Clannad is a seriously beautiful high-school love story at it’s best. This is one of those must see-Animes that goes down in history.

Tomoya Okazaki has grown up with only his alcoholic father, and because of that he’s become something of a delinquent. On his way to school on one of the days when he doesn’t skip class he meets a girl, Nagisa Furukawa, talking to herself about how she loves this school. Tomoya somehow befriends the strange girl, and together they try to reetablish the Theater Club that had to close because of a lack of members. They also befriend Fuko Ibuki the ghost of a girl who passed away on her way home from the opening ceremony a few years ago and is trying to get as many people as possible to come to her sister’s wedding by handing out sculptures of starfish(don’t ask); one of the candidates for the position as head of the Student Council, Tomoyo Sakagami(who has the only voice I’ve ever actually gotten annoyed at, except for Kitsune’s english voice in Love Hina); the genius who also happens to be the worst violin player in existence, Tomoya’s childhood friend who has less than no social skills at all, Kotomi Ichinose; and Tomoya’s twin classmates Kyou and Ryou Fujibayashi who is the polar opposite of each other – Kyou is violent and outwards while Ryou is timid and cares more about others than herself.

While the base story of reetablishing the theater club seems a bit classic, straightforward, uninteresting and a bit boring, the execution and countless side-tracks makes it far better than it seems. Anime News Network had a fine definition that “Tomoya finds his life turning in a new direction”. On top of the beautifully executed story it has the ability to create an atmosphere almost like the D.N.Angel Manga version, great character growth, some of the best animation and soundtrack ever, and an Art Style I completely adore – just look at Nagisa’s eyes on the picture above. It’s actually so good so that it even received a Sequel/Season 2 called “Clannad ~After Story~”. On top of the serious drama and love story in the foundation it also has a high class comedy on top of it that somehow manages to integrate with the serious parts (unlike for example Fruits Basket that switches a bit too fast between trying to imitate D.N.Angel’s Depth and being light-hearted sitcom) and goes along the lines of Angel Beats! or Arakawa under the Bridge‘s humor in that everyone says completely inconsequent and odd things yet stays serious. Example: Nagisa can call Fuko “Fu-chan”, but when Tomoya asks her if he can call her that too she immediately responds with “That’d be horrible!!” in a shocked tone, but can’t define what exactly would be horrible about it. That scene is a lot funnier than it sounds. Another example is that Fuko can’t give a high-five without first pretending to score in basketball. Clannad is also home to some of the saddest scenes I’ve ever seen in an Anime – such as the scene where Fuko disappears and everyone starts forgetting about her. Imagine the scene where Xion dies and all memories of her disappears from her friends in Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, then do that to one of the best characters in the entire series(Fuko actually has a personality unlike Xion). The result is definitely sad no matter how you look at it. She reappears a few times later, though, don’t worry.

Watch immediately here. There are no acceptable excuses not to.

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Screenshots by Random Curiosity. Used with permission.

I’m Haruhi Suzumiya, from East Junior High. First off, I’m not interested in ordinary people. But, if any of you are aliens, time-travelers, or espers, please come see me. That is all!
—Haruhi

Haruhi is many things. Excentric, hyperactive and strange are some of the adjectives that can be applied to her. But Melancholic is not one of them, so I have no idea of where this title came from. Nonsensical title or not, this is one of those series you really need to have seen. This is history, like Neon Genesis Evangelion, and it’s rating of “Masterpiece” at Anime News Network(a site that is to Anime and Manga what IMDB is to “regular” films) is well deserved.

The series is aired with the episodes in a more or less random order, meaning it feels a bit like watching an animated time paradox. It is obvious which order the episodes are supposed to be in chronologically, but you’ll be better off watching it in the default order, since the ending is chronologically in Episode 6… Also, the first episode is number 0 and doesn’t have almost anything to do with the main series other than being referenced in Episode 12. Aside from confusing all viewers, this random order seems to have confused the production company as well, since in Episode 10 there is a reference to the episode “Bamboo Rhapsody” which was never aired until the remake.

