The off the wall harem comedy known as D-Fragments (or D-Frag! for short) has been gaining some notoriety online on late. The general set-up of the show is nothing particularly unusual: a delinquent starts his new high school with a desire to make a name for himself, but is forced to join a game creation club run a group of near-psychopathic women. With only a slight twist on so many other series, this should come across a just another generic show. It should do, but it doesn’t.
The heart of the show is in the wonderful cast of characters, and in particular their eccentricities. While it would be true to say that at a base level not one of them is original (one even has more than a passing physical resemblance to Revy of Black Lagoon fame), each of the various leads does an admirable job of drawing you into their weird and wacky world … with one exception.
Sakura, the pink haired tomboy of the group, is given a lot of time to grow in the source manga. Some of her scenes with the aforementioned delinquent, Kenji Kazama, not only give away that she is a legitimate genius, but also give a wonderful insight into how her mind works. In the anime however, a lot of these scenes are either cut completely or altered to the point that Sakura becomes nothing more than ‘that pink haired on that likes water’. The writers obviously realised that this an issue however, as the eight volume of the manga came packaged with an OVA adaption of the popular ‘Shrine Water’ story arc, itself a vehicle to further progress Sakura as a character.
The humour in the show is pretty much spot on if you’re looking for something that borders on the bizarre, and Kenji is perfectly cast as the sane straight man that has to deal with his club mates’ destructive nature. In all, this makes for a thoroughly entertaining, but ever so slightly insane comedy that stands out far more than it has a right to. Be warned though, if the idea of a board game based around gathering intergalactic porn magazines offends you, you’re onto a loser here.
Yay to picking random anime and having it turn out to be a good watch. That's basically how I pick.... but perhaps I should be reading these tides and picking based on them. – Tatijana8 years ago