Written by Well I promised weekly reviews, and I am a man of my word so here it is, the first Weekly Review. (No longer an Anime Unlimited Review due to reasons of the original meaning of that name being lost to the myths of time.)
Episode 1 Summary
So the first episode starts off with Aikawa Ayumu the main protagonist of the show, walking home waxing philosophical on life. For a while you even think this show is going to be really sophisticated. The kind of show you would watch sitting in a fancy armchair, by the fire, and wearing an expansive robe, with a bubble pipe in your mouth with messages about life, and how short it is, but then well….. this next scene happens. Let me describe it for you, or you can just watch it for yourself ( The fun starts at 1:25) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-HB1KY0LpM
*Aikawa is walking down the street again talking about the meaning of life and the like.
*There are two cats crossing the road ahead.
* There is an old man walking behind Aikawa.
*There are two school girls walking behind the old man.
Now here’s what happens. The first cat has already crossed the street by this point, when it’s kitten decides to cross as well, just as a truck is coming along. The cat freezes in place and starts to scream realizing it’s going to be hit. Aikawa seeing this, and races out in the street to the cat and grabs it in his arms to protect it. Just when we thing Aikawa it about to get hit, time slows down and he tells the audience ”Oh yea, forget to tell you. but I’m sorta kinda a zombie.” Getting hit by the truck he’s sent tumbling into the air in such a physics defying manner Eisenstein would probably cry if he saw it. The kitten jumps out of his arms and on to the other side of the road having a panic attack. Aikawas’ bag shoots off his shoulder while he is spinning and zips past the old guys head causing his toupee to go flying. Aikawa flies into the tree’s and loses all his clothes in a way that Sakamachi, Kinjirou from “Mayo Chiki!” would be jealous of. He is then sent flying naked directly at the school girls screaming in terror with only the old man’s toupee and a conveniently placed beam of light to cover himself with. Now I might have had time to reconsider this anime being intellectual, if I hadn’t been laughing so hard at the time, that suffocating was a very serious threat.
O.K. so I don’t want to end up making this too long, here’s the rest of the episode in summary. Akiawa drags himself back to his house being perfectly fine because he’s a zombie and all. When he get’s home he see’s Eucliwood Hellscythe ( also known as Yuu) sitting there watching T.V. who asks him to make her dinner. After he does this he goes for a walk. On which we learn that Aikawa was killed by a Serial Killer, then revived by Yuu. He ends up in a graveyard, in which he says he fells relaxed. Again a zombie. However while sitting there, he hears a chainsaw in the distance. Then suddenly here comes a new character! Her name is Haruna and she’s a Masou Shoujo. She’s also fighting a monster, called a Megalo. However shortly after winning she loses her magical powers all of a sudden presumably due to Ayumu. Aikawa takes her back to his house where she tells him that she’s going to live with him until her powers come back. Aikawa then goes to school the next day thinking about what he should do about Haruna.
School ends, but Aikawa stays after, because he can’t walk in the sunlight. However when he’s there, a strange tall man in a black cloak with red eyes enters the room. He then begins to slowly walk towards him, saying “I want you, I want you” while breathing heavily. This ends exactly as you would expect it to. The strange man in the cloak turns into a gigantic crayfish……… what? That’s the only logical conclusion to that situation! Let me back up a bit. Right when the guy is walking toward Aikawa, Haruna appears in the window. She bursts into the room proclaiming that the man is another Megalo, but in disguise. He then talks about how he came because he sensed a Masou Shojo’s magic. Then Haruna decides to fight back as she proceeds to a transformation sequence, but because she has no more magic, her clothes just disappear. She decides that Aikawa has to be the one to transform. After he does, he discovers that all he did was just get the costume. Anyway he just decides to take Haruna’s chainsaw and attack the Crayfish, which explodes in two hits. The explosion sends Aikawa out the window and into the crowd of leaving students, who decide in turn to pull out their phones and take pictures because he’s still cross-dressed in the Masou-Shojo’s outfit. The episode ends with Haruna announcing that Aikawa is now an official Mahou-Shojo, and Aikawa screaming that his life is ruined.
Characters
Aikawa Ayumu
Killed one night by a serial killer, Aikawa Ayumu now spends his everlasting days searching for his killer as a zombie thanks to the efforts of Necromancer of the Underworld, Eucliwood Hellscythe. According to his research, when zombies are in the sunlight the mental, and physical ability’s are reduced to that of a 3 year-old. And while your busy pondering how Aikawa did this research considering no one else knows about zombies, or why a zombie can’t be in light, but a vampire can, Aikawa is off going to school and living life, like he did before he died. This series throws out all zombie conventions in the first episode. Sure he may be weak in the sunlight, but you can’t kill him by smashing his head in, he keeps the same thoughts as before he died, he still looks the same, so no decaying skin, and he doesn’t eat brains. And let me tell you he defies conventions on more than one basis, because he is one of the few main characters in a Harem, Comedy, Romance, show who is NOT a Saint Protagonist. Thank the Lord.
