Thursday 10 April 2014

Nanana's Buried Treasure - Episode 1

A state-of-the-art, purpose-build location specifically for students and researchers, Academy City... sorry, Nanaejima Island is an impressive seat of learning, all ensconced within one off-shore island.  It's also the new home of Juugo Yama, who seems more excited about moving out of his family home than he is about specifically gaining a place on this island.

Needless to say, Yama's first port of call is taking up his place of residence, an apartment which has oddly insisted upon him paying an entire year's worth of rent up-front with no refunds.  Surely that couldn't be anything to do with the game-playing, pudding-eating ghost girl who he'll have to share the apartment with, right?


Surprisingly, the fact that this girl was murdered in the very room he's now living in doesn't particularly faze Yama, and nor does his supernatural roommate - in fact, he's happy to let her dislocate his shoulder just so that he can get the slightest touch of ghost-boob.  She might seem like a simple, carefree girl, but Yama comes to learn that there's more to Nanana (for that is her name) than meets the eye, as a manual left by a previous tenant leads him down a path of learning her true place in the history of Nanae Island as well as a little about the buried treasure of the show's title.

Taken as a whole, this first episode of Nananai's Buried Treasure is a bit of a strange beast - it has some interesting conceits, not least surrounding the death of the titular character some ten years previously, but these potentially dark prospects are eclipsed by the show's cheerful, light-hearted and mildly perverted demeanour.  If the series somehow manages to balance the two I'll be impressed, but at the moment I can't help but feel that too many aspects of its wider story are simply poorly glued together in a distinctly unbalanced and roughshod way in service of its ultimate goals, and unless those goals are impressive enough to mitigate its clumsiness it may well fall flat on its face sooner rather than later.

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