Return of the Jellyfish!

AngryJellyfish is back! And by that I mean my internet speeds have returned to usable levels, faster than ever now that we’ve changed providers! Finally I can actually enjoy my days off from work, catch up with the current anime season, and write all those blog posts I’ve been promising since the summer, as well as all the end of year posts I always do in December. 😀 But for now, just an update.

Shukufuku no Campanella OVA

I was planning to wait until Anime-Planet added this before watching it, but screw it. I’m on a roll! Just a warning though, this is going to be looooooooooong.

Shukufuku no Campanella the TV series had way too little plot even for 12 episodes, showing major signs of padding and repetition. So it was inevitable that this OVA would instead take the ecchi comedy route. Because even though it was originally based on a H-game, has a fandisk with more hentai scenes, has plenty of bathing scenes in the TV anime that would no doubt be uncensored on BD/DVD, and that each volume comes with a ~2 minute DVD special featuring one of the female characters bathing IN A CHOICE OF 2D or 3D ANIMATION STYLE (and let’s not forget doujuins and fan art either), clearly the world doesn’t have enough pictures of Nick to fap to yet.

There was a surprisingly large amount of manservice for an OVA obviously aimed at a male audience (even if it was only for comedic effect), with all male members of the cast having at least a partially nude shot, and sometimes more than one. However, the vast majority of the episode was focused on the girl’s boobs (or in some cases lack of them) as you’d expect.

It would be difficult for me to blog this in detail without posting a ton more pictures like the one above, and I’m not editing any more of them! So instead I’ll describe the hilarious scenarios they came up with in order to justify all this nudity, with SFW screenshots wherever possible.

So we start off with Campanella Academy. Knowing nothing about the OVA, I was ready to facepalm my way through 30 minutes of highschool hijinks, but this turned out to be one of several short ecchi-ridden comedy sketches. This one chose to focus on the Tortilla Twins and Golem, who are the school’s disciplinary committee. It begins with Ritos’ harem senses tingling – while they know and accept the fact that male lead (and Vice President) Leicester already has a harem in the other members of Clan Oasis (AKA the rest of the school council), apparently the possibility of a new girl joining the harem is reason enough to investigate… for disciplinary reasons.

(Non-ecchi) highlights of this segment include the Golem Sandwich, and characters behaving… well… out of character.

This was followed by one of several ~1 minute long ‘Hotspring Tour’ clips, which was just the female characters being naked while promoting several of the world’s hotsprings (see screenshot #3). Should be fairly self explanatory.

Then there was another brief, repeating segment where a character was selected from a fighting game style character selection screen. What is this character being selected for, you ask? To participate in a game of strip rock-paper-scissors is the answer, with the selected character losing each time for the sake of fanservice. Except for the last game, that is, where the player is denied fanservice shots of MILF Shelley (they throw one in later to make up for it though).

Next came Campanella, The Movie!

You’ve seen the type before, take the characters of a show and throw them into a spoof trailer that can’t decide what genre it’s meant to be…

What I found most amusing, however, was the *slight* change in title by the end of the trailer:

In case you were wondering, we’re just under 10 minutes into the 30 minute OVA at this point. Thinking back, I should probably have made a tally chart of all the times characters were shown nude, would have made an interesting thing to end this post on. But I’m not watching the whole thing again, apologies for that missed opportunity. Anyway, I digress…

What sounded as though it might be a fun segment actually turned out to be nothing more than an excuse for Carina to stand around naked over Leicester’s ‘dead’ body, the rest of the cast looking on while holding various, mostly phallic-shaped vegetables. No, really.

This was also repeated a few times with different ‘dead’ bodies (they turned out to be simply unconscious though, so all’s good). Moving swiftly onwards:

Since Chelsea has a sense of direction only surpassed by One Piece’s Roronoa Zoro, it makes sense to throw her into a ‘Where’s Wally’ parody. With 10 seconds on the clock, the viewer is given the challenge of picking her out from a crowd of people, in pictures such as this:

As the clock ticked down, the ‘camera’ helpfully zoomed in on the picture, centering on her and making it very easy. But as the intro showed us, this is only a 1-star puzzle! Two more were thrown in later, increasing in difficulty, and by the end we’re being asked to pick her out from an areal photograph of the whole island. Zero fanservice in this segment.

