[New][October 2013] Tokyo Ravens

Summary: Tsuchimikado Harutora was born into a prestigious Onmyoji family, but he can't see Spirit Energy. Therefore, he's been enjoying a peaceful daily life with his friends at an Onmyo branch school. One day, his childhood friend Tsuchimikado Natsume, heir to the head family, suddenly appears.

First Impression: Flashy high budget animation action. Sci-Fi rules oriented Fantasy.

First Opinion: There's a right way, and a wrong way to dump a truckload of information on an audience, and mindlessly reciting a hundred very detailed and lengthy names is not a right way to do it. Very fast into the episode they quickly dump out a bunch of names that are borderline Science Fiction complicated. For me, that's a plus because it means someone somewhere put a lot of thought into this world. Where there's more detail and more thought, there will be more quality, if for no other reason than the time required to create the excess details. For others though, this first episode better not have expected everyone to have picked up or retained anything they just said, because that's just silly.

Things start slow and somewhat solidly grounded within the usual Anime settings, high school, group of friends, vague hints of the protagonist having some past events and issues. When the action kicks off into high speed at the tail end of the episode though, things go bat-shit bonkers. The animation kicks in some 3D computer animations, things get very flashy, very detailed, and most of all: Very Crazy. The sudden introduction of the 3D computer animation made me think of Ghost in the Shell, the only memorable previous instance I have of something similar. The sudden tone shift in animation may throw a few people off, but I've always found to be at the minimum interesting, if not at least hilarious when it fails hard.

This show looks like it's going to be trying really hard to fit into a slot somewhere around the area of Action. They slap the Romance elements onto the back-burner so hard I think they'll have to walk backwards for a while to see where they're going.