Anime Review #3: Atelier Escha & Logy

First Impressions of Atelier Escha and Logy

I came at this title cold, zero background information whatsoever.  First thing I noticed was that it was just oozing kawaii, which isn't necessarily a bad thing but it raises my suspicions.  We start out with a child getting a bedtime story from a clockwork nanny and then by the time the intro is over she's 15.  She probably had a boring childhood, so I can appreciate the fast forward.  It's her first day on the job as an alchemist, though!  Sounds exciting, eh?  She gets tarted up in loli gear and skips off  through kawaiiville to the town's R&D workshop.

Artistically, this is a very cutesy world, the girl, Escha is cute, the town is cute, the raccoon-cat-things are cute, and even the male character Logy is cute.  Mostly, it's not poorly done, but the art in some places just seems too plain and feels somewhat of a rush-job.  It's got a pretty nice looking opening sequence to go with it's theme song, which had me intrigued at first.

The voice acting feels like it's done by the same four people who voice almost every other anime ever since each of their voices are instantly recognizable as at least two other characters from other series.  Severe typecasting, is all I'm saying.  If it's not the same people then they've worked tirelessly to ensure that their mannerisms and speech patterns match identically with work done in other anime. 

Plot-wise, oh boy.  I was a little ways in before I had the distinct taste of RPG anime in my mouth.  A quick trip to Wikipedia and sure enough this is an anime derived from the 15th game in the Atelier series.  From the looks of it, they didn't even try to do anything but have some dude playing the game while somebody was sitting next to him taking fastidious notes to then scamper off and whip up an anime.  Perhaps they made this anime by throwing a few scraps of metal, an otaku, and a lolita complex into a vat and waiting thirty minutes, because I kid you not, that seems to be how they do everything else in the show.  From sciencing up an apple tart, to sciencing back together a part from a windmill, you just throw crap in the magic vat and, "hey presto!" Everything's hunky dory!  For an RPG game, this works, and it's fine because of massive technical restrictions; in an anime, it's just lazy. 

I'm giving this anime a D rating.  It's just shallow and promises very little, even the floating ruins that they shoehorn in at the end of the episode fail to intrigue.  I'd try the RPG, but I won't continue to watch through this anime.  If you're a massive fan of the series and just have to consume every bit of media associated with it, watch this.  Otherwise, just play the game.