The story revolves around a girl named Haruhi Suzumiya(she who wasn’t melancholic, remember) but is told more from the perspective of her classmate Kyon(a bit like how Final Fantasy XII is told from Vaan’s perspective). The first day of high school Haruhi clearly announces that she has no interest in “Ordinary Humans” because they’re boring, but asks any time travelers, espers, sliders and aliens who may or may not be listening to join her. If this wasn’t weird enough, she initially changes her hairstyle, having one hairstyle for each day of the week. She also never turns anyone down, but drops them after a short while instead, as she thinks that love is a sort of mental illness that she don’t want to have any part in. She initially also doesn’t talk to anyone, and joins every club in the school, but decides that they’re all boring and quits them. Then Kyon says something about that if nothing suits her, then she can just create her own. Haruhi takes that as an offer, and forces Kyon into a club she just created in hope of something out of the ordinary happening. She somehow manages to get her hands on both the Literary Club’s clubroom and the Literary Club’s only member, Yuki Nagato, who would do just about anything as long as she can read her books. After that she proceeds to “scout”(= force into her club no one has any idea what it does) a random cute 2nd year girl named Asahina, who spends most of the series making tea, and a not-particularily-mysterious transfer student named Itsuki. That far everything seems normal to some degree. Then it turns out that Nagato is an Alien observing Haruhi because she apparently manipulates “data” surrounding her, Asahina is a time traveller who observes Haruhi because she is apparently a Time Warp that seals access to anytime prior to 3 years ago and Itsuki is an Esper who observes her because she apparently is god, and created the world 3 years ago. Haruhi isn’t aware of any of this, least of all that she is that powerful. And Nagato, Itsuki and Asahina are all working hard to prevent her from discovering her own potential, since that could spell the end of the world. Haruhi’s ability simply works like that if Haruhi wants something to happen, that happens. So if Haruhi wants to play detective, someone gets murdered, etc. And with this background, one of the weirdest and most enjoyable Anime series ever begins.

One of the weirdest things about this weird series is the way Kyon constantly seems to be stuck in the middle of weird situations he has more or less nothing to do with. Haruhi also doesn’t realize how dangerous she is to her surroundings until in the final episode where she and Kyon gets stuck in Closed Space. This series contains a lot of parodies on other things, such as in Episode 8 they imitate Case Closed’s way of showing shadow silhouettes of suspicious people, and also make a parody of Phoenix’s classic ‘Objection’ pose from Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. And that’s just two of the countless references. I think the Giants in Closed Space is somehow based of Adam from Neon Genesis Evangelion, but I’m not sure.

All of this neatly comes together in a very original and incredibly well made high-school story that you should watch here right away.

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Screenshots by Random Curiosity. Used with permission.

This game is set in a world where everything is caused by Spirits, the official language is cliché and all names seems to be just a bunch of scrambled letters thrown together. Everyone also dress worse than in Final Fantasy X, and no one seems to have put any care into either the character design or the voice acting.

There are two main characters, Aldo and Reiha, who somehow gets windled up in a nonsensical story involving spirits. That’s about all there is to the story. It’s lucky there’s no minimum amount of characteristics required to call a character a character, otherwise not a single character in the cast would have passed it. Aldo hits things with swords, Reiha hits things with Magic, and one other party member runs after you acting like a moron.

I can stand bad stories if the gameplay are any good, but Twin Age is played the same fashion as Runescape, which essentially means you tap an enemy and they will trade blows until either of the characters involved dies. And with that I’ve covered all there is to the gameplay as well. You tap your way through the entire game, completely unchallenged since all enemies are constantly under-leveled, through dungeon after dungeon consisting entirely of a straight path with some side-tracks scattered along the way. Possibly just to raise the irritation even more all main characters runs extremely slowly, and the loading times just gets on my nerves. This entire game smells of low budget long way, and I couldn’t stand more than a few chapters. I’m gonna play Lunar Knights as soon as I’ve fixed my DS, since that game at least had some sort of quality to it.

