"Currently, hundred of different alien species come and go, living their lives on the Earth. Species that come in peace, aggressive warlike species... Aliens with all kinds of personalities live among us, maintaining a precarious balance."
Contrary to the belief of its native inhabitants, Mankind isn't the only sentient species living on Earth. Actually, individuals of about five hundred alien species call Earth home for reasons as diverse as their biological peculiarities. The Diskun and Erald, for example, come to Earth because Humans Are Special to them; others are refugees, like the cursed inhabitants of the dead planet Conwell; some come looking for love, like the future Mucbak Queen; and not everyone has a choice on the matter, like one of the last mermaids of Horn. Their existence is a secret to the average human citizen; however, with so many aliens around, it's inevitable some humans eventually get tangled in their bizarre stories. These humans are said to have entered the Level E.
Level E is one of the least known works of Yoshihiro Togashi, of YuYu Hakusho and Hunter × Hunter fame. Prone to Art Shift, Genre Shift and Mood Whiplash, it can go from a wacky parody of Pretty Freeloader shows to a tragic Horror story without missing a beat, and it lacks a definite protagonist, having an Ensemble Cast whose most recurring character is a certain Prince from the planet Dogra.
The manga was originally serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump from 1995 to 1997, and compiled into three volumes. An 13-episode anime adaptation by Studio Pierrot aired in 2011.
Level E the manga has examples of...
- Affably Evil -> Faux Affably Evil: The Prince, though he's not completely evil, just a jerk.
- Affectionate Parody: The RPG is one of Dragon Quest. Which makes it pretty funny when you realize who does character designs on that series...
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Sometimes the Prince is just too smart.
- Aliens Are Bastards: Some species are said to have exterminated others for the pettiest of reasons. And individuals don't fare better, acting as ruthless, greedy and fanatical as the worst of humans.
- And then there is the Prince.
- Aliens Speaking English: Actually, what they don't speak is Japanese. Not even their universal translators come with it.
- Amusement Park of Doom: Calvary, planet-sized.
- Arranged Marriage: Meet Princess Luna.
- Batman Gambit: The first arc was all orchestrated by the
Prince. - Becoming the Mask: Tachibana-sensei feels pretty comfortable in her new job.
- Bee People: The Mucbaks — an insectoid One-Gender Race, but lacking a Hive Mind.
- Berserk Button: For Kraft, everything The Prince does.
- Bittersweet Ending: The mermaid story.
- Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Conwellians. Males eat the females after falling in love with them, with the female's eggs being fertilised inside the male's body after the females are digested and the young being expelled unharmed.
- Black Widow: Both Interspecies Romance stories feature a version of this, with the Conwell variant in particular having The Bluebeard as the species' racial hat.
- Blatant Lies: Captain Kraft didn't want to harm the prince. Sure, not one bit.
- But Now I Must Go: She belongs to the sea, even if it is an alien sea to her.
- The Caligula: The Prince.
- Childhood Friend Romance: Of the Unlucky kind: Princess Luna.
- Creepy Child: Aliens come in all sizes and ages.
- Creepy Crossdresser: The Prince looks good as a Princess, of course.
- Cute Monster Girl: Tachibana-sensei.
- Cute Sports Club Manager: Fujii.
- Darwinist Desire: The Mucbak find mates from other species by looking for those who are fittest in the belief it'll result in stronger children.
- Decoy Protagonist: If this were a typical Pretty Freeloader series, Yukitaka would have been the Ordinary High-School Student protagonist.
- Delinquent: Yukitaka is often mistaken for one, though his argument with Kraft proves he just may have been one.
- Depopulation Bomb: By Synthetic Plague. What the Mucbak drop onto the species from which they take mates. Just for jealousy.
- Did You Just Romance Cthulhu?: Mikihisa doesn't realize what that cute foreign girl is and what dire consequences dating her might have for mankind.
- Does Not Know His Own Strength: A local street gang tries to pick up a woman. The Dogran Prince goes Dulcinea, taking kicks long enough for the woman to escape, but the gang goes too far, so he took one of them by the head and proceeds to smash it onto the ground, fatally wounding him. Not. Unfortunately, these guys are Hair Trigger Tempered, Hot-Blooded Diskunians in human disguise.
- As told by the Prince...
- Downer Ending: The Conwellian story. Nope, the show was trolling you.
- Dude Looks Like a Lady: The Prince, he is as good-looking as he is annoying.
