It’s my favorite day of the week – Guest Review Wednesday! And today we welcome back Day – it’s always a pleasure to have Day’s insight, so I hope you’ll give them a warm welcome back and settle in for today’s review. Take it away, Day!
In a world in which monsters known as Huge (yes, really) present an existential threat to humanity, teen girls known as “Lilies” are what stands between these monsters and the rest of humanity. Riri Hitotsuyanagi, a newly-minted Lily, is beginning her new life at an academy dedicated to training and housing Lilies. Riri has dreamt of being a Lily herself ever since she was saved by one, and has especially looked forward to academy life since it’s a chance to reunite with that very Lily, Yuyu Shirai. Riri is particularly interested in being able to form a “Schutzengel” pair with Yuyu, a big sister-little sister style relationship that allows for mentoring both on and off the battlefield. But Yuyu dashes her optimism somewhat, as she’s grown cold and stand-offish sometime in the interim.
And so begins
Assault Lily: Bouquet, a series that is attempting to adapt a line of Azone International dolls with weaponry and short biographies into a cohesive single cour anime series. And that I phrased it that way may give the key hint to how that plays out ultimately, as while I strongly enjoyed the first few episodes as being exactly my kind of garbage (albeit with entirely too much thigh-gazing), alas, it cannot maintain that garbage truck pace. Instead the garbage truck stalls, it catches fire, and the structure ultimately dissolves into goo that really wants to kick some tears loose from the audience. And it even lacks the grace to do so using the story the shows launches on! Sure, pink-haired genki girl tries to melt the icy exterior of an aloof dark-haired girl is old hat, but it’s at least something, and that Yuyu is haunted by either a ghost or a hallucination of the partner she may’ve killed should make for plenty of fodder. I did wonder what the show would be about after they neaten up this problem in the early going and the answer is – not much, although it does give us plenty of time watching the characters bathe. The show does manage to remember that Yuyu has some trauma issues toward the end, but by then it is simply too late; I am bored senseless.
Not helping matters, the entire cast is a set of cookie-cutters. Some are certainly even more distinctly lacking in life than others, but even with the ones I like, I can’t deny that they’re well-worn variations on well-worn types. That the show sees fit to print the names of every character on-screen every time they first appear in an episode, no matter how regular a member of the cast the person is, leads me to think even the production crew knew no one was going to remember who half of them were.
The visuals are a bit more interesting than the story or the cast, but not in a positive way – there’s just some rather odd choices made with the visual presentation. Shaft is the studio, but outside of a few shots (including some in the primary ED), one would never guess so from how generic everything looks. The animation does kick into a higher-gear from time to time, but rather than doing so during battle scenes, its most often for moments where there is little reason to bother splashing out. Bafflingly, the show also insists on using CG for a tea-set the cast uses throughout the show, a distractingly bizarre move when it appears in scenes that are otherwise wholly 2D.
People weren’t precisely wrong to smell Yuri fumes whiffing off of this one, but anyone searching for something substantive is going to come away disappointed; outside of suggestive shots in the ED, Yuri cred mostly hangs on the thin thread of intense gazes and intense friendships… and Kaede Johan Nouvel, who in a different show would be the evil psycho lesbian, but here is mostly played for jokes for her obsessive focus on Riri.
Ratings:
Art – 5
Story – 4
Character – 6
Service – 5 (no full nudity but plenty of thighs, baths in crotch-emphasizing towels, and characters who enter scenes boobs-first)
Yuri – 1
Overall – 4
I might actually be more upset over this not being good garbage than I end up feeling upset with shows that start out as Good before swerving off the road into crapsville! Good trash is hard to find!
Erica here: Just a reminder to commenters – I know at least one of you has strong feelings about AL:B and so I remind you that if you liked this anime, you may feel free to express what you liked about it. We would be delighted to learn what you though made it good. But you may not be rude about this review or other comments, unless you are able to be very, very funny and rude. ^_^
Thank you Day for another insightful review. I agree, it is hard to find good garbage…and that this was not it. ^_^
I guess it says something if a company thought they could market their figure line using yuri tropes and trappings in their season long commercial. Not sure that’s progress, though.
Haha, yeah. Digress, rather than progress.
I figured the anime was focused on selling a product when I saw all those fully named characters in the beginning, but I thought it was a gacha game or something a la Madoka side story or Princess Connect.
This review has made me feel much better about my own feelings about only getting part-way through the show and stalling out interest wise.
I was so excited at the beginning of the season to get a potential full on yuri anime original, then a couple episodes in I would have been fine with the “good garbage” but I really did just get bored. This review really hits the nail on the head for all the reasons I stopped caring about the show. I’ll probably get through it at some point just to kill time and see what happens; it’s still in my queue, but it’s not alone in there so who knows when that will happen.
I always like to convey my thanks to those taking on these Superfund sites of entertainment. So, hat tip for saving the rest of us time. ><;
This looks like a show-within-a-show parody of a moe battlegirls show. Everything seems so generic and insubstantial, like the old Xerox copy-of-a-copy effect. The word salad Madlibs substituting for worldbuilding, the lazy names ("Lily Oneknife?" Really?), the plug-and-play plotting, the 'ship baiting… ugh.
You are right – good trash is hard to find! I can dig some anime/manga junk food – absolutely give me more ガンブレッドｘシスターズ! But I can't see this being satisfying for anyone unless you've 1. never seen a show like this and 2. REALLY can't go without your upskirt and zettai ryouiki fix.