Anime: Renkin San-kyuu Magical? Pokaan

Where is the #$%@()&^ story!
That is what I yelled when I finished this series. I got trolled from the opening video to expect some sort of comedy going psycho along the way. It was back in the day when the community in my country had no idea of what a series would be about and Elfen Lied was on its peak. So yeah, watching the intro made me think it would be something similar.

So this is a series about four princesses from some magic kingdom coming to the human realm. Why? Just for the heck of it. They are also based on famous monsters. Why? Just for the heck of it. They also appear in the opening to be brutally tortured and doing lesbo stuff. Why? Just for luring you to keep watching in hopes of seeing that. And guess what, nothing happens. There is no story!!! ARGH!!!

Anyways, I watched this with wrong expectations as the intro made me think it wasn’t just another storyless gag comedy. There is no actual plot in this, just short comedic sketches around the girls making mistakes and other silly stuff around otherwise mundane aspects of human civilization. As far as story goes, there is none. Even the premise is nothing but a poor excuse. A trolling one, aimed at making you laugh at how it suckered you into thinking it would be Elfen Lied jr. Ok, it worked. But man, was I pissed. Where is the #$%@()&^ story! Each segment has its own completion but there is no objective in it. Other than comedy that is. Sorry, I’m not going easy on it for being a comedy.

The animation is simple yet cute and artsy at times. Bright colors, cute character figures and occasionally erotic humor TM just for the heck of it. The opening and ending clips are particularly memorable as they are nothing but typical. The intro is like that of a psychedelic torture/lesbo hentai, while the ending is a weird mix of 3D paper-toys and the song is performed as if it’s karaoke or something. Plus, it is different each time! Nice going there. The animation is otherwise low on fluent movements or cinematics. It still does a great job at pointing out the jokes with simple yet successful animation style.

The sound is equally good for the same reasons. The dialogues are very funny since the girls are more dense than solid rock, while the intro and ending songs are actually memorable and likable thanks to the aforementioned trolling/artsy attitude.

The characters are archetypes that don’t develop in any way. They are very funny and do have distinctive (albeit stereotypical) behaviors. They end up being good just for being a parody of the respective monsters they are based on. But that is as far as it goes. They are not exactly memorable or special. Some sort of objective in the story could help at that but no; you get squat.

I don’t find particularly high replay value in this series and it sure has no historical value either. Storyless comedies tend to be good only as one-timers and get forgotten as soon as the next similar show pops up but some jokes are good to watch a second time. But only a second and only some.

Ok, it is very funny even if I hated how I was trolled hard by the intro. The stories are shot and the jokes come one right after another, while the erotic humor and the dense characters really don’t allow you to get bored right away.

In other news, a few years after I watched this, I came to read a comedic loli hentai, titled Petit Roid 3. It had the same archetypical characters in it and equally zany humor. So my raeg went away as I at least got to read something very close to what I expected from this anime. And they lived happily ever after… even if they had no objective.

A splendid chronicide pill.

This rather far stretching eye candy series has all sorts of things going for it in pretty much all departments, but is occasionally let down by lack of symmetry in performance.

What it is, is juvenile-y fun. Despite the consistent and blatant exploitation of underpants, prepubescent thoraxes, post pubescent thoraxes, and entirely artificial constructs making use of them, it manages to perform pretty much everything with style. Also, I'd be amazed if this animu was aired unedited. There is genuine groping and quasi detailed nudity when the animators just gave up on convenient censoring, to which I was (as mandated by UK legislature) Shocked and Appalled, so keep that in mind.

With the convenient censoring bit aside, the artistic effort is well above and beyond the call of duty. Each main character has had a lot of thought and love put into them, which was with only one memorable exception (an oddly inflated head) consistently expressed through the whole series. The stage itself was well done too, with high marks in consistency for back/foreground execution. The only complaint I have is that occasionally character colour palettes (especially for Yuma and K-ko) violently clashed with the backgrounds to the point of distraction, but it was probably a case of bad planning instead of incompetence.

Sound effort, in the aspect of voice actors is made of win. A small pantheon of Important People were roped into to this production, and their presence genuinely improves the whole situation by pushing certain buttons few others can reach. Dialogue thankfully does not call for them to abuse their voices screaming coherently, and indeed felt like the roles were made for them. The Music effort is not so splendid, With the sole exception of the OP ( which I argue with myself over still) the music effort is entirely forgettable, and simply fills in gaps.

Ahaha. Story. This is not for literary critics, in that the height of narrative sophistication is a trip to and swift ejection from the depths of hell. Following the hastily contrived (and refreshingly succinct) introduction, we get a fairly well balanced combination of Friends Participating In Japanese Diversions, creative and exaggerated misunderstanding, zealous pursuit of masculine company and sadly a few reproductive organ jokes (which were handled remarkably well admittedly). Originality (and hence justification) is almost completely provided by character quirks.

