Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku – 04












Flip Flappers – 03


The Gist: Papika walks across a burning desert littered with wrecked ships and submarines. She colapses and is taken in by some Jawa’esq creatures and slowly brings us up to speed on how she and Cocona were separated…

which involves a BDSM flower girl who pretends to be a friend at first but has our friends fight each other by way of an emotion amplifying mask and…

yeah this episode is a tremendous run-on sentence of a plot!


The important take aways are: Pure Illusion can be populated by a variety of sentient beings, Papika and Cocona can transform magic-girl style (including magic weapons that can merge into a magic gun) in addition to powering up, and Yayaka works for the mysterious group of Robots from the end of the first episode.


If all these details feel heaped on and difficult to absorb, the decision to flash-back in the middle of the episode to explain what was going on, only served to make it more a of a mess. Yes, the short reveal of Cocona as a bad-ass villain in a mask was, yes, ultra bad-ass BUT the same effect could have been achieved in a more cohesive fashion.

While the episode made me feel like it belonged several episodes deeper into the series, or part of an entirely separate anime, not all was lost. The animation remains tremendously fun to watch, with stylish and swift gestures and lovely character design. Think something between Final Fantasy the Legend of the Crystals and TTGL and/or Die Buster. (Nono from Die Buster even feels incredibly similar to Papika)


The Verdict: Animation aside, abrupt narrative shift aside, Flip Flappers remains lovely on an emotional level. The characters are warm, fun, and surrounded by a blend of oddly grim and magically dream like. I can not recommend this enough!


Keijo!!!!!!!! – 03


The Gist: Cockroach-chan and Miyata-chan spend this week upgrading their skills, one more obviously than the other. While the vacuum butt cannon is obviously powerful and highly regarded by the instructors, Cockroach-chan is forbidden to use it due to significant health risks it entails. However, she earns the right to learn more about it by wearing a BDSM swim suit for a month.

Meanwhile Miyata learns about… making a tighter butt crack to increase her multi-hit speed, which she will use during the episode-ending challenge with the elite class players.


We also learn about the 3 types of players: Infighters that rely on strength, outfighters that use speed and position, and counters that …use counters. This is very straight forward but lends a bit more credibility to the sport, which is massively important in a show that could otherwise be about butts only.

Straight up, this week was packed with pandering shots. There’s no escaping all the boobs and butts and that’s not even getting into the moaning and homosexuality that seems more erotic than character related.

Still, the episode remained very well rendered, full of charm, and carried the characters forward. We even see some cleverness in the other room 309 players: they give free massages to the girls, which gives them a deeper understanding of muscle and each girl’s tactical strengths.


The Verdict: The fact that Keijo calls out its hero’s super attack as dangerous and possibly career ending, goes way beyond more serious sports anime like Haikyuu!! or Days. I still can’t believe I’m saying this but this show actually puts thought into a typically formulaic genre.

This is sports anime it its best, most pandering, well rendered, and likable. Call it shameless for all its boobs and butts, but Keijo puts all of its heart in the right place: it treats its absurd subject sincerely.


To Be Hero – 03


It is as we feared, we are all male and can not fight the female ‘globers’

The Gist: The aliens have studied humans and believe the race is divided into two types. The male type has tiny globes that are useless and the female type has a broader range of globe sizes, that indicate their innate power. Unfortunately, the Aliens discover they are all male and nosebleed/boners guarantee they can not dominate our world.

Not only is the diagrammatic scene that explains all this hilarious, details like the the alien king growing an ever more absurdly tall boner while chastising his men for panic, had me in stitches.

To overcome this challenge, the aliens create the perfect love weapon… and the result is a guy with an emoji’ head who drives a rapping yellow muscle car called BumbleZ… who’s arms and legs are too short to attack Old Man and is quickly defeated.


“I’m Earth’s hero but you got a fancy CG transformation scene?!”

Verdict: The dialog was slower and less base than last week and it all worked very well.

From timing, to 4th wall breaking gags, to cynical views on what people find attractive, this week was pure comedy gold. More than that, it snuck a slightly thoughtful moment of drama in at the end AND cliff-hangered us with the evil emperor putting his hands right through Old Man’s chest.


To Be Hero – 02


The Gist: Old Man is trapped living next door with his nudist neighbor… but the alien threat keeps on coming. This week a chicken man and a pink bearded muscle man are undone in comical, but extremely quickly spoken dialog. Yet by the end, sadly, Old Man is still trapped in a fat perv’s body…

So this week followed the pilot’s template. The humor is odd and well timed, for example the cutting of Old Man and the Pink Bearded alien makes it look like they are about to confront each other at the door, only to be at the wrong addresses, which causes the pink alien to kill himself accidentally in embarrassment… humor is hard to talk about!


To be Hero’s humor at it’s finest

Oji’s Verdict: The back story of chickens being an alien race and the repeated jokes about the nudist’s family leaving him were all cute but good gracious dialog zipped by at break neck speed. I’m not sure that really helped and, in all honesty, the ‘potty humor’ aspect isn’t very… sophisticated.


