When you think you have seen everything in anime Sekai de Ichiban Tsuyoku Naritai! will disabuse you. SekaTsuyo is a 12 episode long  anime which aired during the Anime Fall Season 2013 from October till December. It was produced by Arms who always combine fanservice and fighting in their shows, Maoyuu Maou Yuusha might be a popular exception.

The show combines the world of women wrestling and Idol industry. Someday everybody learned that WWF and the likes are scripted events and no real tournaments where the best one wins. Also women wrestling always appeared a bit silly as far as I remember.
In SekaTsuyo they portray women wrestling like a real sport without much of fake events or much *bling bling*, it’s more honest competition than show.

httpvh://youtu.be/Yi_4R9mFeN0

Sakura Hagiwara is 17 and the heroine of this show an honest, cheerful and considerate girl who is part of a large Idol Group called Sweet Diva.  Sakura is a hard working and talented character and so she constantly wins the vote, of being the center girl, very much to  the frustration of her biggest rival and best friend Elena.

One day Sakura and Elena have an appointment in a wrestling gym called Berserk, it was planned that they should be filmed while doing some light training, but after Elena acted a bit disrespectful in the gym which calls the  ger of one of the female wrestlers, Kazama Rio. During a little quarrel between the wrestler Kazama and Elena one thing leaded to another and Kazama insulted Sweet Diva as silly bimbo idols, this offended Sakura with her honor as idol on the line Sakura challenges Kazama to an official match. A quite stupid idea.

Sakura tries her best, but never had a real chance of winning. After her quite humiliating defeat Sakura announces to take a break from Idol business, to fully concentrate on becoming an professional wrestler until she had beaten the girl who kicked her ass in the recent event and insulted  her and her idol friends. The manager of Berserk allows her to train in the gym to become a pro wrestler, but the more experienced wrestlers see her as a real eyesore.

Unwillingly a coach offers to give her some advice and coaching, but instead of starting slowly the coach treats her really rough. Nevertheless, the coach acknowledged Sakura’s potential and gives her a tough training shedule, as top Idol she already has a certain level of fitness, but some quite hard months awaited the girl.

After many months of training Sakura has a final exam or something like that before she will be allowed to participate in official matches. She has to endure a barbaric ritual and really suffered this day. I never felt so bad for a girl in an anime, the duration made it even worse, also that Sakura never complained, she blindly endured it, even though she was in pain and quite vocal about it. At this point I thought about dropping this anime, since this scene looked so cruel.

As she is allowed to take part in matches she unintentionally plays safe and just gives up the match, after she is in too much pain, that this won’t get her anywhere is no secret.

Sakura’s cute cries of agony are actually rather hot, but when you see the submission moves (which means the painful bending and stretching of limbs where the opponent can hardly escape.), you can easily feel sorry for her and start rooting for her to leave the ring in one piece.

Just from listening the show could be mistaken for an hentai, a really grim one. I bet my parents thought that I watched hentai instead of an wrestling anime.

That the fights often have a sensual sometimes arousing outcome, is made entirely on purpose. Sakura’s cries, moaning, heavy breathing can be rather exciting in combination with her  pretty body. It might have something in common with hentai, but the horny monsters are replaced with rough wrestler women XD, don’t get me wrong there is really no sexual harassment.

The targeted audience of this anime are males. Well, there are a few shower scenes, yet most of the fanservice stems from the tight, partially skimpy outfits of the wrestlers. Sakura’s outfit in particular, which seems like a tribute to Gunbuster is showing a lot of cleavage and skin.

Most of the girls look very attractive in close up or portray scenes, the animation style really shines.  They have minimal more muscles than the usual anime girl, which actually looks very hot. I think Sakura and most of her wrestling buddies look gorgeous.

The level of violence is rather mild, there is a only little blood, one broken bone. Also kicks and punches in the face are pretty rare, the worst scenes are  the submission moves, it’s so painful to watch and a Sakura in tears makes it even worse. I’m quite familiar with stretching pains and twisted tendons, it fucking hurts. Even from just watching  it, it hurt. At one point, I just wanted her to quit wrestling forever. Watching girls in pain is something I don’t really like in general.

Many frustrating, unsuccesful fights later, one experienced wrestler shows a heart and offers to improve Sakura’s fighting style, as I’ve witnessed this certain training, I felt really sick and angry.

The best moment of SekaTsuyo is the episode where Sakura finally gets rewarded for all the hardships and pain she suffered  until now in pro wrestling. The suffering before really made sense at this point, all the sympathy the viewer hopefully built up for Sakura was unloade in this moment. It is the kind of feeling wrestling or other sport fans have when their favorite overcomes a tough fight, match or whatever. It was a touching moment, I felt so proud of her.

The show does a good job in pacing the story over it’s 12 episodes, on the downside the anime is so strongly focused on the wrestling and the events in the gym. Well, sometimes it is showing what Sakura’s idol friends are doing. There was much more potential in it  than just that. Where it falls short is the portrayal of some free time activity or in telling the viewer a bit more about the other characters, but the 12 episode limitation prevented such things from happening.

 Sekai de Ichiban Tsuyoku Naritai! has an interesting, refreshing concept of a sport themed anime, it features a charming main character with both an attractive body and a likeable personality. It was fun, often painful to follow Sakura until she gained her victory.

With attractive girls and a nice animation style the show also has some good eye candy.
When this anime would have been about males, in all honesty I hadn’t watched this show.
The wrestling moves are portrayed in a convincing way, the submission moves in particular where quite detailed. yet it appears to be more realistic than the wrestling fake on television.

When you can’t watch girls in pain, stay away from this anime, it won’t do you any good.

