Anime bits, weekend Bee Train edition

Precious little animation has been crossing my path lately, though this week a couple o' Bee Train releases managed to cross my path...

"Tsubasa Chronicle" season 2 ep 13 -- continued where ep 12 left off, of course. And though at the time I thought that maybe, just maybe, we'd get a bit of decent action, it was rather abbreviated and dissappointing overall. And then... More sitting around. On the bus. With that sappy vocal number. *Yawn*

The whole thing also had that "cheap" feel of the first couple of episodes of the season. I'm not sure if it's YGO's poor encoding or what, but a lot of the animation was really really lacking. Even the first season was practically Disney-level compared to this. *Sigh* Oh well, I'll still stick with it just-in-case.

"Spider Riders" dubbed episode 10: "The Mask of Aqune" -- Oddly enough, the animation for "Spider Riders" is amazingly better done than "Tsubasa", even though it's just another kid's show. And this is the episode I wanted to see translated because it's our first real look at brooding purple-gal Aqune. But I've said it before, and I'll say it again, that dub is soooo haltingly awful, that I really had to suffer through it. And got precious little as a reward, I'm afraid, because it didn't really tell me anything that I wanted to know. Oh well.

Oh, and the way the entire soundtrack has pretty much been changed to a typical cheesy cartoon score is rather grating too. Once again, *sigh*.

Another episode (21) of "Popolocrois Story" just showed up on the tracker, but I haven't had a chance to watch it. Probably next weekend during Sunday breakfast would be best. :)

Finally, I've caught up with ep 20 of ".hack//Roots" -- and maybe, just maybe, we're finally starting to get some clues as to what's going on. There seems to be some sort of "factor" that gets "awakened", and Haseo's got it big time thanks to that Harold-the-Programmer guy. But he's being a jerk about it, go figure.

After a few episodes of screwing around with introducing new (and/or ressurected) characters and almost totally ignoring everything that happened with our original cast (who still dominate the OP last I checked), I can't say I'm entirely satisfied with the resumption of focus. Something's missing. And this whirl of side-plots just don't seem to make much impact, though I think I could see how they're related, if I squint really hard. And in the preview for the next ep, there's yet another character we haven't met yet.

I dunno, not even "//SIGN" was this screwy, was it? Of course, by this point in "//SIGN", there were interminably long static shots with minutes of dialogue pasted over them to save money. So I guess I should be glad that there's still at least an action scene or two here.

...and one more time... wait for it...


*Sigh*


(Season finale of "Deadwood" in a half an hour; something to look forward to!)