That is a tidbit of the description of this summer 2010 anime, Shukufuku no Campanella. Just with that line one may feel a Maury Povich show vibe coming off of this, at least I know I did. However, this show is not about some guy who ran away from town after "knocking some slut up" like they would say on the Maury show..this is something completely different. As a little information about myself, I very very rarely drop shows and I have only dropped a grand total of 5 shows in my whole anime watching history. This show is the 5th show I have dropped and there is a reason for that.
Let's get started shall we? First off the story to this show is nonexistent. You are thrown into a whimsical Final Fantasy mixed with Aria setting with a bunch of random characters that get literally 5 seconds of introduction and walk around and literally do nothing. Now, some may say "plenty of shows are about nothing" and I agree, however..coming from a man who has Lucky Star on his favorites and even has it plastered on his car this show is beyond boring..even for a Lucky Star fan. The first episode was nothing more than just random flashing names of the characters and a few seconds of some "puppet" girl who was born from a meteor. The subsequent episodes did not explain anything and even went on to describe some incredibly bad and poorly scripted "fight scenes" that look like something out of a terrible JRPG that shouldn't have been made. There is literally no explanation on why they fight and the whole idea of "questing" is thrown in completely off guard and randomly. I generally do not judge a book by its cover and watch at least 3 episodes of something before judging it, but in Shukufuku no Campanella's case unless ICP comes down from the sky and makes a miracle this show will not get any better story wise.
As for the art and sound they are incredibly average. The use of pastels and the whimsical setting is a little out of the ordinary in today's anime which is a plus. However, to make up for the lack of story and characters this show would definitely need some stunning scenery porn, yet it does nothing but be incredibly average. The sound is your basic fantasy music and is nothing extraordinary nor is it terrible.
As for the characters, I have to ask "What characters?" This show is seemingly lacking characters...they introduced a whole bunch of them in the first episode yet none of them are recognizable and none of them have any unique traits. It's like watching a bunch of clones with different wigs on interact. The girls in it are your typical ditzy idiots who fall over and have their tits rub up against the clueless male lead, which in this case is brain dead rather than clueless. The only way I could tell the girls apart was their outfits..they all seemingly act the same and are all just blobs with different hats/clothes/hair. As for the male lead, he is even worse than your generic male lead..he doesn't even acknowledge any of the girls and for some reason has literally 5 lines per episode. For a supposed "harem romance/fantasy" show the male lead has to at least interact with the girls...hell, him tripping and falling on their tits or running away from the one girl who wants to marry him would be more entertaining than this guy. He literally has no personality along with no spine. The only good thing about this show was probably the male lead's mom who was a total slutty tease and seemingly was the only character that I can remember after watching the show.
Overall, this series gets a 3. There is so many things wrong with this anime and with the time constraint of 12 episodes, I doubt this can improve to a "worth watching" point. There is barely anything going for this show and what is going for it is the art and music which is average at best. The utter lack of characters mixed with the complete lack of any coherent story made me drop this show which is a very rare thing for me to do. I've sat through plenty of "awful" shows yet it takes a certain show for me to actually drop it. Shukufuku no Campanella is one of those shows that is on a tier where I cannot actually stand watching it. I would definitely not recommend this show to anybody since the fantasy/romance genre has so many other prime subjects to watch while this is just straight up pathetic. Maybe next time I wont be attracted by the description of a show as much as I was for this one. This is definitely not the hilarious drama involving some guy skipping town after knocking up one of the local girls that was hinted at for the description.
