It’s that time of year again, when the weather starts to get warmer, and the Akiba-dwellers thoughts turn more towards loli than ever.

It’s also that time of year that, once again, I get to churn out an easy post consisting of little but inaccuracies, crazy genre-biased opinions and information pulled almost exclusively from other anime blogs.

Yes, it’s time to take a quick look through the Summer anime line-up! Traditionally chock-full of love comedies, harem shows and lolis, is this year going to be any different?

Not really.

Here in the UK, we have a thing we know as Trainspotters. Rather than what certain movies may have you believe, the life of a trainspotter isn’t about Obi Wan Kenobi on crack, rather they are regarded in the same kind of derogatory tones as, well, Star Trek or anime nerds. That’s because, well, they spend their free time standing around looking for trains.

Tetsuko no Tabi is apparently about some guy who has travelled to every train station in Japan, which doesn’t quite make him a trainspotter, but it doesn’t really make him much better. The show follows him as he drags a manga artist around with him on his station-hopping “adventures” – quotation marks intentional, as I’m really not sure how long they’d be able to sustain interesting stories around the theme. I suppose the fact that Densha Otoko already took one of the more obvious ones doesn’t do much to help it. It might be a fun series if it’s fairly short, but I can imagine it’ll get dull fairly quickly.

Nanatsuiro Drops follows some guy who, thanks to a mysterious beverage, afflicts himself with a strange ailment which turns him into a stuffed ram at night. I’m not entirely sure how he is supposed to cure himself of this affliction, but being based on an eroge I’d imagine it has a lot to do with, errr, ramming under-age girls in uncomfortable positions.

Really, just for once I’d like to see one of these buggers poison themselves. That’d teach them for drinking random things. As it is, it’s sending out the wrong message to otaku everywhere – drink everything you can get your hands on and, one day, you too might get to pork a loli! Maybe it’s really all part of some nefarious government scheme to filter out the undesirables in society?

More seriously, Nanatsuiro Drops looks to be the kind of show which is targeted at a very narrow, specific audience – one which doesn’t include me. I kind of feel there isn’t any real point in listening to (or reading) anything I have to say on the matter since, well, I’m entirely biased against it. If I was at least to try saying something level-headed about it, I’d say that the crazy story strikes me as trying just a little too hard. I mean, I realise that there are an awfully large number of eroge released on a weekly basis, and that anything not from the likes of Key, Age or Type-Moon needs to go to great lengths to differentiate themselves, but Noiji Ito character designs and a crazy-stupid plot? I have to wonder if they are covering for substandard content. Not that I intend to tune in to find out.

E could stand for Excitement, or it could stand for Excellent, or could be Effing-awesome. Unfortunately in the case of Code-E, it seems to stand for Electromagnetic, thanks to the heroine emitting electronics-disturbing waves whenever her emotions run high. Wasn’t there a character in Aquarion like that?

I can’t say it looks particularly interesting – it’s another love-comedy, presumably of the slightly wacky variety. It’s been more than a little overdone in recent years, and the “comedy” part rarely, if ever, works for me.

Moetan apparently makes Japes feel stabby, or at least those which bought into it do. This probably isn’t good news for me since, indeed, I do own a copy of the original Moetan book. In my own defence, it wasn’t purchased in order to improve my vocabulary, or to look at all the “moe” pictures, but rather to laugh at faux-RPG battle menus offering such enticing options as “go berserk with wet pants” – and it WAS a funny book for someone natively versed in English. A show stuffed full of engrish is potentially utterly hilarious – for one episode at least. The thing is that, well, the book was funny because of how crazy a lot of the example sentences actually were. I can’t see us getting the same quality of humour from within the refines of an actual show where you’d think the opportunity to make thinly disguised references to Dragonball and Doraemon will be considerable hampered.

I’ve been mentioning Bacanno! in pretty much every seasonal preview since it was announced over year ago, and now it’s finally upon us. It’s this seasons best chance for a good adventure show where the main male character isn’t some vessel meant to make otaku feel like they have a chance to get some loli-sausaging action, yet still has vaguely attractive character designs. For me, that counts for a lot.

Anyway, how can a show set primarily in 30′s New York about immortal alchemists in a Highlander-esque cannibalism situation be bad? The books are reportedly terrific as well (hopefully if Seven Seas release of Vamp!, by the same author, sells well they’ll pick them up).

Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei interests largely because of Akiyuki Shinbos involvement (speaking of which, I need to get around to watching the last episode of Tsukuyomi once I’ve finished this entry). From what I’ve read about it, though, I can’t imagine it being a whole lot of fun for someone like me – whilst the offbeat humour certainly appeals, the headache-inducing punnery would probably be too much for me to take. I’m curious to see how many Shinbo-isms make it into this show, though – it could either make something with a far broader appeal, or totally ruin it.

Others have already mentioned the unusual number of sequels we have been seeing recently. I don’t really see the point in talking at length about any of them, though I will mention that I fail to see any real point in Higurashis character design tweaks. They aren’t, at least, as painfully generic as those from the PS2 version of the games, but fattening what seems to have occurred does make them rather less interesting – Rena’s arms may have looked like they’d break in half if she tried to actually use that blade in anger, but at least they were distinctive. That’s not to mention it’s about the eight-bazillionth set of character designs Higurashi has seen.

Nothing else is really registering as something that seems worth commenting on to me at the moment, and I’ve warbled on randomly for long enough as it is. I’ll come back to the others later if I can think of something to say about them, but right now I have anime to be watching ^__^

Oh, and apparently ADV have licensed Tokyo Majin Kenpucho, including the second season starting in the summer. Given ADV have been throwing around licenses thick and fast the last couple of weeks, you have to wonder what they’re saving for AnimeExpo…