It really goes for a big fake-out at the end but fails to do anything memorable up until that point.
Okay, so this is one of Those Shows where the first episode is made to hide the real point of the show and it pulls a big Gotcha at the end to indicate that there’s gonna be a genre shift, but the problem is that the episode preceding that moment is so boring that it falls flat on its face. To wit:
School-Live! peppered its first episode with background details and a strangely unsettling atmosphere before pulling the rug out from under the viewer and explaining itself, Puella Magi Madoka Magica had some very dark things happen even while trying to present itself as a normal kids’ magical girl show, and even KADO The Right Answer had an incredibly engaging first episode demonstrating how useful the talent of negotiation was long before it was necessary (or, uh, wasn’t) to save the world. Pastel Memories’ first episode is twenty minutes of girls in the same outfit searching Akihabara for a specific manga, meaning that it all looks kind of the same and the most interesting artistic decision is the choice to rip off Is the Order a Rabbit? and saturate the hell out of the main characters’ candy-colored hair. The main cast are also annoyingly peppy and asinine, and I can’t remember the name of a single one of them.
The reveal at the end of the episode that this is going to be a universe-hopping show gives me less confidence that it can pull it off than Girl in the Twilight gave me last season, and that one I dropped halfway through, so this is a big ol’ skip for me. 3/10.
The Arcane Archive 