I’m not going to be blogging this series episode-to-episode, but I thought I’d give my thoughts on the first episode of Nanatsuiro Drops.
Basically I thought this was a not-so-well-made attempt to be like Cardcaptor Sakura. Basically you have a magical girl with a grumpy talking stuffed animal as a sidekick who has to go around collecting things. That fairly describes both series. However, that’s about where the similarities end.
In Nanatsuiro Drops, the main focus, at least in the first episode, is on a boy named Tsuwabuki who, after getting a drink mixed up with a magical guy that he runs into, turns into a stuffed animal. For him to be able to return, he must enlist the aid of a magical girl (who doesn’t know she’s a magical girl) to collect 7 “Star Drops.”
So why didn’t I like this? Well, I tend to not like comparing one series to another so closely, but how much they are trying to mimic series like CCS makes such a comparison almost necessary. First off, the boy, who is called Yuki after he turns into a stuffed animal, has about the same temperament (if not worse) than Kero in CCS, hardly making him a character that the viewer has an interest in caring about. Yes, I know the series will probably be partly about his growth as a, er, person-in-stuffed animal form, but I, at least, frankly don’t give a squat over what happens to him.
The only person I might be able to feel that way about is the girl, Sumomo, yet, at least as of the first episode, she’s just kind of doing what she’s told and is more of a semi-minor character (though that’ll probably change, but we’ll see how).
Also, her collecting of the Star Drops are, shall we say, hardly challenging to me. She has a ring which tells her exactly where they are, and once she finds them, she basically has to say a magical phrase and volla, she’s collected them. It appears that the challenge in the series will be fighting off a rival rather than the challenge of finding the Star Drops (unlike CSS where there really isn’t any “enemy” so to speak - Sakura has to beat the very cards she has to collect, making it far more interesting, at least to me).
Of course, it’s impossible to completely judge a series based on one episode, but I’d have to say that Nanatsuiro Drops doesn’t exactly look like it’s headed in a good direction based on the initial show.
