Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukinai – 00
I’m not going to put this on first impressions because it clearly was intended as just an appetizer, is just 10 minutes long and was not the start of this show at all, but I do want to share a few impressions of it. In the end, this one turned out to be an abusive harem. You know, the kind where the male lead still is surrounded by girls, girls and nothing but girls, but instead of your regular harem this show thrives on abuse. The big twist is that the females suffer just as much for a change, rather than just have everyone tsundere on the male lead. This episode had a nice sense of irony about it, but it’s going to be very hard for this show to escape its harem roots once it fully starts, especially with so much competition. These are the kinds of twists you can’t keep pulling forever.
Rating: (Enjoyable)
The World God Only Knows OVA
Yeah, I was completely fed up with this series, though after having been told that this OVA would contain some interesting developments I did give in at the end. And yeah, I guess that this episode contained an interesting twist… that is completely pointless to end the series with. You need another season with that, but I do not think that I can bear to sit through another season of this thing. This episode was fairly tolerable because three of its core characters were some of the best characters in the series (including that random side-character who popped up). Elcie however still is a huge pain to watch. Being a moron is one thing, of course, but this girl feels like she had her head lobotomized. I do not want to watch anything of her anymore. Please someone tell me that she gets better quickly!
The musical parts of this episode also were really bad. The OP in particular was just horrid, and also don’t ask me why studying on English automatically improves your musical abilities? I mean, their song at the end wasn’t exactly good, but it still was miles better than their first attempts. That’s the problem with just about every musical performances in anime: the creators just slap some random J-pop tune behind it and expect them to make sense, while instead this nearly always just turns everyone out of character and inserts random instruments that just aren’t there.
Rating: – (Disappointing)
Gyakkyou Burai Kaiji – 25
God dammit Kaiji, you’re still not done yet? Ah well, at least the pachinko arc is over, but to use the old man like that… I am not looking forward to it. Overall the ending of the pachinko arc just felt underwhelming due to how ridiculously dragged out it was. Even this episode was full of pointless symbolism, endless monologues, and other ways to just randomly stall time. Seriously Kaiji: there have been plenty of series that took up just 20 episodes. It has been done before. This isn’t an issue about production or budget anymore because if this series was shorter it would actually flow much better AND be a lot cheaper to make.
Rating: – (Disappointing)
Kamisama Dolls – 12
Oh thank god. I could have sworn that this show only had 12 episodes, but thankfully it got one extra, which was very welcome in terms of timing. I was really afraid that the creators would make Hibino’s near-rape the climax of the series, but this episode thankfully restored itself by focusing on Kyouhei. The way they used Hibino was a bit boring, but at this point that pretty much is the only way for him to really unleash his inner beast, so I understand why the creators did it. The whole Kyouhei vs. Village was quite well developed in this episode, but the problem is that the rest of the cast feels half-hearted and unfinished.
Rating: * (Good)
For a 13 episode anime, I found it stupid that they would include yet another character at the end of the show.
Just for the sake of timeline :
Ep 1 : Introduction of 4 characters (Kyouhei, Utao,Aki,Hibino)
ep 2 : Introduction of 2 characters (Kuuko and Kyousuke)
ep 3 : Introduction of 1 character (Koushirou)
ep 4: Introduction of 1 character (Kirio)
ep 5: Introduction 1 character (Hyuuga’s Leader and possibly the real antagonist)
ep 6: Introduction of 1 character (Moyako)
ep 7: a good background episode, no complaint here
ep 8: Nothing here
ep 9: Introduction of 1 character (Mahiru).
And there we have it, 11 characters in the foreplay. The problem is not the quantity, but the fact the production team doesn’t know that they only has 13 episodes. I can see they want to follow the manga, but it’s not really helping. Hell, Baccano! had more characters than that,but still managed to have some sick character development.
Knowing the manga, this arc doesn’t seem like and appropriate climax but this just makes me remember Letter Bee. In Kamisama Dolls case they’re really close to the end of volume 8 and, if they do use said end, it would be and awesome way to announce a 2nd season. Let’s see if they have the time and intention of this with just one episode more. The manga also seems to be reaching it’s climax so a second season to end the anime and the manga at the same time would be good.
The problem here is the story to be blunt. The fact that Hibino becomes the “damsel in distress” over 3-4 times this one episode makes it horribly overused and cliched.
Meanwhile, Mahiru is quite evil and selfish, but the story takes this lame turn where it’s the “inner emotion” of the kakashi that become the primary villein of this episode. I say BS to that, Mahiru is a plenty good villein, and it shows the writers cowardice that they refuse to use her as such.
This bizarre mix between jealous love triangles and huge robots just give parts of this series a complete lack of reality to the characters. It all seems like a bunch of teenagers randomly destroying buildings and hurting each other for continuously stupid reasons and then the show forgiving them for it (where the heck is the character death for the numerous battles that have been fought between obviously horribly dangerous robots???)