It’s not even worth my time making a picture gallery for.

This is one of those series where every little thing goes wrong, and I completely love it. What I don’t like quite as much is the large amount of fanservice/ecchi, but the plot makes up for it.

Akuto is a guy who enters a high-school for mages trying to become a high priest and make everyone happy. However, a spirit on the school that can apparently predict the future with 100% accuracy tells him that he will instead become a Demon Lord and destroy the world, the exact opposite of what he wants to. Because of this, about everyone in the school except a weird blonde boy named Hiroshi literally cowers in fear of him. Hiroshi instead thinks it’s insanely cool to be classmate with a Demon Lord and proclaims himself as Akuto’s minion. After accidentally scaring the hell out of his classmates, he says he wants to do something to help without own gain, and says he’ll volunteer to be a member of the Cleaning Duty – not knowing until too late that “Cleaning Duty” in this school means silencing anyone who finds out the school’s secrets, and just manages to scare everyone even more. Then the girl named Junko whom he befriended on the train after almost getting his face kicked in by her proceeds to attempt to kill him for “betraying” her by being a future demon lord. Akuto instead absorbs her magic and creates an explosion that blows up the entire classroom, apparently without knowing really what he was doing. At some point he also gets an Observer named Korone, an annoyingly flirty android who enjoys teasing him, and otherwise acts a lot like Nagato from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. He also somehow finds his childhood friend Keena, an excentric hyperactive girl with the average maturity of a 7 years old and the ability to turn invisible and fly. She somehow also reminds me of Kaolla from Love Hina – and that’s my favorite character in that series. Those are the most important ones, typically for an Anime in this category there are a few others, like the two-face decieving little bitch Etou who tries to control Akuto because of his incredible power and my favorite, Lily, the girl with a witch hat and a Hayate-style flowing scarf and a mysterious personality.

Like I said, there’s a tad bit too much Ecchi going on, but the rest compensates for this nuisance. There are an awful lot of superpowers, over-the-top firearms, sci-fi weapons and magic flying around all over the place about all the time, in a similar fashion to Toaru Majutsu no Index, and I like that kind of stuff quite a lot. The more the merrier, they say, and there is more than enough magic here.
Purely animation-wise, the series doesn’t impress as much as Angel Beats!, but it certainly isn’t bad as such. Pretty good actually, just not the best. I really like the art style, though, especially the character designs for Junko and Keena. I really hope this keeps the quality up, but I also hope they’ll pipe down the Ecchi a bit. This is really interesting so far(Episode 6 has just been released as of writing) and certainly doesn’t seem to drop in quality in any way.

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Screenshots by Random Curiosity. Used with permission.

The D.N.Angel Manga was the biggest masterpiece I’ve ever read. Then the Anime must be equally awesome, right? Sadly no.

In case you didn’t know, D.N.Angel is an unfinished Manga series that happens to be one of the best ones I’ve ever read. The story centers around a boy named Daisuke Niwa who on his 14th Birthday gets rejected by his crush Risa Harada. This triggers a hereditary gene that has been in his family for generations, and awakens the master thief Dark Mousy from within Daisuke. Because of this, Daisuke starts living a double-life as both the usual clumsy Daisuke during the day and the perfect and unbeatable master thief Dark during the night. Dark and Daisuke swaps places no matter if Dark or Daisuke wants it or not whenever either of them sees a girl they really love. Of course this opens for a lot of romantic complications in the middle of this. Daisuke ends up falling in love with Risa’s twin sister Riku, while Dark falls in love with Risa, who happens to be a devoted Dark fangirl(?). Then there’s also Daisuke’s classmate Hiwatari who is Daisuke’s friend, but leads the search for Dark. Hiwatari knows very well that Dark and Daisuke is the same person, but doesn’t let his hunt for Dark go out over Daisuke. Hiwatari also reveals himself to be the bearer of Dark’s polar opposite, the mad artist Krad, who looks like an angel but is completely insane and doesn’t care about anything else than killing Dark, no matter the price. He also sold his soul to the devil while he was still human, and is the reason he and Dark is locked inside others’ bodies. The plot is incredibly complicated(now we’re talking complexity on the same level as the Kingdom Hearts series), incredibly deep, incredibly well made, and incredibly engaging. Not to mention the beautiful drawing, which is on par with or even surpasses Love Hina. Also, this is the kind of story that is very easy to understand if you’ve read all of it, but almost impossible if you’ve skipped even a single chapter.

