April 04, 2005
Mar Episode 1 - Open! The Door to Another World
OP - Kimi no Omoi Egaita Yume AtsuMERU HEAVEN (Garnet Crow) - oh dear. I love a lot of Garnet Crow tracks (check out some of their work on Detective Conan in particular, the opening for Patapata Hikousen no Bouken and the Tales of Eternia Playstation game as well). This song...just isn't that great. The OP animation is really quite poor as well. I hope Xebec have saved some decent staff and money up for Erementar Gerad on Tuesday night...
ED - I Just Wanna Hold You Tight (Miho Komatsu) - standard anime ending ballad stuff, and some artwork suggesting that perhaps some of the later characters might be vaguely interesting...but definitely not the one with the spade. He looks hateful.
Ginta is a bespectacled weakling obsessed with computer games (wow, it's like some kind of bad self-insertion fanfic!) who even dreams about the world of Märchen (Fairytale in German) who has a crush on his classmate Koyuki (imagine if this was Beck! MAR needs more Engrish and rock music, I can tell you that.). He gets summoned into Märchen at school, where he discovers that his eyesight has been fixed and he is super strong. He gets collared by a mysterious witch named Dorothy who gets him to go hunting for an amazing weapon called an ARM (with an umlaut, but I can't remember how to do a capital ä). While Dorothy summons an enormous flying lion to help out, Ginta discovers the ARM, which turns out to be a talking, moustache-wearing morning-star called Bappo. Yup. A talking moustache-wearing morning-star.
Did the world really need another second-rate Shounen Sunday adaptation? I guess there's nothing wrong with MAR from a story point of view if you really enjoy particularly formulaic shounen fantasy, but there's nothing here to really engage the interest of someone as jaded as I am with the genre. There's none of the outlandish inventiveness and vibrancy of something like Konjiki no Gash Bell or the vague maturity of Bleach, two of the better adaptations in the shounen fighting genre recently. The characters are fairly uninteresting, the production second-rate (the music in particular is just dire) and everything is just very pedestrian - it's much like Beet the Vandel Buster really. Unfortunately, it's just not my kind of thing.
Kind of sad that the mangaka's (totally forgot the name) works gets killed in animated form. I loved Flame of Recca but was somewhat disappointed with how the anime turned out.
I gave the MAR manga a try but got pretty dis-interested quickly. Tried to watch the first episode but stopped like 1 minute into the OP. The OP was as you mentioned BluWacky and looking at the animation, didn't seem worth my time.
... kind of wished Flame of Recca got re-done or stayed truer to the manga. :(
Posted by: moyism at April 4, 2005 01:22 AMMy initial reaction to the anime is 'ZOMG, it's Goku and Gon rolled into one' (it's a good thing I like Ginta's seiyuu). I keep picturing Bulma and Botan when Dorothy was introduced. And I simply went into WTF-mode when I saw Bappo.
I suppose, this could be interesting. I never read the manga so I had no idea what it is about. From what I've seen so far, it'll be the typical shounen fodder which I'm drawn to.
Oh, well. Another fluff piece in my watch list shouldn't be so bad. ^_^
Posted by: Ten at April 4, 2005 05:10 AMI was reading the mangas in a monthly magazine and got bored very fast and skip them now. From what you wrote about the first episode it's really not worth watching it...it's ju7st a bad manga in worse anime form.
Posted by: Mina at April 4, 2005 04:24 PMI dunno I like it, cooler than a lot of stuff I've seen for a while. I mean, Naruto, Bleach, and Samurai Champloo are the only thing I've felt like following, and the Tales of Phantasia OVA. Dah well, nothing beats DBZ reruns!
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Posted by: aaron jones at September 16, 2005 12:36 PM