The story in Claymore was pretty standard: monsters attack people, people are powerless, therefore an organization of hybrids (female warriors carrying deadly claymore swords) emerges to protect people from said monsters. So it's like Blade, in theory. But in reality it has the feel of Berserk (the first cool part, not the crappy lingering mess that it is now). Or you can imagine Naruto, with the monster and everything, fighting against a species of demon foxes. Only without the sillyness and all the mentoring.

I really liked the manga, I can barely wait for it to continue, unfortunately it is distributed like one chapter per month. The 26 episode anime series follows closely the manga story, but unfortunately ends prematurely with a different idea in the last two episodes. Not that it is not a lot better than Berserk leaving us in the dark at the end of the anime or other series that just ended in mid air.

Bottom line, if you liked Berserk, you will like this. If you like Naruto/Bleach, you will like this. I can even throw a little Akira in, to convince you, but it would probably be a stretch :)

I know, you're thinking "Who made the great effort of coming up with this incredible gay name?", but keep reading a little more, because this anime series is rather interesting. I am refraining from calling it cool, since the name and because it is not over yet and because it is partially mecha. Also, because I think the direction it is going is a bit off course. Now that the bad things are out of the way, let me tell you about the good ones.

Anyway, the whole thing revolves around Lelouch, the third prince in line for the throne of the Holy Empire of Britannia. It is set in an alternate universe where battles are fought with humanoid robots called Knightmares, and the above mentioned empire considers the Britannians first class citizens while any other enslaved nation gets a number that designates its teritory and its people. The Japanese are called Elevens after the occupation of Japan, and Japan itself is renamed to Area 11.

I will let you read the plot in the Wikipedia page, and focus on the good bits: Lelouch is a very smart guy, he plays chess and defeats just about everybody. He uses his strategic skills to fight against the empire of Britannia as the faceless terorist Zero - for reasons too complicated to explain here. He is still in highschool (why must every Japanese story happen in high schools?!) and he has one more advantage: a geass. This is a magical ability that allows him to command any person he has eye contact with.

The first season had 25 episodes and was pretty cool. It involved strategy, drama, action, sci-fi and a tight script. The second season (R2) is more complex, but my opinion is that it lost much of the power of the first season and has reached episode 14 (released with English subs today). It is worth mentioning that the team that made Code Geass also worked on Planetes, a sci-fi anime based on Arthur C. Clarke's ideas, which I also liked a lot.

Some links:
Code Geass Wikipedia page

I was looking for new manga to read on the OneManga site and I found Gantz. It has senseless violence, gratuituos sex scenes and great looking chicks in erotic positions. The concept is that a weird black ball is taking people right from before they die and brings them to a room from which they are sent to battle aliens in the streets of Tokyo. Normal people can't see them or the monsters, but they can be killed by them. And they often are.

[youtube:SJ5ICtGn6u8]

This is something only a Japanese could have thought of. People are dying, most people around don't care and they are all trying to show how superior they are compared to others. And then they find something to PROTECT and they cry all the time.

Bottom line: Monsters, Aliens, Vampires, Hot chicks, Sword fighting, Gore, Sex, Rape, Emotional torture... they are all in there. The script doesn't make much sense, though, and I think all characters are emotionally stumped to the level of three year olds. That's how Naruto and InuYasha won so many fans, through carefully crafted emotional landscapes, something Gantz lacks almost completely.

Read Gantz at OneManga.
imDb link for the anime

A while ago I was recommending the anime called Inuyasha and then reading on the manga. Well, after 558 episodes - each having around 19 manga (comics) slides - Inuyasha has reached the end. A bit anticlimactic, considering the things that attracted me to the story in the first place, but an end nevertheless.

You can read the entire story here at MangaStream

Well, imagine a lonely boy, without a family, learning magic in a special school and who's archenemy is a powerful yet evil wizard. He is always accompanied by his friends, a boy and a girl. The evil wizard likes snakes and manages to kill the headmaster of the magic school. No, it's not Harry Potter, it's Naruto!

