Mirage of Blaze (Twelve episodes, OVA. Manly romance. Well… sort of romance.)
Oh my God.
Granted, it was more than a year since Jing and I watched it, but I can still recall the horrible, horrible dub. For some reason we couldn’t get the translated text to show up with the original voice acting, so we were stuck with… not very inspired people.
Having the text there would also have been helpful because several characters have two names (or more!) and are called different things by different people.
The real problem is that they tried to stuff the plot of eight novels into twelve half hour anime episodes, with predictable results.
Ghosts, stupid women, stupid men, sexual tension that has gone unresolved for the last 400 years (and it takes just about as long in real-time before it’s resolved too, as I understand it), the Original Bishie™ - that is, Ranmaru Moori - demons, more ghosts, ninjas, a dragon named Lord Hojo (ha!), and an old warlord named Lord Kenshin (haw!), existental questions and people getting possessed and stuck in trees.
It is very, very confusing. In a nutshell it’s about a group of ghost hunters who have been living on through rebirth and possession since the Japanese feudal wars. Their leader (originally Kagetora Uesugi) has been living a normal life as a young man named Takaya Ohgi after his last death went down so badly that he suppressed his memories. The second in command of sorts, Naoe, calls him back to battle as other reborns and possessors with Bad Intentions are on the move.
Naoe seems to be the level headed of the troop of bad morale, but he eventually turns out to have some serious issues as well.
The “romance” (“I’ll imprison our souls in this mirror so that you never can get away from me again no matter how much you fight and scream!”) is left unresolved in the series (never watched the OVA, but it’s more of the same as I understand). From what I’ve gathered, in the novels they finally get together in book 24 or so, when they’re alone in a cave and Takaya is too beaten up to move. Uuuhright.
It’s not “good” per se, but it’s fun to watch in with somebody else who likes to make sarcastic comments about all the WTF. This series takes itself 100% seriously and fails to deliver.
Black Cat (drama, humor, action)
“STOP IT WITH THE ROSES!” - Jing and I during watching.
This series contains at least one horrible Mary Sue, but she’s so nutty that you can forgive it.
This is sort of an inverted Trigun - where Trigun starts out goofy and turns serious, this one starts serious and depressing, then turns goofy and goes back to a milder case of serious.
You will be hard pressed to find a series with sillier names for the characters. The hero is named Train Heartnet, who works as an assassin for an organization with their control freak eyes set on the world. Through friendship with a “Sweeper” (bounty hunters who doesn’t kill their prey but catches dangerous people to make life easier for those who can’t defend themselves) he goes from callous assassin to more human.
There’s a whole lot of character interaction and humor, but the blazing star of this one is really one of the main antagonists, Creed Diskenth.
Batshit doesn’t even start with this guy. He makes baby Kefka cry, ya rly. He kills a bunch of people like any ho-hum villain, but what makes him special is his mildly put crazy obsession with Train. It really has to be seen in action, and you’ll never look at roses the same way again.
This one is also fun if you’ve watched Get Backers, because nearly all the Japanese voice actors from that one are also in Black Cat - with characters that are rather similar to their GB characters.