Ghost Hunt Season 1 Part 1 Review

            In this supernatural series, the main heroine is a high school girl named Mai Tanayama and her introduction into the cast comes when the first case of the series is an investigation at her school. Manager of Shibuya Psychic Research, seventeen year old Kazuya Shibuya, has been called in to investigate mysterious happenings at the abandoned school house near Mai’s school. After accidently injuring his partner, Mai is recruited to fill in as an assistant to Kazuya (or Naru as he comes to be known as).

            Also being called in to help with this case is an adult shrine priestess named Ayako, a monk named Takigawa, a famous television psychic Masako and a Catholic priest from Australia (who learned how to speak Japanese with a Kansai accent) named John Brown. And just a side not here but how generic of a name is that? Moving on…

            From here Mai will join SPR on a regular basis working as an assistant while everyone else will be called in to help with cases as well. Five more cases will be covered in this first set:  the team visits a haunted house scaring two sisters and a young girl, a high school seeming to be cursed after a girl with psychic powers is mocked and ostracized by students and faculty alike, a one episode case taking the team out to a haunted park before wrapping things up with the team being presented a case on Christmas Eve.

Good and the Bad

            Instead of telling one grand overall story, the series breaks up its stories into smaller segments. Every case on this set only takes up three to four episodes max and the last two cases only take up one and two episodes respectively. This keeps the series moving at an incredibly strong pace. With the actual stories themselves tending to be a bit slower in pace, telling multiple short stories instead of one long one goes a long way towards combating this.

The writing is another strong draw for this series. In particular the characters is where one of the stories where the writing gets to be properly highlighted. Character interaction and interplay really works well throughout the entire set. In particular the way that the characters were unleashed early and allowed to spend the first case being snarky and hitting each other with biting sarcasm really made things feel real right away.

The first three stories on this set are very dark in their nature and tone. Always suspenseful but never scary, Ghost Hunt takes their audience along twisted paths to get to their conclusions. What grows tiring about these stories however is that by the time you get to end of the third case it becomes pretty obvious who the culprits are.

            Once again though, Ghost Hunt has this problem fixed before most people have even noticed it by completely changing the format of the series during episode eleven. Breaking up the long trend of serious cases, the set ends with three episodes that show the audience that these characters are actually capable of being funny. The one episode story arc in episode eleven really drives this point home telling a story that is always funny if not sometimes a little silly.  

            Originally animated by J.C. Staff in 2006, the character designs all look very well done despite some simplicity to their designs. The backgrounds and effects are also very well done and integrated within the series. The effects always look like they are perfectly layered with the characters and look smooth throughout. 

Music

            Both the opening and ending themes are instrumental themes that are intended to create a mysterious element. Instead the opening theme and music made me feel like I was about to watch an episode of ‘Unsolved Mysteries’. The short theme attached to every episode preview is meant to create a sense of suspense and make the audience anxious to see more. I thought it reeked of cliché and found myself skipping it as quickly as possible every time it came on my screen.

            Most of the background music remained very low key and rarely stuck out as anything particularly special. The string music that closes out the second case was the first theme to really stand out as something special and the fact that it took over five episodes to hear something from the soundtrack that I actively enjoyed is a sad observation. Episode thirteen goes a long way towards earning forgiveness though with an absolutely beautiful harp theme to close out the set.

Dub vs. Sub

            It would be exceedingly difficult to talk about the dub cast for this series without mentioning Todd Haberkorn in the role of Naru. Since the beginning of this year, audiences have heard Haberkorn do a wide range of characters from the over the top Watanuki in xxxHolic to the more sarcastic Ichimokuren in Hell Girl. This is the first role that I can recall where Todd plays a role that is so quiet and always subdued. The change is a welcome addition to his resume though as he manages to capture the quiet and serious role wonderfully.

            In either cast, the only real hiccup that audiences are going to sit through is Jason Liebrecht as John Brown. All throughout these thirteen episodes, two things will be very clear about his performance: he is trying very hard to make his Australian accent to sound convincing and he isn’t doing a great job at it. The accent isn’t a terrible one as you can always tell which one he is trying to accomplish but the accent just never sounded natural at all.

Extras

            Besides the clean opening animation, there are only a couple of extras included with the set. On disc two, audiences will find some sample pages from the manga (courtesy of Del Ray Manga) to start with. Fans of the manga shouldn’t get too excited about this extra however as with other releases that have tried this extra, audiences are going to find that the images will look passable but the text is unreadable. The second extra is a list of character profiles but once again, nothing to get excited about as each “profile” is one to two sentences long. Finally there is a 45 second feature called ‘ghost sightings’ which are still images from the series showing frames of ghosts appearing in the episodes.          

Overall

            I walked into this series with no expectations and was impressed from beginning to end as a result. While the series manages to slip a few times Ghost Hunt still manages to tell strong stories using a solid formula and biting dialogue. While I had never heard of this series before I received the set, I will certainly do my part to rectify that with other people I meet seeking an above average supernatural series. This is a set worth picking up.