Winter 2015: First Impressions – Absolute Duo, Kancolle and The Testament of Sister New Devil

Well it couldn’t be all good, so after yesterdays pretty decent start to the season we get utter dreck today.  So here’s some amazingly generic LN adaptation, cute girls being warships and a mash-up of every imouto fanservice anime ever made –  Absolute Duo, Kantai Collection – Kancolle and The Testament of Sister New Devil.

Absolute Duo

Absolute Duo, more like Absolute Shite!  This show really has absolutely nothing to really make it stand apart from its Shitty LN Adaptation brethren, and it seems to know that and just gives us a bog standard opening episode with very little effort involved.  We have our magical high school.  We have our quirky educators (bunny maid & goth-loli).  We have our monosyllabic silver haired bishoujo who hails from an exotic land (in this case the super specific land of Scandinavia, ja).  We have our exceptionally bland male lead with the tragic past, who is a special exemption to this worlds rules – yes he is the irregular at magical high school!  And of course our bishoujo with little regard for personal space ends up living with the pure-hearted MC-kun and he will have to weather all sorts of lewd temptations caused by her penchant for wearing nothing but a shirt.  Yes, Absolute Duo has truly put considerable effort into setting up this never before seen scenario!

Things aren’t that much better on the production front and the show often looks pretty shitty – especially during the battle sequence of the entrance ceremony – so I can’t even say “at least it looked pretty”.  Boring and utterly forgettable, I really can’t see anyone getting much out of Absolute Duo, even if shitty LN adaptations are your kind of thing.

Kantai Collection – Kancolle

Yeah, I still don’t get it.  The attraction of Kancolle will forever be lost to me as all I got from this opening episode was “sure does feel like a sub-par Strike Witches in here”.  Kancolle’s premiere episode really doesn’t do much to really sell its premise, unless you enjoy watching girls go about their daily business of being clumsy as hell, gushing over their cool senpai and eating parfait? Oh and then under going some sort of mahou shoujo transformation, acquiring bits of battle ships and then missile spamming some emotionless girl masquerading as the enemy ship.  That bit should have been cool looking and exciting, but the Kancolle anime seemed to miss the memo and thus we get a rather boring fight that mostly focuses on clumsy girl being a menace to her entire team and getting rescued by cool senpai in the end.

I am aware that the premise of Kancolle is pretty damn thin and they really are stretching things to make it into an anime series, but it is really rather disappointing to see how dull this show is.  There is no real hook, nothing to draw in a new audience.  It feels like throwaway fanservice for those who have already been enslaved by their daughter ships.  I certainly won’t be back for more.

The Testament of Sister New Devil (Shinmai Mao no Testament)

Where Absolute Duo was terrible in its dullness, this travesty was so bad it actually defied belief and went all the way round to being kind of entertaining.  The Testament of Sister New Devil is an unholy almagamation of every imouto anime and fanservice anime trope you can think of.  They quite literally seem to have a checklist going on in this first episode and don’t really seem to care how they transition between these tropes.  Okay we need MC-kun to suddenly acquire 2 hot imoutos – just have his dad somehow get remarried, we don’t actually need a new wife though.  We then need MC-kun to instantly molest one of the new imoutos – just have him walk in on her in a public bathroom. Imouto wake-up call? – check.  Accidentally fall on top of her? – check.  In all seriousness we will be here all night if I start listing all the tropes this episode alone contains!

Anyway the plot is our lead character gets two hot imoutos all of a sudden, his dad then flees the country and they reveal themselves to be demons.  Shit goes down and then MC-kun reveals he is super-special too and is in fact a Hero.  Blah, blah, blah – now MC-kun must protect his two hot demon imoutos from wannabe assassins and randomly molest them every now and then.  Yeap.  Another totally unique LN adaptation here.

Again I can’t even say that this looks good, because holy crap does this show have some awful animation!  The character designs are horrendous!  Everyone looks derpy as hell and sort of soulless, and the tsundere demon lord girl has the stupidest looking boobs I’ve seen in anime in a while (and I watched Madan no Ou to Vanadis last season).  The only plus point is that the OP (which didn’t appear until 14mins in) looks kind of cool, but is full of hilarious barbie-doll nudity.

I suppose if you’re looking for a show that gives you all the fanservice tropes with very little plot to interfere with things, Testament of Sister New Devil could be the show for you!  As for me?  Dropped.