Alice or Alice

[The Chibi Zone]

There is an anime series beyond that which is known to viewers. It is a series as small as its main characters, and as short as any three minute video. It is the middle ground between promotional videos and full length 24 minute episodes, between hand-drawn manga illustrations and computer animations, and it lies between the whites of one’s eyes and the screen of one’s monitor. This is a series of super deformed characters. It is an art style which we call chibi. Next stop, the Chibi Zone!

STORY:

You notice there are twelve episodes, each comprising 3 minutes and 41 seconds. However, ... upon viewing several episodes, you notice each episode has a 30 second opening song, followed by two minutes of actual animation and story, then a 30 second ending song, and finally 41 second of closing credits. Disappointing, I know.

For the story, you will watch the daily lives of twin sisters, Rise and Airi, and their older brother who has a sister complex. You watch their daily life occurrences include: taking care of his sick sister, cooking meals, going to festivals, wearing a maid uniform, competitions, and opening a cafe. In the end, though, it’s mostly about the older brother being surrounded by many cute girls, such as his twin sisters, the sister’s friends, and the female manager. Still, you realize it’s far too short and boring, even for the Chibi Zone.

ANIMATION:

As expected in the Chibi Zone, you realize that every character is a chibi with their classic characteristics: minimum facial details, large head with a tiny body, bright and vibrant colors, and wearing simple clothes with minimum details. The bright background designs compliments the chibi characters by appearing cheap and lacking details as well. And finally, the animations will sometimes be stiff and jerky with many shots jumping from one scene to the next in quick succession. You, of course, notice that the characters sometimes become their non-chibi forms, but disregard it as it’s very generic looking.

SOUND:

You hear two songs both of which are J-Pop in origin. The opening song contains many chibi characters yelling, “Say Hi!” in a upbeat, loud high-pitched voice, and the ending song contains several still shots of characters in various clothes and poses. Along with those sounds, you also hear the fine voice acting, and many random sound effects for every action the characters perform.

CHARACTERS:

You will watch undeveloped, forgettable, two-dimensional characters with no background stories and little personalities talking, eating, and frolicking to the end of every episode. You realize the older brother’s only redeemable features are being kind and cooking meals, while the girls are all extremely cute and like the older brother very much. You also realize that there’s a lack of investment and attachment to these characters because the series is too short and throws them into random mundane events and situations that you could care less about.

ENJOYMENT:

I hope you enjoyed your time in the Chibi Zone because I didn’t. Hopefully, the Chibi Zone will return under a better anime than this one.

Fuck this anime.

Thank you for reading my review of Alice Or Alice.

Serious talk, I don't like this at all. I have a strong hatred for this anime. This is without a doubt the worst anime of this season. Get ready for a rant, this is my review of Alice Or Alice.

Story: 3/10
Let's look what happens in the first episode:
Sisters wake up.
They fuck something up.
... Their brother helps them.
They say they love their brother.
The End
That's the entirety of episode 1. If you think I glanced over something, I didn't. The story is almost as bad as Tenshi No Drop.

Art: 5/10
I hope you like chibi characters, because 90% of this anime is filled with that. I personally don't have much of a problem with chibi characters, but it you are going to fill the anime 90% with chibi characters and 10% with actual effort it's gonna feel like little effort was put into this.

Sound: 5/10
Best part about the OST? The OP and ED together is almost longer then the anime itself. Plus for me, I have to watch less then.

Character: 4/10
The brother is caring and the girls are cute. That's the whole cast.

Enjoyment: 3/10
With every second I could feel my braincells popping. It is a chore to see this anime. And no, the cuteness of the girls doesn't save one bit.

Overall: 4/10
Don't watch this. Don't support this. Don't even acknowledge its existence. Fuck. This.

I still stand by what has been said 2 months back, and this proves that some studios are STILL raking in towards the short-form format, for people like us whom have some or too much to watch, and then there are the horrible, untouchable ones (like this one).

There's no story, the manga adaptation just makes the anime look trash.

The characters, unappealing as they are, they DO at least serve their purpose in the realm of imoutos and such.

The art is good, THE ONE AND ONLY good point of view, I'll give the studio responsible for this for that.

And OMG I absolutely cringe at the music, ... the OST, fine as they are on their own, but it's really unbearable, just skip it entirely.

Still though, heed my warning, DO NOT touch this horrendous trash, you'll save an entire episode and a half of your time watching something you'll love instead.

