No Game, No Life
Kuuki: Life sucks.
Sora and Shiro are two siblings, they both share a love for games and they happen to be incredibly good at it. So good that there are legends about them going all around the internet. However, their main characteristic is that they are both NEETs and Hikkikomori, and to them life is just another crappy game that they don’t want to play. Which is why, when asked if they’d have liked to be born in another world, they say yes without a hesitation. God, being nice, sends them in a world where games are everything and their adventures start.
The story seems crappy. Ok, well, maybe not, but I don’t really see where it is going. As far as I know it could become everything. You can thus guess that it didn’t do a great job of introducing the story, which is kind of the point of a first episode. (According to what I read on the internet, it’s another “will the heroes save the world?!” kind of anime though.)
Another thing that is everything but original. I do have a huge weakness for characters like these two, I find interesting to see how this kind of personality interacts with the world and others among them. Except that it felt like this was totally overlooked. I don’t get how two hikkikomori suddenly thrown into a completely new and different world can survive. I don’t get how they can interact with other people so easily after literally falling from the sky, meeting a god and being dragged out of their environment in a new hostile one. It bothered me, it doesn’t make the characters believable at all.
And the characters were the one thing I really, really, liked about this …
Shiro is not exactly the kind I usually like, she doesn’t really break the cute imouto pattern. She’s quiet and reserved and she likes food, she really didn’t talk a lot so the only thing I really gathered about her is that she got sleepy very fast and that she was awfully smart and good at games. Somehow, it was enough. Sometimes, a character not talking actually helps.
Now though, I fell in love with her brother Sora and I fell hard. Ignoring the fact that this is not normal at all, he proves himself to be quite a smug, arrogant and smart bastard. Totally my type. Not to mention he sounds hot.
Actually, I think I’ll only keep on watching this because of him. (And because it airs on Wednesdays, nothing airs on Wednesdays …)
Akuma no Riddle
AnimeEmily: Confused. That is probably my most concrete impression of Akuma no Riddle at the moment. I didn’t hate it. I didn’t love it. Maybe I missed some important tidbit at the beginning of the episode, but I don’t quite get the point of what any of the characters are supposed to be doing. Though I wanted to like the episode and did like bits of it, I’m hoping that future episodes will make me want to stick around because this one didn’t quite do the trick.
The episode’s storyline is deceptively simple sounding: a group of assassins (all female) have been stuck in Year 10- Black Class in order to kill a high school girl…for some mysterious reason. Though everyone figures out who said girl is (Haru Inchinose, aka the only blatantly peppy one) almost immediately, no one proceeds to actually try and kill her… Of course our main character, Tokaku Azuma, a seemingly cold-hearted person, seems to take an immediate liking of sorts to the target, Haru Ichinose. There’s also some mumbo-jumbo with a riddle (“The world is full of_____” ) but that only popped up for a bit and only really added to my confusion so beats me what the purpose of that is.
It’s hard to actually pinpoint what I didn’t like about this first episode. I mean, visually, it looks pretty nice and the character designs are pleasantly loony looking at times. Other than that though I wasn’t really drawn in by anything else. Haru and Tokaku are pretty much defined by one characteristic at this point, though there is a bit of hinting that both had less-than-cheery pasts. Admittedly, I think that watching the relationship between the two develop would be quite interesting, but I don’t know if I want to stick around and wait for it. As for the rest of the characters, they’re a bunch of potential crazies but we don’t really get a feel for any of them. Also, the bits of the story that have been introduced aren’t quite clicking either. I mean, if the point is to kill a high school girl and everyone knows that that girl is Haru, why has no one at least tried to kill her yet? Do they have to fight each other for it? Are they not allowed to start until a certain date? Do they have to check with someone? The waiting around just doesn’t make sense and, honestly, doesn’t do much to make the show any more exciting/interesting.
Though I didn’t enjoy Akuma no Riddle as much as I was hoping to, as I said before I didn’t hate the episode and I believe that the show has some potential to at least be a fun/cool action oriented show with some romance thrown in to spice things up. Therefore, I’ll probably give the next episode or two a look before sitting on the sidelines and waiting to see if it gets better or worse. The episode didn’t quite click with me, but since it’s probably a matter of person taste of my part, I’d recommend giving the first episode a shot just to see if you’re interested in see more.
