Archive for the Day Category


If You Could See Love, Volume 1, Guest Review by Day

January 26th, 2022

Hello and welcome to another Guest Review Wednesday on Okazu. I’m extremely pleased to welcome back one of our long-time reviewers, Day! Please give Day your kind attention and don;’t forget to show some love in the comments. Day will be looking at If You Could See Love, Volume 1, by Yeren Mikami, which is out now in Digital format from Yen Press. Day, the floor is yours!

Ever since she can remember, teenager Mei Haruno has been afflicted with a weird ability – she can tell who is in love with whom because that affection appears as a pink arrow to her. The distracting nature of this aside, it’s gotten her into trouble in the past because it’s led to her meddling in other people’s would-be relationships, leading to her own social isolation. Hoping to get away from having to see all these arrows and get a fresh start, she enrolls in a girls’ high school… only to realize that not only are there loads of girls into girls, but that two of them are into her. And they’re both her roommates. Shenanigans and bathtimes ensue.

When I originally planned to write this review, I sat down, opened a word processor… and stared blankly at the screen, as I realized that, despite having read this within the past month, beyond the broadest outlines, I’d completely forgotten what happened in this manga. I did remember that it was a bit bland and not very good, and that there was something to do with love arrows, but that was about it. So, I cracked it open again, and this time I took notes. All of which is a lengthy way to say – this is a really forgettable opening volume. And, wow, my brain sure blurred my recollection of just how wildly stupid the premise and its execution is.
 
Mei is a fairly standard issue manga heroine, her personality lining up with what one could guess from her hair color (energetic, cheerful, not very bright). But did I say cheerful? Oh, how could I forget her dark past (pissing people off by telling their crushes they have crushes on them) that’s made her swear off romance?! Her admirers, friend Sayo and Rinna, are likewise not particularly distinct. Sayo is the childhood friend Mei hasn’t seen in years, and, yes, of course the girl has spent the intervening time pining for Mei… as well as growing very large breasts. Rinna meanwhile is tsundere-ish, and has met Mei previously, although Mei doesn’t remember this; the manga doesn’t quite come right out and say it, but there’s an implication that she’s also been yearning away for our lead for some unknown amount of time before coming across her again.
 
Despite Mei’s repeated insistence that she’ll never pursue romance because of her very sad past, its crystal clear by volume’s end that this is going to resolve itself in a three-way relationship… which is one of the few things I’d give the manga points for. I don’t care much about these girls, but this actually seems the natural direction for the relationship to move in. The other item I’ll grant credit for is that the manga uses the color pink in its otherwise black and white visual scheme to make things like those love arrows, hearts, and cherry blossoms really pop off the page.
 
I’d be hard-pressed to recommend this one, even to the most diehard fans of schoolgirl yuri (goodness knows there’s plenty better series featuring that available in English). It’s aggressively bland, with a bone-deep stupidity to the premise that is never elevated by the writing, nor are the characters engaging enough to make it worth enduring. 
 
Oh, it may go without saying, but there really is NO sense of queer identity whatsoever in this one. Also, I loathe the cover.
 
Ratings:
Art – 6 (its polished while also completely not to my tastes; I smirked over fact that adult characters are indistinguishable design-wise from the teenagers)
Story – 5
Characters – 5  
Service – 4 (surprisingly not pervasive but there is a very extended bathing scene early on)
Yuri – 7 (well, it’s definitely yuri, even if it’s very silly yuri)
 

Overall – 5

Erica here: Thank you so much, for this review, as much for taking one for the team as for giving me a critically needed evening off. ^_^  I’ll be honest, I do not favor Teren Mikami’s work, so wasn’t feeling enthusiastic about this. Blob heads. So thank you for the honest review!

 




Assault Lily: Bouquet, Guest Review By Day

January 27th, 2021

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. ^_^

 




DNA Doesn’t Tell Us Manga, Volume 1 Guest Review by Day

October 3rd, 2018

It’s Guest Review Wednesday again and we sure have a Guest Review for you today! Welcome back Day who know hos their own category, where you can find all their reviews. The stage is yours Day…take it away!

