Anime Watching, Streaming, and Downloading

Although some animes are still good after translation, it doesn’t beat the original. The easiest way to watch original anime is with fansubs. Nowadays it’s really really easy to watch anime, as many sites can just stream it to you.

Anime Top List is extremely useful as it lists the most popular sites to stream anime, and also ranks them. You can also search for an anime and it lists which sites have links for watching it.

Streaming is inconvenient at times though, and actually downloading the video files is definitely preferred. For that, the easiest way is to look for torrents:

Box Torrents is a good place to look for anime torrents, as well as DaTorrents, and also AnimeSuki for newer releases.

For someone who’s not sure which animes would be good, AnimeNfo is a pretty good site for information on the different animes. AniDB seems usefull too.

–

A few of my favorite animes, that I highly recommend, are:

Hajime no Ippo (Awesome anime about boxing. Characters and development are top notch, and the action is excellent)

Hunter X Hunter (Very interesting and addicting action adventure.)

Death Note (A darker anime that really stands out for its originality and intelligence. It also has some interesting philosophical and psychological aspects)

Berserk (Has a Medieval type setting, involving strength and massacres, but also intruiging political aspects. The show ends at an odd place, and one must read the manga to continue the story, and it turns very very gruesome and dark at that point.)

Excel Saga (Very fast-paced, weird, and crazy, but entertaining. Anyone who likes it would also like Puni Puni Poemi)

Nodame Cantabile (One of the best animes I’ve ever seen. Even if you don’t like anime, if you like music, Interesting characters, comedy, and good stories and development, this is a must-watch.)

Azumanga Daioh (This is a really funny and cute anime. There’s no epic or grand story; it’s mostly lots of small misadventures around a group of girls at a school)

Akira(Movie) (A bit old, but still one of the best anime movies out)

And there’s lots of other good animes. Naruto, One Piece, Inu Yasha, and Dragonball are popular ones, but I don’t recommend those unless you have a lot of free time and don’t mind extremely stretched out scenes, as well as repetitive story aspects.

Anime is the shiz.

Anime – Asu no Yoichi – Impression

Asu no Yoichi is a short anime series of 12 episodes, which recently finished.

The story revolves around Yoichi, a young samurai who’s lived his entire life in the mountains, training martial arts with his father in the Ukiha Divine Wind style. One day,  his father decides that Yoichi should head to the city to expand his training and stay at Ikaruga’s Ukiha Divine Wind Style Swordplay school of martial arts. The family staying there consists of 4 sisters. Yoichi is accepted there, and, for humour, throughout his stay, tons of small mishadventures and misunderstandings happen around him, who is unfamiliar with the city life… and women.

The show innately showed some promise. Some aspects are pretty cool; a well-trained samurai with awesome wind techniques, as well as funny or awkward situations he would get into in the city because of his unfamilarity with society. And indeed, In the first episode, Seeing his acrobatics and abilities as he was training was interesting, and the series of whacky events and situations he gets into in the city was quite entertaining. There was also the traditional anime humour of ‘ guy accidentally touches or sees a part of a girl he shouldn’t, and gets beaten up by girl’… which at first was ok, and expected from that type of anime, but as the episodes moved on, I would discover it to plague the entire series.

After the first episode, Yoichi is seen as a freeloader at the dojo, and as he tries to prove himself to the girls, he somehow always ends up on the bad side of Ibuki Ikaruga, the eldest sister. This wouldn’t be a problem if there was any development in their relationship, but there isn’t! It’s just the same kind of cheap jokes over and over; Yoichi does or sees something that makes Ibuki jealous and then she beats him up(cheaply). More characters are added into the mix and some infatuations pop up between certain characters, but none of that or the developments happening throughout the series ever have real consistence or become too interesting or funny; It’s like, just there.  A few characters are sometimes funny, like Washizu, a delinquent in love with Ibuki; his preception of what’s going on around him is exagerated and inaccurately odd.
Unlike the first episode, the rest doesn’t get very whacky, in fact, the whole rest of the series is pretty mellow, which says alot about the action — There’s a fighting scene here and there, but it doesn’t try very hard. The series isn’t bad though, and the animation is pretty decent.

Overall, I’d like to recommend the first episode, and maybe the second one… but unless you’re bored and up for watching anything, I’d ignore the rest of the series — you won’t miss much.

My rating of the series Asu no Yoichi : Mediocre.