I can think of more amusing Inkos.

Impressions:

Something of an odd episode for this show. The tone was all over the place. Not that I’d say it’s been solid on that front in the past, but it’s usually a lot more consistent than jerking painfully between angst and fart jokes. It was ostensibly Hozoin’s episode to hang out with/’fight’ the good guys, but a healthy chunk of it, especially at the start, was dedicated to the sidekicks, Matabei especially, being angsty over being useless. Why this suddenly bothers her after 20 episodes of being useless is a question best left to the sages. Besides that, the only thing that really went anywhere was Muneakira developing his power of red a little more so that Yukihime could block a single attack and then everyone went home. So another stellar action scene there too.

I don’t get you, Arms. The point, perhaps the only point of these kinds of shows, is to try to grab for attention in any way, and in a medium so dominated by a steadfast approach to do nothing whatsoever for as long as possible, I don’t begrudge them for that. But this season so much more than the last, you seem absolutely content to just sit here doing absolutely bloody nothing whatsoever. Fanservice, action, comedy, nada. What’s supposed to be the draw here, if anything?

This episode’s budget collapsed quickly.

Impressions:

It actually started pretty decently too. Sure, over-exposition like always. When you cut open the giant spiked rolly thing and find a creamy center inside, we don’t need to have it explained to us that that’s the core and it’s probably the vulnerable part, or after watching holes regenerate, people explaining that it’s regenerating. Pluuuuus the badly crowbarred in comic relief aaaaaand that besides rolling around, it/they only attacked twice I think, once to show off how badass ol’ whose his face is and once to kill some side characters. Aaaaand even that latter part had focus distracted off it by Fuzzy Hat have a mental breakdown in the middle of it for unrelated reasons. Maybe we should have put a little focus on them… or say… any focus. If you don’t care about them dying, show, I don’t see why I should either.

Okay, maybe it didn’t start all that decently at all, but the animation was better than it usually is, even if it’s still just things swatting against a large thing that ignores them until it’s dead, and they were keeping things at least somewhat tense, aside from the bad comic relief that they keep throwing in. At about 15 minutes in though, all that just utterly collapsed into a heap. An ugly, unanimated, power point lecture heap, spewing out exposition while they show the same 3-4 shots over and over and over again while Hibiki stares in confusion. Yet again. This is not how you tell a story. Especially not one so dull and trite as the angsty living weapon nonsense with now all of space and time and humanity being at stake because now it’s super ultra mega double dog serious.

Next Episode:

If you’re reading this, then I’ve forgotten to change the template.

I’m starting to think I should just be skipping the first eight minutes of every episode.

Impressions:

Well, then again, I would have missed the exceptionally bizarre pre-OP sequence featuring a mech breaking an egg of water over its head to instantly cool off its entire system, enabling it to defeat the man flying a bull head. I guess the rest of the first third was supposed to alert us to the crazy glasses girl being important. I’m not even sure if I should’ve recognized her before this point, but you know me. I still haven’t remembered the names of most of the characters and don’t particularly care to. Anyway, she wasn’t really relevant except as a floating corpse at the end anyway for another character who hasn’t done anything worth remembering him for yet to look horrified over. Am I supposed to feel shocked or bad about that? Or surprised when she comes back to life next week as practically every character in this show is wont to do?

Anyway. Yada yada yada, things actually start happening around 8 minutes in when Elf boy stages a one man takeover of the entire school beginning with the home economics class and a girl in a pillow fort, which as you know are the brains of Japanese militarized high schools, and assisted by them all being completely incompetent, but his ex-buddies trying to kill him. What I’m confused about is where Haruto got a gun from. Did someone actually trust him with one? Since the baddies have an unlimited number of ships and the world’s fastest R&D department, they attack again, defeating Saki with the power of widgets, but lucky for our heroes, they had forgotten that they have two mechs, letting Haruto-as-Elf mob them up as effortlessly as ever, after which, he discovers an old photo of a girl that, like everything, makes him start crying. Whew. That was close For a few minutes there, it was making at least tenuous sense. We sure dodged a bullet there.

Same ol’, same ol’, more or less. The way it swings around character deaths, even of named ones, has long since stopped having any effect, and the main thing that it still stands out by doing, is doing anything. Nobody can accuse this of having nothing happen an episode. Sure, it’d be nicer if it actually made sense or followed any kind of logical progression from point A to point B, but with most shows, especially this season, setting up camp and resolutely digging in at point A with nary a glance or sign of moving, something’s certainly better than nothing.

Next Episode:

Sad boobs.

At least its H scenes continue to be extremely short.

Continuing my quest for something to write about on Monday through Wednesday, I briefly toyed with the idea of writing about writing about sex, mostly because I finally hit the first heterosexual scene in Seinarukana and it was one of the more amusing ones I’ve done in a while. Therefore I decided to instead get up this morning, let the dogs out, feed them breakfast, and then go back to sleep for another four hours. So here’s the briefest of my brief thoughts on Bunny Black 3 trial instead.

