Hello, Momo. Hello, blinding light of censorship.
The Devilukes go to school.
Summary:
Rito still leads a complicated life after the three Devilukean princesses moved into his home and the episode at the pool with the failed confession to Haruna. In particular, Momo has been giving him a lot of trouble lately, including an incident where she unexpectedly joined Rito during a bath and declared that she'll help Rito build a harem. The trouble continues the next day at school where Rito learns that both Momo and Nana have transferred into the school as students in a lower grade. The two sisters (Momo in particular) prove to be quite popular in their class due to their looks. While Momo is basking in attention, Nana notices a girl looking out the window. Nana and the girl begin a conversation and Nana learns that the girl is named Mea. Nana shows off her powers of understanding animal speech and she and Mea starting hanging out together.
A portion of Rito's harem. Censorship comes in black stripes too.
Later in the day, Momo inspects the school for all the girls who are openly or secretly attracted to Rito in order to go ahead with her harem building plan. Momo notices Yami sitting outside and tries to convince Yami to become a student at the school (in order to further her plans to build a harem for Rito), but Yami proves to be hard to move. Suddenly, Rito runs onto the scene being chased by a group of student who appear to be under someone else's control. Momo and Yami beat down the students, but the person behind the attack starts speaking through one of the students. The perpetrator reveals that he/she was looking for Yami and is disappointed to see that Yami has grown soft after staying on Earth. The voice tells Yami that Earth is not the place for her and bids Yami to finish her assignment which is to kill Rito.
The show can't be called Darkness without a little Golden Darkness.
Momo gets in on the action as well... so does Rito.
Both OP and ED sequences were shown at the end of the episode. The OP animation is pretty typical stuff featuring Rito and all potential harem candidates doing some school stuff and a little action from Yami and Momo. The ED was the three Devilukean princesses playing around with their hairstyles.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The debut episode more or less covered chapter 1 of the manga. The first chapter was probably a little longer than usual, so it'll be interesting to see how many later chapters each anime episode will cover. Like the change from the original To Love-Ru manga series to the Darkness series, the new anime is now more ecchi with full frontal nudity and increased sexual undertones, and not surprisingly the white/black lights of censorship are back in extra force for the TV broadcast. The anime production quality is still pretty mediocre and seems slightly worse than the OVA, but I'm not expecting much in that department anyways.
Other than the extra nudity and ecchi stuff, Darkness also brings a more centralized plot to the To Love-Ru universe. The older anime/manga series were a bunch of one-off stories, and the somewhat more centralized storytelling in Darkness is certainly a change, although most people will probably notice the boobs first. One thing for sure is that the combination of Yami and Momo as the female leads should be a bit more interesting than having Lala at the helm.
I have to say the blinding light/darkness really does make it tempting to just skip this series until the DVD/Blu-Rays come out. It's not really the fact that I can't see the fanservice (which isn't of course isn't good either), but rather sometimes the censoring takes up most of the screen. If I wanted to watch streams of sunlight, I'll open the blinds and look outside.
ReplyDeleteThe plot looks to be more solid with Momo and Yami at the helm. If they were to focus in one two interesting characters it'd be those two. Yami of course has quite the background and Momo's efforts to make a harem for Rito should be fun too.
Seriously, I think Momo is the best girlfriend Rito could possibly wish for and I hope he will love her in the future and that she will confess her feelings for him as well!
ReplyDelete