I'm going to come out of hiatus for a bit. If you've been watching the comments, I've updated the top rotation with grabs from five series, and I thought I'd write about those five. Spoilers below the fold.

UPDATE: Pete doesn't like my characterization of Locodol.

Jinsei is about a guy on the school newspaper. There are three girls who run an advice column, and each of them writes an answer to each question they receive. The guy has been assigned to decide which of those answers to publish. The actual conceit is that the four of them end up experimenting with the actual thing the question is about, and most of the show is about them doing those thing. It isn't very serious and basically is a fan service comedy with a not-really-quite-harem, because there aren't really any romantic sparks. There is a fair amount of fanservice, however, if for no other reason because of this girl:

Momo Kyun Sword isn't in any way serious. I would even go so far as to say that it's farce, except that the main point of it is fan service. (Actually, all five of these shows are fan service at least in part, because I didn't bother with any that weren't since there wouldn't be anything worth grabbing for the top rotation.) Momo hatched out of a giant peach that was floating down a river, and pulled to shore by an old woman. When she and her husband opened it, out came a little girl. So they raised her. Somehow or other she ended up being accompanied by a wolf god, a monkey god, and a pheasant god. The pheasant god is female and has to ability to take human form if she chooses. Momo can combine with each of them to form one or another super saiyajin forms, but if she doesn't maintain her concentration the fusion breaks explosively, usually shredding Momo's clothing.

A magical peach has been broken into pieces which are scattered around Japan, and some demons have decided to try to collect all the pieces. Some Goddess or other became aware of this and send the Maiden Sentai Team to Momo to recruit her for a mission to collect the pieces before the demons can get to them. There isn't anything subtle or particularly engaging about any of this because the director isn't taking any of it particularly seriously. For instance, in one episode the Maidens become idols. In another the good guys and the demons all end up on the same beach at the same time, and declare a truce so they can party together, wearing amazingly modern and fashionable bikinis. Then a giant squid shows up, and you can imagine how it goes from there.

Locodol was a complete waste of time. Not for me; I got 56 grabs out of it. But I can't imagine anyone watching it and wanting to finish it. "Locodol" is short for "Local Idol" and the idea is that there's kind of a farming system for idols, where individual towns have locodols, and the good ones get to move up to the big time as they establish themselves, or something kind of like that. Our two main characters are a real prospect and a no-hoper. The no-hoper is the niece of the man in this town who is responsible for it all, and in the first episode he comes to her home and recruits her. Actually, the most interesting girl is the third one, who spends most of her time inside a big blue costume carrying a trident.

I can't imagine where they're taking the series, and frankly I don't care.

Rokujouma no Shinryakusha is the 8-bladed razor of accidental-harem shows. Our hero is attending high school away from his family, and because they aren't rich he wants as cheap of housing as he can get. He finds a room for just 5,000 yen (about $50) a month which is perfect. Except that the room is a major league weirdness magnet.

The weirdness begins before that, however. He's also working a part time job, helping to do archeological excavation. While there, he is walking from one dig to another and has the ground fail under him and falls a long way. At the bottom he finds some sort of shrine, with a statue of some girl in the middle, and though she isn't moving he hears her speaking to him. Or did he? Was it a hallucination caused by him hitting his head during the fall?

At the school, his friend from middle school expects him to go to the baseball team, but instead he joins the knitting club. He says there's something he needs to do, and in order to do it he needs to learn to knit. Oddly enough, the head of the knitting club (and only other member) reminds him of the statue. If there's any romantic interest in the show, she's it. And she keeps popping up unexpectedly and dispensing words of wisdom to him, so there may be more to her than meets the eye.

And now to the room. Let's run down the list: a ghost, a miko, a space princess (and her aide), and a magical girl. I think that's everyone. They're all good looking and they're all about his age. Of course. But they're all nuts.

Initially the ghost wants to drive him out of the room. She's the reason the room is cheap. She is surprised when it turns out he can see her and touch her, and eventually she finds herself liking him.

The Miko enters the story from below. There was a group of people a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago, or something like that, who moved underground and have been living there ever since. She's one of them, and there's a stairway from their underground empire right into the room. It was the location of a major shrine of theirs, and she wants to reestablish the shrine. If she does, her people can use the energy from it to begin to reconquer the surface. I might also mention that she's got the biggest boobs in the show. She also has two magical companions who look like fat dildos.

