A-1 Pictures is a studio that created a lot of my favorite comedies, which have always been hit or misses. Yet they seem to have fallen off the deep-end on comedies recently, as they haven’t put out anything worthwhile (excluding sequels) since Silver Spoon in 2013. Maybe Zveda if I’m feeling generous…Either way, this one doesn’t seem to break that trend strong enough. What I said about episode 2 still stands, and on top of that, I can summarize my problem with episode three in two words: So. Flat.
Now, I love flat humor as evident in my review of Gugure Kokkuri-San awhile back, but there’s such thing as too much of a good thing. It only works for me when it’s contrasted with high energy to sort of highlight its silliness, but here, a majority of the cast are too dull, soft spoken, and deadpan.
That won’t be a problem for long if the characters don’t stay so one dimensional, so I’ll have to see how the show progresses, but it isn’t looking very good. The issue right now really is the cast itself. There are too many characters that are the quiet, soft-spoken “deadpan” type for there to be much variety in the delivery of the jokes. Delivery is really important for me. But Muranushi, Kondou, Kamakura, Shindou, and the MC don’t look like they’re going to stop their flat acting anytime soon. This episode doesn’t get much more than a small chuckle out of me, with Miyakoshi still being the only character that isn’t completely dull.
I really do want to find bigger things to praise this episode for, but I’d be grasping at straws. The way we’re already being loaded with Shindou’s uninteresting background story (continuing since the last episode) confuses the tone, and like I mentioned previously, the pacing is still an issue. I feel like this show already revealed everything it had to offer way too quickly, and even then what I saw wasn’t very interesting.
However as I stated earlier, I have enough faith in Karino and A-1 to hope for the best. A weak start doesn’t mean anything, and if nothing else, the show has charm. The point is, this show has problems that can easily go away once it can vary up its comedic voice and create dynamic characters. Also, please let character interactions be more than just two or three talking amongst each other. That gets old really quickly, I’d love to feel like all the characters could actually exist next to each other.
