Among Lizardmen and Elf Boobs
While the first episode of Outbreak Company was a surprisingly fresh show despite my initial cynicism regarding the premise, the second episode has now arrived and it’s time to see if the show can stick around and keep up the quality with its upcoming episodes. Thankfully, the second episode does deliver.
Our main character, Shinichi, is finally learning that he need to be able to keep his mouth shut and behave like a human being, which was my biggest problem with the first episode. The characters around him, of which no new ones are introduce, are also evolving into more entertaining and fleshed out characters as they interact with Shinichi and he starts spreading otaku culture.
My only worry is that the concept of them requiring Shinichi to be able to digest manga can get old quickly, so hopefully they’ll not dwell to much on that in future episodes. Especially with both Petrarca and Myuuseru wanting to learn the language.
The first episode proved that the show could be quite clever in terms of how it presented differences in culture and norm and the second episode tries to keep up with this as well. It does a fine job for the most part, having Shinichi actually moving about and meeting people around town to get a idea of what everyone is like was a particularity well-written scene that really shows the differences, and parallel, between the fantasy world of Outbreak Company and the real world we know. I’m hoping the show can keep the strong writing up in future episodes. Helps that the show is funny as well.
The art-style is fairly standard and honestly quite a bit uninspired. While I understand that that’s somewhat the point, with the whole series being a play on the “Teenager in a Fantasy Setting” trope, I do wish they did some more interesting things with the visuals, even if it’s just them utilizing more fantastical elements in the backgrounds. Animation is decent enough, but nothing special. Don’t get me wrong, as a show, Outbreak Company looks good, but it’s not going to win any awards for it any time soon.
Really dug the opening theme as well, which is nice because the rest of the soundtrack in the show was forgettable in every way imaginable. I could honestly not tell you if there even was music for a lot of the scenes.
This is in direct contrast to the first episode where I had some tracks stuck in my head, well, until right now even. Hopefully only a case of this episode being unfortunate.
Overall a very enjoyable episode that keeps me hopeful for the coming weeks. Not much else to say, it’s funny.
A Certain Blogging Tobiichi 