By the way since it's not very well known, Miyazaki actually directed a full 26 episode TV series, Future Boy Conan. I've seen some episodes so far and it definitely seems pretty cool, usual Miyazaki stuff.
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclo ... php?id=899

He also worked on a lot of old Lupin episodes apparently here and there, back in the 70-80's. Lupin is amazing, but I dig Cobra even more. Fuck James Bond.



(and that's typical female attire in the world of Cobra. The setting often reminds me of the Heavy Metal films sometimes, but there's some hilarious fantasy in there too. Like necklaces containing galaxies, human head fish, Cobra's "oxygars" that let him breath underwater, people trapped in eyeballs, completely off the wall!)

Cobra baby.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxJ6nJet_jw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwXQo3ZpLgM

I'm gonna check out this Monster, sounds like my kind of thing. Ack, 74 episodes? That's a little daunting... Hope it doesn't take forever before getting interesting.

Edit: found a torrent with all episodes, 12 gigs downloading at 50k/sec... It'll take a while.


?


Oh yeah, I forgot about that one. We did watch a few episodes. It was decent, but a little goofy at times, if I recall correctly. I guess I'd file it under "like" but I haven't bothered checking more episodes... hmm.


Yes.


Wot?


That's pretty much why it was terrible. It was inconsistent, and schizophrenic but not in a good way. I hated the over-the-top cutesy goofiness in one scene, then all brooding and faux-serious in the very next. It's quite annoying. Plus the stories were just forgettable. It really had little going for it.

Trigun is another where the manga outdoes the anime easily, though they aren't all that similar outside of characters and setting, with the plot going different directions rather quickly.

Need to check out 20th Century Boys already too.

Saint Seiya is awesome. One of my favourite animes to watch despite it being so old. The fight scenes are sometimes hilarious though but the themes explored there are done tastefully and in a way that is probably relevant to the age group its intended for.

Honestly I think you need to give Monster a few episodes, I wasn't really feeling it until a big turning point around episode 15 I think. But from there on, it's top tier stuff.

Black Lagoon was pretty fun in my book, Revy was awesome. But it's another one that suffers from being fairly non-conclusive... they're making a new OVA right now about that terminator chick though, dunno how I feel about that.

In a good way, honey. My ex HATED anime, so I couldn't talk to her about it, let alone mention it.

I wonder if HB liked LOGH?...

The Bererk manga is incredible. Easily the best. And the art really evolved from generic manga art to something much stronger.

Anyone seen Redline? Looks awesome from the trailers. Can't find it anywhere though, BUT I WILL.

It's actually by Isao Takahata. I just noticed they apparently made two live-action versions... I wonder if that's worth anything.

Well, we only watched about a handful of episodes up to now. I think it could be interesting, though it's a bit slow and I can't say I really care about any of the characters at the moment.

I haven't actively watched anime in a number of years, but I did re-watch Yu Yu Hakusho earlier this year, and it was still really fucking awesome. It's just a great show - engaging plots, creative character twists and it doesn't succumb to many - if any at all - of the usual anime cliches. At least, not the really annoying visual ones, at least. It's a blend of Western action with a Japanese bent that runs deep into the show's core. It also got better with every season until the Chapter Black saga.

It has some stupid things about it, like a lot of the really popular anime tended to, but...I really don't care. With a show this good it just doesn't really matter.

Back in the day I also really loved Rurouni Kenshin and Trigun, although I haven't seen them in years. There were tons of other ones I gave the chance...mostly manga like Monster, which I didn't get too far in but which was indeed a really awesome story, and Rave Master, which was so much fun it was just ridiculous - and really great. Hellsing was also lethally bloody fun.

I was also really into DBZ and Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon and the likes as a younger kid...fun stuff for the time for sure, just pure nostalgia for me.

Got real tired of Bleach, Naruto and Inuyasha real fast.

I liked One Piece a fair bit, although there's just SO FUCKING MUCH of it that it's impossible to really keep track of. Shaman King was also pretty cool.

After a while though...eh, just kind of got out of it. Can't really say why. I'd be up for watching some new series if they came along, but I just can't get inspired to really go out there and check them out.

Man do I agree THE HELL out of this post. I watched the entire series on youtube this year as well, from beginning to end, and it was marvelous. Just an all around awesome show until the Chapter Black arc. I mean, damn, the four main guys going to face off against the four guardian warriors in that one land is one of the best arc series I've ever seen - so comedic and dramatic. Just Yuske, Heie, Kurama and Kuwabara against a rock golem, a tiger, an ice wizard, and a lightning asshole and a whole bunch of lesser enemies and traps in a castle and spire = the best.

One they got the Chapter Black stuff it downgraded and then the last 25 or so episodes dealing with the demon world were rushed as hell and just , although the ending was a nice (as in how cute) closure, I guess, for as rushed as it was.

