Rubik’s Revenge

We’re finally talking about the last anime of Fall 2012.  Like most final gasps, some utterances are rambling nonsense, while others are filled with wisdom.  Yet still other final words are cryptic clues, offering hints of secrets and discovery, something to solve.  Join me now as I pull back the curtain on this week’s mysterious mysteries!

C3 – Cubed X Cursed X Curious

Yachi Haruaki is a high school boy who is naturally resistant to curses.  His explorer father, who is naturally obsessed with curses, sends Yachi a giant black cube.  That night, an annoying naked girl appears in his house to steal rice crackers.  It is revealed that the girl is actually the human form of the cube, known as Fear-in-Cube (or Fear, for short).  Since she herself is a cursed item, she is sent to Yachi to be purified.

After acting like an obnoxious and misguided twerp, she is then confronted by a woman that hunts and destroys other “Worse” instruments.  After Yachi gets his ass kicked, he screams out in pain, and Fear reacts…violently.

Shortly after defeating the woman, Yachi decides to work with Fear to defeat the other Worse instruments after her, using her various 32 mechanisms of torture.

C3 seems to be one of those difficult series to read.  The entire first episode is pretty much dedicated to Fear trolling Yachi and everyone around her.  Then episode 2 comes around, and while Fear is slightly less obnoxious, she then goes psycho at almost the drop of a hat.  Episode 3 is dominated by her gloomy mood, but then she’s a troll again by the end of the episode.  Although the cursed items seem quite powerful, they are also emotionally unstable.  Fear and Yachi’s fellow instrument-girl Konoha act rather silly, but they freak out whenever someone screams or spills blood, respectively.  In this sense, the items don’t really “break” their curses, they just repress them, and that requires living life in an awfully mundane environment (i.e. one devoid of modern television).  The fights are decent, and the voice acting matches that.  The music has yet to really prove itself, though it trolls and becomes serious when the occasion calls for it.  Then there’s the animation…

Every frame, and I mean EVERY SINGLE FRAME has at least 3 different lighting and animation effects and it drives me nuts.  It distracts every scene and it’s just annoying.  It feels like the producers are jingling keys in my face just to try and keep my attention, as though the story simply isn’t good enough to make me watch in the first place.  Whether this series is any good remains to be seen, but demeaning the audience’s intelligence is not a good approach.  The only real appeal this show presents to me is Fear’s seiyuu, Yukari Tamura.  As such, the show becomes far more bearable when you’re watching it through the lens of Rika Furude.  C3 may prove interesting yet, but if excessive lighting effects and troll-service upset you, then look for a plot elsewhere.

Last Exile: Fam, the Silver Wing

Fam, a cheerful and confident airhead, is part of the Sky Pirates, a group of various refugees that attack airships for a living.  Shortly after returning from a job, her and her crewmates read about the Turan Kingdom signing a peace treaty with the Ades Federation, whose national pastime is conquering nations.   The scene then cuts to a sacred lake where the treaty will get signed.  The Turan Kingdom, although ruled by an ailing king, is led by two young princesses and a head priestess.  Although the younger princess questions the Ades Federations’ intentions, the other two assure her that the Federation is entirely legit.

Since the Federation has a long history of creating refugees (who became Sky Pirates), Fam decides she’ll save the princesses by capturing their ship.  One sky battle later, and everyone escapes unharmed, except the elder princess.  So while the Turan military tries to defend the capital and its dying king from the Ades armada, Fam and Friends try to rescue the princess by flying through the pipe network inside the Ades flagship.  Shit goes down, and the Ades commander uses his new-found power to drop an Exile (one of the moons of this planet that’s actually a spaceship) onto the Turan capital, subsequently converting the city into a fine powder.  While any hope of stopping the Ades Federation from doing whatever it pleases seems small, Fam always has a plan to turn the tide of battle.

Produced by Studio Gonzo, Last Exile: Fam, the Silver Wing is actually a sequel series of the original and far more memorable Last Exile.  Don’t worry, though, this series is about as consequential as the Eureka Seven sequel aims to be: same universe, different reality.  As such, I’ll save you the rants about how this and that don’t match with the original because they aren’t supposed to, and Gonzo (thankfully) doesn’t try to connect the two.  The story starts out rather plainly and just draws lines between the good guys (apparently the Sky Pirates and the conquered nations) and the bad guys (the Ades Federation).  Liberally mix in some moe, large-scale battles, and an infallibly eccentric main character, and this show turns into something pretty generic, especially in a post-Code Geass world.  The lines do tend to blur a bit more as the series progresses, but the story is still rather forgettable.  What does make Last Exile: Fam, the Silver Wing at least more interesting is the world in which it takes place.  There are giant flying warships and even more massive space-ships, and somehow radio communication is completely non-existent.  Instead, everyone uses a variance of Morse code (primarily via lanterns) to convey everything from simple messages to attack formations.

