Asobi Asobase

Surrealistic slice of life comedy series centering around high school girls who act and play like children. When I heard what this series is about, I expected 2 pure 4 this world type of comedy that relies on the imagination of a child. What a blessing, I thought. I could have been more wrong, but not by much.

The actual surrealistic side of this anime is entirely limited to the facial expressions of our characters. These vary from goofy cartoon physics to coaxedintoasnafu-tier memes that are about exactly as accurate and fresh as the third season of Rick and Morty. Only thing missing are surprise dickbutts ... and picklewhomever. I was around 11 minutes and 27 seconds into episode one when this started to get old.

The cast is entirely comedic, and for that reason, the series appears extremely flat and one-dimensional. Thus far, there is practically nothing we know about our characters outside the few obvious remarks that could have been read on MAL if someone had bothered to write them one --or even half--sentence long biographies.

The writing is simply said content-lacking. The events are practically Lucky Star where they removed the moeblobs and put these girls with metamorphing faces to fill the slot. This time Konata, age 17, is not learning how to eat food, instead, it is trio of equally retarded girls do equally boring things in equally boring way.

There are two things worth of anything. The scene where mr headmaster entered room and tasted high school girl's pee, as it confirmed that this series, is indeed, not going to be any better, and the ED song as it is wholesome and very fitting to the series.

When it comes to enjoyment, if you are laughing at this, congratulations. You have done something which I haven't been able to do. I nearly cracked a smile when I wrote the Rick and Morty insult few paragraphs up. The series didn't manage to give me even that. Nichijou was one hella amazing show, but it was nothing like this one.

Overview:

Hoo boy, this review might be a little controversial with some of my MAL friends. We all know how subjective comedy is and how we all find different things funny. I heard glowing reviews about this anime, but the jokes just really weren't working for me.

Humor Style:

Do you have young kids in your family? Have you ever watched Teen Titans Go? Asobi Asobase uses a very similar approach to its humor and episodes, only in my opinion its slightly less funny. For example, characters will constantly make stupid faces and that's the joke. Characters will reference popular things, and that's the entire joke. There's ... an episode devoted to bad online yaoi fanfics and that's probably the best episode. The rich girl's butler is probably the best character just from his line delivery. His character's quirk is that alien's gave him an anal probe and now he fires lasers out of his ass. That's the level of intellectual humor we're working with. Another episode involves the girls getting into a contest to smell each other's armpits. The foreign girl wins because East Asians have less apocrine sweat glands and produce less body odor. You see kids, that's because East Asians usually have the AA allele of the ABCC11 gene that produces apocrine sweatglands. The AA allele is a mutation that makes the gene non-fuctional, so not as many apocrine sweat glands form. Most humans have the GA or GG alleles, so they produce more body odor. Those alleles were selected for in most of the world because body odor acts as an aphrodisiac for primates like us. Scientists believe the smelly alleles were not selected for in East Asians and Native Americans likely due to the cold climate of 20,000-10,000 years ago nullifying the advantage of smelling bad. The whole joke is that the episode is wasting your time teaching you about something you probably don't care about. It's the mortgage and real estate episode of Teen Titans Go!!! Same joke, same technique.

Characters:

There are 3 main girls that make up the pastime club. The first is Hanako, who is rich and stupid. That's her character. The second is Kasumi, who is a geek girl that dislikes games because her older sister always beat her at games. The final girl is Olivia, who was born in Japan to American parents. She pretends to speak English and acts like she can't speak Japanese, but she actually can only speak Japanese. That's the ENTIRE joke with her character. Every episode basically just uses variations of that joke.

Plot:

It's a show about nothing happening except 3 shallow characters hang out and do dumb gags. Occasionally they troll the audience and waste our time. Once again, kind of reminds me of this other cartoon I know.

Animation:

Studio Lerch used all their budget on Assassination Classroom, so this was made with whatever spare change they had left over.

Overall:

If you thought this show was hilarious, that's totally cool. I have shit taste in comedy and I'm in no position to cast judgment on anyone. I recently watched an anime called "Miss Bernard Said", which as of this review is rated at 6.02 here on MAL. Everyone here on MAL hates that series and thinks it's less funny than a brain tumor. I personally thought Miss Bernard was utterly hilarious. It's a simple show about a girl named Sawako who wants to impress people with how intelligent and cultured she is, but she's too lazy to actually read novels or watch art films. She just constantly brags about stuff she didn't actually read and is a pseudo-intellectual snob. I found it funny because I used to be a Sawako in Middle School. I think most people at some point have gone through a Sawako phase and that familiarity makes it funny. At least to me. If you're in the mood for a particular brand of VERY goofy humor, I can see why this show would be appealing. Personally though, I can't really recommend it easily.

One dimensional cardboard characters, plain bad looking art style and jokes that aren't funny in any way, there's the essence Asobi Asobase. The comedy is mostly build around either characters doing or saying something completely random and unexpected or character having a weird over the top facial expression. After seeing first 10 minutes I had already seen all this show had to offer. I still went and watched every episode trying to confirm there weren't any good jokes in the show, there were not. Confirming this wasted about 6 hours of my time though, so I guess joke's on me.

A good situational comedy would ... have build ups leading to a punchline, Asobi Asobase doesn't. Just constantly spewing bad memes one after another isn't what I could call funny or entertaining. Characters themselves are so simple and bad it would admittedly be hard to do anything more verbal that that with a cast like this.

This show really gave me nothing, except an huge overload of obnoxiousness. Nichijou does everything this show tries to do on a whole another level.

You know the humor is dead when Asobi Asobase is everyone's definition of a "Comedy" Anime.
This is just... I tried to enjoy it but Goddamm this was just so bad.

>The jokes felt forced like they were trying too hard. In result it turned out everything but funny.

