Anime Review #81: Sword Art Online II, Part 2

NOTE TO READERS: Just as I had finished the first draft of my seventeenth East Meets West article, unfortunately I had to delay it once again to next week; the reason being that this particular Friday commemorates Our Lady of Fatima, who exactly 105 years ago appeared to three Portuguese children and encouraged them to pray …

Anime Review #80: Sword Art Online II, Part 1

In recent months Sword Art Online (SAO) has found a resurgence in mention throughout the anime community for many reasons: 6 November of this year, in the story, marks the start of the first episode's events: the eponymous game was released, trapping 10,000 users, kicking off a mass nationwide panic and a fervent race against …

Anime Review #79: Hotarubi No Mori E

Some anime movies are just so simple, yet so profound that they can tell a story better than a single novel could. In preparation for last week's post, I had to read Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers and was surprised at how verbose and detailed some of the chapters were, that one would have to …

Anime Review #78: A Silent Voice

I got a question for you guys. Has anyone heard of A Walk To Remember? It was a 1999 novel written by American bestselling author Nicholas Sparks. It chronicled the blossoming romance between a high school jock and a terminally ill female classmate of his. It was adapted into a film three years later, which …

Anime Review #77: Chuunibyou – Take On Me!

Ah, good old Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai (Love, Chuunibyou, And Other Delusions). After Clannad came out some six years prior, this was Kyoto Animation's second throw at the high school romance subgenre. Needless to say, when I watched it, I was less than enthralled. Expectations ended up lower than initially anticipated, as schizophrenic characters …

Anime Review #76: Digimon Tamers

Five years ago, I was a student web developer at a large law firm in Toronto, where I would meet my current best friend and my worries were limited to getting to work early, finding stuff to get involved with, fiddling with my knowledge of HTML, CSS and Javascript in the spare hours as well …

Anime Review #75: K-On!

So yeah, last July I watched all two seasons of K-On! - you know, that show about five girls who spend their after-school days drinking tea and playing with musical instruments. While in the midst of watching this show's first season, I asked the question on Twitter: "Why is everything and everyone in K-On so …