What They Say:
Kou comes to a certain city, in search of his older brother Takumi, who ran away from home and disappeared. Thinking it’d be rather difficult to find his older brother, Kou decides not to go back until he finds him… but he ends up finding him immediately. However, when Kou is reunited with Takumi, he had become the head of the Mikuni Detective Agency. Takumi appears to have no intentions to go back home. Kou then decides that if his older brother isn’t going to come home, he’s going to stay at the Mikuni Detective Agency.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Based on the series from Verno Mikawa that has been worked on since 2002 in Monthly Comic Zero Sum, Strange+ is the latest short form anime series to debut this season. The manga series has grown a bit in the last couple of years as it went along as a drama CD was done and the cast from that is doing this anime as well, which means Tomokazu Seki, Jun Fukuyama, Ryotaro Okiayu, and Satsuki Yukino are reprisinge their roles. The series is being adapted by Seven with Takashi Nishikawa writing and directing it with Hiroyuki Furukawa adapting the character designs into anime form.
The show revolves around a group that’s part of a detective agency that deals with whatever jobs come their way. The focus of the first episode is less on introducing everyone and more showing them dealing with a mission as they have to help a wealthy man in a mansion figure out how to protect a gold statue that he has that a thief has informed them that they’re going to steal. It goes comical right from the start as the thief is in their presence and has laid a series of butt related traps to allow their escape. The foursome are in hot pursuit, but they’re so inept overall that it just goes comically badly at each stage as we see more and more just how bad they are. But th butts are well used here in providing the comedy that you can’t help but laugh at it.
In Summary:
Clocking in at 3 1/2 minutes for the episode, it will survive and amuse me if only they use the fake butt gags repeatedly throughout the series. I’ll admit, it’s lowest common denominator material, but it made me laugh even if I could tell it was coming. There’s no setup in this episode, no laying out who the characters are or why they’re there. It’s just silly comedy through and through and it manages to work on that level in a basic way. The challenges of short-form anime are many and some do it better than others and this one is off to a fairly mediocre start overall.
Grade: C+
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.
