First Impressions: Autumn 2012, Ben's Week 2

First Impressions is a series where I'll be writing about my first impressions of the anime airing in the new season.

Ben's Week 2: Psycho-Pass, Teekyu, Magi, Robotics;Notes, Wooser's Hand-To-Mouth Life, Little Busters!, Girls und Panzer

So here I go into the new shows I'm trying out this week. I didn't list all the shows I'm continuing from last week above, because I won't be giving more opinions on those until we're a bit later into the season and I give a review of what I kept on with and what I didn't in the end. I didn't have the time to watch all this week's anime this week, so the rest will be coming up when I've watched it.

For reference (again), here's the chart showing all this season's anime.

Psycho-Pass

Subbed By Commie.

In the future, computers can determine all of a person's emotions, desires, and so on - and most importantly, their likelihood to commit crimes. Anyone with a high Crime Coefficient is arrested - with force if needed - and brought in for mandatory therapy, or simply killed if the computer judges them to no longer be of value to society. But some people with high Crime Coefficients are brought into the police to hunt down criminals as Enforcers, watched over by Inspectors whose job is to keep the Enforcers in line by force. Psycho-Pass is about newbie Inspector Akane Tsunemori and her clashes with the Enforcers she's been assigned to.

Psycho-Pass was one of the shows this season that a lot of people had high hopes for. It's written by Gen Urobochi, who has a lot of experience with dark series like this and has become popular amongst anime fans with two recent big hits, Fate/Zero and Puella Magi Madoka Magica, and the premise (which is basically "anime Minority Report") has plenty of potential. Unfortunately, the first episode was a real disappointment. It was nice to look at, but it was composed almost entirely of exposition, and the rest of the episode was all Akane being naïve and knowing nothing about the job she's supposedly been trained for. They were obviously going for her as the one real innocent character, and I'm fine with that because it's a natural way to create conflict with the dystopian setting and violent Enforcers. But this doesn't really excuse it, because they could have done that without making her seem completely untrained and useless. If they make it a plot point with new police being untrained and totally unprepared for their jobs as a failing of the system, it could work, but here it's just annoying/ At least, though, this presents some degree of character. We don't really get to see that in the vast majority of the episode's dialogue, which is mostly clunky exposition. 

My Verdict? Psycho-Pass's first episode fell into some of the bigger traps a first episode can suffer from - it was overloaded with exposition, and in trying to play up Akane's innocence (which will presumably be her main character trait) it just makes her feel misplaced and frustrating. Hopefully it'll improve in later episodes, once the exposition's out of the way, but the first episode was frankly just bad and the only reason I found any of it to be okay was because of my hopes for it. I'll keep an eye on this for another episode or two and see where it goes - hopefully up and up and up, because this was so poor but has potential in there.

 

Teekyu!

Subbed by Commie.

Some high school girls are in a club that does a thing! They’re ~wacky~ and get up to hijinks! Each episode is two minutes long! Yeah, it's a pretty generic premise, and I don’t have much to say about this at all. It’s pretty standard bizarre moe-comedy humour, but the rapid pace to get it all in two minutes means none of it has the chance to stand. The jokes generally just felt like they were trying too hard rather than actually being funny. I guess two-minute episodes are pretty much the direct equivalent of 4-panel manga like the source material, so it makes sense as a way to adapt it I guess... Really, the only thing at all worth discussing about this is how freakin' fast the VAs are speaking to get all the lines in in time.

My Verdict? Meh. It didn’t entertain me at all, and I won’t be bothering again... But it’s only two minutes long so if you like the idea then I guess why not watch it?

Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic

Subbed by gg.

Magi is a shonen anime inspired by the classic stories of 1001 Nights, which is a nice change of flavour for the genre. The series’ main characters are Aladdin, an innocent and cheerful boy with a magic flute containing a shy djinn called Ugo, and Alibaba, a young man who’s just after money and sworn to never have friends (Guess what? In a shocking twist, he lightens up before the first episode’s over.) 14 years ago, mysterious structures called “Dungeons”, filled with magic and wealth for the taking of whoever clears them, popped up across the land. Naturally, our heroes want to clear these dungeons – Aladdin to find the other djinn sealed away since they’re Ugo’s friends, and Alibaba to get all the riches and, as far as I can tell, buy a country.

I really enjoyed Magi’s first episode. Obviously, a shonen battle manga adaption isn’t going to have much in the way of deep writing or anything but it was a lot of fun. The characters may not be very original but they're fun to watch doing stuff. They’re well-voiced too; at first I thought Kaori Ishihara’s voice was too girly for Aladdin but she quickly convinced me that it fits him well, and Yuuki Kaji hits the nail on the head for Alibaba. The music was good too – the music that played when Aladdin first used his flute was perfect for emphasising the moment. The setting is a refreshing change from similar shows with their Japanese or vague fantasy settings. It also got the fighting down well for a shonen series’ debut, especially with the djinn fighting a giant plant monster at the end (though I am curious how they’ll handle things in future when one main character’s just a guy and the other can summon a giant djinn to fight for him).