- Dying Race: The Conwellians
- Eastern RPG: The asssociated tropes are invoked and Played for Laughs by the Prince in one of the stories.
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The Prince of Dogra, real name Baka Ki El Dogra. Really.
- Averted in the anime's dub, as several characters call him Prince Baka.
- Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: The guy he helped out turned out to be part of his plan.
- Fanboy: The Diskunians are big fans of baseball.
- Genre-Busting: The mermaid story is at heart an SF Film Noir Fairy Tale.
- Girl Next Door: Miho.
- Hair Antennae: Kraft and Princess Luna (Luna's looks like a spider).
- Happy Ending: It took breaking about a hundred galactic laws, but in the end Earth is safe and Mikihisa finally has a body to match his mind.
- Heroic Comedic Sociopath: The Prince does try to help the Earth... while having fun (from his point of view).
- Honor Before Reason: Mikihisa won't date lesbians; he wants girls to love him as if he were a guy, hoping to eventually find someone who feels If It's You, It's Okay for him.
- Horror Hunger: The "invisible stomach".
- Hot-Blooded:
- Hotheads Yukitaka and Captain Kraft. The former gets hypertension from the Prince's wacky antics. The latter, well... he's just irritable.
- The Diskunian race, of the Hair-Trigger Temper kind. Hinted to be bloodthirsty, revengeful beings. Picking a fight with them is more or less like asking for a full-scale interracial war. The Prince accidentally kills one of them... NOT!!
- Human Aliens: Dograns, except for being Made of Iron and having Alien Blood.
- Humans Are Special: For the Diskunians and Eralds, humans are off limits. Who knows which human might be a potential baseball star or parent to one? The Mucbaks think humans have great genetic potential.
- Interspecies Romance: Two of the stories are about this. Things get really messy because of the Bizarre Alien Reproduction involved.
- It Amused Me: The Prince is apparently unable to do anything without twisting it into some convoluted prank.
- Kid Hero: Both lampshaded and subverted in one of the stories. The kids who the Prince dragged into one of his crazy anti-boredom schemes completely called him out on actually picking kids to fight monsters. They eventually go along with it kicking and screaming, sometimes literally.
- Klingons Love Shakespeare: Baseball is Serious Business for Diskun and Eralds.
- Laughing Mad: Captain Kraft when Prince Baka pressed his button WAY TOO MANY times at once.
- Living Lie Detector: It comes handy if your species evolved in a planet where your predators look just like you.
- Loads and Loads of Races: Almost every chapter or episode deals with at least one new alien, though there are recurring ones, like the Prince.
- Long-Haired Pretty Boy: The Prince.
- Malaproper: Captain Iwata's "pornguys" phenomenon.
- Mood Whiplash: Constantly. This show can and does transition from dramatic to tense to comedic in the span of about 60 seconds, all with the same characters.
- Mucbak Needs Men
- Offscreen Teleportation: Good golly, Prince! Don't show up in front of us like that!
- Older Than They Look: The kids are in 5th grade (11-12 years old) and Yokota already has a tween Perma-Stubble, but Shimizu and Mayuzumi look younger than their grade suggests.
- Oh, Crap!: ...is not enough to describe the look on Kraft's face, when he thought that his Prince killed a Diskunian.
- Organic Technology: Dograns and Mucbaks.
- Out-Gambitted: The Prince eventually finds someone even sneakier than him. And is absolutely thrilled by the fact.
- Our Mermaids Are Different: Alien mermaids with two tails and a deadly reflex.
- Playing Possum: The dead Diskunian isn't really dead after all.
- Plague Master: All Mucbak royalty.
- Pretty Freeloader: Thats what Yukitaka finds as he enters the living room of the flat he has just moved to. Hilarity Ensues.
- Proud Warrior Race Guy: Diskun and Eralds. The Diskun have exterminated species for insulting a single member of its race.
- Psychic Powers: One of the team is a Reality Warper. But which one?
- Scheherezade Gambit: The Princess uses a variant to delay her wedding night. Long story.
- Seinen: Despite having been published in Weekly Shonen Jump, this series is Seinen to the core.
- Sentai: The Prince just throws them in his JRPG.
- Shout-Out: To ET The Extraterrestrial.
- "Clive from the planet Jacqueline Ess" is a reference to the Books of Blood. Come to think of it, the whole series might have been inspired by that famous horror anthology, given the episodic structure, some of the themes explored, the black humour and occasional forays into the weird and macabre.
- Professor Edogawa from Konan Laboratory?
