Summer 2012: First Impressions (Campione!, Kokoro Connect & Dakara Boku wa, H ga Dekinai!?)

Busy day, pity there isn’t much quality.  Oh well lets look at battling gods, body switching and libido as a power source………….Campione!, Kokoro Connect and Dakara Boku wa, H ga Dekinai!?

Campione!

You know if you stick Campione and NakaImo together I believe that you will have every light novel cliché in existence covered.  Where NakaImo has all the high school s’life tropes, Campione is an unholy amalgamation of all the magical girlfriend series ever created.  Again I find myself somewhat impressed by how utterly lacking in originality this series is – it really is somewhat amazing!  There’s nothing overly wrong with the show really, I suppose if you had never seen the previous 1000 iterations of this exact premise, you’d find Campione pretty cool – however I’ve seen this exact same show with very few changes a hundred times before, and am in no hurry to watch another one.

Production values are okay I suppose, I don’t know why the show decided to start off in Sardinia, because it completely fails to capitalise on its exotic location.  The lead female makes a stab at some Italian, but quickly switches to Japanese making me wonder just what the point of that exchange was.  The acting isn’t great – the girl sounds like every other bossy tsundere ever, and the fella is basically yet another bland everylead who suddenly switches from useless to cool for no apparent reason at the end.  We also have the narrator from Kaiji suddenly pop in at the end – which made me laugh for a good few minutes!

So yeah, this is not a good show – it’s very, very dumb, but pretty harmless overall.  Dropped.

Kokoro Connect

Kokoro Connect’s premise has potential, but this first episode had me struggling to care about anything it was saying or doing.  The problem is that it’s very boring and dull looking – not at all what I was expecting from Silver Link whose whole shtick is their wacky SHAFT-lite style.  Instead they seem to be doing a very poor job of copying KyoAni’s usual aesthetic since we’ve got K-ON! character designs but very little of the technical excellence KyoAni excel at.

The characters aren’t really all that interesting either, and they way they chatter on mindlessly while not saying a whole lot was pretty tiring – high school students aren’t interesting at the best of times, but when you have really normal & boring high school students as your entire central cast, things get really dull.  Things got better when the body switching came into play as the voice actors did a really good job of impersonating each other, so hopefully the series will improve as the body switching really kicks into gear.

So not the most exciting start, but there is plenty of scope in this series so I’ll give it another few episodes to redeem itself.

Dakara Boku wa, H ga Dekinai!? (So I Can’t Play H!?)

Well this was just bad, but at least it didn’t even attempt to be anything other than an excuse for fanservice & explosions.  The lead this time is that relatively recent lead character archetype of the unrepentant pervert – a fella who is utterly unashamed of his love of ecchi hijinks, which is kind of a change from the standard closet pervert lead I suppose.  The female lead on the other hand is a generic tsundere magical girlfriend with no other distinguishing characteristics.  Stuff happens, there is a bath scene with tits, male lead shoves his face in girls crotch, there’s a fight scene with a tentacle monster, male lead gropes girls boobs, house gets blown up, blah blah blah – so fecking generic.

Production is reasonable, they certainly loved their magical fire and drawing wet t-shirts though.  This is another show with Hiro Shimono on full screech mode which instantly turned me off – I really don’t like him when he’s doing this kind of character.  Girl is just bog standard tsundere so there’s nothing much to say about her acting.

So I’m definitely not keeping this on, it really was completely crap.