Kigurumikku V3

Oh Boy where to start. First of all there are only 3 12 minute short episodes.
Its a text book magical girl anime but throw in some bad jokes, some ecchi and a lot of randomness you'll end up with this.

The jokes where a bit bad to funny. I did find my self laughing a few times. There is no time line set for this show and you'll won't need it. It just jumps around. The first episode felt like this was jumping in from season 2. The third and final episode felt like it should have been episode 2.

Over all if you have about 30 ... minutes to kill and want to lose a few brain cells trying for figure out what you just seen give Kigurumikku V3 a shot.

There isn’t really that much of a story to this so I’m not going to worry about spoilers, although I personally don’t encourage you to watch this anime so I don’t think spoilers should be too big of a deal. The most I could spoil you is by poisoning the well, and I don’t even have to explain anything about the story to do that. This was released as an ONA, but they seem to treat it as if it were going to be an actual TV series. I wouldn’t be surprised if the TV series was cancelled due to negative reactions towards the ONA. ... Anyway, let’s get onto the important part of the review, shall we?

Not only is there not a story present, the writers even deliberately avoid giving the anime a story. Unlike most magical girl anime where the first episode is dedicated towards showing the audience the girl finding a sentient intelligent god-like being that looks like a stuffed animal turning her into a magical girl and possibly using the next few episodes to show her slow acceptance of this new role this anime starts off with the three main characters already being magical girls. They do explain that the weird hat creatures who properly look like stuffed animals are what give the girls their powers, but they mention nothing about how they met or what exactly those creatures even are. Even Mahou Yuugi briefly explained how the protagonist got the fish on her back. The only information that we do have about these things is that they can only transform with children and that they can be stitched up like real stuffed animals. Despite only have three episodes this anime is extremely episode to the point that you could even watch the episodes out of order and it wouldn’t make a difference. There are “episode previews” at the ends of the first two episodes, but they don’t really correlate with what actually happens in the next episode so even that wouldn’t make anything feel awkward. There seemed to be some attempt at giving the anime a story by having certain bad guys show up as being the main antagonists, but they don’t really do that much and never felt like that important of a threat. One of the characters is shown to have the power to harness the power of emotions to use as a weapon, but for whatever reason this is only used one time.

As they mention in the script an important part of the appeal of this show is the fact that the main characters are lolis. Coming from someone who really does appreciate lolis I can honestly say that the lolis are actually pretty low tier. I wouldn’t go so far to say that they’re unattractive, but out of all the lolis out there they just aren’t that great. Pretty much the entire second episode was about loli fanservice since they just talk about bras and wear them. The main character even went pretty much completely naked, although there was censorship provided by random obstructing the viewer’s line of sight towards her lower feminine parts. The backgrounds were also quite mediocre and unmemorable. The first villain looked like what an ice cream cone mecha would look like in the world of Toppa Tengen Gurren Lagann. In a comedy anime this is a fine character design, but they didn’t keep up this trend of ridiculous looking antagonists and the monsters of the following two weeks were so plain that I can’t even remember what they looked like. The last one was a sort of spy like villain, but the second one was just a generic human if I recall correctly. The transformation scenes were likely the least “special” I’ve ever seen and unlike shows like Cardcaptor Sakura and Shugo Chara where they serve as a sort of eye candy Kigurumikku V3 just shows them put on their weird sentient animal hats, transitions to a different background and shows them wearing something different. The outfits themselves also aren’t too remarkable. They show off what they’re supposed to, but they’re very simplistic and you can tell that there wasn’t too much thought that went into designing anything in this show.

Unlike most TV series and ONA series this anime completely skipped the idea of having a theme song of any type. I know that anime with short episodes like this are notorious for having too much theme song and not enough actual anime content, especially with shows like Aiura and Hell Kindergarten where the theme song or theme songs collectively take up close to half of the shows actual runtime, but for a 10 minute episode to not even have one of the two types of theme songs just seems like a way to cut down on the budget. Considering just how awful and misplaced the music in the first episode was maybe it’s better that they didn’t try to write a theme song. I know the word “cancer” gets thrown around a lot these days, but I honestly think if they were to attempt to write an opening song with the same staff it would perfectly fit our modern and subjective definition of cancer in media. The “background” music in the first episode is extremely intrusive and unnecessary. I feel like even people watching in Japanese would need subtitles just to understand what’s being said since the music volume was louder than volume of the dialogue. Both the background music and the voice were quite a bit below average, although neither are quite bad enough to induce headaches or damage to ears. The transformation animation, the evil lair, and all of the baddies had very generic and uninteresting sounds and voices. You could tell they weren’t important to the anime, but then again nothing really is, nor is the anime important in any way in and of itself.