- Yukitaka Tsutsui is one of the protagonists.
- The last episode of the anime has one to The Lion King (1994).
- The dub throws in its share of references too — on separate occasions Baka imitates Capt. Kirk and Yoda.
- Sour Supporter: Kraft, who has been a bodyguard for the Prince for ten years, hates his guts intensely but keeps protecting him solely out of loyalty to the King and Queen of Dogra.
- Spell My Name With An S: Diskun/Disc(k)on, Mucbak/Makubaku/Macbac, Dogran/Doguran.
- Stern Teacher: Tachibana-sensei.
- Story Within a Story: One of the stories turns out to be just a Very Loosely Based on a True Story manga written by the Prince.
- Take Me Instead: The mermaid agreed to become an assassin so her sisters were spared.
- Trans Tribulations: Kyoko Mikihisa is biologically female, but has identified as male since he was at least 4 years old. He has always asked to be referred to by his family name, and has had many women reject him because they saw him as a woman.
- Trapped in Another World
- Twist Ending: What do you know, humans aren't the only sentient beings native to Earth. Good news for a certain Woobie mermaid.
- Regarding the Conwell story: Apparently, the entire arc was just Prince Baka pitching a story to an executive which gets rejected for being too dark. Even though the Prince suggests that the Conwell aliens exist, it's hard to know if he's telling the truth knowing his usual habits.
- Unreliable Narrator: Take anything the Prince says with a grain of salt.
- The Unreveal: After discovering that he had a minor McGuffin all along, the Prince proceeded to use the McGuffin to reveal the suspenseful truth about him to Yukitaka. Yes it was about him... having a weird pet, that is. He claims to have never said that the truth was all about him, though, much to Yukitaka's dismay.
- Unusual Euphemism: In some translations, Miho is a *+0x* who probably likes to *+0x+*. In others the translator uses Symbol Swearing for same effect.
- Voluntary Shapeshifting: The Prince's pet.
- Walking Shirtless Scene: Captain Iwata has a hard time keeping his shirt on.
- Welcome to Corneria: During the RPG arc, one of the NPCs would keep saying "Welcome to Hamajiri enjoy your stay."
- With This Ring: Even Dogran wedding rings are beyond Earth's technological level.
Level E the anime has examples of...
- 2D Visuals, 3D Effects: All over the place, to the point where it's even used to animate hand puppets.
- All Just a Dream: The fourth episode, which was just one of the Prince's attempts to convince humans that aliens exist.
- Amusing Injuries: I mean, come on, people! Yukitaka punished Prince with a reverse roundhouse kick, Slo Mo and all!
- Not to mention Captain Kraft doing the same thing only with a Repeat Cut and then throwing the prince in the air, kicking him multiple times while falling and ending with a piledriver.
- And later Shimizu gives him a Megaton Punch followed by him and Momochi using the king as a hammer.
- Bait-and-Switch Credits: The OP presents the series as an actioner with a blonde alien bishie hunting uglier aliens.
- Casting Gag: This is the second series where Daisuke Namikawa has played a prince while Takehito Koyasu has played his primary attendant. However, their roles in terms of character interaction are completely reversed.
- Cliffhanger: Of the surprise reveal variety, complete with To Be Continued.
- Early-Bird Cameo: Yukitaka's baseball team captain, Iwata, and Yokota and Shimizu are seen briefly in the first episode.
- The video game Yukitaka plays in an early episode features the Color Rangers.
- Ear Worm: Lampshaded with the Color Rangers theme song in episode 6.Akagawa: The song's gonna be stuck in my head for days!
- Fanservice: The animated Tachibana-sensei gets Non-Mammal Mammaries and a Shower Scene.
- Goggles Do Something Unusual: Kraft's subordinate, Sado, can Stat-O-Vise a dead human body. Which turns out to be a Diskunian.
- Hyperspace Wardrobe: Where does the Prince keep those Cosplay outfits?
- Pragmatic Adaptation: The animated version adds fanservice and action sequences to some arcs and removes some scenes from other in order to make them fit into the tv episodes.
- Saying Sound Effects Out Loud: Prince is a regular offender (this may be due more to Actor Allusion than anything, though)."Boink!" "Kapow!"
- The Stinger: After the end credits of the final episode, it is revealed that the cat was a spy all along.
- The Unmasqued World: At the end of the anime, Baka was outwitted and married the princess of Magra, removing under observation status from Earth — and revealing the entire alien armada to the entire planet.
