Once again, I find my ability to hate anime nullified. As much as the first two episodes of Shuffle! did very little, I find myself hooked to a strangely functional combination of fanservice and plotline. I think it’s time for a Shuffle!-athon.

Mind you, I’m blogging these many episodes behind – I’ve got frameworks for up to episode 10 so far. So if I sound like I know more than I’m supposed to, that’s why (but also spoiler issues, too).

We begin with a flashback, and urges to compare it to pretty much any other eroge (don’t most have dream sequences). The art seems a bit off compared to normal, which is either me hallucinating or a stylistic choice. Kaede’s the focus of this flashback, and she seems to be saying something important that is either getting drowned out or blocked out…

And then Rin wakes up and has an amusing scene where he tries a little too creatively to dodge the fact that he cried out Kaede’s name in the dream (right in front of her face). I’d be a little suspicious if I were Kaede, as the last time I remember a cover-up with this much enthusiasm it was Shiki after the wet dream sequence in Tsukihime.

I mean, aliens, seriously? Now we know the bad liar around here.

What would be really interesting though is if the two of them had synchronized dreams, a la Yuuichi/Ayu in Kanon. Maybe it was just suspicious to me about how Kaede dodged the question of her dream.

It’s very worrying how dedicated Kaede is to Rin – if I were watching this blind I couldn’t see how she would be anything other than dedicated girl…

I didn’t quite understand the earthquake scene, although it was a little funny how Kaede and Rin panicked. I suppose it’s justified as earthquakes in Japan are common and serious business. Wonder if Primula’s prediction and subsequent stoppage of the earthquake meant anything…special powers?

Or maybe it was just an excuse for Kaede to glomp Rin.

In better and worse news, the fanboys are vaguely less eye-searing this time, and they have a decent theme, and they’re vaguely funny to boot. Can’t imagine the self-esteem crash they would get from being destroyed by the very idols they worship, though XD

This seems to be adding up to be a Kaede episode as we watch her be ignored. A lot. Like, almost like everyone’s trying to. I guess if you’ve got 5 girls in your harem you can let one or two go. Especially if she seems to step aside herself…

Unless she comes back with a box cutter in 15 episodes.

Sometimes I wonder when I missed the entrance exam for the school with the unwieldly proportioned teachers with great dry wit. Sia and Megumi’s reactions were priceless too.

Now if I had more of a critical thinking mind I could analyze the hidden depths of Nerine’s quote. So basically if her feelings are like a muddled, soft omelette, then her feelings are confused, mixed up, and very…em, squishy.

If those are referring to her feelings at all.

Stuff happens, and Kaede falls sick, which is very bad. Why? We all know that if there are 3 phases of anime health:
1) Perfectly fine.
2) Minor illness.
3) Death.

And so putting Kaede at level 2 (they call in a doctor, too?) we find out that it’s one of them sicknesses that lasts about an episode until she gets better through more attention by Rin.

She needs to get sick more often, then.

And in the meantime Nerine ends the life of many innocent chicks. I have a feeling that omelettes are going to become a running gag, kind of like panty shots and resulting innuendo. That quote’s from Nerine, by the way, who doesn’t seem able to operate anything. She appears to be the smart-with-no-sense type; although she didn’t have any problems with the finals such mysteries as cooking lay beyond her grasp.

But the real chef here is not Sia, but the Shocking Asa Shigure (as named)! What is more surprising than that is how embarrased she seems of that title and adoration. Asa looked like the last person to be caught acting like Hisui (Tsukihime), but perhaps she has more character than the genki girl who beats the crap out of Rin…

She seems to be the only one aware of Kaede, though.

Primula continues to be mysterious and quiet, having a scene where she picks plants for no reason. It turns out that it’s a medicine recipe as her medicine makes Kaede ‘all better.’ At least, we can assume it’s the medicine and not magic, but who really knows?

