Anime fans as you might have noticed during late 2018 I was looking at a lot of pretty obscure anime and reviewing them. Well it seems that's going to continue because i've found yet another obscure anime. Heck this anime is so obscure that i'm expecting to get comments saying something like "I haven't heard of this" or "What the heck is this" but talking about obscure anime is pretty fun and a great way to expand your anime plate so here is my review of Cosplay Complex.
There's no plot to this show at all so I can't give you guys a summery of the plot heck I can't even tell you what the premise is since the one they introduce in episode one is resolved at the end of that episode. This show is basically stuff happens the anime because things just happen for no reason and like I said there's plot so there's no reason to feel connected to the characters or to see them succeed and that's not a good thing at all especially if you want us to care for these characters.
Starring in this show was Larissa Wolcott as Chako Hasegawa , Carla Witt as Maria Imai , Tiger Darrow as Athena Imai , Jenny Smolins as Jenny Matel , Jenny Larson as Reika Aoshima , Corey Gagne as Gourou , Samantha Inoue Harte as Delmo , Arthur Tilotson as Ikebukuro and Peyton Hayslip as Sachiko. I have to say that the cast do the best with the stuff that there given but there given nothing to work with so there performances can only go so far as for the performances there fine nothing to really write home about.
I'll admit doing an anime about Cosplay does seem like a rather solid idea and about from this show I don't think it's something that's really been done in anime before. What in my opinion is a huge let down is that they don't really go into that much detail about competitive cosplay in my opinion it would have made the show more interesting if they showed the girls designing there costumes and getting ready for competitions but for some reason they don't do that.
The animation for the show was done by TNK who worked on High School DXD for it's three seasons. It's safe to say that there work on that show is far better then there work on this show because the animation in this show isn't that good but on the plus side it's not that bad either it's a strange mixture of both good and bad since for every scene that looks good and well animated there's one or two that look badly animated.
There's something that really never gets explained and it's really annoying because it involves two main characters. What they don't explain is why Delmo and Ikebukuro who are magical beings by the way the show doesn't explain why they would even want to help the Cosplay Club which at several points in the episodes becomes a key plot point so maybe the makers of the show should have put some effort into explaining that part of the story but nope they don't they don't even get one line of dialog explaining it and that's all it would have taken.
I'll admit that this show is no where near as bad as Eiken was but it's damn near close because everything that could be bad with an anime is present here but it's not as in your face with it like Eiken was. Now i'm fine with shows having the perverted character be in the main cast if they add something to the group and sadly this shows perverted character doesn't he's there just to be a pervert and that's it and that's a shame because there's so much comedic potential to be had with that kind of character but the show doesn't really go that far.
This show was only three episodes long and I think that really hurt the show in the long run since a story never had the chance to show up and there was very little chance of any character development. If the show was given say thirteen episodes yes it still would have been pretty bad but then we at least would have been given a story and the characters would have been better developed here tho as it is were left with something that feels like a half baked idea.
The show isn't all bad tho the show is labelled as an ecchi show and to the shows credit it's not as in your face about it like Eiken was. On the contrary it's actually pretty subtle I don't even think there's that many panty shots in the whole show and there's not that many boob shots either. However for some reason this show likes to have one of it's main girls hit the pervert character over the head with a large object which just isn't funny at all.
Speaking of unfunny there's alot of unfunny jokes in this show like I said there's the pervert character getting hit over the head with a large object and for some unknown reason in episode one that same character shoot beams out of his mouth and eyes which isn't funny. This show just likes to throw random stuff at you just to see what sticks and it doesn't realise that you can't do that and expect us to laugh if you want us to laugh you need to tell us something funny or have something funny happen you can't have random things happen and expect to get a laugh out of people.
Overall is this show as bad as Eiken no not by a long mile but like I said before it's damn close the issues I had with this show stem mainly from it's script and how many episodes it was given. I still have to give it a rating tho so this show gets a 3 out of 10 from me.