This is the kind of thing they would only make in Japan. We have a genetically engineered damsel in distress and a desperate young high school male on a field trip who are united and fall in love due to the efforts of a white buck and a herd of deer who fight against giant robotic oni. Koi Sento actually aired almost half a year ago, but it slipped past my radar.

Unfortunately, this OVA isn’t quite as awesome as it sounds. The characters are your stereotypical damsel in distress and loser teenage boy, and the plot is 25 minutes of teenage wish fulfillment. Quite literally, in fact: the boy spends the first few minutes of the show wishing he could meet and fall in love with the female, who is a celebrity (I didn’t follow why). The deer were entertaining, certainly, but not enough to make it worth sitting through the rest of this OVA.

The focus of this OVA was a summoning tournament to earn new funds for the class so they could buy new furniture and Himeji’s father wouldn’t make her transfer schools. Of course, they still ended up with the same furniture due to idiocy, and Himeji is still in the class.

This episode was good and had a lot of funny parts, but I still didn’t enjoy it as much as the last episode. Honestly, I think the summoning battles are the weakest part of the show— the chibi fighters were hilarious the first time they appeared, but the actual fights aren’t all that interesting. It’s the interactions between the different characters which is the highlight of this show. Using the summoning battles as a way to make jokes around the characters works great, such as Yuuji’s proposal to Shouko, Hazuki’s promised reward, and everyone cheating in the final battle, but the actual battles themselves are, over a certain limit, just time spent away from the better parts of the show. To me, this episode skirted that limitrather closely.

Gundam Unicorn has been pretty much everything I could ask for in a Gundam show. Epic space battles complete with explosions, political intrigue, futile wars and depressingly human characters. It seems poised to become my third favorite series in the meta-series, closely following Turn A Gundam and Zeta. My only complaint is it takes so long for the next episode to come out.

In the third OVA, we learn that the Unicorn Gundam has anti-Newtype capabilities which seem to overwhelm the pilot’s own will. Banagher almost kills Marida, only to stop at the last second. Later, Banagher begins to bond with Daghda, so of course Full Frontal kills Daghda. Banagher becomes enraged and finally gains the will to kill someone, only to have the father of the family he stayed with in the colony block his shot and die.

Banagher has been surprisingly pleasant as far as Gundam leads go. He has the usual issue of not wanting to fight, but who can blame him? He really does have no reason to, especially since he even knows the people he’s fighting against. And unlike certain other Gundam protagonists, his indecisiveness has been short-lived in comparison with the usual twenty to thirty episodes. Banagher’s bloodlust after Daghda’s death was also understandable – I, for one, was hoping he would succeed. Compared to Amuro and Camille’s endless whining, Banagher is great. And compared to Setsuna F. Seiei and the protagonists of Gundam Seed— well, let’s no go there. But he does still possess the immaturity and naivety that make Gundam what it is.

In addition to Banagher’s development, the supporting cast gets a lot of time in the spotlight as well. In particular, Marida and Daghda become fully fleshed out, to make Daghda’s death all the more disturbing. It was a nice contrast how the creators allowed Daghda to die – the Gundams withstand debris, explosions and beam particles, but the human body just disintegrates into nothingness with the light sweep of the saber, in the middle of a last-ditch attack which doesn’t even faze his enemy.

For the next episode it seems like we are Earthbound and hopefully will see the political side of things from the point of Mineva. Gundam Unicorn truly makes it feel like the end of an era is approaching, with Mineva, who we last saw as a child,  fully grown, and a weapon that has been built to make Newtypes, once seen as the future of humanity, obsolete.

Nichijou is Kyo-Ani’s next show in the tradition of Lucky Star and K-ON, and I’m quite optimistic after watching this OVA about how it will turn out. We get three segments in this OVA: in the first, Mio (shown above) tries to trick her friend Yuuki into feeling positively after scoring a 1 / 100 on a test, complete with fishing imagery. I’ve been in a similar situation too many times to count, so this part hit home with me. In the second segment, Nano the wind-up girl together with her talking cat try to get a loli mad scientist to take her medicine. The third segment involves doing cartwheels and sleeping on an empty train.  I would say that the humor is actually more along the lines of Azumanga Daioh’s than Lucky Star or K-ON’s.

Mio and Yuuki were enjoyable to watch together and have a good chemistry, both in the first segment and the train segment. I didn’t enjoy the segment with Nano and the little girl as much – I think it could have been a bit shorter, and the jokes just didn’t have the same punch for me.

All in all, I’m looking forward to the TV show beginning in a few weeks and am planning to watch it. I doubt I’ll blog it though – I’ve realized I just don’t have as much to say about comedies (unless they’re bad *cough* onii-chan no koto *cough*). There’s nothing more boring than someone talking about what was funny.

This OVA was a worthy entry in the series, returning to the fast-paced humor of the first half which unfortunately dragged out in the second. We had the same levels of ridiculousness that made the first season hilarious.

Comedy, it seems to me, is something that’s very personal. From trying to write this blog, I’ve realized that I don’t really have much in the way of explanation as to why something is funny. For example, I’ve been complaining for a while now about how Iroha’s stalking in Onii-chan no Koto just isn’t funny anymore since it’s been overused so much. But is that really the reason? Baka to Test reuses the same jokes over and over again – Himeji’s deadly cooking, Minami’s chest, Yoshii’s cross dressing, Voyeur’s peeping, and Hideyoshi’s… existence. Yet it’s still funny every time. It must be something to do with the delivery – when the two punks claimed they had kidnapped the most popular waitress, it was patently obvious they were referring to Hideyoshi in spite of Yoshii’s belief to the contrary. And yet when they arrived to find him, playing the game of Life with his captors, I just cracked up. They go the extra mile with their jokes to put extra layers on them. Plus, the pace is too fast for you to lose interest.

I’m looking forward to the second season of Baka to Test, especially if it can keep up this pace, as well as the second OVA which is due in a month. In completely unrelated news, I figured out how to include subtitles in mplayer! (for the curious, use mplayer -ass -vf ass,screenshot)  We also learned this episode that Voyeur-kun uses *nix and python. Finally an anime character who doesn’t use Windows and silly GUIs.