I never imagined I’d be saying this, but SKET Dance actually managed to make Ookami-san look good in comparison. The premise is basically the same— it follows a club that’s purpose is to do favors for people in the school. The first episode started with them doing a favor for a transfer student.
The characters are bland shounen stereotypes. The punchline of every joke is people YELLING REALLY LOUD, because that’s really funny, HAHAHAHA. I don’t think I managed to crack a smile the entire episode. The music is terrible and completely misplaced. I think it’s supposed to make the characters look cool or something but they just seem like idiots.
As for the “mystery”, it was way too obvious. But it gives our heroes a chance to prevent bullying, the true enemy for heroes of justice! Really, it’s these club members who should be the bullies’ targets. If I went to this school I would join in. The guy with the hat and goggles, and the guy who speaks through a laptop are just asking for it. And what in the world was with that guy’s goggles mode power where he overheated and came up with a plan? He’s putting on more airs than Victorique, except he’s a complete moron. Obviously, I’m not planning to continue watching this.
Steins; Gate looks like it’s going to be awesome as long as it doesn’t pull another Chaos; Head. But given that the staff has a much better track record this time along, I think they should be able to avoid that. The character designs are less ridiculous as well which is promising. I’ll confess, there’s nothing I love more than a good conspiracy theory: two of my favorite books are Foucalt’s Pendulum and the Illuminatus trilogy. Steins; Gate seems poised to deliver.
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.
After watching the first episode of Level E, I decided against blogging it because nothing much seemed to be happening and it wasn’t all that funny. Boy was I wrong. The entire first episode was simply a setup for the amazing twist the creators were preparing for episodes two and three. This just goes to show not to judge anything by its first episode.
My personal favorite part of this show was Kraft, the Prince’s retainer who is most affected by his pranks and is always trying to kill or oppose him, but ends up falling into his schemes anyway. He provides a “sanity” check on the prince, but in doing so has ended up becoming even more insane.
