A weekly look into American otaku culture

I think one of the things that anime blogs don’t focus on enough is the US anime industry. These guys at companies like ADV, Geneon, FUNimation, and Bandai are working very hard at trying to bring these series on to our store shelves. This get anime out there into the mainstream, which gets more fans, which gets more support for bringing it to the fans. So I have great respect for them and I would like to help the industry grow in the US. That’s why I’m going to use this blog as a means to do so. I just so happened to have gotten a preview disk today from ADV that’s filled with some titles that haven’t been released yet. You’ll notice all the screen caps say “For Promotional Use Only” on top, and that’s exactly what this is. So I present to you my first review of an officially US licensed series.

Part1:

Fumoffu is the sequel to the very good Full Metal Panic series. The original series is about a giant-mech pilot who has been assigned to protect a particular high school girl, Chidori. Now while the series had a great storyline involving fighting and comradeship like many giant robot series do, what set FMP apart was the comedy aspect of it. The hero, Sousuke, is a devoted military guy, and he doesn’t do well at all at pretending to be a normal high school kid. He’s extremely paranoid and would do things like bring large amounts of ammunition to class, or constantly detonate anything that might pose any kind of threat to Chidori. But most of the time these suspicions are invalid, so the joke was how ridiculous and destructive his actions are. However, there were clearly episodes that focused more on the mech action and others that focused on the comedy. It was like two different series in one. So what Fumoffu does is focus on the part I liked better, the comedy. And man, it’s in full force in the first episode!

Each episode is broken into two parts. The first one is about a shy girl who has a crush on Sousuke, so she leaves a love letter in his shoe locker. Sousuke notices that his shoe locker has been tampered with, so he does the only safe and logical thing to do…

Blow it up!

And that’s exactly the kind of thing that makes this series so great. While the old “love letter in the shoe locker” trick a very clichéd in romance anime, the idea of it posing as a threat and therefore needing to be detonated is fricking hilarious. And so, he treats the little schoolgirl crush as some kind of terrorist plot against him the entire episode.

Part 2:

The second part starts off with Sousuke’s first experience playing a first-person shooting game in the arcade:

“Who in the hell would shoot a real gun into a video game screen?!?”
“I ran out of ammo.”
“I told you, to reload all you have to do is point your gun outside the screen and pull the trigger.”
“That’s not safe. What if the gun should go off?”

Funny, right? I think so. ^_^

On top of that, the artwork is significantly better with this series then the original. The dub cast from the first series returned, and they fit the roles very well. Yes, you heard me correctly, I like to watch my anime dubbed. Dubbed… subbed… it’s all the same! But after watching so many fansubs lately, I’m in the mood for a little dub.

So overall, Fumoffu takes everything I liked about the Full Metal Panic series, cuts out the stuff I didn’t, and made it look a whole lot more prettier. Contrary to tradition, this is one sequel that’s better then the original! ^_^

Please support this series by buying Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu at ADV films or any retail store. On sale 5/10/2005
Full Metal Panic? FUMOFFU © Gato Shoji · Shikitoji/Jindai High School Student Committee