“I’m one of the bad ones.”
What They Say:
Ange has just transferred into Queen’s Mayfaire Academy, and she’s on a mission to recruit the Princess. The only thing standing in her way is the Princess’ agenda.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Princess Principal started with a group of cute, unassuming high school girls operating as merciless spies, and our perspective is essentially that of the one-off character who meets them and supplies the first one-episode storyline of the series. We learn a bit about them through him, and through their discussions and actions related to his request that he’s not around for, but there are some big questions to be asked regarding who the hell these kids really are and how they came to be in this very unlikely position. It’s common practice to throw you into an established world and then explain how it came to be in the next installment, and Princess Principal is following that progression in these first two episodes, and there’s plenty of room for it to spend several more episodes filling in the gaps before even getting to the “present” of the first episode.
Okay, so we don’t go back all the way. From the get-go, the characters we’re following are spies, and the brief discussions of the further past may be all we get for how that all happened. Or hey, maybe the series will really take off and we’ll get some proper prequels to detail every little bit we don’t see in the series proper. Frankly, we don’t necessarily need all that, and simply seeing the immediate path to the formation of the happy little espionage club whose path the late Eric was unfortunate enough to cross and foolishly believe he could come out on the other end. We follow Ange arriving at the academy in which the story is set and meeting up with fellow spy Dorothy. Princess and Beatrice are already best friends having their pleasant tea time at the same table we know the full team will eventually assemble, albeit with a presumably lighter topic of conversation at this point. The two of them seem to merely be the princess and her noble aide, but that’s only because we’re seeing the story from Ange’s perspective this time, as well as those of her superiors watching the events unfold and sending out orders based on how things are going.
I’ll admit I was largely underwhelmed by the storytelling and twists in the first episode of the series, but with Ange and Dorothy operating on the opposite side of Princess and Beatrice, there’s a lot more conflict to shake things up on both sides now. That doesn’t suggest that things will be less engaging after this point because it was necessary to keep some things secret so this episode could be as surprising as possible. Now that we get a better idea of what each player is capable of and where they’ve come from (to some degree), there should be much more potential for intriguing developments in the rest of the series, especially if the girls face more competent challenges. One concern at this point is that the girls are maybe too brilliant, with their only missteps being faced again another one of their eventual cohorts. The Duke of Normandy is shown to be the primary antagonist thus far, and he does seem like he can give the girls a run for their money, but we haven’t yet seen them truly slip as a unit, and that might be necessary to make the conflicts more than just seeing what trick they’ll pull out of their bag next. There’s also the chance to simply get one twist after another, which doesn’t always make for great writing.
In Summary:
A return to the beginning (in a sense) gives us a better perspective on the relationships between the girls and starts to delve into their backgrounds a bit more. It’s a much more promising offering than the first episode, although it does have to balance its twists and turns so it can sell the story.
Grade: B-
Streamed By: Anime Strike
Review Equipment:
Roku 3, Sceptre X425BV-FHD 42″ Class LCD HDTV.
