Review #47: POW! NUTSHOT! FANSERVICE!

A Fist Laser powerful enough to break
the Sound (FX) barrier!

Title: Oranime
Artist: Aaron "Adyon" Foster (w/ "Ninya" doing some coloring)
Genre: Action!
Updates: M-W-F (usually)
Link: http://www.oranime.com

私は急を要する医学的な注意が必要！

"Dammit, I don't have Google Translate open!" The receptionist boy shouted at the mysterious ninja, "Gimme a second will ya?"

どうぞ、お時間がかかります。 The ninja responded in a calmer voice.

"Thank you." The receptionist boy did his best to read the subtitles, ran them through Google Translate, and then looked back at the ninja, "Yeah, you're going to have to wait until Dr. Haus gets back from his Japan trip."

私は医者にカ月間待って！

"Hey, not my fault that the Doc has mysteriously disappeared and the nurses all left the clinic in the wake of the new Great Depression. Take a seat with the rest of the sick kids over there."

鶏痘の場合はどうすればでしょうか？

"Well, I guess it's God's will then. Now sit down." The ninja sputtered, and then simply took a seat in the already full waiting room. If Dr. Haus wasn't going to make it, then the Receptionist Boy would have to do some...ugh...some webcomic watching in his place.
_____________________

Two self-inserted characters on a mission to rid the world of evil, because they can! Toss in a Guardian Angel, a bunch of rejected bad guys from an episode of Yu Yu Hakusho, superpowered fisticuffs and artistry that treads the line somewhere between manga and manhwa, and that's pretty much the entirety of Oranime so far.

Oh, that's not enough for you people, is it?

Okay, fine. Let's go to the tape, as John Madden would say before he just signed his paychecks directly over to the local buffalo wing place. Oranime is the story of two average folks named Adyon and Ninya (buy two vowels, get a "y" for free!) who have a guardian angel named Krione watching over them. Fast forward after some brief storytelling from said angel, a very obvious "cryptic dream" and some hilarious misandry, our heroes find themselves in a pickle, one that not even John Madden would eat.

Suddenly our heroes are faced with a spiky-headed guy they can't defeat, until they can through the power of positive thinking. Now the Demonic Black Forces of Evil Darkness are invading the world and only Adyon, Ninya, Krione and a Corgi puppy can stop them before they penetrate the last barrier of the sky

[Oh God, Heaven is in the Troposphere! Or was it the Exosphere? Depends on the order, I guess. Maybe they have receptionist desk on the outside? Or perhaps the last barrier is the median, like the Mesosphere? Ugh, I'm wasting too much time on this hypothetical.]

So a few shots of half-hearted fanservice and more comedic misandry later, everyone wants to get their hands on Adyon and Ninya, because they contain the power to magically weld Heaven shut or let the demons invade Earth or something. I'm sure that will be revealed in due time.

Now, despite my misgivings about the story so far, I will admit the artwork is quite flashy and stylized. Sure, the anatomy isn't always perfect, like the guardian angel who has a simultaneous hourglass figure with well-defined abs. But the action scenes are pretty damn cool, tip-toeing on the slash seperating the anime/manga distinction.

Yeah, there's a lot of action, but you can actually follow most of it without having to reread previous scenes to make sure that the combatants didn't just teleport around. Plus, the fighters don't just scream and fire energy balls at each other, at least not yet. They actually kick and punch and grab and make contact where most artists would've just stuck with the *pew-pew-pew* of the energy balls and/or gunfire.

Yes, the action scenes definitely have their wondrous flair, as long as the occasional anatomical errors don't throw you off. As for the writing...well, Adyon wrote in his info section that he was shooting for something like modern fantasy, post-Tolkien if you will. After reading through this stuff, I gotta say that the story sounds more like a cross between Power Rangers and Yu Yu Hakusho: The kind of story that was enough to excite and sell toys when I was a kid. But then I grew older and now look at these series usually as an object of either youthful nostalgia, MST3k-ish mockery or both on the odd chance that someone brings them up.

Okay, so for those of you who are still unsure of whether or not to click through and view this thing (my buddy Ed reports that he could barely make it through the first chapter) I guess I should wrap it up. If you took a look at Ninja Spirit and thought that it could be good if only the story contained more nutshots and the mythology references were more ambiguous, then "...you'll love Oranime!"
--Dr. Haus

[postscript: I know how to write in a few languages, but Japanese is not one of them. So if I got something wrong during the intro, blame Google Translate.]

[post-postscript: I am not updating regularly again. You're just imagining things.]