Hand Shakers Episodes 1 + 2

Overview:

Tazuna is a high school student who likes to fix machines and has a really annoying habit of saying things are meshing (or not meshing) like this is the best catchphrase ever. He meets a girl in a hospital bed and after they hold hands he goes somewhere else where he’s attacked by another boy and girl team. The write up on Crunchyroll says the point of this is to gain an audience with God but to be honest this first episode doesn’t really tell you anything.

Review Episode 1:

You know that scene everyone complains about in the Fairy Dance Arc of SAO where Asuna is held upside down and groped by tentacles? People really need to stop complaining about that scene. Instead, let’s focus on the girl getting bound/groped in chains, gasping like she’s in some kind of esctacy while her partner essentially stands on her crotch. And then let’s also just look at the only other student we met who’s chest exceeds any kind of size logic given the rest of her physique and moves in a way that defies the laws of physics. While neither of these points are enough in and of themselves to absolutely warrant dropping a show (for me at least, for the most part I attempt to ignore these scenes), when we couple this with really off-putting animation, a bland main character, and a premise that kind of looks like it was cooked up by a bunch of twelve years olds and there’s probably a really sound argument in favour of dropping this at episode 1.

For me, I’m kind of hoping they settle the whatever it is they’d like to call that chain girl and explain their plot and then maybe grow because this could be kind of interesting it just isn’t at the moment. I did nearly call it when the protagonist suddenly pulled out a sword because of course the guy he’s fighting uses chains but he uses a sword. What is it with anime protagonists having the least innovative weaponse in a series? Not that I’m against swords if everyone is using them but when there is a rich variety of potential weapons and the MC is flailing around with a sword you just have to wonder why.

Review Episode 2:

Looks like I’ll get my wish about chain girl, turns out losing a fight means losing the ability to go to Ziggurat so I’m guessing she’s done in this story. Unless she intends a real world revenge scenario but it doesn’t seem likely given other than a hospital sequence that pair were more or less swept under the rug.

Finishing the fight in quick order and then going through a really unnecessarily long explanation scene that essentially amounted to a ‘further research is needed and I’m a crazy scientist, watch me crazy’ we then get the obvious now we have to live together (you know, because if he let’s go of her hand she’ll die, only not instantly so it turns out they can have a few moments apart at the moment. She’s also pretty much a blank slate needing help to eat and bathe (so yeah, bathroom sequence complete with bloody nose).

Probably my biggest amusement in this episode was putting these two quotes from the show in the wrong order because it would effectively end the story.

Not the order they were played in and there is kind of a reason given why Tazuna shouldn’t just lose but given how little the science guy seems to actually know I somehow doubt I’d trust his explanation for very much credibility and it will not surprise me when some things we are told in these first episodes turn out to be false.

Hand Shakers is available on Crunchyroll.

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Karandi James.