August 10, 2011

Mystery Meat -- Fighting Beauty Wulong

If I were to summarize this in two words, it would be "low budget". The art is awful. For a fighting anime, the fights are really terrible, with almost no action. Character art drifts all over the place. The voice work is none too good, either.

Our heroine is Mao Ran. She's 17. She's shapely. She's beautiful -- though you'd never know it, from the way she's drawn. The episode opens with her being in a dark alley, in a rain storm, being attacked by five big punks, who she massacres. One of them at least she takes down with an energy blast.

This is all observed by one of her classmates in high school, who is a wimp that the gang had just beaten up. Next day he begs her to teach him the Mao style of fighting. He always refers to her as "Mao shishou" (e.g. Master Mao).

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Mao and her grandfather run a bathhouse. Mao's grandfather is a lush and a perv. Their main clientele is old men from the neighborhood, and one of the things he encourages them all to do is to watch Mao Ran when she's bathing.

Which, when she finds out, usually leads to violence by her against them.

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But he's also a top level master of the Mao style of open-hand fighting, which is reputed to be the best and most dangerous in the world. It isn't taught to anyone outside the family, and ordinarily is passed from father to son in the Mao lineage.

But something happened to his son, Mao Ran's father, and his wife, her mother. And she's their only child; there is no brother. So she has been trained in the style her whole life. Her grandfather assigns her "homework", which means she gets waylaid on the street all the time by people who attack her -- who she invariably wipes out.

She also seems to show up to take out gang bullies pretty commonly; it happens twice in the first episode alone.

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Anyway, she can't teach that guy; it's against the clan rules. But he keeps showing up at the bathhouse and begging her grandfather, and Grampa eventually hires him to work helping to clean the place when it's closed.

At one point Grampa is out getting drunk in a park, and a man in a suit shows up. He is taken (voluntarily) to see an old man named Xao, an old friend and a rival. The Xaou family also have a family style of fighting. Xao wants to fight Grampa one last time. But there's more to it.

Old man Xao has two granddaughters, and apparently no grandson. His elder granddaughter is named Xao Chunyan and she's a bully. She is viewed by her grandfather as disgracing the family name. The younger granddaughter thinks so, too, but she cannot defeat her older sister. Anyway, old man Xao begs Grampa to promise that Chunyan will be defeated.

And our girl Mao Ran is gonna be the one to do it, whether she likes it or not.

That's the story, as presented in ep 1. And I don't have the slightest urge to watch any more of it. It isn't just that the animation is terrible. The cast is almost entirely no-name. The seiyuu cast to do Mao Ran sounds almost exactly like Bulma in DBZ, though it's not the same seiyuu. It's not the voice of a high school girl; she's dreadfully miscast. The only other thing I've seen that she was in was Shingu, where she did the voice of Setsuna. She was really good in that, but it's not the same kind of part.

Based on the first episode, this is utter crap. Yet somehow or other, it ended up running 25 episodes, and was followed by a 25-ep sequel.

This is what I get for looking for Mystery Meat with the "ecchi" keyword on BakaBT. Not recommended.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Mystery Meat at 04:11 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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1 ...the art looks terrible.  If I had drawn a side view of a face that looked like the one in in the second image, I would have thrown the page out in disgust.  And I'm an untrained amateur, for crying out loud.

Thanks for throwing yourself on that grenade, soldier.

Posted by: atomic_fungus at August 10, 2011 05:53 PM (3jwPu)

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