s-CRY-ed

Publisher
Beez
Country of origin
Japan
Format
Series
Running time
26 episodes
Year
2001

s-CRY-ed Volume 2

By Joseph (Joe) Wood
2nd Sep 05

The first volume of s-CRY-ed mixed action comedy and the numerous different perspectives of war that anime is famous for, making an extremely entertaining introduction into the series. The second volume also follows this trend…

Returning home from yet another job Kazuma finds Kanami passed out on the floor with a fever. The poor quality medicine available to those living outside the city has no hope of curing Kanami; Kazuma decides to attack a HOLD medical convoy, which Mimori (the girl who helped Kazuma escape HOLY) is part of. Kazuma must also face Asuka Tachibana an officer of HOLY, whose alter “Eternity Eight” can take control of others and change its form. Holy then starts to move into the Lost Land hunting for native Alters, Kazuma leads a resistance force to stop HOLY and once again comes up against Ryûhô who shows Kazuma the true power of his alter Zetsuei. Trapped deep underground Kazuma and Asuka have to co-operate to find a way to the surface, and they begin to understand one another, and Asuka learns a secret about alter abilities. In “Mad SPriCt” Kazuma goes back to the city to join HOLY, suspecting ulterior motives for this sudden change of heart Captain Zigmarl (the leader of HOLY) gets the alter user Unkei to use his “MAD SPriCt” power in order to make Kazuma start to enjoy life in the city. Unkei’s alter is extremely powerful, will Kazuma be able to break free?

S-CRY-ed is certainly not a show that you could watch out of sequence, until after you had already seen it through once, but this also causes problems for replay value as it means there’s few episodes that can be re-watched on there own. In most cases there is hardly any time gone between the end of one episode and the beginning of the next (in a similar way to Gundam SEED). There’s quite a lot packed in to each episode, you’ve got comedy, some amazing action the battles between Alter users are in most cases spectacular, and a great deal of characterisation. We get to see quite a few more of the powers of HOLY’s Alter users, and see several sides to the characters we’ve already been introduced to.

Characterisation is certainly one of the biggest draws of s-CRY-ed; it’s unlikely you won’t find a character you don’t like from the, cocky Kazuma, the calm and seemingly collected Ryûhô or any other of the wide varying characters. The few we don’t see several sides to are bound to be developed as the series continues.

The second volume of S-CRY-ed is as good as if not better than the first volume, and the series looks set to improve, but there’s nothing that makes the title an essential purchase, at least not yet. This title is a good purchase if your looking for something traditional, but it’s certainly a series to keep your eye out for, and on in the near future.

R2 DVD Notes

Features: English/French/Polish/Japanese Language track, English/French/Polish Subtitles, BEEZ Trillers, Clean Opening animation (8 versions), Charcter Profiles, Translation notes, audio manga 25+31

Release information: Publisher: BEEZ Release Date: August 22, 2005 Classification: PG

Notes: The clean opening animations are the 8 diffrent versions of the opening for the first 8 episodes. However the opening only differs slightly each time. The character profiles provide some good information for charcters who might not have been developed that much yet. The translation notes of words like "Inner" or "Native Alter" are a nice touch but all the terms are explained in the show anyway. The best extra is the audio manga, which take two chapters of the manga and are voiced by the japanese vocal cast (which are watchable with subtitles) and done in a kind of slide show or flash animation. The only problem with these is they may provide spoilers for the rest of the series, but they do provide spoliers for the manga.

-- Joseph (Joe) Wood 2nd Sep 05