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Digital
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Thursday, 27 October 2011 00:00 |
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Page 1 of 2
 We've had a lot of shows lately what sounded crap when you mentioned their "big idea", but turned out to be decent enough in the implementation. Heaven's Memo Pad is the other way around - it sounds a good idea, until you see it...
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...
The first problem I have with the idea here is simple. NEET: Not in Education, Employment or Training. If you're taking paid work - say, as a genius investigator or one of her assistants - then you're not a NEET, and that little discrepancy bothered me like an annoying little hangnail through most of the series. The show's publicity would also have you believe that Alice is the lead character, but she isn't - that honour belongs to Narumi, which wouldn't be so bad (a few more male leads would be a good thing in anime) if it weren't for his noticeable lack of anything resembling a personality. Yes, it's that old bugbear again.
Narumi meets Ayaka and Alice, and thinks they're wonderful. Narumi meets the gang leader known formally as The Fourth, and thinks he's wonderful - to the point where he takes a vow of brotherhood with him. Narumi thinks everyone is wonderful, until they give him reason to believe otherwise - he's naive in the extreme, and painful to watch - which makes it doubly annoying that you just can't get rid of him. As for Alice - she has her appeal, but her "I know so much more than you" attitude soon grows tiring (there's a touch of Victorique about her, without the charm), while her almost immediate close relationship with Narumi just doesn't feel right.
As for story, the series is split into several defined arcs, mostly revolving around things Narumi is up to but usually requiring that Alice be hauled in to investigate something underhand. We've got: teenage prostitution, drug dealing, attempted murder, a potentially deadly battle between two former gang-mates, and more besides - all firmly into underworld dealings, then, and the sort of things that a good investigative series should really be able to get its teeth into. Except that Narumi isn't that good an investigator, and he's the one getting all the screentime, spending his time trying to work things out on his own, invariably getting into trouble, before calling on Alice to work things out.
The final arc is also strange in that it draws the relationship between Narumi and Ayaka as being closer than there was any prior hint given that they were, and it spoils what was otherwise the best arc of the series by having him react in a way that seemed over the top / wrong for the situation he and Ayaka were in. It just another little flaw in a series that's full of them - nothing big or too annoying if they were just taken on their own, but add them all together and what was a good idea becomes something more annoying to watch than enjoyable. A curiosity, for sure, but some way short of being essential viewing.
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