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Henjin no Salad Bowl is simply and essentially Hinamatsuri at home.
This time the premise is not about esper girls but rather an actual fantasy reverse isekai where they fall on our world, and one of them over the male protagonist. Despite the characters using magic, at least the powers have some level of limits and follow some kind of scientific logic, that might be complete bs but it is nice that the author tried to give it a reasoning and keep some sense of groundness regarding the abilities.
From there, the main girl follows the same path as Hina from Hinamatsuri, as she adjusts to the new world, lives with the male co-protagonist, kind of forms a father-daughter relationship with him, goes to school and makes some friends, and also starts working alongside him. What isn’t good about her is that her backdrop is like a chuuni fanfic parallel universe version of Japanese history.
Meanwhile her bodyguard becomes homeless and gets herself into shady jobs, so she is like a combination of Anzu and Hitomi, though nowhere near as good.
Those are the reasons why I enjoyed the show, yet at the same time why I don’t consider it worth watching and why I think it’s better to stick to that other series.
First of all, the visuals aren’t that good. There’s nothing straight up bad about them, besides perhaps the CGI, but everything else is quite basic. The artwork, though always solid, is very simple, the character designs are extremely basic and simple, easy to mix with most anime out there, the backgrounds are nice but not that memorable, the motions are just ok, the special effects are overall good, but there’s that occasional crappy CGI.
The audio is fine but nothing special as well, ok voice acting, ok sound effects, ok music, I liked both the opening and ending, feeling like somewhat upbeat jrock songs yet not going for something cute or funny to listen to as I expected.
There are a lot more topics in here, as the protagonists help a girl with her bullying and then the girl befriends her, there are cases of infidelities, and plenty of lawyers and detectives besides the main character that are quite corrupt, while he is kind of a moral figure for the princess. Also, the bodyguard of the female protagonist starts as homeless yet ends up working in a night club, reselling merchandise, joining and abandoning a religious cult, being the model for perverted figurines, becoming a gambling addict, and forming a band that disbands almost as it starts.
Yet nothing of all of that lasts for long to be considered to be looked into enough, let alone properly. Yes, the series is a comedy, but so was Hinamatsuri, but that show knew how to mix absurd comical situations and some serious topics and moments. Instead, this show feels overstuffed with topics that could lead to some interesting theme exploration and character arcs, yet everything is presented in a superficial way and just for laughs, and nothing has enough time on screen before moving to something else.
Partially responsible for that is the narrative of the series, which is strange, as it is composed of several mini stories with their own continuity and showing all the different characters, as if the source material was a 4-koma manga, and yet it is not, it is a light novel. Thus narratively nothing gets enough linear focus before moving to something else.
The pacing is fast, as you could have guessed based on what I just wrote, yet it is perhaps too fast, not only for how things change from one to another, but also because at the middle point of the anime, it feels like the characters reached the point where nothing else is left to do with them.
Which can be associated with how simple the characters are. Unlike Hina, the princess here is so good at everything instantly that she has nothing to learn or accomplish, she learns fast, finds solutions to everything fast, befriends people fast, and becomes the daughter of the male co-protagonist midway, through a relationship that was always funny and wholesome, with no conflict or anything like that.
The other woman is kind of the opposite, as she is very good regarding any physical activity, but is also quite dumb, easy to fool, and constantly messes up, so in her case she learns nothing and does not move forward in any way, but for the opposite reasons as the female protagonist.
There are a lot more secondary characters, all of which are quirky. From a woman that is sexually into huge buildings, a lawyer that looks like a little girl for some reason, a female detective that is an expert at braking up couples, both of them that like the protagonist, and unknowingly try to help each other to win his heart, only to fail miserably. Also the bullied girl that befriends the princess becomes sort of a detective that helps bullied people on her own. There’s a writer, a singer and escort, and the cult leader, which after being helped by the bodyguard they become recurring characters with their own quirks, but not much else.
The humour suffers from being partially referential, and not like in a parody way, and is not subtle in the least, it directly tells you what is referencing. Other than that, it is mostly about absurd situations, sometimes ecchi humour both with nudity and sexual situations or innuendos, which I did enjoy but at times found too much sexualizing of a certain character at some point, and at times a bit of dark humour, so if you like that combination, you might enjoy this.
So in the end, I think this could have been as decent as Hinamatsuri if it was less stuffed with characters and topics, or knew how to narratively handle them better and with some sense of actual character progression, and it also needed some substance and more serious moments. But it didn’t do it so it stands as a meh alternative to it, which is nonetheless enjoyable in its own right and I’m glad I bumped into it casually, when I almost missed it completely.
5/10
