Eiken Anime Review

Quick Review

• Reviewer: Marc
• Review Date: 2011-07-10 (updated 2012-09-20)
• 0 stars out of 5 (?)

Even accepting that it's plotless, pointless, utterly unoriginal borderline-porn, Eiken is awful. Annoying, entirely unsexy, and once it starts belaboring the generic romantic tension, boring on top of it. The art is deceptively decent at the beginning before the budget runs out, and the plot is a paint-by-numbers "contest" episode of a harem comedy stretched out into an hour of pain. There's only one worthwhile thing in the whole production, and it's ironically the male lead; skilled veteran Akeno Watanabe does absolutely everything she can with the pathetic script to make something amusing of the role. Don't get your hopes up, though--the rest of the cast are no-name placeholders, and sound like it. The English dub, in contrast, has no redeeming qualities at all.

Eiken is just about the worst kind of anime there is--softcore hentai half-heartedly pretending it's a comedy, and failing at that as well as pretty much everything else other than embarrassing itself and its viewers. Unless you're a massive fan of massive breasts, even the fanservice is more grotesque than sexy, leaving nothing at all worth watching.

Read the full-length review...

Full Review

• Reviewer: Marc
• Review Date: 2011-07-10 (updated 2012-09-20)
• 0 stars out of 5 (?)

Even accepting that it's plotless, pointless, utterly unoriginal borderline-porn, Eiken is awful. Annoying, entirely unsexy, and once it starts belaboring the placeholder romantic tension, boring on top of it. Unless you're squarely in the target fetish camp--freakishly huge, nearly-liquid breasts and awkward physical entanglements--it'll just plain hurt to watch.

Come to think of it, maybe the target audience is actually masochists. That would explain a lot, although it'd be easier to just look at the box art while banging your head on a table.

The lengthy manga Eiken is based on is pretty much a completely generic school club harem comedy with a focus on large-breast fanservice--there's a cookie-cutter list of standard harem types, a boyish protagonist with no redeeming qualities, a crazy club, and by-the-book furtive romance.

This anime, in contrast, is apparently the result of a dare: Without breaking from that formulaic framework (meaning no detailed nudity, no sex, and nothing more than incidental physical contact), just how close can you get this thing to hardcore porn? Pretty darn close.

The merely gigantic breasts of the manga version have been cranked up to grotesque proportions; only the most extreme fetishist could possibly find this kind of thing appealing, but it's obviously the point of the entire show. Even if you ignore the stupefying breasts, the level of symbolic shenanigans is... well, pornographic. From post-collision accidental entanglements that are more like something out of the Kama Sutra, to a character who's fellating some food object every time she's onscreen, to a yogurt water slide (yeah...), it's pretty impressive just how far it goes without, in the strictest sense, actually showing or doing anything explicit. That's before you even get started on the forward "little sister" character's come-ons, which throw even that shred of restraint out the window.

It's supposed to be a comedy, and it does try to play pretty much everything (including every fetish) for laughs and as far over-the-top as possible, but it's so lame and derivative, and the fanservice so explicit, that only a couple of gags are at all funny. There is no story--it takes the "plot" of a generic "school competition" episode, tacks on about three minutes of introduction, then tries (and fails) to stretch it out to cover the remainder of the two episodes.

Visually, the mammoth breasts sort of dominate and overwhelm everything else. The art isn't otherwise bad--a fair amount of detail and some creative angles--and the animation is lively and relatively fluid. The comparatively expensive start is deceptive, though--it starts cheaping out near the end, re-using animation and dragging out should-be-short scenes endlessly.

There's one--and only one--remotely amusing thing in the whole show, and that's ironically the spineless male protagonist, Densuke. His character animation is pretty colorful, but mostly the credit goes to veteran (and talented, not to mention versatile) actress Akeno Watanabe, who gives him way more personality than he deserves, and certainly more than any of the girls. The combination of lively complaining and assorted grope-induced freak-outs is actually worth a couple of laughs. I have no idea how she ended up in this garbage, but I'll give her credit for doing absolutely everything she could with the pathetic script to try and make something of the role.

The rest of the cast, with few exceptions, are no-name placeholders, and sound like it--even hardcore hentai usually has better acting than this. The central love interest, Chiharu, is particularly awful--the character has all the personality of a meek brick, and Miwa Oshiro (in her first and thankfully only anime role) voices her like one. The fact that Oshiro is a pin-up model probably explains how she somehow landed the part. A quick glance at the English dub--a couple minutes was about all I could stomach--revealed equally cringeworthy acting.

In all, Eiken is just about the worst kind of anime there is--softcore hentai half-heartedly pretending it's a comedy, and failing at that, as well as pretty much everything else other than embarrassing itself and its viewers. Unless you're a massive fan of massive breasts, even the fanservice is more grotesque than sexy, leaving nothing at all worth watching.

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Related Recommendations

Kanokon is very similar in that it's an extremely dirty take on a generic schoolyard comedy concept and features a very boyish protagonist, and it's both marginally more coherent and drastically more interesting (though that isn't saying much). On the less-dirty end, Kujibiki Unbalance is exactly the same general category of schoolyard competition done with about as straight a face as you can, and far less fanservice.