Burrowowl

After a young girl dies in an accident, her tight-knit group of friends drift apart. Years later, Yadomi Jinta is a recluse hiding away from the world. After skipping out on a semester of school, he is haunted by the memory of his lost friend. As he reconnects to the world, a touching story unfolds.

Eleven half-hour episodes of excellence. I rather admire that this series didn’t attempt to stretch itself out to an artificial “season” length. It took eleven episodes to tell the story properly, sometimes leaking into the end credits where things would have been too compressed otherwise. Highly recommended.

Spoiler: They never find out the name of the flower they saw that day.

If there’s one thing that’s annoying about time travel stories, it’s people fussing about some contrived “paradox” theory or other. A close second is people fussing about the butterfly effect. Stein’s;Gate has had its share of butterfly-fretting, but in its thirteenth installment we finally get to one of my favorite time-travel trope, the Groundhog Day scenario. In the classic Bill Murray film, the main character is stuck in a time loop, repeating the same day over and over again for reasons unknown. Haruhi Suzumiya no Yuutsu had a similar plotline with the Endless Summer arc. Higurashi no Naku Koro ni revolved heavily around a time loop. There have been dozens of video game scenarios that are simply so difficult that the player has to re-try over and over again in a manner reminiscent of Groundhog Day, and I’m not just talking about Donkey Kong Country here.

Time travel tropes are sticky business, but Stein’s;Gate is handling it admirably so far. I certainly feel a bit liberated in regards to posting pictures that look like spoilers now, that’s for sure (a character can only die so many times before it loses its dramatic kick).

Previously I gave a conditional endorsement of Stein’s Gate based on an assumption that everything would derail after a half-dozen episodes or so. Twelve episodes in, we are finally at crossroads of sorts. This show is either just about to faceplant into a steaming pile of failure or soar into greatness. I stand corrected. This series has remained awesome for at least twice as long as anticipated.

Tune in next week to find out how Hououin Kyouma uses seemingly-ordinary kitchen appliances to challenge murderers, turncoats, international conspiracies, and fate itself!

Hey! You, there! Remember Chaos;Head? Me neither. Not very well, at least. You see, it had a really good start with a mysterious-but-cool premise, nice presentation, passable character design, and I was initially quite excited to see where it was all going. Then everything fell apart. By the time I found out what was actually going on I was seriously disappointed and the show ground down into an inevitably lackluster ending.

Stein’s Gate just started up this past week, and is based on a visual novel by the same team that brought us Chaos;Head. Again we’ve got a mysterious premise: our protagonist, an under-funded mad scientist, goes to attend a lecture on time travel. A satellite falls from the sky. Some woman he knows from the academic world ends up getting stabbed. Upon returning to his lab, the mad scientist discovers that the lecture he attended had never happened, that he shouldn’t have witnessed the satellite crash, and maybe he’s a little more crazy than he thought he was. Or maybe there’s some time travel happening, after all.

Oh, and some bananas are put through a microwave. This is very important to the protagonist’s research, you see.

I’m generally opposed to time travel fiction. It encourages some of the worst narrative excesses and discussion of the topic nearly always involves ridiculous notions of the supposedly-necessary consequences of paradox and alternate timelines. Fie on all that nonsense.

One episode in, the main characters appear to be the aforementioned mad scientist, his absent-minded female assistant, and a stereotypical overweight computer geek. Their adversary appears to be the paranoia of their own leader, who believes The Organization is moving against them, attempting to stifle their important scientific work that will overthrow the social order of the world. A little more slapstick and we would see shades of Excel Saga.

Give it a shot. I fully expect this to be awesome for at least five episodes.

Season two of Wakfu is well underway, and somehow I neglected to ever post about this odd French cartoon. Based on a sequel to a French MMORPG (Dofus), Wakfu’s first season followed the adventures of Yugo, a young boy seeking out his long-lost family with the help of a number of companions, each based on character archetypes from the game. Alongside this was the story of a megalomaniac time mage hell-bent on accumulating enough Wakfu (a kind of mystical power source found in living things) to send himself back in time to right a past wrong.

The art style is distinct and the animation style somewhat odd to start with. You see, Wakfu is generated not by traditional pen-and-paper means but via Flash animation. An excellent sample to preview the stylistic character designs and animation style would be from season one, episode one, when Nox the time mage confronts an old man with an infant Yugo. The production company clearly has a certain European flair to it.

Character development is slow in coming, refusing to touch the main characters nearly at all over the course of a full season. I understand the necessity of this, as the show is practically an advertisement for Ankama’s upcoming Wakfu computer game (sequel to Dofus). Each of Yugo’s companions needs to remain a paragon of his character class; Ruel must remain an unrepentant greedy Enutrof, Tristepin must remain a headstrong overconfident Iop. It just wouldn’t do to confuse the RPG-buying public about what they’re getting into.

Season two picks up after shortly after the first one trailed off, with the same core cast of protagonists. Just enough time has passed for their deeds and heroic sacrifices to have become a legend of sorts. I highly recommend checking this series out.

Postscript: I find it highly entertaining to hear French voice actors actually use the phrase “ooh la-la” in dialog. It’s like hearing a Mexican say “ay caramba.”