Pretty much everything I tackled yesterday was trash; today we’ve got four keepers, more or less. These are all on my Current list, at least—your mileage may vary. After all, not everyone enjoys chaff as much as the good Dr. Elkay!

Yosuga no Sora (2010-10-04) Fall Series

Description

Having lost both parents, the Kazugano twins, Haruka and Sora, decided to move in and live with their grandfather of whom they are fond of. Other motives, however, contributed to their decision to reside at their grandfather. Kasugano Haruka and his sister Sora have lost both their parents in an accident, and with them all their support. They decide to move out of the city to the rural town where they once spent summers with their late grandfather. At first everything seems familiar and peaceful, but changes come as Haruka starts to remember things from his youth.

Genre: romance
Status: airing
Time: Mon 23:30+JST
Episodes: 12
Specials: 5
Duration: 24m

Links: Official ANN

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This pilot episode resists panty-shots for 20 minutes… only to shower us with tits and sex in the last six minutes. Uncensored nipples, a decently hot masturbation scene—and I’m like, I’m sooooooooooo confused!! But this is not a bad thing. Keep us guessing, Yosuga no Sora! Stay classy, and keep us guessing.

One thing I have to say I’m really digging here is the shamelessness of it all. It doesn’t pull punches. Male lead Haruka is unabashedly the sexiest thing ever to the point where people so much as lay their eyes on him and their panties dissolve in overflowing juices. Must have been a grizzled old man driving the rich bitch’s car, else we’d have seen one hell of a car crash.

I look forward to more of this, and will almost certainly go the distance. Awwww yeah.

(More substantive things will be said as I blog further episodes, beyond these survey posts.)

Psychic Detective Yakumo (2010-10-03) Series

Description

In order to help a friend possessed by a spirit, Ozawa Haruka knocks on the door of her university's movie research association. There she meets Saitou Yakumo, a rude, unkempt young man with a red left eye, who is said to have spiritual powers. At first Haruka is skeptical, but she comes to believe him when he conveys messages from her older sister, who died when she was a child. Together, they work to shed light on the terrifying events happening at their university. But this is only the prologue of what's to come...

Genre: mystery, supernatural
Length: 13
Status: airing
Time: Sun 23:00+JST
Duration: 25m

Links: Official ANN

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Let’s get another long pan on those eyes… no, that wasn’t long enough, let’s do it again!

(This really feels like Spiral and Avenger’s illegitimate child two decades down the line, when it is more mature than either of its parents were when they had it. Whether this unholy union will produce an angel or a devil remains to be seen. I’m holding out for the “just a 16 year old girl” option.)

Shinryaku! Ika Musume (2010-10-04) Fall Series

Description

Squid Girl has come to the land from the depths of the sea to conquer humanity for its pollution of the ocean. Unfortunately she ruins the first house she uses as an invasion base and has to work to pay for repairs. Of course, she can't overcome the Aizawa sisters who manage the house, so who knows whether she can subjugate humankind.

Genre: comedy, slice of life
Theme: Beach, Invaders
Status: airing
Time: Mon 26:00+JST
Length: 12
Duration: 24m

Links: Official Official Official ANN

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Refreshing sea-side comedy! Tentacles aplenty! Dumb verbal quirks! And somehow I am not turned off. We’ll see if the second episode wears out the series’ welcome and turns it into something that is annoying and nothing else, but for now I am entertained. Keep squirting that ink, Squid Girl!

Hyakka Ryouran (2010-10-03) Series

Description

The story takes place in Japan in the early 21st century, in an alternate reality where the Tokugawa Shogunate has remained in power. In this reality, student councils are tasked with oppressing schools. Yagyuu Muneakira is a high school student who rebels against his student council with the help of girls who've had the names of famous samurai heroes passed on to them.

Genre: action, romance
Theme: ecchi, samurai
Episodes: 12
Status: airing
Time: Sun 24:30+JST
Duration: 24m

Links: Official Official ANN

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The answer is epic win. If nothing else, this show is rocking the season (the year?!?!) with its distinctive art style. Mad props for that—it seriously puts Katanagatari to shame, and looks like it’ll be what Queen’s Blade always wanted to be in terms of how visually appealing its fanservice is. “T&A isn’t everything; it must be aesthetically satisfying,” quoth the #AnimeHipster.

(I actually watched this pilot a long time ago—when the pre-air version came out—but didn’t think to mention it here until now. But there it is! Fall 2010, epic samurai schoolgirl fanservice! Enjoy!)

Ciao.

That’s it for your third glance at the new season, notdotq’s Fall 2010 Grope Test. Tune in next time for… a Listen Test? A Watch Test?

Positively taken with the masterful art-style present from episode one of endearing slice-of-life/comedy K-on!, I hung myself upside down from a tree for three weeks in order to contemplate the meaning of my relatively bland existence. I died and was reborn, and when I examined my robes I found them gray no longer. (They were blood-soaked, possibly the result of the runes.) I took a long, soapy bath and, when the laundry finished drying, I looked at my figure in the mirror.

My Days, Jim, has kindly recorded the words I uttered as I examined my new self:

“I have become moe, destroyer of brains.”

(Thanks, Jim.)

As I stood there, transfixed by my own fixation, I realized that I was missing but one thing: a musical instrument. I was going to revive pop music. I quantum divided my hand into a drill, focused on the tones I most dearly wished to reproduce, pierced time and space and the twelfth wall, and—you guessed it—produced my instrument: a shiny new well-greased flute.

Transformation complete, I stand before you on my wobbly spearlegs.

Now, who will be my three accomplices? I know that I’m the most bad-ass thing to ever set foot on the stage of the world, but a band is four (or five?!?!!?!?), not one.

UPDATE: Please post your interest in joining the band in the comments below, along with your cell-phone numbers. You will receive anonymous texts instructing you where to go for your… *ahem*… auditions.