The main new twist to the series is the city building aspect, which is extremely simple, but as Eushully showed us by doing the complete opposite, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Build town to unlock characters, events, H scenes, whatever. Town will only function as much as you’ve attracted people to it, so balance residental/attracting buildings/useful buildings appropriately. Being a trial, it’s hard to tell if that’s going to be a trivial joke or show some actual depth. The dungeon crawling is to collect money and supplies to build more things. Repeat this cycle until game is beaten or you’ve shot yourself in the head.

The dungeon crawling hasn’t received any particularly major upgrades, but it still looks nicer and flows better than Gears of Dragon’s did. As much as I want to like its mass party system, it lacks the speed or flow of games like Ogre Battle, Soul Nomad, or even Venus & Braves. Actually, I think I’d like this a lot more if it just ditched the SP system and used V&B’s system. That seems like what it’s half designed for with the integrated pseudo-AI system built in. It’d help the RNG issues too. Even leaning on the Ctrl key, it should still be moving at 2-3 times the speed and turning animations off is just lame. SHChara’s usual issue of the RNG simply hauling out a spiked dildo because the upper range on it is set too high for no reason still remains. In the very first dungeon, you can be encountering just groups of 2-3 monsters at a time, cruising along easily, and then run headlong into things like this, which with the aforementioned flow problems, even at best makes battles painfully grindy affairs. Aaand with the AI system, means you could just wander off for two minutes, come back, and the battle will still be going on.

SHChara’s recent issue of the writing not being quite humorous or parody enough still remains too. There are glimmers of it, but too much is too understated for it to actually be a joke. "I’m a demon lord, but I’m stuck doing paperwork." *ba-dum tss* It’s like Disgaea if it was choking on ritalin. The story (such as it is in the trial) is probably the weakest of the lot too, and I say that having played nothing more than the trial of the previous two games either. A truly painful "Prove your worth by uhh uhh uhh building a city! Or we’ll hit you or something," bit of fluff. Yeah, there are war angels or whatever they call them wandering around the background, but they were there in the second too. I’m pretty sure you’ve already got at least a half dozen in the harem already. Some made of fire.

Anyway, it exists. I don’t like dungeon crawlers in general all that much. Something about the copy-paste block corridors and my lack of direction sense frustrates me and for as much as I like almost any RPG with parties of six or more, Bunny Black still hasn’t seemed to figure out how to make that actually flow well. The end.

Well there goes my interest again.

Impressions:

No surfer lesbian lobster harem pirates? No uncomfortable attempts to give Red a chubby? An entire episode of talking heads, characters not actually doing a bloody thing, wailing violins, and "fighting baaaaaaad"? Well paint me green and call me Gumby because it’s time to stretch everything out again like there’s no tomorrow. Although I think the most damning part of this episode was the end, when someone simply keeled over from a heart attack after all the ‘excitement’ had passed. Otherwise, it would have just ended with the only thing happening being everyone standing really, really still for a couple minutes. 

Also, by excitement, I mean that the plan to avoid the evil glowing sea aliens was to shut everything down until they went away. Good lord, there was even a point where someone dropped a wrench and everyone gasped in panic that the sound of a single wrench falling would have doomed the entire city. I guess they must have also butchered all the cows on the spot to make sure that none of them mooed at the wrong time and doomed the entire city. Also, might I add, the whole stillness and quiet thing? That would have been a lot more tense (or any tense at all) without the music swelling and heaving through the entire thing. Whatever tone they were going for there, they didn’t hit it at all.

They’re a little too happy to rub those cucumbers.

Impressions:

Stronger than most recent episodes and recovered the budget a bit, but like usual, I feel like they missed an entire vein of incredibly obvious jokes. Dick jokes even. They clearly understand the entire cucumber = dick thing from the way that the girls were excitedly stroking them toward their open mouths at the end (or it was just one very lonely, very frustrated animator), and teased Taku being terrified of being made the love pillow of a burly kappa, but neither of them went far enough past that. The cobra and mushrooms also seemed like things that could fit into an entire episode of comedic phallic abuse like the one great episode of Majikoi, but instead they very badly forced some mandrake jokes that also seemed like just barely the setup before going really over the top with it. Oh well. At least it’s a step back toward the right direction.

Next Episode:

Fewer phallic objects.

Everything’s better with dog anuses.

Impressions:

I think this show’s trying a little too hard to stick to the ‘date’ part of the title. I’m really not certain what purpose the dates between Touka and Origami were supposed to serve that couldn’t have been better served by them simply not existing. I mean as far as plot or character development go, not wasting time. Their purpose as far as that goes was obvious. If the goal is some kind of them-getting-angsty-over-perceived-betrayal angle (or god forbid, some growth by not getting bitchy and growing up to a maturity level above petulant three year olds), then they didn’t need any of that, or it’d be served better by him standing them up because he was being dragged around by a psychopath. They weren’t really using it for humor either. Just a vehicle for a montage of a date between all three and yet another insert song, this time with extra autotune. But hey, there were dog anuses pressed up against the camera at one point, so we can’t call it a total loss.

