Ugh... seems like I'm plagued by some so-so Anime lately.

First up is Ruin Explorers, which is a 4 part series-show-movie about 2 gals who are basically treasure hunters. Along the way they meet up with 4 other folks and have a showdown against a big bad wizard for the "ultimate power". Unfortunately, the characters are flat and you never really feel like cheering/jeering for any of them. I'd have to call this anime-light because it lacks any depth, complexity, or character.

Secondly, I'm taking my 2nd pass through the Evangelion series, including the 2 DVDs - Death and Rebirth and End of Evangelion. Now, the Evangelion series is a great show up until episode 20ish, as tension builds between NERV and Seele over Gendo's plans for the future. But, suddenly in episode 25-26 things go strange and the writers get lost. It's one of the series endings that you sit there and wish you hadn't bothered to watch the last 2 episodes and just left it all to your imagination.

So, they came up with Death and Rebirth, which is a ~65 minute re-cap of the series (with 10-15 min of new animation) done in a flashback / slide-show format (which is on the whole, rather boring) and then a 30 minute episode where Seele invades NERV and it ends with the 9 mass-produced EVAs circling Asuka in EVA-02. Sadly, the 30 minutes are not well spent, and while we see lots of action, it's no where near the quality/drama of the early EVA episodes.

End of Evangelion begins with the same 30 minute episode that was at the end of Death and Rebirth and then leads into the rest of Armegeddon. Now, the second 60 minutes of EoE wasn't actually that bad... however, that may have been because I was watching it while listening to the audio commentary instead. So, while visually more satisfying then the original end to the Evangelion series, it's still a bit of "am I watching Evangelion or am I watching Akira?".