One of the things that made the Manga to such a masterpiece was the mysterious atmosphere. There was constantly something mysterious or unknown or both over the slightest of things, and you were constantly figuring over what exactly was going on behind the scenes. Not to mention the incredible feeling of depth and it’s ability to keep up the energy in a similar fashion to Mayoi Neko Overrun! ensuring that you were constantly completely hooked, and just had to know what happened next. Also, I’m not sure if the author is trying to imitate Beethowen by leaving an unfinished symphony, or if she is just actively trying to piss off the fanbase. If she leaves D.N.Angel unfinished, she’ll succeed in both.

Too bad none of that is in the Anime. The Anime Adaption brutally murdered the mysterious atmosphere, cut the remains to pieces, burnt the pieces and scattered the ash over the ocean from a helicopter. Not an ounce of the original D.N.Angel feel is left. Where the Manga was figuring, suggesting and implying, the Anime puts all the cards on the table, ruining the entire mystery of it. Also, the Anime is far more action-oriented. Dark now has a black feather that works like some sort of magic wand, while Krad has a white angel feather. This makes absolutely no sense at all, since in the Manga both Dark and Krad can use magic all by themselves, but Dark refrains from doing so as much as possible since it will gravely hurt Daisuke’s body should he do so. Now he instead spends a lot of time wildly blasting magic at Krad. Also, since the Manga is still unfinished, some moron came up with the idea to write a new ending. A terribly bad ending at that. They should have done like Toaru Majutsu no Index instead and left it unfinished. Or waited for the Manga to be finished.

The Anime does have it’s good spots too, however. The graphics are beautiful, but a bit un-original – especially Dark and Krad’s wings are really beautifully made and looks about as real as angel wings can look. Krad also gets a lot more screentime, and is introduced earlier. The voice acting is excellent, not as good as Hayate no Gotoku! but still great, and I especially like Krad’s voice that really sounds like an immortal insane artist (don’t ask how I know how immortal insane artists sounds) and Hio’s that is very high-pitched and loopy and sound really funny. The scene where Daisuke grows his own wings is also a lot better than in the Manga. A bit on the downside is that they cut the coolest character in the entire series, Argentine. Possibly because they thought there was a terrible lack of living artworks trying to kill Daisuke, they cut in a girl named Hio Mio, who pretends to be an exchange student from america, but is really just a doll given life for the sole purpose of killing Daisuke, but changes her mind when she sees how happy Risa is with him, and instead gives up her own life to lift the curse she laid on Daisuke and move in as a second personality in Riku, a bit like Dark is for Daisuke, but she only comes out when both her, Riku and Risa wants her to, and posesses the bodies of both the twins instead of just Riku like Dark does to Daisuke – possibly because her magic is weaker than Dark’s and she needs two people’s energy to materialise herself. A lot of the plot is changed, and a really annoying thing is that Daisuke keeps whining about that Freedert is dead for like 5 episodes after she died. Dammit, Daisuke! You knew her for 20 minutes before Dark killed here! Blame him, but don’t waste 5 EPs whining about it!

Despite all the shortcomings of the Anime version, it’s still a good Anime – just short of ‘great’. You can start watching here already, if you feel like it. The story that is left is by far enough to motivate watching it at least once.

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Quick Update on Angel Beats! since the fifth episode has just been released. This is actually the first of these Single Post reviews, but certainly not the last. The reason is simply that I’ve never felt this sad for an Anime character is you don’t count Aeris. The only thing I can really say about this episode is: Now they’re just plain mean.