YYH and HxH come from the same creator, from what I've heard back in the 90's when YYH was going they wanted him to make it more and more like DBZ and he said screw it, so that's why I've heard it's apparently rushed. With the way HxH is going though, I'm not expecting much of a conclusion there either...

I was watching YYH off and on this year myself, it didn't really grab me though. I definitely wouldn't praise it for originality ... lol. The dark tournament thing in the middle went on for fucking EVER! But I'll probably finish it someday.

And I can't stress enough again if you guys only grew up with DBZ, DB is totally worth seeing and probably much better in my book. Way better pacing, way more adventurous, way more interesting fights, it's insane. I also never realized Goku grows up throughout it, by the end of the series he looks just like he did in early DBZ, I thought it was awesome knowing that. That and Piccolo Daimao was probably the second evilest villain next to Freeza, he killed so many people it's hilarious. If you got all the DBZ nostalgia going in, it makes for an awesome experience. I watched it all late last year and regret not getting to it sooner, haha. I watched all of it in Japanese too actually, it completely changes the characters for the best. I hated Goku in the dub because he was a pacifist bitch, but in the original he's just insanely naive and wants to be the strongest person around, so he LOVES fighting. All the characters just felt way more intelligent.

How far did you get in One Piece Emp? It's pretty insane where I am at this Impel Down arc, shit is finally really happening and I can't even imagine what'll happen in the next inevitable arc, Marineford.

@HB: Not even YANG!? Well if you can stick it out for the first season or so, ~26, you'll probably be hooked. If not I will destroy you.

Chapter Black was the best YYH, and the rest of it is still very good on its own. Chapter Black is a more cinematic, unified epic, and it really ups the intensity to its maximum point - infectious, consuming material. Will definitely watch again.

Even that demon world stuff at the end was good, though. It ended every character's story the way it should have been ended, and had some of the best fights in the entire series - Yusuke vs Yomi was ground shattering with how good it was. Too rushed, yes, but it still managed to work and be entertaining.

I did grow up with Dragonball too. They're both very good series. In fact I have some of the DVDs at my house.

I didn't get that far at all in One Piece. Not at all compared to the 500+ chapters there are now...last I checked they still didn't have Chopper on board yet.

Yeah, Dragon Ball was really cool too, I have big nostalgia for that series. The sense of adventure is just awesome. My only real problem with it is it doesn't have Piccolo (my favorite character) until the very end, though I like how it features other characters like Krillan and Tienshinhan more. I really liked the way it alternated between the characters searching for the Dragon Balls and butting heads with the villains who were doing the same, and then preparing/fighting in the martial arts tournies. Those feel as epic as any but the very best fights in DBZ, and don't tend to go on too long, either. I think the manga was a lot better about not having the fights drag, but I haven't read it all. Wasn't there some new edit of the DBZ anime that followed the manga more closely, and cut out a bunch of the filler? That'd be pretty sweet.

Yeah that was DBZ-Kai, or something like that. I watched an episode once and the voices were changed, the animation cleaned up and the whole thing felt more modern. I didn't watch enough to see all the cuts they did but I imagine it's worth watching...

So I have to wait the typical length of a whole anime series before it gets really good?

Xeogred gets a huge boner for these massive space operas that span 600 episodes. I tried to get into Ideon, but couldn't. LOGH seems better though, and I don't really have anything to watch right now anyway.

Well I thought LOGH was intriguing from the get go. I know some friends I got into it that chugged along for awhile but it clicked eventually for them and it's now also their #1.

Somebody not liking Ideon is understandable, probably because of the directing. Tomino (creator of Gundam and directed the early ones, along with other shows like L-Gaim, Dunbine, Xabungle, etc) has a really quirky style that you kind of love or hate. He doesn't handle characters very well and the pacing in a lot of his shows is pretty ADHD (the beginnings to all of his shows are hilarious. In Dunbine the main character is just riding his bike and suddenly gets teleported to another world for no real reason, bam!).

If you can though I'd still maybe recommend the two movies. Ideon A Contact is a recap of the entire series so the pacing is off the wall and it's pretty random, but you get the idea... however Be Invoked is a masterpiece in my eyes and definitely worth seeing. I guess I have a big boner for end of the world stuff anyways.

Ideon got him the name "Kill em' All" Tomino and the talk is always that he was off and on pretty depressed, a lot of his shows are pretty grim. Even the original Gundam has its fair share of crazy violence, for a show that's meant to sell toys basically.


(that's pretty nice compared to Ideon though. Anyone who's seen Be Invoked probably knows exactly what I'm talking about!)

