The Fall 2014 Anime Preview Guide

Girl Friend BETA

Nick Creamer

Rating: 2

Kokomi has to get up early to get to her rhythmic gymnastics practice. After being flustered by a girl taking pictures of her, she's rescued by upperclassman Lemaire, who speaks with a kind of criminally adorable faux-French-Japanese accent. Unfortunately, Lemaire drops a family photo when she leaves, which is picked up by Kokomi, who spends the next seventeen minutes attempting to return her photo.

That's not a pithy reduction of a more complex narrative or anything. The vast majority of this episode is actually composed of Kokomi walking up to classmates, saying “have you seen Lemaire,” making small talk for a few minutes, and then moving on. Girl Friend BETA is based on a visual novel that originally had a male main character, and that clearly shows in the way this show's many, many, many tertiary characters are defined. On her way to school, Kokomi passes Flower-Watering Girl and Lacrosse Girl. When she gets to class in the morning, she has a brief conversation with Juggling Girl and Health Committee Girl. Outside of Kokomi and Lumiere, the characters in this show don't seem to have personalities - they have “attributes.” The general, overarching, overwhelming “show personality” is “pleasantness” - all the characters are pleasant to each other, all of them seem to be leading pleasant lives.

That's not actually a bad thing! Girl Friend BETA is clearly not designed to be a drama-heavy show - it's designed to be a light, fluffy slice of inoffensiveness. The show's aesthetics support this - the designs are rounded and childlike, the color palette is light and breezy, the music is inoffensive (if repetitive) visual novel fare. Scenes transition through the use of crossfades marked with bubbly colors and jingling sounds. Everyone seems to exist in a nice world where everything is bright and your biggest concern is whether you'll get to return your friend's important photo today or tomorrow. It's very much not my thing, but if you're looking for a purely mild-mannered show to relax with, Girl Friend BETA seems to fit the bill.

Girl Friend BETA is available streaming at Crunchyroll.

Rebecca Silverman

Rating: 1.5 (out of 5)

There have been dating sims and other similar video games that have made a successful transition from choice-based adventure to anime format. Girl Friend BETA doesn't look like it is going to be one of them. This is not because it is horrible, offensive, or any other number of negative things. No, it is simply because its first episode is really quite boring. It opens with the adorable Kokomi Shiina, a second year in high school and apparently the ace of the rhythmic gymnastics team, waking up. Then she goes to school. Along the way she meets many (adorable) named characters, all of whom have a distinctive hairstyle, hair color, and/or way of speaking. We see her stretch and practice her sport for all of maybe a minute before the Aggressively Affectionate character – Erena Mochizuki – charges in, only to be stopped by Chloe Lemaire, the Obligatory Transfer Student. After showing us how adorably bad she is at speaking Japanese, Chloe drops a family photo, which Kokomi spends the remaining fifteen minutes of the episode attempting to return.

Apart from the fact that this does not make for a scintillating viewing experience, the bigger issues lie with the overall presentation of the episode. If Kokomi is so good at rhythmic gymnastics, shouldn't we see her doing more than tossing her clubs in the air and getting startled by Erena? We should see her skill, not hear about it from the other characters. There's also the issue of the fact that she and all of the other girls have the exact same body shape, which in Kokomi's case makes little sense for her supposed sport. Then there's the sheer number of girls introduced in this episode – far too many to keep track of (I filled an entire post-it note with names) and too many of them look vaguely similar to really keep them separate in your mind. Plus with the number of girls shown, it comes as a huge shock to realize that this show is set in a co-ed school – there isn't a single male character who is named or shown to be remotely important.

Unfortunately there isn't much to recommend the art and animation either. Everyone is pleasant looking enough, but there's just something off about them in most shots. Most of the scenes of people walking also appear to be missing a few frames, with characters magically transporting from one place to another without taking all of the required steps. This gives the show a jerky quality that takes away from any soothing aspects it might have had as it leisurely follows Kokomi around school.

While shows like Girl Friend BETA can be a nice brain-break, this one walks far too close to the boring line. Twenty-four minutes of forced character introductions and a thin plot about trying to find someone only to just keep missing her hamper the episode's efforts at being cute, and poor animation and artistry keep the viewer from fully immersing in the show. If you're starving for cute girls, this does deliver, but if you like a plot along with them, look someplace else.

Girl Friend BETA is available streaming on Crunchyroll.

Theron Martin

Rating: 1.5 (of 5)

Review: While the title of this newest offering from Studio Silver Link practically screams “harem series,” that's not what it actually appears to be, as not a single male character appears except in background shots. If the first episode is representative of the series as a whole then this will instead be a slice-of-life “cute girls doing cute things” kind of series, one which is going to rely on being sweet and cloying, and having a vast array of pretty girls, to be entertaining. The first episode has literally nothing else to it – no real plot, no significant indications of romance, nothing more than incidental comedy, no substantial drama, not even overt fan service – so if you cannot get interested in a series solely on the basis of pretty girls being cute then nothing here is likely to keep your attention.

Given the source material, this probably shouldn't be a surprise. It is based on an immensely popular smartphone-based dating sim whose most prominent feature is that it has over 100 uniquely-voiced girls as options. That aspect comes through in the first episode, as while it follows a day in the life of ace rhythmic gymnast Kokomi Shiina, she meets and interacts with well over a dozen other named girls (and a couple more are shown and named but she doesn't interact with them), most of whom have distinct appearances and some distinct trait, whether it be a sports accoutrement or a readily-definable behavior quirk. The other one that seems to be most important at this point is Chloe Lemaire, a French exchange student who is characterized by a stilted speech pattern, occasionally getting Japanese terms wrong, and occasionally inserting French phrases into her speech. She meets Kokomi early on, drops a family photo, and Kokomi spends most of the rest of the episode trying to track her down to give it back to her. . .  and that's the entire sum of the plot. Both the final scene and the closer suggest that the two will become quite chummy. The source game also apparently has a card-based battle component, but no hint of that is present here. Something like that would certainly liven up what otherwise looks like a very dull series.

The character designs for many of the girls introduced so far favor a petite-but-busty look, but that is the farthest the episode goes in a fan service direction. The different-colored skirts used for each grade is a nice visual touch, but otherwise the character rendering is unimpressive and stands out a little too much against the higher-quality backgrounds. Voice work is uniformly soft and gentle, which is probably meant to give a soothing effect but comes off bland instead. Nothing that the musical score does generates any excitement, either.

Some first episodes get a low grade because they're bad or offensive. This one get a low grade because it simply doesn't do anything to be worth watching.

Girl Friend BETA is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.