The turning point of the episode, four minutes frm the end and where it decided to actually bother getting to the bloodshed that I so crave, was when we came upon a group of masked thugs shooting BBs at the ground around a cat. Maybe they were trying to shoot the cat and were just horrible shots, but it did successfully combine the kind of comical over the top antagonist with utterly ineffective villainry that is completely impossible to take seriously, kind of like Lex Luthor’s 1950s plan to flood the Earth in order to steal all the fruit pies. That was further not helped by the censorship again. Like anything meant to evoke a visceral response, especially fear or terror, subtlety is a great way to go. Our imaginations are worse than anything you can spit out, Japan. Let our brains scare us. Give the sickening sound of bones crunching or blood splatter, don’t show it like someone took the photoshop tool to a silhouette. Granted, they were probably trying for more jarring than scary, what with the blaring sirens and screaming, but I haven’t the faintest idea why they would for something we saw just one episode ago. It’s not going to be surprising a second time. Maybe if you hadn’t done the first one. Plus, I don’t even know what it is I’m supposed to be seeing here or what was censored. I think it’s half a bloody shoe. Either way, between the Dastardly Cat Torturing Squad, ineffectual attempts to be frightening using the same thing already seen before but now with more sirens and censored shoes, and then immediately beating up the bad guy to remove the cliffhanger from the end of the episode, that wasn’t a high point.

Next Episode:

Fighting the psycho, finally.

Always a great vehicle for gags.

Yeah, yeah. I slept in. I’m getting to things.

Impressions:

Or maybe this episode should be title "strange noises" since the episode is full of them, mostly of the uncomfortably sexualized variety, like Yukari Tamura doing possibly the most unconvincing sexual sit-up grunts I’ve ever heard, but the entire female cast had points where they were squeaking in uncomfortable ways. Well, besides the new one who popped p to be bitchy for 60 seconds and then disappeared again. Unfortunate too. This show needs something to mix up the formula. After a relatively quick start (at least for an LN adaptation), it’s been spinning its wheels and going absolutely nowhere while not being particularly funny or creative about it in the process. As usual, trying to split itself between maudlin drama in the last 30 seconds to 2 minutes, ‘wacky’ comedy, and spreading both thinner than half a dollop of peanutbutter on a football field are not working.

Just to harp more though, the episode’s budget was also particularly godawful this week. The scene where Tsu-Small was wiggling and squeaking around in a shirt that only barely covered her ass took place almost entirely showing nothing but the back of her head. Maybe the kitchen was just a budget sucking area in general, because a similar thing happened when they went back there shortly thereafter. An entire scene lasting I think a minute and a half and using approximately three shots. Even a four-camera sitcom knows that’s not enough.

So much for her taking over as the only competent character in the show.

Impressions:

Essentially a very brief training arc where they try to pass the time with yet more of Kanetsugu’s now ground-into-a-bloody-stump ‘slapstick’ routine culminating in the world’s longest grope while auras flare, people use the power of friendship and struggle against ill-defined magic for magic’s sake, with such tremendous feats of drama as "screaming her name", "yelling that X can’t take any more of this", and "putting one’s hand on someone’s back and letting their super friendship shine through" while one person writhes around on the ground due to the magical pain of magic which totally wasn’t just fabricated on the spot or anything.

And then, Keiji’s part in the story over, she goes off to job to the blue squad in a particularly montage-a-riffic sequence of each of them simply hitting her in turn, and find a new shirt, before riding off into the sunset. Hip hip hooray. There’s just something about the big bad’s sitting 15 feet away the entire show yet having no nefarious plan that is killing my already minimal ability to care about this show first thing in the morning. At least introduce something going on. They’re not even ignoring anything to putz around. Just putzing around.

Good god. Do something.

Damn, I’m quick under pressure.

Impressions:

Japan, I know how much you love the cliche of the extra powerful guy looking bored to be in your shows, but you’ve got to understand that when you’ve got one character looking bored while the entire rest of the cast is staring slackjawed, rooted in place, for minutes on end, rambling on at each other, that’s not the most exciting thing. Conveying (not even particularly required) information does not need to be this dull. Good god. There was someone standing in the middle of a fire for the entire first half of the episode and he was as slack jawed and rooted to the spot as every single other character.

And then? Flashback to the two white haired bishies du jour rooted in place for further exposition, then some talking heads, exposition, and yet more talking heads. Is this really the most interesting way you could think of to handle this? Or was this just one of those episode animated by three interns over the weekend so all we could afford was some generic fire effects in terms of animation? That would also explain the very bad very half-assed joke scenes toward the end too. What it basically boils down to for this episode though is what happened was: "People told people things." The end. I think the most insulting part of this whole boring affair was how the credits started in the middle of exposition. As if the episode wasn’t dull enough to begin with, it got to be an extra couple minutes of being dull on top of it. When it’s clear that the sundae is made of grit and sand, it doesn’t help to spoon out an extra helping of grit.