Ranked #4741

Shukufuku no Campanella

In a world powered by a magical substance called Ale, Leicester Maycraft is a technician working for the adventurous Oasis clan. He and his comrades take jobs helping others in various ways, usually involving stopping Ale-powered "Crystal Monsters." Leicester is living the life, surrounded by a good amount of lovely girls who are always willing to shove themselves in front of him for his attention. Alas, this wonderful world made possible by the abundance of Ale is being threatened by the flow of the Ale itself...

Shukufuku no Campanella is interesting. No wait, that's a lie. It's incredibly boring. Sukufuku is an adaptation of an ero-visual novel, but you would probably never be able to tell this from the anime itself. As a result of the sudden change of direction, everything about Shukufuku feels half-baked and strangely maneuvered.

The characters themselves are not exceptional. We have the childhood friend, Carina; the loli, Minette; the modest warrior, Chelsea; the outgoing girl, Agnes; the opposite twins, Salsa and Ritos; and the slightly airheaded one, Garnet. There is very little if any development of any of these characters except for Minette, and only because she is a central part of the overarching story. As a result, all of the characters are left flat and uninteresting, rarely venturing outside of their individual archetypes that everyone has seen before. Ritos and Salsa do have their moments, however. They have amazing chemistry and I found myself enjoying the segments where they were the focus very much. Unfortunately, as they are not actually part of Clan Oasis, they were not around as often as the rest of the characters, and their parts were usually used as transitions from one half of an episode to another.

The story itself was also quite conventional. The basis of everything seemed to be to defeat the monsters as they appeared, which is all good and well for an adventure anime. The monster designs seemed bland, though, and the fight scenes were not particularly phenomenal or even memorable. The final fight was an exception to this in a way; it was fairly exciting and had me wishing more of the show was like this. The story's progress at the end, on the other hand, seemed to fall apart. It felt like much was skipped in order to fit all the events into one episode, and the puzzle and "Spirit Bomb" ending did not help make this any better.

Now, being based on an eroge visual novel, there would of course be plenty of fanservice. And there was, but it was toned down to become a bit awkward in most situations; most of the time I felt like the swimsuit stills and other various fanservice scenes were inserted just because there was no other fanservice in that episode and they didn't bother coming up with some sort of transition to most of it. In order to avoid this, much of the fanservice was placed in parts about Ritos and Salsa, further reducing their status as characters with any sort of real meaning in the story. Finally, as the scenes involving sex and actual nudity obviously had to be taken out to work in anime form, scenes that lead to these parts felt only half-done. The biggest perpetrator of this to me was when Leicester was putting Chelsea to bed after her party was compromising to say the least - not that there was much they could do to prevent that outside of removing the scene completely.

Overall, there is simply nothing outstanding about Shukufuku, and the things it tries to do it does averagely or below averagely. If you are a fan of shallow adventure stories with a bit of fanservice, then this may very well be the show for you. But it certainly didn't do much for me at all. read more

I didn't really expect much from this anime to begin with. Maybe a little humor, some fanservice, and characters with at least a tiny bit of personality. Sadly, even with such low expectations I was still disappointed.

There wasn't much in terms of plot (there was just this little issue about the cores of the automata and having to fix that thing that controls eru or something like that). There was only a couple of episodes with any plot development at all, so there wasn't much substance to what little it did have.

The visuals were pretty good, which is actually what got me interested in the series. I can give some leeway to most anime to some extent if they have good visuals, but this one really had nothing else going for it. The female characters had good designs, and the art and animation in general was good, but I didn't like the male characters. Their designs were very girly. Also, the color schemes were all colorful and fruity, killing any traces of masculinity. Not necessarily a bad thing mind you, but they would have been better off cutting out the male characters (it's not like they were that great in the first place), and just going full on ecchi with an all-girl cast. That wouldn't have helped it much, but anything would have been an improvement (they even made a 3D OVA of each of the girls bathing after the series ended, if that tells you anything).

I don't usually pay much attention to sound unless it's really good, but I didn't even notice the sound in this one for the most part (the ED and OP were fairly bland, so I always skipped them). Voice actors were OK. Not really much to say in this department.

Now for the important part: the characters. The protagonist and other guy in the guild were amazingly feminine. The protagonist probably would have been more interesting if he were a girl, and frankly, they would only need to add breasts to accomplish that. The other guy, Nick, is supposed to be a tough guy I guess, but is not at all convincing. They even gave him an axe, which is supposed to be a BA weapon in pretty much any medium, but his looks more like a toy. Testosterone in this show was practically non-existent, despite having a male protagonist. Usually a male protagonist is used solely to give the viewer someone to relate to (I don't use it as such, but it's certainly less distracting than having one that's poorly made), but I don't see where the protagonist is very relatable to the average guy, so there was really no point in using "him."

The female characters were well designed, and more interesting that the male characters at least, if only for the fact that they're girls. Their designs were better, and they had more personality at least than the protagonist (though I suppose that isn't saying a whole lot). They tried to give the female protagonists wand thing a personality when it was introduced, and it was slightly humorous too (for what little screen time it had). Then it's personality disappeared and it was either mute or vocally robotic the rest of the show. This happens to other characters too, like that dragon girl I can't remember the name of (I'm horrible with names). She was important one episode, and then all of a sudden gets very little screen time and is somehow a part of the guild (I don't recall it showing that part. Maybe I was just so bored during that part I spaced out when it happened). There's also the maid(?) who is just there. She probably had 3 lines the entire show. There was also a talking cat, who surprised me every time he talked since I kept forgetting he was even there, let alone able to talk. The twin sisters were probably the most interesting (and funny) characters, but it wasn't enough to help this series. Had it all revolved around them, this anime probably would have been better. It's sad when side characters are more interesting than the "important" ones.

All in all, there really wasn't much to enjoy. I was expecting action, but the only bits there were aren't worth mentioning, which is weird considering how much they talked about crystal monsters, and how they were all armed guild members. One of them was even a knight. There was occasional comedy, but it was too sparse for this anime to be considered a comedy. It was supposed to be a romance too, but it was all pretty one-sided (yeah yeah, I know that's pretty normal in anime, but the protagonist was much less interested in his harem than is normal). Slice of life is probably the closest thing you could call it, but I like slice of life. This was just boring. Really, everything it claimed to be or pretended to be, it completely failed to be. Oh, and it was supposed to be ecchi too. The show was boring enough that I didn't really pay much attention to it when it was there, so I almost forgot there was any. I took another look at it and found that the ecchi scenes had some of the best art in the show, as if that's any surprise, but were awkwardly mixed in (there really wasn't a good place for them anyways).

This anime gets really boring at times. It looked good, but generally failed at everything else. There's really not much else to say. I don't recommend watching it, and really I only watched it because it was mixed in with 10 other new anime that I was watching as the episodes came out (all of which were better by the way). I just didn't want to drop it, so I kept holding out to see if it would improve. It didn't. read more