Review of Ya Boy Kongming!

A pleasant surprise. A music anime that isn't idol, melodrama, and shoujo. Biggest surprise of all? It's actually well made. Coming into this show, I thought it was destined for failure. The first three episodes were really not drawing me in. It kind of just confused me. Are you really going to take Zhuge Liang and isekai him into the modern world, just for him become a manager for a musician? What a waste. I was thinking that Zhuge Liang is probably turning in his grave when he's being produced into a caricature of his former self, being a manager in modern Japan, speaking Japanese, andbeing made into an anime by Japanese people. I mean, making him serve a female as well? He'd probably laugh his imperial Chinese ass off if his substitute for Liu Bei was a woman. He'd probably be turning in his grave anyways if he was brought into a Chinese cultivation novel, but at least the premise and setting would have been cohesive and makes sense.

However, it did start coming together after you give it some time. With the introduction of Kabe Taijin, and overall just well executed and paced plot points, this show does start shining. Making a "connection" to Zhuge Liang's past each episode was a nice touch, no matter how forced some of these as well.

But the main reason why the anime starts getting good is the pitfalls that it avoids, and perfecting the main charm points of series that focus on entertainment. The first pitfall is CGI. Each dance for each song is hand animated. Regardless of how little dancing is shown, there is no CGI. Plus, when there is actual dancing scenes happening, they're well made, and the choreography, despite used to mask some of the costs of animating full body movement, was still good, and I have no complaints at all. Facial expressions, lip syncing and dancing were all above average quality when they were shown.

The second reason is having relevant characters. What I mean is that each character that Kongming encounters or recruits is not a Mary Sue. Take notes, Carole and Tuesday. To have people start caring about the main characters, you have to have them feel like it's realistic. Some sort of obstacle, or some sort of coming of age and realization. Kabe Taijin has stomach cramps and has anxiety. Eiko isn't a world class singer from the get go. Sure, these obstacles do get solved to an extent, but they both are talent that can be produced and also, grow more. They're unpolished gems, and you get some gratification when you see them overcome their obstacles. I think I see it too often that a lot of the main characters in showbiz media are perfect from the start, and the only problems that they encounter is outside of their control, like rich companies bullying them, having no money, etc. Their talent is of course, on par with the best of the best, but those other things are weighing them down. It's boring.

That being said, characters are decent, but they're not great. I like the small pool of characters, and that does bring the quality up. You don't encounter showbiz people that are eccentric to the point of being obnoxious, and some of them show visible weaknesses sometimes, and act like human beings. Amazing. But even our main characters, mainly Eiko and Kabe Taijin, they're just average. That's honestly good enough. They're not charismatic enough for you to actually like them--we're all there for Zhuge Liang obviously--but they're not bad enough for you to hate them. Pair that up with the next reason why the show is good, which is their progression to stardom, and you got a banger.

A lot of showbiz media tend to have some sort of concrete goal for the MC. In the case of Eiko, it's to sing in one of the famous venues in Japan. That's good, and on the way there, there will be a lot of clear objectives. These things can be generic, like just filling up a venue, getting enough CD's sold before a time limit. etc, and Paripi Koumei is no different. Other than the more generic objectives like filling up a venue, or beating a rival singer, this show used a competition to garner 100,000 social media likes as their clear objective. That in itself is nothing special, but it's the setup that's important. The story arc is clearly the culmination of a lot of character development, and there's an actual sense of cohesion and accomplishment amongst the people participating. The competition that Eiko faces isn't just another random band, but rather, their main competitor is someone that Eiko got to know. Kabetaijin ties up his loose ends with his personal arc and can finally move on to better things, working with Eiko towards that goal. There's a conflict with Eiko and Azalea, her competing team. There's Eiko and Kabetaijin overcoming obstacles to get to where they are, to compete against Azalea. Azalea, too, has their own ambition and discord that also will come to a boiling point. And best of all, the execution is well done. The social media event, the direct confrontation between the two bands, and the strategy that Zhuge Liang employs is good.

That brings me to the last point: Zhuge Liang. Obviously he's the actual main character of the show. He's also a cheat. Similar to Narsus in Arslan Senki, Zhuge Liang is infallible. He's basically omniscient. All of his tactics works, and they work to a terrifyingly high degree. Nothing his enemies do can make him sweat. Rather than say he's a smart tactician, he's just a broken omniscient god that can rectify any and all situations. And that's fine. Unlike Narsus, Zhuge Liang is not leading armies or battles in a serious fantasy world, where outcomes of battle are a matter of life and death. He's just a manager for a singer. It's comedic. Zhuge Liang makes peace with a lot of the opponents he faces, and that in turn, is good worldbuilding, and perhaps, setup for another appearance of these characters later on. This show isn't exactly comedic, but it's light-hearted for the most part.

It still irks me that Zhuge Liang has an attitude of servitude towards Eiko. Like, disregarding anything else, is Eiko really a suitable replacement for Liu Bei? Couldn't he have been on equal ground with Eiko, rather than serving under her? Don't give me that crap that the show does this because Zhuge Liang is accustomed to serving under lords, and is stubborn about his ancient ways. As if the show also didn't let him get accustomed to modern world in no time at all, with his personality completely warped and changed.

Other than that, I also want to talk about the music. Honestly, nothing special. The songs are professionally produced, and the singers are good. That's about it though. Rather than listening to DREAMERS, I'd rather be listening to fighting dreamers. Hell, I thought Grotesque, the supposed "lifeless corporate" song, to be one of the best. DREAMERS was kind of just sounded like generic JPOP to me, but I guess that's up for debate. Azalea's final song was good, the I'll admit. I'm personally not the biggest fan of 96Neko, but it's pretty cool they got a well known Vocaloid cover artist to star in this show. She's pretty good too, but if they managed to get Ado in, it'd been sick. Oh well. Good show.