BASTARD!! -Heavy Metal, Dark Fantasy- (Japanese audio) - Episodes 1-6
Knights of the Zodiac: Saint Seiya -Battle for Sanctuary- (English audio) - Episodes 1-6
Knights of the Zodiac: Saint Seiya -Battle for Sanctuary- (English audio) - Episodes 1-6
AOASHI eps 22-24
Gelling and promotion.
A really good sports show about football which was pretty grounded. It took its time with the progression of our MC from cocky hero of his school team in his small town in the sticks to being the out of depth hick in the big city big club youth academy and gradually improving his skills till he gets promoted to the youth A team! Yes that's right 24 episodes in and he's only got to the youth A team, not the first team or winning at nationals like nearly every sports show I've seen. There's also no dumb "superpowers" like some sports shows, just skills honed over the course of the show, although the MCs skill is his vision which they sort animate as a "superpower", but vision is really hard to get across verbally without a lot of explanation. There's also a sweet, but subtle romance/love triangle which made the off field stuff more interesting too.
The art was pretty good, all characters are pretty unique, but the animation was a lot of the time non-existent, although I get that animating a whole match would take ages to do and some of the things they did with slow-mo etc worked, but other things didn't.
8/10
Indeed the songs covered stories from the battle at the end of the Heike period and whilst dubbing the songs might not have worked it's weird that they didn't sub them.however it was fairly clear that the songs were conveying parts of the story as well