Grisaia no Kajitsu Episode 1 [First Impression]

Her birth itself was a mistake… the sin of defiance… dead, yet alive… no one will protect her… and her own survival is her punishment. 

Impression

Hello, hello! I said I’d do this, so here I am. That was certainly an interesting pilot episode, especially when all that really happened on the surface was that a guy transferred in and introduced himself to five girls. For future reference, I have not played the visual novel but know of it by reputation – which is reason enough these days, really. All that’s left is to see if the anime adaptation will deliver, and at the very least it’s managed to keep me intrigued for next week… uh, tomorrow. Really sorry about that.

Grisaia no Kajitsu didn’t receive much love at all from our seasonal preview impressions, but if anyone’s tried it they’ll probably have found the initial synopsis fairly misleading. It is not about a sole guy studying at an all-girls’ school. Kazami Yuuji is the only male student, yes, but that’s just by chance more than anything else – it just so happens that he is the only guy of all the people sent there. Which amounts to a grand total of six students across the entire school. As male protagonists go, Yuuji is a breath of fresh air – ironically because he doesn’t seem to have many emotions at all, let alone lust. He in fact looks rather grimdark. It’s not really the sort of personality championed by Jesus Tatsuya of Mahouka though, and he’s still very much capable of snark – it’s like he’s not bothered enough to care, actually. He must not give very many fucks if he rationally weighs up the possibility of them all masturbating in their rooms after school. Where it is shown, the occasional fanservice incites hardly any response from Yuuji at all – which implies that fanservice in Grisaia thus becomes inexcusably catered for a single purpose. Well, it would have been better if said purpose could actually appreciate it in the first place. I’m sure Amane has wonderful boobs, but no censoring or it didn’t happen.

I love how there was such a strong emphasis on how “normal” everything supposedly was, when you’d have to be five to realize that not all was peachy there. Is Yuuji a normal guy? If his toned, scarred body and relation with the Ministry of Defence is implying anything – no, he’s not. Is the school itself normal? Okay, so this massive school is populated by six people, and the first thing the headmistress says is that she will insist it is normal to the bitter end – which means it’s not, is it. Are the other students normal? If they’re problem children at Mihama, then I doubt it. The school itself feels more like an isolation facility than a school. I’m guessing they all have issues of some sort, with some more obvious than others –  and that’s not even mentioning how Yumiko walks around with a box cutter or why Sachi makes bombs in her room and owns a gas mask. I think that’s the intriguing bit really, especially as if you take away all these irregularities it would have been a quiet, dull episode – there’s an underlying grimdark tone here that’s being masqueraded as normal life, and I want to know what’s going on.

The girls themselves seem quite fun for now, although what we’ve seen of them so far is probably the tip of the iceberg – just wait until they start pulling out the baseball bats, cleavers and tasers. Other than Yumiko, the ones who stood out to me were Amane -I’m weak to onee-san types- and Michiru, the strange girl who for some reason is pretending to be a tsundere. I must applaud that subversive originality at least. She does admittedly do it quite well – she has the blonde hair, the twintails, the shimapan and even a decent zettai ryouiki! Well, she can’t beat Tohsaka Rin’s S-grade tsun. I’m not sure who the main girl is or how they’re going to adapt this – not having played the visual novel makes it rather hard to guess. You have the ones where the routes can literally be animated side by side, and then you have things like Rewrite, where the plot, world and characters all change in a completely different way throughout each route to the point that a complete reset is needed to embark on a new one. Hopefully 8bit know what they’re doing – I know this is supposed to be really good. I don’t know why, but I hope the adaptation can show me easily enough.

I don’t know whether I want to blog this, especially as I’ll prioritize the other two shows that I have coming out on Sundays, Sora no Method and Akame ga Kill – it’s a fairly painful coincidence for me. If I do find that I want to say some stuff about it when the time comes, then I’ll make a post or something. That’s what we do here!

Possibility of Watching: Guaranteed
Possibility of Blogging: Moderate