Autumn 2014: First Impressions – Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de, Amagi Brilliant Park & Ai Tenchi Muyo!

And we’re back to stuff I’m not keen on – chuunibyou teens, less than magical theme parks and uninspired fanservice – Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de, Amagi Brilliant Park and Ai Tenchi Muyo!

Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de (When Supernatural Battles Become Commonplace)

You know I was still holding out hope right until the end of this episode that some glimmer of the style and energy that has been a key feature of Trigger anime would present itself.  But nope, didn’t happen and I am pretty disappointed by that.  Inou-Battle isn’t terrible it’s just really run-of-the-mill and pretty much exhausted its repertoire of jokes before it was midway through the episode!  This is a very standard chuunibyou story, the only twist being that the characters actually get the superpowers they’re fantasising about….although still seem to be lacking a meaningful outlet for their practical use.  I doubt they’ll be spinning their wheels for long though and the show will become a teen superhero sort of show – just with more inane clubroom chatter.

On the production front, while it is fairly decent looking there is no real spark of creativity.  The presentation is exceptionally flat considering how much fun Trigger usually has with their visuals.  Character designs are really bog standard too – archetypes we’ve seen time and time again in harem anime.

Again, this isn’t a terrible show and I’d probably have kept it on once upon a time as being fairly inoffensive and moderately entertaining.  However I am trying to cut down on the amount of meh shows I pick up so I’ll be skipping this.  Hopefully Trigger come back with something more interesting once they’ve paid their bills.

Amagi Brilliant Park

So KyoAni’s latest offering then.  As expected it is a well polished episode and I was reasonably entertained throughout – there was just something fun about musket girl’s absolute monotone delivery of hype-filled statements about the most horribly run-down theme park attractions – it did start to get old though so I’m glad the magic aspect was added in at the end.  Slightly bewildered as to why the girls think a narcissistic highschool boy who was a former child actor will be able to turn their beleaguered theme park around – surely a marketing specialist would be a much better choice?  But ah, anime……couldn’t have a weird harem if we were sensible!

In terms of production, well it’s KyoAni so the animation is beautifully done with lots of attention to detail and the world is populated with well polished, cute girls in adorable outfits.  There is also the customary highly detailed OP and somewhat artsy ED – it is business as usual for a KyoAni show.

This is a fairly decent episode, but just seems to lack something to make it pop.  I’m keeping it on, but it isn’t high priority and may get dropped if the writing doesn’t grab me.

Ai Tenchi Muyo!

So these are 4 minute long shorts and all we really got treated to in this episode is Tenchi getting attacked by a stream of cute girls.  So the set up here is that Tenchi is now 22 and a trainee teacher in this school populated by girls in non-existent skirts.  Expect zero plot and lots of clichéd fanservice because that’s all we really have time for in 4 minutes.

The new artstyle is going to take a bit of getting used to – I sort of like the designs, but the costumes are a bit ridiculous.  I’m not sure if I’ll keep this on for the full run (it is 50 episodes), but I’m curious about how they’re going to work in the original cast.  While I loved the original Tenchi OVA & Universe TV series, I’m not really keen on seeing that kind of fanservice in modern shows – we’ll see how long I last.