Cinnamon Ass

Anyone got a better meaning for “sotonori”? I think it kinda indicates that this is a sidestory (which would certainly explain why the episode is so madcap, perhaps) but I obviously don’t know much in the way of idioms.

This show is… mad. As far as I can gather, it’s basically about a group of six teenagers who fight demonic forces in a Tokyo gone to seed - we have a tomboyish archer, the telepathic student council president, two martial artists (one beefy, one fast) and a brash kendo swordsman, lead by the suave bishounen type. This episode deals with a giant spider-thing turning hordes of people into zombies and then puppeteering them around to add more to its collection; the fast martial artist (I really didn’t get the hang of anyone’s names this episode is so manic) had a bit of a thing for her, but that’s all the emotional connection that really matters as mostly it’s just about people thwacking zombies. A lot.

Oh, and there’s a half-nude mad bishounen wizard and his pyrokinetic cat-wielding sidekick Marie, but they’re not in it that much.

There’s a series of Tokyo Majin Gakuen RPG/ADV games out there, and I guess if you’ve played those you’ll be perfectly at home with whatever the hell’s going on here. This episode launches us in essentially in media res with only a few snippets of exposition to explain what’s going on, but that doesn’t really matter as it’s essentially about the jerky, thriller-esque directing and things exploding. And very nicely they explode, too - it reminds me a bit of how some ufotable shows look in that everything just happens so smoothly and frantically that the sensory overload just carries you through.

With that said, there aren’t too many annoying characters given the show’s origins (it’s no Demonbane!) and the show could potentially be interesting, but as it is whilst the eye candy of Tokyo Majin Gakuen is easily worth a look I’m not really sure that there’ll be the substance to match up to the animation in the long run, although I’m game for a try.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 21st, 2007 at 8:45 pm and is filed under Tokyo Majin Gakuen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.