Seitokai no Ichizon
生徒会の一存
Student Council’s Judgement
Premiere Date: 10/2
Studio: Studio Deen
Genre: Otaku Comedy
Trailer (click ニュース)

Starting pretty much the same way I believe every episode is going to begin, episode one of Seitokai no Ichizon starts within a meeting of the Heikyo Academy student council. Made up of four cute girls and a perverted guy who’s only in as a perk of being valedictorian, the first episode is broken into two parts. In the first half of the episode, around eleven minutes of conversation revolving around anime, eroge, visual novels and harem endings as valedictorian Sugisaki exclaims his quest to obtain the harem ending with the girls of the student council. Moving into a minor story in the second half, the student council is given an actual task to accomplish but no one wants the pervert’s help to get things done.

Good and the Bad

Before I started this series, I had no idea that it was going to be a comedy in this vein and gods help me, I enjoy silly otaku comedy. Call it a weak point but the jokes always make me laugh. That said, I knew I was in trouble with this series as soon as the introduction started and I watched almost three minutes of the characters breaking the fourth wall to talk about the series they were about to star in. In these first minutes, the Seitokai characters will reference the manga and Amazon reviews before discussing how they think the series should be presented. And I was almost completely won over.

From here, Seitokai no Ichizon does exactly what successful series in the past have done before to get a laugh: drop references and tropes every few seconds and hope that most of them are funny. Luckily for the series and its audience, the writing through the rest of the episode remains sharp enough to keep the audience laughing. If you wanted to accuse Seitokai of anything at all, it would be what has started as an early need to milk a joke to death.

The entire first half of the episode deals with setting up Sugisaki as a pervert who enjoys erotic video games. Not only that but it has also been deemed that in order to get this point across, you will be hit with a string of visual novel jokes that runs for minutes on end. The jokes are funny and really do a good job of establishing some personalities early but I can only hope future episodes plan to break things up a little bit.

Here comes the disclaimer; the first episode has led me to classify this series as ‘otaku comedy’ meaning most of these jokes are going to make no sense to a lot of people watching. While most of the references dropped in the first episode were a little more obvious, it seems likely that the references are only going to get more obscure from here on out.

Getting past the writing, the characters and animation in Seitokai are all visually pleasing examples of moe archtypes: pint sized president Sakurano, the serious secretary Chizuru, the tsundere vice president Minatsu and her sweet sister Mafuyu.

Music

The series relies on a lot of sound effects but other than that, the music rarely stood out as anything particularly memorable. Using a soft pop theme to open the series, I was surprised that the parodies weren’t carried further into a dance number for the opening animation but the sound of the theme was still a nice segue into the episode.

And by the way, if anyone was wondering where the fan service was in the middle of the episode, you’ll find it all in the closing animation.

Overall

Ok just to get it out of the way, for me personally; the first episode of this series was an entirely entertaining start. I laughed most of the way through the episode and even if some sections dragged on, I can’t imagine not finishing it now that I’ve started. That’s just me though. Not everyone is going to get the same amount of laughs as the person next to them with this series. A lot of the humor early on was based on in jokes and references but as characters become more developed one would expect that the jokes are going to get a bit more accessible. If the first episode left you cold, I would suggest sticking with it for another episode or two. It’s the hardcore otaku who are going to rally around this series the fastest… and loudest.

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