Aoto Endo and Shihono Kobayashi are in their school’s Broadcasting Club, the people who make the end of day announcements over the school tannoy system. There may or may not be ulterior motives when Shihono Kobayashi invites Aoto Endo to play the Love Me Magically! otome game with her, but framing it as a means to practise commentary as they watch the computer people fall in love certainly convinces Endo. It transpires that this dating simulation has a tragic villainess, Lieselotte, who is destined to be shunned and fall into darkness, becoming a monster that is eventually killed by the main characters. Two things happen… Kobayashi recognises that Lieselotte is actually a tsundere who hides her kind nature beneath a spiky exterior, and then a rainbow light suddenly envelops one of the potential love interests, Prince Siegwald, and he can now hear every word that the ‘gods’ Endo and Kobayashi commentate. This could be their chance to change the rules, and give everyone in the game including Lieselotte a happy ending. But it’s not going to be that easy.
When I was a kid, I read this novel called God Game by Andrew Greeley. In it, a priest got a PC game where he was meant to micromanage the lives of little CGA pixels. Only one day, the computer got hit by lightning, which opened a portal into another world. Now he was actually playing god with the lives of people. It didn’t go well. Soon they were killing each other over different interpretations of what he said. Only anime could take a high concept premise like that… and turn it into a rom-com. And so I look at Endo and Kobayashi Live! The Latest on Tsundere Villainess Lieselotte from MVM, a title so long that it simply must be an adaptation of a light novel series.
Endo and Kobayashi Live! is no God Game. Of course that is the problem going into any new show with expectations. Sometimes a show does something completely different, and it becomes incumbent on the viewer to reset those expectations sooner rather than later. Alas, this show does nothing to inspire such a reset for most of its run. That makes it a somewhat tedious show to watch. For me, the whole shtick of having two people comment on a story as it unfolds, even if it is a video game, quickly wears off. There’s a reason it’s the accepted protocol to watch a movie on Blu-ray or DVD first, before delving into the audio commentary and associated extras. At those times when there’s no narrative agency, and just Endo and Kobayashi stating the obvious as to what’s happening in the game, it feels like I’m watching an anime with the commentary track on without having seen it ‘naked’ first.
The interesting stuff happens when the commentators start to interact with the game characters, when they decide to obtain the impossible, and find a happy ending where everyone survives. In an otome game where the point is to find a love interest in a reverse harem of male suitors, and destroy the stock villainess character, whose jealousy results in possession by ‘The Witch of Yore’, Shihono Kobayashi wants the impossible: a happy ending for everyone including the erstwhile villainess Lieselotte. That possibility manifests when the game changes, and Endo and Kobayashi become able to communicate with one of the love interests in the game, advising him to look beyond Lieselotte’s spiky exterior. They use this line of communication to start engineering the game to turn out as they wish.
This is how Endo and Kobayashi Live! The Latest on Tsundere Villainess Lieselotte unfolds over 10 episodes: a statement of intent, then moving events to unfold so as to fulfil that intent. It’s drama without any real drama to it. I was hoping that someone else would be playing the game too, trying to steer events to a different ending, and they would come into conflict with Endo and Kobayashi. That at least would have inspired my interest. But this is really just a low effort feel-good show. There is the aspect that while Endo and Kobayashi are vicariously shipping characters in the game, they’re mostly oblivious to their own feelings for each other, which could have added some spice if it had been played up more. And early on, we’re introduced to the Kuon character, who ominously and obsessively mistakes Kobayashi for someone else, popping up once or twice thereafter to remind us of his existence.
It’s not until the final two episodes that we get the drama the show has been lacking to this point, that we get to learn of the nature of this game, and just how Kobayashi and Endo are instrumental to its resolution. And sadly, we get much of this as an exposition dump. These mysteries could have played out over the course of the episodes, alongside the relationship peanut gallery antics, and the story could have been more engaging as a result. Unfortunately the writing remains pedestrian at best.
Twelve episodes ofEndo and Kobayashi Live! The Latest on Tsundere Villainess Lieselotte are presented across two Blu-rays from MVM. The discs present the episodes with a 9-3 distribution with static menus. Each episode is followed by a translated English credit reel. The extras on disc 2 comprise the textless opening and the textless closing. The show is presented at a 1.78:1 widescreen 1080p ratio with a sole DTS-HD MA 2.0 Japanese stereo track with player locked yellow translated English subtitles. I found the audio acceptable enough, the characters rather generic but performed vividly, and the subtitles are accurately timed and free of typos. The show is a typical comedy anime, full of bright colours, but the animation is rather ordinary, and I did notice character models drift at times. It’s not all that special visually speaking.
Endo and Kobayashi Live! The Latest on Tsundere Villainess Lieselotte is a title that makes me happy that someone invented cut and paste. Facetiousness aside, it’s also a show that justifies its existence in how it makes the viewer feel warm and fuzzy by unfolding in a nice, predictable and unchallenging way. Were it not for the premise or the character tropes, I’d call it an iyashikei and be done with it. But at the end it remembers that it needs to give the characters a challenge. For me that drama is too little too late. On the third hand, it’s rare to get a complete story in the space of a single cour these days. Endo and Kobayashi Live! The Latest on Tsundere Villainess Lieselotte is an inoffensive show that didn’t bore me, mildly entertained me, but I’m sure I’ll have forgotten it as soon as I click ‘save’ on this review.
Our review copy was supplied by MVM.
Just Passing Through
There was this apocryphal story some years ago about a man crushed to death by his own magazine collection. That’s going to be me and physical media. I’ve been collecting since VHS was a thing, and writing about what I’ve watched, including anime, since my first DVD player. Now that I’m writing for Anime UK News, I still have a 2.77 meter pile of unwatched anime that I have yet write about. Please don’t fall on me, anime pile…
More posts from Just Passing Through…
