Summer 2010 – First Impressions (Mitsudomoe & Black Lagoon OVA)

I’m on a roll today (god bless painkillers!) – Mitsudomoe and Black Lagoon: Roberta’s Blood Trail OVA are up next!

Mitsudomoe

Looks like I may have to eat my words slightly. The character designs still freak me right the hell out with their hideousness; but this inital episode of Mitsudomoe was actually pretty damn funny! The humor is scraping the barrel kind of lowbrow, and actually cringeworthyly wrong in places; but it still made me laugh quite a lot as it is utterly random at times. The stars of the show really are the triplets with their ridiculously skewed personalities, the teachers only exist to bounce jokes off of and provide the straightman (and he even failed at that sometimes). The nurse is just annoying though, I took an instant dislike to her. Judging from the OP there will be quite a large cast as all the kids of the class seem to have their own quirky personalities which gravitate to one of the triplets in some way or another.

The episode is split into three stories – bland male teacher’s attempt to break the ice with his new class, the triplets attempts to get him together with the school nurse and his buying the class a hamster. Its hit and miss with the jokes, but they come thick and fast enough to cover the misses. Music is maddenly catchy and voice acting is pretty solid. I hate the character designs, but the animation itself is pretty nice and the direction is also interesting.

I’ll catch a few more episodes of this to see if it goes anywhere or degenerates into recycling the jokes, as it was pretty amusing despite how ugly it is.

Black Lagoon: Roberta’s Blood Trail OVA

Ah good old Black Lagoon. You can always be counted on to provide amazing action scenes and awesome characters, why can’t all series be this entertaining!? It’s a pity this isn’t a full TV series because without a shadow of a doubt, it would be my pick of the season!

Anyway, this episode is mostly spent fleshing out Roberta and refamiliarisng ourselves with the residents of Roanapur. We learn that in the time Roberta has been away she’s trained a mini-me maid to guard the Lovelace families young master in her absence; because the plot of these OVAs seems to be Roberta travelling about the place torturing and killing people in her quest of vengeance! Sounds promising doesn’t it?  Mini-me Meido’s introduction was absolutely brilliant – loved the choreography and variety in that fight scene; it promises good things in the future!

The animation was pretty damn good throughout the episode, I watched was tagged as the TV-edit, but there didn’t seem to be any censoring at all. Further investigation reveals that the DVD cut will be ~10mins longer…….so looks like I’ll have to watch the episode again in a few weeks! Ah such a chore~ 😆

The usual cast is back, and it seems like they’re trying to bring Benny and Dutch back into things after 2nd Barrage mostly focused on Revy & Rock. However this inital episode really was more about Roberta than anyone else. It’s great to have her back with her many and varied methods of torture! The OP is a remixed version of the TV OP (much prefer the original mix) and the ED was a pretty decent number.

Hard to really review this and remain spoiler free – basically these OVAs are clearly being made for fans of the TV series, so if you like me loved the TV series you’re going to love the OVAs, as there are lots of little nods to the previous series. I loved it.