My Verdict? Magi isn’t breaking any new ground, but it looks like it’s hitting all the right notes to be a damn solid shonen action series. Who knows, maybe it’ll be the new Fairy Tail in popularity? I’d definitely recommend it if you like the genre -  I don’t watch much of the stuff myself but I’m going to stick with Magi.

Robotics;Notes

Subbed by WhyNot?.

In the year 2019, apathetic gamer Kai and energetic girl with good taste in media mecha nerd Aki are the only two members of their high school’s Robotics Club. The club’s ultimate goal – at least according to Aki – is to finish a working replica of the super-popular anime super robot “Gunvarrel” and exhibit it at the Robotics Expo, but on top of the difficulty of actually building it, they need a huge budget approved by the school. The vice-principal offers them a chance – if they can win the Robo-One hobby robot competition in two weeks’ time, they can have the money. But will they succeed?

Robotics;Notes is the adaption of the third in Nitroplus’ “science adventure game” series of visual novels, following Chaos;Head and the very popular Steins;Gate (which you should watch if you haven’t, it’s excellent.) It was my love of Steins;Gate that got me interested in Robotics;Notes from the moment I heard about it, so I can’t help but compare the two, and as far as the first episodes go Robotics;Notes doesn’t start as strong. The characters are appealing, but nevertheless feel familiar as fairly archetypal characters – I’m sure they’ll develop further once they get the chance, but it doesn’t make as strong an impression as it might. Likewise, the high school club setting is one we’ve all seen a million times before, and the current thrust of the plot as “we need to get funding for our club to survive!” is far from original.

Despite these complaints of it feeling a little cliché, Robotics;Notes has plenty going for it, and I certainly enjoyed the first episode. While I grumble about another show being built around high school club, the fact remains that the club’s activities being the actual focus of the show is a nice change from so many series just using school clubs as an excuse to bring the cast together. The setting of the series is nice – it really feels like a near-future where technology has advanced in understandable ways, notably in everyone having high-powered tablets and using them all the time. While the initial setup might be familiar, it’s well-written, and the first episode has endeared the characters to me enough that I want to see how they work towards building their attempt at a giant robot. Considering the more dramatic nature of Chaos;Head (not that I’ve read or watched it) and Steins;Gate, I’m pretty sure that at some point things will start to get more serious, though I’m not sure how; it might just get into character-focused drama rather than a shift in the nature of the plot itself, but a scene at the end of the episode makes me think there's definitely going to be more of the extreme science we saw in its predecessors. Either way, I’m confident that the show will build up into something really enjoyable – it’s definitely got a good start here. 

My Verdict? Robotics;Notes’ first episode may not have been as incredible as I’d hoped the followup to Steins;Gate would be, but in its own right it looks to be a good show. I’d recommend picking this up to see how it grows.

Wooser's Hand-To-Mouth Life

Subbed by Interrobang‽.

3-minute 3D shorts containing a bunch of really short skits starring a rabbit mascot from some band or something who's not as nice as his cute exterior would have you think. It's not very funny. Mamoru Miyano continues to be one of my favourite voice actors.
My Verdict? Meh.

Little Busters!

Subbed by UTW and Mazui.

Little Busters is the story of five childhood friends who used to spend all their time causing chaos fighting for justice as the "Little Busters". Now they're older, and one of them - Kyousuke, who everyone in the show acknowledges as being awesome in every possible way despite his actions being incomprehensible and probably stupid - is due to graduate from high school at the end of the school year. Since this is is their last year together, the main character Riki suggests they do something as a group like they used to, and Kyousuke decides they're going to be a baseball team because <insert reasoning here>. This means they need more members to be a baseball team... and that's where the plot's going? The story thus far wasn't really important to the episode, and I've heard that baseball is tangential at best to the actual plot, so I dunno..

This first episode was a lot of fun. It was really goofy, with everyone acting ridiculously but taking it completely seriously, and I found it quite funny. The characters are all likeable, the writing's good, the music's great (I presume they're using the same BGM as the visual novel it's adapted from)... To be honest, I have little (hoho) to say about Little Busters, because it's not actively done all that much to comment on (though the second episode's out now, and I presume more happens there, but I'm still working through all these first episodes before I can get to it). It's just a solid show all-round, unless it goes off the rails once all the other girls in the cast get introduced in the next episode or few.

My Verdict? Little Busters is a cheerful (for now) slice-of-life (or something) that does everything right in its first episode. Definitely worth trying.

Girls und Panzer

Available streaming on Crunchyroll.

What a coincidence, that was my reaction to this show too!

High school girls? In tanks? What will you think of next, Japan?

Well, how about a protagonist with more character than "I don't want to tank but circumstances have made me tank, also I am clumsy oops"?

How about character designs with a hint of originality?

How about not being sexist by having tankery be promoted to the cast through them being told "It'll make you a better wife and mother and all the boys will like you"?

How about a show that's interesting enough that I don't end up half-watching it (just because I felt obligated so I could write this) while repetitively grinding my Pokemon?

My Verdict: Generic moe with a badly-executed gimmick. Tedium. If you want to watch something "ironically", I guess this is the show of the season.