Category: Shinryaku! Ika Musume

Aah, and it went so well!

This episode… it contained the “why the heck are you pulling so many twists at the last moment only to make them pointless at the end?”-syndrome, and it’s unfortunately the bad variant of it. Let me explain what I mean by that:

I was actually fairly impressed with this episode for its main part: the final two segments actually were an actual conclusion to the series. It was completely out of left field, but actually worked surprisingly well. Squid Girl actually suddenly loses her powers due to some mysterious reason, which pretty much makes her hopes for world conquest impossible. After returning to the sea for one year she returns and actually seems to have accepted that she’s not special anymore. She’s really about to significantly change as a character.

And then out of nowhere, the scientists launch a giant whirlpool that conveniently swallows Eiko and makes Squid Girl magically regain her powers immediately in order to save Eiko’s life, completely nullifying just about every part of the serious development that was put into Squid Girl. What the heck was that?

This episode was horribly rushed. It’s the kind of ending where the creators first want to give some decent conclusion to the characters, only to hear at the last minute that they’re not allowed to because of the possibilities of a second season that this series doesn’t need. It’s these kinds of endings that I hate, especially when it’s obvious that too little thought has been put in it. I mean, the final two segments weren’t even funny. It would have been better to just pick the funniest chapter of the manga in order to end with a bang.

This final episode is a shame, but it doesn’t ruin this series at all, because it never really was building up to it, so only these final two segments were wasted and nothing else.

I hardly ever blog pure comedy series because you never know which ones turn out to be great based on just their first episode. Squid Girl however was consistently fun to sit through and write about. It’s perhaps not the best comedy this season, but the reason why I picked this series over Panty and Stocking and Tantei Opera Milky Holmes was that it had by far the most solid characters of the three. In the end there is very little character-development, but Squid Girl’s characterization really is something the creators should be proud of.
Rating: – (Disappointing)

What…. was the inspiration for that first segment? This show has this tendency to sometimes use really creepy jokes, and this was another one of them. I mean, Squid Girl is one thing, but even I would be disturbed if I had to sleep next to such a creepy doll. Just shows the bizarre things that kids get into at a young age. Oh, and of course Eiko as a child was awesome.

The other two segments mainly stood out because of some hilarious standalone jokes. The American researchers have always been a bit corny, but I have to admit that I laughed really hard when that black guy put on that invisibility suit and started toying with Squid Girl and Eiko. In the same way, I loved it when Squid Girl got attacked by all kinds of animals in the third segment. My favourite was the bear.

Oh, and that first segment was also good in the way that we finally saw an entire segment of Sanae without these obsessive tendencies of her. That was really needed to balance out her character, and remind us that she used to be just a normal girl and childhood friend of Eiko.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

The first segment of this episode probably was the funniest segment of Squid Girl so far. It’s just brilliant!

At first it seemed pretty boring, as everyone was inside due to heavy rain and they started to make Teruterubouzus (those things that Japanese people hang up next to their windows to try and make it stop raining), but then Squid Girl suddenly revealed her amazing drawing skills, and then proceeded to draw everyone in the way that they appeared to her. Some of these drawings were utterly priceless, like the one of herself, the one of Takeru and the one of Shizuru. It was a bizarre glimpse in what goes on in the mind of Squid Girl.

And there’s much more in this episode than just that, since it also spent quite a bit of time on Takeru making a Teruterubouzu, which eventually led to some of Squid Girl’s interpretations of it, including dressing herself up as one (very cute, by the way), a giant one, and some rejected ones with the most hilarious faces. I also loved that scene in which Squid Girl threw her Teruterubouzu dress on top of Eiko: we only saw the aftermath of it and she didn’t say anything, but her reaction was just awesome.

The second and third segment in comparison were rather mellow, although I do have to give the second credit for its creepiness factor. It’s a bit lame that it ended with a reset ending, though: Sanae is again exactly the same at the end, which is a bit of a pity. The third segment though… was just too predictable. Squid Girl enters a baseball match and blows everyone away, it wasn’t that special except for the end in which the opponent team suddenly begged Squid Girl to join them.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Another hilarious episode, especially the first two parts rocked and were able to get the best out of Squid Girl. The first part was awesome because of all of the things that go on inside Squid Girl’s head, the second part was awesome because of her antics, while the third part was more focused on the side-characters, and was probably the first story in which Squid Girl did not take up one of the lead roles.

The first part was really good at Squid Girl’s usual habits of making an elephant out of a mosquito when it escalates a simple game of Knock Knock Ginger to the point of Squid Girl getting a new best friend. (On a side-note: that game really has different names in all kinds of different countries: the Japanese call it “Pin-Pon Dash”, while in the Netherlands we call it “Belletje Trekken”, which roughly translates to a childish version of “Pull the Bell”). I especially liked how her antics in this cased managed to surprise even Shizuru, who usually is in control of everything.

