The Blue Fox Alley

Well.. The P-Meister has been watching Soul Eater the past few weeks and has decided not to post anything until the character introduction has ended. Taking his hats off to this anime, the P-Meister hope it will maintain its standard for the full 51 episodes… Power to the shounen!!

Soul Eater was released on manga several years ago 2003, and is still ongoing. For me… the great P-Meister, of course i haven’t missed it. However, due to several life threatening/money issues, the P-Meister had to choose between reading Ichigo 100% and Soul Eater. The P-Meister chose the harem, strawberry pantsu! However, he did read 1 book of Soul Eater! This belonged to a good buddy of his!! This made him remember the uniqueness of the artwork in the manga.

The Anime Came

One day, the P-Meister was blog surfing and he came across a site that mentioned Soul Eater as an anime… As it sounded familiar, the great P-Meister decided to take a look… Apparently, the anime had just started on 7th April 2007. The first three episodes were introduction to the three Technicians and their weapons, 1 episode per Technician. Before carrying on with the story, I will go through these 3 episodes first. Oh.. and guess who’s involved in this anime? Square Enix…

General Intro Given by Anime

To sum it up briefly, this anime starts with introducing the Shinigami Weapon Technician Vocational School. Basically its not really a school, but an organisation that prevents Kishin, an evil being that will plunge the world into darkness, from being ‘born’. The anime however then focused on such Weapons trying to become being Death Scythes. I will explain this under First Episode.

First Episode

The first episode begins the introduction of two characters, a female weapon technician, Maka  Albarn, and her weapon, Soul Eater. What does Soul Eater do? Eat souls of course. Basically he is maka’s weapon. He is in human form normally, however, he has the ability to transform into a scythe for Maka Albarn.

Anyways, the episode started with an intense fight, with them defeating an evil human. They then explained that to become a Death Scythe, a weapon must consume 99 souls of bad people and a soul of a witch. The previous fight turned out to be one that reaped the 99th bad soul, which came in the form of kishin eggs.

The story then introduced her father(Death Scythe) and Shinigami, the one who runs the ‘academy’. To put it bluntly, her father is already a death scythe, however he spends his life flirting. Shinigami on the other hand is a lame character. The way he speaks and acts and treat her father is just hilarious.

To cut the last part short, they go in search of a hot sexy witch, called Blair. (I think Maka likes Soul, more evidence in episode 4) However, Soul is sexually aroused by Blair, saying that she has bigger boobs than that of Maka. He eventually ‘betrays’ Maka and goes to Blair’s side. However, his trick succeeded and they managed to kill Blair once. However Blair’s soul is not one of a witch, and one of a cat… meow! Now, Soul and Maka will have to start from SQUARE 1!!! THANKFULLY, a cat has many souls, so the hot sexy uh.. cat… didn’t die… I think she’s quite hot… don’t you?

Second Episode

The second episode introduced two characters, one shounen crazy guy called Black Star. Apparently he likes to be cool. He failed his first mission against Al Capone and his men by making a big entry. His weapon, is called Tsubaki. this time the gender has been changed, with Black Star being the male and Tsubaki(a pair of chain scythes who could also turn to other weapons) being the female. At first glance, it seems as if Tsubaki was talented but Black Star was dragging her down.

The episode then carries on with some lame shit about Shinigami again. He is funny… but I won’t spoil it for you. Anyway… Black Star often peeked at Tsubaki showering. A conversation of Maka and Soul then reveals that Black Star isn’t all talk.

Anyway, upon hearing Al Capone and his men were gonna go kill some witch and obtain her power, he accepted the mission from Shinigami hoping that he could let Tsubaki consume all the souls. Upon arriving at the witch’s castle, all the men were dead, and the whole place was covered with kishin eggs. What a great opportunity, but Tsubaki didn’t eat them. There was a battle, as he defeats the guardian of the witch who defeated the 99 other men, showing a little more of Tsubaki’s abilities. From the guardian’s comments, it can be seen that Tsubaki is quite a powerful weapon.

Right after that, the witch appeared as a weak little girl. With no more intention to fight, this shounen-blooded man left, not killing the guardian or the witch. He also didn’t consume all the souls, claiming that they weren’t his kill.

Third Episode

The third episode is an intro of yet another technician and his weapons, but this time its plural. The scene starts with a small fight of a perfectionist who wanted everything to be in symmetry. Being the Shinigami’s son, he doesn’t need to train any weapons at all but he chose to train two instead! What a man! Because of this, he would need twice the number of souls to feed his little girls, Patty and Liz, being two double guns. The technician’s name was Death the Kid. He is called Kid by his friends and family though. Unfortunately, because he of his perfection, he let his target slip.

