Anime Review: Shakugan No Shana

Here we are with another anime review. The second of this blog with many more to come. Today I will be looking at Shakugan No Shana. This 24-episode action-drama is a fun ride with many likable and some unlikable aspects.

Synopsis:

Yuji Sakai is just a regular high school student. Until, one day he trapped in Seal and his life is absorbed. He is in the hands of a Rinne, just about to be absorbed when a Flaming-Haired Blazing-Eyed Hunter appears to save the day. Through persistent following, Sakai finds out about the Crimson World and why she is here. Together they must work together to stop the Crimson Denizens from disrupting the balance between worlds.

Story and Plot:

In terms of story, this anime's is not bad. Basically, Crimson Denizens (the bad guys) who live in the Crimson World, a world like ours, and infiltrate into our world to absorb/consume human souls. This consuming of souls causes a disruption between worlds. Shana is known as a Flame Haze. Her job is to protect the balance between the worlds, but this does not mean she will always help the humans. At first the story and some of the terminology may seem complicated (because they are), but after a while it starts to make sense.

Rating: 3.8/5
Overall: Solid story with too many complicated words.

The plot and advancement of the story were both okay to say the least. The show had some sudden shifts from standard romantic comedy antics at the pool to weekly bad guy fights. The first few episodes are introductory episodes that help explain some of the complicated terms and also take a look at Yuji's life. While the subsequent episodes have are a mix of the abovementioned romantic comedy and weekly fight scenes. As we go on the romantic comedy aspects of the show start to disappear and what we are left with is a story which is very well developed. Right? Wrong, Personally some of the bad guys take too long to defeat and turn out to be mini-bosses instead of regular weekly battles. Also another point that would be slightly rage inducing if this show only had one season is that Shana's story is explained in the middle of the series. Usually the middle is when we might find major turning points or the main villain, or whatever. Instead, for 3 episodes we get a flashback of the past of Shana. My problem with this is that it takes 3 full episodes to explain this. In a 24 episode show, 3 episodes is a lot.
Of course, Shana isn't the only Flame Haze out there; there are others. These including my personal favourite 2 (good) characters, maybe even favourite characters, Margery Daw and Marchosias, The Claws and Fangs of Violation. Basically, if I haven't already explained it (which I don't think I have), Flame Haze are regular people who have made a contract with a Crimson Lord. Crimson Lord's place there presence inside objects and that object becomes your communicator. (Ex: Margery is the Flame Haze and Marchosias is the Crimson Lord. Instead of appearing in person he communicates through his object, a book/grimoire.) Shana's Lord is Alastor, The Flame of the Heavens and his object is a pendant. Anyways, this is  a short explanation of the plot and even some of the characters.
Rating : 11.3/15
Overall: Somewhat confusing with, many seemingly important characters never reappearing. 

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Animation and Sound:

Animation:

This series is pretty good when it comes to animation. It provides very solid animation and some nice battle scenes to boot. Since there really isn't much to talk about the animation except that is really good and a solid fit for this type of show, I spend the next paragraph discussing 1 or 2  of my personal dislikes.
One thing that concerned me is the lighting of the show. Whenever they are in an Unrestricted Area, the lighting always seemed off to me. It was always way too bright. The brightness prevented me from seeing the characters mouths very well and overall hindered some of the effectiveness of the facial features. I don't know if this was just a problem for me or if many others notice this problem. Heck, maybe it was planned and I'm just weird for not liking it.
My second issue is some of the voice match. Some (very few but still noticeable) appear to have a mismatch with the actual mouth of the character. One of the worse examples (potentially the only one even) is in one of the later arcs, Shana is screaming and the voice and mouthing is absolutely terrible. Her mouth is literally not moving and all I heard was: "AAIIIIIIIIIIHHHH..AIIIIIIIIIIIIHHHhh....AIIIIIIIIIIHHHH". If you are unable to decipher this, it simply shows how she takes multiple pauses in between screams and her mouth doesn't even move. Once again, this could be an issue that only I experienced due to lag or some other problem, but I don't think so.
As a final note, I would once again like give a lot of credit to the rest of the animation and the overall colour and accuracy of the show. Oh, did I mention the show messes around a lot with different bright and gleaming colours. Personally, I didn't mind some of the colourfulness of the series, but I can understand if others see issues.
Overall: Solid, moderately above-par animation, with slight flaws that could very well just be experienced by me.
Score: 8.1/10

