This all seems eerily familiar….
What They Say:
When a young man seeks romance and adventure by joining the campus foreign language club, he finds himself caught in a bizarre love triangle where a night of drinking leads to intrusive gum massages and sloppy tongue baths.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The rose colored glasses are out again as our nameless lead has ended up in a new club, this time an English Language Conversation Club since it’s one of the more prominent languages across multiple lands, and he wants to up his chances on meeting beautiful women this way. With his push into this particular club, he once again comes across the creepy looking Ozu who easily finds himself able to wheedle his way into the leads life and begins to twist and corrupt everything that he gets into. It’s a very, very, very familiar routine at this point and there aren’t any significant changes to the overall idea and you can feel yourself almost tuning it out some as we see it every episode.
Much of the overall concept is the same here as we see our lead going through the motions of trying to get close to a particular woman, this time Hanuki of the English conversation club, and invariably things don’t go well and Ozu gets involved in some way that makes it even worse. What’s amusing about this one, in particular, is that because it is an English conversation club, we do get a fair number of lines spoken in English which obviously sound amusing, much as my own spoken Japanese would amuse a native there. These moments are relatively few though in the overall scope of the episode and it actually feels like we spend more time in the drinking contest he gets into with Jogusaki than the English conversation side.
While our lead gets closer to actually getting some this time around than ever before, so much of this episode feels even more of a mishmash of different things than it has in the previous five. It’s all of the map, largely from his drinking so much early on, and it mixes in different animation styles in order to showcases how out and out crazy his view of the world is. While there is definitely an appeal in Tatami Galaxy acting a bit more mature this time around as Hanuki is ready to take him completely, it’s done in that over the top way that turns it into a farce, which is fine, but it just adds to the way the show is completely intent on just continually beating down the lead and never giving him any real sense of hope during any of his attempted club moments.
In Summary:
Tatami Galaxy started out as a really intriguing show both in its story and it visual design. Then it decided to reboot it regularly for the first six episodes, though apparently there are some minor tweaks along the way for those heavily invested in it to discover. What I’ve found over these first six episodes is that Tatami Galaxy has become a chore to watch and not fun or interesting. There are moments that I like and I’m definitely a fan of the character designs and the art style in general for the backgrounds and how it ties it all together, but the story itself and the characters have lost almost all their appeal at this point. I’m finding myself still only in it because I want to know if they really will do something with it to make it all make sense.
Grade: B
Streamed By: Funimation
