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Looks can be deceiving. Prejudices can blind unreasonably. Combine these two and it gets extremely easy to watch the beginning of Mai HiME and swiftly dismiss it as yet another mediocre clone that goes nowhere. Equipped with your standard issue of charm items of adolescence: School girls as premier combatants. Check. Busty school girls. ...

Good triumph over evil is a myth. Millennia of human history have not seen any real shift in balance and we continue to struggle in our battle against wickedness in effort to make the world a ''nicer place'' to live in. By this I do not mean evil nations or organisations seeking to destroy the world. Rather, the more down-to-earth lifestyle of ...

Do not be deceived by the quiet, mellow first scene. Buckle your seat belts. And preferably wear a G-suit as well. You about to experience the biggest roller-coaster ride in all anime. What is FLCL? Unfortunately, this high-budget 6-episode OVA by Gainax is indescribable. Anything resembling a normal plot about 12-year-old Naota ...

The most tragic fact about video gaming is that any title's enjoyment and entertainment value is tightly depending on the currency of the technology platform. Once that platform goes obsolete, no matter how great it was during its heyday, the game is destined for the graveyard. Not so with film and music. Done correctly, productions on such medium ...

It is easy to become ''spoilt'' with the luxury of TV anime. Even a quarter-year season would provide approximately 5 hours of storytelling opportunity; more than twice the length of an average movie. This is why I tend to experience more disappointment than not with movies, with that strict budget of time that condenses and ...

Some interesting things in life come about purely by accident. So just in the early evening my friend called me to check if we could catch Transformers in the theaters, but sad to say he was way ahead of his time; Transformers won't arrive in Singapore until next week. Maybe he got caught in some time warp. And it was from there did I see ...

Ah, the title everyone loves to hate. I don't even think I need to write an introduction. With the advent of Naruto Shippuden to continue the second segment of the Naruto manga series, I finally feel free to unleashed all my accumulated complaints I have for this atrocious production. ;-) Adaptations from manga titles are generally not easy. ...

Growing up as a boy was fun. I lost count to the number of giggles and hard ROFLs I had watching the utter silliness that is mahou shojou. I mean, swinging that magic wand, that sparkle of nakedness to prove that a kid can instantly swell into adulthood, and ridding the world - or really just the neighbourhood - of all that evil, sprinkling ...

Life is about growing up. The process of learning what's good and what's bad, and focusing to deliver what's good even better the next time round. Such a simple rule, and yet people continue to miss many lessons in their lives and repeat costly mistakes. Not so for wise folks of Kyoto Animation. Having taken over from GONZO to produce the second ...

The first disillusionment I had on my return to anime (end of 2002) was a noticeable lack of decent mecha titles. Gundam SEED had been airing a few months back then, and it totally made me lose confidence in Sunrise's ability to produce anything beyond mediocre. Sure Macross Zero just came into the picture too, but the snail pace of OVA releases ...

One thing that never sits well with me, even with my adolescent years, is how manga and anime manifests so strongly the bubbly wet dreams of young boys. Nothing exemplifies this better than the existence of so many titles of similar themes that warrant the harem genre. So it was with skepticism that I loaded the first episode of Love Hina despite ...

Sometimes the mainstream adult cannot be blamed for dismissing anime as a ''children's thing'' - there are just too many titles delving on the amazingly young participating in outrageous or impossibly epic activities, leaving little sensibility for the mature to ponder upon. (Not to say that is entirely a bad thing, since some of them are still ...

Being somewhat of an aviation buff, my biggest beef with most air combat anime titles is how the genre has been terribly marred by inexcusably cheap animation techniques; completely failing to capture the essence of flight. It gets really annoying to watch modern titles that cannot even match up to classic series like Macross or Gundam. I ...

Wow.Somebody pinch me. Real hard. I need a firm grasp on reality. (no, put that knife down)Ok in truth, I needed that pinch some 8 years ago when I first came upon Bandai plastic model kits for the mecha and monsters from this series in a departmental store. A friend of mine mentioned back then this was one of the most fantastic and hottest anime ...

''Final Fantasy'' should not be an unfamiliar phrase to anybody who has been entertained by quality gaming from Square Soft (now known as Square Enix) the past two decades and more. It should then not be surprising one bit for me to state that Final Fantasy VII is possibly the greatest gaming experience I ever had in my life so far. Never had I ...

Summary: Young James Ray Steam carries the same engineering blood as his renowned professorate grandfather and father, Lloyd and Edward Steam. While both of them have been working for the O'hara Foundation in the USA for years now, Ray lives up to the Steam name by demonstrating his inherited genius on mechanical and steam contraptions in his ...

Summary: Mireille Bouquet is a mercenary firearms assassin, always operating alone under the codename ''Noir''. Her solitary modus operandi is set to change forever when she gets contacted by a Japanese school girl, Yumura Kirika. Suffering from amnesia, Kirika seeks help to remember her own self, but demonstrates she hasn't forgotten her training ...

Summary: Kouta returns to the town of his cousin Yuka, ready to attend the local university together. In reminiscence of their childhood days they visit the beach, only to find a pinked hair girl floundering out of the sea naked. On closer inspection, they find horns protruding out of her skull that sends Kouta into an undesirable shock of an ...

In this age of processed, fast, and instant food, we (or at least me) cannot help but trust our tastebuds to tell us nothing really beats traditional, and natural, seasoning and cooking methods. This is almost the case with alot of anime I have watched these few years - plastered with increasing quality of graphical and musical candy but somewhat ...

Trigun is one those productions that will have a higher chance of success in luring the international audience uninitiated to the power of anime. With the abundance of anime stories that find some sort of life-critical need to have events occurring in Tokyo, it is tremendously refreshing to find the rare title that, in bold search for a new ...