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Three-Episode Test: Phillip’s Spring 2015

Delicious Fanservice

Welcome to the Three Episode Test, a new feature on Ani-Gamers, where contributors give you the low-down on what they’re watching from the current simulcast season and why.


Food Wars!
Streaming on Crunchyroll

Soma Yukihira is a laid-back teenager who works as a sous chef to his father, Joichiro, in the family restaurant. While an excellent cook himself, Soma constantly feels the need to better himself in an attempt to best his old man. When Joichiro closes the place and packs Soma off to Totsuki Culinary Academy, Soma’s going to have pull out his A-game. In other words, this is Toriko set in the kitchen. This is MasterChef meets Fist of the North Star with high doses of comedy in between. Along the way, Soma manages to piss off every student in the academy, make friends, and still find time to make honey dipped squid for his dorm mates to try. These opening episodes strike while the iron’s hot and wallop you with joke after joke, all while we get the “Ah-ha! You thought me vanquished but try to beat my secret weapon of extra salt in this next dish!” school of dueling. This show’s in my “Ride the train till the bitter end” queue now. Hey, any show that starts with villainous estate agents, after sampling a dish, being forced to mentally orgasm amid jets of gravy while stroking their nether regions has got to be a keeper, right?

Punch Line
Streaming on Crunchyroll

Oh, boy. This was the first noitaminA show I’ve watched while it was actually streaming! (Thanks so much, Funimation, for buying up the rights and then geolocking your streams.) Punch Line starts out looking like it’s going to be a caper show and then slowly turns into the film The Ghost and Mrs. Muir if it was made by the people who brought you Animal House. Yuta Iridatsu is on a bus being hijacked by terrorists (maybe?). After Yuta saves the day and consequently gets turned into a spirit, someone else moves into and cavorts around with his body. With the help of a cat porn-watching spirit cat (yes, you read that right), Yuta must discover who is in his body and the connection with the girls who share his apartment building. Oh, I forgot to mention that Yuta gains superpowers whenever he sees a girl in their underwear. But if he sees a girl in her underwear again soon after, Yuta overloads, and Earth is destroyed by an asteroid. Luckily, he can rewind time to stop himself from witnessing said embarrassment. So bullet dodged there. With that conceit in place, we have a fanservice show in which the main character can’t receive any fanservice. So it’s wide open as to how this series can go. We could get some gold or we could get Sister Princess. I’ll hang on and see where it goes.

  • Phillip's profile

    Born of fire but now sporting a treacle waistline, Phillip has been a consumer of anime since 1996, graduating into podcasts and reviews in 2006. When he isn’t writing for Ani-Gamers, you can find him at his own site or writing reviews for Otaku News and Manga BookShelf. He maintains a lone outpost of random anime, manga, J-culture related stuff plus whatever he finds down the couch at his Twitter page

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