Megami no Café Terrace – 01

So begins the part of the season where I start to make allowances for the sheer volume of it.  Stuff from the third tier of the preview just isn’t going to get full intro coverage – it’s impossible.  In fact there are going to be series from the Season Preview I won’t even write up if they flat-out whiff with me – with 22 shows that’s unavoidable.

That brings us to Megami no Café Terrace, which was pretty far down on the pecking order but one I thought might just be half decent.  It has a good director in Kuwahara Satoshi, but whether you consider that it’s based on a Seo Kouji a positive or negative is a matter of opinion.  He’s one of the all-time rage inducing mangaka out there, and this show is a pure old-school ecchi harem.  These tropes get more and more dated every time we see them, but I think there is a sort of nostalgia goggles appeal to them when they’re brought off well.

Are they here?  I would say just well enough to not be awful, though there are definite cringe moments in this premiere.  It’s the story of a kid who inherits his grandmother’s beach cafe (they hadn’t spoken in three years) with plans to tear it down for a parking lot (ROFL), only to find there are five hot girls living there (how he finds out is pure Seo).  There were a couple of times when I was ready to bail, but I did manage to make it through to the end, which I suppose is as faint praise as it’s possible to damn a premiere with.

There’s not a lot to build on, really.  I didn’t especially like any of these characters, and by now it’s pretty clear that Tezuka’s niche is as a low-bid studio and no more.  I didn’t hate this and I’ll give it one more week, but in a season like this Megami no Café Terrace has almost no chance.

Mashle – 01

This one was a little better to be sure.  Mashle is one of those middle-feeder Weekly Shounen Jump series, the ones not popular enough to get a lavish adaptation.  But basically any WSJ series that does well enough not to be cancelled is going to be adapted at some point, and Mashle has done well enough to have 16 volumes and counting (that the adaptation came as late as it did is testament to the series’ mid-tier status).

Mashle is the story of a seemingly dim-witted kid named Mash whose life basically consists of working out and eating cream puffs.  He and his adoptive father Regro live in a cabin in the woods, and the old man has warned the boy never to go into the city.  The issue is that this is a world where magic is everything and everyone can use it – everyone but Mash, that is.  Not only that but everyone has some sort of mark on their face, which he also lacks.  Regro took pity on the baby Mash, abandoned by his parents, because he was more or less disowned by his family for being weak with magic.  Eventually he signs up for a prestigious magic academy after he flashes a vaguely Index-like magic ability.

At heart, Mashle is a gag manga more than an action series in my view.  And I think it works better in anime than manga form, where the jokes – almost all of which are physical comedy and sight gags – have a little more pop.  The direction is solid and the casting fine (getting Hirata Hiroaki to narrate scored a few brownie points with me).  That said, I never found the manga engaging enough to stick with and I have my doubts about the anime too.  The writing is pretty by the numbers for the most part, and the premise – while competently executed – is hardly inventive.  Mashle might have a shot in a weak season, but it’s another facing an uphill battle in this one.

Rokudou no Onna-tachi – 01

I’ll be honest, I went into Rokudou no Onna-tachi expecting to hate it.  It wasn’t in the preview – I gave it a shot because it has a sort of 90’s look to it.  And in the end, I didn’t hate it.  In fact, I enjoyed it more than the two shows above, though that’s not a terribly high bar.  To the extent I do enjoy this one I think it safely qualifies as a guilty pleasure, because it is pretty dumb.  But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t laugh a couple of times during the premiere.

The gist of this is, a bullied kid (Rokudou) gets a scroll from his dead grandpa with has an onmyouji seal in it that makes bad girls (fill in the blanks with your 15 year-old imagination) fall for him.  Yes, it is as silly as it sounds.  Yes, this is pretty sexist even by anime standards.  But that 90’s thing is real – it’s not just the look of the series but the whole kit and caboodle is like a 90’s anime harem comedy.  That balls-out dedication to the gag is what makes this sort of work – it doesn’t try to be smart or subtle or modernize itself.

I must say, I also like the fact that Rokudou’s sidekicks are played by Ishida Akira and Namikawa Daisuke, two of the titans of the seiyuu trade.  That seemed so incongruous to me that I had to double-check the credits just to make sure I wasn’t hearing things.  And these two greats do have fun with this ludicrous roles in a ludicrous story, which sort of exemplifies the whole thing.  I see enormous potential for this to get really offensive and limited paths for it to have staying power, but I will give it another go next week at the very least.