My Hidan no Aria review is in my opinion one of my best reviews to this day and still remains a personal favorite of mine. Not only do I feel that this is one of best written and funniest reviews but it’s also the review that showed that I can do this. Around this time I really was thinking about stopping Project Nitsuj. I was stressed out from work and I was dealing with the BS of life as I like to call it. So I thought about writing this review and then start working on a series finale in April. Luckily, that didn’t come because of this review. I just had so much fun writing this review. All the stress and problems that I was facing in my life just faded away and I became a lot more relaxed and calmer with my life.
Anyway, getting to the anime. In this anime we focus on a special academy that trains students to be mercenaries for the country and at the school we focus on Aria the best student in the school and her partner Kinji who at first glance looks like your typical slacker but when he gets aroused he goes into a state called hysteria mode where he turns into a badass spy man who’s got amazing skills, a cool attitude, and is smoothed with the ladies. The anime follows these two unlikely partners as they try to track down the people responsible for framing Aria’s mother of a series of crimes while also developing feelings for each other in the process. We also see that there’s a number of other girls who fall for Kinji which I kind of regret not talking about in the review. There’s his childhood friend Shirayuki who is one of the cutest yandere girls you’ll ever see. Her obsession with Kinji is unbelievable and funny at the same time. Riko is the flirt who’s assertive with Kinji and uses her womanly appeal to weaken him and my favorite girl Reki is the badass silent type her let’s her actions speak for her. Yeah I know she doesn’t display signs of affection in the anime but in the light novel she tries to have a shotgun wedding with Kinji. The anime has a good balance of comedy, action, drama, and character development that gets you really invested into the anime. However, the one major problem I have with this series is the magic element. I have nothing against magic being used in an anime but here it only serves as a way for the author to dig himself out of a hole he dug for himself. For the first 4 episodes they establish a real world like setting only to have a twist and reveal that hey supernatural powers exist at the end of episode 4. You can’t do that in a story. You have to establish this kind of thing sooner or at the beginning of your story, you can’t just throw it in there after you’ve gone 4 episodes of not showing it or mentioning it. It’s like if AoT revealed in the final episode of season 1 that the characters can use alchemy and they’ve known this all along. Big whoop. Why didn’t we use this on the titans then? That was pretty much my only complaint with the anime. Well that, and the fact that we could have used more hysteria mode. Really didn’t come into play all that much as I would have hoped.
This was also the first anime where I did a dub vs sub scenario. I was trying to add something new and interesting to the blogs and actually thought about doing this for all animes that had both a dub and sub but after receiving mixed thoughts on this and a lot of weeaboos saying: “oh you’re not a true anime fan because you like the dub”, I decided to do it sparingly and only if I really felt one offered something better than the other and both versions of this anime offer something better. I like Kinji’s voice in the dub but I like Aria’s voice in the sub. I think Riko’s voice in the dub has a bit more energy and personality than the sub and both VAs nail Shirayuki perfectly, they both managed to capture the innocent sweet girl persona of Shirayuki but also did a good job at making her sound threatening when she goes into yandere mood. I gave this anime an 8.5 when I reviewed it the highest ranking I’ve given an anime at the time and. . .yeah I think the score still holds up for me to this day. In my eyes it’s a great anime and one that definitely needs a second season and if you’re wondering what my thoughts are about the spin-off well don’t worry I plan on getting to that sometime next year.