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Sep 27, 2024
A warning before you go try to find this anime: the only English subbed version that exists (as far as I’m aware) has some of the worst translations I’ve ever read. If you can’t understand Japanese and you don’t want to spend three hours trying to untangle the word salad at the bottom of the screen you might wanna skip this one. My best guess is that whoever subbed this fed the audio into an online translator and did not edit the output at all.
If you want to brave the incomprehensible subs anyway, this OVA is pretty solid. The music is a big highlight,
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it’s very 80s with lots of weird synths, it boosts the retro vibe which honestly makes the whole thing much more enjoyable. Hand drawn cel animation always has a certain charm to it. I can’t comment too much on the fine details of the story, because as I mentioned the subtitles are a disaster and my Japanese is terrible, but in broad strokes the main characters are likable and the central mystery is intriguing. The retro horror vibes are top notch, if you're a fan of J-horror inspired by folklore this is probably right up your alley. Mysterious deaths and schoolgirls fighting with psychic powers drive this story forward.
Your mileage will vary with this one. Check out the movie before you jump in the deep end with these OVAs, the movie is easier to find and the subs are much better.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Nov 19, 2021
(spoiler-free)
This show is one of the strangest sports anime I’ve ever seen. Calling it just a bad show feels wrong somehow. And don’t get me wrong- this show is not good, but there’s just something so, so weird about it. It can’t seem to decide what it wants to be. It seems like they want to tell a more serious story but can’t figure out how to. None of the characters are likeable, and the show has a bad habit of retroactively making itself worse. The worst example of this is the final scene, which is so genuinely unsettling in its implications that I have
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no idea what to make of it.
Let’s start with the plot. In the first episode, we are introduced to our main character, Minato. He used to be a star water polo player, but on the way back from one of his games he was in a traumatic car accident that put him in a coma and caused him to lose several years of his memory. He has no memory of ever playing water polo, nor any particular love for it. In addition to that, his body has been affected by the year-long coma, and he isn’t in any condition to play a high-intensity sport like water polo. When he’s asked by his family if he intends to keep playing, he straight out tells them no. Of course, we as the audience know he’s going to get back into it- it’s right there on the cover! But the way that this happens is… not great.
Minato gets back into water polo not because he wanted to, but because some random girl tells him that before his accident, they agreed if he doesn’t become Japan’s best water polo player, he will owe her a lot of money, and she’s going to hold him to it. Putting aside the fact that no sane person would hold Minato to this deal he doesn’t remember making and is physically incapable of fufilling, this is dumb and creates further plot-related problems down the road. It takes away Minato’s agency as a character- he’s not taking up his old hobby because he chose to, he’s doing it because some rando is convinced he owes her money.
As for the sports aspect of this sports anime, they do the same thing every other sports anime does (school club with no members gets all the members they need except one, the guy they recruit has some baggage related to the sport, they give him group therapy for an episode and the show moves on), but the issue is that they’re… REALLY bad at water polo. Like, genuinely terrible, and they don’t ever get better. On one hand, I’m glad they didn’t try to make us believe this group of total amateurs has a real shot at winning a national tournament, but it’s also a bit frustrating watching them struggle to tread water eight episodes in. At one point they lose a practice match against a middle school team, and they take it embarrassingly hard.
The real issue with this show isn’t the water polo, though. It’s how every single character is an absolutely irredeemably awful person.
Multiple characters in this show take advantage of Minato’s condition, lying to him about past events or holding him responsible for things he has no memory of doing. Without getting into spoilers, the girl I mentioned before reveals something later on that completely ruins the show retroactively and also just makes her seem like a terrible person. One of the characters on the water polo team is, genuinely, one of the most unlikable and disgusting characters I’ve seen in a while. Don’t get me wrong- I love shithead morally grey anime boys as much as the next guy, but he is so out of place in this show. His actions feel too real, and he is never framed as anything but a sweet guy who might just be a little misguided in his attempts to make friends. He comes off as such a manipulative little toad that I genuinely had to get up and take a walk to calm down at one point.
The team constantly feels like it’s on the verge of falling apart. Nearly everyone has a token “I’m quitting the team” moment, but they never feel properly resolved. These moments don’t feel like road bumps they have to overcome as a group, they feel like wedges driving the characters further apart. It’s not even fun to watch them interact, they barely have any chemistry.
