Ah, BakaTest, pearl of the Orient! Just look at all these jolly good reviews filled with hype and squealing!
But, as an old Russian idiom says, always there is "a spoon of tar in a barrel of honey". So, let's take a more critical look at this show. Although I've watched this anime long time ago, I re-watched some episodes in order to refresh my memories, and now I'm ready to share my opinion with you.
OK, let's look at the title first.
Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu.
Let me start from the end, i. e. "Shoukanjuu" or Summoned Beasts. Well, I think that this should match
...
proper to some kind of "-mon" anime, and so I thought when I just started to watch the series. Surprisingly, in the very beginning it looks kinda like an anime about kids and their "mons" fighting for glory, money and whatsoever. But if you look closer, you will see that these "shoukanjuu" are added only for a tick. All battles are short as a... I don't know what, let it be a bunny tail, the whole premise is that if your grades are high, then you're as cool as Chuck Norris and you can beat anyone without even lifting a finger. Also, we don't see the "shoukanjuu" much often, because the plot concentrates more on the everyday life of main characters. So, the titular Summoned Beasts become absolutely useless for the plot. Even without them the series won't lose anything. Just any random super-duper thing could replace the "shoukanjuu", for example, laser swords which sing traditional Japanese songs in battle.
And now, for the "Tests", or plot.
There is nothing special here, to be honest. All we see is just everyday high schoolers' activities, flavored with some situational jokes and so on. Meet the characters, the characters get into first serious action, pool episode, amusement park episode, bla bla bla... *yawn* The whole show looks like it's filled with random events, typical for the anime of this kind. Only in the end the plot gets more action, but it's too insufficient to cover its lack in previous episodes.
All right, let's go to the "Baka" part. The characters.
What do we have here? Oh, it's just a bunch of clichéd school guys and girls - a tsundere, a main character's stupid friend, a moe girl with big boobs (oh, boy, this stuff is just gonna keep happening and happening), a pervert and yet another pervert. Groovy! And do we have any character development during the series? Absolutely not! The tsundere is needed to do her standard "tsunder-ish" activities, the moe girl is needed to make us all like "Ohhhh, what a cutie!" and the perverts are needed for some perverted jokes if there is a necessity (ha-ha, repetitive jokes about nosebleeding, so funny I could die). You may argue with me that this is a comedy anime, not some kind of drama, but I'll tell you just one thing - the flatness of the characters makes them so annoying, that I wish to hit each in a forehead with an axe dipped in curare venom. And I didn't even say a single word about our main hero...
OK, there he is, Akihisa Yoshii. He is nothing but the biggest loser I've ever seen and this fact annoys me greater than the stupidity of other characters. His behaviour seems so unrealistic and lame, and I'll tell you what - in Russia, we call such people "lokh" ("лох", don't be confused with "loch" which means "lake" in Scottish, everyone knows about the famous lake Loch Ness). This word is used to describe a simple-minded foolish person, which is easy to manipulate. And so our main hero is. I think, that if such character should exist in real world, even a Russian kindergarten kid could easily fool him and make him its... uh... well, you should guess, what word goes here. And for this reason, as other characters, Akihisa also deserves to be hit with a poisoned axe in his forehead. And then with another axe. As a coup de grâce.
Oh, come on, man, if this anime is a parody, then the characters at least should act not so stereotypically. For example, let's take our moe girl, Himeji Mizuki. Instead of being cute and clumsy and other yadda-yadda-moe-stuff she should do something different, something out of the ordinary. For example, riding on an elephant, shouting "THIS! IS! JAAAAPAAAAAAN!" and shooting down UFOs with a shotgun which fires fried chicken legs. The parody is meant to be satiric or ironic to the source material (in this particular case, it's about "school" and "super-duper power" anime), not to bring all cliché and stereotypes over the top and up to eleven.
Well, there is one parody element that makes this show more interesting for otakus and kinda postmodern - loads of background events, references and shout-outs to different anime, videogames and whatsoever (yeah, the whole Evangelion-style episode is memorable only because of this). But, most of these references are quite openly revealed, it looks like they are waving hands at us and shouting "Look at me! I am an easter egg! I am an easter egg!" (this phrase is an easter egg itself too, ha-ha-ha). This makes BakaTest look more like Scary Movie.
Well, and what should I say about art and animation? Ah, let it be "OK", the picture is bright with colours, the characters are drawn pretty good, especially girls. Nothing else I could say about it.
And so about the sound. You see, guys and girls, because I watch all anime in subtitles, I concentrate my attention on the writings and I'm really not into that "seiyuu" thing, for me all Japanese voice actors, both female and male, sound the same. So, let's leave it as it is.
So, to sum it up, Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu is just an ordinary anime mostly for otakus who will undoubtedly have great pleasure while watching it. For anime beginners this series could be hard to understand because of all references (just like Haiyore! Nyaruko-san) It's not a great masterpiece, although you can kill some time with it. But keep in mind all the aforementioned things.
Dixi.
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Jun 14, 2014
Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu
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Ah, BakaTest, pearl of the Orient! Just look at all these jolly good reviews filled with hype and squealing!
But, as an old Russian idiom says, always there is "a spoon of tar in a barrel of honey". So, let's take a more critical look at this show. Although I've watched this anime long time ago, I re-watched some episodes in order to refresh my memories, and now I'm ready to share my opinion with you. OK, let's look at the title first. Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu. Let me start from the end, i. e. "Shoukanjuu" or Summoned Beasts. Well, I think that this should match ... 
Jun 13, 2014
The original Dirty Pair TV series made me a bit confused. It was rather... silly, I can't find another word to describe its overall mood. In some episodes the plot moves were strange, in others they were wierd, there were also some so-called "Big Lipped Alligator Moments" or BLAMs for short.
And so it was in "Nolandia no Nazo". This anime is full of plot holes, strange plot twists, some wierd scenes are also present. Yeah, like this scene in the beginning with Kei and Yuri both nude and merging one into another (which makes me think about some sort of hidden message here, like the ... |
