Asobi Asobase is a 12 episode anime based upon the manga series. There are two short specials and an OVA that was bundled with the DVD / Blu-Ray and manga releases. It is a slice of life anime following the trio in high school, Honda Hanako, Olivia, and Nomura Kasumi. Each episode has a few shorts and the anime focuses on comedy. There are frequent art shifts of the characters’ faces during their highly exaggerated reactions.
Kasumi hates playing games since she was forced to do so when she was young. She would play against her older sister and whenever she lost, she is forced to do something. This has scarred her for life. Kasumi is quietly menacing with an intense stare and loves to read books. She is somewhat decent at school but very bad at English. Olivia is a foreigner but she likes to pretend her Japanese is poor. However, she is actually really bad at English since she grew up in Japan. Due to being tense and embarrassed during her introduction to the class, she ends up playing as a foreigner who just moved to Japan and thus her English is great but speaks broken Japanese. This will continually come back to bite her over the anime and is a source of plenty of humor.
Hanako is an energetic girl who is surprisingly both academically and physically gifted. Yet she can be completely stupid and naive at times. However, she has a grudge against anyone who is popular since she wants to become popular herself. At the beginning of the anime, she is shown to be tricked by Olivia, thinking Olivia had just transferred from America and becomes her buddy to show her around.
So how do the three get together? Kasumi, thinking Olivia is amazing at English, being a native speaker and all, forces Olivia to help her. As a result, and through a lot of twists and turns, the three form the Past-timers Club after school club, which is basically an excuse to do whatever they wanted. As the series progresses, we learn more about each of the characters that makes them unique. Kasumi has an irrational fear of boys and is into the genre of boys’ love. Hanako is a rich girl who is a bit naive due to her upbringing and is really conscious of her bust size. There are weird recurring characters who seem to have out of the ordinary powers, there are lifelike androids, and other characters who are addicted to unusual things.
The humor comes from the reactions of the characters, as well as the surprisingly weird actions of characters whom you least expect it. Usually, a character does something and it is the implications of what they did that will hit you after a second or so. There are some really funny one-liners when you least expect it. On the other hand, all the constant overreactions, shrieking and yelling can cause it to feel like a repetitive wave of background noise.
There is some reliance on crude humor and playing on the tropes of pop culture. These references range from sci-fi movies to anime and all the way down to hentai. There is nothing taboo that the anime will not touch. As is typical for this type of anime, there are huge exaggerations from the characters in ridiculous predicaments. Fighting for classroom usage rights? Let’s make it a super serious competition of who can kick their shoe the furthest, and to make it even better, let’s bring props to help with the run up.
Then we have the hilarious moments such as when the trio dabbles into the games of the occult. This leads to some choice quotes that you have to understand the context to know why it is so crazily funny. Then in the next episode, they will suspect that there is a cross-dresser attending their all girls’ school and thus launch some crazy antics to find out who it is. Overall, Asobi Asobase might seem like an innocent cheery upbeat anime about a few high schoolers but it is much more than this. The situations that they find themselves in, the antics that they get up to, and the fact that the anime pushes in what is acceptable to be aired makes this anime a pleasant surprise.
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