Tenshi never do anything to them unless they break the rules, and then she doesn’t do it because she wants to but because the NPC teachers chew her out otherwise. In this episode, Yurippe has “Christ” sabotage Tenshi’s tests for no reason, knowing very well that it would just traumatize her. Sure, they do it in a very enjoyable episode, but it’s still mean to Tenshi. This causes Tenshi to lose her status as the Student Council President to be replaced by the scary green-haired guy from EP4. Somehow I get the feeling that Tenshi will seem like a shy little girl who wants everyone’s best most of all(Tohru from Fruits Basket?) in comparisation to this guy. Also, after Yuri is done ruining Tenshi’s life for no reason, she initiates an Operation Tornado and even steals Tenshi’s last food cupon! Seriously, Yuri! You’ve already traumatized the poor girl for life several times and when she tries to drown her sorrows in Mabu Doofu(A sort of spicy dish that she and Otonashi are the only people on the school who actually orders) you even steals that away from her!? I sure hope Otonashi is right in that Tenshi might want to join the SSS, Tenshi is by far the best character in the series, even with her life destroyed. Otonashi is the only member of the SSS who is able to have a normal conversation with her without trying to kill her, so if someone is going to recruit her, it’s Otonashi. I can’t really see Tenshi of all people going for revenge, Roxas Style with guns blazing, but it could happen. Angel Beats! has surprised me before.

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Screenshots by Random Curiosity. Used with permission.

Academy City… is a place to be yourself!
— Misaka

Toaru Kagaku no Railgun, also known as A Certain Scientific Railgun is a side-story of the previous series Toaru Majutsu no Index(a.k.a A Certain Magical Index), and focuses on Misaka and Shirai rather than Touma and Index. Anyone who has seen Index knows who these two are. Misaka, the Level 5 Esper with the ability to control electric and magnetic fields, and her roommate Shirai, who is the Lesbian Stalker character of the series. The initial idea is quite good: Take two of the best characters out of Toaru Majutsu no Index, and make a side-story revolving around them. Sadly, the execution isn’t nearly as good as the concept. The animation holds the same high standard as Index, so does the Voice Acting and the Sci-Fi theme. The Scenario doesn’t, however. A lot of the episodes are fillers, and the story progresses too slowly, taking a bit too many side-tracks. Like Ace Detective Conan(a.k.a Case Closed in some localities for seemingly no reason) most of these side-tracks are later reused, but the large amount of fillers makes the story a bit hard to follow. There are two new main characters, Uiharu and Saten, too. Uiharu works as Shirai’s backup/computer support at Judgement, and Saten is Uiharu’s friend who is also a fan of Misaka. While Uiharu is cute and has a lot of character, Saten only seems to cause trouble, get in trouble, stick someone else in trouble and flip Uiharu’s skirt to such an extent that Uiharu actually catches a cold because of it. I’m not sure why Uiharu still counts her as her friend, as Saten never seems to do anything back for Uiharu. The main characters of Toaru Majutsu no Index, Touma and Index, appears, but only briefly, though Touma appears briefly in the first OP theme. Touma saves Uiharu and Misaka from a Graviton explosion in one episode, is in a heavily altered version of the first scene of Index, tries to help Harumi find her car(which she forgot where she parked, and could only remember there was a traffic light nearby…) and almost gets beaten by Misaka with a chair in one scene. Index appears only once, when she almost breaks a cleaning robot that apparently stole her Donut, and appears along with Touma about one second in the final episode.

Oddly for a side-story centering about Misaka, the MISAKA clones and the Level 5 Esper Accelerator never appears. And that’s just one of the unexplained events here. Something that is good is that it gives several other characters(such as Konori in Judgement) gets more backstory, while some other characters gets more personality outside of the story(like Komoe and the Anti-Skill Duo). Misaka also has an obsession with Gekota, a Frog from a kids TV show, and has several keychains with it on, believes the Frogface Doctor is a real Gekota and wants to go to a Gekota festival in one episode. Her eyes also change to frog-eyes whenever she talks about Gekota, which looks really funny.

