Category: Kami-Sama no Memo-Chou

The fourth episode is traditionally a place for either the first big climax of a series, or a silly episode meant to flesh out certain characters. This was the latte, in which the cast tries to sniff out an underwear thief.

And yeah, that could have been better, and it could have been worse. I mean, it’s obvious that a show like Kamisama Dolls is better at these kinds of scenes because it’s got an actually good comedy director, but I do like that this episode tried to be serious despite having such a silly premise. It did make the revelation of the true culprit strangely contrasting and funny.

I can understand the need for this kind of an episode: it’s good to break up the mood and show more of the characters. I’d just wish that JC-Staff would pick something other than weird fanservice. The underwear thief wasn’t really the bad part of this episode: it had this nice camp-ness. Instead the creators couldn’t refuse to bring Alice in and start making small boob jokes. That’s where it really turned into the bloody overused territory. Go for something different, will ya!?

But I digress: this was a very good episode for Min. At the end of the episode Alice delivered a very good twist to the story, and I did not suspect that the creators would bring in her father at this point. The story between the two of them is very good, down to earth and yet a bit silly, and it worked out really well., on top of asking a few more questions (why didn’t she recognize her own father).

What puzzles me though is why the creators picked Min of all people to give some real depth. Seriously, she’s the most fleshed out character at this point, having gotten two full episodes of attention. Of course, it would be great if she were just the tip of the iceberg, but that entirely depends on the length of this series. This show is one of the very few series this season of which it’s still a mystery of exactly how long it’s going to be, but Ideally you’d want 24 episodes for this thing. Especially considering how large the cast is, and how much time this episode just devoted to one of them.
Rating: * (Good)

And this show too breaks the Kujou-syndrome. Finally, this episode gave the male lead some character. He may not be a detective, but this episode instead established him as a con-man, and certainly something other than an idiot who just holds the others back. Instead, his main flaw is that he’s physically weak, which is something that plenty of other characters have covered here. In other words: the main cast are all filling in for each others’ weaknesses, which is a very good thing to spice things up.

On top of that, the fanservice in this episode was a lot more subtle and actually didn’t feel out of place, plus the comic relief also got better and balanced. This may seem like small nitpicking, but when it was the main flaw of the first two episodes, it’s really great to see this improve as well.

Now, I did cringe when the male lead suddenly claimed that banks could easily be hacked and all, but thankfully they realized that such a thing was impossible. That’s also quite rare in series that feature hacking: generally those seem to believe that even potato chips can be hacked. . Now, this episode did not have the most interesting villains who on top of that were dumbed down in order to make them a) believe this b) fail to overtake a high school kid dragging another high school kid around and c) not taking a lot of security measures in case something went wrong. I can forgive this for the sake of variety, though, since the first episode did have interesting villains.

I can understand using Yakuza as a villain and all, since they’re pretty much one of the biggest criminal organizations in the world and all, but the problem is that they’re always portrayed very stereotypically. Kaiji is currently one of the few series who really made them an actual threat. This is not just criticism on this episode, but on anime in general.

This is just nit-picking, though. the dialogue is still among the best of the season, and once again this episode put a ton of new information about its characters in just these 20 minutes. For variety’s sake this episode also had much less Alice than usual, which also is good to spice things up and prevent one character from standing out too much. I’m surprised at how large the cast already is in this series, but I have to say that this is a great attempt at a series with a huge cast so far. The key is to give everyone enough time to show off, while at the same time not trying to make everyone equal a la Idolm@ster.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Kami-Sama no Memo-Chou will be the fourth series I’m going to blog this series. After Penguin Drum, it had the best first episode of the new season, but then again it did get extra time to prove itself. I was a bit worried about it because the episodes afterwards were slated for just 25 minutes, but there is no need to worry: this episode ended with a cliff-hanger, so episode length isn’t going to be the issue.

In any case, the reason I chose this over some of the other new series this season: the dialogue. The script of this is huge, and is amongst the best of the season. JC Staff are really a studio with their ups and downs, and especially Hidan no Aria and Twin Angel were worse than I ever could have imagined, but in comparison, Kami-Sama no Memo-Chou was really surprisingly solid. I’m not sure whether it’s ever going to go to a continuous story, but that doesn’t matter, really: it’s good enough with its individual stories.

I was really looking forward to this one because it pretty much reunites the anime creators of Asatte no Houkou, a wonderful coming of age drama, but even considering that this is completely different in style. The acting is very good, and especially Alice when she’s on a roll is very interesting to watch. The cat is full of colourful characters, and each episode has plenty of interesting and imaginative twists. It focuses just as much on its story as its characters, and that works out really well so far.

The worst part of this show is that it’s giving me Index II flashbacks, because it has the exact same fanservice scenes (only not as numerous): completely out of nowhere the main character is put into a situation where he sees one of the girls naked, it completely breaks the flow and afterwards it’s never mentioned again aside for one snide remark. That’s really the type of fanservice that I hate, because it serves no point or purpose other than being annoying. It feels slapped onto the series at the last minute by some higher-ups. It got really bad in Index II, but that was because it was only magnifying a lot of other issues I had with it. With Memo-Chou so far, it’s just the only flaw so far. If it can keep up this pace, it’ll only end up as a mild annoyance, I hope.

Whether this arc was as good as the first though, we’re going to have to wait until the next episode for that. This again was all of the necessary build-up, but the previous episode also only really fired off with its second half. It was pretty interesting though, and the yakuza have promise as long as they’re not portrayed too stereotypical too often. That big Yakuza was a nice start, though.
Rating: * (Good)