Anime Spring 2008 First Impressions: Soul Eater

For those of you that don't know, Soul Eater is a new Anime for this season. It currently airs on Tokyo TV, in Japan, but I myself am watching a fan subtitled version as I know little to no Japanese. Basically, we got four very well known companies involved in the production of Soul Eater, including Bones, Dentsu Inc., Media Factory, and finally TV Tokyo.

However, I bet you're not even interested in that, so lets start talking about the first episode and my first impressions of it. Soul Eater starts off sounding like another Bleach knockoff, but during the first episode my impression on things changed quite a bit. Keep in mind, that before I started watching the first episode, I knew nothing of what the storyline was about, other then rumors it revolved around Shinigami.

During the opening you start to notice that the animation is really colorful and interesting, I can't help to think from the character's faces that they look something like you would see on Eureka 7. After the opening "Resonance" by T.M.Revolution is finished, the narrator summarizes the story up into a nice little gift basket that I like to call, greatness.

It seems that there are demons that want to eat human souls to feed to a stronger demon, who the narrator calls "the creature of destruction", Kishin, or Devil. On the flip side, we have the good guys of the story, students from the Shinigami Weapon Meister University or commonly known as "Shibusen" as the narrator explains.

Each weapon meister is paired with a human weapon, and the series seems to center around three of these pairs. Their whole goal seems to revolve around collecting the souls of the demons in order to reach one-hundred souls collected so that the human weapon can transform into a "Death Scythe". I'm assuming that after becoming a Death Scythe the meister will simply continue to slay the evil creatures.

Moving on now, after the narrator finishes, we find ourselves in a town at night watching a demon murdering a helpless female. He spot's another female and mumbles "More power", as if he needs to feed and thus get stronger. At this point, I'd venture to say that the animation reminds me of a beefed up brightly colored Fooly Cooly episode.

The demon chases down the other girl and is about to kill her when what looks to be two of the main characters shows up, the male is called Soul Eater, and the female's name is Maka. I thought, "uh-oh", Soul Eater stands up and delivers and interesting speech, extends his arm, and then transforms into a scythe. I have to admit I've never seen anything like this in an anime or elsewhere.

Of course Maka picks up the scythe and guess what happens next? One of the greatest fight scenes in an anime I've ever seen. Seriously, the animation is flawless, those who have seen Full Metal Alchemist and remember watching Ed fight with Greed will know the kind of animation I'm talking about. Only in Soul Eater it's more fast pace and Maka is doing some outrageous tricks before slaying the demon and taking it's soul.

After the dust settles from that fight, the male turns back into human form and eats the soul, then they both go and relay information back to the lead shinigami, it seems. The way they contact him is a bit weird, but I for one can see this story line getting pretty interesting.

Along with the bright looking animation you also have a bit of comedy, there's nothing wrong with that, the jokes are pretty silly and almost what you'd expect in an anime like this. Honestly, I wasn't expecting the next enemy to be a sexy looking witch, but in all seriousness thats what it turned out to be, and apparently if they take her soul, Soul Eater will turn into a official Death Scythe.

Of course their attack plan failed and the pair begins days of trying to hurt down the witch to take her soul. In the end the resulting plan looks unfolds to be a bit of a shocker, I wont spoil it I'll just say it was very interesting. At the end of the show, we see a sneak preview of the another pair of good guys, and it seems as if the next episode will be about them.

Now that I've summed up the first episode, will I continue to watch this anime throughout the season? Yes, I am very impressed by everything about it, Soul Eater takes everything you've ever seen in an anime, flips it around, and eats your face. Thats how good it is, seriously. Kudos to the voice actors as well for doing a great job.

Two thumbs up!