Tsubasa Chronicles (Season One)

Information of Anime

Syaoran & Princess Sakura are very close friends.  In fact Sakura may have a thing for him.  During an night incident in the old ruins, a mysterious force tries to kidnap Sakura as she magically creates wings on her back.  Syaoran saving her, the wings broke apart into feathers & disappear into the air.  It turns out that each feather contains a fragment of her memories & she needs them or else she will die.  In order to save her, he gets help from a time-witch named Yuuko.  When he mets her, he also meets Fai & Kurogane who each come from different worlds. In order to continue travelling to different worlds, each of them must surrender a precious part of their life.  Fai give up his magic tattoos, Kurogane gives up his sword, & Syaoran gives up his relationship with Sakura.  Together, the trio travel to different worlds to retrieve Sakura's feathers.

Storyline (CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Below is a summary of the storyline I've seen.  This section does contain some spoilers.  If you haven't seen the series yet & don't want to be spoiled, skip this section.  If you want to know the story & want to see how I viewed it, read on.

The story is mainly Syaoran, Sakura, Fai, & Kurogane travelling to different worlds to obtain Sakura's feather.  Each time Sakura obtains a feather, she gets her memories back but without Syaoran in her memories.  Each world is different from others & contains almost all the characters of CLAMP's past works.  Worlds include ancient Japan, modern cities, amusement park worlds, etc.  While travelling to different words, someone is watching their every move.

Fei Wong Reed watches the groups every move in obtaining the feathers.  He's the one that tried to kidnap Sakura because of her strong powers.  He's using this power to resurrect someone.  The story ends with Syaoran & company go to another world & Fei saying that the person being resurrected with return soon.  This is the end of season one.

My Personal Review

I've heard that Tsubasa Chronicles isn't as good as the manga & is quite disappointing.  I haven't read the manga, but the show was ok.  Although I won't highly recommend watching this, but it's a nice show to enjoy.

Animation

The character designs are have that Bee Train face look.  However, the body proportions are CLAMP's style with the long arms & legs.

The colours are flat.  Not dull & not bright.  It was balanced quite well.  It made the characters stand out from the background very well.

The animation flow is smooth.  Not really natural, since the characters run with large heaps.  The battles was quite entertaining to watch with the high leaps.

Sound       

The sound effects weren't bad.  Some of them sound dull though, since as the sword fights.  The clashing of swords did sound real, but it felt kind of short.  But for the majority of the show, the sounds were pretty clean without fuzzes. 

The seiyuus are pretty average.  Most of them talked very quietly, probably to make their characters look gentle.  Some of them did annoyed me at times, but I managed to get use to them over time.

The music was good.  The background music blended well to give off the mood of the scenes occurring in the show with it fast new folk songs.

Story

It's mainly dimension travelling to get Sakura's feathers back.  There is a lot of flashbacks when Sakura or Syaoran are thinking about their past together.  It's quite interesting to see the different worlds with a lot of CLAMP's other characters from other series they made.

The characters are pretty good.  In fact, some of them are almost too perfect.  Syaoran seemed too perfect to me.  It's like he's a kick-ass kind of guy.  Too strong with little weaknesses.  He's the kind of guy that viewers want to see that doesn't take any pounding & can't lose.  This is probably an important factor to the 2nd season. 

Overall Conclusion

Tsubasa Chronicle isn't a bad series really.  Season two air on Spring 2006 since the story was not completed at the time.  If it ended it that way, I would be disappointed.

Tsubasa Chronicle season one gets an eight out of ten.  The storyline isn't too bad, but the pace is kind of slow which lead me to think the show will get rushed in the end..  Thankfully, there is a second season coming to continue the story.  The travelling of different worlds can get boring after awhile, but it manages to make up for it with different themes for each worlds with CLAMP's characters from different series.