>Relying too much on weird faces which at times felt way too weird and out of place.
You see weird faces can be funny too if executed perfectly. Prime example would be Grand Blue and maybe even Great Teacher Onizuka.

>Voice Acting was full of cringe. I am sorry but the voices in this show was ... really bad. Want to know what a Good voice acting is like when comes to comedy genre? Watch Disastrous life of Saiki.K. Voice acting in that show is absolutely gold and fits perfectly with characters and moments.
Here it was just a bunch of weird ass screams.

>Depends too much on vular jokes.
OK Vulgar jokes are somewhat fun and can be extremely hilarious. Look at Detroit Metal City for example. That show depenes solely on vulgar jokes but My God it was hilarious.
Here? Well, not so much. That epsiode where they talked about position or whatever and Hanako's butler's story were downright BAD.

At this point, the rating 2 is me being generous

This show is very funny, at least for 90% of the first episode.

Then the TLDR is just "gross".

It's not just bad, it's butt-jokes-on-episode-4 bad. Dirty jokes, body odor with a hint of racism (Japanese people don't smell so bad as American), funny faces, then the same faces, then no-longer-funny faces again. Loud voices, kamasutra with dolls, and no connection to the main theme of the first episode: typical Japanese pastimes.

No plot whatsoever. No character development. No background. Complete lack of interesting contents.

But... it wouldn't be that bad had the first episode not been so good. They had potential and completely wasted it. Yes, the humour ... is a little forced and the voices and faces are just a little exaggerated, but it could have been funny.

So, if you liked the first episode, and think this is a good surreal comedy show, then watch no further, otherwise you will end up writing a review like this.

For me, this is te most disappointing anime ever. You could watch episode 1 thirteen times, and have a better experience than watching the whole series.

BELIEVE ME, WATCH PLASTIC NEESAN INSTEAD!!!

Story: 3/10
Well, there isn't any story, which is normal. It is as it should be, in every episode happening something new that doesn't have any connection with the previous one, or the next one. It's main goal is to be funny, and it fails.

Characters: 2/10
I will talk first about Kasumi Nomura, a girl who dislike playing games (due to her sister for making her doing tasks as punishment after losing) and likes reading or even create stories about gay people. The second is Hanako Honda, a stupid rich girl who want a boyfriend and to have boobs. ... The third is Olivia, a girl whose armpits smell, and pretend to speak english, but she can't.
Our three main characters lack personality. I describe them in one sentence and two words some of them being "hilarious" and that's it, that's the joke, we must laugh.

Overall: 3/10
I don't think you should put yourself into this painful and boring ride, by finishing this anime and lose 5 hours by watching literally nothing. If you really want, just one episode it's enough. After you see how empty and bad humour this anime have, you will most likely don't want to continue. It wouldn't get better. As i said, watch instead Plastic Neesan, it is 10 times better, you will laugh 10 times more and in only 24 minutes you finished it.

Asobi Asobase

"Bizarre" describes this title quite aptly. The plot is about the 3 girls who want to start a party people circle together. Their entire dayli life is completely twisted and disturbing.

The mangaka clearly used the power of nonsensical humor. The jokes are often stupid, flat or just crazy. However, this gets all the crazier, but the exaggerated representation of the scenes and their faces.

The joke was there. However, the level hardly rose. In other words, there were one or two good gags. In the overall package, most of the episodes ended up rather empty.
-

For my part, I like this wacky and stupid kind of ... humor. This type just offers a pleasant change. But the episodes clearly lacked creativity. There were really jokes with the "WTF" effect. But only to a limited extent.

Genre:


Basically everything represented. Except for the part with drama. The exaggerated drama in the series was actually just another aspect of the "comedy" part. Therefore, this is one and the same.



Animation / pictures:


Interesting style of animation. The characters' faces were strangely flat, but was that part of the ... drawing style?

In any case, the colorful animation and the visual representation were a big plus.


Characters:


The characters are in line with the concept, very bizarre. A shy girl, an extremely excited and the "normal blonde" with a slightly spicy smell. There was nothing worth mentioning here.

Music:


Intro extremely misleading, unless you inquired beforehand what the work is about. Pretty good trap, I like it. Musically in the norm. Besides that, Outro as well as Osts was satisfactory.

Conclusion


An amusing comedy title for in between, with an enormous hint of bizarre humor. However, some episodes are enormously weaker than others. The quality of the jokes also fluctuates enormously. Still worth seeing.

The dust has settled, new comedy animes have been released, rankings of comedy animes have been updated, and it's 2022 now. To compare this to Grand Blue as of now is a wet spit to all top-tier comedy animes. Out of all comedy anime that I have seen, this one would have to be the unfunniest as I was STRAIGHT-FACED through all 12 episodes.

Story 3/10

Even though it's a Slice of Life Anime, the events in the story were more boring than usual since the comedy only made it worse than what it already was. Just involves a lot of screaming and random unfunny faces.

Character 4/10

The ... main 3 protagonists as a whole had odd one-sided chemistry as it felt like Hanako was the middle man between Olivia and Kasumi's interactions with each other. Olivia never did anything funny or memorable when I think of her; Hanako however could have been a very good character if the scriptwriting for her jokes weren't on an elementary level. Instead, Hanakos's character is just a more annoying version of Chicka from Love is War. Kasumi was just your average slice of life shy girl that had dominant strength moments and that was it.

Enjoyment 5/10

I wouldn't have kept watching if it didn't have any specs of enjoyment or maybe because I was sick from covid and saw the reviews that this anime "gave Grand Blue a run for its money". The episodes gradually get somewhat better with side characters and events.

Overall 4/10

I would not recommend this if your desire is to laugh. If you wanna watch 3 middle school girls make cringe jokes, bother side characters, and troll each other then be my guest.