Cosplay Complex OVA Episode 2 Fanservice Review

Cosplay with fairies instead of breast surgery seems like a Only-in-Japan formula….

Anime

Cosplay Complex is a three-episode OVA that was published in 2002.  That’s right, 17 years ago.  Which means it’s SD video not HD.  It’s an original work.  Cosplay as a high school sport.  Only in Japan…  Part of the fun is trying to recognize which anime characters are being cosplayed in the competition scenes.  Last but not least, and the main reason for this fanservice review, Cosplay Complex is from a time when people expected and wanted OVAs to be more risque than TV shows.

Plot summary from ANN:

Chako and her friends are members of the struggling club the Cosplay Association at East Oizuka Academy that dreams of going all the way to the Cosplay World Series. Can these girls, with the help of a new member and a magic fairy get well on the way to becoming Cosplay champions. Clothing and costumes will fly as we find out.

Tags from AniDB and ANN:

comedy, cosplay, ecchi, fanservice, large breasts, original, parody, school clubs, school life

 

Episode 2

Title and summary from crunchyroll:

“Summer Training Camp of Charm!”

 

The gang heads to Mikazuki Coral Beach, a hot summer destination, to show off their cosplay talent.

 

Images

WebMs (WebM Album)

Thoughts

The girls in swimsuits was nice.  All the girls got to show off their stuff a little bit.  And it was nice to see an extensive bath scene.  But closeups of only one girl.  More missed opportunities…


Check out the links to AniDB, ANN and MAL if you want to learn more about the characters and story.

Although Cosplay Complex does deliver nipples, it’s not as consistent as it could be.  Only some of the girls.  Only some of the time.  Same for nipple bumps and panty shots and more.  Furthermore, some of the fanservice is just slightly off-screen.  LOL.  Seems to be done mainly for comedy.  And Cosplay Complex is a silly comedy, first and foremost.  But it’s fun to watch and the risque and/or politically incorrect scenes can be refreshing and funny at times.

Speaking of politically incorrect, one of the main characters Jenny is an openly unabashed lolicon.  Jenny is a girl but something that new anime shows tend to steer well clear of.  Different times.  Different strokes.

The video and artwork can be rough at times.  Older SD show that may not have had a high budget even though it was an OVA.  Plus it might have been part of the early transition to digital.

One reason I decided to make media for all of Cosplay Complex was that readers here and on FapService Discord kept posting media from this show.  Unfortunately, most of that media was low quality to be kind.  I had made better quality versions of key stitches for all three episodes but it became obvious that wasn’t enough.  Hopefully, readers will make the effort to download my original media (or something very close) and use that for posting.  Readers can even download gifs of my webms as mentioned below.

Notes

Videos hosted on gfycat.com are actually HTML5 videos.  That is, our writers upload WebMs and viewers see the video format that best supports their device and browser.  Including mobiles.  Including GIFs if applicable.  Which means readers can download a GIF version of any of the WebMs in this review.  There are some steps that have to be navigated though first.

First step is to find the gfycat share button.  It looks like this:

You should find it on the lower right of the embedded videos above or on the middle right of the video page on gfycat.com.  If it’s not visible, pause your adblocker and refresh.  Then unpause your ad blocker. Then click on the gfycat share button.  This should open a open up a popup window.  Then you should see EMBED and GIFS buttons at the bottom of the popup window.  Then click on GIFS.  This should take you to a popup window with URLs for small GIF and large GIF. Turns out that for Cosplay Complex SD videos, both GIFs are 480p, so pick Large GIF since it has slightly better quality.  Then click the COPY button next to the Large GIF URL and open a new tab and past the URL to there and save the GIF from there by right-clicking the GIF and selecting “Save image as…” from the context menu.

If you want to upload any of our videos to comments , you’ll need to save a GIF and upload that since Disqus does not display WebMs the last time I checked.

A new technical challenge was the gfycat embed code that we used for HD video actually upscales SD video.  Go figure.  But not good.  So I wound up switching to fixed iframes embed code which doesn’t upscale SD video.

This review uses a combination of jpgs for display images and pngs for link-to images in order to be more mobile friendly and speed up page load times.

For details on how to access and/or download the original media, or something close to it, see the Notes section of Kanata no Astra TV Episode 05 Special Edition Fanservice Review.