OKITSURA: Fell in Love with an Okinawan Girl, but I Just Wish I Know What She’s Saying ep1: As per the title, the hero of this comedy romance moves to Okinawa and struggles with the local dialect, especially when it's being spoken by his cute, bubbly classmate who lapses further into her native language the more excited that she gets. The object of the lead's crush does seem to understand (and be capable of speaking) standard Japanese as well, albeit with an accent, but it falls upon a second girl to act as a go-between in every conversation. Unfortunately, this occasionally leads to conflicts of interest because the translator girl has a crush on the lead herself! The central love triangle isn't all that interesting so far, not least because there doesn't seem to be much basis for the lead's crush on someone he's not really spoken with, but there's still entertainment value to be had in the abundant educational tips about Okinawan life and culture. It's a bit basic at the moment but I hope that the lead will try to meet his crush halfway and quickly start learning more about his new home.
(Regarding
I Want to Escape from Princess Lessons...)
Having read the books what actually happens is the Prince chases after her, kidnaps her and imprisons her in the castle (in the lap of luxury it has to be said) and she continuously runs away with him chasing after her, as well as the brother being on the Prince's side and helping capture her. It sounds mean-spirited but was better in execution than it sounds like. When the novels were licensed there was a huge stink on the J-Novel Club forum about the series tho, due to them feeling the romance was Stockholm syndrome (it isn't) and ignoring that a lot of the tropes are common in those kinds of romance novels... Kidnapping perhaps aside lol. The translator even came in and had to point out that hey, neither of these leads actually have brain cells and they're just being dumb dorks.
Thank you for the summary - it sounds as though that feeling could have translated to the anime with only tiny changes required, but perhaps they want to keep the 'reveal' about
the Prince's nature/actions for later episodes, at the expense of actually drawing new viewers in or clearly establishing the tone?
I liked the way they showed her rubber-faced reactions to the climax, then it all kind of petered out into nothing and ended!
On the
Medalist conversation, I agree that the anime seemed to do a good job with the character motivations in the first episode. Sometimes people who have read the source material can be quite precious about changes in adaptations because they want new viewers to have the exact same reaction that they did to the manga, but they don't appreciate how changing to a new medium can make tricks which work well in prose (e.g. protagonists who narrate internally about their personal backstory for entire chapters) come across as boring in animation. Having never read it I felt that Inori's mother's conflict was clearly communicated and there is obviously plenty of room for future development on that front. If things have been shuffled around a little to allow the first episode to stand on its own: good! My partner certainly felt that it was a very strong debut.
This is definitely a frustrating season in terms of having everything spread across different platforms. I've let my HIDIVE subscription lapse as I can't subscribe to
everything so I guess I'll be missing out on a few shows (nothing that looks essential, though). And it's not just the cost; simply keeping track of all of the different episode releases each week is a chore when they're all in different places, and I can't keep up with broadcast change announcements because I don't want to subscribe to the main social media account for every single platform! Please sort it out, anime industry.
R