There’s often a joke that it’s only coincidence that cars were invented before computers, but so it makes some sense (though not much) that a similar circumstance could follow for a similar world.  Visually, the ship designs are pretty interesting, especially the Sky Pirate ships and the Exiles.  Unfortunately, the budget for this show seems to have been rather low, since almost 70% of the show’s animation is pure CGI.  The voice acting is…par, but the soundtrack delivers a very rich experience.  Music starts playing exactly when you expect it to, and it’s usually during the battle scenes, which of course makes them more epic.  Then there’s Fan.  She’s foolish to a fault, but she is exceeding great at what she does, which is plan, attack, and fly.  In fact, she’s so good that it seems almost pointless to have so many secondary characters always running around, since all they do is further point out how great Fan and her co-pilot Gisey are.  Still, the series leaves me wanting.  Although the fights look good and the music is fine, and at least the core cast have something to offer, the story just falls flat.  It’s just feels so difficult to engage the viewer into why they should care about these loser nations, why the Sky Pirates are anything more than poser Robin Hoods, or why they are moon-sized space ships floating around in orbit.  If everything else about this series interests you, then you’re better off watching the original series Last Exile.

Phi Brain

Kaito Daimon is a brilliant 16-year-old teenager who loves to solve puzzles.  He’s so brilliant, in fact, that he attends the prestigious Root Academy as an honor student and generally trounces everyone else with his analytical mind.  So, one day the president of the puzzle club gives him a modified Nintendo DS which continuously spit out puzzles, which Kaito continuously solves.  Then he receives a message from someone named the Minotaur, inviting him to solve a Sage Puzzle.  After navigating his way through a labyrinth that is in itself a puzzle, he and his dumbass female friend get trapped in a giant chamber that will be flooded Rube Goldberg-style if he cannot determine which of 3 levers to pull.  Fortunately, the chamber also contains a mystical object called the Armband of Orpheus that allows the wearer to fully utilize their brain.

Shortly after escaping the labyrinth, the principal of Root Academy invites him to confront a secret organization named POG (which ironically does not advocate the return of POG’s).  They create deadly Sage Puzzles to protect invaluable treasures and challenge the select few individuals capable of facing them. Given the title of Einstein, Kaito battles against the mysterious group in order to keep a promise he made as a kid while at the same time he heads towards the ultimate test: the Divine Puzzle.

Remember the good ol’ days?  The days of shonen series that would never end, and you never wanted them to end?  Phi Brain harkens back to a time when such shows didn’t have to have a dark overtones, interesting plots, or creative characters in order to entertain an audience.  The episodes themselves are pretty episodic, and therefore the overall storyline progresses unbearably slowly.  Aside from the obvious logistical questions Phi Brain presents (such as why city planners have the authority to blow up their own city or why POG members are willing to destroy priceless artifacts to cheat at their own games), the series suffers from a lack of excitement that a Saw-style atmosphere may/may not be able to solve.  While the new take on puzzles is interesting, the series rarely states how the nastier Sage Puzzles are actually solvable by regular humans and basically just flaunts the “heart of the cards” mechanic that we all love to mock.

The characters (although fairly entertaining) follow standard archetypes which tends to limit any conscious growth or development.  Meanwhile, Kaito remains as aloof as ever, only shaking off his generally annoyed demeanor to solve some puzzles.  Naturally, POG is willing to oblige, since they don’t seem to do much without him.  The music isn’t overly obnoxious, only really making itself known when you need to be in the high-stakes puzzle-solving mood.  The animation is strictly digital, with almost every building being CG.  As for the character designs, you can easily tell how important each character is strictly from their hairstyle.

Overall, Phi Brain pays a decent homage to the old ways of Saturday morning cartoons in an equally decent new way.  That said, suggest this not to your friends but to their (rougher 10-years younger) siblings.

With that, I’m finally ready to begin reviewing the Winter 2012 anime line-up.  Wear a jacket, because it’s going to be a very cold season of shows.