What if, all over the world, animals suddenly began turning into teenaged girls? Well, in DNA Doesn’t Tell Us, Volume 1 (published in English by Seven Seas) what happens is that special schools would be formed for these young ladies to attend, complete with exploding uniforms (sometimes the girls revert to their animal forms, you see, and mere clothing rarely survives). Youko, our lead, happens to be one of these young ladies; once upon a time, she was a bighorn sheep, but after living for two years with a farmer, she’s now a student at Animalium in rural Japan. Animalium’s purpose is to teach former animals how to live in the human world as humans. Youko herself is displeased with being separated from her father figure, but she adapts fairly well to the situation and makes some friends.

What follows is fairly standard stuff for what is probably best classed with monster-girls-go-to-school tales, itself a fairly large subset of the burgeoning monster girl genre. Youko and her friends have a career day, there’s an athletic day, we spend an inordinate time peering into a high school locker room, Youko teaches her friends how to bathe like humans do… there’s a sexy lady in a skirt suit who runs the place, and who is, of course, there for those of us who don’t dig schoolgirl panties. But through it all, we get a pleasant surprise – Youko is far and away the most competent girl in the room, her time living on the farm as a human having already done a lot to ready her for the wider world. Given how common heroines are depicted as being “cutely” stupid and clumsy, it’s such a relief to run across a case where that isn’t so, and its genuinely enough to elevate this manga from tolerable to decent for me. Well – that, and that we get a good-natured story that, despite the fanservice, doesn’t descend into mean-spiritedness in its treatment of its characters.

I’ve made a bit of the visual fanservice thus far, so I feel its worth noting that while there is a decent bit of nudity, it declines from the quarter-way mark or so. There is a former Jersey cow later in the volume whose breasts are genuinely overwhelming, but, mercifully, she’s an adult, and she only shows up for a few pages.

As for Yuri… on the back cover, there’s a panel re-printed showing one girl biting another girl, with the caption “#girlxgirl”. I am sure that many readers fervently believe that the scene this is drawn from is a love confession scene which involves supporting characters Shin and Usami. I am equally sure that many readers of Okazu would feel much more skeptical toward it. A bit more grist can be drawn from Youko’s friendship with another sheep, her room-mate,and former Australian Merino, Fuwako. They actually seem genuinely fond of one another, which helps; its clear that Fuwako relies on Youko, and Youko enjoys spending time with Fuwako. She also regularly helps Fuwako get dressed, and we all know how sexy it is to have to clothe your romantic partner every day, right? Right??? Ahem; I’m being a bit mean, but although there’s more grist there, I myself still don’t see it, and its pretty obvious that the folks involved in this manga’s production want people to think its so without actually having to move it to the realm of text.

All in all, this is a decent if not particularly novel manga about girls in a special school with a solid heroine anchoring the whole thing, and I found it entertaining enough for a rainy afternoon. I am even considering picking up the second volume! If you dig monster/animal girl manga, but prefer to leave out the harem aspect many of those carry, this will likely float your boat. I wish the art was a bit less moe, but its polished and, sure, it’s cute (other than the poor Jersey cow woman), even if there’s no way any of the girls remotely resemble a teenager.

Art – 6
Story – 6
Characters – 6
Yuri – 2
Service – 5

Overall – 6

Thanks again, Day!





Pretty Derby – Umamusume Anime (English) Guest Review by Day

July 18th, 2018

I am super jetlagged and whiny (I know, I know, you totally sympathize with me being exhausted from too much food and travel) and here comes Day, riding up like a heroic white charger horsegirl, ready to save you from me making too many unfunny horse jokes. So let’s saddle up and Day will will lead us along the bridle path of Umamusume, streaming free and legally, with regional restrictions on Crunchyroll.

“In an alternate world which resembles our own in every respect but one – there are horse girls (the titular umusume) – we meet Special Week, a young horse girl headed off for the big city, where she plans to pursue her dream of becoming the “best horse girl in Japan”. Challenged early to define what this means, Special Week (nicknamed Spe-chan) flounders a bit before deciding that it surely involves running very, very quickly. And, she hopes, at some point running very, very quickly with her personal idol, Silence Suzuka, a popular and successful fellow horse girl. Silence Suzuka, it turns out, is also her room-mate at her fancy Tokyo training school, where horse girls from all over Japan train hard to participate in the horse girl racing circuit in Japan and abroad. Thus begins Spe-chan’s quest.