The characters are pretty much all there just for comedy and titulation so their personalities are all pretty bad. The main character has the important trait of not caring about what other people think, not saying that she’s a sociopath but just that she doesn’t have any shame or modesty. She has no problem walking into someone else’s house, eating their expensive food in front of them, and then saying true insults right to their face. She even points out to an onee-san character (can’t remember what their relationship was) that she was using alcohol as a coping mechanism for being lonely and not being able to maintain a romantic relationship for very long. This character is obviously very troubled. One of her main characteristics is her large breasts, which is a pretty pathetic thing to be your most significant defining feature aside from your mental issues. As much as I would like to go on about the other two characters who make up the titular V3, there really isn’t anything to say about them as they get little characterization. The full cover that shows all three characters will tell you more about who they are than I ever could, which is really saying something. A picture tells a thousand words, but if these thousand words you’ve read so far have told you anything it should be that you need not go any further than the picture. The villains were even less developed than the main characters, although unlike most series there actually isn’t too big of a gap. Usually it would be something like 1 or dimensional villains and 2 or 3 dimensional main characters, but in this it’s more like 0 dimensional villains and 0.75 dimensional main characters. None of the characters have any depth, but even most background characters have more characterization than both the villains and the main characters in this series.

Even for a low budget shoddy magical girl parody short this still wasn’t very enjoyable. I know I’ve already made the comparison of Mahou Yuugi, but that was a far better anime that basically does everything right that this did wrong. Unlike some other anime even watching it just to make fun of it doesn’t work that well to turn the negatives into positives since it’s already so bland that it’s like finding the opposite of perfect grey (as in, it doesn’t change the quality). It doesn’t feel painful to watch and it isn’t actually boring in any normal sense of the word, but it still isn’t very satisfying to watch. The dumb humour and somewhat unique, despite not very realistic, characters do make it at least somewhat watchable. It’s sort of like a cheap knock-off Twinky: it’s not that great, you know you’re not really getting anything out of it, but it’s also not hard to get down. Even if you don’t end up feeling sick after you’ll still wish you had something else instead. There are much better alternatives so it’s a bit of a worthless thing to watch unless you’re just trying to pad your list with stuff that doesn’t take that long to watch. In this case it might not be too bad since there is far worse anime out there and it does make for an easy watch even if you won’t get anything else out of it.

In the end I wasted about half an hour watching the anime and another three hours writing this review, but in the end it wasn’t exactly a bad experience. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, but I wouldn’t discourage you from watching it, especially if you like anime such as Mars of Destruction and Pupa. It’s somewhat interesting in itself that something that feels so mediocre all across the board could feel less fun than something that was genuinely horrible. Anime like Inferno Cop and School Days are intended not to be perfect masterpieces and aren’t expected to be loved by everyone, but they still have fans who love them for what they were able to accomplish by having one or more factor of MAL’s Story-Art-Sound-Character-Enjoyment be worthy of a score lower than 1 since that makes them unique and interesting in their own way. In contrast nothing in this anime stands out as being anywhere near good nor is any of it horrendous, which makes it surprisingly bad in the end.

Kigurumikku V3 is an ONA from AIC. Yes, the same studio behind Bubblegum Crisis, Explorer Woman Ray, OreImo, Sasameki Koto, Battle Athletes and many more. The stuff of theirs I've seen has ranged in quality quite a bit, sometimes being really good, sometimes being dull and sometimes being terrible. So, where does this 2009 ONA land?

Story:

There isn't really a story. The ONA has three episodes that are just meant to parody magical girl tropes. There are three girls with powers granted to them by equipping avian mascot characters as kigurumi, or full body animal costumes for those of you who don't know that term. The ... three of them face a vague evil threat resulting in shenanigans. The episodes aren't really in order and they skip details between them.

As a premise goes, it isn't a bad one and it has comedic potential. It's basically the same concept behind Galaxy Angel's super sentai parody episode. But whereas the Galaxy Angel episode was really funny, clever and charming, Kigurumikku V3 is none of those things. There's very little that actually parodies the tropes that are common to magical girl stuff. A lot of the “humour” is based on perverted things happening and over the top reactions to them. To be fair, most of the really risque jokes revolve around the older sister character instead of the elementary school kids, but it's still pretty damn sleazy. In all honesty one or two of the actual genre parody jokes do kind of work but they're pretty heavily outnumbered by the insipid bits.

Characters:

There's really not much to say about the characters in this. Chocotan had more fleshed out characters and it lasted all of ten minutes. Granted, this series isn't that much longer, running a bit over thirty minutes for its three episodes but that's still thrice the running time with worse results. To be fair the kind of one-note cast of characters could work in a comedy if they actually meshed well for comedic purposes or if they were entertaining via quirkiness or some other factor. Kigurumikku, unfortunately, doesn't have that going for it. It just has characters who are loud and kind of annoying. I've seen worse casts, but they're pretty bad.

Art:

The art would be passable, if a bit mundane, if not for the focus on fan-service. Frankly, it's a worse offender in that regard than Devil Hunter Yohko was. At least its main characters were older, albeit still too young for this shite.

Sound:

The actors themselves are quite skilled, although you wouldn't know it from their performances in this. They're ridiculously over the top and don't really have anything going for them. They aren't terrible performances but they manage to be grating. The music is bland but not bad.

Ho-yay:

There's really not much. There's a bit where Azuki decides to check the other girls' chests but it comes across more as nonsensical and vaguely creepy than it does as them having chemistry.

Final Thoughts:

Kigurumikku V3 is a vapid, unfunny and just plain stupid little series. You might like it if you're into the whole idea that girly bits are inherently funny. Otherwise, I wouldn't recommend it but there are worse things out there. My final rating is a 3/10. Next week I'll look at Mushishi.