Site Index | Blog What's New? Review List Stuff Review Outline Why Hate Anime? Wheat RoD: The TV Haibane Renmei Teen Titans Chaff Akira Legend of the Overfiend Black Heaven It's not difficult, really. The entire goal of this site is to watch lots of anime, then separate the wheat from the chaff. For those of you so deeply mired in Japanese subculture that it's impossible to decipher simple English phrases anymore, chaff is the hard dry stuff that grows up around grain in the fields. When you go to harvest your crops, you have to separate the useless chaff from the edible grain via a process called threshing. So, to separate the wheat from the chaff means to separate the good stuff from the bad stuff. It is my personal opinion that, in the fields of anime, there is far more chaff than wheat. And I'm talking about a chaff landslide. It's like a ten-to-one shut-out in favor of the chaff. There is a lot of really, really bad anime out there. But lo! I am not about to set about all that threshing alone. Who knows better the difference between chaff and grain than friendly harmless rodents? That's why AA uses the patented Five-Point Hamham Ratings System! Zero Hamhams = Pure Chaff Most anime this bad I won't even bother with. This stuff is so painful to watch, there's nothing I could say about this particular anime that would separate it from any of its neighboring ilk. One Hamham = Some Redeeming Value This is a mostly horrible anime that has at least some distant spark of redeeming value. Maybe it has a plot that could be construed as good in some alternate universe. Or maybe the artwork isn't absolutley vomitous. But just because it gets something partially right doesn't mean it's good. Two Hamhams = Not Entirely Bad This still isn't anything I'd want to watch (or talk about except for review purposes), but it's appealing on some quantifiable, measurable level. Maybe there's one character worth liking, or one storyline element that's genuinely cool. Three Hamhams = Just Plain Average Not good, not bad. Lukewarm in the truest sense of the word. A three hamham anime is good background noise, but if you pay too much attention to it you start to realize how blah it is. Anything three hamhams or lower is categorized as chaff. Four Hamhams = Fun Without Substance This anime is definately watchable, but there's nothing amazing about it. It tells a good story without blowing you away, or has cool animation without being remarkable, or just ends up being fun to watch without being overwhelming. Something to lick at, but not sink your teeth into. Five Hamhams = All Kinds of Good Not only is this anime fun to watch, but it's got other stuff going for it too. Great characters, a schway soundtrack, a story that's out-of-this-world or maybe just a solid translation. Whatever the case, this is something worth buying as well as watching. Six Hamhams = Truly Hamtastic! This is the king 'o the wheat. This is the coolest anime imaginable, the cream of the crop, the proverbial bee's knees. You'd be daft to dislike this anime, and even the most venomous detractors to the cause will grudgingly admit "Okay, I guess it's pretty cool." "But Brick!" you ask, "What makes that a five-point system?" I understand your confusion. It's like this: each reviewed anime gets the appropriate one to six hamhams in each of five different categories. I debated long and hard (well, not really) about what sections to judge an anime on, and settled on these five. Characters come first, because without cool characters nothing is worth watching. This section gives a quick outline of each of the major characters and why they rule/suck. The more interesting likable characters an anime has in proportion to the stupid obnoxious ones, the more hamhams this category gets. Story is the biggest thing I notice in an anime, because without one there's simply no reason to watch. Lots of anime simply cannibalizes stories that have come before, and I take that into account when I give this rating. Bonus hamhams to stories with cool plot twists or logical endings. Animation gets its own rating because I'm a graphics whore. Pretty, colorful, and attractive artwork wins me over better than ugly, grainy, or bland artwork does. Also, I make a judgement on how crisp and fluid the animation is, and how well the visuals support the story and characters. Culture Shock is an AA-exclusive rating, but that doesn't mean it's not important. See, in order for me to like an anime, it's got to have some appeal to people who don't know every obscure fact about Japanese culture, who aren't studying the language, and who won't catch all the pokes, jabs, and in-jokes directed at other anime. This is also where I'll drop any translation quirks, fansub or not. Overall Rating is given at the end of the review. This is not an average of the other four scores, because some anime is better than the sum of its parts (and some is worse). Also, there are often intangibles that become important in some anime and not in others that can affect its overall score. If you don't feel like reading, just PgDn until you hit the bottom and check the overall rating. With the help of those adorable little hamhams, I am able to determine whether an anime is wheat, chaff, or some mixture of the two (and if that's the case, the compositional makeup of each). Some reviews might get updated if I see a different translation, or the dub instead of the sub, or catch some more episodes... and as such, additional hamhams may be added or taken as needed. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. You needn't worry about spoilers when reading reviews. If I'm going to ruin something, I'll blank the text out * like this *. Highlight the blanked out text to read it, or skip over it if you don't want to have the story ruined beforehand. I'm such a nice guy.

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