Fall 2021 First Impressions: Shin no Nakama, Muv-Luv Alternative, Puraore! Pride of Orange

Shin no Nakama ja Nai to Yuusha no Party wo Oidasareta node, Henkyou de Slow Life suru Koto ni Shimashita

Short Synopsis: I Was Kicked out of the Brave Man’s Party Because I Wasn’t a True Companion so I Decided to Have a Slow Life at the Frontier.

Amun: Ho hum, another silly show that’s put the synopsis as the title. And they messed up the translation of “hero” to “brave man”, although it’s clearly a woman? Ha! This is probably going to be terrible. Wait…wait a second. Wait…that wasn’t too bad. Huh…the animation wasn’t terrible. There was a hint of nuance to the characters’ backstories. There are some interesting character dynamics that aren’t completely romantic. It’s not an isekai?! The owl-bear is a fun monster design?!! Hold on lads, this is not a drill – we might have a real show on our hands! Oh, here comes the main girl – never mind, false alarm. In all seriousness, this was not a bad opening episode, considering some of the major duds we’ve had recently (Tatoeba Last Dungeon comes to mind). I’m pretty interested, especially considering the emotional baggage and constraints put on the main character. Most of the red flags I’m seeing come from the OP/ED, and that’s not a surefire judge of how a show will progress (I mean, if you judged Vanitas from the OP, you’d be beyond puzzled at the show itself). I guess the premise sounds so flat on paper, that I’m going to be skeptical the whole season until it proves me wrong. Which it very well could do. I’m saying there is exactly a 50% chance of this being watchable and 50% chance of me dropping it next week.

Potential: 50.000%

Lenlo: A title that’s basically your synopsis? Check. Fantasy world? Check. Opening info dump about a demon lord? Check. Adventuring guild system with maid outfits, massive tits and ranks? Check. Class based power system rather than any kind of meaningful granularity? Check. MC with a “unique” blessing that makes them OP in their own way? Check. That same bog standard “SAO Lite” visual style? Check. A harem? Not confirmed but clearly in the works. Everything about this show just screams unimaginative Light Novel adaptation. Oh sure the basic idea of your overpowered starting companion getting outscaled and kicked out is fine enough. It’s a nice premise for a short story! But between the title and this being a Light Novel I’m not expecting this to grow or do anything interesting whatsoever. It’s a premise created to hook you in early and then go absolutely nowhere. If that’s your thing, if you just want some probably wholesome popcorn entertainment, then have at. But for me this is a pass.

Potential: 20%

Muv-Luv Alternative

Short Synopsis: 36 million Japanese citizens are wiped out in an alien invasion.

Wooper: I’m not a visual novel guy, so I had no idea what Muv-Luv Alternative was about before watching. I still don’t know how the story will progress after having seen it, since the premiere was a giant prologue – one that focused far more on setting and action than on character. But I’m okay with that, because the first episode is all I’m likely to watch, and it surely succeeded on its own terms. Gruesome aliens storm a major human settlement and kill everything in sight while mecha pilots offer feeble resistance – that’s the direction we got here, and though my lack of connection to the cast prevented me from feeling horrified, I did find myself thinking, “They actually went there?” at several points. Hundreds of civilians were slaughtered after their shelter was breached. Diminutive nutsack monsters fired laser beams from their eyes. The boring male lead seemed to drown in monster acid while trapped in a cockpit (though the post-credits teaser indicated that he’s still alive 25 years in the future). The CG was rough, but there’s no way you can animate alien hordes using traditional methods in 2021 when even background actors are commonly rendered in 3D. By the end of the episode, I believed in the bleakness of this alternative history – I just have no interest in seeing what comes next.

Potential: 30%

Lenlo: Ah the second dystopian “mecha” series of the season. Where Eighty Six is gunning for a “nuanced” political drama where the real enemy is your fellow man, Muv-Luv is more your standard “Faceless, nameless, unknowable entity whom you can’t talk to”. It’s all about unbeatable odds, giant monsters and over the top brutal deaths. Oh and skintight, form-fitting outfits. We can’t forget about those. And I have to say… the comparison isn’t favorable for Muv-Luv. Even on a purely visual level Muv-Luv’s rough CGI, boorish backgrounds and early 2000’s designs simply can’t compare to its competitors. Meanwhile on the story side it’s exactly as Wooper said: I don’t know or care about any of these people. Yeah the world sucks… but so does the show so why should I give a damn? Fact is, there are better mecha series within Muv-Luv’s own franchise, not to mention anime as a whole. This one is a pretty easy pass for me.

Potential: 0%

Puraore! Pride of Orange

Short Synopsis: A middle school embroidery club signs up for a day of ice hockey training, thus beginning their journey to represent Japan in the Women’s World Cup.

Lenlo: Pardon my language but… What the fuck. First you try to make a series about hockey but choose the version of the sport where the players aren’t allowed to body check each other into the wall at 20 miles per hour. Then you open on the absolute fantasy of Japan beating CANADA of all countries at the World Cup of Hockey, something I don’t think Japan has ever even been to. Then it turns the whole thing into an idol performance on stage! Just… Just picking a fucking genre! Sports, Idol, CGDCT, I don’t care! Just pick one and focus on it! But no. Puraore tries to go for all of them at once and in doing so fails to achieve any of them. I imagine even CGDCT fans will want to give this show a pass.

Potential: 0%

Wooper: Pride of Orange’s dialogue is some of the worst that I’ve read this year. Here are some snippets: “The bonds of our hearts connect the puck!” “Nothing says ‘springtime of youth’ like sweat and sports!” And, talking about an embroidery club: “We all share a common thread!” These are just the tip of Puraore’s iceberg of cheese, and the rest of the show is no better. I thought we might be in for a decent Cute Girls Playing Cute Sports series after the opening scene, a solidly animated flashforward to the team’s appearance at the World Cup, but then came the subsequent Idols on Ice performance, and it was all downhill from there. Back in the present, the main characters don’t even have broad archetypes to fall back on, as they all fit into the same impossibly optimistic bucket. One is a little shy, though, so whoever drafted her personality must have woken up for a couple minutes during his high school lit teacher’s lesson on characterization (then gone back to sleep for the rest of the year). Anime blogger Scamp tags these sorts of shows “girls being insufferably nice to each other,” and I can’t imagine a better phrase – emphasis on “insufferably” in this show’s case.

Potential: 0%

4 thoughts on “Fall 2021 First Impressions: Shin no Nakama, Muv-Luv Alternative, Puraore! Pride of Orange

  1. PuraOre confirmed all of my concerns about where the industry might very well go with UmaMusu’s explosive popularity on all fronts (anime, manga, gacha game). I was only kidding when I made a whole bunch of pre-suppositions that this show was merely going to just be UmaMusu’s format (the insufferable CGDCT/idol/sport format of s1 which also made all the money in 2018 thanks to associations to another gacha game, not the inspirational Disney-schmaltzy sports biopic format of s2) of shoving idols into a sport just from the promo art and initial trailer, and they had to go and prove me right.

    Prepare to see more companies trying and failing to copy and cash in on the success of that accursed horse girl idol series moving forward, because PuraOre is merely one of the first major casualties of that trend. It’s only going to get worse from here as the cross media franchises start piling up.

    1. Also that part where the coach admits that shoving in idols into ice hockey was the only way to get people in Japan interested in the sport? Not funny, not witty. Horrible attempt to come off as self-aware (as if the self-aware humor in Western media was bad enough, it’s usually awful).

  2. Just a small correction on Muv Luv. The guy who drowned in acid is indeed completely dead. The post credits scene is actually a different character who the real protagonist of the story.

Leave a Reply