This time, I wanted to check out something I knew absolutely nothing about. So that’s why I went for a strange obscure shoujo-adventure from the 90s. Don’t ask why, I’m not sure myself. Anyway, to my surprise Kero Kero Chime actually turned out to be good. Talk about overlooked!

The way Kero Kero Chime sets itself apart from most other shoujo comedies is its sense of humour. Really, I can’t recall many shoujo-series that spend so much emphasis on sarcasm. Believe it or not, but Kero Kero Chime can be surprisingly witty at times. There are of course enough quirky characters in this series, but the added degree of sarcasm really adds an extra spice that makes this series much more enjoyable than your average comedy.

Those who’ve been following my blog will probably also recall my annoyance with a lot of comedies that get dull after their first ten or so episodes. Examples of this are Bamboo Blade, Zoku Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei and Magikano. And here comes Kero Kero Chime, and it actually successfully avoids these flaws. Heck, it really stays enjoyable until the end and finishes off with an actually nice climax for such a series. The characters know when to be stereotypes and when to not be them, which allows them to get fleshed out and developed well enough to keep both their quirks and the comedy fresh for thirty episodes.

But yeah, I think you can already see from the screencaps that this series can be very childish at times. It’s not as bad as the pencil and eraser from Power Puff Z, but if you’ve got something against kiddie-shows then this series will be hard to get into. The comedy is also hit or miss: even though most of the episodes work, there are a few amongst them that are embarrassingly dull, especially around the middle of the series. There’s also a little issue with the voice-actors for the male and female leads: at times, they can’t carry their characters, so be aware of this while watching.

Seriously though, if you want a comedy that makes you laugh and don’t mind a bit of childishness, then you should consider checking out Kero Kero Chime. It’s also great to see a shoujo-adventure-series from the 90s that doesn’t involve a main female character with a “godmode-beam”. Instead, Minori only can jump very high and swim very well, while Aoi (the male lead) only has one power throughout the entire series: the power to turn into a frog when he comes into contact with water. Add a narcissistic crystal, a tea-serving forest-fairy and an obsessive doll-maker, and you’ve got lots of hilarious banter.

Just one warning if you do end up watching this: stay away from episode 23. Those monkeys fainted for a reason!!!

Really, is there no end to this series awesomeness? This was quite possibly the best episode of Kaiba yet, for very obvious reasons. For the sake of spoilers showing up in the blog-aggregators like animeblogger antenna, this sentence is meant to fill up space. This one is meant to fill up space as well. So, this should be enough.

Kaiba finally meets Neiro! Although under very strange circumstances. She spends this episode in the form of a huge male cyborg without any hands. The thing that made this so awesome was that both of them were struggling with the feelings of being in the body of another gender. Kaiba has his first period as well, while Neiro has trouble with the male hormone-impulses.

As it turns out, Warp was the worst kind of king. He killed Neiro’s family, imprisoned thousands, and he was also probably responsible for the huge gap between rich and old, and several of the memory-clouds we see in space. That makes me even wonder why Neiro fell in love with him in the first place, because right now she seems to consider him as an enemy.

What’s more: in this episode a strange plant appears, which sucks out the memories of nearby persons. Neiro calls it a KAIBA!!! Could it really be that Warp fell victim to one of these Kaiba, and that’s how Kaiba originated? Oh boy.

The case in this episode looked a lot like the episode with the old couple in Kemonozume. Both couples have been travelling for decades now, and both suffer a huge loss as the episode went on. I must say that I prefer the Kaiba-version. This might be a small spoiler, but the problem with Kemonozume was that the ending had no point whatsoever. The two of them just turned into monsters and killed each other due to the big bad guy. This episode in Kaiba has been very deep, though. This time, just the old lady gets her memory sucked out, and as it turns out, she has been cheating on her husband. And yet the husband doesn’t matter, and he’ll just continue to travel with her memory-less body.

With this episode, I know for sure that Kaiba is my favourite series this season. The 26-episode series really need try their best in their second halves if they want to trump this series.