Category: Level E

Oh my god. This episode was completely different from what I expected, and yet it continued this series’ streak of awesome episodes like it was nothing! Heck, there was very little comedy in this episode, and it really tried to tell a serious story, and it worked like an absolute charm here! Why the heck did this brilliant of a manga take this long to get animated?!

The thing that immediately sticks out: the graphics in this episode are absolutely amazing. The visual effects are incredibly imaginative and there are a ton of different ideas that looked absolutely gorgeous and that had had no intention at all to look conventional. I mean, holy crap: this is how you make a show with a tight budget! It’s also the contrast with the graphics of the previous three episodes that makes the graphics of this episode stand out.

Also, the story: from out of nowhere, it stars four random high school students with no hint whatsoever from the lead characters. That takes balls there, especially this early on in the series. What’s also great is that the creators pretty much created four distinctive and interesting male characters here: they feel unlike many of the other high school students that we’ve been seeing in anime and they’re completely away from any cliches. The dialogue and characterization is excellent and down to earth.

The episode basically revolves around those four guys as they witness an alien killing a young girl. The story of this alien was also really excellent and tragic: the case of an alien who eats the females in order to reproduce. It made for a really tense climax. All in all it was a brilliant episode…

And the irony is that that moronic prince came up with it! Oh, lord that anti-climax at the end just sealed the deal here. Usually whenever a character comes up with a story it’s pretty lame, but to create such a good scenario here… the creators really showed that this guy is a genius by not portraying him as a terrible storyteller.

I absolutely love David Production at this point. I mean, they continue to go right against the current trends, and they continue to animate stories that make you wonder why the heck nobody else had taken them before, and give them really worthwhile renditions. Ironically, they also don’t seem to care about the “pretty first episode”-syndrome in which creators put a lot of their efforts on the graphics of the first episode as a means to draw people in: first there was Bantorra with the ugly CG boat of episode 1, and now too: the first episode of Level E wasn’t really anything special in terms of graphics, but this episode looked utterly gorgeous.
Rating: *** (Awesome)

That. Was amazing. Seriously, this show completely blows 95% of all comedies completely out of the water. These past three episodes have been absolutely fantastic.

I was really wondering how the creators were planning to top the first two episodes. Somehow, they did, with one heck of an awesome anti-climax. To think that a show would start with an introductory arc that was pretty much one big joke, I just love the guts that this series has. All of the build-up and the bloody drama of the previous episodes was rendered completely useless. In the last episode I noted how this series really knows how to plan ahead. I didn’t think it would be to such an extent, though.

I also remember noting how, before the twist, some of the aliens were acting a bit weird, and how the Diskonians were getting a bit too one-sided when their attack begun. To think that they were all acting this. Even the prince’s outrageous behavior now totally make sense when you think that throughout the entire airtime of these first three episodes, he pretty much was nothing but being one giant troll.

What also made this such an amazing episode was the characters who were on the receiving side of the prank. You could really see that that prince completely got on the nerves of his three subordinates and it was completely awesome to see that one bodyguard’s eyes twinkle at the prospect of getting to kick the prince in order to attempt to restore his memory.

The time-skip of three months is also getting interesting (I also like how the main character actually got a tan from practicing outside so much). After this the main storyline should probably start. With this kind of series, it can really be anything. Level E has been by far my favourite show this season, and to think that this only was the introduction. Seriously, it’s been a long while since I’ve seen a show that had SUCH a good start: there have been plenty of series with excellent first episodes, but the ones who can keep this up for three whole episodes are really rare.
Rating: **** (Fantastic)

As for the series I’m not going to blog:
– Beelzebub is just crap. Why does this director keep getting work?
– Zombie is being overshadowed by the other comedies this season. It’s funny, but not the funniest of the season.
– I’m probably going to pick up Dragon Crisis after Showa Monogatari’s four preview episodes end. It’s enjoyable, but I don’t have any room for it right now.

Meanwhile, Level E is just unbelievable: this second episode was even better than the first. This show is absolutely amazing, and just about every scene in this episode was just awesome. It’s been a while since I’ve seen such a good comedy as this one, and this is coming after the Autumn Season of 2010, which had more excellent comedies than you could shake a stick at. The comedic timing, the build-up and voice acting in this show are all just perfect.

I also loved how this show subverted various alien cliches. Usually when aliens come to earth, they try to blend in by putting on some kind of people suit, right? This episode premiered some new aliens as just human-like, but they travel around in these bizarre cheesy alien costumes. Or take those scenes in which the aliens are surprised by some of humanity’s inventions, which this episode parodied by having that blond-haired alien enjoy the heck out of the snow on a broken television set.

I also love the main characters. Yukitaka and Miho in particular, as they turned out to be nothing like the first episode made them out to be. Yukitaka already had an interesting background with his history as a bench-warmer at Japan’s top baseball school. This episode also revealed that he was a former punk (and used that extremely well, by the way). Miho meanwhile threw all stereotypes away in this episode with her own unique backstory, being raised in an extremely paranoid way. I especially like how sharp she is: she immediately notices everything around her, including Yukitaka’s backstory. Seriously, a lot more female leads should follow her example.

In fact, there are a ton of characters who are completely different from what they appear: it was for a long while a mystery what these men in suit were, and the cat turned out to be… a walking alien camera. This is just full of these awesome details and nice ideas.

Oh and on a side-note: don’t try to look up the long-haired alien’s name on sites as Myanimelist and AniDB. I did, and unfortunately just spoiled myself to an awesome joke that the creators have in store for us for the next number of episodes and that only amazed me even more of how extremely well this show is planned out.
Rating: **** (Fantastic)