Sound:

Once again, I'm not the most keen when it comes to listening for the music and sound an anime, but I think I'm improving. (lol, I'm probably not) In any case, I really enjoyed a lot of the music inserts and even the openings. I like the openings, especially Scarlet Colour Sky. The insert songs were pretty good and paired really well with the scenes that they were in. Though there wasn't one that particularly stood out to me as awesome, none of them were bad. I must say though, Shana Final has some very nice openings and it definitely has 2 of my more favourite openings of the series.

Overall: Strong, like the animation, but nothing stands out as amazing. (Like I said I don't really know much when it comes to sound section.)

Score: 8.2/10

Characters:

This series is known for its red hot tsundere girl Shana. Personally, she isn't my favourite (which is very odd for me because I'm usually attracted to the tsundere girls in a series), but I still feel like she isn't a bad character. As she starts to develop feelings for Yuji, she starts to become confused. I feel like she doesn't know what is going on and although she clearly likes Yuji, the way in which she hides her feelings is weird. Also the way in which her relationship with Yoshida (Another girl who likes Yuji) is unexpected and not the most realistic. Anyways,, the Blazing-Haired-Flaming-Eyed-Hunter is a likable character that should be respected. 

And oh yeah she doesn't know where babies come....

Moving on. The main male lead is Yuji Sakai. He's a pretty standard male lead who is a nice guy and cares about others.The first few episodes do a satisfactory job of explaining his story and his personality in general. Otherwise, there really much to talk about his character, at least not much in season one. His character is really weird when it comes to his feelings for Shana though. Sometimes, it feels like is a real idiot and oblivious to the fact that Shana likes him. This creates an akward mood when Shana is really bad at sharing her feelings, but Yuji thinks that she is acting weirdly. I’m not really sure that I like this, but I guess I’ll roll with it. Oh yeah, one more thing, for some reason, I find him surprisingly smart. Not that this is a bad thing, but I didn’t like this about him. I wouldn’t call it smart, but maybe clever and always finds the solution to the problem. It didn’t make sense to me that the character with almost nothing to do with the Crimson World was able to figure out many of the solutions to the problems they faced. At the end of the day, this is just my personal opinion and I guess I can I say: At least he isn’t an idiot. LJ

Finally, there a few other supporting characters that I will mention loosely. Kazumi Yoshida is the really nice and shy girl of the series. She is actually also in love with Yuji. She is somewhat better at sharing her feelings with Yuji, but still not that good. Personally, I don’t really like the way that she is used in the plot and I also don’t feel like she really does anything outstanding. Actually, the only thing outstanding thing she does is manage to piss me off in the other seasons. Freakin Yoshida! Next! Saato and Tanaka are students that aren’t exactly the most responsible; often skipping school and slacking off. One day the Flame Haze, Margery Daw, comes to Misaki City. Not knowing much about the city, she finds two young boys and recruits them to help her. So the two become her sidekicks, referring to her as “Big Sister” most of the time. Anyways, there isn’t really anything interesting about the two guys until later seasons and I don’t want to cause any spoilers! Finally, I will talk about my two favourite characters in the series: Margery Daw and Marchosias, The Claws and Fangs of Violation. Margery Daw has a flaming hot, impulsive, yet still carefree and laid back attitude. These qualities along with her own sub-plot (that honestly, I didn’t really like the resolution to. It wasn’t that it was bad, it’s just that it would have been easier going with a more standardized route instead of deviating too much to have a somewhat anti-climactic end.) are what make her and interesting and also entertaining supporting character. I may have mentioned it above, but I’ll mention it again, Marchosias is a the Crimson Lord of Margery. His item, that holds the path to communication, is a book/grimoire. His personality is carefree and silly. He often makes fun of Margery and provides some sort of comic relief for the audience. Margery subsequently responds with, “Stupid Marco!” I think they are a great pair and that are arguably the best Flame Haze-Crimson Lord pairing in the entire 3 seasons.

