My Rating: 3.5/5 Stars
IMDB Rating: 7.5/10
Genre: Action, Comedy, Fantasy, Romance
English Title: Stigma of the Wind
Content Rating: TV-14 (Violence, Language, Fan-Service)
The thing I am most upset about with this show is that it isn’t continuing.
It just barely scratched the surface of possibility for Kazuma and Ayano’s relationship (not to mention plenty of other story lines). I was waiting and waiting and waiting and while the last scene between the two was sweet, it was almost too little too late. That was extremely disappointing, as I went into the show assuming there would be a slightly bigger emphasis on their romance. Their relationship was certainly entertaining to watch, but after a while, for the romantic in me, it just got frustrating.
Ayano got kind of annoying. She was supposed to be the awesome heir to this super powerful family of magic users, but she could barely take anyone out. She had a very short temper, and jumped to all sorts of conclusions about EVERYTHING. Eventually she had some pretty cool moments, but Kazuma was always having to rescue her. Her character development was good though, and she grew quite a bit throughout the series.
Now, Kazuma was a pretty awesome. He had some good character struggles. Granted, he was an idiot and a jerk for half the time, but eventually you could tell he really did care about Ayano and his younger brother Ren. He had a ridiculous amount of power, so it was fun to see him beat his enemies with ease.
The action was pretty cool in this series. All the main characters are magic users, and you encounter someone from each of the elements, so Kazuma is a wind user, Ayano and Ren are fire users, etc. There was certainly plenty of action. Huge portions of each episode cover some sort of battle, if not multiple battles. At some point in the second half of the series, one of the main characters goes all evil, and it was easily my favorite storyline, seeing how everyone reacted and how they dealt with it. It caused LOTS of problems, and was the best conflict of the series.
At the start of Kaze no Stigma, there was little to no fan-service. And then it started popping up randomly until it was a fairly frequent thing. It wasn’t anything too terrible, but there are some hilariously ridiculous over-exaggerated anime boob shots, so just a warning. Not to mention panty shots. Especially from Ayano, since they weren’t getting any boob shots out of her in that uniform she wears. Fan-service is so unnecessary in shows like this, where it starts out WITHOUT it and then the artists are like, you know what this show needs? More boobs.
FALSE. It was just fine without them. I know, it’s part of the genre. Whatever.
There was some hilarious stuff with Ayano’s father continually setting Ayano and Kazuma up to go on dates. But he always told them they were missions. It was quite hilarious. So there are definitely comedic story lines among the action.
So all in all, a fun, interesting anime. Not my favorite, and frustrating since the author won’t be continuing (he passed away). Perhaps someone else will pick it up?