Dual Parallel! Trouble Adventures

You can sum up Dual in one sentence: 'It's Evangelion but not too far up it's own ass"

I know it's a flame-worthy summation, but it's true. It's a not-very-well-disguised clone of the series with some harem aspects. For christ's sake, the annoying, overbearing chick who's secretly into the protag even runs around in a red mech. You cant buy that kind of blatancy. But what does it have that NGE doesn't? Why a protag that you ACTUALLY like. Or, at the very least, you don't hate him for bitching and moaning every three seconds and masturbating to comatose girls!
(wow, didn't even get through the first paragraph without mentioning that. a new low)

Okay, now that i got that little bit out, story time!!

The show centers around a boy named Kazuki Yotsuga, a regular dude(don't they all, though) who everyone at school laughs at because he keeps seeing these giant mechs fighting in the street. He sees this so frequently he's even started a little website where he chronicles what he sees. Well it all goes tails up for him when the school queen, Mitsuki Sanada shows an interest in the boy, telling him that she believes that he sees these things. More importantly her father believes him too. He has a theory about there being a parallel world with events and a time line similar to theirs, and that Kazuki has the unique ability to peer into it. Since this is an anime the Professor immediately straps the poor schmo into the deus ex teleporter he already had made up, complete with comfy chair and arm straps, and BAM!! Kazuki is now in the other world.

He soon meets up with the Mech he is always seeing in his psychotic episodes and, through serendipity and overly obvious plot devices, he ends up piloting it; defeating the generic mech it's pilot, now unconscious, was fighting. It is through here that young Kazuki learns that he is in the other world when he runs home to find that his parents have no idea who he is(NOT when he was piloting the mech he's seen so many times in his hallucinations that he's actually given it a name... which i am not even going to TRY and pronounce, let alone spell. i just started calling it "Harpsichord"). Eventually he is swept up by the Giant Mech Military, ran by this Earth's version of the loon who sent him there(just go with it), because he is the only male who has ever been able to pilot a mech, previously only women could for some reason. He soon runs into Mizuki, who decided to follow after him into the Chair of Spatial Impossibility shortly after he disappeared but got there a month earlier for some reason(SCIENCE!!!), and she turns out to be a mech warrior as well, along with the 'Rei' character of the story who is actually explained in the first appearance as an alien-clone-robot-thing.
you read that right, they ACTUALLY flat-out told you that she was a alien clone-robot-thing instead of making it painfully obvious but never even really alluded to in the bulk of the story. And she's a very interesting character, i always liked Tabula Rasa characters, their humor may be obvious(i.e. when looking for a character who ran away they tend to look in the trashcan for some reason) but they're always enjoyable and usually give me a smile.

And all this brings up a really important point, why the crap can only children pilot giant mechs of death? does puberty not compute with the OS or something? but at least this show altered that a bit, the pilot originally controlling Harpsichord was 23, so at least there was that.

After the establish the main cast the episodes went kinda basic, they met the Team Rocket-inspired villain who seems more concerned about the the spectacle of invading rather then the actual winning of the battle. The also have all the old songs of anime here: They go to school, everyone is jealous of/hating on the protag because the school queen is always hanging around him, everyone wants a piece of him, there's a stray dog somewhere along the line that the alien-clone-robot-tabula rasa-Priscilla: Queen of the Desert grows attached to. It doesn't really try to push any boundaries as a show, its more like the people who created the story were given a big box of what all anime before it did and was told to pick two good concepts to play with and three bad concepts to try and fix and to make a show out of those 5 things and they said 'to piss with that' and took the whole box and ran with it.

And, to me, that's not a bad thing. It's a good view if you're bored off your rocker and want to just enjoy yourself for 12 episodes. There's nothing really to take away from it in the end, but is that really a bad thing? Eva tried shoehorning some depth into itself near the end and it turned into one of the few shows that i stop watching before the last 4 eps.

The ending is one of the better ones out there, even though it has one of them open ends that damn near every harem show has, but this show's harem aspects-while predominant throughout the entirety of the story-was never more than a plot device... to me, at least. There was even a 'finale' episode after the story proper where they showed what happened after everything was righted and whatnot and everyone gets on with their lives and eventually setting up yet another open ending where they all try to go to space. What really pissed me off about this is that there was NO continuation of the story after that. I would have loved to see more of the show because it was the first non-toonami/adult swim anime that i ever really loved. Hell, the show even opened me up to the awesomeness that was once TechTv since I found it on the channel's Anime Unleashed block. The show will always be one of those few things I can watch over and over without getting bored of it. It is worth a viewing if you're wanting an amalgamation done right.


postscript: Found out later that it was done by the same guy who did Tenchi Muyo, one of the best harem anime ever done. too bad its had so many different people working on it it got rather confusing to figure out its continuity.
But that's another review

Welcome to Just Go With It Reviews

You will have to bear with me for a while here, a little new to the whole blogotetrahedral so it may take a bit to get this whole thing off the ground running. Let's start with the basics

What is this?
This site will be my little soapbox in a sea of them, where I will throw my hat over the wall, two cents tucked in the brim and give my take on whatever seems prevalent to my interests at the time. Mostly it will be reviews of odd shows/comics(American or Japanese)/whathaveyou that's out there in the world today. Will it always be about current things? No, as a matter of fact I have one review in line that's about a movie that came out some time in the late 60's.

What's with the title?
It came from a recurring theme i've found with a lot of my reviews of things when people asked me online what I've been watching/reading/whathaveyou. At some point in the explanation of the basic plot I found that I would always insert "just go with it" in parenthesis after every sentence that i knew was pure insanity to the uninitiated(case-in-point: my upcoming The World God Only Knows review)

How often will you update?
Your guess is as good as mine at this point, little kid. Got an odd schedule until after the New Year and after that I have to try and get a job, so Sho'nuff only knows when I'll get around to it.

So, until i can finally find time to sit down and work on this, please occupy yourselves with trying to find ALL the grammatical errors in the above post.
Should be a lot