azuki Yotsuga sees phantom robots. His friends think he's weird and his schoolmates giggle at him behind his back, but Kazuki himself has adjusted pretty well to sudden visions of monstrous battles, with intangible wreckage and phantom missiles streaking toward him. He even names his favorite giant robot Hartzenen, and he posts regular reports of the robots' building-smashing battles on his home Web site.
The sudden interest of school idol Mitsuki Sanada is a bit harder to adjust to, though, and the enraptured fascination of her mad-scientist father, Ken, is downright disturbing. Ken believes Kazuki's the key to an experiment involving parallel dimensions, which Ken's famous, Nobel-Prize-nominated rival, Hiroshi Rara, has dismissed as unprovable nonsense. Ken quickly nabs Kazuki and zaps him into the theoretical parallel dimension, advising his unwilling subject to find the alternate Ken Sanada on the other side and ask to be sent home.
Unfortunately for Kazuki, it turns out that in the parallel world, Ken Sanada is the busy leader of the Earth Defense Force, a U.N.-sponsored organization whose giant robots (Hartzenen among them) hold the line against the dictatorial designs of the alternate Hiroshi Rara. The war for the world is moderately civilized; the Rara Army announces battlegrounds in advance (by broadcasting upbeat "trailers" for upcoming fights) so the areas can be evacuated. But the battle's left Ken no time to work on his own research, so he has no way to send Kazuki home.
Again, Kazuki seems to adjust fairly well, although he never existed in the parallel world and suddenly has no family or friends. Instead, he has a bevy of female admirers, including the pilot he replaced; Rara's gentle daughter; Mitsuki Sanada, who also made the crossover; and "D," a near-silent alien clone found in the same artifact that granted Ken and Hiroshi the power to make giant psychic fighting robots. Kazuki quickly ends up piloting one of those robots (Hartzenen itself, naturally), though their interface normally accepts only female pilots. Suddenly, everyone on both sides is very interested in who he is and what makes him tick.
Everything but the mecha sink
Parallel Dual is an astonishingly derivative conflation of just about every hoary old anime standby, all rolled up together in one big entertaining package. From parallel-world teen saviors to the meek-boy-surrounded-by-competitive-female-harem paradigm to the endless parade of alien-tech-inspired weapons and psychic robot battle-suits, virtually everything about Dual has already been done a hundred times over. Even the character and mech designs carry constant echoes of earlier works, from the original Bubblegum Crisis to Neon Genesis Evangelion.
But Dual somehow still manages to find its own footing. While the series openly parodies (and frequently imitates) Evangelion, and draws much of its character from Tenchi Muyo (also an AIC project, with several creators in common), Dual strikes a comfortable balance between comedy and drama that doesn't lean too heavily on either Evangelion's cosmic melodrama or Tenchi's often-shrill humor. While Kazuki is a bit too much like Tenchi (and Evangelion protagonist Shinji Ikari) in that much of his personality is a meek reflection of whoever's closest to him, the females in his life are out to win him with kindness rather than beating him and each other into submission. Instead of constant explosive catfights, they mostly hold quiet cook-offs. Their understated competition and their basic humanity give parts of Dual a pleasantly dreamy, mildly reflective flavor, closer to that of Oh My Goddess! than to the various other series it follows in structure and plot.
There are quite a few tonal variations, including the de rigueur slapstick, quite a bit of genial goofiness related to the artificial nature of the Rara War, little slices of mystery and romance and even some fairly gripping conflict, particularly as the series heats up and rockets towards a surprisingly explosive conclusion. Longtime anime fans who can't help but recognize Dual's many sources will initially have to decide individually whether they find the show's copycat nature enjoyable or irritating. But it's well worth sticking with the series for its full run. Dual never really covers new ground, but it walks familiar paths with a reckless, funny, solid confidence and a definite visual flair.
