Anime — Spring Season '08 revisited

Two more titles, as a result of filling in wet afternoons. From the top...

Crystal Blaze is set in a sorta-now sorta-generic Left Coast city, where a sorta-noirish dead-beat detective agency, with a case-load that seems to mainly involve seeking out lost pets (but has ridiculously good contacts with the figures who really run the district) gets involved with a case of missing girls, political cover-ups and Science! in the pulp tradition. It took a lot of starting, and was on the "I'm only torrenting this for completeness' sake" list for a while, but the story has finally picked up as the series passes the two-thirds mark.

Kurenai was on my "tried it and dropped it" list for a while. I'd tried the first episode, based on liking the art style I'd seen in stills -- but the OP is majorly off-putting, as was starting off with the h4x-powered kid at the centre of the story (and picture). While he actually turns out to be the generic wussy anime lead (trying to earn Shinji-like levels of disgust), and his eccentric neighbours (left and right) are fuel for a bit of slice-of-life, the real star of the show is Murasaki, the little girl placed in his care after extraction from her old aristocratic family's harem -- and who, for all her naïveté and archaic ways, has ten times the spine of her nominal guardian.