This is going to be a long post…

No actual fighting occurs, however, with most of the attention on their (nude) transformation scenes, and the humorous addition of other rangers who can’t even be bothered sticking to the colour code.

Skip forward through another murder mystery, hotspring tour, find Chelsea AND a strip janken, and we find ourselves at:

This segment actually adds to the series(!), exploring one of it’s unresolved mysteries – how does Golem work? This is a question that Agnes is determined to answer, and so she decides to spy on Tortilla Company HQ…

A slightly creeped out Tango makes a throwaway comment about the fact Golem seems almost human, which leads Agnes to the following conclusion: someone must be inside, controlling it!

As luck would have it, today is Golem’s maintenance day! While Salsa prepares food (as part of a not particularly funny anti-climax for this segment), Ritos gets to work fixing Golem… and Agnes watches through a hole in the ceiling!

Turns out Golem is being controlled by… a team of chibi Golems!

The rest of this sketch was Ritos teasing Salsa, more of the usual but nowhere near as funny. Then came another murder, this time Nick was the corpse! And those heartless moe-blobs took one look and just walked out of the room, leaving him there! I’m not even going to screencap that, it’s just mean. This was followed by the other repeating segments, and then by the final main arc:

Maitress shows up at Clan Oasis when the main cast are out, and only Shelly is at home. She gives Shelly an artifact she found on her travels – a blank, featureless plushie.

Later on, Leicester comes back to find the HQ empty. Seeing the doll on the table, he picks it up, and (you guessed it):

The next few minutes are spent showing the girl’s reactions as one by one they stumble across Plushie Leicester. Nina hugs him (causing the plushie to blush slightly). Agnes, being a puppeteer, has plenty of clothes that are just the right size for him, and (after changing in front of him herself) sticks him in a red, frilly dress. Chelsey’s reaction is to pick him up and examine him intricately, noting how everything is to scale…

Carina proceeds to bathe with him… as you do. Finally, Minette finds Plushie Leicester hanging up to dry, and takes him to bed. Once she’s asleep, the full moon breaks the enchantment, and Leicester turns back to normal… while still in bed with the loli. In the morning, the girls ponder what might have become of their beloved plushie, while Leicester sits there, broken.

THE END.

Kaiji S2 Episode 1

SURPRISE! I had absolutely no idea I’d be blogging this, but 5 minutes into the episode I knew it had to be done. Expect me to post more frequently than I did for Campanella, since I actually really like Kaiji. Just to confirm, this is series 2. Not that there’s much to spoil, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. As ever, hold your mouse over the pictures for bonus captions!

So instead of an OP this week we were treated to a recap of series 1. Which ended with Kaiji in even greater debt, and minus an ear and some fingers.

Wait, I didn’t post last night?

It seems I completely forgot to post anything yesterday. Thinking back on it now I was busy reviewing Romeo x Juliet and went to bed quite soon afterwards, but when I first logged in and noticed that I was missing a post it really threw me. I spent several minutes trying to remember what was in this non-existent post, and how it could have just vanished. Craziness.

Anyway, the reason I went to bed so (comparatively) early last night was because I was visiting Plas Tan y Bwlch this morning. It’s basically a huge garden, free entry to the public, which also holds training sessions and stuff. The reason I was there is because I’m going to start volunteering in the gardens starting the week after next, in hopes of getting some proper work experience and boosting my CV. Perhaps not the best season to go and have a tour of a garden, because even ones as big and grand as Plas Tan y Bwlch aren’t all that pretty this time of the year, but at least I’ll get to see it as things change and slowly come to life as spring and summer come around. Anyway, it’s something different to do at last, and without the constraints of paid work – I can pretty much come and go as I like, so long as I let them know.

Tomorrow I’ll be home alone, and watching anime all day. So I’ll probably either post about that, or about nothing at all.

Under construction…

I have made a blog. But it is late, and I have nothing to say other than that I’ll shortly be heading to bed. Expect a post with a little more meaning soon. Actually, maybe ‘meaning’ isn’t the right word. It will be longer though, that I’m sure of.