Time for a new anime review this time it’s about the recently ended show called Eureka Seven AO. I actually planned to write a positively toned review of this anime, since it was decent most of the time, but the last two episodes made this impossible after all. First some introductional words.

Eureka Seven AO is a 24 episode long anime from BONES that aired from April to November 2013. It was planned as a sequel of the popular 50 episode long anime Eureka Seven from 2006.

Im a huge fan of the prequel Eureka Seven, which had everything a good shounen adventure should have; an epic storyline, great supporting and main characters, epic battles and a cute first love romance and to top it all, an more than impressive, unforgettable OST was also part of it.

I already watched it three times and also bought both DVD Boxes and both OST Soundtracks.

As I heard about a sequel of my beloved show, I was very happy, but at the same time I also thought that it would be quite challenging to come up with something as epic as Eureka Seven.

httpvh://youtu.be/7CeX76jKAS4

The story of Eureka Seven AO starts on the Island of Okinawa, where our main character Fukai, AO lives together with an old doctor, who took care of him after his mother disappeared. Okinawa aims for autonomy and so the inhabitants are suspicious about any person from outside. Ao is mainly shunned in the community of the Island, but he has cute childhood friend called Naru.

Obviously Eureka Seven AO plays in another dimension, here are also Scub Corals (huge coral like lifeforms) who emerge Trapar which is kinda hazard to the human body. Another new force appears in this dimension, the Secrets which are of unknown origin. Their goal is to destroy the Scub Coral, but they are also a threat to humanity with the destruction their attacks are causing.

The private organization Generation Blue takes care of dismantling the Scub Corals to prevent the massive attacks of arriving Secrets. In order to achieve that, they excavate the cubes called quartz, which are inside the Scub Corals. After an incident on Okinawa, Ao joins the organization as member of the mecha pilot team Pied Piper. His comrades are the 16 year old Fleur and the 15 year old Elena. Elena and Ao have a quite good relationship, while Elena… well she’s Elena.

Eureka Seven AO wanted to create a complex political framework, there are many different parties with different goals that they want to be achieved; Okinawa, Japan, China, USA, Generation Blue, Scub Corals and Secrets. One really could loose track while watching this anime on a weekly basis. I found it quite hard to follow with the many plot twist, time and dimensional travel and fast pace.

Out of good will and in hope to get more info out of the story, I watched the whole anime for a second time, where it actually made more sense to me and offered more entertainment while being marathoned, but it still feels chaotic and halfheartedly done at some points

possible spoilers time from here on…

Soon a true villain appears, an invincible creature called Truth, mhhh what did he actually want, ah yes being evil and changing the world were his goals. The main problem that Eureka Seven AO suffers from is relatively weak character development, between all these story twists the characters are changing their positions and purposes too fast.

The weakly developed characters lead to the next problem, lifefless character interactions and relationships. I rarely sensed real team spirit between Ao, Fleur and Elena or Ao and Naru.

Only the OVA “Jungfrau no Hanabanatachi” manages to portray some very convincing moments of interaction and a nearly friendship like scenes between Ao and his comrades.
There really should have been more character centered episodes in this anime, the viewer just learns a little more than the absolutely necessary about each character, even AO as main character stays plain most of the time. Elena as mysterious, energetic, weirdo otaku is the most interesting character, not because she has more depth compared to the others, but she is fun.

As kind of service for fans of the old Eureka Seven there were some guest appearances of machines and old characters. The audience was quite enchanted by the few appearances of Eureka from the predecessor anime. In this sequel she turned out as the mother of AO.
The appearance of a grown up Renton in episode 22 was one of my personal highlights.
I actually have the opinion that it had been more interesting to give more screentime to Renton and Eureka instead of lame AO. Don’t get me wrong he is a good boy, but really boring.

Fortunately, one very good part of Eureka Seven AO is the visual  presentation, it looks very good overall with vivid colors and appealing characterdesigns and also very smooth animations.

Now I will talk about the things that turned Eureka Seven AO into so such an unsatisfying show.

After episode 22 the anime took a break, probably to finish the last two remaining episodes. Wrapping up the plot and all the subplots in only two episodes already appeared quite optimistic, but it turned out worse than I could have ever imagined. They literally pulled off a new rushed story arc in the last 1 3/4 episodes that rendered all the episodes and characters before useless.

They used a dimension altering device in the story to conclude this anime and get rid of the unanswered questions and subplots, that’s so lame that I can’t put it into words how angry I was. I can’t believe that the same director as for the old Eureka Seven was in charge of Eureka Seven AO, as well. It makes me wonder why this show turned into such an half baked sequel.

It makes no sense at all to build such a complex story when you don’t have an idea how to end it in a satisfying way. There actually are a few nice ideas and good looking action scenes in this anime, but overall it is not enough too reduce my disappointment after the last episode. They should have kept it more simple without including present day politics stuff or cleared everything in a less rushed manner in 20 more episodes. After J.C. Staff already drove Shakugan no Shana III against the wall this year, Bones followed them with Eureka Seven Ao, that could have been a great show, if the plot had been planned more thoughtful with the spirit of it’s predecessor.

Fans of the predecessor won’t like like Eureka Seven Ao cause it’s storytelling quality is not even close to it. In case you like uncountable plot twists in exchange for weakly portrayed characters you could give this a try, but honestly I can’t recommend anyone to watch this strange show.

I rather would recommend to watch the Original Eureka Seven it’s a fantastic anime.

httpvh://youtu.be/CfK7NKqDPqk

Have you watched this show? or did you have a better opinion of Eureka Seven AO ?

please share your opinion in the comments.