Goon & Switch
Maken-Ki is an obvious ecchi anime, but it teases itself as ecchi-action. I got bait and switched.
I’ll make this quick: this show is shit. That might piss some people off, but if you are like me and like action when advertised action you’ll understand my disdain. I knew this was an ecchi/harem style comedy anime, that much was obvious from the title card and the teaser description. But, it also was labelled a shounen/seinen and action, which the teaser also promised. Other than the end of season 1, there was none.
Now, I’ll give you the positives: the art style is appealing and the characters are well designed. They are mostly appealing in personality, the two best being Takeru and Azuki.
Honestly the only one I find irritating in Inaho, who has this annoying cat-girl mannerism. I think it’s supposed to be cute, but it makes me wonder how many ways there are to skin a cat. Haruko is a typical tsundere to Takeru in most ways, but the glaring problem is EVERY time she makes a little progress as a character she immediately reverts to how she is at the start of the series. Takeru saves her, or she saves him, there’s a heartfelt moment and their relationship deepens…oops he just fell into her chest accidently because someone pushed him and she gets mad and everything resets. I get what a tsundere is and how it works by now, but this has zero progression over two seasons and just repeats in this cycle over and over.
Azuki is mostly a side character, but we see her tough tomboy exterior crack at times to the feminine woman underneath. Frankly she has more character development than Haruko, who is the lead female protagonist of the fucking show.
The premise, I suppose I should give you that. Takeru and some other boys are the first males allowed at Tenbi Academy. Tenby, they learn immediately, is a special school for young people with powers called Elements that manifest into weapons called Maken. Why the separate names, I don’t know. Takeru joins the security council, or whatever it is called who cares, where he learns all the council members have one of the “Original Eight”, or the original Maken used by the gods.
The show opens with action as Takeru enters Tenbi, where he learns it is as much a battle training academy as it is an academic institution.
I enjoyed season 1, with learning the characters and the typical comedy tropes: hotsprings, locker rooms, etc and ending with the final 3 or 4 episodes being a fight between with the evil organization Venus.
Season 2 is where it lost me. It literally ignores season 1, or feels like it, and becomes a slice of life dating show. I can’t tell you if they fight Venus again at the end of the season because frankly I had becomes so bored. The comedy was uninspired at that point, Haruko went back to start of the series persona, and it felt like a rom-com more than anything. The show felt like it wanted to be High School DxD, which balanced good action with raunchy comedy and goonerific scenes, but it felt like some malformed bastard child of Tu-Love-Ru and Dragon Ball Z, only without the action of DBZ…just the filler where they talk about the stakes that don’t seem to exist.
Maybe I’m being too harsh, maybe I “don’t get it”. Sure, you are free to like it. This is just my review. We all have something shitty we like. If this is your shitty guilty pleasure, congrats. Season 2 ruined it for me. The end.