Hidan no Aria

High school comedy has a new name, and it's Aria the Scarlet Ammo! No series this season is zanier or more action-packed than this spiritual successor to Toradora!, where high-schooler Kinji Toyama finds himself subject to the temperamental whims of sub-5-foot-tall Aria H. Kanzaki (played by—who else?—Rie Kugimiya). But hot girls aren't Kinji's only problem. He's also attending Tokyo Butei High School, a Tea Party wet dream where everyone is safer because (by the doctrine of mutually assured destruction) every student has a gun and a knife. Of course, they're also packing heat because the school is a training ground for future law enforcement agents, but hey, who needs poorly-reasoned plot devices when EVERYONE HAS GUNS?

Kinji's wacky adventures begin when his commute to school is rudely interrupted by remote-controlled Segways equipped with Uzis—plus a mysterious phone call telling him there's a bomb strapped to his bike. In his madcap quest to avoid being blown up, Kinji is rescued by dual-wielding gunslinger Aria, who pulls him to safety just in time. However, another wave of armed Segways attacks them, and this time Kinji's rising blood pressure transforms him into Bruce Willis and he eliminates the threat with a single flashy move. Bravo, young man! As a reward for your actions, you get to sit next to Aria in class since she's transferring into the school!

In all seriousness, Aria the Scarlet Ammo obviously isn't meant to be pure comedy. But this surgical grafting of boy-meets-girl onto girls-with-guns (boy-meets-girls-with-guns?) is unintentionally hilarious—and stupid. Apparently, at no time did anyone stop to think about the illogic of a fully armed student body, or Segways with submachine guns strapped to them. Meanwhile, on the visual side, even shiny animation technique can't redeem the predictable character designs, generic suburban scenery, and dumb sight gags about Aria's chest size. If it were simply about high-intensity gunplay, with daring camerawork and a pulsating action-thriller soundtrack, it wouldn't be such a bad thing. But the high-school sitcom flavor makes it taste as bizarre as ketchup on chocolate.

Originally Posted by Carlos Santos at animenewsnetwork.com

Ore-tachi ni Tsubasa wa Nai

I've seen my share of head-scratching avant-garde anime. I've seen Cat Soup and Mind Game and Lain and things that leave lesser mortals wondering what the plot was about, or if there was a plot at all. But who'd have thought that my undoing would be a visual novel adaptation?

We, Without Wings tries to dress up the old boy-meets-harem formula with a meta-story involving "TV channels" linked in some kind of "hypothetical fairy tale." But what it really means is that, instead of following the exploits of one young lad and the ladies who love him, the first episode skips inexplicably between a whole gaggle of male characters having varied encounters with the opposite sex. In one scenario, a high-schooler finds his walk to school disrupted by all manner of bishoujo clichés; after the opening credits, ten pointless minutes are spent at a casual restaurant where a freeloader is trying to invite young waitresses to a get-together; then comes the nighttime story of a part-timer wandering the international part of town and taking on a thankless construction job because he needs the money.

Does this make sense to anyone? No? Didn't think so. This is more nonsense than Steins;Gate and Chaos;HEAd combined, minus the psycho-thriller atmosphere—or a slice-of-life gone horribly wrong. Because the male characters are so blandly designed, it's almost too easy to miss the fact that they are acting out different scenarios. And the girls they meet, being mindless panty-flashing ciphers, are equally forgettable. Perhaps they become more interesting as the storyline progresses, but who's going to want to stick around for a storyline as baffling as a calculus textbook mistranslated from Russian?

With lazy animation leading the way (seriously, count all the slow pans across static scenery), and boring city backgrounds providing the setting, there's absolutely nothing to look at here—even the fanservice is boring, with its predictable array of pantyshots and boob jiggles. Surely even first-time fans have better standards than this; how bad must a show be that it even fails at being mediocre?