Uzaki-chan wa Asobitai! – 01

I have never, ever seen an anime season like this one.  Take out the two Netflix shows (one of which actually premiered there in June) and the landscape is almost totally barren.  It’s the worst kind of damning with faint praise, but how bad does a season have to be for Uzaki-chan wa Asobitai! to be above average?  And considerably so?  Rewatches and such are fine, but not having any new anime to follow really sucks.

Uzaki-chan is… not terrible?  It’s basically a couple of dumb jokes repeated over and over.  The titular (pun intended, and I apologize) airhead’s huge cleavage jiggling suggestively.  Her embarrassing her curmudgeonly sempai Shinichi.  Him being a curmudgeon.  She’s annoying, he’s a pill, and we’ve seen it all before.  But we’ve seen it all before a lot worse, I suppose.

This sort of works – for a week, anyway – because some of the gags are actually kind of funny.  Director Miura Kazuya does display some sense of comic timing, and while the gag is mostly victimizing Shinichi it’s not done in an especially mean way.  And the tables get turned on Uzaki-chan often enough to deliver some satisfaction.  Comic brilliance this ain’t, but in this vast wasteland of a season it’s an only mildly brackish puddle that probably won’t kill you if you take a sip to avoid dying of thirst.

Muhyo to Rouji no Mahouritsu Soudan Jimusho 2 – 01

The second season intro of Muhyo to Rouji doesn’t break any molds, but if you already liked this series you should be fine with it.  It’s not a series with much following in English (or on this site specifically), and I’m not so enamored with it that I’d usually feel compelled to blog it just to be perverse.  But for what it is Muhyo and Rouji is pretty solid entertainment, and willing to go a little dark when the mood strikes it.

This time around the Madoka drama starts out on the back burner, and the focus is on the rival Goryou Bureau of Spiritual Investigation.  They’re both a lot more successful and more expensive than Team Muhyo, and there’s apparently a history between the two Executors.  But you get the sense that this rivalry is pure preamble, a way to ease into the second season as bigger fish wait to be fried.

Once more, the execution here is pretty solid.  The premiere is creepy when it needs to be, and does a good job of painting a picture of what’s happening without the use of clumsy explanations.  As with the first season Muhyo to Rouji figures to be a solidly entertaining diversion, albeit with a lot less competition this time around.