La Corda d’Oro ~Blue Skies~
Muse: You know you’re legit when you have tildes in your title.
The previous La Corda d’Oro followed a high school girl who was BSing her way through a music competition with the help of a magic violin given to her by a fairy, and gradually learned about the wonder of music from her attractive competition. Blue Skies follows a girl named Kanade who was a musical prodigy but has apparently fallen out of the competition scene. That changes when she and her childhood friend Kyoya visit another friend, Ritsu, who spontaneously moves them into the dorm at his school so that they can compete in a national music competition. And there may or may not be fairies. Overall, I was underwhelmed.
So far this version only shares the name and some storyline similarities with the first one, so new viewers can watch this without any problems. However, without the immediate ridiculous supernatural angle, Blue Skies is pretty bland. Everything is very obviously in service towards getting all the characters into the music competition, and it’s pretty clunky with the way it goes about it. Most of the time in the episode is spent mooning over the abnormally large pretty boy cast (“He’s playing an electric violin at a classical music competition, what a rebel“), which is honestly to be expected, but it comes at the expense of setting up the situation better.
Our lead character doesn’t seem to be much more than an airhead at the moment, despite her love of the violin. It’s implied by the opening and the constant reference to the “are you at your limit” card that Kanade has given up her prodigy status, but she seems perfectly happy otherwise, so I fail to see how this is a problem. It also doesn’t make a lot of sense how Ritsu, despite being Kanade and Kyoya’s childhood friend, acts kind of cold to them and then turns around and tells them that he’s moved their stuff and had them transfer schools without their permission. “Your sky is too narrow” is also pretty cryptic as far as reasoning goes. Basically, Blue Skies comes off a little too heavy in the random anime logic department.
However, the La Corda d’Oro series consistently promises one thing–cute guys playing musical instruments. Blue Sky is definitely prepared to deliver on that. I’m hoping that it will fix the flat character issues in the weeks to come, but so far it’s giving out exactly what it says on the tin, no more, no less.
selector infected WIXOSS
To be honest, the first thing I thought of after I read the synopsis for the show was a certain other show about girls and magic cards which, as many of you remember, hurled itself down the dark path relatively quickly. Thankfully, WIXOSS is a bit more subtle about its intentions, but you don’t have to be a genius to figure out that these girls are not going to be in for a pleasant ride. To get this out of the way now, I don’t particularly care that Mari Okada’s involvement since I’m relatively okay with her brand of melodrama…and I still tend to eat that stuff up like there’s no tomorrow anyway. That aside, WIXOSS’s first episode was pretty entertaining, and I’m interested to see where it goes from here, especially in terms of how it lives up to its foreshadowing.
Though, at this point, a large part of the story is still a mystery, the episode introduces us to the concept behind the card game, as well as gives us a basic idea of who are central heroine is. Essentially, WIXOSS is a new card game that is all the rage amongst teen girls and after Ruuko Kominato receives it as a present from her brother as a way for her to start making friends at her new school, she quickly discovers that her’s is a bit different than the others when her card starts moving and making noises only she can hear. As it turns out, she is among the select few who have the title of Selector and get to duke it out with each other for the title of “Eternal Girl” which comes with the ability to grant any one wish for themselves. The only catch is that after three consecutive losses, the girl loses her Selector title and the ability to have her wish granted. Of course Ruuko, at this point, doesn’t care too much about this whole wish granting thing and even offers up her first loss to Yuzuki, another Selector who goes to Ruuko’s school, but, as we all know, it’s only a matter of time.
As I mentioned before, this first episode reallllyyy emphasized those dark undertones. From the two mildly creepy dream sequences to Tama’s mildly unsettling attitude during the fight, WIXOSS wants us all to know Ruuko’s peaceful life is about to start falling apart. Truth be told, I actually didn’t mind the heavy foreshadowing since it pretty much accomplished its goal of drawing me in and making want more. The only things that bugged me a bit were how Ruuko is already being portrayed as unnaturally strong, Tama’s baby-like noises, and a strange lack of care for any of the characters. Admittedly, the latter isn’t much of an issue at this point since it’s only the first episode, but I was a bit surprised by little I cared about Ruuko by the end of the episode, especially considering how quickly I liked the main in The World is Still Beautiful… My quibbles aside, I’m really interested in seeing how far down the dark road WIXOSS ends up going and what Ruuko’s wish ends up being since she isn’t too into the whole game thing at the moment. Speaking of the wishes, I can’t say I was too thrilled by the first one we learned about? I don’t know. I wasn’t really feeling Yuzuki’s secret pining for her twin brother, especially since he doesn’t seem to feel anything for her (as he should), meaning the realization of her wish would be iffy on a couple levels. That said, I am interested in seeing what kinds of wishes everyone else has and if they’re as morally dubious.
In terms of how the episode looked, I quite liked the visuals, especially during the sequence at the start and the dream sequence near the middle. The small glimpse we got of the fights was also pretty nice looking, though I curious to see how inventive the attacks will be since this one wasn’t terribly exciting or interesting to watch. In terms of character designs, they’re all pretty cutesy, making them all the more open to having terrible things happen to them. The episode’s color palate was also relatively dark, which only added onto the ominous feeling running throughout the episode.
All in all, I quite liked WIXOSS’s first episode and am definitely looking forward to more. Though I’ll admit I don’t care too much for anyone that showed up, save for Grandma (now watch as she kicks the bucket within the next couple of episodes), the chances are relatively high that that will probably change over the course of a couple episodes. Admittedly, the show will pretty much live or die by how well it manages to execute this whole wishes thing and by how much it can up the ante on these fights since having the card character thing simply disappear doesn’t seem too crushing, but I’m willing to be optimistic and hope for the best.
