Shelf Life

Ōkami Pinkos

The animation starts off strong, too. The characters all have cute chubby cheeks (like in K-On!), and the backgrounds are cheerful pastels that suit the mood. Ōkami even throws some elegant punches with her cute wolf-faced boxing gloves. This is a handsome looking show overall.

Unfortunately, Ōkami-san turns sour every time it resorts to clichés, tropes, and anime standards. For example, Ōkami and her friends work for a favor-based agency that takes on client problems in the standard anime “we do anything” agency. I'm not convinced this is a financially stable business model, but since Ōkami's group is a high school club, they don't need to worry about cash (more like Sket Dance than Gintama).

I like Ōkami's character as a tough chick, but it's quickly established that she secretly has a girly side (she reads romance novels OMG!). Ever since Otomen, I've gotten weary of characters that go against Japanese gender stereotypes for the laughs (a boy who likes strawberry frappuccinos is apparently hilarious in Japan). You can't just use shorthand for humor, and if you do, the trick to it is in the telling.

Amnesia is so common in shojo manga, one might think it was an epidemic in Japan. I was willing to brush off episode seven as one stinky episode, but episode eight has an overly lengthy discussion on the merits of breast size. I thought Ōkami-san was a much more girl-friendly show up to this point, but like last week, I don't think it's funny offhand to say that women with bigger breasts are simply better than the flat-chested. I believe a joke about anything could potentially be funny, but even the dub couldn't make episode eight better. I could let the scene go if it was a fast insult (like Ranma ½'s jokes about bust lines), but that scene drags on too long.

Fortunately, the dub is quality stuff. Luci Christian brings a lot to the show as the Narrator has a lot of overlapping dialog with characters, making her performance sound like a female riff on R. Bruce Elliott as the (excellent) narrator of Sgt. Frog. Monica Rial is so perfect for Ringo that it's kind of scary, but then, many of Rial's performances are like that. For me the break-out performance is Terri Doty as Alice Kiriki, the club's uptight workaholic secretary. (I haven't heard Doty in other shows, apparently.) Her voice is uniquely memorable and absolutely perfect for the character.

Ōkami-san works better when it doesn't follow pre-set anime standards. A fake preview for an episode about the three little pigs as villains is funnier than the rest of the show. Mostly it's rough that such a nice looking, well-drawn series is written in a disappointing way. If it had low production values and no dub, it may have even been Perishable.[TOP]

Two weeks ago, I complained about the color palette and costume designs in Part 1 of LOL Heroes, and it seems as though my review fell into a time warp and was translated into Japanese and handed to the character designer, because in Part 2 there are some costume changes that feel as though they are directly in response to my opinions.

Most of the show's humor is dropped in part 2 in favor of more beheadings and limb loss. It feels as though the title's creator aimed for something between Slayers and Berserk. He managed to achieve that goal, and this is a really weird show because of it. For example, the white-haired Sion's machinations to the crown are similar to Griffith's, but Sion's fate is not nearly as dark, and it's peppered with unfunny paperwork high jinks.

Worse, there's something deeply wrong with the plot structure. A lot of dialog is devoted to an invasion that never happens. Instead, two episodes take place inside characters' heads across surreal landscapes. I hope that's not becoming an anime standard of some kind (hello, Book of Bantorra). I enjoyed Ryner Lute's fights outside of his head more.

Next, the action stops short in order to plan Sion's birthday party before the fighting finale. What ever happened to Miran Froward? I thought he was important… but nevermind that.

When the final fight happens, it's clearly done by better animators, which is to say, probably guest animators, as it doesn't look like the rest of the show. 24 episodes doesn't quite seem like enough when everything wraps up in a hodgepodge montage of scenes that set up another arc. I wish I knew the manga series was ongoing before I started watching this show.

Speaking of which, the LOL Heroes light novels and manga ran in Dragon Magazine and a few related publications which are known for gamer fantasy, or Dungeons and Dragons sorts of stories. There were one or two episodes of this show I'd rather play as a module than watch on TV. At the very least, if D&D is your thing, LOL Heroes is certainly more of a keeper than it is for non-fantasy-gamers. [TOP]