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If only they'd made a series that does whatever it is that makes this series so different without all the fanservice/ecchiness/romantic comedy. As it is, you lost me at the introduction Confused

Megiddo wrote:

Lists can be really fun Key. I like lists myself. I use them to remember what to get at the grocery store for instance. However, in a review, they are practically meaningless if there is no substance to back up anything in the list. How is it actually clever? How is it subverting genre cliches? What is the actual substantial underlying plot, apart from "Bad people don't want aliens having fun"? I would have loved to see some actual substance in the review. If all I want is a checklist of what the show has, the ANN Encyclopedia does a pretty good job showing what genres and themes a show has.

Megiddo, what exactly are you expecting the review to do for you? Spell out every little thing the series does in a play-by-play? Because that's what you seem to be asking for. I carefully provided specific examples of what I was talking about over the next three paragraphs which address all of the points I made, so I'm more than a little miffed that it's being considered insufficient. Also, that "list" you were making the condescending comments gives the points which separate this show from others of its kind. It does not represent genre elements or themes, so it is considerably more detail than you could find through an ANN Encyclopedia search. I don't think I'm out of line here to take that as a double insult.

You ask "what is the substantial underlying plot?" Based on what has been shown through episode 6 (I haven't had a chance to watch ep 7 yet), spoiler[there is a faction which is opposed to having First Contact being with aliens like the Catians because it is inelegant, and another minor plot involving the cult, but the bigger underlying issue is that the Japanese government has already engaged in secret dealings with the Dogisians, so also having relations with their bitter rivals, the Catians, would be a problem. Dogisians have already started to act behind the scenes to interfere with the Catians.] That's a vastly more substantial plot than you'll see in nearly any other series of its type.

You ask "How is it actually clever?" I refer to two examples given in the review:

Quote:

[1.]That Catian technology might be too slick and gimmicky-looking to be convincing as sci fi elements from an Earth perspective, or that Elis might look too much like a cosplayer to be convincing as an alien, also become issues in a later episode. [2.]Connecting a female character trying to jump the bones of a male character to a biologically-based mating season is a gimmick that has been used on rare occasions before, but in this series the Catians demonstrate that they actually have brains by realizing that this could be a problem and taking sensible precautions, such as putting limiters on their power suits which kick in during mating season (because mating season is commonly associated with irrational behavior) and making arrangements for when they don't have mates present during such times.

These are background issues in virtually every series of this type that never get addressed. Confronting them and providing practical solutions/explanations, while seamlessly integrating them into the regular content, is certainly clever.

You ask, "how is it subverting genre cliches?" As talked about in the review, the series gives the aliens entirely different (but not at all illogical) motivations than just the standard dumb gimmick of an accidental marriage/misinterpreted proposal causing the alien chick to fall in love with the male lead. It treat the action capabilities of its other two girls very seriously rather than as a means for comedy (as is most often the case). It explains the cohabitation gimmick in practical terms. And so forth.

If that is not enough clarification to satisfy you then go ahead and dismiss the whole series as just another stereotypical exercise in fan service. I fully expect a lot of people are going to do that because they're going to get so hung up on the fan service and/or what the series looks like it is. However, even genres like this can have their bright and shining stars, their series that achieve far beyond the what their genre is normally capable of doing, and this is certainly one of them.

And fwvrweb ghq74w viut4bg: My, that sounds like trolling to me. If you want to say that you think I was paid off to do this, why don't you just come right out and say it?

And Kimiko_0: It would be an entirely different kind of series if it didn't have the fan service. (Just like a yaoi series wouldn't be a yaoi series without all of the BL content.)

Kimiko_0 wrote:

If only they'd made a series that does whatever it is that makes this series so different without all the fanservice/ecchiness/romantic comedy. As it is, you lost me at the introduction Confused

It sounds very much like they are trying to have their cake and eat it too ... that is, "well, the viewer/buyers for the fanservice will buy it for that no matter how well or poorly it does anything else ... so lets pay enough attention to plot arc and character development and whatnot to try to rope other viewers in too".

Which if done well, sounds more like a B+ than an A-, but what's two or three percent among friends?