The second part was all about makeup. It started all innocently with some lipstick, but I especially loved the scene in which Squid Girl went to get some tips from those trendy girls and ended up looking absolutely ridiculous. This episode also had a lot of fun putting makeup on the rest of the cast, which worked surprisingly well.

The creators did miss a chance to include some neat continuity when Squid Girl ended up painting her face with some coloured marker. The segment ends quickly after that with Squid Girl looking perfectly fine in the next one. In the third segment, they could have had her complain about how long it took to get that off, to introduce some interesting continuity between the different episodes. Also, at the end of this episode the entire restaurant gets destroyed. I really fear that the next episode will just skip to the rebuilt restaurant, though it will be awesome if the next episode focused on rebuilding the entire thing.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Okay, we don’t have to worry about this series running out of material. With this episode the creators showed that they can make something as simple as an umbrella awesome. The third part of this episode was definitely my favourite sketch of the past three episodes. Generally, for me the best episodes of Squid Girl have been not the ones who focused on some gimmicky character, but instead left Squid Girl and her imagination alone for a while, only to observe the carnage. Squid Girl was just too adorable as she discovered the magic wonders of the umbrella.

The other two parts of this episode also rocked. In the first part we see Squid Girl as she catches a truly bizarre disease that makes her hungry for shrimps in a way not too dissimilar from a person drinking sea water: eating them would only make her more and more hungry until she’d eat as much until she dies. How do they think of it? The episode also built up to a great punch-line at the end with the shrimp costume making its return.

The second part also was hilarious as it introduced another part of Squid Girl’s bizarre powers: her hat, as it suddenly starts moving. It’s a pretty useless power, although it seems quite powerful (I loved the part where she tried to squat a mosquito with it). A large part of the episode was also spent om some bickering between Squid Girl and Takeru and a friend of his, which also was just priceless.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

This episode was about the scared girl, the scientist woman and the owner of that other beach restaurant. It both revisited old premises, but brought enough new stuff to the table.

The first part looked like it was going to develop the scared girl a bit, only for it to reset itself at the end. It’s her story that’s currently in the most danger of being milked out, although it was very funny to see her discover Squid Girl playing video games at night.

The second part of the episode was mostly fun because it introduced a bunch of goofball scientists who clearly have been working too long on their jobs at finding alien life. Squid Girl herself also had a lot of neat antics in her quest to gather subordinates: the banter between the different characters was really great in this part, even though it was completely stupid at times.

The third segment: I really liked that scene in which Squid Girl was put in that room with a drum-set: you could just bet your hat that she’d eventually use her hair on it (which was awesome, by the way). I also have to praise the creators for not dragging out the hot shy girl joke. At all, especially when any regular moe show would have overstated/ the jokes around her and her boobs way too much. Apart from that, this was a typical part which just let Squid Girl alone, and instead of relying on banter it just relied on her own random antics. Worked well.

But still, this episode again wasn’t as good as some of the other Squid Girl episodes: it had its funny moments, but it wasn’t as funny as the first five episodes, and neither was it as creative. Now, the interesting thing is going to be whether this show will pick itself up again, or whether it really ran out of steam. Everything is still possible at this point, especially since this episode looked like it was building up quite a few things for future episodes.

As for the animation… that one also took a bit of a nose dive, unfortunately. Again, it’s nowhere near bad, but it’s not as god as it used to be. In the previous episodes Squid Girl was really well animated, with a ton of frames spent on her movement, but unfortunately this episode didn’t have that. Again, the question remains whether or not the creators are saving their budget, or they blew it all on the first five episodes…
Rating: * (Good)

A consistently funny episode, though unlike the previous episode there wasn’t really one thing that stood out. This episode wasn’t really anything special for this series’ standards, but it still packed some great jokes. The biggest problem with this episode was that half of its jokes weren’t fresh.

What I mean by that mostly lies in the first and third segment: the first segment featured super sentai parodies: that has been done plenty of times before. The third meanwhile came with no new material and instead was more of a set-up, developing a bizarre love polygon that is probably going to be used by future episodes. It has the potential to spiral out of control to be hilarious, but at the moment it still revolved around the scared girl being scared of Squid Girl, which was already featured in this series.

Nevertheless though, all of the segments had something fun. In the first segment, I love how down to earth the people organizing the sentai show were: they were perfect straight men for the antics of Squid Girl and the way in which she took over their performance. The second segment rocked because of how we suddenly discovered that Squid Girl was really good at math. It was obviously meant as something silly at which Squid Girl would completely outclass Eiko at, but to think that the creators went with math of all things.

As for the third segment, I can see what the creators did there. At first I was fearing another forced love triangle or something, but the twist here that everything exists in Eiko’s head definitely made for a bunch of laughs here. At the same time I’m quite surprised at how the creators have restrained themselves from devoting a segment on Goro’s crush on Chizuru: especially this early in the series it probably would have come off horribly forced with predictable romantic jokes you see everywhere. When it surfaces here and there though, it has its charms.
Rating: * (Good)