Trix’s Anime Reccomendations

The following shows I’ll call the prerequisite pillars for anime in general. These are shows you should do your best to watch as soon as possible. Even if you can’t watch the entire show, watch at least an entire story arc. These are not neccessarily the ‘Best Shows’, but serve as a reference and foundation for many anime afterwards.

Dragon Ball Z
Mobile Suit Gundam (The original)
Neon Genesis Evangelion

Those are probably the three pillars of modern anime. Cowboy Bebop is another show you should watch ASAP, but it is not as important overall as those three shows.

It’s fine for you to think that “Naruto is the Best Thing EVER”, but if you’ve never watched DBZ you’re really missing out on a lot. A good number of today’s action shows are inspired by DBZ, in fact the creator of Naruto directly credits DBZ and its creator for inspiring him. While I wouldn’t argue that Naruto may be a better show, once you see DBZ you can draw a lot of similarities to the core elements.

Mobile Suit Gundam/First Gundam is undoubtedly the single most popular franchise in Japan. The Big Mech genre existed before Gundam of course, but Gundam really made it explode. The Gundam series is still going strong today, with many different seasons and spinoffs of the show with varying themes, some better than others. Still, it is best to go back to the original, and see where it all began.

Neon Genesis Evangelion is much more recent than Gundam, but it serves as a significant milestone in anime. (In fact, the creator of Evangelion actually worked on a Gundam series). Eva was a very different kind of action/mech show, and it dove much more into the psychological thinking and behaviours of the characters, and humanity itself. After Evangelion, there were many more ‘psychological thriller’ types of shows about. While many of them may not have been directly inspired by it, Eva created a clear path for those shows to reach a wide audience.

Ultimately, you cannot deny that there have been shows since DBZ, Gundam and Eva who have surpassed them in terms of overall quality. But you also cannot deny that they had to start somewhere. Without DBZ, there may not have been a Naruto or a Bleach. Without Gundam, there may not have even been an Evangelion. Without Evangelion, we may have never seen Serial Experiments Lain or Paranoia Agent. These three shows all have their own culture around them that has been ingrained with the anime community. Ask any casual fan of anime what a Kamehameha is, and he could probably tell you. Go to anime discussions and you’ll inevitably see some whiny, sissy hero be compared to “Shinji”. Find out why one blonde man with a mask fetish goes by at least three different names.

Now, on to the list.

My thoughts on the Death Note licensing

It’s been licensed by Viz, who seems to be picking up all of the Shonen Jump anime. Details/official press release here.

http://www.animeondvd.com/news/pr.php?pr_view=915

I think it’s great. Sure, you have to pay for it, but I don’t see it being very expensive (how much do TV shows cost on iTunes?).

It’s significant because they will be starting to do this while Death Note is still airing in Japan. This means you get it a lot sooner, it’s subtitled and you don’t have to worry about potentially crappy dubs. They will still be releasing DVDs in the future, with a dub on it and whatever other special features.

Several places have been making anime available online, most notably Bandai and Cartoon Network/Adult Swim, but they are always streaming versions (i.e., nondownloadable) of the English dub, and the show has often already been available on DVD for some time. I welcome this ‘innovation’.

Another anime horizon broadened

So I have these two games for the Nintendo DS: Jump! Super Stars and Jump! Ultimate Stars. The game being entirely Japanese, I went straight to Gamefaqs.com to look up some guides for them.

I was quite surprised to see how many different manga were represented in the game. At this point, I knew Shonen Jump was responsible for the likes of Dragon Ball Z and Naruto, but I discovered that some other properties like Ruroni Kenshin and Yu Gi Oh were part of it as well. Not only that, but there were *tons* of different things I had never even heard about.

I was never much into comics or manga, but these games piqued my interest. After all, with so many characters in a fighting game that I knew nothing about, it would do good to do some research on them. So I browsed the ‘net, managed to find a few scanslations of some manga and was pretty impressed. Not impressed enough to keep reading, but I knew the most basic elements each manga and its characters.

What this also did was expose me to some new anime that had just started in Japan. The anime Black Cat–which was also a Shonen Jump manga and is coming out on US DVD soon–was just starting at that time, so I followed that through to the end and it was very enjoyable. Right now, I’m downloading Busou Renkin, Gintama and Death Note (highly reccomended), all which are quite entertaining in their own right.

I also learned of the ‘purpose’ of Shonen Jump, and I have a greater tolerance of their sometimes simple themes. Most, if not all of the manga properties are based on the values of Friendship, Effort, and Victory. Basically if you try hard, keep good friends, you will win. This is fairly obvious in DBZ and most other properties, as the heroes always get into the predictable flow that I’m sure you’re familiar with. It all serves to reinforce these values, and after all the “Shonen” in Shonen Jump means “young boy”. It’s like inspirational stuff to install these values into the young boys.

So, these two games have expanded my anime knowledge and viewing range. and if I see any more new anime that I recognise from these games I’ll be sure to give them a shot. If you have a DS and are looking to import a title, Jump! Ultimate Stars (the newer one) is one of the best you can go for.