The debut episode was much more impressive than I was expecting. And it delivered the goods for ecchi fans too!
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As you can deduce from the gifs above, the episode ends with the kind of content confirmation we all want to see. But for once I’d like to focus on something else.
Grisaia no Kajitsu looks to be a bit of a benchmark anime. Sure, eroge adaptations are hardly a new idea, but this one really goes out of its way of capturing the feel of an actual eroge experience.
For example, the music is timely rather than a constant, allowing atmosphere to build. And on that note, the music here is pretty good, especially by ecchi standards.
The girls are often looking straight into the camera, or pushed off to one side, with detailed isometric backgrounds behind the characters. As many around here know, this is a subtle reference to the layout of eroge dialogue screens in the games.
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It’s made even more obvious by the intentional black space on the top and bottom of the screen (which I cropped out). The black space mirrors the feel of an actual eroge screen. No detail was too small for these guys to overlook.
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It is hard to express in words, but the episode seems well directed and the 3D style of animation is blended with 2D very well. Everything just seems to have the right touch, right down to the character design style that at times almost seems to be SHAFT-lite.
The story actually promises to do more than just service viewers too, with hints of a fairly serious and engaging back story.
But maybe the best thing of all is that we don’t have to endure yet another bland do-gooder protag who freaks out at the sight of scantily-clad, attractive young women. Rather, we get a classic Takahiro Sakurai lead (Cloud Strife from FFVII, etc), which is pretty much exactly what the doctor ordered here.
Really, the whole cast seems just perfect, and it even includes Kaori Mizuhashi in a fairly major role (Michiru Matsushima, the blonde twintails girl). Nowhere in the world will you find a 40 year old who can play a better 14 year old brat. (You might remember her as Elina from Queen’s Blade or Minami from Baka and Test .) She doesn’t get nearly enough work in my opinion, so it was pretty damn cool to see her in this.
But more than the skilled directing, great music, interesting story and well cast seiyuu, the most impressive thing might be how ambitious the animation is, which mixes 2D and 3D seamlessly in a way that puts Infinite Stratos to shame.
As you can see, this show has made quite an impression on me, as eroge adaptations have been on a bit of a slump since they peaked with titles like School Days and Ef . These kind of anime can either be really good or really bad, so it’s awesome to see one get off to such a nice start.
Of course, I’ve spent all this time talking about how impressive the anime is, but let’s not overlook the other way in which this debut episode was a bit of a benchmark. This anime ends with a blatant nude scene. Nothing cute or wink wink about it. Boobs in you face, the way a company like ARMS would do it.
Except this anime wasn’t made by ARMS. It was made by 8 bit! The same company that seemed so reluctant to openly show nipples in previous works like Infinite Stratos and Walkure Romanze . But after this, we can’t really think of them as being a second tier ecchi producer any longer.
8 bit has always had good animation and produced solid anime titles. So having them join the likes of TNK and ARMS is obviously a really great thing, and changes the way we look at 8 bit titles going forward.
