Episode 2: Complete the Mission, Seriously!
So... the first minute of the episode consists of Shiina, our archer from last episode, sneaking into Yamato's futon for some sexytimes. And taking that whole minute to realize he's been replaced with a Ninja Log.
And then... a mime is auctioning himself off for meal tickets to some students for some reason? As in, "I'll give you fifty meal tickets if you'll be my partner." I can tell that this post is going to be hella disorganized. Anyway, Yamato of all people says he'll do it for a 144. I really hope they're talking about fighting.
We finally see the OP for this show. It's your standard J-pop/J-rock opening with group and action shots of the characters from last episode, but it focuses mostly on the five girls. Shiina, Momo, Yukie, Kazuko, and... Rapier girl. Katherine? I only remember that her last name is Friedrich. But Hey, I'm 4.5 for 5. Not bad.
After that, we're back with the Main female group, along with Yamato, Cookie, and... two other guys (at least he black guy doesn't look like Jynx), discussing what they're going to do with the meal tickets. I still don't know the kind of challenge that's going on. Essentially, Yamato asked for a multiple of 9 tickets so that he and the 8 others in the group could share them. And he expected some guy named Cap not to show up (he didn't, yet) which is why he chose a multiple of 8 as well. And we get a gag about Kazuko counting out how much they'd each get if Cap didn't show (which is exactly what I did; it would be 18 instead of 16). She's doing this for the rest of the scene.
So. Anyway, Matsukaze, Yuki's talking horse pendant... thingy blurts out that if they win the meal ticket's there'd be fewer chances for her to make box lunches for Yamato (All of the girls in the room want him, natch). Apparently, there's a God trapped in there that only Yukie can hear (he gave her warnings during the war last episode; I should have mentioned that, shouldn't I?), but nobody believes her.
Anyway, after some belligerent flirting from Momo, (and the outline of a nipple through her skintight suit), Yamato finds a mission to do. Somehow. Because that's apparently what they pay students at a Ninja Academy for. I find this odd because they never said anything about that before; we just spent four minutes discussing the meal tickets and then whoop, mission time! Anyway, they're looking for a their history teacher's missing dog.
We watch them discuss their plan to find said dog, and get some shots of the neighborhood they're in. And it's at this point, two minutes into the scene change, that I realize that the mime is their history teacher, who is paying them to find his dog.
I'm not a stupid person. I learned to read when I was 2. I was in the top 7% of students in the United States in Elementary and Middle school. I got the highest SAT scores in high school. But the dialogue and scene changes never gave any hint that the scene of them looking for a dog and the scene with the mime were even remotely related. All it would take was a "Hey, we're getting 144 meal tickets to find this guy's dog." But nope, I literally had to use context clues to figure out the plot for this episode.
I rewatched the scene to make sure, and the part that was necessary to comprehending the coherence of the scenes is shoved in after 2 and a half minutes of character exposition and nonsense, and so remarkably easy to gloss over.
There's a reason for this, though:
It's so we get a "Momo is violent" joke; She's mad because she was promised a mission where she could beat people up. Because Yamato apparently never mentioned that they were looking for a lost dog while they were gathered in the room, but waited until they were on the street. Even worse, Yamato has a handful of "Lost Dog" posters, which would have had to get printed somewhere. And the whole group minus two are on the street right now, so they had to have been there when he got them printed, which means the joke doesn't work at all.
Back to the plot. If you could call it that. Chris suggests (jokingly) that Kazuko, being a bitch, should be able to discern what the mime's dog looks like from the blurry photo on the flyer (Aside: The history teacher came off as a bit of a Camp Gay guy. Why would he only have a single picture of his dog, and a blurry one at that?). She then sniffs the poster to see if she can track him. Because we've established that she's an idiot.
And lo and behold, the dog shows itself. Shiina is about to shoot one of the stunt arrows at it, loudly declaring her intention and causing the dog (who apparently understands Japanese that well) to run off, and a chase scene begins.
The dog runs underneath some wood that's blocking an alley. Only Yukie has the sense to cut it down. Everyone else decides to use Yamato as a stepping stool. Then the dog showcases his platforming skills by wall-jumping onto a roof (Cut to the History teacher, saying the dog is a "special breed"). They split up to look for it.
We then cut to a department store, where the dog is bothering a woman who is tring on clothes. Kazuko barges in and fails to get it. The scene is repeated in another room, with another girl changing, and Chris barging in. The third time is, obviously, the charm here; Yamato successfully gets his arms around the dog. And Jynx from last episode is changing in there. Cue Megaton Punch, and the dog getting away.
Then we repeat the scene with an ice cream parlor; The dog knocks over a random woman's ice cream, and Yukie chases after it, apoligizing. Then it knocks over a little girl's ice cream, Shiina apologizes for it. Then the dog knocks over Jynx's ice cream. Yamato catches the dog, and gets punched again, and the dog gets away again.
Note here that those two random women were all given names, while I still have to call Jynx... Jynx.
Cut away from the bad jokes, and there's a meeting between a maid and a white-haired lady, probably concerning the two random women from the mock war last episode. They're going to send in a squad of people to stop them from finding something, I guess? I couldn't really follow it.
