American University Anime Society’s Blog

Seeing how Kristen, aka Airviper, has been doing quite the nice job recently on reviews, I figure I might as well hop in and do a couple of quick ones myself…

Murder Princess is an OVA that is coming out in Japan as we speak. It opens with the King of some kingdom about to fall, and he sends out his omly daughter to safety as he sacrifices himself. The show almost immediately starts to be different, in an odd way, when the villain is revealed to be a mad scientist with twin robot girls, who simply kill everyone. Hey, at least the killing id done differently, slightly. However, the juicy plot of the show is that as the Princess (Alita) tries to escape, she runs into a mercenary (Falis) who happens to be one of the best around. After an incident though, the two switch bodies—meaning the princess soul is now stuck in the body of the mercenary, the mercenary stuck in the princess’s body. Kinda of like in that not so good Disney movie I know. But still, the Princess (in the mercenary body) begs for help, with the Mercenary (in the Princess Body) agrees. By the end of the first episode, the two females are back in the castle leading the kingdom, having defeated the doctor, which should lead into interesting storylines for the rest of the 6 episode series. The design and art are solid, and the action is quite good as well. So it has a chance to be pretty good…

Venus Versus Virus is yet another shonen series, but unlike the recently reviewed Claymore doesn’t really have anything really going for it. It’s rather generic about two girls (Lucia and Sumire) who hunt down demons in a modern type setting. But uh oh! Sumire has control issues, and turns into a huge angry demon whenever she uses her power! Oh no! Bah. I’ll admit that the character design for Lucia is pretty cool, and the show itself seems to be ok—it’s not bad, but it’s just not good either. If you haven’t watched too many shonen series, you would probably enjoy it. But if you have, the fact that you have the cliché episode where one of the characters (sumire) tries to go back to her life and realizes she can’t by episode frickin 2, well, it’s just not a good thing, espically when compared to the more dynamic Claymore.

From Shonen to Shojo now, we now turn to Ghost Hunt. It begins with a somewhat basic premise; high school girl gets into trouble, forced to work for rather arrogant, cold high school aged guy, but she starts to develop feelings. Fortunately, there’s more to the show than just that. Ghost Hunt, not surprisingly, is about Mai (the high school girl) and Shibuya (the ghost hunter) solving mysteries about ghosts. And no, not the Scooby Doo type. I’ve only watched three episodes, but it seemed alright. In the first episodes, the viewer is introduced to all the various ways of how you might find a ghost, from technology (Shibuya), to Christan Missionaieres and Buddhist Monks. And they do a good job to explaining how each of them does their job, and the differences. The first three episodes revolve around a nearby school with a history of “Accidents” with a bunch of people nearly dying. The problem with the show is that it’s pretty slow—rather it’s very talkative. Some scenes will tend to drag at times. Still, ff you don’t mind this though, and you enjoy shojo shows, this might be a series to look into.