The final scene addresses a new aspect to the plot that was always there, but the show was carefully avoiding addressing directly. I don’t think the writers meant to retroactively turn their sports anime into a borderline psychological horror, but they sure did. After the final episode, I had to spend a few minutes just sitting in front of my screen, processing the implications of the protagonist’s final line. I have never been made so uncomfortable by a sports anime before.
Overall, I really can’t recommend this show. It can’t decide what it wants to be, and in its confusion it creates a surprisingly heavy plot that it simply cannot handle properly. I know that everyone has different tastes and are entitled to their own opinions, but I genuinely struggle to understand why there are people who like this show. If my description piqued your curiosity in any way, I would honestly just tell you to save your time and read a plot summary. There are a lot of hidden gem sports anime out there, but this is not one of them.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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Sep 15, 2021
I've seen fans of this show say they hate when people compare it to Ouran High School Host Club, and I completely understand why. Aside from a crossdressing female protagonist and a club of pretty boys, there really aren't many similarities. They're very different shows, and if you like one of them there's no guarantee you'll like the other. I won't lie, I'm a huge Ouran fan and that premise is exactly why I took interest in this show in the first place, but I won't hold it up against Ouran as a judgement of its quality.
Pretty Boy Detective Club's fatal flaw is that
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it takes itself too seriously. When the twist of the first arc was revealed in the second episode, I had to pause multiple times because I was laughing so hard. And that's not a bad thing! It was so stupid and over the top that I thought it HAD to be self aware. The show HAD to know that this was a terrible twist, that it was completely nonsensical and no one could ever take it seriously. I was so entertained by it that I was telling people about it for days, and I couldn't wait for the next episode to come out.
Sadly, I was mistaken. The show has absolutely no self awareness. The cast of characters navigates their way through nonsensical mysteries, arriving at batshit insane conclusions with no reasoning behind them, with essentially no plot connecting each arc. They hint at something more going on behind the scenes, with a secret society and a rival student body president from another middle school, but these plot threads never go anywhere. I was really disappointed as the show went on, and worse, bored. The mysteries were stupid enough that they didn't make sense, but weren't so over the top dumb that they looped back around to so-bad-it's-good territory. It felt like the show still wanted to be taken seriously, like it was unwilling to just be a silly, low stakes series of mysteries.
I might as well mention the cast here. Not a single character has any sort of arc or purpose for existing. They are all given a single personality trait, a name, and a quirk, and then spend the rest of the show doing nothing. When I watched the first episode, I was excited to see what role each of the characters would play in the story. They all seemed to have a decent starting point for some fun character interactions, but they never moved past those starting points. In the last arc, the protagonist and the red hair boy had a couple scenes together where they demonstrated pretty good chemistry. Would've been interesting to explore, in, say, a twelve episode TV anime series.
Some of the characters are better than others. The red hair boy I mentioned before comes pretty close to having a personality. The main detective boy, the one with the blue hair, is honestly so grating that I was tempted to skip forward a few times so I wouldn't have to listen to him speak any longer. The only character who has any sort of development (and I use that term very generously) is the student council president, the one with silver hair. His development happens through a different character who exists for one arc, long enough to make us suffer through another nonsensical mystery, and then never comes back. Any development that he went through is instantly scrapped in the next arc and is never brought up again.
This show's one saving grace is its visuals. At a certain point, I was only watching for the backgrounds and barely reading the subtitles. The art in this show is absolutely gorgeous, it's honestly worth watching the first couple episodes just to drool over the visuals. I bumped up my overall rating by a full point just because of this.
Overall, I'm really disappointed by this show. It's confusing at best and boring at worst, and there is absolutely no depth to the characters. You're better off saving your time and watching something better.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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May 29, 2021
i am literally begging you to go watch this right now. this anime is borderline surreal. why is the whole thing in english with japanese subtitles? why is there a fake advertisement in the middle of it featuring a knockoff pillsbury dough boy? why does this anime end with the twins kissing and then going to make yogurt with ice cream and raisins for breakfast? every choice made in the production of this anime is baffling. how on earth did they afford to license these songs? i wish every anime would just randomly start playing footloose halfway through. i felt like i was having a
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spiritual experience. please watch this anime. 10/10
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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