asshi and Arumi are still in grade school, but they've been friends all their lives—thanks to their family businesses in Osaka's Abenobashi Shopping Arcade, they're practically neighbors. At least, until Sasshi's family moves into a small condo, forcing him to sacrifice his prized collection of geeky paraphernalia. Meanwhile, Arumi's father wants to shut down the family restaurant and move to Hokkaido. The entire shopping arcade is slowly folding, leaving the goofy anime series Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi to begin on a solemn, low-key note, as
the two children revisit their family history and prepare for their separation.
One topic that comes up along the way is the links between their families and their businesses. But as Sasshi and Arumi uncover a family mystery, an accident destroys an old protection around the shopping arcade, and the whole place collapses like a stage set. The children find themselves in front of a castle, where Arumi's father appears to be the king, and a local transvestite named Ms. Aki has become a well-endowed (though still disturbingly masculine) woman, who loads the kids up with gold and sends them off to fight the "Great Evil Lord." Baffled, Arumi and Sasshi obey, but they're attacked by a scantily clad woman named Mune-mune. A helpful mole holds up a sign indicating Mune-mune's level and hit points; once she attacks, it indicates that Sasshi has taken 30 hit points of damage and died. Arumi resurrects him by returning him to a save point, whereupon it becomes clear that they're in a fantasy-themed video-game world, where the obvious genre rules must be obeyed.
From there, they proceed to a science-fiction-themed world full of space pirates and giant robots, and a martial-arts-themed world in which Sasshi must train with a giant panda and don a Bruce Lee outfit to win a tournament. In each world, they encounter genre-appropriate versions of Mune-mune, Ms. Aki, and their own family members and in each world they must find and defeat a pesky goblin, which tries to send them home. But the goblins keep screwing up, sending the kids on to still more parody universes.
Genre-flavored parody that rarely lets up
The obvious touchstone for Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi is Excel Saga, an earlier comedy series centering on episode-by-episode genre parodies, in-jokes, frantic action, over-the-top humor and non-lethal protagonist deaths. But FLCL also seems like a partial inspiration, given Arcade's bizarre visual distortions, initial serious tone and eventual break into near-nonsense. Still, once Arcade shifts into hyper mode in the second episode, it rarely lets up. The humor sometimes seems entirely random, as though the writers were simply cramming in every style of humor they could think of—running jokes range from digs at Osaka to mega-excessive fan service to repeated visual gags (sometimes literally) involving the hairy,
mannish Ms. Aki in revealing female attire.
Like FLCL, Arcade doesn't stick to a visual style long enough for viewers to get
complacent. The initial episode, in which Arumi and Sasshi wander forlornly around their neighborhood, is pretty and very well executed, and by contrast the frenetic later episodes seem visually sloppy, given all the super-deformed characters and flying sweat drops and immobile pose-panels and such. It's all deliberate, of course, it's just not as cleanly attractive as the initial simple imagery of the kids' real-life world. At least there's always plenty to see.
And there's plenty to watch for as well: Half the fun of series like this comes from trying to get all the references. In a 2001: A Space Odyssey-inspired sequence in episode 3, Sasshi
finds a monolith, regresses to a bone-pounding ape, evolves back to himself and witnesses the beginning and end of the universe. In episode 4, he trains with a panda out of Ranma 1/2 who turns him into Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star; once he goes into battle, he becomes, by turns, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and a pumped-up Dragonball Z parody. Like Excel Saga, Arcade is to some degree a game of spot-the-reference, and it's most likely to appeal to fans who either enjoy that game or just like their comedy broad, bubbly,
slapstick-driven and genre-flavored.
Fortunately for American viewers, this disc comes with optional pop-up video notes, which explain the many Japanese-language puns and cultural references. ADV used similar notes to good effect in Excel Saga, and they're just as welcome here. If nothing else, it's useful to know the source of Mune-mune's name.
— Tasha
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