Favourite Male Character: Marchosias

Favourite Female Character: Margery Daw

Least Favourite Character: I don’t really have one, but I’d say Alastor, solely because of the Ending. The ending of this series really made me mad. I almost didn’t want to watch the second series

Overall: Many of the characters are likable, but some are not developed enough to stick around and love them.

Score: 15.5/20

Enjoyment:

Honestly, I enjoyed a lot of this series. The action scenes were well done and the story tried to be as fluent as possible. Some problems I ran into were that some important characters were introduced once and then never seen until season 2 or even 3. It was frustrating to see them have one appearance and then never see them again until much later on. Another problem I had was that the relationship between Shana and Yuji didn’t really feel like it was there. There were many opportunities for them to talk about their feelings, but instead the writers took the comic or coincidental approach by interrupting whenever the slightest mention of anything love related came up. Many questions are left unanswered and they basically force you to watch season 2 in order to get any hope of understanding anything. Although I didn’t mind this, the only bad thing about it was that the ending blewwww. Terrible. I’ll get to it in the next section.

Now to pump some positives in the seemingly lost enjoyment section. The series as a whole (aside from the ending) was pretty entertaining. The wombo-combo of slight high school harem-comedy and some nicely animated action scenes combine for great assets to the series. The music and sound department also delivers with the right music for every scene.

Overall: This was an entertaining series with no major flaws except for the infamous ending.

Score: 24.7/30

Ending:

Now, for the pièce de resistance, the ending. The ending, for any anime, paramount to the show’s success. It is what could determine whether or not the show is good or great or amazing. The only exceptions are the animes that are multiple seasons long. If the first seasons ends in a sort of cliffhanger-esque way that leads to the second season, the ending only needs to be passable. The other type of multiple season anime is the popular sequel anime, where the 2 seasons are not very related and the second is a new plot branch. This anime Is the former and the latter in one. It is clearly a plot that isn’t finished and that needs to be completed in further seasons, but the writers decide to put an “Epic” ending to cap it off. Guess What… It didn’t work! This ending is atrocious! It’s one of those Evangelion-esque endings, where it could be an epic action scene but instead is not. This is all that I will spoil for the ending, just be warned that I might rank this even lower than Evangelion’s ending.

Overall: Actually not that bad, until the real last 4-8 minutes, that really sssssssssuuuuuuuccccccccccccccckkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeedddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd. 

Score: 2 happy faces=2/10

Final Score:

Story: 3.8/5

Plot: 11.3/15

Animation: 8.1/10

Sound: 8.4/10

Characters: 15.5

Enjoyment: 24.7/30

Ending: 2/10

Overall: 73.8/100

Final Thoughts:

When I was reading reviews for the next seasons, I read that the next seasons were worse than this one. Honestly, I liked the third season more than this one and the second season was around the same as this one. The Bottom Line on watching this series for me is that it is an fun series to watch, but you can’t stop at season 1. If you don’t watch the next 2 seasons, you will find yourself very disappointed. If you have the time to watch it, then go ahead. Otherwise, if you are not looking to watch a basically 72-epispode series than you are not missing out on too much. (this show still does have its good moments.) If you guys would like to season me review the next 2 seasons, please feel free to comment just that in the comments please. Well, that’s is all for today, I’m off to watch the NHL game tonight. As always, Comment, Follow, Enjoy and CYA!