Sengoku Otome is yet another show reenacting a historical era with the main players as girls in costumes. The main difference from other shows like it is that instead of being about the Three Kingdoms era the subject is the Sengoku period in Japan.

This episode was about what I’d expect from the premise— very little. It wasn’t bad, per se, nothing near the level of Oretach ni Tsubasa, just boring and unremarkable in every single way. The characters are bland. The best action sequence (which was just someone posing with a spear) happened in the first twenty seconds as an “exciting” preview, and of course was cut and pasted as is later in the episode too. The plot looks like it’ll be a collection quest. Dropped.

This was terrible even by the already low standards of perverted harem shows. The entire episode was basically a slide show, having a brief scene with every character and showing their name on the screen. Plus completely random and pointless fanservice, even worse than the usual tripping and gusts of wind. A  little kid walks up from out of nowhere and lifts up the waitress’s skirt. He complains that they aren’t striped and so he pulls them down. I don’t even know what to say. The only slightly redeeming point of the entire episode was how the main character treated the girl at the bar (see above picture).

I called it quits when the seven year old girl pulled up her skirt and started making dirty jokes, and fast-forwarded through the rest. A cursory glance revealed that the main character is actually a king in some fantasy realm complete with winged creatures. I don’t care though, I’m out for this one.

Tiger and Bunny has a strange premise: superheroes competing in a reality TV show to become the “King of Heroes” and bring fame to their sponsors. Based on the first episode, it’s actually looking quite promising: characters which are certainly not your typical superheroes, intensive and well-animated action scenes, and a healthy dose of cynicism. At this point the closest thing I would compare it to is Starship Operators, although I don’t quite feel that Tiger and Bunny will reach the same level of seriousness.

The show seems to be building up a bunch of intrigue and exploring a bunch of different directions, so it’s hard to say where the main focus will be. But we have already have Tiger’s personal life (he’s definitely not going to keep that promise with his daughter), the relationships between the superheroes, the shake-ups in the corporate hierarchy and the station management, the ethical questions raised by vigilante justice and a “justice” system which values both capturing criminals and commercial time more than the lives of civilians, and the behind the scenes intrigue of Sky High’s backers colluding with criminals to win the competition. It definitely a lot of promising directions to explore, so this show is one to watch.

In the first episode of Hanasaku Iroha, Ohana moves from the city to her grandma’s hot springs hotel in the country after her mother flees their home.

This show is looking quite promising. I thought that going to live in the hot spring hotel would be a happy experience, and she would make friends and have lots of fun and this would be another show about cute girls doing cute things. Boy was I wrong. Her grandmother is harsh and forces her to work, and the employees there are not nice either, especially her roommate Minko who hates her.  In short she’s absolutely miserable. This seems like it may be a show that will actually have some bite (although I don’t doubt that she will eventually grow to get along with everyone). But don’t get friendly, get even. I really want to see Ohana stick it to her grandmother and Minko now.

The confession scene was one of the better ones I’ve seen as well— having it on the slide in the playground and making Ohana fall down at the end was a nice touch. You could see his desperation and Ohana’s confusion well, and it didn’t seem forced like most of those scenes do.

My main concern is that in the first half of this episode, Ohana’s monologues were walking the thin line between intelligence and pretentiousness. This disappeared in the second half once she got to work though, so it’s hard to tell how much of an issue this will be in the rest of show. I’m considering blogging this, depending on what else is on Sunday and how the next episode goes.