This could have been good, if it were better done. Sad that it isn’t.

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Then, would you accompany me to the depths of hell?
— Index

Logo

Academy City is a city that is, according to a tourist guide in an episode, about 20-30 years ahead of the rest of the world. Also, the city is in itself an experiment. 80% of the inhabitants of Academy City are students(thus the name) and about 70-90% of the inhabitants has an Esper Ability – a sort of Superpower that has been scientifically awakened from within a person, such as Misaka being able to control electric and magnetic fields(including those within her own body), Shirai who can Teleport herself and things she touches, Accelerator who can change the nature of whatever object he comes in contact with and Konori who can see through anything. The remaining 10-30%(the exact number isn’t given) is called Level 0, and has powers which is still sleeping – or undocumented superpowers which wasn’t supposed to be awakened. Kamijou Touma is one of those who has an undocumented “power” – Imagine Breaker, which allows him to negate or block any other superpower hitting his right hand. The fact that he has that ability is good, since otherwise the series would have ended two minutes into the first episode – counting the opening theme which takes a half minute.

After a prologue where Touma is almost killed by Misaka Mitoko(a.k.a “Shocker”, or as Touma calls her, “The Biri-Biri middle schooler”, or just “Biribiri” for short), Touma finds an unconcious nun hanging over the ledge of his balcony(it’s just as weird as it sounds, see picture number 2 below), who doesn’t react at all to the fact that she is hanging from a balcony on the thenth floor of a student dormitory, but instead asks Touma for something to eat. It turns out Index is actually a nun from the English Purist Church, the Necessarius faction, and that she has all the knowledge of magic in the world, in the form of 103,000 Forbidden Grimoires stuffed into her head, making her a sort of living library. Index is chased by other magicians(the opposite of Espers, they use magic, as the name suggests. While Espers represents Science, Magicians represents the occult) – or so she thinks – who are after the endless knowledge inside her head. Despite that Index initially tries to keep Touma out of the entire Science-Magic thing, Touma manages to be pulled in anyways when he finds Index lying on the ground, stabbed in the back. Touma then gets involved in a series of (sometimes pretty nonsensical, but still great) events revolving around Esper Powers and Magic.

I can’t really write much about the story, as it would spoil the entire thing. While the story isn’t the greatest one ever, sometimes it gets a bit repetitive, the amazing way in which it is performed more than makes up for it. Toaru Majutsu no Index is a visual masterpiece from start to end, the visuals being in the same class as masterpieces such as Love Hina, and D.N.Angel. The sound isn’t far after either, and while it isn’t the best soundtrack ever(that’s Neon Genesis Evangelion, or possibly Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu), it certainly is good, and really fits into the general atmosphere of the series. Returning to the animation, everything holds high class with natural movements and really awesome special effects. The only real complain about the graphics is the way Accelerator’s Wind Plasma ball looks strange, people sometimes has their eyebrows on top of their hair(it’s only visible on some people though), Innocentius is hard to really differentiate from the surrounding fire sometimes – like in the OP. Speaking of the OP, the first one, PSI-Missing, is one of the best openings I’ve ever seen(although it is still beaten by Neon Genesis Evangelion‘s “Zankoku na Tenshi no Thesis“). The second OP, Masterpiece, is about as far from a masterpiece as you could possibly get, being just a big disappointment all the way through.

