Review: Nyan Koi

"Nyan Koi" tells us the story of a teenage boy with an allergy to cats, who accidently breaks a "Neko Jizou", a statue which is an entity in charge of protecting the cats, for which he is cursed to... being able to talk to cats! However, he also has to perform 100 tasks cats ask him, or he will turn into a cat, which will kill him, since he would be allergic to himself! In addition to this, he will have to interact with the girl he likes, who loves cats, without telling her the truth, or the curse will fall upon him.
Graphics: This is the reason why I chose "Nyan Koi" to be my first review. This anime has the best drawing and cleaning I have ever seen. It is truly amazing the technical quality, being at the top in this scale, and an standard to which all anime should aspire, being the one I will use to compare others, in terms of graphic quality. Evaluation: 10

Narrative: The creators of the anime did a good job creating original characters, specially when giving personalities to the cats Junpei (main character) talks to, but what they have exceled was in the interactions between them, and how that makes them evolve. The rest is a pretty straightforward shonen romantic comedy, with an happening serving as an excuse for the boy to interact with the/some girl(s). Evaluation: 7

Originality: As I said before, the anime follows the mould that is generally applied to the romantic comedy shonen nowadays, but it seems fresh, because the characters are original, and the fantastic element feels natural in the story, unlike other anime where the fantastic elements there introduced seem forced. Evaluation: 8

Overall: Summing up, "Nyan Koi" keeps himself inside the mould established by the industry for this genre, but it organises things in a way that make things seem new, supported by the astonishing graphic quality. All added up, I came up with the score of 8,5 for this anime.

Preview: High School of the Dead (HOTD)

I hate horror. I really do hate horror.
So when I "discovered" this anime, I really didn't pay much attention to it. But then I saw the image on the left and thought "Wow, those are some big ....err... breasts", and figured that it would be a mixture of horror and ecchi. Now, we have here two things, one I like, and another that I do like. It seemed that the idea could end up badly, forcing the two genres together, two genres that try to cause opposite feelings/sensations in the viewer. But as you can't judge a book by its cover, I became curious and decided to watch it, having already watched the 3 first episodes. The drawing was nice, the opening was good, and it ended grabbing my attention. However what "hooked" me was not the ecchi's parts, which could and should be way more subtle (for example I doubt most of the people are interested in the pants of female zombies...), but the relation between characters because, altough some are sterotypes, it can come a nice character evolution form there, specially from the "main couple". It also pleased me that the creators haven't focused too musch on the gore, and made the characters find belivable yet good solutions for the problems they face, showing also the interactions between emotions and thoughts, in which the bad ideas are caused by the interference of the first in the secound, and not by incredible lack of intelligence.
Summing up, I believe this anime has "legs to walk", specially because the authors used the zombie theme effectively, protruding the thrill instead of the disgust, making it more of an action thriller with ecchi nuances, which recall "Black Lagoon" (but with fanatasy and some ecchi), and "Ikkitousen" (with thrilling atmosphere).

The evaluation system

This post serves to explain how I wiil proceed in the reviews I write.
While reviewing, I'll focus my attention on three main characteristics, being them:

1. Graphic Quality: in here I will refer to the quality of the drawing and how "clean" the image is (I know that the concept is a bit unclear, but I'm sure you'll understand it once you start reading the reviews and comparing the images yourself)
2. Story: this is the aspect I consider to be the most important, and its englobes the plot, if its twists are well timed, if the story progresses in a reasonable way, the pace of the narrative, and how well the characters are built and how they evolve.
3. Originality: I think the name says it all, but here I say if the anime "stands out in the crowd", or has something that puts them in a different level from the others.

Each one of this topics will be evaluated from 1 to 10, scale that will be used to release the overall "grade" of the anime, which is NOT an average of the previous three.
I hope you keep following me here in the courier, and more anime related stuff is "coming out of the oven right" now!

The first "Hi"

Hi everybody!
This is the first post of my brand new blog. As the title says, I'm going to wright about anime, posting review, of series i've already finished watching, preview, of series I am currently watching, and sometimes I'll post a few notes about the anime world.
I hope you feel welcomed at blog,
the reviews will start soon.

(P.S.: I do not own any pictures I post, as neither I own any anime I comment here)