Kemeko Deluxe!

The current featured review for this anime is criminally unfair so here is a positive one to balance it out.

At a glance, Kemeko DX doesn't break out of the mold: a space girl with a mecha suit barges into a student's house, disrupts his ordinary life with her supernatural abilities, and drags him into a worldwide conspiracy. And yet, this is one of the funniest animes out there. The overall humor is reminiscent of Nichijou, with comical sketches interspersed between plot-driving scenes, and a crew of archetypical characters. Like any harem anime, the main character is surrounded by a cast of beauties, but it's Kemeko, the titular, rotund, dead-eyed mecha suit who steals the show. Delivering punch(line) after punch(line), she channels Robin William's energetic Genie from Aladdin, constantly switching up her appearance and voice for every situation. References to other animes are aplenty, while some of the jokes might feel a bit dated. But if you're a 90s kid, this just adds extra charm. What other anime has a calisthenics chant that goes: "sub-sub-sub, sub-prime mortages!"?

Despite coming from a little-known manga, the animation is excellent. Hair and clothes move in every frame during fight scenes, and those are very frequent. Characters designs are maybe a tad forgettable, but this is compensated by the frequent outfit changes. The japanese voice acting for Kemeko is fabulous and wide ranging. This anime feels like it was a labor of love for its creators.

The only weakness of this show is its incompleteness. A couple of characters are introduced superficially but go on to play an outsized role in the finale, suggesting that a lot of material was cut from the source. Plus, the lack of a second season means that some central elements of the plot are never resolved.

Still, Kemeko DX doesn't take itself seriously and neither should you. Don't go in expecting a mind-blowing plotline or titillating romance. This one is all about the comedy and playing with tropes, so try to keep up because Kemeko's zingers come out shooting like the bullets of her machine gun!

From the absolute rubbish that is the art style, to the poor animation techniques seemingly perpetually attempting to cut corners, very little visually amounts to much. This odd, dysfunctional and overwhelmingly unsettling series overuses generic tropes to the bitter end, leaving a poor taste in the mouths of nearly any viewer that crosses paths. Its minimalistic plotline as well as its very dull slice of life moments bare minimal fruit, loosing the attention of many in the process. While references decades old are thrown into the mix, and I am impressed to an extent by what the writers came up with, it can't compensate for the sheer weight of negative material perpetually mixed in. What I can appreciate is the attempt at some semblance of a real romantic relationship. My issue is not necessarily even the romance's continuity but its consistency throughout the series. That and the lack of growth it had, likely attributed to a poor overall setup.

A final rating of five was given for its shotty attempts at displaying something better than what it could rightfully handle. Especially for its time period, to ask anything of a series in the ecchi genre feels like a lost cause. This series was no worse an example than any other. At the very least, I was not appalled or deeply offended by the lack of thought put into each character.