The above shot pretty much sums it all up. A high school boy is blackmailed into coaching an elementary school girl’s basketball team after his own team is suspended for a year following the team captain’s elopement with an elementary schooler. This doesn’t seem like the best plan to recover the team’s good standing.
The coach’s new team tries to win him over by dressing up as maids, calling him onii-chan, and showing him their undergarments. There are long shower scenes. The girls all conspire to raise their coach’s “affection level”.
The story actually looks like it might have some potential. The girls seem to have some sort of conflict with the boys at their school, and need to win the prefectural tournament in a month for some reason. The short basketball segments weren’t bad. And the coach’s family and classmates seem interesting. Of course, this is all assuming you can get past the rampant pedophilia. I wasn’t able to, and don’t plan on continuing with Ro-Kyu-Bu.
The first episode seemed fairly promising. It moved along at a decent clip and had a good mix of baseball, management and interactions between the characters. I’ll admit that I’m not the biggest fan of baseball— I find it to be the most boring sport ever created— but it’s portrayal wasn’t that bad. A fairly accurate portrayal, but they skipped through the 99% of the game which is just people standing around, and showed how the game is won or lost through one person’s stupid split-second mistake. Just not my thing.
As far as the characters though, the main girl seems a tad bland, but she’ll probably develop as the show continues. I’m generally not a fan of tragic girls in hospitals, but her backstory was well thought out at least. I like the guy who joined the baseball team to make business connections. It’s a much better reason for joining the team than actually liking baseball. I won’t blog this since I’ll just complain about baseball the whole time, but I do plan to keep watching.
Woot, more Crystal Dragon Jesus! I have to say: the priest is awesome. Not quite at the level of Father Anderson, but still,he brings back some good memories. He needs to add some more “Amens” to his prayers though.
I had fairly low expectations for this show, but was pleasantly surprised. It seemed like something that would be a standard shounen fighting show, but the characters are actually pretty interesting. I especially like the main character, his brother and the priest: they have a unique and eccentric family dynamic.
This has a lot of potential if it keeps its focus on the characters and not on endless battling and power leveling. I have high hopes that it will though, since this seems more along the line of Fullmetal Alchemist than your standard fighting show. I’m guessing that next we will further develop the demons and meet new exorcists other than the priest. This show will need villains that are actually interesting, since fighting against demons and the devil is generally rather morally unambiguous. I wonder if this Satan will be more along the lines of Milton’s Lucifer, although I don’t have my hopes up.
Deadman Wonderland begins with a bang, as Ganta’s entire class is murdered by a man in a red cloak and he is framed for the crime. He is sentenced to death and sent to Deadman Wonderland, a privately owned prison where prisoners compete in deadly games for the amusement of the crowds. He meets a mysterious girl, Shiro, who knows him somehow. His fellow prisoners and people associated with the man in the red cloak are all trying to kill him.
This was a good start for the show— there is a good sense of fear and anger at the people who did this to the main character. I think there are two ways this show could go though: it could either examine the conspiracy surrounding how he came to the prison, or it could become an action show focusing on the “games”. I imagine it will try to do both, but with more of a focus on the games, which would be a shame. The first episode was more focused on developing the mystery though, so you never know.
I am looking forward to seeing the interactions between Ganta, Shiro, their fellow prisoners and the guards. There is a lot of potential here especially since Ganta has been introduced with such a huge misunderstanding. The show has a promising setting; let’s see if they can put it to good use.
Ano Hana follows a group of childhood friends who have gone their separate ways but appear headed to come back together, due to the reapparance of their friend who died as a ghost. This one is definitely looking promising, mainly due to the strong characters. Jinta, the male lead, has become a hikkomori and is afraid to talk to people, while other members of the group have become arrogant or dishonest. At the end of the episode, Jinta reunites with one of his old friends in their secret base which has been revamped.
This episode reminded me a lot of 20th Century Boys, except without the evil cults, conspiracies, giant robots and aliens. Ok, well it isn’t that similar, but the part where they both have a secret childhood base and they reunite