Sequel Tuesday: More Shows I’d Like Mined

I was playing GameDevStory recently, and sequels? They’re grand.

With Gonzo’s revival and plans for more Last Exile, that got me thinking–what golden age early 2000/late 1990s show would I like? And LOL did I just call it golden age? It’s when anime was just making its strides over in America, so I have a particular attachment to that era. I don’t know if I can say the same about the shows from that era: they weren’t really that good. Maybe I could say the same about shows from any era, as long as the number of shows from then is greater than a statistically significant number. Anyways, here are some things I’d like to see–

More Vampire Hunter D. The original Vampire Hunter D novels are pretty much pulp hack-and-slash fics that kind of gimps on that visual kei imagery so stereotypically associated with those musical artists. Of course D is not about music, but about a badass half-vampire person killing things. And sometimes about his badass (usually) non-human acquaintances that often end up dead. I thought the original movie and the subsequent remake did pretty okay to convey a degree of grit, but they could do better on the glam and glitz. Even worse, the action was just not very, well, hack-and-slash. Don’t get me wrong, they had those things in it, but they were not so much a core part of the viewing experience beyond being token genre identifiers. I mean, we watch D  anime because it has cool action scenes. So a D anime with a lot of said cool action scenes would be the ideal way to go.

Witch Hunter Robin. Shoukou Murase bombed his Ergo Proxy bid, and not entirely because it sucked. It just lacked that something which Robin had a lot of. What is it, I don’t know, but I can tell you that Robin is still a character that charms me so many years after her last appearance. Like Last Exile, it is also ripe for a spinoff. It has a fairly open and easy-to-work-with setting. It has a very solid art direction and aesthetics, so a sequel would do well to follow suit. The story may be what’s weak about Robin, but it wasn’t its weakest point. Still it followed a rather straightforward template and people would enjoy even watching the same story unfold, just better executed the second time around, if it happens. Now it is actually besides the point if Robin or any of the original cast makes a return, but cameos would be more than welcomed.

I would totally say Trigun, but having seen Badland Rumble I think it puts that thought out of mind.

Like D, I think the world can use more Full Metal Panic. The problem is I’m not sure how much more we can pull out of that franchise. And I mean it in a spinoff-neutral sense. I wouldn’t really mind another TSR or Fumoffu equally, even if one is much better than the other and I do like Fumoffu much more than any other part of the series. In fact, I can barely stand anything else about the series, having tried them. Hopefully another spinoff anime would salvage the series in some degree for me.

While nothing can quite touch the original Boogiepop Phantom, it is a much more preferrable thing to see sequels of than, say, Serial Experiments Lain. Boogiepop just has the added attribute of a light novel series that has been milked dryer than the Gobi Desert. I think there’s a lot of treadmill crap in that series, especially when compared to the high bar the first book has set, but at the same time there are some stuff worth animating.

These are just a handful. I can continue, especially if I creep up on the time line and hit mid 2000s shows… What are some of yours?