Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
Pervy lesbian girlfailure seeks to join the power armor-clad alien defense force / idol agency for the space colony she lives in, despite her vast, galloping incompetence in every relevant field. Need I say more?
I mean, I literally do, but if you wanted a concise pitch for alice gear aegis Expansion you could do way worse. I jokingly called this show “Bocchi the Mech” to some of my friends as I was watching the first episode, and that’s not entirely accurate—Nodoka (Miyari Nemoto), our lead, is way more together than Bocchi ever was. Also, this show isn’t quite as good as BTR yet—but it does a good enough job of summing the whole thing up. Nodoka is a fangirl of Actresses, idols / mecha musume-style battle girls who defend her planet from alien invaders. She desperately wants to be an Actress, so she can fight alongside her favorite of them all, Yotsuyu (Manami Numakura), who she is ludicrously, obviously gay for. Unfortunately, she’s been ruled unfit to pilot a Gear—the Actresses’ equipment—via a computerized test. Initially it seems like there’s not much to be done about that, but we’ll circle back around to that point.
First, let’s hone in on the name of these battle armor units. Yeah, they just straight up are called Gears. I’m not going to sit here and say that Alice Gear is a front-to-back rip of Symphogear, because it isn’t, but the influence is obvious. Symphogear is one of my favorite anime of all time, despite some flaws, so one might expect that I’d be very harsh on Alice Gear because of this. To be honest, though, there are much worse things to try to be than Symphogear. Assault Lily Bouquet managed to make it work, so there’s no reason this couldn’t, too, but the actual fighting part of the genre seems fairly incidental to Alice Gear, (despite a very strong opening action sequence, only killed a little bit by some harsh screen-dimming) which instead traffics mainly in zany character comedy, at least so far. One might be more inclined to think of it as something of a parody of this kind of show. Again, a solid idea.
Much of this first episode is basically a single long training montage. Yotsuyu (and some of the other girls) get the notion that if they can build Nodoka’s stamina, she might be able to pass the test. Thus, a parade of ridiculous things like having her balance books on her head while walking on a narrow bridge over a river filled with alligators, practice asking people to please buy idol tickets while wearing heavy cartoony balls-and-chains, etc.
Not all of these jokes work; there is a particularly unfunny bit where one of the characters dons A Certain Kind of Military Uniform to show that she’s going hardass mode. (Maybe rethink that one, guys.) But a lot of them do, and Nodoka’s sheer shameless infatuation with Yotsuyu is fairly endearing. Not even the presence of old-school romcom cliches like high-pressure nosebleeds can kill it.
There’s an interesting little twist at the end, indicating that there might be a little more to this show than just jokes. Time will tell, but I do hope we get to see Nodoka fight at least a few times.
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