Sweet mercy, I go and take a break to staff AX and the anime companies unleash half of their big announcements! I’m glad I’ll actually have time during Otakon to post the news as it happens, because falling behind on AX feels like a mountain already.

So, here we go with the alphabetical company-by-company roundup:

Aniplex

Durarara!! (DVD)

Bandai

K-On! (DVD)

Crunchyroll

Occult Academy (simulcast)
Tono to Issho (simulcast)

FUNimation

Nozomi

Sora no Woto (DVD)
Revolutionary Girl Utena (TV and movie)

Sentai

Highschool of the Dead (simulcast)

Viz

Nurarihyon no Mago (simulcast)
Strawberry 100% (streaming)

Phew! What a list. Out of these, I’m most interested in the To Aru series, the Trigun movie, and the amusingly self-aware Legend of the Legendary Heroes. What are you guys looking forward to owning or watching?

- A trailer for the Darker than Black side stories, which will come with the Ryuusei no Gemini DVD releases.
- An anime music “contest” on New Year’s Eve, similar to Japan’s famous Kouhaku program.

Darker than Black

Go to the official Japanese site for Darker than Black and you’ll find a 3:17 trailer for Darker than Black: Kuro no Keiyakusha Gaiden, an original OVA episode that fills the two-year gap between the first season and the current Ryuusei no Gemini run. The OVA, which is planned to be spread over the DVD releases of Ryuusei no Gemini, shows Hei and Yin after they leave the Syndicate and are pursued by its assassins. It should also show how the pair became separated, which is a major question in the current series.

Currently, four OVAs are scheduled for release. They will be packaged with every other Ryuusei no Gemini DVD starting with volume 2.

Kouhaku for Otaku

With anime music increasingly making its presence known on the weekly sales charts, the inevitable has happened: Nippon BS Broadcasting Corp has announced the Kingrun Anime Songs Kouhaku program, which will air late on New Year’s Eve into January 1, 2010. The live program will split famous musical acts into Red and White teams and have them perform their greatest hits, just like the famed Kouhaku Uta Gassen program that it is based on.

While the real Kouhaku has recruited seiyuu/singer Mizuki Nana in order to promote itself to the otaku audience, the new Anime Songs Kouhaku program seems to have a lot of more of the old guard of anime singers, with Kushida Akira (best known for Kinnikuman Go Fight!), Mizuki Ichirou (whose mile-long discography covers everything from Mazinger Z to Gatchaman), and Oota Takako (who you may remember from Creamy Mami) featuring prominently on the list.

We’ll see how popular this show is in a month and a half – I don’t know how many years it will run, but it at least has a chance in an age where the real Kouhaku can’t pull 80% of the viewing population in anymore.

(Source: Anime News Network)

Image from the official FUNimation site.

First, let me get my obligatory plugs out of the way – One Piece starts an all-new, Oda-penned short story this weekend, as the anime and manga both start telling the tale of the Gold Lion before Luffy and friends face him in December’s One Piece movie.

Meanwhile, InuYasha: The Final Act seems to have found its groove again, so if you were a fan of the first series, it’s time to pick it back up!

In more personal recommendations, I just finished watching the latest episode of Darker than Black: Ryuusei no Gemini. It had the most emotional cake-eating scene I’ve ever seen, and I don’t even mean that sarcastically.

I highly suggest that you go back and watch the whole Darker than Black first season, which is available online from FUNimation. It has everything – superspy action, shadowy politics, an incredible soundtrack, great cinematography, and just enough comic relief to keep the show from being utterly gloomy. The only problem is that it leaves behind a lot of unanswered questions, so hopefully the second series will start answering those. It’s a pretty big time investment, but it’s definitely worth the watch.

I missed the boat on Darker than Black back in 2007. I wasn’t watching much anime back then, but I recently started watching it on FUNimation’s video channel (it’s also available on YouTube, for those international readers who can’t see the FUNi site) and got hooked hard enough by the setting and the style of the superhuman superspy thriller to watch it from start to finish.

The sequel, Darker than Black: Ryuusei no Gemini, retains most of the staff and cast who made the first anime so interesting, but just one change on the staff makes it very different from its predecessor – and sadly, the change is for the worse.

Don’t get me wrong – I still like the new Darker than Black. It still has Hei as the sociopathic Chinese assassin version of Batman, and it still displays the same twisted imagination and complex politics that defined the original. But the new version has terrible, terrible music compared to the first series.

The score for the first Darker than Black anime was penned by Kanno Yoko (Cowboy Bebop, Macross Frontier), one of the best and most famous composers working in the industry. It had a moody and subtle sound that meshed with the stylishly shadowy visual palette of the animation to create an atmosphere that breathed with amoral life.

This time around, the music is composed by Ishii Kouji, who did the music for the Hellsing anime and not much else. The mournful strings and melancholy guitars that helped define the series have been replaced by generically loud and vaguely annoying techno, and I’m a few badly mixed dance tracks from shutting off my sound every time a fight scene starts. It’s truly unfortunate that the music is so noticeable and so horrible, because it starts to overshadow the good qualities of the series.

The story of shadowy Contractors, who have superpowers but use them at the cost of their conscience, and the many governmental organizations that use them unscrupulously, is as good as ever. We see the underworld of Darker than Black through the eyes of a young Russian/Japanese girl named Suou Pavlichenko, who serves as the show’s conscience in a world with no moral compass. It’s interesting to see the bloody and brutal battles between the Contractors as well as the innocent Suou’s reactions, and the story is still as well-written and mature as ever.

But you just keep coming back to that music…

The good:

- The brutal action is as intense and fascinating as before.
- The story is still strong, with plenty of shadowy conspiracies and mysterious motives to provide a constant stream of new and interesting wrinkles.

The bad:

- Cheesy techno fight music replaces the stylish and moody soundtrack of the original and makes me want to strangle kittens.

The ugly:

- Don’t ever get attached to a Darker than Black character other than the main character Hei, because the mortality rate of this series is the highest I’ve ever seen in a TV anime.