Winter 2011 – First Impressions (Starry Sky & Rio: Rainbow Gate)

So here we go again – the start of another season.  I try to sample at least the first episodes of most things to see how they stand up to my gut reaction at preview stage; sometimes I’m right, sometimes I’m wrong – it’s always fun to find out!

We’re kicking off the season with two fanservice shows – Starry Sky (which has its eye on the female demographic), and Rio: Rainbow Gate (which has plenty of shiny boobs for the boys).

Starry Sky

I’ve watched two episodes of this………and its utter tripe! Not even my depraved fangirl side can pretend this is anything other than poorly slapped together pandering – I’m not even sure if the original fans of the otome game this is based on will enjoy this rubbish! Each of the bishies will be getting 2 10min episodes each, however if Capricorn’s two episodes are any indication there will be huge amounts of recycled footage and absolutely no resolution. Starry Sky just seems entirely pointless.

Even on the production front things are pretty poor. I know that DEEN are hardly the best studio, but the can draw bishies – just look at Hakuouki, it was pretty if nothing else! This is just meh, and the seiyuu seem to know it since they sound like they’re phoning in their performance.

Overall its quite disappointing, but since its only 10mins of my time each week I know I’ll watch it all regardless! XD

 

Rio: Rainbow Gate

Dear god – my pre-season assessment was spot on with this terribad travesty…..just add poorly animated and very, very shiny, to the ‘boobs, gambling, cosplay & fanservice and you have Rio – Rainbow Gate!

Rio has this special skill where she can set foot inside any casino and suddenly everyone in the room starts winning – you have to wonder why she’s allowed to work for a casino if she’s going to cause it to haemorrhage money whenever she tries to do any real work as a dealer! It’s probably for this reason that the perverted casino owner (with the biggest mouth I think I’ve ever seen) keeps Rio away from the tables by making her dress up in various skimpy outfits and wander about the place doing ‘promotion’ for the resort…….Rio isn’t very bright. There was some sort of plot where the villain was a teddy bear collector (although I was more distracted by the fact he sounded like Tatsumi from Shiki) and a very strange poker game where Rio & Mr Villain seemed to think they were in Yu Gi Oh or something…….it was a bizarre episode. Utterly awful, but straying into the ‘so bad its good’ territory at times!

Production values are terrible. Have I mentioned the shininess!? Everything looks like its been coated in a fine layer of baby oil or something! Also the way the camera appears to be glued to either Rio’s boobs or arse is distracting – they don’t even bounce convincingly! Oh then there’s the eyes! The hideous, creepy eyes!! They’ll eat your soul!! Urgh. I didn’t pay much attention to the voice acting (I was too busy dying of laughter at the crappy dialogue and rubbish animation) I suppose it was fine. There was no OP this week, and the ED was even more pure fanservice – the accompanying song made me want to claw my ears off though.

Yeah. Rio – Rainbow Gate was terrible, but I’d kind of urge you to watch it for the lulz, I may even give it another episode depending on what kind of form I’m in next week