It’s been over several weeks since the start of the new anime season in Japan, so a lot of the shows are pretty far along. It’s a little late, but here are some reviews of current properties if you haven’t started watching yet and need a helping hand trying to pick what to watch. They’re not in any specific order:
Kiniro no Mosaic – when it was first announced, I was somewhat interested in this title, but after watching the first episode, the inevitable end was fairly obvious. The Japanese character being heavily Westernized and the foreign character being well-versed in Japanese culture schtick has been done numerous times before, but usually as an aside, not as a core interaction device. I’m sure we won’t see anything new this time around. The character design is cute and the character animation is above average. The backgrounds are very good. By nature of two of the characters being from England, the English language is naturally going to be encountered. They got reasonably close grammatically, though it is still a little “Speed Racer†awkward. The thing that ruins it is the accenting of words within the sentences is all off. At least it will probably be a somewhat entertaining ride. B-
Root – I have top say I was pretty let down, I was looking forward to this, but it fell pretty flat for me. It isn’t terrible, it looks nice and can be entertaining, but the gags and humor are a little weak. Yes, the English is bad, although correct. But that’s something I’m used to and expect, although there has been a rare case of native English voices, but the script they read from is filled with odd english. It just occurred to me, they really should be speaking the Queens English. Wonder what that would sound like! C+