Even aside from all the fan service, this is a very FUN series. It has a lot of funny moments, some serious moments, and a lot of cleverness. In a way, it sort of reminds me of FLCL in its playfulness.

I'm really enjoying this series. It doesn't take itself too seriously, yet it isn't dismissive of itself. I think Key's grades for it were pretty much spot on.

BTW, if you don't like this sort of anime, then don't watch it.

damn sparky, technology goes bonk, and I lose my train of thought into the ether.

So, Key, dunno you want to go back and forth on your spoiler...spoiler[but the impression that I got was that the dogians were acting as covert arms merchants, and playing both the Japanese {via Futaba's powersuit} but also the Americans through the DIA which has one of Jens' operatives as a ground supervisor. Plus I's wager even more going on behind the scenes. And maybe not just on the dogians' part.]

Having differences in what each person gets out of seeing the thing is much fun to me, anyhow. I also tend not to look at this as any kind of parody or anything. Rather as a well made, straight ahead harem/espionage action/comedy that has a great deal going for it.

If you don't happen to like any of those things... well, I guess they weren't aiming at you. But like other shows that you sometimes start, you may find things that actually appeal to you.
If not? er, it's FREE, why are you complaining?

agila61 wrote:

"well, the viewer/buyers for the fanservice will buy it for that no matter how well or poorly it does anything else"

Do such people exist? For me anyway, you can't just slap some T&A into a cartoon and expect me to buy it. Just because I like titillating visuals doesn't mean I don't care about any other element of the show.

For example, this season I'm buying Highschool of the Dead and Strike Witches 2, but not Shukufuku no Campanella, Sekirei, or Asobi ni Ikuyo. And of the two shows I'm buying, my reasons for liking them are different: HoTD because it's tense, exciting, and funny, with fluid animation where it counts, and SW2 because I'm infatuated with the characters (especially Lucchini Embarassed

)

What I really think is so great and innovative about the show is it's seamless integration of plot with comedy and fan service.

It's not actually too unique for a fan service show to have a "serious plot" [sic] and the usual slice of life hi-jinks but the results of these usually turn out quite sloppily. A drastic example from last season was Demon King Daimao (or whatever the exact title was) which veered wildly from "plot" to "funny" or "sexy" and made the whole thing a giant mess. The more usual tactic is to have a 12 episode show that spends 10 episodes dropping tiny hints of plot in fan service heavy comedy episode as the girls one by one improbably get charmed by the harem lead and then in the final episodes switch to almost exclusively serious with only token tiny bits of humor and typically makes me furious with its sudden insistance there was supposed to be depth in these early episodes and the villain they've so easily foiled for so long is suddenly actually competent..

Now, this show could have gone either way.

Picture a story of
(A) two alien races (no animal ears), one secretly trading military equipment with the earth's nations for their greedy purposes and the other openly trying to make peaceful contact because they find earth worthy of such contact. Then replace the group that want to stop contact because of their silly cosplay appearance with one that wants to suppress their appearance for religious reasons (there are groups that would deny alien existence because it denies that humans are the center of the universe and that their god is absolute.
or picture a story in which
(B)a cat girl alien drops in and likes the guy simply because it's where she landed and he's basically nice and maybe secretly had a cat alien for a great-great-grandmother. The girl next door doesn't shoot actual guns- she likes violent video games and the the shy girl is just embarrassed because she likes samurai and gunkata movies more than cooking! The dog aliens just want to prove they're stronger than cats, get pummeled in short silly skirmishes by the cats for the requisite 10 episodes before successfully kidnapping one of the helpless human girls and having to "seriously" fight in the final episodes.

But it's neither, instead it melds them so well. It's a show that takes its plot as seriously as its comedy and service.

