New Anime Batch Review - Nana, Zegapin, Utawarerumono and Air Gear

Ok so today there's been a shit load of new anime subbed so instead of reviewing each in separate posts (which will take ages) I thought I'd do them all in the same post.

Nana

My Opinion: Damn, these Slice of Life shows will be the death of me, yet another superb offering from Madhouse, they seem to be in their element with this genre, Beck and ParaKiss were both great and this is shaping up to be the same. What really surprised me was that in Madhouse's previous SoL shows the budget seemed to have been quite low causing the animation to slip at times, but throughout this entire episode there was no trace of bad animation, its good stuff all the way with Nana so I'll definitely be continuing with this.

Zegapin
My Opinion: I'm partial to a bit of mecha, there's nothing better than watching big heaps of metal smashing the crap out of each other while the teenagers inside them scream. Sunrise are pretty much the most influential studio for mecha, after all the genre wouldn't be the same without our old friends the Mobile Suits would it? So It was with this that I sat down to watch Zegapin, now the promo's didn't do much for me from what I could see the characters looked pretty boring and the cg mecha looked equally bland, well how wrong was I! This was suprisingly pretty good, the action was awesome, the cg mecha's looked great, sure it stank of every mecha anime Sunrise have done (anyone notice the White Base rip off?) but it was still enjoyable as hell and left me wanting much much more, I'll definitely be continuing with it!

Utawarerumono
My Opinion: Having seen all of the promo's for this show I was quite excited, the prospect of a Fantasy show with violence and harem elements excited me somewhat, so far it hasn't disappointed, judging from the first episode we could be on to a winner here, a mysterious man wakes up in a town, he can't remember anything about himself nor can he explain the reason he is wearing an un-removable mask on his face, it may sound like a pretty standard set up but this could be great, if the opening is anything to go by there'll be a fairly large cast of characters and hopefully a violent battle or two, not much happened in this first episode but It was a nice set up, I look forward to seeing where this is going.

Air Gear
My Opinion: Let me start off by saying this, this didn't feel like a anime at all, It felt like It should have been some Megadrive game, this reeked of the old sidescrolling beat em up "Streets of Rage" not just because there's a kid with rollerblades in it (I think that was number 2) but the music literally sounded like it had been ripped out of it, the awful techno crap that was in that game had been stuck in this, and do you know what? It kind of worked, I'll say now that I read a few chapters of the manga (because I'm kind of a fan of Ten-Ten) and hated it pretty much, but for some reason the anime was somewhat enjoyable, sure it belongs in the 90s and is possibly the stupidest anime I've ever seen but roller blades + fanservice seems to have proven somewhat of a winning formular, now I could get very bored of it very quickly but then I'll still probably watch it just so I can laugh at how shit it is. More fanservice please though (I can't believe I just asked that).