Yatogame-chan Kansatsu Nikki – 01

So this turned out to be a 3-minute short, which pretty much ends any chance I’d be blogging it.  It’s hard even to draw much of a first impression from a three-minute episode, but I do think a show that attempts to poke fun at the regional particularities of a place like Nagoya could do with a little more time to work with.

What we saw here?  A couple of chuckles, nothing too offensive.  Tomatsu Haruka doing her native accent is a draw, but I want to hear more of it.  As for Nagoya I don’t know much about it except that it’s a Shinkansen “flyover” city, but the food is supposedly good and it almost always ranks last in any poll of most interesting cities in Japan.  That’s about all you’re going to get from three minutes.

RobiHachi – 01

While RobiHachi is an original series, with the pedigree behind it you could formulate a pretty good guess as to what was coming.  Takamatsu Shinji has as distinctive a sensibility as any anime director out there – shameless broad comedy, male bonding, absurdity.  And RobiHachi has all of those things in droves.

More than anything, what this first episode reminded me of was a kind of low-rent Space Dandy.  Low-rent as in the budget is clearly nowhere near as big, and the comedy not as punchy.  Still, I rather enjoyed it.  Studio Comet is a frequent partner with Bones and in fact did in-betweens for both Space Dandy series.  The staff and cast are mostly longtime industry veterans, and just hearing Nakai Kazuya in a leading role again is enough to give the whole enterprise a very retro feel.

As for a premise, we have a vaguely Dandy-esque loser named Robby Yarge whose seed money for his latest harebrained get-rich scheme is stolen, but recovered from the thief by bored whiz kid Hachi Kita.  Turns out the money was borrowed from a mob boss named Yang (played by Takamatsu-snsei’s on-screen alter ego, Sugita Tomokazu), and Hachi has gone to work for him as a means to fight his boredom.  One thing leads to another and Robby ends up blasting off into space in his apartment, which is also a space cruiser, with Hachi on-board and Yang and his cronies in hot pursuit.  There’s also a manservant who appears to be a snarky mechanical rabbit and a pair of fighters that can gattai into an old-school mecha, complete with a 1980’s transformation sequence and accompanying theme song by no less than Kushida Akira.

I would imagine whether RobiHachi will work is pretty much going to be contingent on one’s compatibility level with Takamatsu’s sense of humor, but as I said I rather enjoyed it.  RobiHachi as a goofy buddy pair going to a new age retreat planet with mobsters in pursuit and mecha transformations could be kind of fun, and the feel of the piece is definitely nostalgic.  This series is definitely pitched at a niche audience, but if you’re part of the niche (I would say I’m sort of on the periphery of it) I think it has a chance to be a good weekly distraction sort of series.