First Impression: Urahara

Synopsis

This is the tale of three high school girls that have a shop of their own focused on fashion and cute items. But this is no tale of cute things and fashion as one day the girl’s town ends up being invaded by aliens who seek to take away earth’s different cultures and famous monuments. When’s the girls’ district culture gets threatened, they make the decision to stand up and figth and even get the ability to do so from an artifact given to them by a pair of escapees of the aliens.

The Good

There is always at least one edgy anime to make the year and this is one of them. From beginning to end the art style comes off almost like a combination of traditional art mixed in with the graphics meant for a highly feminine magazine and resulting in something like an animated magazine of sorts, especially given the attention to fashion and cute food items like parfaits. It’s bright, fun and presents cute style that would make for good art inspiration on an off day.

The general plot of the story while somewhat ludicrous has at least some solid framework going for it and a semblance of sense. As for the characters they also hold a established role and characters for them and surprisingly, compared to other works involving cute girls and alien invasions, rather than have them being “chosen”/made to save the world after given a powerful item, they instead choose to stand up and take the “magical” items.

So much unconventional points are shown in just a single episode but that is what makes the work so interesting. The fact that the episode only set up with a total of five main characters with a barrage of side characters yet maintained a steady flow to its story is a thumbs up worthy thing.

The Bad

While the beginning ha a somewhat strong base to it, when the second half rolled in, that’s when the internal issues of the work made itself known, especially with the characters. When the aliens came to invade, each girl had a specific reaction to them, but then when it showed, it felt as if an unintentional switch was turned on as the girls lines seem to come off as rather redundant and they keep on going back to their initial thoughts of the invasion, how they can;t believe things or how eager they are to meet one, generally the second half just brought a lot of repetition with the characters and their dialogue.

Then there is also the convenience of a lot of things, case in point, one of the characters was a young girl from America who ended up escaping with the help of a creature that looks like fried shrimp. The convenience point of this work lies in the fact that we have this tiny foreign character and yet she is able to smoothly speak the language with ease…just, what? And the fact that the alien that managed to escape just happened to grab the magical item that would turn them into heroes is just case in point,

While having a well enough established beginning the episode was a bit of a let downwards in the second half of the work, from the repetitive course of the characters to the amount of conveniences that could be tallied. Even in the end it came off as rather hanging and not in the good way.

Conclusion

It cannot be denied that in terms of background and design, the anime has a rather edgy and fun style to it that is obviously meant for the female audience. The beginning of the work was well established enough and the general plot of the work was straightforward and simple though a bit nonsensical side. However, when the second half of the episode rolled in, things went rather downhill as said. It was a bit of a disappointment that the writing on the characters ended up flopping quite a bit and the set-up ended up being a little too convenient. Still, there is at least some potential to be found with the series and it is only the first episode

Rating: 6/10