There’s another earthquake, flipping the lights off and on for no good reason. I really want to say these are more than a plot device, perhaps foreshadowing for episodes to come but I have no concrete evidence for that. Maybe it’s just time for more Kaede glomping.

Luckily her melancholy seems to be over for now at the end of this episode but the signs of unrest are beginning to show in the harem, Rin should be watchful…

-CCY

Shouldn’t I just skip like 16 episodes of Shuffle! and just go forward to sad Kaede time and blahblahblah ending stuff with green-hair? That’s really, what I know about this series and why I keep watching it. Just to see how Kaede can compare with emo-Nayuki for the sad rejected (despite ‘First Girl Wins’ trope) character.

But then again, I’d be missing out on 16 viewings of that spiffy opening. I tend to judge anime a lot by their openings – or the music at least. The animation in Shuffle!’s OP isn’t anything out of the ordinary – it looks to have spoilers x 1000000 in there but I can’t really say for sure yet. Also, it lacks dancing :P But it’s a decent rock-ish song that’s been stuck in my head for a few days now.

And considering it pushed out Lucky Star’s 1 minute 10 seconds of caffeinated karaoke, I call that impressive.

Shuffle! continues to speed onwards at rapid pace. While the supernatural aspects of the story haven’t seems to kick in yet they are readily apparent as Nerine (blue hair) proves she shouldn’t be messed with. Man, harems sure are dangerous these days.

Also, collateral damage, hmm?

I was more surprised at the fact that this wasn’t a continuation of Sia’s arc, as it so seemed to be at the end of last episode. Not sure if this may end up pulling a To Heart 2 where it focuses on all the girls for an episode and then launches into something…different.

Also, there’s something about that cat. It’s everywhere. Originally, I thought it was part of Primula’s arc, as she shows up with it in the OP, but with it in the eyecatch, alone in the OP by itself and now in the flashback Nerine, it might be more all-encompassing than I thought. It remains to be seen if it grants 3 wishes also.

Shuffle! has done away with most of the angsting of most romance shows, in that the female characters all have an established huge gigantic crush on Rin. There’ s no ‘do I like him, do I not’ (see: Syaoran from CCS) here. Still, they didn’t have to resort to the obviousbat here.

Also, about the second picture there, the girls in Shuffle have too many names, I swear. We’ve got Kaede/Kae-chan, Shigure/Asa-sempai, Sia, Nerine/Rin-chan (and I thought that was a translation error), and Primula/Rimu/that one thing she was called in the second episode. Geez.

An oddity here is the flashback in this episode…to all of one minute ago. I understand that this line certainly be an important one, but I doubt we would forget it that fast. As long as it doesn’t end up like Nayuki’s snow bunny, showing up 20 times in an episode, I’ll forgive it. Besides, I figure Rin should already know the status of everybody in his harem (infatuated beyond belief). The line in question here also reminds me of ‘infinity plus one’.

What is it with anime and cooking scene? I must be missing the whole ‘make a lunch box for your beloved’ scene in America. Shame. But this feels like the tenth time I’ve heard this line, and I’m not sure what I can attribute it to as 90% of the romance anime I’ve watched have a cooking episode.

Not the brightest line to say to a girl with a knife. I was surprised how Rimu seemed to confront Rin so readily after glomping him for an entire episode 2 episodes back. Not sure if it’s because she doesn’t know personal skills, or if she’s bitter? Abandoned from Rin’s childhood (think Mai, or pretty much any other Kanon girl for that matter)?

And the iconic line from this episode. The whole omelette scene made me burst out laughing. Turns out harem leads have a way to stand up for themselves after all, if only in trivial situations.

Also: why does Midoriba get to partake in all the bento awesome, being the resident ecchi? His line where he gets a different lunch from a girl every day, supposedly. Maybe it’s because he, along with Rin and the harem’s parents, is the only guy with a face that is not entirely fugly.

