But an improvement it ain't. And by sharing so many things with "Spice and Wolf" (including a big chunk of the staff), "Spice and Wolf with Tits" - or just SaWT for short - naturally invites comparisons with the material that inspired it. Alas, it's a comparison which ultimately does SaWT no favours because it falls so far short. But perhaps I'm being overly harsh on the show; it does deserve plaudits for putting some interesting twists into the age-old humans vs demons script.
The show starts with humans and demons at war with each other, and the Hero - literally named "Hero" - storming the demon king's castle solo to try and end the war. The demon king (and guess what the demon king is called) surprisingly turned out to be an attractive girl with big bouncy breasts instead of a giant frothing monster with razor fangs. What also surprised Hero was her personality: she spoke a remarkable amount of sense, and, with a few well-chosen arguments, demolished the pre-conceptions the Hero had regarding humans, demons, and the nature of the war. Bewitched by Demon King's silver tongue and hypnotised by her jiggling assets, Hero agrees to co-operate with her mission to set the world to rights with wisdom rather than wars.
SaWT started a little rough, but its concept got me interested enough to continue watching. Most of the first half helped maintain my interest, mostly with the way Demon King went about changing the world through her learning, introducing new technologies, new methods of doing things and new ways of thinking. And it's this, and not the interaction between the main leads that's the focus of SaWT. But that's not a bad thing, because while the nuanced interaction between the protagonists excels as one of the greatest strengths of "Spice and Wolf", that same aspect is one of greatest weaknesses of SaWT. I realise things are supposed to be a bit awkward between the ridiculously shy leads, but the insipid small-talk and overblown romance cliches is a combination cringe-worthy enough to embarrass a third-rate romance novelist.
While showing some initial promise, the show soon started falling apart. SaWT has a major problem of being overly self-conscious of what it's trying to do, and thus very little of what it does feels natural. Speeches about the ways of the world is almost condescendingly delivered through long expositions that's aimed more at the viewer than the other characters. Then there are Demon King's inventions: she starts off introducing things like crop rotations methods, but soon began inventing one major technology after another, like some kind of Thomas Edison raised to the third power. What's more, her contributions span across ludicrously diverse fields, from agriculture to medical science to navigation, just to name a few; nearly every episode she conjures up something new. In one episode, someone other than her actually managed to invent something (namely, sparkling orange juice, aka Fanta), and, determined not to be outdone, Demon King invents not one but TWO things during that episode (and no, Coke isn't one of them). By the half way point of the series, I felt like I was watching a game like "Civilization" being played, with the Demon King way ahead of the other players in researching the tech tree comprising mankind's greatest ideas and inventions.
If Demon King is guilty of over-performing in her role, Hero is guilty of the opposite: as one half of the central protagonist pair, he simply doesn't carry his weight. While Demon King busied herself with changing the world, Hero spends the first half just tagging along and doing very little beyond admiring her. Though later on he does goes off to distant lands and contribute to Demon King's plans there, we rarely see what he does because the story is still mostly focused on Demon King and her endless output of inventions. In fact, the imbalance issue extends to everyone else, too: the Demon King seems so intelligent that she makes the show kind of boring, and everyone else appear so dim that they can't do anything until Demon King bestows onto them her pearls of wisdom; you have to wonder how the human race managed to hold off extinction before the Demon King came along.
SaWT also has pacing problems. I enjoyed the gentle strolling pace of world changing used for the first part of the series, but the global politics quickly escalated to the point where I struggled to follow. Everything began changing in all the nations, half of which the show failed to properly establish in the first place; I'd also started getting lost in all the economic babble, perhaps owing to my own meagre knowledge. The show simply accelerates away during the later parts and finishes in unseemly haste, leaving one giant political mess, full of dangling plot strands and badly explained developments, in its wake.
But there I go again, coming down quite hard on the show. I do have a degree of respect for what SaWT tried to do, but the problem is that it simply did not do a good job. While it captured my interest early on, I struggled to get through the series as it progressed. It may not be a show devoid of intelligence, but it needed to be more intelligently written; it may not be a bad show, but it's far from being good. I guess it's just too much to expect a show that sought to improve upon something noted for its writing by throwing in a pair of big tits to amount to anything beyond A Good Try. And A Good Try is all SaWT managed to be.
Personal rating: -0.5 (mediocre)
