|
Meanderings
|
|
Friday, 05 August 2011 16:18 |
Narumi Fujishima’s new to Tokyo, and it doesn’t take him long to get lost in the big city. He somehow manages to stumble into the red district, where he sees a girl jump out of a second-floor window. A group of teenagers help her and her friend, but no one is open to answering any of Narumi’s questions. The next day at school Ayaka, one of Narumi’s classmates, forces him to join her Garden Club. After school she takes him over to a ramen shop, where she introduces him to her friends — the same guys he saw the other day. Apparently they’re a group of NEETs that like to help out Alice, "the NEET detective", who's received a request to put an end to a prostitution spree - but before she can do that she must find a prostitute that has gone missing. Narumi's about to find himself caught up in Alice's investigation...
NEET. "Not in Enployment, Education or Training". So if you're a detective - as the NEETs here claim to be - you're in (self) employment at not really a NEET, are you? And with that little (but relevant) bit of nitpicking out of the way, I'll move quickly on.
This first episode is double-length, which I didn't realise until I started feeling that it was running on a bit. Narumi is one of those annoying characters with low self-image and low belief in his abilty to change things, which frankly makes him annoying - he also looks a lot like Kyon (Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya) and has the same tendency to think that everyone around him's an idiot, which doesn't exactly make him appealing. The NEETs are a collection of annoyinh stereotypes - the military otaku, the pimp, etc - and Alice plays on so many "OMG she's so cute!" cues that you almost feel the show is slapping you in the face. And Ayaka's irrepressibly cheerful. This is a combination that should draw cries of pain from me, and having the series be one of my least favourite genres - whodunnit - and, on the surface, this ticks so many "not for me" boxes that I should have given it up before the half-way mark.
And yet it somehow works a lot better than it seems that it should. The investigation itself doesn't take up that much of the episode - it's more about getting to know the characters - but it hangs together quite well and has a bit of a sense of humour about itself. Narumi's Kyon-esque wisecracking also helps.
THE GOOD: Style, both visual and storytelling. Character designs are easy-on-the-eye, too.
THE BAD: So many things in one place that would normally tick the wrong boxes. Sure, it's working okay so far, but ther's a nagging little feeling that somewhere it's all going to go horribly wrong.
Nagging feelings or otherwise, though, I'm curious enough about this one to keep watching.
|
Backbites 
