The Blog of Xbolt

I’ve saved the best (or at least, the most important to me personally) for last. This week is the crown jewel of this season of Xbolt’s Anime Reviews.

A Touhou anime.

Granted, it’s not an official anime done by a professional studio, but honestly, who cares? The fans who put this together did a superberiffic job! It’s pretty much exactly how I imagined a Touhou anime would look. Seriously.

But while the animation may not have been done by a professional company, they somehow managed to hire big-name seiyuu (voice actresses) for it. (Where they got the money for it, I’ll never know.) I was amused to see that:

The narrator is played by Sanae Furukawa, and Reimu by Nagisa. Suika is played by Yui Hirasawa. Marisa is played by Shinku, and Sakuya by Koyomi Mizuhara. I haven’t watched any shows with Aya, Remilia, or Patchouli in them, but I’ve heard of some of them. (Aya is credited in Clannad as “Female student (ep 6)”. So I suppose technically, I have seen her in a show before. Technically.)

Since it’s only one episode long, (For the moment. They’re still working on episode 2.) I can just embed it here:

Part 1

Part 2

And that’s it. Pretty good, eh?

Well. Now that my glowing fanboyism was allowed to speak out, here’s all the little details that I feel could have been better: I was disappointed to see that neither Flandre nor Cirno was in it. (Cirno did make a brief “appearance”, but that doesn’t count. Flan was mentioned, but not seen.) But Suika was there, so that’s ok.

Remilia’s voice sounds different than what I’d imagined, though the others are really good. I’d have given her a more sultry-sounding voice as opposed to just a high pitch. But that’s just my opinion on how it should be, obviously other people will interpret the character differently.

The last thing that I would have liked to see, is some danmaku action. The fight between Patchy and Reimu was great, but danmakus are what it’s all about! (Danmaku literally means bullet curtain, an attack move involving channeling energy into large amounts of weaker bullets, as opposed to the large single attacks Reimu and Patchy did here. (See also: Touhou Dogfight. Notice Utsuho’s epic displays there.))

But despite these niggles, I really liked this production, and can’t wait to see the rest. And I want to find out who the culprit is behind Gensokyo’s newest incident. I have several people on my “Persons of Interest” list, but that’s only based on my external knowledge of those characters. It could still be someone else entirely.

(Oh, and pay attention to the bookshelf in part 2 at 2:16. I was amused.)