fgraham - 2013-07-02 06:08:45

In a world powered by a magical substance called Ale, Leicester Maycraft is a technician working for the adventurous Oasis clan. He and his comrades take jobs helping others in various ways, usually involving stopping Ale-powered "Crystal Monsters." Leicester is living the life, surrounded by a good amount of lovely girls who are always willing to shove themselves in front of him for his attention. Alas, this wonderful world made possible by the abundance of Ale is being threatened by the flow of the Ale itself...Shukufuku no Campanella is interesting. No wait, that's a lie. It's incredibly boring. Sukufuku is an adaptation of an ero-visual novel, but you would probably never be able to tell this from the anime itself. As a result of the sudden change of direction, everything about Shukufuku feels half-baked and strangely maneuvered.The characters themselves are not exceptional. We have the childhood friend, Carina; the loli, Minette; the modest warrior, Chelsea; the outgoing girl, Agnes; the opposite twins, Salsa and Ritos; and the slightly airheaded one, Garnet. There is very little if any development of any of these characters except for Minette, and only because she is a central part of the overarching story. As a result, all of the characters are left flat and uninteresting, rarely venturing outside of their individual archetypes that everyone has seen before. Ritos and Salsa do have their moments, however. They have amazing chemistry and I found myself enjoying the segments where they were the focus very much. Unfortunately, as they are not actually part of Clan Oasis, they were not around as often as the rest of the characters, and their parts were usually used as transitions from one half of an episode to another.The story itself was also quite conventional. The basis of everything seemed to be to defeat the monsters as they appeared, which is all good and well for an adventure anime. The monster designs seemed bland, though, and the fight scenes were not particularly phenomenal or even memorable. The final fight was an exception to this in a way; it was fairly exciting and had me wishing more of the show was like this. The story's progress at the end, on the other hand, seemed to fall apart. It felt like much was skipped in order to fit all the events into one episode, and the puzzle and "Spirit Bomb" ending did not help make this any better.Now, being based on an eroge visual novel, there would of course be plenty of fanservice. And there was, but it was toned down to become a bit awkward in most situations; most of the time I felt like the swimsuit stills and other various fanservice scenes were inserted just because there was no other fanservice in that episode and they didn't bother coming up with some sort of transition to most of it. In order to avoid this, much of the fanservice was placed in parts about Ritos and Salsa, further reducing their status as characters with any sort of real meaning in the story. Finally, as the scenes involving sex and actual nudity obviously had to be taken out to work in anime form, scenes that lead to these parts felt only half-done. The biggest perpetrator of this to me was when Leicester was putting Chelsea to bed after her party was compromising to say the least - not that there was much they could do to prevent that outside of removing the scene completely.Overall, there is simply nothing outstanding about Shukufuku, and the things it tries to do it does averagely or below averagely. If you are a fan of shallow adventure stories with a bit of fanservice, then this may very well be the show for you. But it certainly didn't do much for me at all.