Well I like Yankee Kozue's (or Saki) attitude, but her voice is grating! Her THIRD personality Nanako sounds annoying too. They should have separate seiyuu! Satomi Arai is only good as a straight talker in my opinion.

And I forgot to mention it before, but I really like the ED. Chihiro Yonekura's still got it. The OP is boring, however. It sounds like a SPITZ song sung by ladies, and that just doesn't work!

Kind of a letdown compared to the first episode. Tsubomi and Vivian don't really appeal to me. And their transformation sequences weren't even ready!

This almost made up for the mediocrity I've had to endure in the previous 11 episodes. Setsuna is just flat out awesome and the gun-fu sequence between her and Rushuna was very well done. It's obvious where the entire budget for the show went. I'm not saying it was AIR or Jinki 1 quality, but it was definitely 10x better than what we usually get.

Why, oh why did they wait until the very last episode to reveal Setsuna? The show would've fared so much better had she been a periodic or constant rival throughout, bad animation or not. The wasted potential makes me fume!

Mikan takes a trip into Central Town on a quest to eat Sweat driciaus Howaion. Tons of great outbursts from Mikan here. It's like she ate four bags of Halloween candy before the episode started. Kana Ueda rocks!

The HiME take back the school, super squadron style. Mai and Gucci Bag EVOLVE after taking a blast from Arty, then fly into space and blow the hell out of him, thus killing theirselves (until next episode). This strips the Golden Child of her HiME goodness, and kills off her special someone - decoder ring mad scientist. Afterwards, she and Miyu escape into the forest, then old man winter sneaks up and kills her. Then Miyu kills HIM, then herself. Whew. I don't know why I summarized all that.

Anyway, pretty cool episode. I hope Miyu's not gone for good.

Next week they celebrate Mai's passing with FANSERVICE!

The angst reaches a boiling point, then simmers back down with the power of reminiscence and rejection! They handled this really well, I thought. Not once did I roll my eyes.

Haduki mixes with Luna (to annoy me!), experiences the awesomeness of daytime, and discovers the stupidness of Kouhei. There was something about Saitou's "weak and helpless" voice that really irritated me this week. It felt like she hadn't done it in a while and was trying to remember what it was supposed to sound like.

Eyecatch. The OP switched to Tsuku Yomi Mode again. Boo.

I like Kozue (especially her voice!), Yankee Kozue, Radiation Head's mom, and the calm atmosphere. But I'm not too fond of the rest of the chara, the chara designs in general, or the Maburaho color palette, so the jury's still out on this one. I'll need another episode or two.

Dirty Ultraman fans unite! Dirty Yamcha fans unite!

This is another brainless M.O.E. show, right? Right
It's got lots of moe and suggestive themes, right? Right
It's got Toru Furuya, voice of the masterful Yamcha, right? Right
So you like it a lot, right? Right!
So you have no taste, right? What!? ...Right

I require more Hotaru and fewer filler bots! Not that this was a bad episode. It still had some good gags.

Touka returns for the final battle! On a missle no less. And that was the only exciting thing about the episode. There is absolutely no steam behind this final battle!

Ichijou is cute! She's like Tenma on ritalin.

I'm actually starting to like everybody on this show now. Well, everybody in these two episodes, at least. They're doing a good job with the stories of the secondary folk. Even got some ANGST going on in 14.

Alyssa pulls a Red Dawn on the school but the HiME escape to the digital underground thanks to Wheels. Such a huge place. How can SEARRS not know about it!?

Oh, and Haruka makes me laugh.

Aobaaaaaaaaaa! YOUR SHOW ROCKS! YOUR GRAY HAIR ROCKS! YOU ROCK!

This is quality stuff for a TV anime, especially the animation. I had never heard of "feel," the studio that's working on it. I looked them up and saw that they collaborated with ZEXCS on Da Crapo, but that's all I could find. These are good people! If they're up and comers I hope this will get them established.

In addition to the animation, there's nice chara art, Kenji Kawai music, and a strong cast including three of my favorite seiyuu: Yukarin, Satsuki Yukino, and Tomoko Kawakami. Also, if Aoba keeps on being as awesome as she was in this episode, Fumiko Orikasa could easily become another one of my favorites.

So yeah, I have high hopes for this show. Not even the impending onslaught of mecha battles will make me nitpick it, because...

...will be front and center!

This was just what I was expecting after reading some of the manga. It's dialogue heavy, but the characters are a fairly likeable bunch and everyone is casted well, so it didn't bore me like it could have. Whether or not I'll keep commenting on it weekly is still up in the air, however. This kind of show I usually like to marathon.

Me:"What's with this montage OP? And the animation sure isn't very g-*shot pops up*"
Me:".....oh"

Snooze. The only thing this has going for it are the Poyoyon Rock character designs. But even they're no use in the hands of the wrong studio, demonstrated nicely here. So unless Nana Mizuki's Cerulean Blue turns out to be ridiculously awesome, this one is a "pass."

Happy New Year everyone.

I've decided to list my favorite crap from 2004 too. I figure it might be useful when one day in the future I ask, "what the hell did I like in 2004?" You gotta be prepared for these kinds of things, you know.

Anyway, I'm just going to use a few categories. If you care what show is in a pic just hover your cursor over it. And I'm not doing any "worst" stuff, because I don't like thinking about them.

Overall

Chara

Chara Runner-Ups

Episode

OP

ED