| Girls Bravo #2 |
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| Tuesday, 24 June 2008 | |
 More episodes of Girls Bravo, more girls for Yukinari to deal with, and more entirely unnecessary bare flesh to liven things up. What more could you want from your mindless entertainment? Somehow, I don't think an annoying brat was on the wishlist, but sometimes you have to take the bad with the good...5 - Bravo on a Rainy Day! Part 1 Someone else has come across from Seiren - although the first Yukinari knows about it is when Kirie and Miharu find a body floating in the bath. Her name's Koyomi and she's very afraid of men, although past that she has an amnesia problem - but Miharu recognises a badge on her uniform that could spell trouble. While Kirie and Miharu do their best to make Koyomi feel welcome, it's not long before she ends up on the wrong end of Fukuyama's attentions...   6 - Bravo on a Rainy Day! Part 2 Having been assigned to the case when Miharu's sister reported her missing, it's Koyomi's job to bring Miharu back to Seiren - she's only got 36 hours to complete her mission (or else Bad Things™ will happen, and after so much was wasted trying to run away from Fukuyama's advances, time's running out - and the chaos that is Yukinari's house isn't making life easy for her. Yukinari's smarter than he looks, though, and quickly figures out what Koyomi's here for. Which just leaves figuring out what to do about it...   7 - Look for a Groom Bravo! Miharu & Koyomi are back - with annoying brat Tomoka & her pet seal in tow, and a mission from Miharu's sister Maharu: find her a husband. But isn't Koyomi supposed to be afraid of men? Put that together with the sheer number of men on Earth, and she has a problem before her mission's even really begun - and that's before Lisa gets involved. Meanwhile, the girls hit on a good way of attracting plenty of men for them to assess for Maharu - and skimpy clothing is involved...   8 - Lots of Bravo! Miharu's suspiciously cheerful, and Tomo & Koyomi want to know why. Seems she has a chemistry practical coming up, and she's hoping they'll create something delicious. She has the wrong end of the stick about what happens in chemistry, it seems. Even after Yukinari warns her that chemicals aren't usually edible, though, Miharu can't resist drinking some strange pink stuff - and all of a sudden there's a school full of exploding 'replicas' of Miharu-chan - and they're hungry. As a horde of Miharu's embark on a mission to eat he city dry, can Kirie and Yukinari find a way to stop them..?   Girls Bravo is one of those shows that are incredibly difficult to write about - being so heavily based on physical comedy, there really isn't any plot to speak of, and the comedy is of the sort that you'll either click with and love, or find demeaning / sexist / overly violent and hate. So it's almost a case of "insert your own review here". This release has one big advantage over the original Japanese TV run, and that's the removal of the huge clouds of steam that regularly obscured the view of various parts of the girls' anatomy (insert your own comments abour "demeaning" or "yay! fanservice!" here). If you're a fanservice junkie, then that alone will make this disc a real treat, but there are little nuggets of storyline here and there that raise the overall tone a little and try to add at least some depth to the story. Here, that mostly comes from episodes 5 & 6, which float the idea of Miharu having to return to Seiren and leave poor Yukinari without the one girl he can bear to be with (on account of his allergies, of course). Koyomi's a good addition to the cast - sure, she fill in another of the harem stereotype roles, but hey, what did you expect!? One good thing deserves a bad thing, though, and Koyomi is balanced out - and overwhelmed, almost - by Tomo and her pet seal. She's too young a character to really play a full part in a show that majors so heavily on T&A, and she's just too annoying for words. She doesn't appear too often in these episodes, and she's already stretching my patience to the limits... Highlight of the disc? A horde of Miharu clones descending on the town's food stores in much the same wayas locusts on a crop, and the efforts of the heroic shopkeepers to keep them at bay. It's an almost smut-free episode (see, the show doesn't completely rely on fanservice!), and it produces more laughs per minute than I've suffered in a while. Great stuff. As I've said, you'll either love Girls Bravo or hate it - I'm in the former category, but then I've never made any secret of my enjoyment of shallow, fanservice-filled anime. If you don't fall into the same category, your mileage may well vary, but I'd have to give this volume a definite recommendation.  |
