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| I think this is the light novel cover and not the anime cover. |
Tokyo Ravens is not the best show I've watched and it's not the worst. First off, I found the story a bit amateur because the ideas have been done before. I didn't like the characters too much because they followed common archetypes in a very straight forward manner. For example, Harutora is the typical slacker with a good heart and Natsume is the typical girl that will pound her crush. The storyline is quite obvious from the beginning and the characters haven't changed much. I will say that I will continue to watch Tokyo Ravens even though I am not satisfied with a couple of things because there are some interesting things that they include in the series. The animation is pretty good and I like the combination of onmyouji and highly modern city. Their opening theme, X-encounter, was nice to listen to and the opening animation was nice to watch. It tries to be funny in a lot of scenes because Harutora is a very dense character, but his denseness gets in the way of the plot and I didn't find the humor appealing. I prefer more witty humor. I did hear that there are some twists in the future and perhaps it'll change my mind.
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| Manga illustration. That's Hoozuki right there. |
Hoozuki no Reitetsu is a comedy about Japanese Hell (and Chinese because both cultures share the same ideas about the Underworld). Their humor uses puns, pop references, and some witty language. The Crunchy Roll subs did a bad job on a few episodes due to inaccuracy such as naming Zhuge Kongming (Zhuge Liang) as a Japanese scholar when he is a Chinese scholar from the Three Kingdoms era. Thank goodness I know my Asian history and enough of languages to pick up on the mistakes. I was thrilled to see that they used Yusa Koji to voice Hakutaku. I had an immediate liking to Hoozuki as a character because he doesn't follow the standard badass image too strictly. He's cool and has a soft side while wielding a large spiky club. Aside from bad English subs, the original content was very good. The references to Chinese medicine were very accurate since I study a bit of Chinese medicine myself and Hoozuki and Hakutaku's relationship is really poking fun at the Chinese-Japanese relations in real life only on a much lighter scale. I don't think the author will actually put in his personal opinion on real politics into his story so let's leave it at that. It's too controversial to talk about it.