That is quite a shame because up to about episode 8 (minus the Kirio arc), this sense of danger was quite real and well-portrayed, but now it just seems like a worthless soap opera with random robot fighting. The lack of danger to the characters from each really cheapens the whole show.
Guess Magatushi had enough of Kyouhei’s whining. LOL!
Kaiji…I give up.
This second season started out so great with the amazing Chinchiro arc. The pachinko arc started off great too, but somewhere along the way (sad part is I don’t even know which moment it was) it started getting really derailed. There was really no reason to make it drag out so much. Those inner monologues and symbolism were effective at first but the more they are used, the more ineffective they become to the point where they are just used to fill up the time.
Also, the tension is completely broken. Every time Kaiji loses and despairs about it, he gets more money out of nowhere. After the second time this happened, I just started laughing.
Anyway, it’s a real pity that this show which had so much potential will end up like that.
Yeah, season 2 of kaiji started awesomely. The Chinchiro arc was wonderfully done. But the Pachinko arc needed to be at least 3 episodes shorter.
The manga was already dragging a bit at this point (I didn’t mind though, because I was kind of rushing through it), but the anime creators instead of upping the tempo a bit, they dragged it even more. That killed it.
“And it’s finally over. I’ve decided not to write a review about this series, though. I’ve watched this series the wrong way, and it turned out to be a big disappointment, save for four or five episodes. I feel that I’m way too biased to give an objective view about this series. It already was difficult to give this series a fair rating during my monthly summaries. Kaiji is a series that you need to marathon, in order to pump yourself up with adrenaline. It’s not something you can watch casually.”
Psgels, it’s honestly your fault for not following your own conclusion…
If you decided to watch it week by week, you should’ve expected some episodes to be build-ups.
As for cutting on the number of episodes; it’s a faithful adaption, so what did you expect?
They try thier best to adapt the manga in it’s entirety.
Bunny: it was indeed my fault for not just marathoning it. However, I do not think that you can just use the argument of “the manga is like that, so it must be good”. If the manga had a pacing problem, it would have been ideal for the anime to fix it.
I love TWGOK but there’s no way I can defend this OVA, they didn’t even used the best part of that chapter (speaking about comedy and romance) and instead included a terrible musical segment. And about Elsie, Psgels: After the ” regular” conquests she is temporally replaced by Haqua during the actual arc.
I would like a new season just for the love I have for this manga but the pacing and “original content” of the anime is something I just don’t like.
I actually liked that chapter of the TWGOK manga, but the anime seemed to gloss over the whole “the girls remember him” subplot, rendering the whole OVA a bit pointless.
The manga remains a really enjoyable read, but I fear it doesn’t get really good until all the one and done captures were finished, and I’m becoming increasingly doubtful the anime will make it that far. It’s a bit like how Negima only gets good in the manga past where the original anime series ended.
@ K.K.
The anime hasn’t glossed over anything really.
There are hints of the girls remembering in the anime with Ayame during the Chihiro arc, if Ayame ends up having a goddess in the end otherwise this was just a red herring.
The whole “remembering” thing doesn’t really come up until the chpaters the OVA covers where Kanons behavior makes Keima question if she actually remembers.
@Psgels:
Rather than saying “the manga is like that so it must be good”, what I was saying was “They’re doing a faithful adaption so that means they can’t cut on stuff”.
An adaption is an adaptation. It should be as close to the original as possible, as the author intended for it to be. If a whole voulme was about dragging than I think they have to at least waste an episode on that. Besides, considering Fukumoto works I think most fans, believe it or not, are actually anticipated the dragging. That’s just the kind of charm of his works, they’re being streched to the point they are both very thrilling and very tiring.
With all that said though,I should mention I’ve only watched the chinchiro arc of this season for now, so I don’t really know how they handled the last few episodes. But if I go by the chinciro arc, it’s very possible they added some filler stuff and made the dragging seem even more tiring. (if that’s even possible…)
For example, Darklord mentioned too much symbolism, while there’s no shortage of such in the original, it’s quite possible the anime added some extra ones that may or may not be pretty silly. The chinchiro arc at least did something like that, adding this really bizzare symbolizm wherein that fat guy… climbed a rope to the moon when he thought he was winning. It’s so over the top you just can’t take it seriously.
BTW, thanks for understanding my point despite my somewhat bossy tone. I respect that.
Nice spoilers then, qwerty1.
I honestly think noone familar with the light novel or manga should have watched Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukinai 00.
First off it’s not a real episode 00, it’s more a Episode 8.5 than anything else. Secondly I just think it’s a bad representation of what the series is about. And you know how people are with first impressions…
What 00 was based on is just a “yeah that’s alright” chapter once you’re familiar with the characters, it’s a horrible starting point as far as I’m concerned.
Not trying to hype the series up but the start should be infinitely better than what you saw with 00.