Kaitou Tenshi Twin Angel #01 — Let’s Go Fever Time!

August 7th, 2008

 

And other semi-random magical girl ramblings.

Yes, you’re reading that correctly. The translated title for this show would be something like Thief Angel Twin Angel. Welcome to the department of redundancy department.

Some other background could also be interesting and/or distracting to knowing about the show itself. The Kaitou Tenshi Twin Angel product is actually a series of pachinko machines. It might be best to think of it like someone took the terrible coin eating machines from Chuck E Cheese that spew out tickets for rolling a coin down a bowling alley looking thing so you can trade 80 tickets for a finger gobling and a ring pop. Imagine somebody franchised those, built a magical girl theme on top of it using the cliched imagery and such because, hell… it’s just pretty pictures and maybe some noisy sounds to entertain and amuse the seven year olds feeding their 100 yen coins into the blood thing. Now they’ve taken that and tried to make a show out of it. Amazingly, it’s actually pretty good for what it is, which again… is a vehicle for convincing elementary school kids to feed their money into an arcade machine. I wasn’t certain if it was just going to be that, some kind of crazy magical girl parody, or what, but whatever.

On another side note, my first run in with this series was about a year and a half ago when I found this wacky Duel Savior combo video set to their theme song. There are worse first impressions to be made.

Impressions:

Oh right… the episode. It’s a little hard to classify magical girl shows these age because with the whole feminist revolution finally starting to hit Japan, girl power has been on a steady rise for the past half decade. Gone are the days of Sailor Moon throwing her hat at people. These days, it’s Pretty Cure tackling the living daylights out of giant scorpions or probably more recognizable to the western crowd, Nanoha beam spamming people. There are also almost as many parodies of the genre as there are actual traditional magical girl shows, lest we forget Dokuro, Punie, or even (ugh) Ink. To put it simply though, if you’re a fan of classical magical girl shows, you’ll eat this up, hook, line, and sinker.

The show is like a big ball of homages to the prototypical magical girl motif, right down to having Tuxedo Mask Misty Knight as the lovable bishounen upperclassmen. It has been upgraded for the times, trading in the hat throwing for energy kicks, but that’s about it. I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t complain a bit about Noto in a show, so here goes: "Noto still sucks." With that out of the way, eternal magical girl Tamura does a good job as Haruka, though the Nanoha does voice leak through at times which makes things feel a bit weird. Production values are decent, and far be it from me to complain about opening a show with a seven minute action sequence, but it didn’t really feel like it was up to OVA level standards. Especially through the school parts, the animation and art seemed painfully average. Nothing terrible by any means, but I hold OVAs to a higher standard than normal broadcasts. Even better animation wouldn’t have made the school parts more interesting though. Yawn.

What it boils down to, I suppose, is that if you like these kinds of shows, then you’re already watching Pretty Cure, and it does the same thing, only better animated and once a week instead of as an OVA. You’ll definitely still like this one, but it’s not going to really break any new ground and doesn’t have much of anything for the people not already firmly entrenched in the magical girl fandom. I have to admit that despite the really really silly villain at the end, I did think that they did a great job of picking a pretty unique way to go with the story, having him utterly crush the pair and destroy their transformation devices in the first episode while Haruka sobbed in fear instead of fighting back. Certainly different from your usual magical girl beginning. 

I’ll probably end up checking out the next episode just because I really did like the ending there that much, but I don’t know that I’ll say anything about it. The episode didn’t give me cancer or make me feel uneasy with panty shots or any kind of inappropriate fanservice or anything, it just feels a bit weird watching this. Maybe I’ll bring it over when I have to babysit my friend’s kid. Lord knows that’s the only place where it’s socially acceptable for me to play with finger goblins these days. Damn you, society and your bias against finger goblins!

Posted in Anime | 5 Comments »

5 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • Hinano says:

    LOL what the hell is this? A TV show? OVA?
    I see Tuxedo Mask’s long lost cousin!

  • Aroduc says:

    It’s a two episode OVA with the second part due out in September.

  • sage says:

    Don’t know if want…

  • DmonHiro says:

    Who says the good guys always win?

  • AGear2Ax says:

    @DmonHiro

    The good guys always win, they always end up winning regardless of whether they have been defeated before.