I think it was mostly the big combiner robot + little kid & animal sidekick team that put me off of it. I liked the original Gundam, but the Ideon robot/concept was really kind of silly. A bunch of huge trucks combine to make a Voltron-style super robot? Meh. I'm not going to deny that it might've gotten better later on, but y'know, how many episodes does that take? What if I still don't like it after 20? 30? 40? LoGH at least was pretty interesting from the get-go, the ultra-nationalistic paramilitary group menacing the one soldier's widow who spoke out against the government was pretty cool. Also Yang Wen-Li's old-man superior officers not really understanding space combat reminds me of the British and French generals at the beginning of WWII still being stuck in a WWI mentality, leading to their initially getting crushed by forward-thinking German tactics. That also happened in WWI if I remember right, with some British general limiting deployment of machine guns among his troops because they encouraged "unsportsmanlike behavior".

The episodes move pretty quickly, too, so I've been watching one or two a day. We'll see how much I end up liking it.

Glad to hear, I took my time with LOGH since it was such a dialogue heavy show and so much to take in. I just kept a pace of 1-2 episodes a night myself and finished it in 2-3 months. No big deal for me, I used to think watching anime was a race but now I just take my time with stuff and enjoy it. LOGH only gets better as it goes and you probably won't predict some of the major things that happen, I think like I mentioned back it covers ~4 years of events or so which is amazing, you'll see "history in the making". Speaking of history, the series has a few "history episodes" which I thought was just fucking awesome.

Ideon is 30 some episodes, but like I said if you want you can check out the two movies instead. I'll agree the combining concept is kind of childish, that's more like the super robot stuff like Maziner, Getter Robo, childish monster of the week junk, stuff that probably influenced Mega Man and whatnot. The Ideon itself was what I loved about the show, them trying to find out what the mystery of the Ide was, and later in the series the machine starts roaring across space like a beast (scary as fuck), and cleaves this one planet in half. You can feel the hopeless tension between the characters and it was kind of scary. That's kind of what I mostly liked about Ideon, the Ide was almost in a way the true villain. It wanted to help people but it wasn't happening, so cue end of the universe. It was beautiful in a sadistic way I guess.

So you liked the original Gundam, how about Zeta and Char's Counterattack? I absolutely loved Zeta, "Quattro" is just too awesome. The Federation becoming the bad guys was pretty neat. I'll agree with some people though that think CCA could have been way better if they included other characters, like Kamille, or whatnot, instead of basically being "Char vs Amuro Fight 2!" but I still dug it.

You are a bro. The second season was basically watching loli drama. Still, saw the OVAs and I would be confused as hell if I saw the second season without them. Just finished watching this series today and man it was still sad. Sad in both story and sad in my expectations. So it was a (spoiler)fake out? Like the characters are transported to an illusion world without any memories of the real one? wtf that sucks for them. Where did the lead character go, too? Some blue dream ocean or something?(spoiler).

As much as I don't want the show to continue, I do want it to continue just to give me a better closer than that - even for one OVA.

Ok, I was just watching the first episode of Samurai 7 (mentioned in this thread) and I just had to shut it off. I can't watch something like that - something just puts me off. Maybe it's the extremely goofy CGI or the lack of resemblance to source material, it just seems like a gimmicky rehash. Fuck it, moving on to LOGH full time now.

Never saw Zeta, but Char's Counterattack was on TV so I saw that. I guess it had a bunch of characters who were introduced in Zeta, because I had no idea what the fuck was going on. I actually didn't get to see the end of the original Gundam either, Cartoon Network stopped showing it right as the Federation were winning that battle for the huge asteroid fortress because of 9/11. Everyone's assholes were slamming shut around then, and I guess CN decided that the war portrayed in Gundam was too sensitive a subject, or something.

Yeah, that's hilarious. There's a movie trilogy of the original Gundam that I watched if you want to consider that sometime, thought it was all really good. Had some changes here and there and new animation.

Actually though, aside from some bigger side characters like Bright Noa and all, CCA brought in a bunch of new throwaway characters. Amuro was with yet another random bitch, the blue haired chick Char picked up was new and worthless, etc. You should definitely consider looking into Zeta (American intro was pretty awesome too). In Zeta the Federation is taken over by a private military group called the Titans. Char, takes on the role of "Quattro" and plays a good guy throughout the entire thing (making his character all around all the more awesome) forming the AEUG I think, (Anti Earth United Group?). He's essentially the mentor for the new main character Kamille. Eventually you'll get recurring characters later, even Amuro whom knows from the start that Quattro is Char, but he understood the circumstances and they worked together (Titans needed to be eliminated). Pretty damn epic. Later in the series Quattro and the AEUG bump into Haman Karn and the child Mineva Zabi (the family Char was killing in the original) and they're controlling the remnants of Zeon. Both the Titans and AEUG try to win them over but it kind of becomes a threeway war in the end. The whole series is rather grim with a very fucked up and dark ending that anyone who's seen it wouldn't forget. Zeta had a pretty epic budget as well for 1985, looks really good especially compared to the original.

