In an attempt not to add to my huge backlog of awesome anime I own on DVD, I'm making every effort to actually watch whatever I buy at the moment.
Three of the titles I recently paid for are Black Blood Brothers, Ghost Hunt and Starship Operators. I paid £12 for the first, £10.50 for the second and £10.50 for the third - all new. So, if they all had turned out to be ****, I wouldn't have lost a great deal.
Black Blood Brothers: 1-4
Black Blood Brothers is your usual vampire story. There are old vampires who don't change those they bite into vampires and there are a newer type - Kowloon Children - who do change people into vampires when they bite them. The details of the plot and back-story of the main character are up in the air at the moment, but the main character, Jirio, is feared as the 'Silver Sword' (or something) and is trying to reach an area where old vampires and humans can coexist (for reasons unknown), together with his younger brother.
At the moment, I'm unsure what to think. It looks nice enough for a TV series - it having been released back in 2006 - and the action makes it enjoyable enough to sit through, but I won't know if it's very good or just watchable until someone explains what the hell is supposed to be going on. The best thing about it so far is the standard attractive virgin character; the type who appears in almost every vampire story. She almost orgasmed when Jirio drank her blood and kicked his arse when he revealed she was a virgin - that's reason enough for me to keep watching!
Ghost Hunt: 01-07
For a show rated so highly, Ghost Hunt is surprisingly boring at times. It's fairly high quality mystery fare, each episode building the suspense as the mysteries move closer to being resolved, but it's still been rather uneventful for such a highly rated series up to yet.
For example, the first three episode story (each story arc seems to last for three episodes) was about discovering the mystery behind a supposedly haunted house. Naru moved in his recording equipment, a school girl helped him since she'd injured his assistant, a Shinto maiden came to shift the evil spirits, as did a monk and even a young Aussie priest came to join in on the fun. The entire first three episodes involved them trying to figure out why doors kept shaking and whatnot, and in the end ghosts turned out to not be the cause. Not exactly the most pulse pounding way to start a series about hunting ghosts!
The good thing about these drawn out, slow-paced stories is that plenty of time is given to character development and with every episode the tension builds. But, again, it isn't the most exciting series in the world when very little happens. I'm into it - it's pretty involving - but I'm not really sure what to rate it. I think it'll be an 8/10 because it's definitely superior to the other two series I'm watching at the mo, both of which appearing to be 6-7/10 affairs.
Starship Operators: 1-4
So far, this series has failed for one reason: a lack of any character development. Mamoru Oshii's younger brother must have come up with this story since there's been more space battle technobabble than there has been character development. Every sci-fi series should open (or, at the very least, follow the first few episodes) by fleshing out the main characters as much as possible, moving away from the space battle scene until enough has been done to make the reader/viewer care. There's a very good reason why in LotGH the story was quick to switch to the back-story of the leads before attempting to delve too far into an epic all-out war between multiple planets.
There have been other issues, too, namely how hard it is not to think of the story as dumb.
While on a class trip on a new battleship, the cadets on-board learn that their planet has fallen to a planetary alliance. They respond to this by deciding to take on this alliance of nations on their own, in one battleship, despite them having no battle experience. And, even worse, it appears that the enemy is trying to rule the universe with only a few battleships - they only ever send one ship after the 'pirates'.
Starship Operators appears to be no more than an excuse for lots of pretty young girls, who look out of place in a war with their thin arms and all, to be on a spaceship. No character development, a poor excuse for a story and the visuals aren't even very impressive. Even the MVM box set is cheap as hell - the DVDs were chucked in a 3 DVD case that's the size of a single DVD case, and it smells like the cases you can buy at Poundland.
To sum it up, so far...
Ghost Hunt: 7.5-8.5/10
Black Blood Brothers: 7-7.5/10
Starship Operators: 6-7/10