I went into Umamusume expecting a complete trashfest. I am shocked and happy to announce on the other end that that isn’t remotely what I got. Instead, Umamusume is a good-natured sports show which is quirky and typical in about equal measure, as it hits many of the usual tropes of the sports genre even as it throws in some more unpredictable plot elements. On the one hand, Spe-chan’s story is largely that of the spunky underdog who makes good on her dreams; on the other, Suzuka’s experience of triumph followed by near-tragedy, and how that interacts with Spe-chan’s own ups and downs, presents us with a rival whose story doesn’t simply end with their defeat by the protagonist.

And then there’s the fun details, in everything from the fact that the girls all nail horseshoes to regular shoes to the oversized telephone handsets perfectly designed for top-of-the-head horse ears. Every girl has her own special racing outfit, none of which are at all suited to running. And then there are the more alarming details, like the fact that, just like real horses(!), a horse girl who falls during a race can very easily die from it. Oh, and, lest anyone become upset if they discover this when watching and not because I forewarned – the single stupidest element of the mobage from which this was adapted has been preserved, so, yes, we get a few post-race idol concerts. You can skip them all.

As I mention having anticipated trashiness, the relative dearth of fanservice bears mention. In fact, there is so little fanservice that I wouldn’t even be mentioning it at all if the property didn’t look like the sort that would have a lot of it. Unlike many of its kin, Umamusume proves fully capable of showing off athletic girls without treating the audience to extended locker-room sequences, and there’s nary a dreaded bloomer in sight when everyone dons their training uniforms.

Having said that, we do get a few stabs at the ol’ “guy mistaken for pervert” routine, and its just as tiresome as every other time we’ve seen it. And while this “gag” disappears by episode three, subsequent developments just make it worse, as the guy thus mistaken is the otherwise decent and solidly-handled coach, known, bizarrely, only as “Trainer-san”. (I can only assume this is a carry-over from the icky tendency of idol shows to have all the girls merely addressing their producer as “Producer-san”.) I hated him off the bat, but by the end I was just irritated that the production crew were so committed to checking boxes that they did a disservice to the character. It was especially galling in light of the great rapport which develops between him and fellow trainer Hana Toujo, a dynamic which manages to steer clear of the misogyny-tinged nature seen in other similar shows wherein a man and a woman are up against each other in training young women in a competitive realm.

Yuri is pure subtext. Am I surprised? No, I really am not – but I am a bit disappointed, as the years-old PV gave us a smooching couple performing a pairs figure skating routine. The characters who were thus featured there are relegated to peripheral roles here. Spe-chan and Suzuka form a close bond which begins as idol worship, wraps into codependence, and finally emerges as one between equal partners by the close of the series, but the show is satisfied to leave it up to us to draw the obvious conclusion. Beyond that, Spe-chan has two mommies, although one of them is dead and may’ve had sex with a man at some point, given Spe-chan’s existence (“may’ve” because in the first episode we’re informed that horse girls come about as… impregnation by the gods, or something? Its a little vague on the details!). Also, there’s a character who is Oscar de Jarjayes, but a horse girl. Everyone is in love with her.

Production values overall are… not great. In an era of visually impressive sports shows like Haikyuu, Yuri on Ice, and Hanebado!, Umamusume is distinctly lackluster. Character designs tend toward the cookie cutter, and racing sequences range from merely acceptable to awkward. At least, though, this was one of the once in a blue moon moments where P.A. Works opted to leave the lacquer at home.

Taken altogether, Umamusume is a sports anime that is probably best thought of as being pretty standard for the genre in spite of the seeming oddity of the premise. However, its good-spirited nature, combined with just enough deviations from the norm in terms of plotting, leaves something better than the sum of its parts. While I won’t feel any great grief if no more is made, I’d watch a second season in a heartbeat.