Cheating Craft – 02


The Gist: L-type and C-type students go at each other and then the teacher to win their way through the school entrance exam. Body doubles, poison bees, copy-cat pingpong balls, and even micro-slicing a paper in half to repeat the answers, this show shows a ton of clever cheating and anti-cheating tricks of it’s world.

Unfortunately, that’s all it shows.

Verdict: While I got a many chuckles out of the episode, it was equal parts visual gags and technique-names, with no meaningful character development, no memorable music, and a snails crawl plot. The sound design was good at least but, at the end of the day, this is not the kind of show that leaves much room for a review.

Dropped… but:


Soushin Shoujo Matoi – 03


The Gist: ‘Toi and Yuma continue to dabble in magic girl hero antics, including another possessed dude bringing demon trouble, culminating in a showdown with another monster. It’s much the same as last week, except this time Clarus gets her butt kicked too and ‘Toi’s latent mom power has to activate and save the day.

While SSM is serviceable as a straight forward rise of an unlikely hero story, with decent graphics and sound, the dynamic between Yuma and ‘Toi continues to be its strongest selling point. The fact that Yuma over explains how embarrassing the situation is is especially charming too.


“Wow, ‘Toi, this has gotten more than 50 million hits! That means, roughly, 50% of Japan has seen you naked!” – Yuma

Oji’s Verdict: Soushin Shoujo Matoi provides some easy viewing girls against demon bad guys magic action. I’m not sold on the conspiracy going on in the background, and ‘Toi’s sudden power surge to save the day was… generic… to say the least.

However, at the end of the day, not every show needs to be a masterpiece to earn my respect, let alone my eyeballs as a viewer. If you’ve got time, you could do a lot worse than following this.


Shuumatsu no Izetta – 04















Watashi ga Motete Dousunda – 03

R to L: Snow White, Eren Yeager, Shion

The Japanese government mandates that at least one episode of romantic comedies must be a cultural festival episode, but Kiss Him Not Me didn’t treat it like legal compliance; it put quite a bit of effort and its own wonderful brand of energy into it, making for twenty minutes of television that felt much longer, but had me wishing by the end it was longer still. All the positive aspects I mentioned in the first two eps apply here, and then some.


This KHNM took its real life otome game theme to its natural next step: growing mutual resentment among the boys. The four of them are only together because they like Kae. Kae, a fujoshi, its perfectly content to keep things this way, but they aren’t. They want to court Kae properly, which means they need alone time with her (the last thing she wants).

It’s a great dynamic, and I’m glad it comes to a head so quickly in the series, and so organically, as a result of the give-and-take of the otome scenario. Kae formed a coalition so her class would vote for a cosplay cafe, and she gets to dress up all her boys the way she sees fit. But in exchange, she has to tacitly accept it when they set up time slots for alone time with her during the festival.


To the show’s credit, despite her amazing physical transformation, Kae remains steadfastly Kae, even if she often manages to hide her baser instincts from the lads. She worries she won’t do well alone with guys, and then she goes and doesn’t do well alone with the guys. It’s the English title in a nutshell: She wants them to Kiss (or do other romantic things with) Him, not her.


It doesn’t help that the guys are a little overeager. Nana backs her into a wall and they come close to a kiss, Mu achieves an indirect kiss through chopsticks; Iga takes her hand in his, then puts it on his knee; and Shi leaps into her arms in the haunted house, resulting in a fall and his face in her bosom.

It’s all just too much for Kae, who is completely un-inoculated against such romantic gestures. She rushes into the arms of her friend Akane, lamenting how impossible it all is. A-chan was initially amused that Kae had four dates with four hotties, but she’s quick to drop the ribbing and offer support when it turns out badly.


But while A-chan is grabbing Kae a drink, Kae is accosted by three less-than-savory classmates, who make her guys’ aggressiveness seem coy by comparison. These guys aren’t even trying to be subtle: this girl’s hot and they’re going to get as much out of her as they can.

Then she gives one of them an uppercut, which both he and she thought was overreacting…but how the hell else is a girl supposed to act when there are hands all over her and a crotch in her face?

They chase her down the hall, but she’s rescued by Iga and Nana in the nick of time. Soon Mu and Shi are also there and the four locked in combat with the punks. Kae stops gawking and spluttering and yells, at the top of her lungs, “KNOCK IT OFF!” 


Kae’s four guys hear her, and realize that and how they erred, and apologize, and all agree to take things slower so as not to overwhelm her again. Thus we return to the status quo, as expected, but it was a fun ride. The show didn’t want us to forget not just that these four guys really like Kae, and not just in a buddy-buddy way, but that when it comes down to it, they also don’t hate each other’s company.

When the time comes for the bonfire dance, the four agree to drop the romantic pursuits for the day and give Kae a little something for tolerating their forwardness (and the brawl, for which there was somehow no punishment). That something turns out to be another dream come true not just for fujoshi Kae, but her fujoshi BFF Akane: the four pair off and dance with each other.