-CCY

(apologies about the low image quality; I’m screencapping them off Youtube)

What I’ve noticed about Shuffle! is that it certainly seems to move a lot quicker than other harem anime.

2 episodes in we already have what seem to be the main harem completely introduced (Kaede, Sia, the blue-hair one, and Primula/Rimu/loli jailbait/whatever, and the green-haired sempai that no one sees coming), and now with the third episode we have what can technically be termed the fastest meeting-to-confession, ever.

Although Kaede was rather possessive in episode 1 when fighting off the Defence Forces. Speaking of, we could do much better off without these otaku; as funny as their obsession may be, it’s a pain staring at them – I don’t care if we really are that damn ugly in real life, we don’t need that photorealistic depiction.

Also, that stampede-chasing-harem-lead joke’s already done to death in TokiMemo Only Love. (despite it coming later chronologically XD) Why is it that the harem characters are so immensely popular at their schools?

While I’m busy breaking the time-space universe now would be a nice time to notice that even Shuffle! contains some retroactive Kyonisms, defined as ‘hyperbolic statements that could very end up being true in this situation’. Rin and Kyon, after all, do share the same VA.

If you want to talk about story I suppose that it is getting somewhere. If this is organized in arcs then Sia is up first, and it’s only thanks to that fact that I’ve figured out her name by now.

With the amazing trio of childhood friends in Shuffle! I have a feeling that I’m going to be seeing lots of annoying flashbacks to when Rin was busy being more of a pimp at age 8. Funny that. Maybe I’m just tired of all that stuff; it seems to be dime-a-dozen that in visual novels (eroge?) that the protagonist has no memory of his pimpitude as a child, presumably because something traumatic happens, like your entire family getting killed or somebody falling out of a tree.

Still waiting to pass judgment as I liked this episode more than the previous one, and I’m hoping the story picks up and really gets going in the next episode or two. I know where (who) this story ends, so I’m really interested in how, how the bloody hell do we get there.

I leave you with the girl so obsessed about final exams that she manages to change her eye color. One of them, anyway. I will have to watch for signs of this around finals week at our school.

-CCY

Shuffle! (with exclamation mark) is one of the series I’ve meant to be getting around to – I just began watching it today, and it’s a mixed bag so far.

From what I know of Shuffle!, it’s another eroge/visual novel adaptation, and that shows so incredibly much in the character design:
- Sort of clueless, boring main character (gray hair = top sign of anime normalness) with girls falling over him? Check.
- Main character’s perverted guy friend? Check.
- No parents for the ‘main’ characters (Kaede/Rin)? Check.
- Quiet and/or lolicon girl (Primula/Lyco/Whatever she calls herself)? Check
- Childhood friend? The counter’s at THREE. And rising.

There doesn’t appear to be much substance yet, as the first two episodes have been mostly lighthearted character introductions, in which we learn that everybody has fallen in love with Rin, even moreso than is the norm for a type of story like this.

Fanservice is more abundant than the other visual novel anime’s I’ve watched – Air, Kanon, To Heart, although all of them were heavily sanitized I suppose – but it’s not overwhelming, yet. I do consider it awkward – and I think of the point in Episode 2 where Military Guy got his head up Red’s (Sai? Or the other one? Odd names in this show) skirt and wonder, if they are really the descendents of gods and demons, they shouldn’t be wearing panties so much as having a black hole of whirling death down there to smite the perverts.

Which brings me to the next point – which is the nonexistant story so far. We’ve established that there are gods and demons in the world, and that nobody really seems to care. I’m hoping for some plot exposition in the coming episodes, which I suppose is coming one of these days; Kanon was, I suppose, equally empty in it’s first few episodes.

Will have to keep watching this, but at this rate it’s doubtful I’ll make it to the end, perhaps also because of accidental spoilering I already know what’s going to happen. (insert Kaede with box cutter picture) Which will make for an odd viewing…

-CCY