Animeph

Review: Spice and Wolf plays in a distant past and tells the story of Lawrence, who is a knowledgeable traveling merchant. One night he finds a beautiful naked girl with wolf ears and tail inside his wagon. Her name is Horo and she is a wolf god in human form and used to help the local peasants with their wheat. She decided she wants to leave the town and travel the world with Lawrence. In her own way she helps him to gain profit, while they always have to be careful not to let anyone see that she is a wolf girl.
Spice and Wolf offers an interesting view on the life of a merchant along with a nice developing story.
Rating: 8,5/10

Review: After his mother died Hirose Takuma moved away with his father to live in a small rural town. For an unknown reason at some point of his childhood he lost his eye sight. That’s why the classmates of his new school help him out a lot. On the other hand there’s Kohinata, an outsider girl, who is bullied and beaten by her classmates and lives alone outside of this town. Hirose cannot understand this unreasonable behavior of those people who treat him so kindly and he wants to help her. Unfortunately as an outsider he doesn’t understand this towns past and the relationships between those people. Suddenly on his second day living in this town his eye sight returns and he can see again. Will he be able to help Kohinata and uncover this town’s history and secrets?
Rating: 5/10

Review: This is the continuation of the popular Gunslinger Girl series. Gunslinger Girl is about a certain secret Italian agency that fights terrorism. This agency searches for young girls who are hopelessly close to death, and then through newest medical technology save them, erase their memories, enhance their muscles and condition them to be loyal and affectionate toward the agent handler they are given to. Those girls are trained to become perfect fighting cyborgs for assassinations of terrorists and still look like innocent little girls as the perfect cover-up. As all those girls used to be near death patients their seemingly forgotten past sometimes slips through as it is connected to the handler’s past that isn’t any less sad and complicated. In a perfect way this show portrays how some agents have a hard time seeing those girls, who struggle for praise and acceptance, as objects and how others don’t.

Perfectly performed and animated fights and movements, same as deep political and moral problems that are introduced, make Gunslinger Girl into an outstanding action drama that has Sci-Fi elements and yet seems so real. Sadly the animation quality of this anime is not quite as good and detailed as in the first season, but that is only a small drawback.
Rating: 9/10

Review: Shinichiro is a young highschooler who lives in a big house and even employs a few servants. For a yet unknown reason they have adopted Hiromi into the family. Shinichiro was already friends with her before that and his classmates tease him saying they should make out with each other, but there really isn’t anything going on between those two and for some reason their relationship became rather distant after the adoption. At school by chance Shinichiro gets involved with the cute, energetic but also mysterious girl called Noe. His classmates become interested in their relationship, and so is Hiromi.

I know many already have had enough of this flood of dating-sim adaptations that we saw for the past years, but True Tears is yet another example for the recent trend of more and more outstanding decent quality shows from this harem genre. The animation is not only flawless, but the cars, school buildings, school grounds and simply everything is designed so realistic that you could actually think you are looking at an animated version of a real contemporary small Japanese town. The character personalities and reactions are just as believable as the animation, but still manage to be original and interesting. Even the few anime clichés that are picked up are presented in a credible way. So far I have high hopes that this story will be interesting.
Rating: 8,5/10