More of the same, which isn’t exactly a good thing.
What They Say:
Souma Akira is a glasses-wearing high school student at the rural Himalaya Third Technical School. He loves glasses more than anyone and is proud to wear his own. Along with Hachimine Takuma, Minabe Yukiya, Kamatani Mitsuki, and Kimata Hayato – four other boys with glasses who have joined (or, perhaps, were forced to join) the club born of Akira’s greatest ambition – the members of “The Glasses Club” share sweat, laughter, tears, and the occasional explosion(!) as they pour their undying passion into their eye-wear.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The use of the student council in the previous episode certainly helped to give the show a bit of what it needed in a foil. But they weren’t enough to really give the show a sense of direction other than their continued quest for the special glasses that they’re working towards creating at various times through numerous designs and imaginative moments. It’s comical in small doses and the more I watch the show, the more I think it’s an ideal five minute show rather than a full length piece. The boys still aren’t all that defined outside of their meetings with Akira that brought them into the club, though I’ll easily admit I’m liking some of them a bit more now that we’re moving away from those back story episodes.
Keeping the student council out of things for this episode for the most part, the first half of the episode is just… nothing. As I sat there and watched it, it ran through a variety of little character quirk moments, various gags and other moments about the way some of them were acting out of sorts that you just sort of can’t see the point to it all. There’s even a lengthy segment on curry that just paints the boys in a poor light simply because it doesn’t actually go anywhere for the length of time they spend on the gag. The second half brings in some of the student council members a bit, but they’re mostly just the straight man to the wackiness of the Glasses Club members. That does make for some fun at times, especially since they can get physically ill just in being associated with the club. But mostly with this episode, even though it goes through a bit of a detective phase, it’s largely just one wacky instance after another with no real substance to it. Some of the parodies are cute but entirely forgettable.
In Summary:
Nonsense for the sake of nonsense can be a lot of fun and I’ve certainly enjoyed my share of those series over the years. Meganebu just doesn’t seem to be able to pull it together though. I keep coming back to the same thing in that I love watching it for the animation and style but the characters simply leave me frustrated. Archetypes abound in many series and that’s no different here, but something about them all just feels even more forced than usual. This episode works with Hayato a lot as he plays detective, which leads us to our first female character of note (a lunch lady) to solve the mystery. A wholly uninteresting mystery that can’t even really draw attention in the slightest, though it leads to some comical food-glasses moments.
Grade: D
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Apple TV via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.