Witch Hunt!

Hopefully everyone's winter break went well and year got off to a good start. Hopefully, I can find my groove after by first semester of school so I can make regular blog posts again. (School starts on the 9th!)
Well, back to your regular programming and a promised post (from 2 posts back), an anime related post.

A "childhood" anime for me

    For all the local readers, you might have heard of YTV (a Canadian youth entertainment TV channel) that used to (and still does to some extent) broadcast many cartoons, teen targeted comedy shows and at one point, anime. Let's go back to late 2002, which is when Witch Hunter Robin ran (for 26 episodes). Well back then, YTV used to have a late night anime focused programming which included: Zatch Bell, GIST: SAC, Reboot, Samurai Jack, Witch Hunter Robin and much more. I remembered that I had to stay up to the wee hours of the night (well, it was late for me back then) just to catch a glimpse of these shows. I was much more young back then and I don't think I understood anything that was going on when I was watching Witch Hunter Robin but what I do remember was that YTV was notorious for airing older episodes. Sometimes, they would do reruns, and other times, out of no where, they just air a random episode which made it near impossible for me to follow any series. Before actually being able to watch it, this "Witch Hunter Robin" show always remained a mystery to me, almost like a show characterized by "the one that got away".
     Well, let's skip to 2011/2012 where I finally watched the series. The first thing I noticed was the unique character design and the art style of the show. The style truly held up, and aged very well. Now veering off topic a bit, I am not the biggest fan of episodic/"monster of the week" shows. I might complete a series that runs like this, but it is very unlikely that I would watch a sequel that would follow this format. But Witch Hunter Robin did follow a "monster of the week" format, but strangely enough, I wasn't bothered at all by it. The show had a nice flow to  it (almost like a CSI style, where every episodes they work on a new case and there are small segments where we get to see relationships and drama between the main characters develop).
     Well, Witch Hunter Robin initially revolves around Robin, a "craft-user" (who is a person that can utilize special powers) who is sent to STN-J the Japanese child branch organization of SOLOMAN. We don't learn much about either of the organizations except that STN-J focuses on monitoring "seeds" (which are people that have dormant witch/craft powers) and on hunting witches that actively utilize their powers. Note that the existance of witches is kept from the general public, thus the operations of STN-J appear unknown/mysterious to the general population.
    The hunters that work for STN-J mainly include: Robin Sena, Amon, Haruto Sakaki, Michael Lee, Miho Karasuma and Yurkio Dojima. I won't really discuss about each character as they're pretty much cut and paste characters (at least for the first half of the series). As mentioned before, the series takes on a case each episodes, for about the first half of the series. We get little character development until after the first half where we find out the motives of each character and of the organizations (which I will not spoil).
     All in all, this show felt very satisfying, even if I didn't have the urge to dig this series up just to see what it was about. The art style, and surprising plot (although other may disagree) really made it for me.

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If you watched Witch Hunter Robin, what was your opinion of it? Any childhood shows you'd like to revisit today? How was your New Years? Let me know in the comments below!