Monochrome Factor Episode 1 - Silver Shadow

OP - Metamorphose (Asriel) - the strings in this make the song sound SO much like Tsubasa wa Pleasure line from Chrno Crusade it’s uncanny. Anyway, I like the song for no apparent reason - the OP gives absolutely NOTHING away about the show, you just see the main characters and a bit of fighting. How am I supposed to make predictions about the rest of the show now? (note: this will become important later in the entry)

ED - Awake ~my everything~ (a couple of seiyuu) - oh, the hideous cheese, it causes me pain! A very monochromatic, and thus fitting, ending animation, where the characters look curiously different (better) than they do in the episode.

Yes, that IS a man wearing lipstick who is not a transvestite. Yes, it IS a bit weird.

Anyway, summary - well, not much of one, as there’s not really much plot to speak of. Akira Nikaido is a mildly delinquent young man with a regular shounen sense of justice; his mildly annoying best friend is one Kengo Asamura, and his tsundere nemesis is class president Aya Suzuno - they’re all obviously important as they turn up in the OP hitting things with swords and boxing gloves, so we should expect more of them later on. To cut a fairly uninteresting story short, they end up in school at night looking for a stuffed toy of Aya’s when they’re attacked by shadowy monsters, as predicted by freaky dreams Akira’s been having and by a strange, extremely camp man in a cloak called Shirogane who accosts Akira on his way home from school. Eventually, after some hoo-ing and haa-ing, Shirogane transforms Akira into a shadowy version of himself who can beat these monsters in order to preserve the balance between Light and Dark yadda yadda fishcakes rhubarb.

Please feel free to ignore the rest of this entry, because it is going to defy any rules of common sense whatsoever.

I don’t know why, but I find Monochrome Factor strangely interesting, and it’s not just my completely unfounded and irrational Mag Garden-philia rearing its superpowered slightly androgynous head. This episode is fascinating precisely because it seems so utterly mediocre that I think there must be something up the team behind its sleeves other than gratuitous bishounen kissing. The story is painfully thin - Nabari no Ou at least sets up a continuing arc with Joji Nakata and his Voice of Evil in the first episode, but Monochrome Factor doesn’t have anything beyond “bad things - fight them!”. The art style is totally flat and uninteresting, the animation sparse and only competent, the acting barely beyond cliched (if you’ve seen one tsundere you’ve seen them all…) and the structure of the episode all over the place. Yet all this (plus a catchy OP) has only served to make me more interested in seeing what the HELL the show is going to do to string itself out over at least 13 episodes. Normally I’d have some idea of, say, an arch nemesis turning up or at least SOMETHING like a story arc, but I’m coming up completely blank on this one.

Monochrome Factor is not a good show, and it’s not something I’d recommend taking time out of your anime viewing schedules to sample if you weren’t going to already. It must be lack of something in my diet, then, that means I plan on watching the second episode next week…

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