I finished watching the One Outs anime series today. I’m neither a sports fan nor a sports anime fan, yet One Outs really won me over.

One Outs is a sports genre anime about a pitcher named Tokuchi Toua. He was found and recruited to the Saikyou Saitama Lycaons by Japanese batting legend Kojima Hiromichi and is not your standard pitcher. Discovered during a game of One Outs, a betting game that pits a pitcher against a batter in a battle of wits, Tokuchi mixes his gambling proficiency, his ability to intimidate and read other players, and his strategic expertise to bring the Lycaons out of their long slump.

My personal interest in this show is how Tokuchi is extremely-creative in how he manipulates everything and everyone to his advantage. This starts when he gets his team’s owner to agree to a contract where Tokuchi is paid 5 million Yen for every player he gets out while he pays a penalty of 50 million Yen for every player that he allows to gain a run. The owner believes that the contract will result in Tokuchi paying him millions of Yen each game, but he is quickly frustrated when Tokuchi sends him a bill of 110 million Yen after the first game he pitches in.

There are currently 25 episodes, which is just half of the story at best. From the series’ Wiki page, I found One Outs was originally a manga running in Business Jump from 1998 through 2006, so there should be plenty of material for many seasons of the show. However, at this time, I have yet to find any confirmation of additional seasons. I’d really like to see them run this series at least one additional season as the story really deserves it.

The music is really bland in this series. Also, the animation isn’t anything special. Neither of these are reasons to watch the show. This show is all about the characters and story, both of which are top-notch.

While I don’t think that this show is for everyone, if you are an anime fan that likes stories involving strategy and tactics, then I highly recommend One Outs.

I’ve always been a big fan of AMVs. Years ago, I would find and archive my favorites and then show them to my buddies when we’d hang out at IHOP. It was always a great way to start conversations about music and anime. Over the years, my focus on AMVs has waned. Fortunately, that has now changed.

Lately, we’ve been having groups of friends over to the house frequently, and queuing up some AMV Hell on the HTPC is a great way to keep everyone entertained and talking. This has broken my fast and got me back into digging around for some great AMVs, and great AMVs are what I found. I had never Nostromo is my new-found favorite AMV creator. Checking out his deviantART page, I found that he’s from Paris, has a pretty sweet computer setup, creates some cool images, and is a fellow fan of The Big Bang Theory. Also, considering how he is younger than me by a few years and has created some awesome AMVs, I am incredibly jealous (even though I have no knack for creating AMVs and probably never will create one myself).

Nostromo, to you I tip my hat. You have some amazing work that not only has me hooked on AMVs again, but you also have me purchasing music because I enjoy your music selections so much. Thanks for introducing me to Watch Them Fall Down by DJ Spoke and Lifelight by Andy Hunter.

I’d have to say that two of his AMVs stick out as definite favorites of mine. I’ve included vids of them here so you can check them out.

Galaxy Bounce by Nostromo

Auriga by Nostromo

The Youtube vids don’t do adequate justice to the quality in his vids nor to the audio (even though I embedded the high-quality versions). You can find the full-quality versions of the videos on Anime Music Videos.org at the following links: Auriga and Galaxy Bounce.

If you haven’t been bitten by the AMV bug yet, what are you waiting for? Browse around the Anime Music Videos.org site.  You can search by song and by anime so you can find something that you are sure to enjoy quickly. After digging around for a while, start looking at random videos, you never know when you will find something that makes you want to watch an anime that you’ve never seen before or when you’ll discover an artist that you’ver never heard before.

Another great way to jump into AMVs is to watch the AMV Hell videos. Make sure you pay attention to the warnings as some of them have explicit content. AMV Hell 2 and 3 are definitely my favorites. They are huge movie-length videos that are composed of dozens of songs.

In closing, I leave with a short AMV that I enjoy that features scenes from Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. The video is called Project Xanthium by Niotex and features You’ll be Under My Wheels by Prodigy