The space princess has been assigned a quest to prove that she's worthy to become queen. She has to come to this backwater planet to this particular room, no idea why, and get the occupant to swear fealty to her.

She's blonde and thin and flat-chested, so naturally she's tsundere. Only when she gets tsuntsun she starts calling down laser fire from her spaceship, which is holding in orbit. (She also wears kuma panties.) Her aide is more mature and tends to hold her back when she gets a bit too vindictive.

The magical girl is the real tragic case, and she's a bit annoying. She was drafted; there was an attack and she got caught in it, and a magical girl saved her but got badly hurt, so the force behind her forced this girl to take her place. She genuinely can do magic, too, but no on believes her; they all refer to her as a cosplayer. She doesn't have any money, either; apparently magical girls don't get any salary. The reason she's there is that there's a huge concentration of latent magic in the room, and she's there to make sure that evil magical girls don't find it and use it. She ends up sleeping in the closet.

As a joke she's something of a one-trick pony and I really wish she'd prove to everyone else that she's really magical so they'd stop being cruel to her.

So anyway, initially the ghost and the miko both want him out; the pricess and her aide want him there but want him to swear fealty to the princess, and the magical girl doesn't care what he does but needs to stay there herself.

Oh, and there's also a landlady, who is the same age as our hero and attends the same school. In fact, eventually they all do. (The ghost starts hanging around Our Hero even when he's away from the room.) The landlady finds out all about everyone in the second episode, and ends up hanging out with the crowd.

The last two episodes were two parts of a story which was intended to show them all beginning to bond. Some bastards are in the business of capturing ghosts and selling them, and they capture our ghost. The rest of the group comes together to find her and save her, including a big supernatural fight. (The magical girl contributes a lot to the victory, but she got separated from the others, and they don't know what she did and don't give her credit.)

Afterwards, the ghost is a lot more deredere.

I cant say this is high art, but the story looks like it might have potential. Some of the characters are intriguing and the art is nice, and Our Hero can be a bit of a jerk but deep down he's a pretty good guy.

Which brings us to NouCome. This is certainly one of the strangest concepts for a show I think I've ever run into. Our Hero's life has become a dating game run by a sadistic god. Every once in a while, he sees a popup menu with anything from two to four choices on it, and he has to pick one. If he doesn't, he gets a splitting headache and it keeps getting worse until he gives in. In the first episode he refuses to do so and eventually gets to the point where he crawls back to where one of his choices was, and picks it.

This happens with no rhyme or reason, and often there isn't any good choice. For instance, one time he had to choose between completely stripping the top of his body, or completely stripping the bottom. This was in his home room, full of other students.

Also, occasionally he receives a text message on his phone (from God) giving him a mission and a deadline. They are sometime perverted, and often more than a bit strange.

If he ever fails to achieve a mission, he's been told, then he will be stuck with this curse forever. Only by completing every mission he's given (exactly how many TBD) can he eventually be free of it.

Now setting this up would require adroit scripting, let alone bringing it to a satisfying close, so they don't bother. He's already cursed when the show begins, and he doesn't become free of it at the end. But he's not totally alone. First, his home room teacher went through the same curse and became free of it, and knows what he's going through. She can't offer him much in the way of advice (or she gets splitting headaches again). And as a result of an early choice he makes, God sends him a helper who lives with him.

Her name is Chocolate and she acts as much like a dog as like a girl sometimes. Plus God calls him on the phone occasionally to offer him advice or to explain things to him. Strangely enough, God seems like an appointive position; the current one is replacing a previous one who was a woman who got pregnant, and God himself has a manual but still doesn't know everything that's going on.

God isn't the one giving Our Hero the choices or the missions. He doesn't know where they're coming from, either.

Basically, they're relying on the Rule of Funny to justify everything. And mostly that works. The situations are varied enough, and the girls are varied enough, so that it doesn't get repetitive. It's ecchi but not so much so as to wallow in it (see e.g. High School DxD) and Our Hero isn't a perv but is often forced into perverted situations by the missions and choices he's given.

It isn't terrible but I sure as heck don't recommend it. However, I did manage to come up with 89 grabs from it.

So that's what I went through to find 315 more images up top.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 08:12 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
Post contains 2069 words, total size 12 kb.