AnimeVision

2 - Purple Hair, How Hip Can Ya Get!
With their first challenge having been disposed of fairly easily, it's time for Suzuo to face his next challenge - Kosuzu's cooking. Being alien, she hasn't really managed the art of edible food yet. After that, the GFP's next challenge seems set to be harder than the last, with two Class-A Space Criminals for them to take care of this time - bondage queen Hyacinth with her trademark hentai attack, and butter-wouldn't-melt-in-her-mouth cutie Edelweiss, expert in the art of Golem-making. Taking them on would be so much easier if they would just stop fighting each other...

3 - Dokkoida Versus Edelweiss
Suzuo's lamenting his low pay & contemplating asking Kosuzu for a raise when he meets young girl Ruri (Edelwiess's alter-ego), who has just moved into Cosmos-sou with her family. Ruri seems to have a mission in life - to properly peel an apple, without cutting herself. Suzuo would be quite happy to show her how (in return for a bite of said apple...), but Ruri's not the most approachable little girl. One thing she is good at, though, is creating her Golems, so she takes out her frustrations with a little Golem-fuelled rampage through town. Naturally, it's the rival powered suits, Neruloid Girl & Dokkoida, who have to stop her...

4 - The Strange Neighbor, Sayuri
Cosmos-sou has another new resident, Sayuri (aka Hayacinth) - not that the other residents realise she's moved in. All they know is that there are some very strange sounds coming from an apartment that's meant to be empty.... Meanwhile, Marronflower has a personal crisis when his copy of Petite Princess is sold off, and resorts to drastic measures to retrieve it from its new owner - except everyone else seems to want to join in the fight as well...

The lack of attention that Dokkoida!? got when it was on the fansub circuit bordered on the criminal, if you ask me. The show takes a stab at being a parody of the likes of Kamen Rider, and pulls it off brilliantly - there are only a few recent comedy or parody shows that have been able to consistently make me laugh, and this is the best of them.

For these episodes, there is an ongoing plot of sorts, but you really don't need to pay much attention to it - the fun is with the dysfunctional characters, the situations they find themselves in, and the ways they interact with each other, both in their 'human' forms (where the show also manages to display a surprising knack at pulling at the heartstrings), and in their transformed supervillian / superhero personas (which is where most of the comedy comes from).

Even if you never really liked the sort of shows that Dokkoida!? is poking fun at, there's enough here to make it worthwhile viewing - all that's needed is a vague idea of anime conventions and clichés, and you'll feel right at home. Volume 2 can't arrive quickly enough.