Alien Nine

The history revolves around Yuri Otani, a sixth-grader that has been unwillingly elected for the Alien Fighter group. The Alien Fighters consists of 3 girls, Yuri Otani, Kasumi Tomine and Kumi Kawamura whose job is to catch aliens that land on the school. To help them and make sure the girls don’t die, each girl gets a symbiotic alien helmet that has wings and metallic tentacles that protect the user and attack threats. They are called Borgs and eat the sweat of the user, thus making the symbiotic relationship, the feed from the user but protect and help them.

As for the other Alien Fighters, Kasumi Tomine loves her job, and she is good at it, as she is with anything she does, and Kumi Kawamura just got the job to avoid being bothered by her classmate’s problems, but she is quite skilled at alien hunting.

Back to Yuri. She hates aliens. She hates Borgs. She didn’t want to be in the Alien Fighters. Now that she is and has to live with a Borg on her head and has to fight aliens everyday, her life is miserable. The anime shows the problems that Yuri has to face with her alien phobia and the battles between the Alien Fighters and the aliens.

Yuri is almost always crying and whining about not wanting to be close to aliens and Borgs and is almost of no help to the others. Most girls wouldn’t want to be close to icky sticky dangerous aliens, but her whining is really tiresome. It even becomes a problem to her partners.

After a few fights, things start to get weird and that’s when the story gets good. There are a lot of things that the Alien Fighters have to face, and while they do, their own history and problems come to light.

The anime ends in a less than satisfactory way, leaving a lot unanswered, and worst, if you watch the credits, you will see scenes of the next episode, which wasn’t made. The anime is based on the homonymous manga created by Hitoshi Tomizawa, but the anime only tells half the history of the 3 manga volumes. Right now, the only way to know how it finishes, is to buy the manga and read. There are also a few sites out there in the internet that reveal the ending and explain some things.

While watching this, I couldn’t help remembering Evangelion. There are a lot o elements in common with NGE, but I will not list them here because it could ruin the experience for some people. Just think of Evangelion without the religion and with hats instead of giant robots.

I enjoyed watching this anime, despite the lack of ending. Aliens problems, conspiracy, school girls, battles and everything an Otaku needs. I’m not going to rate it, but if you are like me and have almost no free time to watch anime, skip this, there are better things out there, and some of them have endings.

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is one of the most hyped anime series of 2006. I stumble on this one when I was looking at some anime ranking for 2006 in Japan. It was voted the most popular anime of 2006. After watching it, I thought that it lived up to the hype.

The anime is very light, and anyone can watch. There is almost no violence in the whole series but there are a few sexy moments. This is the story of a young high school girl that is bored with her life and wants to meet aliens, time travelers, ESPers (Extra Sensory Perception) so that life can be more interesting. The first episode can be very misleading, since it is not like the rest of the series. Even if you do not like the first episode, try watching the second and third ones, they are much better examples of what to expect of this anime.

The story is told from the point-of-view of Kyon, another high school student that kind of becomes friends with Suzumiya in the second episode. The series progresses with them meeting other people, like Yuki Nagato, Mikuru Asahina and Koizumi Itsuki and living the day-to-day life, sometimes with unexpected and surprising turns. Oh, by the way, the series does not follow the timeline of the anime, meaning that episode 6 is actually episode 9 in the anime continuity. But don’t worry about this, you can watch them in the order they are presented (this episode mix-up was probably done on purpose). Most of the episodes have self-containing stories, with little hints to the whole thing.

After I watched all the episodes, I went back to watch them following the timeline. A lot of things made more sense now. If you want to watch them in the timeline order, here's the sequence: 02, 03, 05, 10, 13 ,14, 04, 07, 06, 08, 01, 11, 12 and 09.

I really like the music and the animation on this one. The music is great, opening and ending, and even Suzumiya’s performance in one of the episodes are worth buying (actually, this was a great song). A few soundtracks came out and even CDs with radio shows with the characters for the school radio.

This anime got so popular that there is even a live action porn movie. It is basically the beginning of the anime story, but with sex.

The anime is based on a shōnen (boys) novel by Tanigawa Nagaru, that so far has 8 volumes. There is also a manga being published. As soon as I get some free time I am going to read the novels and the manga. And post a comment on them. :)

Since there is more story on the novels that was not animated, there is hope that there will be more episodes to come.

Conclusion: Great anime, worth buying.

First post

It starts.

Hello, my name is Giuliano and this is the first entry in my first ever blog.
I decided to create this blog to talk about some of the Anime and Manga and related stuff that I have been reading / watching recently.

Bear in mind that I am by no means and Anime or Manga expert, I just like to read / watch them in my free time, and discuss some with my friends. Most people will notice that most of my comments will focus on the story. That is because the story is what I most like about them.

Hajimete.