Char and Amuro have a friendly moment.


There's actually another sequel ZZ before CCA, but it's not too popular for good reason. Basically does away with the entire Zeta cast introducing new stupid characters, the first 20 episodes were hilariously lighthearted and pointless. It mainly focuses on the new cast taking on the rest of the Zeon remnants and Haman Karn, thus they're not really in CCA... honestly the first opening says enough (the lyrics are something literally like "It's not an anime! It's not an anime!" ... what). Granted the second half of ZZ was pretty good, it's still pretty throw away in the end. Second OP is great though, that's Haman at the start. Badass character!

Finally after all these years, the newest Gundam OVA Unicorn goes back to the Universal Century, so it's a follow up to CCA/F91, etc. Way better than the last Gundam's (SEED and 00) so far. I'm not sure how I feel about the Char character, Full Frontal (yeah that's his name). In the novels this OVA is based off of he's clearly a clone, but they want to play it off in this OVA like he could potentially be Char... even after CCA. So that'd be kind of lame, but who knows (oh and yeah, they combine three parts to form ZZ. Haha lame, the Zeta was way cooler which could turn into a jet like form).

Yeah I'm pretty gay for this stuff.

If anything though failsafe, I think you should check out Votoms.

You don't say.

Anyway I think I'm just going to get through LOGH before I consider "Xeogred's Space Opera Enema".

LOGH'll do. Definitely destroys everything else in the end anyways!

My favorites are Death Note, Evangelion, and *looks around frantically hoping no one makes the Trey Azagthoth comparison* Sailor Moon.

I also like InuYasha, and old Bleach

My Favorites are
Full Metal Alchemist
Death Note
Elfen Lied
Hajime no Ippo
Hellsing
Code Geass

I'm mainly into Berserk, more recently. I just dislike the fact that they ended the anime in the worst way and then continued the manga. Ridiculous.

Your big worry about being into Sailor Moon is that people will think that you are in some way similar to Trey Azagthoth?

The best anime by far is Samurai Pizza Cats.

You watched the English dubbed version first??? That' a crime mate, everybody knows that the english dubbed versions are the worst (except for some latin american countries) but on the other side most of the latin american versions are in fact, better than the originals, Dragon Ball is just one example of this. Goku a pacifist bitch? I don't think so

Read 20th Century Boys in 2 days.....well, being sick and covered in poison oak rashes helped find time. Overall, its a worthy contender for Monster, but didn't leave as much as an impact. The characters feeling less memorable, the plot seeming more outlandish, and the antagonist's elusiveness being more ridiculous.



Read the earlier volumes? The anime left out loads and was lacking in many of the areas it did cover.

Edit: Punctuation.

Hey, nice to see some Berserk fans. There's a new Berserk anime in the works and I think, its going to be better than the previous one. Some trailers for y'all :

http://www.younganimal.com/berserk/cm/index.html

Edit : Byrain, check out Pluto, its from Urasawa as well. Its pretty awesome.

Dragon Ball Z,
Ranma 1/2
Doraemon (damn, I really love this anime, really)
Naruto (and only because of 3/4 characters)
And the others are Shaman King, One Piece, Hellsing and Trinity Blood.

How could I forgot Doraemon?! What an amazing shit
Also Ranma 1/2 has one of the best dubbed openings. It is WAY better in spanish.

Jeje yeah, Doraemon is amazing.
In the anime, really i like more the dubbed in Spanish. To me, are simply perfect, it's not the same in English or even in Japanese. In Spanish the voice fits exactly with the character (an example: Dragon Ball, in Spanish is vast superior than in English)

I think it may be because you read Monster first, I read 20thCB first and had the reverse opinion you had. I actually preferred the more outlandish plot. Both are still really, really good, though.

I really detest anime in general. I think what gets lost on me are the Japanese cultural memes that are present in most animes and manga. Just as I understand perfectly the underlying memes of European comics like Asterix and Tintin or the North American Marvel/DC/Dark Horse comics, I don't "get" Japanese entertainment (or most Asian entertainment, to expand).

That said, I have watched Dragonball Z and thought it was pretty ok, Death Note was actually one of my favourite series of all time in any genre, and I've heard good things about Berserk, so I'm gonna eventually go out and see if I can get the mangas.

Definitely planning to.



You're probably right, lots of the characters in 20thCB certainly gave me that déjà vu feeling (Minor spoiler ahead) as when Nina & Kanna would be headstrong and attempt to play the hero to end up being needlessly reckless, the former of which argubly was the worse offender.

Well, The way I understand Berserk is that it jumps around a lot. It starts off at the beginning of the second arc (I'm not sure?) and then goes through the first and then ends at the second again? It's fucked. I want them to properly assess the situation immediately.