Amazing Stranger Review Episodes 3 + 4

When sexy anime figures go to war?

Episode 3

Okay, I’d be lying if I said this was a good episode. By itself it doesn’t do much with just two skits. The first being Bouida’s sister interviewing Nona and the second involving Bouida going out to Christmas dinner with an old friend and getting into a fight about anime. Both sections work well enough, although Bouida’s sister seems way too fixated on her brother’s love life.

What this episode really cements though is that there is a potential for the premise to be more than a one trick pony though whether they do anything with this or not still remains to be seen.

Where Amazing Stranger is slightly elevated beyond just being background noise is in the genuinely warm relationship being formed between Bouida and Nona. While it isn’t as heart wrenching as some anime couple’s out there, there’s still a fierce loyalty and sweetness to their affection and that’s probably the show’s greatest strength right now. Where it fails is that it can’t decide if it wants to use sex to sell or stay on the safer side of the line and the end result is something that probably doesn’t meet the needs of either the fan-service fans or those who prefer more wholesome viewing.

That and the comedy is far more miss than hit.

Still, the dinner scene and the arguments between two old friends and anime fans, one who denies everything and looks for faults and the other being a hopeless dreamer, is kind of fun to listen to and while I’m sure most anime fans don’t get worked up enough to flip a table in a restaurant, I’m sure most of us have had sillier arguments with our friends over anime at some point.

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Episode 4

That was actually a pretty good twist at the end of this episode of Amazing Stranger. I’m not going to get into what happens but I kind of hope next episode continues from this point and doesn’t just scrap the plot line and go on to the next set up because that was kind of fun.

Anyway, this week Nona and Bouida are being sickeningly sweet together so naturally another figure shows up and attacks. Watching Nona explain reality to the new figure and the new character’s interpretation of what it meant was fairly good and the fight sequence that followed between the two figures was actually pretty entertaining.

However, the punch line of the sequence was Bouida solving the problem by opening the character’s in-game stat screen and unequipping all their best gear and then playing dress-up with them. Honestly, this is another of those moments that while it is kind of amusing is also kind of creepy. What makes it kind of work is that at least all the other characters point out that Bouida is the worst for his actions even if they were effective and neutralising the threat.

For those who have felt the keen absence of solid fan-service both the dress up sequence and the subsequent bath sequence kind of fill that gap, though quality fan-service it really isn’t, not that I particularly like any fan-service but fairly lazy and uninspired fan-service is definitely worse than just the usual fan-service.

But as I said at the beginning, the episode ending was pretty solid and I definitely appreciated it. I’ll appreciate it more if episode 5 moves on from that point.