- Comic Party 4
- Amaenaideyo! 9
- Ichigo100% 11
- Okusama wa Joshikousei 5
- Stratos 4 Advance 1
- Oh! My Goddess! 1
- You're Under Arrest 2nd season 1
- Bincho-tan 1
- Ichigo Mashimaru OVA 1
Ichigo 100%, with exactly one episode left, is getting more complex instead of less. I'm still thinking that there should be a hell of a lot more episodes of that series than there are.
Comic Party--I'm liking it more and more. It looks to me like I was right about the main character's girlfriend, by the way...but there's a new character introduced in ep 4 who I fell in love with the instant I saw her--Reiko-chan. She's a cosplayer working at a cafe which has a cosplay theme; they were doing Wedding Peach and playing the WP music over the PA system--and they played "Funk Jama-pi"! I instantly recognized that the main character was dressed as Limone....
Anyway, Reiko-chan is wonderful.
Stratos 4 Advance uses the same theme music but a different chorus, and it looks damn good. Hard to tell what's up with the story after one episode but the main characters from the first series are bumped from the elite flight squadron, apparently victims of internecine politics.
Bincho-tan is unexpectedly charming. Anyone who likes My Neighbor Totoro might like this; it's got the same kind of feel, at least as far as the first episode. The artwork is stunning.
YUA--no surprises here, the first episode of the second season followed the YUA formula, but I'm glad that they're still using the Kenji Kawaii music from the OVA series in the TV series.
The first Ichigo Mashimaru OVA is basically "more of the same"; it's basically the TV series with different events. It's pretty good.
Okusama wa Joshikousei continues to develop its story. Every 15-minute episode begins with the main character introducing herself, explaining that she's 17 and a senior in high school, and that she's married and hasn't told anyone. Etc. The latest pair of episodes features her neighbors discovering her secret (hence her pretending kitty is a machine gun) and her husband's grandmother's great-grandchild fever....
The real surprise was O!MG!, Ah! Megamisama!--it's been a long time since watching anime has given me chills. It is perfect. I'm not too certain about the music but the way the story was presented was just...just...it could not have been done better. And since the producers of the series had 24 episodes to work with, it looks to me like they did it about 85,000 times better than the OVA series. The OVA had better animation but the story was hacked to hell and gone; this one took an entire episode just to set up Keiichi's and Belldandy's first meeting. I love it.
Back when the OVA series was all that there was of O!MG!, I continually said that there had to be more of it--but I was worried that it wouldn't be as good. Those worries, I am pleased to say, have proven to be unfounded. If the first episode is any indication at all, this one's a winner.