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O.K. so I am completely breaking up the formatting of this review, although I promise that next weeks review will be in my normal formation. MM! is just a very special anime.
My Original Video Review For You To Laugh At: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3v4i7e5hEt4
Plot
High school student Taro Sado comes to realize that he is an extreme masochist and attempts to conceal this from his crush. To fix his problem, he enrolls in his school’s “2nd Volunteer Club”, where Mio Isurugi and the other members attempt to cure him through various “training” regimens.
[Review Begins Here]
So as you might imagine, last weeks review got me some scorn from my father. (Oh the joys of being 14.) Apparently he doesn’t like me watching anime with lesbians in it, (I’m not that big a fan of Yuri anyway, so that shouldn’t be much of a problem for the future.) but I’m sorry to say that I already had scheduled and watched this anime by the time you told me that, so your going to have to suffer through my review of MM!, which is about as heavy in terms of stuff my father won’t like as anime can get. Oh and don’t worry next week I’m reviewing Twin Angel Twinkle Paradise, which is an anime meant for small 5-year-old girls, and is full of happy, rainbows, and kittens. But again, this week is MM!
So because this is critical for the rest of the review, I’m going to talk about MM!’s characters first by using the Op. EVERY character in this series has something wrong with them or has some kind of fetish, except for one white sheep. (And even then she might, I have no idea.) At one point Mio try’s to cure Tauro’s masochism and succeeds in doing so, however soon after that more problems just arise. So in an effort to combine my characters section with part of the actual review please follow me into the Op, as I explain the characters and what’s makes them “unique”. (Also sorry, but the Op’s backwards, nothing I can do about it.)
0:07: Arashiko Yuno- She’s Androphobic, which means she’s afraid of men. She’s also a tsundere, although to a much less extent than Mio is.
0:22: Taro Sado- He’s a masochist, although he doesn’t want to be. He spends the majority of the series trying to get rid of his masochism.
0:40:Nanaha Sado and Tomoko Sado – Taro’s mother and little sister. They have an unhealthy amount of incest for Taro. These are probably my least favorite characters in the anime, and not just because his mothers name, is the same as my beloved, but I’ll get to that later.
0:45: Michiru Onigawar- She’s the school nurse, and the adult sponsor for the Second Volunteering Club. I can’t find anything wrong with her. All she does is take a lot of freaking pictures, but that’s hardly a problem.
0:50: Tatsukichi Hayama- He’s Taro’s best friend as well as a cross-dresser. (His original gender is male, you’ll see his female form in a few seconds.)
0:52: Yumi Mamiya- She’s a friend of Yuno, and has absolutely nothing wrong with her. She’s totally not a lesbian or anything. /nervous laughter. Seriously though, she seems to be more bisexual than anything else. She goes after both Mio and Yuno, but she appears to have a romantic past with Tatsukichi. (And no, not the cross-dressed Tatsukichi, they explicitly state that she doesn’t know he cross-dresses.)
0:54- Dōmyōji- He’s Taro’s boss at the convenience store he works at, and is heard to have called his assorted merchandise of 2D beauties as his “wives”.
0:57- Tatsukichi Hayama And Yukinojō Himura- Tatsukichi again, but this time cross dressing, as well as Himura who is Noa’s lab assistant and a Lolicon.
0:59- Noa Hiiragi- A super genius who founded the inventors club, and a loli respectively.
So because of all of these “problems” you might expect me to hate the anime with a passion. I’ve always been against things like fanservice, fetish fuel, and anime without plots that took more than 5 minutes of the creators’ children’s time to write (examples: Rosario Vampire, Girls Bravo, Kanokon, Kiss x Sis, and of course Kampfer) but no I don’t hate MM! in fact I freaking love it. What separates MM! from those aforementioned terrible animes’ is that MM! isn’t trying to create fetish fuel, and in fact succeeds in not doing so, they just play all the insane quirks these characters have for laughs. Here is an average start to an episode of MM!
