Sankaku Mado no Sotogawa wa Yoru – 01

The fact that this is the first digest post since May is indication of just how few summer series interested me enough even to do First Impressions posts.  Fall at least has quantity, though quality remains very much an open question.  Horror and the supernatural is definitely a theme this season.  Horror comedy even more specifically, though Sankaku Mado no Sotogawa wa Yoru doesn’t have much humor – its interests clearly lie elsewhere.

This show, like Mieruko-chan, chronicles a young person who can see the souls of the deceased and would rather not.  Mikado (same Kanji as “sankaku” – triangle) Kousuke works at a bookstore and, like Mieruko, basically tries to ignore what he sees.  But when his manager calls in an exorcist to try and cleanse the shop of the rumors it’s haunted, said exorcist- Hiyakawa-san – immediately shows a keen interest in Kousuke’s ability.  It’s useful for his line of work, but that’s not what this is all about…

Sankaku Mado plays it pretty straight about its actual raison d’être, though it isn’t very elegant in the way it goes about it.  The double-entendres aren’t really amusing in the first place, and certainly not when they’re repeated over and over.  The storytelling isn’t bad (the premiere mostly focuses on a cold case involving a serial killing sewing bits of different victims together to create a cursed object) and the cast is certainly full of big names.  But I found this neither amusing or especially scary (it was a little too silly for that) so it’s hard to see much reason for optimism.

Kyuuketsuki Sugu Shinu – 01

By contrast, The Vampire Dies in No Time leans heavily into the comedy, at the expense of everything else.  If Sankaku makes little effort at comedy. Kyuuketsuki makes no effort whatever at horror.  It plays like a gag manga (which I assume it is) adapted to a format that’s just a little too long-form.  Half-length would likely have been better.

The gag here is that the titular vampire, Lord Draluc (FukuJun deep inside his default zone) is such a wimp that he turns to sand just from being startled (though any sort of violence will do it too).  He’s a meek guy who just wants to hang out and be a gamer but the townsfolk are making a fortune off turning him into a legend.  His foil is a vampire hunter named Ronaldo (I really wish the vampire had been called Messi) who gets called out to rescue a boy whose mother is convinced Draluc kidnapped him.  In point of fact, the kid has been sneaking into Draluc’s castle and using his consoles during the owner’s coffin time.

That’s the A-part, and the B-part features the son of a konbini owner who’s been bitten by a low-grade vamp and is desperate to turn into one so he can win the attentions of the part-timer.  The premiere is basically rapid-fire gags one after the other for 22 minutes, always a risky style.  I’d say about a third if them sort of work, and none of them are flat-out hilarious.  Maybe the comedy gets better but in a series with nothing else to offer, it has to be a damn sight better than it was here.  Just not funny enough, at least for one week.  It’s kind of disappointing, as this is Madhouse and Koujina Hiroshi (series director on Hunter X Hunter 2011) but my expectations were pretty modest in spite of that.

Digimon Ghost Game – 01

Yet another supernatural story to round out the trio (yet another one premiered this week, the vampire astronaut one, but that’s a LN adaptation and I may not get to it right away).  This time around it’s neither horror nor comedy, really, though it does have a sprinkling of both.  Digimon is certainly a familiar franchise worldwide, about to hit its 25th anniversary with entries in a dizzying array of media formats.  As for the anime, this is the ninth entry.  Digimon may not be quite as eponymous as Pokemon, but it’s not all that far behind.

We’ve come a long way from the days when Hosoda Mamoru was working on the anime, but Digimon Ghost Game is a perfectly solid entry from Toei.  I’m not an expert on the franchise by any means but my sense is that this series is one of the more loosely connected to the core concept – I don’t recognize any of the characters here, and the premise has a bit of a stand-alone “Digimon school detectives” feel to it.  At the heart of this story is Hiro, a first-year middle school who lives in the dorm and whose father has mysteriously disappeared.  The MacGuffin of the piece are “Hologram ghosts” – a mysterious new paranormal phenomenon that bridges the occult and technology.

While Hiro’s best friend is annoying the premiere on the whole worked rather well.  I’m assuming we’re looking at a Digimon-themed mystery every week, and this time around it’s a Digi named Clockmon who goes around “stealing the time” of kids in urban legend fashion (kind of scary as presented here).  Hiro’s father turns up it hologram form and passes along a new “little brother” for Hiro – Gammamon, a Digimon I don’t recall seeing before now.  It’s all good fun and quite nicely brought off – good solid kids entertainment with enough steel to make it interesting for adults.  Who, let’s face it, are going to be a big part of the target audience for Ghost Game given the amount of childhood nostalgia for Digimon out there.