The time has come for all the Yami-chan fanboys (and fangirls if any) to rejoice as Golden Darkness finally gets some screen time. Out of all the character introduction episodes we’ve had so far, I think this one had to be one of the best ones as they stayed very true to Yami’s character.
Although the producers have seen fit to push aside the manga’s version of the story and use their own lately, for some reason they chose to go back to the manga material for this episode (with a few adjustments). I’m not particularly mad nor happy about the decision but to me it just seems weird for them to just randomly choose when they want to use the source material than come up with some bullshit on their own.
Summary
The episode starts out with Yami descending upon Earth. No word of what she’s there for yet, but for the fans, you should already know what Yami’s about. As Rito is out shopping, Mikan remembers that she needed him to buy something for her. Zastin and Lala volunteer to go after a weird sort of game they played to decide who would go tell Rito.
Rito bumps into Haruna at the store and offered to help her shopping. After Haruna buys a mug from the shop they go on their separate ways (I think it may be the same mug that Rito gave Haruna in the manga?). Rito stops by a taiyaki shop and buys a bag full right before he finds Yami. Rito decides to offer her some taiyaki since he thought she was staring at the bag. Yami eats the taiyaki and shortly starts to attack Rito after confirming his identity. She explains that someone has asked her to assassinate him.
Zastin and Lala come to Rito’s aid and challenge Yami in order to protect Rito. Zastin and Yami fight against each other at first, but Zastin’s usual clumsiness comes back to hurt him as he falls into a sewer. Lala continues the fight in Zastin’s place using various gadgets instead of actually fighting. After a bit of running around, Yami asks Lala why she’s helping Rito. Apparently, Yami was told that Rito was a fiendish man who was taking advantage of Deviluke. Lala tells Yami that it’s not true and Yami starts to believe it a little. However, since it was her mission, Yami could not just quit on killing her target.
Lacospo, an alien who hired Yami to kill Rito, arrives and appears to be one of Lala’s suitors. Yami asks if the information he gave her was true or not and that she would not continue her mission if the information was false. Lacospo panics and denies the fact that he was lying. Yami realizes that Lacospo wasn’t telling the truth and quickly turns on him. Lacospo then summons his giant frog, Gama-tan which can melt away clothing with its acid like spit. He begins to attack Yami for disobeying his orders.
Yami soon finds her weapons ineffective against the giant frog and is quickly at a disadvantage from the acid. Lala jumps in front of Yami to protect her from an oncoming attack and has her clothes melted away. Before Lacospo could get another attack in, Rito jumps in and gets his clothes melted too. Rito is able to get a punch in on Lacospo, but is overpowered by Gama-tan. Lala recovers her clothing through Peke and sends Lacospo and Gama-tan flying off into space.
Yami askes Lala why she helped her and Lala replies that it was because it was Lacospo at fault and not Yami. Rito asks Yami if she could cancel the assassination and return to space, but Yami simply replies that she will stay on Earth until she settles things with him.
Impressions
Not too shabby for a TLR episode. Much better than most episodes we’ve seen so far anyways. I think they did a decent/good job with Yami’s character since it’s pretty close to what the original was like. They didn’t rush her development like they did with Yui nor did they make it a manly fest with Ren/Run. Overall it was pretty decent with a bit of decent action as well.
I don’t remember exactly how the voice acting was for the “Black Cat” version of Yami(Eve), but I think the voice acting was pretty spot on for TLR. You can’t really go wrong since it’s a pretty easy role to fill, but nevertheless it was a good job.
Animation quality was okay as well. I’ve felt that the quality had been going down since the last few episodes, but I’m glad that they decided to step it up for Yami. I’m pretty sure the fans wouldn’t stay still if they did a terrible job on Yami.
Next episode seems to be a sports festival for the school and involves most of the cast. I guess we’re finally out of introduction episodes and perhaps maybe seeing more of the entire cast more often.