There is an art form to time constraint.  With limited time, you're given very limited space in which you're able to tell a story, making it so that every minute you're given is valuable space to at least make something entertaining.  Or you can waste everyone's time and make something like this.  

There's honestly not a lot to say about 'Alice to Alice'.  The show based around the original manga's 4-koma style is in essence, three minutes of fluff totaling to about one full episode of any other show, detailing basically nothing as you're dragged along from one scenario to another, varying from maid cafes to ... idols, rival cafes, new years, bathhouses, the typical anime fanservice fluff that populates and plagues many a show in order to give it that familiarity of overused tropes.

Though that may be the rough plotlines for a myriad of the show's episodes, the show actually has no actual plot structure as things just...happen, and things...exist, to put it frankly.  Trying to understand why some of the girls have nekomata tails or why dust bunnies are floating balls of fluff that are capable of housework is the kind of thing that's commonplace in this show and never get explained because why bother when you've only got three minutes for a single episode?

As expected, characters mean nothing except for being puppets on a stage, the only male character is literally referred to as 'Nii-san' for the entire show as he actually does not have a name, and aside from that little fun fact, no one actually has any sort of memorable qualities.

So, when culminated altogether, what do we get?  A below average piece of medium that's worth less than the money used to make it.  Sure it scrapes by by being cutesy and having a good chunk of fanservice moments (especially when your titular twin characters both dress in maid outfits as normal attire), but I highly doubt this will go down in history at being memorable in ANYONE'S list of shows.  It's pretty harmless I admit, but it's so lacking in anything worth mentioning that it's really not worth the half hour it eats up.

A show wrought from 100% pure fanservice that can't even sustain it's 3 minute run time. The artstyle jumps all over the place, I have very little idea who any of these people are, whats going on and why I should care.

It gets 2 points because I made it through the whole thing, not hard considering there's about 15 minutes of content in total if you skip the OP and the ED.

I'm half tempted to go dig up the manga and see if there was ever anything there that warranted making this show, and to find out while floating space rabbits seemingly turn up at ... random.

When you think of "loli anime", Alice or Alice is exactly what you're thinking of. The degenerate mc, the "ecchi" scenes, the kawaii voices, and the CONSTANT "onii-chan" ringing in your ear, are all things you can find in this show. From maid dresses to catgirls, you can find loli A-Z in this anime in only 12 3-minute episodes! At the end of every episode, you can of course hear the "onii-chan daisuki!!" from at least one of the girls, even after him not doing anything! What a lovely anime🥰

Sound: 0/10. The music can't be described as anything other than annoying. The OST? annoying. The ... opening song? annoying. The ending song? ANNOYING. I also don't know whether the voices count as sound, but if I wanted to say anything about it, I would call it, not even annoying, just extremely irritating. I think they were trying to do something cute, but this is literally the things you could find in nightmares. Other than their voices, their Japanese is terrible too. I'm not fluent in Japanese, I'm not the greatest either, but even the most novice learner could tell that their Japanese was so off... but I think that's a part of the "kawaii" aspect to it. Is adding -masu or -desu to the end of EVERY SINGLE LINE cute? Especially while talking to their "brother"...

Art: 2/10. You may be wondering why I'm saying that it's bad. "The art isn't terrible, it's quite well done!" Well, the rare times where they actually use an anime style is fine. But the whole anime is in a chibi style, and normally I wouldn't have a problem with a chibi style, but something about it is just so infuriating. They tried to make cute baby-style girls, and ended up with these boring characters that just make you want to throw the device you're using out of your window. If I wasn't writing this review it would be because I ended up doing it.

Episodes: 0/10. The episodes are 3 minutes long, which 1 minute is used up during the OP and ED. What are we able to understand in the 2 minutes we have? Nothing! Other than the fact that it's hard to know what's going on, the episodes are really weird too. The 9th episode is... well, I don't want to spoil anything, but just know it's really, really weird. I'm not saying the rest aren't, because they really are. Not to mention there's a beach episode too. If the creators thought this was hot, news flash!! It isn't.

Story? What story? Yep, there is none. Not a single one. I mean, it would be hard to fit a whole story into 24 minutes...

Enjoyment: 0/10. All I need to say. If you enjoyed this anime, I don't know what to tell you.

Overall: 0/10. I'm surprised I was able to get through this whole thing. I came across this after accidentally clicking on it while searching for Hana to Alice, and decided to watch it cause why not. Biggest mistake. Please do not watch this anime, it is NOT worth it.