Noragami

The Spiritual ROSSMAN

Noragami is like Beyond the Boundary-lite. It's a fun little series about supernatural beings killing rogue demon-spirits in Japan, but there's just no real substance to it. It LOOKS phenomenal though (Studio Bones showing its cred like a champ), and the music is good, and the characters are well drawn and 3 dimensional (so to speak)... But it's just missing that UMPH that would have made it great.

Anyway, Noragami (a name which literally means "stray god") is about a war god named Yato who wanders around modern Japan doing whatever anybody willing to offer him 5-Yen asks him to do. Yato hasn't been worshiped much since Japan became all peaceful-like, and all he wants is his own shrine, which costs money, you know.

So Yato-gami wanders and kills dark spirits that spread despair, but he'll also clean your bathroom grout if you ask him (and make him an offering of 5-Yen), or work the graveyard shift of your convenience store (if you make an offering of 5-Yen to him). Also, Yato has a companion of sorts (as all decent gods do) known as his shinki, or his spirit-weapon. After having his current shinki quit (because he had sweaty hands when he held her in her dagger form), Yato came across the spirit of a dead middle schooler whom he claimed and renamed "Yukine," and made him into his personal spirit-fighting sword. Yukine is kind of a twat at first, but he gets better.

But wait, I forgot to tell you about Hiyori Iki, the cute high school student who gets involved in Yato's shit when she tries to save him from getting run over by a bus after he rushed into the middle of the street to catch a cat he was made a 5-Yen offering to find. Hiyori pushes Yato out of the way but gets flattened by the bus and dies.

Nah, I'm fucking with you. Hiyori only has her spirit/soul/essence separated from her body, and finds that whenever this happens she gets super powers, and a tail. Who wouldn't want a tail?

That's pretty much it. Yato, Hiyori, and Yukine go around killing malevolent spirits, hanging out with (much more powerful) jovial gods, learning life (well, afterlife) lessons, and avoiding gods with armies of their own shinki who have a bone to pick with Yato. There's kind of a big bad who shows up and tries to get Yato to revert to his old ways of being a soulless killing machine for his own reasons, but this show is pretty light weight and never dives too deep into anything too dramatic or life-threatening.

It's a good little wafer-thin mint of a show, if you need a break from a long series or from something truly emotional and thrilling. Though I'd still recommend Beyond the Boundary before Noragami.

Once again, it's not a bad anime, but it's got no real meat to it. We laughed at the silly parts while watching it, we cheered when Yato got serious and when Yukine manned up from being the wimpy little pissant he was starting to become, and we got the giggles every time Hiyori lost her body (which always just narcalepsied out wherever she was when the separation occurred), but in the end there was nothing really to it. It meandered around for a while, seemingly not going anywhere in particular, then got some good characterizations in, then some silliness, and then BAMMO, big ending battle.

Like I said, if you need a break from some serious shiznit and you have Netflix, give it a whirl. If you're looking for something with serious substance, keep looking, my friend

Not much to this review, but not much to this anime series. I find that I must give Noragami a "B-". It could have been a lot worse, but it also could have been a whole lot better. It was a silly little series while it lasted, and it had great production values too, but not much else going for it.

MALCOLM ZETA

More gods than all y'all mothafuckas can count in this mothafuckin' show. Japan is one weird-ass mothafuckin' nation.

I'm used to all those fuckin' shows dealin' with lame fuckin' gods with no power an' shit anymore, but this mothafucka wasn't that bad. Not really. Yeah, it ain't no goddamn Shakespeare or nothin' but it ain't a piece of shit like that one show with the stupid high school girl becomes a god because she wanted to, or that other show where gods are everywhere and don't have powers because none of them mothafuckas praise them anymore.

This shit's okay.

I already said, this shit's okay, mothafucka! Back the fuck off.

The SKIPPER too!

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz........ Arrrrrr. Zzzzzzz ZZZzzzzzzzzzzzz........

Arrrrrrrrrrrr.... Arrrr. ZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzz... Whatinthefuck!? Arrrr, oh, this Noraganami show? It put the ol' Skipper to sleep better than a bottle of Ambien and a liter of whiskey. All I...

ZZzzzzzaaaaarrrrrrrrrzzzzzzzz.

ZZzzzzzzzz...... Arrrr.