Someone finally posted a fansub of the first episode. The MKV they posted was damaged and wouldn't play, but they also posted a hard-subbed AVI. It's low res, but I was watching it this time mainly for the voices and dialogue.

Between when I looked at the raw and now, I found out that this series is based on an H-game, which fills me with very mixed feelings. The good side to that is it means that the girls will be really good looking, and they are. The bad side is that these kinds of shows quite often end up being crap. Since they have to omit the sex, then the original story pretty much is gutted, and quite often the director does a poor job of finding something else.

But it looks like they're trying for a decent story here, and not just "Teppei meets lots of bodacious babes all of whom have the hots for him."  At the beginning of the first episode, Teppei's parents are murdered. There's been a string of murders of VIPs, and though his parents didn't seem to be VIPs, it turned out that his mother was the only daughter of a very rich and powerful man. Teppei is now his only descendant. His grandfather, name of Isshin, adopts him as Isshin's son. That may seem strange, but that kind of adoption to get an heir is surprisingly common in Japan. (Admiral Yamamoto was adopted in exactly that way.)

Anyway, Teppei has sworn to find out who killed his parents and to wreak revenge on them. That looks to be the plot they're going to try to use to give the series some structure. (Or at least some gravitas.)

A lot of H-games have five girls in the harem, and almost always one of them will be a loli. (Which is one of several reasons why I'm not a fan of H-games.) And it's clear that Maria, the little blonde, was the loli in the original game. As a wild guess, she's probably about 10. But from the way the OP is animated, clearly they're not going to make Maria a romantic interest. Whew! (Even though she calls Teppei onii-chan. Yikes!)

Teppei begins by rescuing a damsel in distress. She's gorgeous. She's named Charlotte Hazelrink. Turns out she's genuinely a princess. Her butler/bodyguard is named "Alfred" and he is one hell of a fighter, when he needs to be. But he wasn't able to save Charlotte from three thugs who attacked. Teppei got involved, and saved her. He also groped her boob, inadvertantly, while she was asleep, only she wasn't quite and she knows he did it. She hassles him a bit for it, but was also cognizant of the fact that he saved her life, so she forgives him.

Lessee; the other main girl he meets this time is Sylvie. She's the blonde with the saber. She's Maria's older sister, and it turns out that Isshin has arranged a marriage between Teppei and Sylvie.

Sylvie's father is named Vincent and he's voiced by Koyasu. These days I'm kind of primed to think that any character Koyasu does is probably a villain, but only time will tell. Koyasu's voice doesn't sound the same as I'm used to.

Isshin's voice is the legendary Wakamoto Norio and he's on the ragged edge of scenery-chewing, even though Isshin isn't a comic part. Still, I like his voice and hearing him in that role isn't an unpleasant surprise.

What gives me hope for the series is that Teppei seems to be a nice guy. I had that impression from when I scanned the raw, and now that I've listened to it I'm sure. The one true path to disaster in this kind of H-game adaptation is for them to make the guy in the middle a lech, and Teppei doesn't seem to be one.

He's normal and healthy, and thus was reacting to Charlotte's rather amazing rack in about the way any normal healthy young man would. (She's about 0.8 Rushuna.) On the other hand, when he saw Sylvie practicing with her saber, he ran to join her. Not because he was looking for a score. It was because he's quite good at kendo and wanted to try sparring with someone who was good at European-style fencing.

I don't quite understand her reaction to him: she cussed him out and then attacked, apparently intending to genuinely kill him. Fortunately he's good enough so she wasn't able to do it.

It would have been better if all these people were in their early 20's, but that's not the story being told. They're actually all high school age, and a lot of the story will take place in a ritzy private high school, one where only VIPs send their kids. Charlotte and Sylvie are going to turn out to be students there, and presumably that's also where Teppei is going to meet the last of the four girls.

I didn't mention the third one: Isshin's maid. I still don't know what her name was. We've seen her, briefly, and she's spoken to Teppei in the course of serving him, but there hasn't been any character development.

Overall? I like it, and I'll definitely be watching more.

UPDATE: The big mystery for me is Aroduc's comment about this series:

I think I’d rather just see some panties and roll my eyes than be attacked by a white dwarf star obscuring everything within a two foot area of Charlotte’s waist.

I never saw anything like that. No dwarf star, and no shots in which it might or might not appear. The camera was always focused on her amazing boobs.

And I don't recall seeing anything that looked like "removable for the DVD" censoring going on, either, on her or on anyone else. In fact, though Charlotte bounces around a lot, there wasn't any nudity at all, nor was there any panchira.

Was Aroduc just playing around? Or did he see a different version than I did?

UPDATE: By the way, I won't be at all surprised if there is nudity and censorship before the series is over. But I didn't see any in the first episode.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 10:47 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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