It's like the Japanese liked Harry Potter, but thought they can do one better. They're not exactly magicians, but ninjas; Naruto Uzumaki, the main character, is a mix of both Harry and Ron, while boy number two, Sasuke Uchiha, is more like a small Snape. With a bit of a stretch, one could take the Naruto story and rip it off in a prequel to Harry Potter, with the parents as the characters :)

Anyway, long story short: the anime is children oriented, with all kind of soapy feelings, camaraderie and friendships, no gore, little blood, a bit of death, but "censored" where violence or tension is concerned. If you ignore the ridiculous simplicity of the characters, the story is pretty captivating and the "ninja science" fun. It more than makes up in quantity what it misses in quality. The first anime, Naruto, is concerned with the childhood of the characters and spans 220 episodes, while the ongoing Naruto: Shippūden with the adolescence and it is close to 50 episodes so far. There are 20 minutes episodes, if you count the 1.5 minutes presentation in, but don't worry, the fights last well into fourth episodes >:). Also, there are currently 4 Naruto movies: 3 for the first series and 1 for Shippūden.

Basically, if you cross Inuyasha with Harry Potter you get Naruto. I guess that any media industry, once it reaches a level of maturity, makes compromises in order to satisfy the greater audience. What Hollywood did for the US, the anime companies are doing for Japan, but in the end, the result is the same: dumbed down versions of what it could be.

Fortunately, animes are often based on manga publications and you can read Naruto well over the story arch in the anime, freely online.

Links:
Naruto Wikipedia
Naruto Manga Online
Naruto meets Harry Potter video

Rental Magica started very well, like a combination of Elfen Lied and Full Metal Alchemist. Unfortunately the magic is a lot more benign and not founded on anything interesting like in FMA, and the only connection to EL is the fact that the lead character is a nice guy surrounded by children looking female girls that have a crush on him.

Other than that, I've only watched the first 10 episodes. There was the potential of greatness, while the series explored the taboos of magic and what happens to mages trying to break them. Also there are a homunculus and a mechanical archenemy present. However, someone decided that it is better to fight evil with goodness and that in the end goodness should win, making the whole thing really silly.

I would recommend it to children only.

Mushishi is a strangely calming anime. It takes place in almost feudal Japan (they seem a lot more liberal and have access to some technology like microscopes and the mushishi talks about genetics in one episode) and follows Ginko, a man that can see the strange lifeforms that are all around us, called Mushi.

In the end the episodes are rarely tense, with no or almost no violence. The mushi themselves are not perceived as evil that must be killed, but as a part of the ecosystem. Unlike most mushishi (a sort of mushi hunter/doctor), Ginko, the lead character, seeks only to restore the balance between normal life and mushi life.

The anime itself takes place for only 26 episodes, all self contained, you could watch any of them in any order without losing any continuity. The manga is of course much longer and you can read it here.

The calm music and the elements of traditional Japanese life and history are most welcome for a leisurely time when you want to relax and take your mind of things.

Update 2020 - most of the links here are dead, the things they referred to long forgotten. So much for "once you put it on the Internet it never disappears".

Having reached the 200^th entry, I really wanted to write something cool, something interesting, something that sticks (and it ain't shit).

I thought of blogging Kartoo, a very nice - albeit slow - visual search engine that shows not only relevant links, but also the context items that link different pages.

But Kartoo is not personal enough, so I switched to YouTube, thought about blogging (yet another) female vocalist nu-metal with goth overtones band like the Italian band Exilia. Or something else, like the Turkish band maNga, or the Spanish Dead Stoned or Demiurgo. But this is a blog, not a video/music site.

Then I thought about programming; there must be something in the three projects I am working on worth blogging about, or at least something important like Don't use the .NET Random class when concerned about security. But then again, the blog is full of (I hope) interesting programming hints.

