action
Yoshika Becomes a Runepriest + Your Main Party
If Strike Witches were an RPG, Yoshika is the party cleric, which is usually a pretty boring class if you decide to specialize in healing and buffing armor class like she pretty much does. It’s great for survival and sweet when everyone is bloodied, but seems low on the Awesome! Eila pretty much nailed it [...]
501s, 504s, Training and Broomsticks
What I find amusing about both the 501 and 504 strike witch aerial divisions is those numbers are also designations for brands of Levi’s blue jeans. Given the flight junkie thing about this show, the squadron numbers, if not just some random numbers pulled out of their pants, are more likely related to the air [...]
Sakamoto the Jedi
At the end of last season it looked like Major Sakamoto lost her ability to generate a barrier able to block Neuroi attacks. Just as long as the Neuroi or something worse doesn’t come back, she’d be fine. Bring on season 2 and the Neuroi are back. Oops. Actually, no, not oops, but a sweet [...]
Girls, Guns, Propellers and…
Strike Witches feels a lot like one of my all time favorite anime, Battle Athletes Victory. There’s similarities, a convenient excuse for teenage girls to be the only hope for mankind, an international cast of characters, aliens, the dead parent of the clueless main character as a central figure, and the girls in Battle Athletes [...]
Sword of the Stranger and 2D Power
Producer Masahiko Minami and director Masahiro Ando of studio Bones created Sword of the Stranger as a desire to show the strengths of hand drawn animation in an action film. This is a particularly interesting goal to put forth considering hand drawn animation shrinks in relevance every year. Advances in technology have rapidly eaten up [...]
Finding the Action, Soul Eater
One of the things that I like about the niche anime we tend to get on dvd is most of these shows weren’t expected to run very long (12-26 half hour episodes), so they would end in a reasonable amount of time. This preference meant I passed on the action/fighting-type shows like Naruto, Bleach, [...]
