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ファイト／ステイナイト 
Since Garten is extremely overworked on his Japan leave and even has his second Kongetsu blog to take care of, he asked me to blog Tsubasa 02&03 for him. "Sure", I said, "no problem. After all, the first episode was really great!"
Unfortunately, the next two episodes were not. Not by a long shot. Episode 01 captured me with a good pace, likable characters (both Sakura's kawaiiness and Syaoran's levelheaded non-wimpiness appealed to me), a great score by Yuki Kajiura (I had the hymn of the last battle on repeat for over one hour) and great visuals. Most of these strong points have vanished. Sakura is out of commission due to the story, Kajiura seems to be on vacation, the animation quality has dropped a bit, but most importantly - the pacing is totally screwed. In these two episodes we had more pointless flashback-repetitions than good animes have in a full season. What the heck are they thinking?
I'm not going to drop the anime because of the strong start - otherwise I'd be outta here. And so, after a solid (+) in the beginning, the only fair verdict for the next two installments in my opinion would be "flawed and disappointing"
Episodes Rating: -
I'm sorry that it's been a while since I wrote anything but I had problem accessing this site ever since I arrived in Japan. Thankfully, the issue has been resolved for now so I hope I can continue doing this without too much of a hiccup. Anyway, onto the series itself, this turns out to be a rather good adaptation of the manga. The OP theme, Blaze is a fitting song for the series. On the other hand, I have to say that I'm one of the few people who don't really appreciate Maaya Sakamoto's Loop as the ED theme. The ED is not bad or anything like that but it definitely took a couple of 'loop', so to say, before I got used to the song. Thankfully the background music are very much spot-on thanks to Yuki Kajiura's arrangement. I have more to say about the entire series itself but let's just get to the episode for now.
I supposed it's not surprising that this series gets so much exposure from various anime magazines given the CLAMP name and all. Having said that, I have to say that I'm still pretty skeptical about this particular anime adaptation. I'm probably one of the few who have not been impressed with the character design for this anime. I think the anime characters have this unusually thin frame. The picture that I posted above is probably one of the few pictures where the characters look closer to their manga counterpart. The other illustrations as well as the brief trailer that I've seen, however, suggests that the characters will look much thinner than the picture above.