Haruna
Haurna as voiced by Iori Nomizu is a ”Masou” Shoujo, which is a pun on the word Mahou Shoujo meaning magic equipment girl rather than magical girl….. I’m sure it’s one of those “funnier in Japanese things”. She is by far the best and cutest character in the show (source above).
Eucliwood Hellscythe (Yuu)
Necromancer of the underworld Eucliwood Hellscythe, often called Yuu, by Ayumu. She is mute and thus communicates through a pen and notebook. She is responsable for bringing Ayumu back to life as a zombie after he was killed by a serial killer.
Seraphim (Sera)
She’s a vampire ninja from an all vampire-ninja village. Reread that sentence, and then think about in what other medium besides anime, that would even be plausible? She apparently lives breathes and eats the “Tsubamegaeshi secret sword technique” or at least that’s what she says. She originally arrives to ask Yuu to come back to her village with her, but after she refuses, she offers to become her servant in hopes to change her mind. When Yuu “says” that she doesn’t need another servant since she already has Ayumu, Sera challenges Ayumu to a duel which Ayumu wins. In an ongoing effort to change Yuu’s mind she decides to become Ayumu’s servant instead.
[Review Begins Here]
First things first I really like the Op. It’s kind of dark and gritty feel of it even if the anime has a much more lighthearted moments, but the Ed covers that aspect of the show quite nicely. Either way it looks visually appealing with the chainsaw motif, and the animation is really nice. Altogether it’s a pretty good, if only slightly above average Op, with a nice catchy song.
So if you didn’t pay attention to the content above, or more likely skipped it, you might not know that this show requires a lot of suspension of disbelief. It seems like the majority of the plot and story were thought up while the creator was drunk doesn’t it? But trust me at least watch the first episode if you have doubts that you might like this anime. If you have even a remote love of over the top humor like I do, then this show will definitely draw you in. And for those of you who like the more serious stuff, Kore wa Zombie does have a bit of that as well, but if it’s all your there for, I can’t recommend this anime to you. And while were on the subject don’t watch this anime if you hate blood, after all this is the show that coined the phrase “Blood Geysers” in my Terms Glossary.
Now for some problems. First off, something I disliked about the show, is that when Aikawa gets ready to fight and turns into a “Masou-Shoujo” they always make the same joke about how strange Aikawa looks. And this happens to the point where it’s kind of annoying, because it’s repeated again and again and again, adding nothing to the gag, and not just with this one joke, with a lot of other jokes as well. Such as Sera always insulting Ayumu (which wasn’t even funny the first time.) as well as Aikawa calling himself a Masou Shoujo, and not a Mahou Shonen. The joke is funny at first, but not so funny the 10th time.
I also had a problem with an episode in particular for being too strange. The episode in question is episode 9 which starts out pretty normal for a Kore wa Zombie episode, then in the middle goes completely out of the realms of comprehension, and just starts to get confusing. I really don’t want to spoil too much, but lets just say that this gigantic golem comes out of nowhere (and was never mentioned before at ANY point) and everyone talks like they always knew about it. The episode then proceeds to make no sense in any scene afterward with said golem in it. Overall it wasn’t a bad episode, just really confusing, and the whole golem thing had no impact what so ever on the story.
Now you might find yourself saying” UO you dashing, sexy, and perfect example of all things man, when the only faults you can find with an anime are one strange episode and reuses of jokes, how can this not be your favorite anime ever? You hate more stuff in Sora no Otoshimono than you do this!” And to that I would respond “Yes my hopefully female readers, your right I do have less problems with this than I do SnO, but the thing is, that Kore wa Zombie is watertight”. It doesn’t have all that many bad things in it, but at the same time there’s not much in the way of plot. To make a terrible analogy, “Kore wa” is good at juggling all the balls it has in its hands, but it’s only juggling 4 balls. A show like SnO on the other hand is juggling 10 balls, and while it may fumble from time to time, it is still a lot more impressive, and you know that a lot more work and training went into learning how to juggle 10 balls at once.
And at the time of writing, I honestly can’t think of anything else I want to say, and I really want to say more, because the review only seems like 3/4′s of this entire post! I suppose I could talk about Saint Protagonists, and how Ayumu is most definitely not one, but I want to save that for my Sora no Otoshimono review coming at an as of yet unannounced time. Again I really don’t like having spent so much time on the summary and characters, and coming up with a short review, but if anything you can think of it as the bar I’m setting for myself for future reviews, just not for this one 
. Alternatively I can understand that some people don’t like overly long reviews. So if all you want is the meat and potatoes of my review, just say so in the comments and I’ll consider just dropping things like the Character section, or changing the Summary of episode 1 back into just the few sentence summary of the show. Also next week, I won’t tell you what I’m reviewing. In the meantime you’ll just have to ask God, because He knows….. cause it’s His world….. Ya joke fail.
[ Next Week: "The World God Only Knows"]
