Funniest Show of The Season – Asobi Asobase Review

Asobi Asobase or Players/Pastimer Club is a strange and wondrous show literally from start to finish. This show starts out as a very stereotypical shoujo, in that the intro is sweet enough to give you diabetes. When it properly starts out however, we find it is a comedy built into a number of skits, much like other meme-worthy comedy shows such as Haven’t You Heard? I’m Sakamoto, Aho-Girl, Dropkick On My Devil, and Tsuredure Children with a considerable amount of humor in great bite sized sketches wrapped in full length episodes. Asobi Asobase stars and mainly revolves around three girls who comprise the aforementioned Pastimer Club and their interactions with the other organizations at school.

First off we have Hanako Honda, an energetic rich girl with a crazy imagination, flat chest (a very comedic plot point), and eccentric family. She starts off the show interacting with Olivia, a blonde haired, blue-eyed girl who speaks broken Japanese, as she pretends to be an American transfer student, even though she speaks no English. Watching the two of them as they play “look over there” but with full slaps instead of flicks, is Kasumi Nomura. Kasumi despises playing games due to her sister constantly beating her and always forcing her to do chores such as retrieving ice cream on a hot summer day. While seeming studious, Kasumi is doing very poorly in English class, and requests Olivia give her English lessons as a prize for winning a game, which of course Olivia is not well suited to give. After brutally losing “look over there” Olivia “teaches,” her the cliche saying “Give me chocolate,” something the Japanese children told US marines post-WWII.

The three of them form the Pastimer Club and move forward coming up with random games to play and interacting with other clubs such as the Occult and Shogi clubs. We have them interact with a number of other people at school, ranging from their sketchy teacher who did the world’s most awkward taste test, to the student council president who won because her VP frankly terrified everyone into voting for her. All the characters are great and there’s even a kind of character development you don’t typically see in this type of comedy show. We have Olivia’s lack of English skills slowly revealed to others (while still keeping the gimmick alive) and a recurring joke about Hanako’s imagination culminating in my favorite shogi scene ever.

Moving off this, we have my next direct point I wanted to make about this show, and that is the art style itself. I’m not kidding when I say the art changes are so drastic and interesting it’s almost like different artists animated this show throughout the entirety of the season. While not as radical as 18if, which actually had different art directors, the show had different styles that for the most part had me really surprised with every episode. Beyond that, there was one factor that never varied from quality, and that is when they make horror faces. The scary faces these girls have when in an awkward, scared, or otherwise abnormal situation are things that make you think you are watching Junji Ito.

All in all, I really enjoyed this show and look forward to a continuation later on in the future. Asobi Asobase has been a great comedy and is my ringer for comedy of the year, which sucks because I totally felt that way about Dropkick on my Devil! I randomly decided to pick Asobi Asobase up and found it something I ran through in about a weekend, laughing the entire time. My last note for the show is the ED, which opposed to the OP, is well…different. Much like our own @piecesofminty, it starts out sweet and innocent enough (the OP), then you find out about her rusty axe collection (the ED).