I made someone mad in the below thread for suggesting Asobi ni Ikuyo was like Full Metal Panic if FMP didn't separate the silly from its plot (and added cat ears), It wasn't an insult- FMP does it's job of separating the two sides of it's nature expertly (unlike most) but Asobi fully integrates their two sides. And I truly think that at it's core Asobi's plot (plot A) is as good as FMP's plot - it's secret alien conflict versus international espionage and black technology. Granted Asobi fluffs the story up more but that's because they're also a little more serious with the fan service than FMP. But the truth is, I was actually getting a bit annoyed by FMP:TSR because of how heavy the plot got, and the opposite problem with Fumofu. I'll never have to worry with Asobi, the quality plot will be taken care of (although the season will of course end partially unresolved - as all series based on unfinished novels series do) but instead of drowning in one extreme or the other, I bet I'll always be able to see the other extreme within each minute of the show.

Key wrote:

You ask "How is it actually clever?" I refer to two examples given in the review:

Quote:

[1.]That Catian technology might be too slick and gimmicky-looking to be convincing as sci fi elements from an Earth perspective, or that Elis might look too much like a cosplayer to be convincing as an alien, also become issues in a later episode. [2.]Connecting a female character trying to jump the bones of a male character to a biologically-based mating season is a gimmick that has been used on rare occasions before, but in this series the Catians demonstrate that they actually have brains by realizing that this could be a problem and taking sensible precautions, such as putting limiters on their power suits which kick in during mating season (because mating season is commonly associated with irrational behavior) and making arrangements for when they don't have mates present during such times.

1. I'm not sure what you mean. Again, all the "alien" technology I have seen is "slick". I mean, do you expect alien technology to have huge devices powered by vacuum tubes? Of course not! It's going to be sleek. Now "gimmicky" is something that I honestly cannot picture in my head. Providing an example of what makes it gimmicky would help quite a bit. Okay, so the alien looks like a girl in a tight track suit or something with cat ears. This becomes an issue. I'm not sure how it becomes an issue, so how am I supposed to deduce that it's clever? Does some side character just point and say "Hey, you don't look like an alien should and your tech stuff is too slick and gimmicky" and then everyone laughs for a few seconds?

Who are we to say what aliens should look like and how their tech should be. I know many people don't like how the Raalgon Empire looks in Tylor, but I don't really see much of a problem. I don't claim to know what aliens should look like and what technology they should use.

2. Can the "power suit" simply be removed? Or is that required for the "Catians" to be able to live on Earth? And yeah, you are not winning any sort of "cleverness" points from me by outright stating that this show follows that awful setup of a hot girl showing up and wanting to jump the main character's bones. That's about as lazy and hackneyed writing as you can get by copy and pasting the same setup from all the other ecchi/harem shows.

Annf wrote:

agila61 wrote:

"well, the viewer/buyers for the fanservice will buy it for that no matter how well or poorly it does anything else"

Do such people exist?

It seems so, but primarily in Japan. Not incredibly large numbers, but it doesn't take incredibly large numbers to keep an anime series afloat.

Of course, there is character design and various other things that go along with having a successful fanservice focused anime, its just that serious plot development and substantial character growth are generally not the top priorities.

Megiddo wrote:

Again, all the "alien" technology I have seen is "slick". I mean, do you expect alien technology to have huge devices powered by vacuum tubes? Of course not! It's going to be sleek.

My personal view on this is that the technology just doesn't fit any reasonable person's expectation of how it should look. No, of course robots shouldn't look like Robby The Robot, but the appearance (and behaviour, what with their penchant for talking literally in sign language! Razz

) of the Assistroids would raise eyebrows.

There's a great bit in episode 6 where a craft is being manouvred at low speed for the benefit of some spectators filming it. In order to do this, beams shoot upwards from the craft; it looks like the thing's on strings!

Megiddo wrote:

Okay, so the alien looks like a girl in a tight track suit or something with cat ears. This becomes an issue. I'm not sure how it becomes an issue, so how am I supposed to deduce that it's clever? Does some side character just point and say "Hey, you don't look like an alien should and your tech stuff is too slick and gimmicky" and then everyone laughs for a few seconds?

Well, for me it's clever because it at least attempts to address the situation of having an alien that looks like some mad cosplayer arrive on the scene. If aliens arrived, I would expect to see something wildly different from humans. If I was wearing my boring Realism Hat (not suggested attire for this series) I would say that an AI probe would be the most likely thing.

