Sticks & Stones: Girls Bravo

   Welcome back readers, to the second helping of Sticks & Stones for your anime reviews. I've had some positive feedback from readers on my first post, so I'll continue to bombard this blog with more writings! How truly wonderful for you all. So with some further ado, let's go on to the series! (To assuage your burning eyeballs, I plan to make this post is a bit shorter than the previous one.)

Bikini clad anime characters? Yup, we're in a harem anime.

    This week I've perused the offerings of Girls Bravo. As you may surmise from the picture, this anime isn't what tasteful people would call a work of art. In fact, it may be the furthest thing from art that I've seen in years. But don't let that dissuade you from watching this show. What should dissuade you are the insipid characters, the middling & predictable plot and the enduring sense that you could be using your time better somewhere else. So what is this show about? Well, it's a harem anime where a boy finds a portal to a world of filled with women and brings back (accidently) a girl from that world, and slowly but surely he starts getting a menagerie of female characters around him. To the shows credit not every female falls for him. Which is surprising, but that still doesn't make this a good show. One thing of note is that unlike most harem anime I've seen, which have loads of fan service, this shows goes past that to show full on nudity. I think every episode (or nearly every) has some sort of nipple shot. Heck even the opening credits to the second half of the show has nudity. This is pretty rare in my experience when talking about mainstream harem anime. But...Maybe it isn't as mainstream as I would believe, but then again, it IS on Funimation. Once again, this isn't enough to really save this meandering waste of brain activity. On the positive side, because it takes such chances on not being to subtle on sexuality, the dirty jokes hit the best. I truly did laugh out loud at some situations I've never laughed at in an anime. When it goes raunchy, Girls Bravo is at its best. Otherwise, it's exactly like every episode of harem you have seen before, only done much much worse. I can't stress enough how incredibly uncreative this series is. So bereft of any new ideas that, It's almost a parody of itself.

   As an example, here's a summary of one episode that I saw. It was the date episode. Where to the main male & female character both go out. The first half of the episode was great, actually. I was laughing hard, and if you know my laugh you know that's not an understatement. This was caused by the raunchy turn the anime took. Good job show! Bravo, indeed! Then, of course, after driving through Hilarious Blvd., it decides to take a turn into Crap St. The second episode was filled with NO HUMOR and the typical plotline of someone getting there late...but instead, now they beat that horse twice by causing both of them get lost. What? Really? That's what they had to come up with? Are you kidding me? They were lost for most of the second half, with NO PURPOSE but looking forlorn. Talk about ruining the pacing of the show. NO, I'm wrong. Ruining would be not cutting the correct scene. Here they just wrote crap. They just had these two characters run around doing...nothing. It wasn't even emotionally moving. It was so frustrating, what happened to the great first half? It was literally, the best thing I saw the whole show...followed by the absolute worst.

   In the end, I cannot recommend this series. Pass. Pass. Pass. At best a D, it took some chances with the risqué aspects, but...to what end...well...none. Nothing truly came out of it. We just got a rehashed story. Even though the humor was quite good at times, to trudge through all that for just a bit of laughs? No. There are much better humor series out there. Much better everything out there. Don't watch unless you are some sort of hyper fan of Haremé (my name for Harem Anime). Instead go (re)watch Love Hina.

Picture courtesy of www.animehere.com