Soul Eater DVD Boxset

Part 1 of 4

What do you do when you are behind the times? Well you watch one anime at a time and hope that someday you catch up to what the rest of your friends are talking about. It seems that the Soul Eater anime is still making waves albeit misleading IMO... Fresh character designs, recycled stories from various other shows, make the Soul Eater anime a great mash-up of familiar stories while not ever giving a direct nod to any one particular show. This is a point I'm not clear how I feel about... Perhaps I feel the Soul Eater anime was trying to make an original splash that could never be?!? Taking this point seriously requires more originality IMO.

On the positive side, there was not one single character that I did not like or think wasn't written or designed well. And that is saying something huge. Even my favorite animes have one or two characters I could easily do without. And I think that is the strongest point the Soul Eater anime brings to the table.

If you can afford the steep price tag to buy the 4 current boxes then hey, go for it. It seems however, that FUNimation has been doing a couple of different things with their anime releases... make a batch and make some money... Make another batch, repackaged and recover some costs... Then squeeze every last drop of milk out of an old cash-cow that they can. In the latter case, you can walk away with a pretty nice discount on an entire series... the only down-side is that there is no guarantee that discounted release a couple years from now will always happen...

Back to Soul Eater now... I would rent it first and if you think it is epic, don't wait for the discounted Soul Eater DVD boxset as I don't see this being a classic. Sure it's been hyped plenty, and I am not an expert on forecasting anime popularity... But if it does get a re-release it will probably be due to the hype only as I'm sure the love will cool off.

Wrap-up: Soul Eater is over-hyped, but still worth watching. The Soul Eater anime failed to inspire me or make me want to add it to the rotation of  "watch-again-stuff". You decide... the preview is actually terrible, but at least you can get an idea of the character designs that I really enjoyed: