Yozakura Quartet - Episode 1

Acting as Mayor of a town is usually a pretty boring job - Lots of long meetings that run late into the night, signing documents, wearing more bling than even your average gangster rapper would feel comfortable and being driven around in a big, gas-guzzling limousine. Not so for Hime Yarisakura, the mayor of Sakurashin, who instead gets to spend her days leaping between buildings, throwing spears around and swatting bullets to protect her town from any bad stuff that may be happening in the vicinity.


In short, Sakurashin isn't a dull place to be in charge of, thanks to its rare place as a home for both humans and demons alike and everything that entails. Thus, Hime and her counterparts (three of which make up the "Yozakura Quartet" of the shows title) each have their own powers and place in keeping the town and its inhabitants safe and happy, be that replacing some roof tiles or chasing down a manic guy with a penchant for shooting at young girls but not killing them, both of which take up a portion of this opening episode of the series.

While there are some pretty major parts of this first instalment that are hardly awe inspiring (with the bad guys we've seen so far proving to be your typical run-of-the-mill "act crazy and laugh evilly and I will surely succeed" type), and the animation quality is pretty average, there was something about this series I can't quite put my finger on that holds some promise. It could be that the juxtaposition of the every-day minutiae of running a town contrasts so nicely with the more typical chasing around using superpowers that it adds an extra layer of interest to the series, or it could be that I'm already warming to the main quartet of characters slightly, but there is at least some potential here for this to become a watchable little series. Of course, having said that it will probably crash and burn into the sea of anime mediocrity, but from this first glimpse of Yozakura Quartet it does at least seem to be holding steady at a respectable altitude.