Recently in mystery anime Category

"Yakushiji Ryouko no Kaiki Jikenbo" or "Ryoko Yakushiji's Strange Case Files" is an anime which started life as a light novel. The 13-episode show aired in Japan last summer.

Ryoko, who comes from a rich family, is a cop with the Tokyo Metropolitan Department. But she's not just any cop. At 27, she is a superintendent who heads a department, can speak several languages, is universally feared by the bureaucrats and can solve the weird cases that often come her way. She is also a crack shot and can take on the baddies with her fists and feet if need be.

She's also imperious toward her underlings, thinks nothing of going shopping in the middle of her shift, wears skimpy suits and shamelessly uses her family's influence.
Her dad heads JACES, one of the major security firms in the country where many police bureaucrats apply to after retirement. She holds this over their heads in order to get her way. Thankfully, she is on the side of the little guy and hates fat cats who abuse the system.

She also likes her much put upon assistant/shopping bag holder. This Watson-wanna-be to her Sherlock is Junichiro Izumida, 33, who narrates the series. He fears and respects her but doesn't get the massive hints she gives him that she really, really likes him. What a doof.

Called Izumida by everyone, he is a decent and hard-working cop whose wits are not as sharp as Ryoko's. But he can fight as well as her. He is not a career police officer so he does his job whether it annoys a bureaucrat or not.

The show is reminiscent of "X Files" because the cases Ryoko tackles include man-made horrors and regular creatures with an unfortunate effect on humans. Case in point. One episode deals with a cricket whose chirping drives people to kill themselves.

Ryoko is also aided by her French maids, Lucienne and Marianne. Fellow superintendent and rival, Yukiko Muromachi, often trades insults with Ryoko but once or twice helps her. Not that she'd ever admit it.

With the new year just around the corner, I find myself mulling over anime I saw this year. Some were horrible, a few were excellent but most were entertaining enough.

I noticed many of the shows I watched had a supernatural or magical theme. I don't even remember seeing anything mecha-related. Sorry but giant robots leave me cold.

I have to feed the artsy fartsy side of moi now and then so I gravitate toward shows that look unique, tackle an unusual subject matter or tell a tale in a way I haven't seen before. "Mononoke", which deals with the adventures of an unusual medicine peddler, fit that bill. You should check out the show when you have the chance. I suppose you could say "Mononoke" was a spinoff of "Ayakashi" since the peddler was a character in one of the featured tales there.


Yes, I also saw my share of shonen anime from "Naruto Shippudden" to "D. Grayman" this year. The latter ended recently and was a letdown. Since the manga isn't finished, the animators decided to end the show just after the Black Order's headquarters get attacked. Lame. I hope they later come out with movies.

Do stay away from the mess that is "Le Chevalier D'eon". It is loosely based on a historical figure who was a spy for the king of France and who had a fondness for wearing women's clothing. In the anime, he dons dresses when the ghost of his murdered sister possesses him. The show is a mishmash of historical figures involved in conspiracies, secret societies and other arcane stuff. While the animation is beautiful, the plot is too convoluted and unbelievable. And anyone who loves history better steer clear of this anime which plays fast and loose with the facts.

Yako Katsuragi, 16, is known for eating like a pig and solving mysteries, The public refers to her as "the high school girl detective" or sometimes "the piggish detective." Her mother is abroad as far as she knows but the elder Katsuragi is actually in South America trying to unravel the mystery of her husband's killing.

Before she became a detective, Yako's father was found killed and decapitated in a bloody room locked from the inside. The cops labeled it a suicide. Uh how is that even possible? The poor man killed himself then cut off his own head?

Anyway, Yako is not really the one who solves the cases in "Majin Tantei Nogami Neuro" or "Demon Detective Neuro Nogami." The teen is merely a front for Neuro Nogami, a demon who eats mysteries. He devoured all the mysteries in hell so he came to earth looking for more.

Anyone who sees this show would wonder why the public would think Yako is a detective since all she does is say, "And the culprit is ... you!" and points out the guilty party. Neuro posseses her and makes her do the pointing too, As her assistant, he also explains how she solved the mystery. And people give her all the credit? Duh.

The evildoers are then gobbled by Neuro in his bird form, Well at least their evil intent is what he eats.

Yako learns to be a detective of sorts later on. And the show doesn't get really interesting until midway when a serial killer/thief named Sai pops up. But I won't spoil it for you by telling what happens the rest of the series.