The development of having a faction that hates the thought of such a silly-looking and frivolous race make first contact is a fun one, as is the Cult that worships the idea of catgirls, which I think is a jab at a certain type of fan. This is certainly a step up from having everyone just blithely accept Alien Girl after a few episodes.

agila61 wrote:

there is character design and various other things that go along with having a successful fanservice focused anime, its just that serious plot development and substantial character growth are generally not the top priorities.

You seem to be implying that those two specific elements are dramatically more important than anything else (so much so that other elements, e.g. character design, aren't really worth talking in detail about) and a show that lacks those is "doing everything (but fanservice) poorly."
Am I understanding you correctly?

Does that mean you feel that animated cartoons that lack those two elements--say for example, Futurama or Disney's Phantasia--are poor?

This show does play with its tropes and cliches, but I still need to be impressed due to how utterly dull all the characters are.

Megiddo wrote:

1. I'm not sure what you mean. Again, all the "alien" technology I have seen is "slick". I mean, do you expect alien technology to have huge devices powered by vacuum tubes? Of course not! It's going to be sleek. Now "gimmicky" is something that I honestly cannot picture in my head. Providing an example of what makes it gimmicky would help quite a bit.

Oh, my god. . . I'm honestly starting to get the feeling that you're yanking my chain here.

When I talk about alien technology looking "slick," I am talking about it being so advanced that it doesn't even look like technology anymore; it could almost be magic. It doesn't have the look of technology seen in recent sci fi movies and series because it has progressed beyond the level where it looks like it has mechanical origins. The joke in one of the episodes is that, because of this, it does not look suitable for an amateur sci fi movie some students are trying to put together; the thing about how the energy beams Elis's ship uses to maneuver very slowly look like it's being suspended from strings is part of that joke. That a second group of people have told Elis that she doesn't look enough like common conception of an alien to appear in the movie is also part of that joke.

As for how that's supposed to be clever? Because it is parodying the fact that so many series are just blithely accepting of even the most ludicrous looks for aliens like Elis and her technology. It is something that was done deliberately to make a kind of underhanded point while still technically staying within the bounds of the series and its setting (i.e. no breaking of the fourth wall). That is something that you don't see other series even attempting. If that doesn't count as clever then I have no idea what standard you are using to define that word.

Quote:

2. Can the "power suit" simply be removed? Or is that required for the "Catians" to be able to live on Earth?

It can and is done (and this becomes something of a plot point), but I was hoping I wasn't going to have to spell out all of the series' gimmicks. . .

Quote:

And yeah, you are not winning any sort of "cleverness" points from me by outright stating that this show follows that awful setup of a hot girl showing up and wanting to jump the main character's bones. That's about as lazy and hackneyed writing as you can get by copy and pasting the same setup from all the other ecchi/harem shows.

Wow, are you deliberately trying to misunderstand things? It's not the fact that the series has that very typical set-up that's clever; it's that it plays around with that notion and hot the series handles the whole mating season business - and no, this does not play out like anything you've seen in any equivalent series.

And no, I'm not going to go into detail about that.

Look, if you're not trolling then you're just looking for excuses to deny the truth of anything I'm saying, so I'm not feeling inclined to waste more time on this. If you still aren't seeing the appeal despite my (and others') attempts to explain it, then just don't watch it or waste my time about complaining about it.

This has been a surprisingly fun show to watch. Unlike Demon King, Asobi is taking the time to give you characters and story that can be followed and enjoyed. While this is not a masterpiece of anime Asobi is taking the time to tell a story and include fan service. Rather than a series that presents the fan service and maybe a story can be found between panty shots. The series has a good balance of seriousness and tongue-in-cheek humor that keeps scenes from becoming dull. However it's hard to get nervous about an enemy that has cute floppy dog ears that would give any cat girl a run for their money. It goes without saying that if you don't like the genre you're better off passing by. Asobi just offers more to the Ecchi fan than the norm.

It does seem as if Meggido is being purposely obtuse.

I too have enjoyed this series and have a vehement dislike of harem series. But the fact that aliens aren't taken seriously because they don't look "alien" enough was enough to get me to watch.

Also, you gotta like a series that can launch a thread like this.

Nice review, Key, thanks

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