Princess Principal
I will rate this after I am done with other anime and stuff
This Will Go Nowhere
So this one I just could not really do keep on watching sadly. I got through most of it before I got bored with it but still it was not enough for me to watch those last two or three episodes. It is kind of sad because overall this anime has the trappings of a good series. With an interesting setting and plot the overall anime had a great deal of potential to be something really cool. However, the various choices made by the team on how to present the anime ruined things for me and made the anime hard to follow and boring.
So let us start off with hard to follow. This anime pulls a Haruhi on us, meaning they mix up the episodes. Given the premise of this anime this can actually work for the series, but the problem is that the episodes either have the full team or are an origin story for a new team member. It gets a little confusing when you see these characters, dressed in their spy stuff, clearly having no idea who each other are. I am sure there might have been a reason for this, but I do not know what it is.
Next it is hard to follow exactly how they are trying to accomplish their objective. There is something about a queen and succession and how this group of spies is working with the princess to put her on the throne. However, all of their missions have a sort of Mission Impossible or James Bond feel to them. Spies get their mission, spies carry out mission, spies encounter problems. So on and so forth. They do not really have anything to show, at least as far as I watched, where the characters would hit targets on their own to help make sure this princess succeeded the throne. So that is a bit annoying and disappointing.
Which means that this anime is going to be too short. Sadly when an anime goes nowhere for 10 episodes you know it is a bust. Each episode is pretty well self-contained. I cannot think of more than one mission that took more than 1 episode to tell. Which means one of two things for an anime. Thing one, the anime is going to have a crash to the finish as they try and tie together all the missions and how they helped out and how they will make the series come to the conclusion. Then there is thing two, the more likely of the things. Thing two is the anime will just sort of hint that they want to continue making the anime and fade into obscurity. Either way I could see the writing on the wall with this one. Which is why I bailed and decided to spend my time on something else.
Despite all the good art and interesting outfits all the characters are very one dimensional. Really only the main character seems to have any kind of skill or ability for the profession and that is pretty obscure at that. I can easily sum up all of the characters with one work, floater, voice, boobs, samurai, and princess. Each of the girls seems to have one thing they are particularly good at. Take boobs for example, she is good at using cleavage to distract guards. However, beyond that she just seems like an old lady. Voice has a special voice box and can only seem to use it to tune her voice. I could waste more time going on but you get the idea. All the characters are pretty shallow even for tropes.
Which is disappointing for me because overall this anime has the trappings of a great anime. Good art, interesting setting, interesting plot, and then there is poor execution. It seems to be a trap when you have such elaborate steampunk outfits and stuff. I am thinking that they just waste their time on the drawing of the artwork and expect figure sales to be the best part of the series. It is so sad when an anime like this one shows up with so much promise and then is poorly executed and I am left wondering why I wasted my time with it. Well no matter I guess that is just the risk that you take. At least it was just one night of watching anime and not watching for 10 weeks and then coming to the realization that the anime was in fact not worth the effort. I can take some comfort in that.