That shot pretty much sums everything up.

A magical tsundere girlfriend arrives in Haruaki’s house. Her name is Fear, and she is a cube. Cue ten minutes of exposition. Fear eats cookies, has hair that looks suspiciously like a certain other character from two seasons ago, and doesn’t know how to interact with humans. Her love rival, Konoha, the childhood friend appears, and they get into a big fight.

Next, Fears gets embarrassed because people treat her nicely. She then proceeds to destroy the house. Haruaki and Konoha forgive her and everyone becomes best friends again.

*Gag* I liked Fear better when she was a box. Coupled with our worthless male protagonist, I’m not looking forward to this show. It’s filled with hilarious jokes, such as “you have no breasts! Shut up cow tits!” and gratuitous panty shots.

And am I supposed to feel bad for Fear when she’s feeling lonely? She’s been alone in the house for all of thirty seconds. And she met the guy she wants to stay with when? Half an hour ago? They’re acting like this is a tragedy.

Some aspects remind me of Kore wa Zombie Desu Ka though. If they can up the craziness significantly and forget about the main characters, this could be salvageable. Not that I think that’s likely.

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Have no fear, Ika-chan, this isn’t the end!

The second season’s title is differentiated by an added question mark. That’s so last year. They should have gone with Shinryaku! Ika Musume’.

Anyway, it’s back to the same sort of comedy we saw in the first season. The first segment has Ika-chan finish watching a movie about alien invaders who are tragically defeated. She goes around mistaking everything for weapons to be used against her, and ends up getting in trouble with Chizuru. A good way to reintroduce all the characters without things getting tedious.

The second segment features Sanae getting jealous over squid girl’s new friends. Sanae deduces that she’s in last place in terms of squid girl’s possible lovers, but decides it’s better to be hated than to elicit feelings of indifference. Ika-musume verbally abuses Sanae, she seems to enjoy it.

We end with a jellyfish catching competition. Squid girl uses her tentacles to great advantage, but tangles herself up and gets stung. The scientists cheat and win.

I’m not going to blog this, since (as you can see) I usually have very little to say about comedies. There’s nothing more boring than someone explaining what was funny. I’ll definitely be watching though— it seems to have retained the sense of humor that made the first season so successful. Let’s just hope they don’t run out of jokes and use the same ones over and over again. Most long-running comedies seem to fall prey to that eventually; hopefully Ika Musume will be an exception.

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The second season of Working!! starts in October, and they decided to air the first episode a month early, as they did for the first season. There seems to be some controversy over the naming scheme: Working!! ==> Working’!!, but for those with a mathematical background it makes perfect sense. If you have a variable name (i.e., a) that you’ve already used but need to use again, you name the second variable a’ (a prime) rather than resorting to less descriptive names or subscripts. So it’s not an apostrophe, it’s a prime symbol, and the pronunciation would be “Working Prime!!”. Either way, the title is much better than counting the number of explanation marks at the end, which seems to be the current trend.

On to the episode itself. This was one of the last comedy shows that I thought needed a sequel. While I enjoyed the first season, by the end the jokes were starting to become repetitive. We have the millionth joke about how Poplar is cute and tiny, how Takanashi likes cute things, and how Inami hates men.

This episode took all those overused jokes and hit us on the head with them over and over again. Literally half the episode was about Poplar being short and cute, and Takanashi obsessing over her. They’ve had a year and a half to come up with new jokes, and this is the best they can do?

I’ll still watch it, since it can be funny when it’s not stale, but I won’t be blogging it. Talking about what’s funny is boring anyways.

Oh, and happy Labor Day. A perfect time to talk about working.

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A boy transfers to a school in Tokyo, and meets a group of NEETs led by the NEET detective, Alice.

This was mostly a setup episode, so not much happened aside from an introduction to the characters. It seems like the show could have some potential, but there are a bunch of problems.

First of all, the protagonist is your stereotypical transfer student, someone who isn’t special at all thrown into a world of weirdos. It’ll be tough to make the main character somewhat interesting. The first episode was all about him transferring schools and making a friend of sorts, and these were all scenes that have been done to death. Second, there’s way too much talking and not enough doing. Very little actually happened, and instead we were stuck listening to explanation after explanation for the second half of the episode. Third, I’m worried this will descend into a showcase of how cute Alice is and make the actual story of secondary importance. We’ll see how well-founded this fear is.

The setting and the cast (aside from the main character) do seem interesting though, so I’m planning to keep watching.

In case you didn’t see my previous post, I’ll be travelling and this will be the last post I make on a new show until I get back home in a week and a half. There will be sporadic updates until then.

In this episode, Saya goes to school, fawns over her father, and kills a flying statue in the middle of a puddle.

Everything about this show screams Clamp. Yukiko runs a cafe next door, Doumeki, Maru and Moro are in Saya’s class, everyone has skinny wobbly legs, and the main character is a goody-two-shoes with a daddy complex. I kind of wish  Clamp would try something new, especially in regards to the characters.

I haven’t watched anything else from the Blood franchise, so that may be part of the reason, but I had no idea why Saya was fighting that crustacean statue. I’m sure we’ll find out eventually. Still, this battle scene was the best part of the episode. The animation was excellent, and the statue thing actually used its claws in interesting ways. It felt like a battle against a lobster instead of a battle against a human in a lobster suit. The battle might not have made the most sense: Saya’s head definitely should have come off, and at first her sword just bounced off the statue’s shell, but later it cut right through it. But all in all an entertaining fight.

My biggest problem with this show (aside from my aversion to Clamp) is Saya. She helps old ladies, picks up trash in the street, is clumsy, and in love with her dad (and probably with Doumeki too). The most popular guy in the school is hitting on her. She’s just… boring. Ok, she goes and kills monsters with a katana in the middle of the night, but her day life is going to need some more spice if it’s going to keep my interest.

Now for some blog news: I’m going to be out of the country for the next week and a half. Unfortunately, this coincides with the start of the new season, and I won’t have a good enough internet connection (or the time) to download and watch any new shows. So there won’t be any of these first impressions posts while I’m gone. I’m planning to do an aggregate first impressions post of everything when I get back. I’ve also queued up a few reviews and other posts to publish while I’m away, so the site won’t be completely empty during this time.