The latest episode of Gundam SEED - Destiny came out today in Japan and being the impatient anime fan that I am, I downloaded the raw as soon as it was available. But there was another reason I was particularly interested in the raw today, more so than usual because there was a new opening and ending sequence.
The new opening theme is by a duo called High and Mighty Colour who sound very similar to Move, of Initial D fame. The song starts off sounding like any SEED inspired song before it, but then the rapping kicks in and ends up with a nu-metal meets Rage Against The Machine feel. It'll take some getting used to but its definitely growing on me. The opening sequence itself is very nice, lots of new mecha and Gundams revealed; I could see an upgrade for Impulse, a new big baddy type Gundam, Andy Bartfeld's new custom Windam, as well as the orange Zaku from a few episodes ago.
I don't have much info on the end theme but the sequence itself seems inspired by SEED's fourth ending, Find the Way. There also seems to an inordinate amount of character pairings that are presented, whether we should take these with a pinch of salt or not has yet to be proven.
The second volume of the RahXephon manga also arrived this morning, courtesy of Amazon.co.uk. Any fans of the anime really should check this one out since its a rather unconventional retelling of the story. It features the main elements of the original story, though coupled with ecchi comedy. The girls all look fabulous, very different compared to their anime counterparts. As mentioned before, I also received volume nine of the Evangelion manga. Probably the most removed volume from the anime so far, it'll be interesting to see where things go. So, what's different exactly? Well, Kaoru/Kawaru is a complete ass hole. He kills a kitten in front of Shinji's eyes which doesn't earn him any Brownie points and as a result, Mr Ikari ends up detesting the guy. Asuka's past is also fully explained, filling in the gaps left by the anime. A very good read and I look forward to the apparent final volume, number ten.
Thats all from me, més copains. Toodleoo!