Art – 5
Story – 6
Characters – 6
Yuri – 3
Service – 2

Overall – 7

Erica here: “Also, there’s a character who is Oscar de Jarjayes, but a horse girl.” LOLOLOLOL. Thank you, thank you. I will never watch this anime, but I am so very glad I was able to read this review! Now I can ride off into the sunset….

 





Love Live Anime, First Season (English) Guest Review by Day

June 8th, 2016

LLSIPS1O happy Guest Review Wednesday! Today we have a returning Guest Reviewer and a unique perspective on something that I know of, but have not so much as lifted a single finger to engage in. But, let’s be real….any series with a large cast of girls and a presumptive male audience will be seen as “Yuri” by some portion of that audience. So, with that in mind, please welcome back Day!

Love Live is a multimedia juggernaut of which the first season of Love Live! School Idol Project is but one manifestation. The anime’s first season tells the story of a swiftly fading girls’ high school, Otonokizaka High, which faces imminent demise due to falling enrollment. Second-year Honoka Kousaka, cheerfully enjoying her shining youth (as anime teenagers are so given to), is devastated by the news. Luckily, Honoka lives in a parallel Japan wherein there exist “school idols”, girls who are regular high school students but also amateur musical stars, and it is in this that she believes she’s found the salvation she so desperately seeks for her school. Thus, Honoka sets out to recruit fellow students to her effort.

Set aside the silliness and creepiness of the concept of school idols, and what remains is a pretty bog-standard school club story populated by archetypes who rarely manage to elevate themselves above their assigned roles. Honoka’s the energetic can-do girl, blue-haired Umi is serious and uptight, anime-chubby Hanayo loves food… And while the stakes are allegedly high, the proceedings remain largely mired in the fluffy and the asinine, even after the eight (!!) episodes it takes to get the band together.

Ultimately, what irritates me about this show is that it takes a premise that could’ve made for a good sports anime and instead gives us a mediocre slice-of-life story. From the get-go we are made aware of A-RISE, a mega-popular group who looms large over the landscape of school idols, and who our plucky cast will eventually be fated to go head-to-head with. It’s a situation ripe for intense rivalries and melodrama, but after the initial bombastic introduction, they pretty much vanish. Instead, the girls struggle through daunting tasks like deciding who should be their leader, and convincing the student council president that school idols aren’t total trash. Occasionally, there are interludes featuring polished but bland music.

In among all this dull material, there are some items of note. The aforementioned student council president’s issue with the whole idol business is related to her own failure as a ballerina several years prior, which was a decent change from the generic “they’re a wet blanket” explanation for no-fun student council presidents. (Unfortunately, once she accepts that it isn’t a bad idea, her edges are totally sanded down and she ceases to be at all interesting.) One of the cutesier girls turns out to be the only one who has a part-time job and goals for her post-high school life. But best of all is twin-tailed Nico, who also happens to be the only fully-rounded character in the show. Nico is oft-scheming and oft-thwarted, initially stand-offish, given to bouts of duplicity, and the only one who seems to harbor no illusions, other than as regards her own ego. She’s frequently *terrible*. She’s great and I’m still shocked that something like series this would manage to produce something like her.

Now, of course, I wouldn’t be writing about this show at all if there wasn’t *some* Yuri angle to be found. But while the franchise writ large has been happy to proffer Yuri goggles for ages, and the fandom for Love Live has been merrily churning out Yuri fanworks, the evidence is nearly nonexistent here. Watching it, I myself felt mildly puzzled at the general absence of fuel; other than the obligatory breast-groping character, this seems to be shipping fuel for people who think two girls being within two feet of each other is reason alone for romance.

At the end of the day, I label the first season of this anime “eminently skippable”, unless you really enjoy low-stakes after-school club shows.

Art – 7 (it’s bright and colorful, and the girls are cute and don’t look like they’re eight years old)
Story – 4
Characters – 5 (I only hated one of them!)
Yuri – 1
Service – 2

Overall – 4 (a complete waste of time)

Erica here: Well, this sounds like perfect late night fevered watching, but I think I’ll continue to largely ignore its existence. ^_^ Can’t wait for your Season 2 review!