| about
trismugistus.com
and digital-bondage.net
are my web sites.
trismugistus.com
is where I upload my anime, manga and tv&film reviews,
and also where I occasionally post short stories and
longer works I've written.
digital-bondage.net
is my wallpaper site and provides anime, manga and other
desktop wallpapers in a variety of resolutions. I also
have a few tutorials and some resources, such as psds
for you to download.
I also run a site called scan-city.org,
which provides scans from the latest japanese anime
magazines for you to download and use in your wallpapers.
You can also read my blog here
or check out my anime list here. |
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| details |
| The Genre: Fan-service, with a wafer-thin
bit of rom-com. |
| The Format: 12 episodes across 3 DVDs from
Media Blasters. |
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| The plot: In ages past, a man and a woman
tasted forbidden love. Even though they could
not be together, they made a vow that would transcend
time. When next they meet, their fire will rekindle.
In modern day, there is a boy's academy located
high in the mountains called Kanenone. Yuusuke
is one of the reincarnated lovers, and a student
at Kanenone. When an all-girls class is transferred
to the school for a summer session, could one
of them be his past romance? |
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| opinion
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| Perhaps it's too much to expect an anime adapted
from a porn game to be any good. But then there
are several other series based on porn games--most
notably Fate/Stay Night and Tsukihime--which have
been quite widely acknowledged as reasonable-to-good
series. So perhaps it isn't too much to expect.
But, to cut to the chase, Green Green really
isn't that good at all. In fact, it's extraordinarily
repetitive, and really quite tedious with it.
Green-Green sets out to be an ecchii, romantic-comedy
type of anime. And, I guess, in some ways, it
achieves these goals.
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But then, as goals, they're setting themselves
a pretty low bar. There are loads of series
like this for them to steal ideas from.
I mean, I've reviewed two others in the
last few weeks alone--DearS and Girls Bravo,
both of which are better than this.
No, what makes Green Green fail, and fail
so hard, is the non-central characters.
The "Baka-Trio", as I've seen
them described. They are Tadatomo Ijuin,
Hikaru Ichiban-Boshi and Tenjin. These guys
are presented as Yuusuke's friends, but
really they're more like hangers on.
And they're complete losers. Now there's
nothing wrong with that, I suppose; hell,
many an anime character could be described
as a 'loser', to some degree or another,
but these guys take the cake. In fact, they
actually probably baked the cake as well.
And invented the whole concept of cake baking
and the eating there of. They're that loser-ly.
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What makes this a problem is that they're also
stunningly annoying. These guys whine like a broken
fire-alarm, and worst of all they keep repeating
the same things over and over and over and over
and over again. The first time it's funny, the
second it's amusing, the third it's starting to
become repetitive, by the hundredth you just want
to rip your own tongue out and hang yourself with
it.
Which isn't to say they don't slip some good
gags in there, when they can be bothered to think
of some new ones, but generally it's the same
thing over-and-over again.
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To make this whole situation worse, and why
it really spoils the anime, is that these guys
are really what most episodes end up focusing
on. Now, call me a heterosexual, but if I'm watching
an ecchii anime, I want to at least see a bit
of lady-flesh in each episode. Controversial,
I know, but there we have it.
And it's not like there isn't plenty of nubile
young girly-flesh kicking about for us to ogle
at, it's just that we never bloody see any of
it! Instead, for many episodes, we end up focused
entirely on the three losers shouting and screaming
and whining the same things at us yet again.
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Give it a rest, lads...
Sorry if that sounds rampantly pervy, but
when a show advertises itself as an uncomplicated
something, and then delivers something else
entirely, it's a failure in my book. If
it hadn't pretended to be all about the
ecchii, I probably wouldn't have seen this
as being a problem, but it did, so I do.
But perhaps I am being too harsh on it--I
did laugh in quite a few places, and the
ecchii that there is, is good ecchi--but
I dunno, it just annoyed me too much. I
read in my research that it's quite a Japan-specific
show, with lots of references in there that
only the Japanese would get. To me, this
read as something of an excuse. A way of
making allowances for something that just
isn't any good.
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One highlight for the Green-Green release is
that even though it's 12 episodes, it's only 3
disks, and each disk has a nice clutch of extras.
We get 'videos' for the series' songs and most
notably some oakaki episodes. These are bonus
short episodes, which I presume are DVD only material.
Ironically then, since these oakaki episodes focus
much more on the girls, and are much more solid
in their telling, these bonus episodes are far,
far better than the actual series itself.
Mitigating these nice extras is the dub. Which
is awful. Part of the blame has to go to the original
source material of course--it's annoying, so how
could the dub not be annoying too?--but also the
performances are often poor and sometimes quite
lifeless, and at other times horribly over-acted.
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Animation quality is average, but does stay
quite consistent throughout, which is often not
the case for series like this, where animation
quality lurches from the sublime to the ridiculous.
There is a lot of repeated animation and padding,
though--the intro and outro sequences are particularly
long and made up of multiple elements, and recapping
is, shall we say, not exactly infrequent.
Sometimes I actually wonder why I buy some of
the things I do. As part of writing these reviews
I often, as mentioned, do a bit of research. This,
generally, is more about making sure I get the
spellings of the character's names right in all
honesty, but sometimes it goes a bit further and
I read plot summaries or even read other people's
reviews.
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When I do this, and, as here, the series
is a bad one, it makes me wonder why I didn't
check the series out before I wasted my
money on it.
That's right--I actually pay for everything
I review. This may seem a bit odd to those
familiar with 'review copies', and may seem
even stranger given that 90% of anime 'fans'
just download all the stuff they watch,
but I think it makes it a more valid review.
It's all very well to watch something that's
free and critique it, but when you've spent
money on that thing (and in the case of
anime we could be talking £15-£20
per disk) surely it's much more representative
of what I'm reviewing? If I'm shelling out
and I say I like or didn't like something,
that's done with a view that I must inherently
be considering whether it represented a
wise purchase or a waste of money.
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Y'know, you can often tell when I've not got
much to say about something when I pad my reviews
out with things like the above. In this case,
it's because Green Green is just plain bad, and
I got bored of explaining that same basic fact
over-and-over. Just like a got bored of the baka-trio.
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| summary |
| The Summary: Repetitive, and slightly annoying
with it. |
| The Score: 1/5 |
| The Pictures:
(click for larger versions) |
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