This Week In Anime

My philosophy is to give a series three episodes before giving up on it, to avoid that "it gets going after episode 2!" regret.  For Asobi no Ikuyo, I have to pull back and give a run down after two for reasons you shall see.

A summary of Asobi ni Ikuyo sounds like something out of a How to Plot an Anime book - cat girl alien comes to Earth to move in with high school boy to learn about Earth.  Quickly, however, you get the feeling that the previews are trying to hide the true nature of the plot.  The first 4 minutes are from a completely different anime than what you were expecting (of course they tie that in later).  Then, we introduce a world where the arrival of a cat girl alien in a small town really doesn't seem to bother anyone.  And with a quick one/two punch, I am confused, bewildered and angered by a completely incomprehensible introduction.  The rest of episode one doesn't help that opinion.

This is pretty much what I was expecting

Let's list the ridiculous elements we are supposed to accept in the first 15 minutes:

• Boy, Kio, with absent parents, get adopted by a cat girl alien, Erisu, who moves in
• Overly possessive neighbor girl
• Little bit too concerned female teacher/club advisor
• Quite classmate with a secret crush on boy

Now see where they take these in the second half of the episode

• Neighbor girl is a surveillance otaku with ties to the CIA
• Teacher is the leader of a paramilitary secret society
• Quiet girl is a technologically enhanced assassin for hire

By the end of episode one, I'm so lost and confused I'm pretty much ready to pass this off as a 12 year old's fanfic.

In comes episode 2.  I was fully expecting the remainder of the series to be a run down of each of the harem members taking a shot at Erisu while Kyo convinces them one by one not to do evil stuff.  Instead, all three of them take a shot at Erisu at once, as the CIA sends the neighbor, Manami, to kidnap Erisu, Itokazu-sensei sends her alien defense buddies to take her out, and assassin for hire Futaba gets Erisu as a target.  And thus, in practice, all three of them first threaten, then regret, then assist Kio in one short 3 minute scene.  So much for the rest of the series.

THEIR SO FLUFFY I'M GONNA DIE!

Then, they take all that and pretty much throw it out the window, as Erisu reveals her alien bad-assery credentials by taking out not only her entire team of captives, but a battalion of tanks with squeaky hammers.  SQUEAKY HAMMERS!!!  We end with her ENTIRE RACE showing up to visit because Erisu told them the food was good, and a tiny teaser indicating that we will be seeing a race of dog people show up soon, and you know what happens when cats and dogs get together.  So while I thought we were going to get the combined efforts of the CIA, paramilitary alien otaku and hypertech assassins protecting Kio and Erisu from the forces of evil, we instead get a friendly alien invention who could eat any of those three groups for lunch. 

Apocalypse MEOW!

This show will go down either as one of the greatest parodies of anime tropes and stereotypes, or the biggest mess of a plot this season.  And that's a season that includes Amagami SS!

It's a new summer anime season, and new shows demand our attention.  In an attempt to try something new, why don't you que up that first episode of Amagami SS, the latest dating sim turned anime, and follow along as I share my thoughts real time below:

0:45 Is getting stood up a life changing event in Japan?

0:50 Oh god this is going to suck - not a soundtrack I'm going to be hunting down
1:52 First Kimikiss connection - isn't that same shot in that opening too?

2:58 "You're in the closet"  That puts an interesting twist on things

4:20 Sister character - yep, we're in an eroge

4:50 Remember, when meeting a long time friend in the first episode of an anime, be sure to call them by their full, formal name for no reason

5:42 I'm guessing this is our girl of the week introduction

6:05 and infodump COMPLETE!

7:10 one girl at a time please, I can't keep all these intros straight

9:25 was this animated by 8 year olds or are her eyes supposed to be pointed two different directions?

9:39 I think she snapped his neck…

10:11 all she did was compliment him, yet I conclude she's a stone cold harpy.  Maybe it's me…

10:48 I've lost count, how many girls were in this game again???

11:30 we now return to mundane conversation theater…

12:46 why am I not surprised

13:18 books about bitches for the…OK, not going for that joke just yet

14:06 even her best friend knows when she's being a stone cold playa

14:48 the feeling of being dumped?  This guy needs a hobby
15:14 are they playing Buck-Buck?!?

