity have retreated into a massive city with three protective walls.  This is where our story begins.

Hero Ehren Yeager, his cowardly genius friend Armin Arlehrt and the moderately-attractive Mikasa Ackerman have all joined an expedition/Titan-repellent force known as the Survey Corps.  This motley crew of warriors in their gas-powered, super-jumping flight gear, is sworn to defend their city from those few Titans who break through, as well as to try and take back their world.

Ehren, Armin and Mikasa are also doing this to take revenge on the monsters who slaughtered their family and friends several years before the story actually started.

Along the way, we also discover the existence of people who can transform into Titans (for good or evil) and a fanatical cult dedicated to worshipping them [the Titans].

All in all, it's a pretty decent series, as far as I'm concerned, though that isn't to say that it's not without its faults.

Somehow, despite the amount of time that the series has gone on, the Internet is still saying that there is no new information on the actual Titans themselves.  Their existence and where they came from remains a complete mystery, which is infuriating to me.  I like to have things explained for me right away, and to have the answers to all my questions delivered right to me and all wrapped up in a nice little bow.

That, and the series itself (at least the manga) seems a tad bit slow-moving.  Perhaps it's that the still and silent manga can't really convey all the "whoosh" and all the explosions and what-have-you in a way that I can really appreciate.  I still have yet to watch the anime, though I will most likely be watching it as the Funimation dub.  To me, as a manga, it pretty much seems all military-like: "This operation will take 15 minutes that we don't have, and it will take X minutes for Group Y to move to Point Z", etc.

Some people call this horror, but it hardly seems that way to me.  In point of fact, I only picked it up a year or two ago at the library just because it was something new on the shelves.

It isn't great, but I'll stick with it.  I leave you people free to take it or leave it as you please.  Let's hope that the anime version is good.

Manga Review: "Deadman Wonderland"

I was just down at Barnes and Noble the other day, and I saw a new volume of this series.  A few days later, I find that same volume available at my local library.

I think it came out a few years ago here in America, but then died out or something.  But it's recently made a comeback, especially with the Funimation dub of the anime coming out a year or two ago.  Greg Ayres, man.  That guy is good.

And, so we're all clear, we are talking about the blood-slinging adventure-horror series known as Deadman Wonderland.

Ordinary middle school student Ganta Igarashi is enjoying an ordinary day at school.  Suddenly, a mysterious humanoid creature only known as "The Red Man" somehow floats up to the third-floor window, breaks in, and violently slaughters all of Ganta's classmates using some unknown power.

Wrongly framed for the incident by a phony lawyer who is actually a crooked prison administrator, Ganta is sentenced to life imprisonment in the titular prison of Deadman Wonderland.  There, he discovers that The Red Man left him with some of his own powers during the attack, and Ganta is thrust into a series of life and death battles with similarly-powered fellow inmates known as Deadmen.  All the while searching for the one who slaughtered his friends.

The entire anime series only lasted for 12 or 13 episodes, but they were pretty good.  Unfortunately, it only covered material from the first 4 or 5 volumes.  They still had much further to go.  That is, at least according to the wikia.

I enjoyed Greg Ayres' portrayal of Ganta, first thing.  But then I began watching the drama and intensity unfold.  The battles are excellent, as well.  In point of fact, the blood-based Deadman powers from this anime directly influenced the abilities of Demon Sword wielder Chrona from Soul Eater, another series which I enjoy.

You wouldn't think there was a heck of a lot you could do with blood alone, but you'd be wrong.

Now that the anime is finished, I look forward to seeing how the story moves forward in the manga, beyond the place where the anime left off.  Reading how it all goes on the wikia is just too time-consuming, taking what you learn from one article and trying to connect it to the next.

Unlike Sword Art Online, this is a series that I highly recommend.

"Sword Art Online" Review

Hi!  Flatware Moth here, reviewing something that he just found new in the Graphic Novel section of his local library.

Sword Art Online has apparently become majorly popular for some reason, but, frankly, I just don't see it.

The story itself is an odd mix of the cliched and the stolen.  Anyone remember .Hack?  The one with the really realistic game that people could log into?  Well, that's about half the story.  The other half (or some other fraction of it, because the whole thing just feels like a big mishmash) is sort of "Battle Royale" -ish, in that the game's designer made it without a Log Off button.  The players are now trapped inside the game and must battle their way through 100 levels of a floating castle-world-thing in order to escape.

And, true to video-game-becomes-real-life cliche, if you ever die in the game, you die for real.  It's the price you pay for being hooked up to in neurologically and made to feel and taste every aspect of the game world.

The story itself is told in a very odd way.  We start with a flashback of everyone logging in and being told the story by the game's enigmatic creator.  We then flash forward to two freakin' years later, when everyone in the game is now coming closer to achieving their impossible task.  (And, also in accordance with the falling-into-another-world cliche, some people in Sword Art Online are quite content not to go home.)

Kirito, the hero, is a loner with a dark past who falls in love with a moderately attractive female knight named Asuna.  Their interactions are yet another facet to this confusing story, where they fall deeply in love (almost entirely off-screen) and come together to find their way out of the game.

I was never really a fan of .Hack, and this series only seems to be a sappier, somewhat darker version of that.  True, The World was in certain danger in .Hack, but at least the players could log out whenever they wanted to.

Here, people die by the thousands, we wallow our way through pages and pages of angst and regret, no real answers are given, lots of time is skipped, and all the action sequences go by too fast for me to really understand how the characters pulled off some of their moves.

As I said before, it all just feels like a weird mishmash of fantasy, sci-fi and romance, mostly made up of ideas stolen from better works.  There's a sexy scene of Asuna in her underwear, but that didn't really seem like enough to really try and undo the overall suck factor of what I've just read.

There's a novel out there too, I think.  But my advice: go read something else.  Black Butler just put out its 17th volume; go read that.