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Mar 7, 2020
Marimashita! Iruma-Kun started as a welcome breath of fresh air; the plot, the character designs, the comedic timing, the backgrounds and even the OP looked like taken straight out of a forgotten shounen school comedy from 2002. Like those early noughts series, Marimashita! Iruma-Kun is based on a simple long running gag: Suzuki Iruma is our MC, a human without any sort of magical power who attends a demon school and the only thing he wants is to avoid danger by not standing out. Everything he does to keep his peaceful school life and annonymacy backfires and by the end of every story arc, Iruma
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ends up being more and more admired by his peers.
It was a fun show that, I thought, would stay afloat if it didn’t (a) become to repetitive and (b) try to take itself too seriously.
Sadly, it accomplished neither of those things.
Iruma, the character, too often falls into the “Idiot Houdini” archetype, the “good natured but untalented MC who climbs his way to the top despite lacking any sort of talent, thanks to Deus ex Machina”. That type of character generally walks the thin line between endearing (Forrest Gump) and irritating (Jar Jar Binks) and the plot of Marimashita! Iruma-Kun walks the same fine line: at first the show is dumb but endearing, but as Iruma stumbles his way to an unwanted and undeserved success over and over again it becomes tremendously irritating to watch.
However, if there’s anything more undeserved and unneeded in Marimashita! Iruma-Kun it’s the length of the show. This didn’t deserve nor did it need twenty three episodes to tell the story and like most assets in life who are both undeserved an unneeded, they ended up being thoroughly wasted.
It’s no wonder then that the pacing in this show is horrendously inconsistent. Things move at a good speed for the first half of the show until it hits a tedious wall known as “the Batora/School festival arc” which simply goes on for too damn long until by the end of it, it’s hard to care anymore about what’s happening with the arc and what will happen to the show moving forward. If you felt that the best thing that could happen to the show was Kirio blowing up the entire school, trust me, you are not alone.
The biggest attractive to Marimashita Iruma-Kun it’s the colorful, interesting cast of side characters who range from trope-defying to functional to the story. Asmodeus is the perfect complementary sidekick to Iruma, his general story arc (a powerful demon who is destined to do great things but prefers to take a secondary role and support someone who he deems more powerful) is perfectly symmetric to Iruma’s arc (a demon with absolutely no power who would prefer to stay low-key but is pushed to the forefront at every single chance). Clara is a complete energy ball who continuously generates laughs which are never at her expense. Amerie is an decently written love interest, a strong female character revered by his peers for her power and demeanor without a single trace of the tropes and fanservice that at times plagues the shounen demographic. Sullivan and Callego-sensei both play their roles to perfection and add laughs to the story and the story even nails the comedic timing with some tertiary characters like Sabnock and Kamui.
Sadly most of these characters take a back seat by the second half of the show which seems to focus on annoying secondary characters turned antagonists (Kirio) and probably the weakest character of the show: Iruma.
Overall, Marimashita! Iruma-Kun was a show that had good, fun, lighthearted moments but proved to be too repetitive, long, inconsistent and filled with bad decisions in terms of storyline to be able to fulfill its potential.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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May 2, 2019
Hachigatsu no Cinderella Nine lives somewhere in the intersection of three common anime tropes.
1. The "Sports anime" trope. Including, but not limited to (A) the character that used to play the sport but doesn't play anymore, no matter how much you ask her to join your club (Suzuki), (B) the character that takes the sport too darn seriously while everyone else just kind of wants to play and have fun (Nozaki) and of course (C) the hyper-optimistic team leader who spends most of the show trying to keep everyone together (Shinonome)
2. The "Starting a new club in school" trope. Including but not limited to (A)
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fighting with the school council over creating a club, (B) struggling to get new members and (C) long explanations about technical subjects related to the club (in HnCN's case, mostly about Baseball equipment and technique).
3. The "Cute Girls Doing Cute Things" trope. Which is self-explanatory.
While HnCN won't defy any of its trope's conventions, the series does a good job of playing to each trope's strengths. Meaning that yes, if you enjoy all three of these tropes, HnCN might just be the show for you. However if you're looking for any sort of depth here, if you're looking for unique, distinguishable characters, if you're looking for well thought out dialogue, or if you're looking for something, anything else beyond the youthful optimism of cute bat-swinging 2D girls, then you're better off looking for another show to watch.
Here's where the technical qualities of the show come into play. Certain shows that play to their tropes distinguish themselves from the pack with good background art and fluid animation. In HnCN however, beyond the character designs (which are decent-to-good), the art quality makes this a difficult watch as the background art is simple and repetitive, the animation lacks fluidity and the character's faces are oftenly off-model.
Overall, I find this show to be quite enjoyable: I like the three tropes I described earlier, so I'm naturally inclined to score this higher than it "objectively" deserves, and I can honestly see some people actually enjoying this. With that being said, the poor art quality, the lack of depth in dialogue and character building and the mostly unoriginal story will turn-off a lot of people, especially those who aren't interested in the three-trope intersection previously described.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Mar 11, 2019
Mieruko-Chan is a collection of mostly stand-alone chapters about a girl (Miko) who can see monsters that no one else can see. At this point you must be thinking that you've already seen the "girl sees things no one else can see" thing done a million times, right? Well, actually that's not entirely the case with Mieruko-Chan. This isn't your feel good story about a girl becoming the "heroine that fights and beats the monsters that she can only see" nor the "girl helps the spirits so they can finally cross to the other side instead of lingering on this earth". Mieruko-Chan is an authentic
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black comedy, derived by the absolute terror Miko feels when encountering those monsters in every place imaginable (from her classroom to the girls' locker room and from her bathroom to her own bed).
These monsters whose origin is still to be determined, are drawn in the most horrifying way possible. The designs are vague, as they are mostly deformed masses of flesh with some eyes and mouths thrown in there for good measure, but they get the job done in two levels: 1) It scares the living hell out of our heroine and 2) they make for an interesting visual contrast between the horrific monsters and the girls that are drawn in the most attractive way possible (and in the first few chapters, with a lot of fan-service thrown there for good measure).
It's still early in Mieruko-Chan's run (only 8 chapters out so far) but there are definitely some concerning trends should this series go the distance. After eight chapters the formula of Miko being extremely terrified for an entire chapter is getting a bit repetitive and you would like to see the story move forward in some how or way. The repetitiveness in Mieruko-Chan's formula makes its characters feel a bit shallow and stereotypical up until this point in the story (Miko's best friend Hana is your stereotypical attractive happy-go-lucky girl who has no idea what is actually going on around here, Miko's little brother is your stereotypical younger brother who is kind of concerned with his sister and her erratic behavior).
It will be interesting to see if Mieruko-Chan can find a way to build upon its formula and get closer to any sort of progress in its story and depth on its characters, because the comedy in Mieruko-Chan is not as good at this point to overcome its repetitiveness; a reaction face can only be funny for so long.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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