Going back... ooh, a couple months back I bought House of Five Leaves. This anime was very different for me, but also fair to say it's a rather unique anime. Mostly drama and character study, it's a story about an out-of-work ronin Masa who makes the acquaintance of the yakuza looking Yaiichi. Yaiichi initialy hires him to protect him, but Masa realises that he ended up being an accomplice to a kidnapping. He's very intrigued by the friendships he makes with the other members of the kidnapping group the Five Leaves, and Yaiichi mostly, but feels conflicted at the idea of committing crimes. His struggle is one of his stomach against his spine too, as he has little other chance of getting work due to his personality, which is very shy and lacking in confidence.
I was hooked, it's good stuff.
Now for something completely different.
I started watching Gintama. Currently I'm up to episode 235, but I think I can make a fair assessment of the show at this point.
Somewhat Excel Saga anime like with screwball comedy, mindscrew storyline and positively out of left field, I wasn't too hooked on the show initially. Basically, I thought it swung and missed with me, I didn't like the humor, I thought it was stupid - it didn't know where it was going, crude, with too much toilet humor (I've never watched a show with toilet humor, or at least this much). It was like shooting hundred of arrows blindfolded in the hopes of hitting the target at least once. But I reasoned to myself "If this series has 250 episodes, clearly there must be something about it that's good". So I stuck it out. And you know what? It does get to you.
I never really liked the original Ruruoni Kenshin anime to begin with, but when I got to those awesome fight scenes and I fell in love with Kenshin's voice, I wanted more. More! Gintama is kind of like that. I still get a bit bored in arcs because they're often an episode or two too long. The humor sometimes hits on something epic. At the very least, there's eye candy. And Voice-actor ear candy. Tomokazu Sugita (Gintoki) and Kazuya Nakai (Hijikata) were already much loved voice actors of mine. Kazuya voiced Date Masamune and Mugen, and Tomokazu voiced Kyon! Takasugi's voice is like whoa! Too deep for that guy.
I'm going to be a bit sad at finishing it. I rushed the series, and would download several episodes a day. But at the same time the rewatchability of most episodes was pretty low too.
What can I say, I like it a lot. But I'm also very much aware it's not the best thing out there, nor does it aspire to be. I'll probably stop fangirling soon after finishing, but I definitely want to support the series and will buy the dvds when they start releasing past the 4th set (they currently only have 50 episodes out and the movie which I already bought) and want to get all the manga volumes even though Viz stopped releasing past volume 23.
If I start talking about characters and storyling this will turn into a definite wall of text, so I'll end it here.
