D-Frag! Episode 1
What They Say:
The Game Creation Club must make a new game or recruit a new member by the end of the day or it will lose its club status. When the delinquent, Kazama, attracts the president’s attention, he’s stuck joining her club whether he wants to or not!
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Based on the manga series by Tokmoya Haruno that began in 2008, D-Frag! Is a new twelve episode series from Brain’s Base directed by Seiki Sugawara. The seinen series has been serialized in the Media Factory magazine Monthly Comic Alive and has hit eight compiled volumes so far and that original series has already been picked up for release by Seven Seas Entertainment, which will be a good thing as at the end of this season, fans will have the original work to go to in order to see more of what’s going on. The show has had a pretty good campaign ahead of it with promos and news, making it one of the easier to check out shows and one with a good, short and fun title to say.
The series revolves around a high school group that’s part of the Game Creation Club, which is facing its greatest challenge yet in that it’s about to lose its status as a club. This is because they haven’t really done anything noteworthy. So they have the struggle of finding a new member since the deadline is today and they’ll be out of luck otherwise. What luck falls into their laps, in an awkward way of course, is one of the small group of “delinquent” students named Kazama that is trying to conquer the world with his fists but is finding that the school is just too well balanced and happy of a place to really be dealt with in this way. He wants to be the bad guy, but he gets involved in the club by doing something good as he races to help out when he thinks there’s a fire there as opposed to the illusion that they’re running. Before he and his associates know it, they’ve been friended and amusingly conquered by the all girls club members that are there.
This encounter gets the club president, the pint sized Roka, to push Kazama into becoming a member. And not in a friendly way as it’s all quite threatening and dark as she basically kidnaps him, which plays against her small and cute nature for bigger laughs. That gets Kazama trapped into joining the club, though he has thoughts of ways out of it before discovering that they’re truly got him cornered into it. Not surprisingly, he has to start coping with the diverse personalities of the club – and an advisor that looks about the same age as a lot of them – while hoping to find his way out of it. There’s some good slapstick action that runs through it and a lot of verbal back and forth as well that goes on which is comical since we get the delinquent side trying to find an out for him while the girls in the club are likely more violent and dangerous than they are. It’s a cute dynamic that, with some time and exploration of who the characters are beyond the archetypes here, could lead to some good humor and situations.
In Summary:
D-Frag! kicks off here in the way that a comedy of this nature should with some fast and silly moments, a good dose of comical action and some characters that looks like they’ll make for a fun time as it goes on. We’re introduced to quite a few characters overall, probably about ten or so of note, but it’s largely focused here on Kazama himself as he’s dragged into the club and has to deal with the situation. That lets us see it all through his eyes and it definitely has some good bits to it, even if it is working largely on archetypes at this point. Kazama is nicely accessible, the cast in general looks like they should be fun and even with as much as it does here with the hyper side, it doesn’t feel overdone or like it’s going on for too long. D-Frag has a whole lot of solid comedy potential here and I can already hear a dub for it in fact.
Grade: B
Streamed By: FUNimation
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Apple TV via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.