Although "quirks" is probably not the right term, it will have to do since there was not enough substance to call it "awesomeness". By simply slapping polar thematic opposites together and seeing what will happen according to formula, a remarkable depth of (asymmetric) individuality is revealed. While it is by no means sufficient (as I personally would like to know more about Aiko than was provided in the OVA), a very good balance of "who" to "doing what" was achieved, and might have become too tedious otherwise.

This has formed a few fond memories that will likely have me grinning inappropriately for several months (TES-TI-CLES!), but that is pretty much it. With micro-segmented stories, it is a straight forward business to get a quick laugh, but thats the limit of its worth beyond the first run.

But it was fun, and I can say with conviction that I do not consider my time investment here to be wasted. Furry aside, this has a lot going for it.

[value:7]
Honestly, this is one of those series that outside of the internet I'm a closet fan of. Because there are just some aspects of it that cater to the baser side of humor and well, to use some wappo jargon, the moe side of said base humor.

Case in point, the racoon episode. It just proves that there are some things that will only show up in anime. Which to a more or lesser degree is a good thing. That said the show is still a fun to watch, with your doors locked, using headphones, and a "Do not disturb sign".

I'm not trying to give the impression that I loathe the genre this is in, but it's something with questionable value since the gags are based around a group of what seems to be mid-teenaged girls trying to understand an unfamiliar world (in fact I'm pretty sure that's what the Opening sequence is supposed to illustrate). But the way it's done is by having the girls poke fun at each other for not washing their underwear or how they're unable to come to terms with the opposite sex.

Again, there's room to enjoy the series, but it's fluff with a hint of ero and some good gags at best. If that doesn't work for you, don't watch it.

Then again, the group that doesn't work for should be a minority.


[Animation:8]

Reasonably strong here, they're not pushing the envelope, but the character designs are pleasing to the eye, if a little on the underdeveloped side of things. It's pretty obvious who that's catering to, but it's not to hard to get over.

Pretty much nothing to complain about here, but it's not like it's the latest groundbreaking anime from studio XYZ with uber 3-D effects integrated beautifully and so on. Just well a well animated comedy that gets across to who it was meant to.

[Sound:8]

The Opening is the clincher here. Otherwise I'd be rating it a 7. It's just so different from what you get within the show. It's dark, moody, and with vocals only the Japanese could come up with. If the vocalist for this song showed up next to the definition of whiny in the dictionary I would not be surprised. It's still a good tune though, but that's mostly the guitar.

The endings were a series of character based theme songs(sung by the seiyuu), which were entirely forgettable. I'm sure someone enjoyed them, but in addition to the song the animation was just as plain (wind-up cars going by a series of images), so they had very little impact.

Background music takes very little importance in a comedy in this vein, and it was as per usual, copmpletely forgettable.

Watching it in Japanese left me with the usual expectations, and they were met. Solid performances all around, and in particular for some reason, Momoko Saito's job as Uma stood out, she just seemed really into her role.

[Characters:8]

What we have here is: a) the tomboy b) the meido c) The flat chick d) the airhead. Which makes for some great gags, but don't expect anything deep.

These are characters that don't know what a mailbox is, or that forget to wear underwear. The most character development we get is along the lines of "and then they lived happily ever after". Which is more than enough.

It might seem a necessary to talk about how Uma is a witch, or Pachira is a vampire, but those are just used as punchlines more than anything else.

Overall they're somewhat quirky, if a bit conventional characters- but that's what you should have been expecting when you decided to watch Magipoka.

[story:8]

There basically isn't a story. What we have is episodes split into short stories which follow the exploits of the princesses with an emphasis on how clueless they are.

It's a comedy so there isn't any overarching plot, surpisingly, the lack of any sort of antagonist makes ythe series more enjoyable than it otherwise might be.

But again, most of this is gags based on them not being able to find a boyfriend, or something about Pachira being flat, or Uma forgetting her panties.

So it's just above average, especially because of some of the well executed gags. But it's staying there because of the tendecy for them to go into rants like what each of the girls ideal man would be.

[Enjoyment:9]

While I might seem to dump on the series for being pretty shallow, I enjoyed it a lot. Then again, I'm a somewhat shallow person. It just really needs to be noted that if you can't enjoy that kind of thing this show is not for you.

The press-text "four princesses came to the world, for some reason" is right, no heavy backgrounding here. The writers could focus on just the character-traits of the protagonists, which is emphasized by every episode resolving around a specific problem in everyday life.
We have a female wolf (likes the moon), a robot (boots in the morning), a vampire (tries to live off tomato-juice) and a mage (is only 3rd grade (san-kyuu), so misspells are possible).
So, yeah, this is soap opera at it's best and by the end of the show, you LOVE 'em all.
The comedy is all done in a NON-ANNOYING way (read: noone behaves like a child ALL THE TIME), and the dialogue is quite witty (read: yeah, they really talk and don't just utter each others name all the time).
I liked the natto-juice-episode best :-)