What else is there? Ranting about bycicle lanes the city hall is building on the sidewalk and on which old people are happy to walk (slowly) without losing themselves;
interesting conceptual games like BoomShine, Straight Dice or Stickman Fight and how they can be improved;
the BBC Baghdad Navigator, to show you the distribution and timeline of Baghdad bombings;
the Lilium song for the anime Elfen Lied;
the Coma article on Wikipedia (I didn't write it);
coming improvements in the Sift3 algorithm;
InuYasha manga reaching chapter 500;
the new Google/Kartoo/Wikipedia searches for any selected text in the blog;
how I am reading Il Nome de la Rosa and The Name of the Rose in the same time, trying to grasp more of the Italian language;
Gwoemul, a very nice South Korean film...

No, there is too much to choose and I can't decide. I think I will skip entry 200 entirely.

Ok, let me feed my weird side. This is the soundtrack of a very nice anime series, itself spun from an anime movie called Ghost in the Shell. The series was called GITS - Stand Alone Complex and this was the opening song. This is not the official video for this song, especially since it depicts images from the movie, not the series, but I liked it better. Enjoy!

The original video was removed from YouTube, this is another, same song.

[youtube:h71xGNXpRVo]

Inner Universe - GITS SAC OST
Composed by Yoko Kanno
Performed by Origa
Click here for lyrics and details.
You can also download the manga for Ghost in the Shell and its sequel (GITS 2 :) ) at narutocommunity.net, after a very annoying registration and a lot of popups (or javascript errors).
Try these direct download links, although they might not work:
Ghost in the Shell
Ghost in the Shell 2
Warning: don't use multiple connections or download accelerators. This site only allows one connection from one IP, apparently.

And here is Making of a Cyborg, by Kenji Kawai, the original soundtrack for the movie.

[youtube:-u77XdL8_B4]

Yes, Manga again. I feel the whole manga/anime intensity fading away again, since I've read the Berserk and InuYasha manga and watched the Samurai Deeper Kyo anime series. Oh... that and my wife hates me for ignoring her :)
But before this manga fading to black, I will blog one more manga series. I think that it is nicely drawn, but hard to actually follow. I am talking about hardcore sci-fi manga Blame! by Nihei Tsutomu. Placed in a distant future, humans and silicon creatures (and some crossbreeds) inhabit a huge structure and fight each other for obscure reasons. The manga is a cross between Giger and Aeon Flux and, if you remember the MTV show, just as hard to follow due to very little explaining and scarce dialogue. It is basically a world description, even if it has a central character and a plot line.
The same artist created two other manga series in the same universe: Biomega and Net Sphere Engineer. You can download most of the Nihei Tsutomu works at the Controlling Authority site.

Ok, a few days ago I wrote this post that basically said Inuyasha was a great anime and that the manga goes on further and the story is still going. Here I am telling the same thing about Berserk. The story is a cross between Flesh+Blood and Hellraiser. The anime ends suddenly at chapter 11, but the manga has reached chapter 32 and goes on. You can find the manga online here and here and here.

If you can read Japanese, here is the official site for Berserk.

Update 11 Oct 2009: A new anime started, continuing the InuYasha story, although some people seem to not agree with the interpretation of the manga. It is called Inuyasha Kanketsu-hen (or Inuyasha Final Act) and it starts where the first anime ended. Having just seen the first episode, I must say that I can barely understand what is going on anymore. There are so many characters and I don't really remember how they cam to be as they are now. So my recommendation is to read the chapters of the manga from about chapter 360. Here is another link where you can read InuYasha chapters online: Inuyasha on OneManga.

A while ago I've seen the Inuyasha anime series and fell in love with it. But at that time I didn't have a blog and I also thought that most Japanese anime is that good. As written in my review back then, I was soon crying for more episodes when it ended. I got a bit upset, too, because the series didn't end anywhere. It just stopped!
But, even if it is something obvious, I never thought about searching for the Inuyasha manga! Yes, the anime is based on a manga series that is, as I write this blog, ongoing and (almost) close to its finish. And you can read it! Free! online! :)

Ok, here is the link: Read on!