10 February 2005: Jinki:Extend
Jinki:Extend keeps getting better and better, mostly due to the fact that Aoba, its 13-year-old mecha-pilot lead character, is boundlessly charismatic. Voiced by the ever-talented Fumiko Orikasa, Aoba is a fairly standard character from the teenage-mecha-pilot-with-a-shitty-life idiom, but is done so uncommonly well that she easily (and quite obviously) carries the rest of the show.
Genta, Aoba, and Ryohei
This is good, because the male lead in Jinki:Extend is quite the jackass, and a sandals-and-parachute-pants-wearing doofus to boot, who really needs to be punched in the mouth each time he says "Ahobaka."
I'm also hoping for good things in the coming episodes. From the manga, it seems Jinki:Extend is not quite what it appears, and should take the plot in all sorts of twisted directions. There are some hints of that already; the story jumps from the 1988 Venezuela arc to the 1991 Japan arc regularly with few clues to fill in the missing years.
