Anime Love (Part 1)
Sometimes it’s hard to believe how much I fall in the general category of boys that start off with reading Dragonball mangas just for the thrill of it to then become a skilled analyst of anime. I don’t have a master degree and visual conception of art (does a master degree like that even exist?) but I want to tell you about my favorite anime of the hour.
I’ll put my cards on the table right away, from what I remember, I used to watch Sailor Moon and Dragonball Z all the time and really liked anime over other animation, still I loved the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mummies Alive! and X-Men. High school and college is pretty much a big black-out from anime culture, I still had my roots with my all time favorite character Piccolo.
Shaman King: The story is about a young boy named Yoh Asakura who wishes to become a great shaman. The shaman merges with his gardian ghost who then enables him to use the ghost powers in the physical realm. Yoh teams up with the ghost of Amidamaru, an ancient samurai and throught their fusion they must battle ennemies and enter the Shaman Fight. The winner of the tournament will be crowned Shaman King and will receive the Great Spirit. By accomplishing this the Great Spirit grants his owner all the knowdledge of any spirit of Earth, thus gaining all-knowingness. The plot eventually thickens as the opponents become more powerful and the techniques required to fight them off more elaborate (Oversould, Giant Spirit). None the less the story eventually an evil twin brother who wants to destroy the world and reshape it to his own twisted vision. In the end the objectives change and Yoh and his friends have to go against an unbelievable new foe that is to put it simply overwhelming.
It’s a 64 episodes show of about 24 minutes each. Very fun to watch, oriented towards friendship and how to live with one an other and that you have to stick with your friends to the end. Even if there are ghosts all over the place the theme of death is crushing you since you have multiple parties with weird visions of what human life is worth competing to be shaman king.
Just like many other anime you sometimes get the impression the show got cancelled towards the end and they had to wrap up the show so towards the end you get crazy gear shifts, those actually add to the excitement of a great show. I have a short video sample from a previous post you can see what kind of content you can have in Shaman King.
You can read more on Shaman King on Wikipedia. Part two of Anime Love will present RahXephon and Vision of Escaflowne. Stay tuned with RSS feeds!