He then accepted the mission to go to the pyramid of Anubis in Egypt. Doing so made Soul Eater and Black Star unhappy, feeling that he’s trying to be the centre of attraction. I’ll briefly describe the Pyramid of Anubis, basically it contains a witch and her mummies who raised even more mummies, a wonderful place to collect kishin eggs.

He travels there, only to worry about his portrait at home not being symmetrical, he then leaves his two weapons behind with the mummies. The weapons however took great care of the mummies and split their souls into two. The witch is then shown summoning the pharoah and being consumed instead. The two girls head on to get trapped by the monster. Some hentai mummy wrapping scene occurs. I’ll put a picture for the perverts.

 OO PANTSU….

Finally, after doing some symmetry checks, Kid returns to the relic of Anubis. He only goes there to find his two girls being sexually harassed. He frees them and they become his weapons. He however couldn’t bear to hurt the pharoah as his coffin is in perfect symmetry. He was hit and tossed around. In the end, the pharoah came out to deal the finishing move.

Guess what? the pharoah wasn’t in perfect symmetry, and so he finished him off with gunshots. The end. I know its wierd… Anyway, the end of this episode promised us that the story would start in the next episode. Hence i clinged on…

Artwork

Well… Before the story begins in episode 4, we can already identify the uniqueness of the episode. Personally, I believe this is the REVOLUTIONARY artwork itself. The artwork has quite similar features to bleach and one piece, however its style is not crammed. In fact, it crossed the borders which many anime have failed to do so. This is different than what we always see. This new generation of artwork is fresh and original, not to mention, beautiful. The art has little correlation with Japanese culture yet we can still define it as anime. Here are some examples. The P-Meister is greatly impressed. Good job Atsushi Okubo.

As promised… the story BEGINS…

The 4th episode started rather well. Soul woke up from a fighting dream against the Phantom Priest Rasputin, only to see this:

Why don’t these things happen to me… Sigh… Anyway, Maka got jealous, revealing a little more about her relationship and Soul. Right after their ‘wild’ breakfast, they go to school, only to find out that a teacher had died. In class, Maka’s father, Death Scythe, being the ‘relief’ teacher sends his daughter and Soul to go find Shinigami. This time, he was portrayed as a ‘cool’ teacher. At least his students do so. Also, he seems to hate Soul for some reason.

Anyway, it seems that Maka, Soul, Black Star and Tsubaki were given ‘tuition’ by Shinigami (for having collected 0 kishin eggs), that is to go deafeat the zombified teacher, Sid<Oh man! I love that basketball attire>. If they fail, they would be expelled… uh oh…  Just for your information, Sid was introduced in episode 3 already, that was while he was still alive. Apparently, all he wants is to make people into zombies. This is unlike him as he was a good teacher while he was alive.

This battle displayed the teamwork between the two technicians, apparently, Black Star  turns out to be a great fighting partner for Maka. Of course… Maka had to screw up to make things lulz. She did so by channeling Soul Echo with Soul and summoned a powerful weapon, called the Witch Hunter. I’m pretty sure it will appear in future episodes so keep your eyes on it!!

At first, they had a few problems fighting Mr. Basketball… but with the revealing of Black Star’s new technique, such as Trap Star, they managed to capture the teacher. Somehow, fight scenes were pretty nice to watch. I was expecting Black star to be a liability but he proved to be surprisingly competent in this battle.(Thumbs up to non-cliche!)

Anyway, the episodes end without any fighting from Death the Kid, but he mentioned Maka’s Mother and Death Scythe in a conversation with him and his father, Shinigami. Shinigami then reveals that Sid was transformed into a zombie by Dr. Stein<probably Frankenstein>. Dr.Stein was actually a technician who partnered up with the current Death Scythe (Maka’s father) before Maka’s father met Maka’s mother. FINALLY…. I HEARD THAT THEY REMOVED THE PANTSU FLASHING WHICH WAS IN THE ORIGINAL…

My Thoughts

Currently, I have a good impression of SE. Its unique artwork is one to be praised. Besides artwork, the actions of the character also show some creativity, such as Dr. Stein turning the screw on his own head while thinking. Also, it is made even more special in the sense that it uses characters that are famous in the real world for notoriety such as Al Capone in episode 2 and Rasputin in episode 4. Background introduction is done by slipping little bits of information at the right time. This anime wastes no time to show repetitive scenes. In fact, the animators have done a good job to make a good manga even better!!

Being 51 episodes, I’m not sure if it can hold out its uniqueness. Lets just hope it doesn’t become TARDish like some of the animes we used to love.

Final Notes: There are plans for this to be released on the Wii… Looking forward to it.

-Signed, your beloved cool uber wonderful and amazing P-Meister