It’s bad enough to have your sex tape leaked, but when you didn’t even take a sex tape, you’re not even a celebrity, and you’re in high school, it’s all kinds of wrong.
What They Say:
Hikayu Hoshikawa, a character from the dating sim video game Starry Sky Milky Way, appears in front of the group. Hikayu doesn’t possess any abilities for battle but is still required to participate in the Elimination Chamber Festival since she’s a Creation. Ohnishi, Hikayu’s creator, comes up with an idea to help her. Meanwhile, a new Creation joins Altair’s side….
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Even just for anime, you’re only ever a few degrees of separation from porn. Re:Creators is directed by Ei Aoki, who directed Fate/Zero, which is a prequel to Fate/stay night, which started with pornographic content. The source material of Fate/Zero was also written by Gen Urobuchi, who has written other visual novels with pornographic content. There are probably even closer paths you could take, but you get the idea. The Creations who come into our world aren’t even necessarily from anime in general, but all otaku media, and without a doubt visual novels make up a good portion of that, most of them featuring pornographic content in at least one release. So it really wouldn’t be accurate representation if we didn’t have the heroine of an eroge show up. Of course it would never be a protagonist, as they are often meant to be as bland as possible to allow the player to insert himself into the role and focus on the girls; it’s probably safe to assume that any character that would never be featured on a cover of their original work would be brought into this world, and when it comes to galge, that means a male character is completely out. It is a “gal” game, after all. This, of course, means that this heroine who thinks herself a normal high school girl is transported into a world that’s exactly like her own, except for the fact that anyone can see her having sex; in fact, they can essentially have sex with her, and that’s basically her purpose. Other Creations have faced some suffering in their respective worlds, but she may have it the worst in this one. Still, I can’t sympathize with her enough to not be incredibly annoyed by everything about her personality. I’d question if this would really be the “best girl” chosen by the community, but looking at some real-world examples, her popularity is unfortunately very realistic.
What makes it worse is meeting her Creator. Some of the Creators have been less likable than others, but hers is possibly a more exaggerated caricature than even her, and probably more than about half of the other Creations. He’s the image of a loser otaku who got into the industry to make his perfect waifu. If this was being written by an eroge writer, I could appreciate it as self-deprecating humor, but it seems like it’s just an outside perspective giving that category of creators such a representation. Needless to say, while the inclusion of Hikayu is entertaining in theory if perhaps a bit obnoxious in execution, Ohnishi is thus far a much less welcome addition. I’m sure they’ll both have some form of character arc, but I don’t know if it will be worth it enough.
Speaking of material meant for titillation, we spend a significant scene following a naked Magane bouncing around with convenient censorship. And speaking of characters I’m not a fan of… yeah, I’m not that happy to see her again. Still, her interaction with Alicetaria in this episode is slightly more intriguing than her usual eye-rolling attempts to be edgy that frustratingly always work out.
In Summary:
The one major medium of eroge finally makes its debut in Re:Creators, to great comedic effect considering the implications of a character with that background finding herself in the world that her material is from. Unfortunately, she and her Creator are both very irritating in different ways.
Grade: B-
Streamed By: Anime Strike
Review Equipment:
Roku 3, Sceptre X425BV-FHD 42″ Class LCD HDTV.
