More story than service this week though there is still some potential nudity.
Before moving onto episode two, lets revisit the “less censored” version of episode one. There weren’t a lot of changes and sadly there wasn’t nudity, which wasn’t really expected as there wasn’t a parental lock. Here’s a recap of the less censored imagery from episode one:
Episode 1 (less censored version):
Something to make note of- the less censored version utilized a lot of screen cropping techniques. The butt shots were just off screen in the originals. This is worth remembering as there as many shots with breasts just off-screen as well.
Episode 2
When I first saw this I thought it might be a bare butt and maybe a blank crotch, but with high levels you can see that the steam is hiding panties.
Screen cropping?
This part where we get a direct view of her boobs pressing up is NOT in the manga!
This part was the only nude scene from the manga portion which this episode covered, and they seemed to use a hybrid of To Love-Ru steam and Monster Musume redrawing. The good news is that Momoka is in the same pose in both versions, you can see her arm go down the floor- there is nothing covering her right breast but steam. Maihime’s left nipple will probably also be visible. Kirara is unfortunately covered up… hopefully a BD redraw is in the cards.
Another potential anime original nipple sighting.
Screen cropping?
Yet another potential anime original nipple sighting.
Hopefully there’s some screen cropping here.
Overall thoughts:
Well, there’s good news and bad news this week. The good news is that this episode again takes liberties and gives us potential nipple sightings that didn’t exist in the manga. And again, the visual quality and production values remain the highest we’ve seen in many years.
On the downside, the “less censored” version didn’t unleash the nipple as you’d have hoped, and the story once again covered just 1 chapter of the manga. That’s 2 episodes of the TV show covering 2 chapters of the manga. That’s it. If the show wants to reach the logical stopping point at the end of volumes six they’ll have to cover 28 chapters. Even the end of volume five would be 24 chapters. They’ll have to pick up the pace at some point, and unfortunately that will probably mean losing some manga nude scenes to get where they need to go. I hope I’m wrong about that and they pull it off.
As far as the chances for nipples on blu-ray, it was mentioned in the comments last week that the official twitter for the anime appeared to suggest good news in a tweet:
“[Blu-ray & DVD series released! ] The <H energy limit breakthrough ver> that the cut that was hidden in the broadcast was released is recorded.”
So at minimum, this suggests that the BD version will be different than either of the two broadcast versions! The version with less censorship on AT-X was called the “less censored” version and the BD/DVD will be called the “H energy limit breakthrough” version. This doesn’t quite guarantee nipples on blu-ray, but it’s yet another piece of evidence that suggests blu-ray nudity is at least somewhat likely.
As far as the anime itself, the story is pretty much directly following the manga, and that story is pretty meh. The villains are neither competent enough to be threatening nor funny enough to be comical. They are kind of in that Goldilocks zone of having the audience give zero fucks about them, and yet the story keeps committing a lot of time to these ineffective characters when more time could be spent on T ‘n A. Thankfully it looks like the emphasis will be switching to the latter very soon, based on what’s coming up in the manga.
