Ubu Roi laments the lousy quality of the anime he's been watching from the fall season. Seems that the most interesting series are Moyashimon, which is about bacteria, and Goshuushou-sama Ninomiya-kun, which seems to be a fan-service vehicle under which the director is actually trying to tell a real story.

The comments thread is interesting; we've been talking about the quality of the story which might appear, using other series as standards.

The top rank, the ideal to which we all yearn, is Divergence Eve/Misaki Chronicles. That's a fan service show which has a story which is so good that nearly everyone who sees the series (the whole series) wishes there had been much less fan service, because it detracted from the story.

Next rank down would be Hand Maid May. It's a good story (though the logic doesn't survive the first step in the direction of the refrigerator, let along the entire trip) full of extremely fun and engaging characters, and most of the fan service serves the plot.

Below that we have Hanaukyo Maid Team La Verite. There's a good story, about decent characters, but it's not top bracket and the fan service is largely gratuitous and unnecessary to the story.

Next step down on our scale, we have Najica Blitz Tactics. The fan service is the point of the show, and there is so much of it, on screen so incessantly, that watching the show is really a surreal experience. That said, there is genuinely a good story being told in it, with a rather surprising ending.

Then there's Popotan. It's largely stuck with a certain role, and certain character designs, because it's "adapted" from an erogame in which the object for the player is to seduce everything on two legs that's female. If you get 'em all, including the two who are in grade school, you win. The anime pretty much amputated the original story and built an entirely new one using most of the original characters, but omitted the one which was the player avatar. And though there's no seduction going on, there is a non-trivial lolicon factor to the graphics, enough so that I don't recommend the series.

Which is a shame, because the new story they came up with is surprisingly good. If only they had resisted the urge to incororporate all the explicit lolicon pandering, it could have rated up just below HMM on this scale. As it is, it's another example like DE/MC of a story seriously marred by excessive and gratuitous fan service.

We're starting to get down into the real dregs here, where we can start pointing to things like "Girls Bravo" and "Eiken" but if we're comparing to those kinds of examples then it means the show is a real trainwreck.

Ubu Roi says that he has no hope that GSNK will rank up with DE/MC, but thinks that if we're all lucky it might reach the level of HMTLV. If so, it'll be worth getting once it comes out in R1. In fact, it might be even if it only rises to the level of NBT.

UDATE: I just noticed a screencap from Grenadier in the top rotation and realized that I should have included it in the scale. The story is genial but not really hugely engaging, the fan service is nearly constant, and it rates below HMTLV but above NBT.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 02:44 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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