11 Comments
Yami fan boy here… I found it a very good episode indeed. Well done adaptation that I generally didn’t have any problems with which is good considering I pretty much didn’t watch the last few episodes, only skimmed them. things are looking up for this series now. XD
This series has been one of the most painful to watch and I’ve watched a LOT of bad anime before. It started off with some promise with a Lala-Rito-Haruna love triangle going on but then it just kind of devolved into an alien-of-the-week (sans the Yui episode) series. It’s like the series is struggling to find it’s identity.
It doesn’t know whether it wants to be a harem, romance, or comedy series and in trying to be all three simultaneously it fails at each individually. These episodes mostly seem like filler. One-shots which really don’t move the story forward at all. Which isn’t very surprising considering the source material -_-
I just wish they’d do something more with this series. ;/
She was cuter in the manga. And more of a loli.
Decently done intro for Yami, one of the two characters I was looking forward to seeing. Hopefully she gets involved more in the rest of the series because she’s awesome.
@Deranged: Yeah, hopefully since we’re past all the character episodes (for the scope of this anime anyways), we’ll get to see more interesting episodes involving all the characters.
@Halcyon: I’m assuming you’re familiar with the manga already since you mentioned it in your comment. To me, the TLR manga was fanservice + comedy… not GREAT comedy, but comedy nonetheless. I think it’s been branded as an ecchi harem comedy series which the manga does pretty well, but the anime seems to fall short of being anything but mediocre at this point. I can only hope that the series improves since they do have a chance at giving the series some structure that the manga severely lacks. I’m certainly a fan of this series with the amount of attention they give to the side characters which almost overshadows the main ones (besides Rito). I’m usually a “side character” kind of guy anyways.
@LDC: If you’re talking about the visual “cuteness” of Yami then I would have to say I prefer any of the character’s manga version over the anime. The art quality of the anime can’t even compare to how good the manga looks to me.
@Calawain: She’s indeed awesome and hopefully we do see more of her. Her appearances in the manga weren’t that often so maybe they might change that in the anime.
I’m somewhat familiar with the manga. I’m not a fan of the pacing of the manga (it drags the relationship building between the characters far too slowly, IMO, it took close to 90 chapters to introduce Lala’s sisters? WTF@that. With an engagement you’d think they would play up the awkwardness of having alien-in laws a lot sooner).
I’m just surprised that the production studio has managed to take a good concept (in theory) and completely trash it (IMO, Onegai Teacher had a similar concept and a better execution). I look at similar ecchi harems like Inukami! or Kanokon and can’t help but think TLR has a long, long way to go. Fortunately, they have another 15 episodes to go to rectify both the humour and character development. I just don’t know if I’ll be able to stomach sitting through them all.
And this is coming from a guy who actually sat and watched G-On Riders in its entirety. There’s a few hours of my life I wish I had back. -_-
Anime references :
Eve from Black Cat
Garlic Jr from Dragonball
Luffy from One Piece
Boss Toad from Naruto
Also, Yami-chan… :3
@Halcyon: I don’t know if I should be trying to rationalize anything that happens in TLR, but in regards to her sisters, either A) They were made up right before that chapter was written or B) Lala’s carefree nature detaches her from her family therefore leaving no communication between her and her sisters. If I remember, her very own dad didn’t come in till later in the series.
As far as other ecchi series go (I especially enjoyed the Onegai series), the TLR anime does seem to fall very short of what basically makes an ecchi anime work: tons of fanservice and comedy(usually). The TLR anime attempts to use these two key features, but does not really get any done effectively. The fanservice is scarce and often covered up to the point that you can’t even see anything and the comedy is typically lukewarm at best. What I’m still doing by watching this show is probably waiting for it to redeem itself. As a fan of TLR I can only hope that it gets better from this point on.
@Randor: I’m not sure if you knew, but Eve from Black Cat is a creation of the main artist of TLR. He did Black Cat and now he’s doing TLR. But yes, I suppose that can be considered a reference.
I like the Lala’s character design. It’s very similar to Nono from Diebuster. Other than that, I’m praying for a miracle to turn this series around.
me gusto mucho. tienes una colección de imágenes muy linda bueno espero subas de junjou romantica
the original To love ru Anime was great when the producers decided to stick with the manga storyline and did not go too over the top, the second series “motto to love ru” was much better since it did just that.