School clubs, cute girls doing random things, strange supernatural rituals that somehow turn out to work with interesting results, these are all things we’ve seen before. Yet we know the formula works well enough provided it is linked to a decent story so I guess we’re all wondering now whether The Girl in Twilight is going to give us a decent story or not.
There’s no real surprises early in this episode. We have the girls doing what at first appears to be a serious ritual and then the main character, Asuka her name turns out to be, starts spouting some random nonsense and they crack a glow stick. It quickly diffuses any tension the scene may have been filled with the fizzled ritual draws to a close with the girls wandering down the temple stairs discussing what they could do next time. It is a mixed bag of an introduction because on the one hand the basic idea of opening a path to another world has been done to death but here it sounded like it had some weight, and on the other hand, five girls in a school club getting up to weird stuff is very much something I’ve seen enough of and isn’t exactly my favourite thing to watch in the first place.
Persevering and we get Asuka and friends getting in trouble after hijacking the school radio before another attempt at the ritual, this time using a frequency determined by some crystal the French speaking girl in the group found last time. And what do you know? Success. They end up in another world. However, I’m pretty sure the girls were as surprised as the audience that it worked and they certainly weren’t prepared for it.
I kind of expected them to have to try to get home but the anime has taken a different path with another Asuka showing up, fighting off the yellow snow bunnies, and then transporting them all home. There’s definitely some mystery here but it isn’t the usual how can we escape the world we travelled to.
And that is enough to make me kind of interested in where this is going. There’s plenty of room for exploration of characters and ideas and the sci-fi label MAL has on this is making me interested in what they might do with it in the future. That isn’t to say I won’t end up dropping the story later on but at least for now I’m curious.
Thanks for reading.
Karandi James
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I thought was a fun opener. I like Asuka already! 🙂
Interesting… Seems to have a Crucible vibe at the start but I’m liking the scifi twist.
It could have been really interesting if they’d kept the serious tone but they rapidly backed away from that to go into the more familiar cute girl tone of things. Still interesting but I must admit I was a little disappointed that it wasn’t just played straight.
I saw this one over on Cactus Matt’s blog yesterday and I have to say that I have already marked this one down as at least checking it out. I like the story, and I’m usually in for a little bit of mystery/sci-fi, so this one sounds interesting enough to at least give it a go 😊
I’m kind of waiting for the second episode to see what direction they plan on taking and the balance of the cute girls in a club vs the actual sci-fi/supernaturally stuff is going to be, but still,, this one could definitely be interesting.