The first review for this blog is for the anime Tenshi na Konamaiki.
Basically the story revolves around the main protagonist Amatsuka Megumi, a boy trapped inside the body of an extremely beautiful high school student. His (or her ) mission is to find the magic book in which the devil that put the curse lives, and return him to normal. Meanwhile, he (or she, whatever you prefer) and his best friend Miki has to put up with bunch of MALE students who has fallen in love with him, in adventures that includes fishing, saving a drowned man, stopping a pre-arranged marriage and more.
Story:
The story itself is pretty average and your standard anime fare. While there is magic involves, they are rarely seen being practiced in this show. The majority of the time are spent in a typical high-school setting, with no devils or magic books in sight.
The weakness of this story is that it is filled with needless episodes that bloated the series to a massive 50 episodes. I think it will be safe to kill of at least 10-15 episodes and no one will notice the difference. Meanwhile, the story itself have done a good job in the first half of the series at keeping the lid on how the story will end, but this unravels itself at around episode 30 onwards.
The ending seems to be rushed, especially in the last 3-4 episodes. Funny, considering how much trivial stories stuffed into earlier episodes. I still remember how near the end of the series, that an episode ends with the Amatsuka’s gang failing to find the entrance to the enemy’s lair, just to find out that in the first 30 seconds in the next episode, the so-called ‘great problem’ is resolved just like it wasn’t even there.
And, did I say the ending is predictable?
Character design/Voice/Animation/Music:
The voice acting is great, as expected from the famous Hayashibara Megumi, a veteran of many anime titles such as Ranma 1/2 and Slayers trilogy. Amatsuka’s sidekick, Soga, voiced by Wataru Takagi also works great for a reformed gangster who has fallen in love. Generally, I have no complains about the voice acting.
There is nothing to shout about the character design and animation/direction though. Amatsuka is supposed to be the most beautiful girl alive, but it seems that she is just an above average female student with other female characters being made ugly. I have seen more beautiful characters in hentai titles. Male characters fare much better though, they are appropriately designed. The animation is sloppy at times, and the director sure made some (many) strange decisions (mostly negative) on how some scenes panned out.
About the music, the in-show soundtracks are good, but most of the OP/ED themes are uninspiring (read: I skip them all the time). An exception can be made for the first OP though.
Conclusion:-
Not exactly a masterpiece. I’ll give it 6 out of 10.