It opens on Mio trying to cure Taro of his masochism by hurting him a lot. Presumably her idea of curing someone with a cold, would be to lock them in a room of people infected with Smallpox, but I digress. It fails in some way or another, usually with Taro ending up getting kicked, punched, or indeed roflstomped into Arashiko, who then sends him flying off-screen team rocket style shouting “Men scare me!”, and usually hurdles him into some semblance of a plot for the episode.
And another anime (Kampfer) would repeat this joke again, and again, and again, until 24 minutes passed by and they could play the Ed, but not MM!. Let me give the example in the form of episode 5. Because of Noa’s evil plan to turn the entire world into perverts (don’t ask), Himura gives Taro the “DX Hentia Belt” an invention of Noa’s that turns pervert energy into a super power. He then turns into a Super Saiy- I mean Super Hella Masochist and proceeds to fight Noa’s gigantic robot. Unfortunately he can’t quite beat the robot, so he calls upon the power of all the perverts in the world, and now with this new-found mega power boost, he manages to defeat the robot, while simultaneously making me wet my pants.
This has to be the most hilarious parody of anything, ever.
And because it’s my never-ending mission to cram SnO into every review ever, I want to point out that this episode from SnOF came out the exact same week as episode 5 of MM!.
Now I watched this on Gogoanime like I do everything I can’t find on Crunchyroll, so I have no idea if this next statement is accurate, but MM! really didn’t seem to have a lot of, if any fanservice. Don’t get me wrong, it’s there, but it seemed like an anime of this nature would have a lot of fanservice it. Now again I watched this online, so there is the possibility of the fanservice being hidden for the T.V. release then being flaunted as the main reason to buy the DVD/Blu Ray, but again I have no evidence of this. If its true that the show has no DVD exclusive fanservice, and I watched it in it’s final form, then I have to say I have a great deal of respect for MM! for not going down the well worn path of least resistance. However the opposite is true if MM! does put all its fanservice on the DVD’s only
I really like both Op’s MM! has, because in essence they’re both kind of the same song. The songs “Help! Heaven Side”, and “Help! Hell Side” are pretty much the same song. But I prefer the Hell Side because hearing “Go to Hell desu!” never gets old.
So one of my problems with the anime is that it seems to show a scene of someone talking (and we clearly see the conversation from beginning to end) then later on in the episode they add a scene that we never saw, to the exact seen that we saw from beginning to end. I only saw it happen two times, so that’s not really a big issue.
Now for my biggest problem with this show. Taro’s mothers name is Tomoko! NO UNFORGIVABLE! NO ONE STEALS MY BEAUTIFUL TOMOKO’S NAME AND GETS AWAY WITH IT!!!! DIE! DIE! DIE!… Oh sorry, must have had caps lock on or something.
THIS is the TRUE Tomoko! Gaze upon her magnificence! She is without a doubt the cutest girl in any anime ever.
[cincopa AUKAQtaBfXOU]
Anyways moving on, as varied as they try to make jokes about Tauro’s masochism, there’s really only so many times you can watch a guy get punched in the face before it becomes boring. So around episode 10 or so I just started flipping through the episodes looking for the good bits. Although at this point it feels like I’m grabbing at straws, because for what this show is it’s really good. The most important thing about a comedy is that it’s funny, and keeps you entertained, and for the most part MM! manages to do just that.
/sigh. So now for the issue I’ve been dancing around. Akinari Matsuno won the 1st Media Factory Bunko J Light Novel New Author Award and made his debut with the science-fiction comedy work Aoba-kun to Uchū-Jin in October of 2005. He then launched the first volume in his second series — MM! — in February of 2007. He was able to write 10 light novels of MM! before sadly passing away on April 18 of this year. He was a fantastic author and he will be missed. Akinari Matsuno R.I.P
So nothing else I can really say after that, so let’s just go ahead and finish this up really quick. MM! is a fantastic anime that you should really watch if you remotely are a fan of over the top comedy. By the way I was joking before when I said I was going to review Twin Angel, but I will be reviewing another Magical Girl anime. One that I has been continually shoved into my “watch later” pile. You can email in recommend anime for future reviews, by mailing your suggestion to webmaster@ultimateotaku.com.
If You Want To Buy The “MM! Complete Collection” You Can Do So At Amazon.com
[Next Week: Mahou Shojo Madoka Magica]
