Silver Link and Oonuma Shin continue to deliver some of the prettiest comedies around, but at this point I’m undecided about whether this one has a place in my blogging future.

OP: “Endless Story” by Yukari Tamura

The pedigree behind C3 is interesting.  Based on a LN series by Minase Hazuki that’s supposedly full of graphic violence and lots of blood, Silver Link have added character designs by noted hardcore hentai artist Sasorigatame.  They look like a cross between Denpa Onna (we even get sparkles) and Kore wa Zombie.  The premise reminds me a bit of “Zombie” too, with perhaps a bit of Asura Cryin’ thrown in.  We have the mild-mannered high schooler Yachi Harukai (Kaji Yuuki) whose father sends him weird items from his travels overseas.  We have the first weird item to arrive, a girl called Fear (Tamura Yukari), who proceeds to destroy his house.  And we have the megane-girl osananajimi (two, two, two tropes in one) Konoha (Chihara Minori) who’s extremely jealous of the new girl in Harukai’s house.  All sounds pretty standard.

However, it’s immediately obvious that things aren’t as they seem.  Harukai is a bit too blasé about the weird box on his doorstep turning into a girl, and it’s revealed that Konoha isn’t just the girl next door.  Obviously Harukai is used to this sort of thing happening.  I’m assuming that both Fear and Konoha are cursed objects sent by the father, and given that Harukai is apparently resistant to curses he’s the perfect man to help them (and I’m sure there are others) break the curses that bind them.  Given that these cursed objects are apparently devices used for evil and that Fear was a torture device, I’m sure things are going to get interesting there.

Nothing really leapt off the screen for me in the first episode content-wise, though it looked great.  The shot of Fear’s room bathed in sunlight as dust motes drifted through the air was a passing moment, but absolutely gorgeous, and the ep is full of those visual details.  I didn’t find the humor especially funny – how many times have we seen the non-human girl inadvertently wreck the boy’s house gag already, and the sniping between Fear and Konoha about breast size was pretty generic.  None of the characters grabbed me either, and I confess I’m getting pretty sick of Kaji Yuuki’s voice at this point – he doesn’t vary his intonation or tone very much and he’s in about 4 series per season lately.

I feel as if I really shouldn’t judge this one until things get bizarre, as I have the sense that the first episode quite intentionally eased into the material.  I’m not a huge fan of Kore wa Zombie, which as I mentioned this reminds me of quite a bit in terms of dialogue and comedic style.  I guess I was just expecting something more outlandish based on the buzz, and what we got was a mildly pleasant and fairly conventional nascent romcom that looked a lot better than average.  We’ll see how things develop and the weirdness ramps up and go from there.