This anime is pretty violent, but not particularily bloody(the sequel/side-story Toaru Kagaku no Railgun is however, even if it’s not much blood, you have been warned…), but the violence still isn’t near the class of Soul Eater or Angel Beats!. The story also seems unfinished, seemingly ending in the middle, even providing the start of a Season Two if there ever is one. Since Toaru Majutsu no Index leaves a mess of loose ends, you shouldn’t watch it if you’re expecting something that answers all the questions it raises. If that’s not a requirement, you should watch this no matter what. Touma has an annoying tendency of holding long monologues, but it’s not that annoying. Something that is more annoying is that Index’ personality changes drastically after the first episodes. At first she acts(relatively) mature and has a large impact on the plot, and her knowledge of every magic force in existence is cool, but then she becomes just an annoying nuisance who spends most of the time either whining, causing trouble, scheming something with Misaka or biting Touma. She seems forgotten until the last episode where she is the focus of one of the coolest scenes in the series where she holds her own against a 4 meters tall Clay Golem named Elliot by first using a needle from her coat to reverse engineer and sabotage it’s self-recovery ability and then reverse-engineering and jacking it’s control. That scene is also where the epic quote “I may not be able to use Magic myself, but I can create confusion in the magic!” comes from, right before she makes Elliot trip over it’s own feet.

The only plausible excuse I can come up with(except the mess of loose ends) not to watch this would be if the entire internet would die overnight. And since that’s not very likely to happen, go here and start watching on Anime Season.com!

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This is an excellent example of a Dragonball Syndrome. A DB Syndrome is an Anime or Manga where the main characters gets far too powerful towards then end, and at the same time the plot starts dropping in quality. This is exactly what happened here.

Dragon Drive starts out really good, a guy named Reiji Oozora gets invited to an underground arcade where a Virtual Reality Fighting Game called Dragon Drive is played. Reiji gets a Dragon to play the game, which happens to be an one-of-a-kind dragon which is pretty much useless. Reiji starts training the dragon anyways, and it seems it has far more powers than it looks. Reiji is invited to the Special Training Room where he gets a chance to practice Dragon Driving with the DD Champions. His friends Hagiwara and Yukino comes after him and sneaks into the Special Training Room too, but then they all gets sucked into another world where Dragon Drive is real – Ri-kyuu. It then turns out Dragon Drive is just a way for an evil dude who looks like Xemnas with long hair who calls himself Rion to trick people who has talent for Dragon Drive into helping him gaining control over both the Real World and Ri-kyuu using a magic stone known as Jinryuseki.

As i said, the plot starts shallowing badly towards the end, where it also gets incredibly repetitive. The painfully bad animation, the annoying soundtrack(there is about two good songs in total) and a Character Cast who loses their personalities towards the end. Dragon Drive was good at first, but then dropped in quality quicker than Neon Genesis Evangelion did after running out of money. DD does have a good Voice Acting though, especially Toki and Rokkaku, too bad the rest of DD is so bad.

STORY: 5/10
SOUND: 1/10
GRAPHICS: 1/10
CAST: 5/10
VOICES: 8/10

Has it ever bothered you that some Background Applications doesn’t hide their Dock Icons(such as Hardware Growler and Veoh Web Player), thus takes up unnecessary space in the Dock. But, it’s actually possible to hide these!

There is two ways to do this, one that’s easy but not guaranteed to work, and another that’s sightly more complicated but also almost guaranteed to work.

METHOD ONE: The Quick Way

The Quick and easy way that’s not guaranteed is by using the application “Configure Application Dock Tile”, which can be downloaded here. To hide an application’s Dock Tile with this app, simply close the app you want to hide, then open it with CADT, check the box in the window and save. When you open the application, it won’t have any dock icon!

METHOD TWO: The Guaranteed Way

Look up the application in Finder, Right-Click on it and select “Show Package Contents”. A new window opens. Navigate to Contents and open the file “Info.plist”.

If it opens with Plist Editor(it does if you have the Developer Tools package installed), mark the top element and click “Add Child…”, select “Application is Agent(NSUIElement)” from the Drop-down list, and check the box.

If you don’t have Developer Tools, you can instead open it with a Text Editor. You should see a long list of <key>…</key> tags with different kinds of value tags. If there is a Key with the name “LSUIElement”, change the String below it to 1. If it isn’t, add this code after the other Key/Value Pairs:

    <key>LSUIElement</key>
    <string>1</string>

Start the application, and it won’t have a Dock Icon!