15:55 This is wrong on so many levels

16:22 I BET you did :)

16:40 I think her bitchdar just went off…

18:10 Baka Ni-Ni was my high school cover band

19:09 I'm going to chalk up the "carrying a handwarmer to school" to one of those charming cultural quirks that make Japanese people deathly afraid of gloves

19:47 I get the feeling nice guys finish last

20:26 Oh don't take the bait you moron

20:40 Seriously, it looks like she's about to go for his neck

20:55 Did she just trick him into confessing so she could shot him down?  I think at long last, I have no issues assigning BITCH to Haruka

22:00 and back in the closet!

Overall, that was pretty ho hum, and yet I want to watch more.  Mostly to see her taken down a peg.  A WHOLE PEG!

Let's get this out of the way - I am going to watch B Gata H Kei.  Just accept that I am a horrible person and move on. 

But something happened on the way to hell.  I watched a quicksub of BH to check it out, and much to my surprise, it was frickin hilarious.  The quality was scary, enough so that even I knew where the translation mistakes were, so I watched another version a few days later.  Oddly, it was not as funny.  And what do we do when odd stuff happens?  Blog about it!

The plot - Yamada is half airhead, half pervert.  Her goal is to have sex with 100 boys in high school.  But she's self-conscious about her first time, so she targets the most plain, and hopefully as inexperience as her, boy in school.  Yamada's pure lack of sense, logic or tact makes every action a bizarre train wreck.  And it's really funny. 

For the first episode, half the fun was the bad translation. In the following example, the first line made me lol.  The second is just creepy.

The second proves I have the same maturity level at Yamada, who underlined all the dirty words in her middle school dictionary.  The first one is just funnier.

But I don't think it's just the amusement of seeing naughty words in my anime.  In the following, I find the first one funnier again, and the second just crude.

In the end, the fact remains that for a horrid concept, this show is just funny and over the top.  And oddly enough, very little fanservice, allowing me to focus on the comedy.  I can't believe I'm going to predict this is going to be one of my favorite shows this spring.

Visual artists Key...chartacter designs of Kanon...guns...this will not end well.

Morning, Sunshine

Let's get one thing off the table.  There are so many plot and logic holes I could go nuts trying to document them all.  And it's very apparent they are only going to flesh out enough of the world to make any one particular episode make sense.  The only way I'm staying sane is to jump to the conculsion that everything the main characters think they know about this world is completly wrong and they are in something else entirely.  Now we're all in the dark, and I can get back to the show.

Sense, this show makes none

That being said, I'm going to assume most of you know the plot, a purgatory high school where the students are staging a heavily armed revolt against God and Angel, and concentrate on the astetics. Key's strength is always their character designs, which in the case of the two main characters, is both lower and greater than expected.  The first is Yuri (NotHaruhi), the leader of the rebels.

Red hair, not black, important

Let's face it, she's Haruhi.  From bow to attitude, kind of disappointing.  The other character is Angel.  She speaks softly and carrier a big, bullet deflecting knife.

Who knew bullets were binary?

She falls outside Key's normal by being TOO mysterious, quiet and overpowered.  Not that we have enough of her to make any judgements, but you can guess where they're going with her.  Of course, character development is going to be hard considering her reaction to any other character is to gut them like a fish.

But what about the show?  It's an odd combination of introspective visuals and comedy.  I found it odd that every memeber of the SSS Brigade is a joke stereotype character.  Then there is the fact that no one can die in the afterlife, leading to an oddly dark version of slapstick.  The protagonsist gets killed 102 times in the first episode alone.  But then you throw in amnesia, and you're back to a serious, mysterious tone.  And to be honest, it switches tones on a dime, which is jarring at times.

This may be episode 1-idice, and it will take a few for this show to find its legs.  In the mean time, I expect there to be an entire episode just explaining the laundry system in this world.

One with extra strength stain remover

And unlike a truck, those tubes can be filled!  And when they're filled...stuff gets real.

Easily the coolest thing you will see this year

Mikado has been holding back - all this time, he was the founder of the Dollars, which evolved from an online chat group into an urban legend.  That's pretty much the big reveal for the episode, as Mikado uses the Dollars to thwart the attempts of Namie to capture him and Selty's head.  At the same time, Selty finally meets her head, which triggers some kind of angry response, and we get to see the greatest feat of bikemanship since Evel Kineval failed to jump the Grand Canyon.

I also can't forgive them for ending on a friggin cliffhanger, but that's par for an 11th episode.  Not much to comment on, except to say it will be a race to the end to see who survives and who comes out the end changed forever.  And I have to rag on someone for the following:

Of all the cameos in all the animes in all the world, they had to walk into this one