Cut to nighttime, where the 5 girls are taking a bath and discussing their failure to catch the dog. I don't know why they had to be naked for this scene, but hey, that's anime for ya. At least it's on Hulu, where nipples don't interfere with the plot (or, in this case, lack thereof). We get more of them all (Except Momo) saying how much they want to ride Yamato into the sunset. Momo gladly interrupts the line of conversation, and then.... the dog shows up, right in the bath, leering creepily at them. The worst part is that they stand there looking at it for five seconds before they start chasing it (stark naked) through the halls.
Shiina pulls her bow from Hammerspace and shoots an arrow at the dog, who then Matrix dodges out of the way (He does the Neo pose and everything) without even breaking stride. Three times in succession. it was, admittedly, kinda cool. She deduces that the dog was trained in martial arts (because in anime, the phrase "everyone and their dog does X" is taken literally). Momo rejoices, because she now has free reign to beat the crap out of this thing.
They chase the dog down a dead-end hallway and into a room, where they all, well, dogpile it.
I don't have to tell you whose room the 5 naked girls just barged into, do I? Good. They all beat him up. I'm not going to get into how wrong that is, but I want to note that it's left ambiguous whether or not Shiina took part in the beatdown. I say that because she went into his room naked at the beginning of this episode, and not three minutes ago proclaimed that she'd gladly show him any part of her body he desired to see. But I can only assume that she was in on it too, which would be inconsistent with what little established character she has.
Once they get their clothes on, they chase the dog to an abandoned factory getting the attention of some ninjas. Shiina pins the dog to the wall with an arrow outline and Yamato notices some weapons lying around; bullets, grenades, etc. Chris, being foreign, knows all about this kind of stuff, down to their model names. Of course, all these foreign weapons are illegal in Japan. So the ninjas send the The Men in Black to snuff out the meddling kids and their dog. Momo is ecstatic, because now she can club them all the death with a minigun.
The first bit of the fight scene is hilarious, because not only is Momo dodging bullets while wielding a Gatling gun as a club, but the four guys she's fighting take forever to point their guns at her. It's almost like Ikea Erotica, except with fight choreography. Momo dodges bullet, slaps guy with Gatling gun. Other guy points gun at her (she's standing still while they do so). He fires. Momo dodges, slaps him with Gatling gun. Rinse and Repeat.
Yukie gets points for slicing a bullet apart in midair, and after she's done with her group of guys, she announces that she used the dull side. So it's okay because they're still alive! despite all the internal hemmoraging and bruised internal organs that comes along with getting hit by a dull blade.
Three guys have Yamato against the wall, when Yukie shoots her arrows into their gun barrels. This is highly impractical, because she was offscreen in such a way that she'd have to curve the arrow to achieve that effect.
Anyway, 20 guys with guns just lost to five guys with melee weapons and one with a bow and arrow. Kind of like Stormtroopers. Momo is about to question the only remaining one, when the three ninjas show up. They can easily take on all of them (Except Momo, who can break a stone hammer with her fist), and only leave because some guy offscreen whistles for them.
Then a grenade gets dropped, and Momo punches it, too.
Except not really. She punches a slab of concrete out of the ground and puts it on top of the grenade to shield them from the blast. Because it's not like that would cause concrete shrapnel to fly all over the place or anything.
The other 4 girls, of course, had tackled Yamato to the ground to shield him from the blast, Kazuko and Shiina being the ones who succeeded what was obviously a race to see who could press their boobs to his face. Then, because of the said face-to-boob proximity, Momo punches him in jealousy. Despite the fact that guy poured his heart out to her, said he loved her, and she turned him down.
Some time later, the group is walking along, expositing that they called the police, who assumed that it was a gang smuggling ring or something. Then Shiina remembers the dog mission.
And lo and behold, Cap shows up (He was the random guy who KO'd the blue leader last episode), with the dog eating out of his hand. So now he can get his 16 meal tickets despite not doing a shred of work.
Momo is concerned about the ninjas because of the fighting style they used. Cut to said ninjas, with their boss and another guy, saying how since some of the shipment of weapons was destroyed, they have to go get more.
Thoughts:
- I am well aware that this is a Harem anime and I shouldn't expect much. But most of the Harem anime I've already watched were already way better developed than this by episode 2.
- First of all, the series starts with the harem. This is bad, because not only do we get any proper introduction to the girls, we're going to be wasting plot time discussing why each girl likes him so much, or whatever. It usually goes that guy meets one girl every episode or three until the harem is filled up, slowly (and accidentally) seducing all of them. And don't tell me it can't be done in 12 episodes, because Nagasumi from My Bride is a Mermaid already had three of his six harem girls around his little finger by episode 3.
- Second from that point, None of these girls have a personality beyond "boobs + fighting + X".
- Chris is "Boobs + fighting + foreign."
- Kazuko is "Boobs + fighting + stupidity."
- Momo is "Boobs + fighting + Sadism."
- Shiina is "boobs + fighting + pervert"
- Yukie is "boobs + fighting + shyness."
- Beyond anything that pertains to their one specific character quirk, any line said by any of the girls could have been said by any other girl.
- The harem antics are... odd. Momo, not wanting to date Yamato, has no right to treat him like she does, especially if the only reason for it is that other girls are flirting with him. Not to mention that even though all the girls want to jump his bones, they get mad at him when they barge into his room naked. And we're supposed to like these girls?
- The gang violence/whatever subplot remains interesting for now.
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