What in tarnation is wrong with anime nowadays? Not only is there a whole bunch of harem anime that are pointless and stupid, there seems to be more than enough pretentious shows polluting the airwaves.

I started out with such high hopes for "Ghost Hound" then as the series progressed I became more disappointed. I have no complaints with the quality of the animation which is high but the plot is just too convoluted and cloaked in way too much psychobabble. Like a middle school student can just talk about a psych theory at the drop of a hat let alone understand such yappings about the id and the nature of
memory.

Plus the droning on and on about this and that theory was enough to make me scream. The show drags when this happens and it occurs every episode.

The show tries to end with a big flourish by focusing on a cult religion and how the spirits of the mountain and of the faux organic beings created in the locally-based lab team up to help quash these nutjobs - literally. It was too late for me at that point. I didn't much care if Taro or his friends succeeded in saving the elementary school girl who gets possessed by an ancient God. Don't ask.

Avoid this pretentious yawnfest if you can.

Here is the opening song to the anime "Shion No Ou" or "Shion's King" which combines a mystery with a sport anime. This is courtesy of YouTuber xAzakura. The show is also known as "Flowers of Hard Blood."

Shion Yasuoka is a sweet girl who plays shogi, a board game similar to chess, very well. She communicates via a notepad because she hasn't spoken a word after witnessing the stabbing deaths of her real parents at age five. Her neighbors, the Yasuokas, adopted her and raised her as their own. Her adoptive father is a professional shogi player and he nurtures her innate talent for the game.

At a young age, she is considered an excellent female shogi player.

Like any anime geared toward competitions, the show focuses on the players and the games. So the simple act of moving a game piece is overblown sometimes. But that's common in such shows.

What makes this anime interesting is the mystery of who killed Shion's parents. The show never loses sight of that main plot line so I have yet to see a wasted episode.

OK OK so it's been ages since I last posted. I've been on vacation (whine whine) and was out of the country too. Don't ask where. Suffice it to say I won't be back there.

Anyway, I've been watching this new anime called "Persona - trinity soul" which apparently is based on a video game. The show is set in Ayanagi City and happens 10 years after the last game. Our protagonists are three brothers who seem to lack the gene for expressing love. This trio of cold fishes are Ryo Kanzato who heads the local police department, his high school-aged brother Shin and their youngest sibling Jun. They had a sister, Yuki, who was Jun's twin but something happened and she's no longer with them. Ditto their parents.

I've only seen up to episode three and the show still hasn't explained if Yuki died or was kidnapped or got vaporized. Since I never played the game, I'm reduced to getting my info solely from the show.

In the first episode, Ryo gets summoned to check out a submersible where the crew vanished. At the same time, his two younger brothers return home after several years of living with another relative. He doesn't seem to relish seeing his brothers again.

There's a mystery with a capital M going on. People are disappearing. Folks have been found dead and turned inside out. There's a group of folks who seem to be grabbing certain young people and pulling out what looks to be their souls. Ryo keeps things from his own men much to the chagrin of one cop who thinks he's up to something. Ryo, who is as friendly as an iceberg to his siblings and underlings, possesses some sort of power that launches a transparent giant robot thingy that saves one of the kidnapped girls and slashes some giant alien thingy that comes out of the kidnapper.

At his new high school Shin hears about "shadow extraction" and sees students doing such a feat on others. He passes out after a classmate, Takuro Sakakiba, and he managed to pull out these giant robots from each other. It seems these robot things are called Personas.

Interesting that the robots look like the models Shin possesses and even dreams about.

Little Jun is weird in his own right, He keeps a dress of his missing twin with him and behind locked doors, Ryo overhears him talking to a girl.

There's some trouble brewing at a local karaoke bar when Shin and his classmates run into a group of young punks.

The show is interesting so far.

Here's the opening song to "Ghost Hound" which hands down wins the award for best production values out of the slew of anime shows aired in Japan this fall. Thanks to a YouTuber by the name of "explodedrunes", I am able to show you the quality of the animation used for the series.

For some weird reason, I feel the need to dress all in black and snap my fingers a la Beatnik whenever I hear this song. I also dig the two-toned ghostly cat that passes by the hero. Cool.

Although the series makes me want to scratch my head sometimes with its talk about the subconscious, out of body experiences and the mysteries of the human mind. I don't remember signing up for a psych class when I opted to watch this show.