A Certain Scientific Railgun

[pfarber]

So far I'm in 10 episodes and this is really turning out to be a good series. Its a slice of life/Shojo/sci-fi anime that so far has been pretty good story wise. At times its a bit heavy on the 'girl crush' aspect and there has been a fan service episode (they literally teased it as 'the next episode is a swimsuit episode... gotta give the fans what they want!'... God damn it Japan, don't ever change!) But it was not as bad as it could have been. I really hate fan service episodes... I have no need to cartoon boobs.. so I skipped out 80% of the episode (ok Japan, if there is ONE thing you need to change it's your obsession with cartoon boobs).

There already seems to have been a spin off of one of the characters, but I didn't watch it yet... still going through Railgun.

Good show so far.. opening and closing themes are pretty good, average animation, and better than average stories/plot. The first 4 episodes are dubbed (on Hulu or Funimation) but the rest are subbed... from my very, very basic understanding of Japanese the English sub loosely follows the Japanese dialog... and the Dubbed version changes it even more.

[pfarber]

Finished the first season and the last half of the episodes where BRILLIANT! Action, some comedy, all around good sci-fi/shojo series.

The first few episodes of the second season are both good sci-fi and and also kinda dystopian... Misaka's ('Missy') DNA was sequenced when she was a child (she thought they would come up with a cure for MS) but evil scientists actually cloned her to try and train a never-before-thought-possible Level 6 esper. The battle where 'cloned missy' gets killed is kinda dark.. I mean dude (The Accelerator) is a kinda sadistic at points... but the flip side is that the clone's he's fighting are not really people... just programmed meat bags with limited esper powers. Still Misaka still seems them as human (the clones are called 'sisters' and they refer to Misaka as 'Big Sister') even though the clones are happy to march to their death as programmed.

Misaka gets into some major battles (and the esper's all have equal or greater power than Missy) so its not one sided at all. The fights turn into somewhat of a puzzle as Misaka has to figure out their esper power they try to counter it. The animation of the battles is pretty good and the music is also good.

Only the first 4 episodes are dubbed so its subbed on Hulu or Funimation (which simply plays the Hulu video).

Definitely worth a watch for a good sci-fi/action series.

[pfarber]

Finished the second season and again , some good stuff. Season 2 was a little lighter on the action and did follow a similiar arc as season 1 (aka clones) but does dig deeper in the dark underbelly of Academy City and the espers vs non-espers... I don't want to get into spoilers but there are a few revelations that you might miss unless you pay close attention. Probably need a second watching to catch all the secrets that are given up.

Its odd that there was a fairly long break between S1 and S2 (like 4 years) but all in all a good franchise, and both season arcs ended/closed well.