The Summer 2010 Anime Preview Guide : Asobi ni Iku yo

Asobi ni Iku yo!
Rating: 4 (of 5)

Review: Although this may not be the best series of the new season, it is almost unquestionably the most surprising. The advertising artwork and plot blurbs for the series pitch it as a romantic comedy
with a typical “sexy alien girlfriend” shtick, and indeed the first episode certainly showcases some of that, complete with the expected scene of featured catgirl-alien Eris waking up, provocatively clothed, in central boy Kio's bed. Unlike in nearly every other like case, though, Eris isn't doing it because she's already hopelessly in love with Kio; she just sees it as a comfortable spot to curl up for the night. In fact, there's no indication by the end of the first episode that she's actually in love with Kio at all. She came to Earth “to research the planet and have fun at the same time” and cheerily goes about doing exactly that.

But that is far from the biggest twist the first episode delivers. The prologue scene is actually a hard-core action scene involving a young woman (other than Eris) in combat armor, but that wouldn't be so unusual; To Love-Ru started out with an action scene, too. No, the even bigger twists come after the episode starts looking like it's going to settle down into more mundane romantic comedy territory, when we start discovering that, while Eris is happily frank about her identity and intentions, everyone else around Kio is not who or what they appear to be. Some people, it seems, cannot handle the notion that mankind's first contact with aliens is with someone as ridiculous as Eris, and they intend to resort to lethal measures to rectify that situation.

In other words, what we have here is a legitimate attempt to - gasp! - actually do something different with one of the most trite anime gimmicks of the past decade. In fact, AIC PLUS+

So far this approach works wonderfully well, as it provides both fan service standbys and plenty of pretty girls to look at while doing its weird plot twists, but can it keep this unexpected level of freshness up over the long haul? If it can then this could be one of the year's landmark series.

Asobi ni Iku yo! is available streaming on Crunchyroll.