Kami Sama no Memo Chou
Studio:  J.C. Staff
Premiere Date:  7/2
Reviewed: 7/7
Genre: Mystery

First Impression: I was right, GoSick without the period setting.

In the first, almost hour long, episode of Kamisama no Memo chou, the hero is introduced as Narumi Fujishima. Living in his own world, he is approached one day by his classmate Ayaka who has a couple of special tasks for him: join the gardening club and help out in a restaurant. When he visits the restaurant for the first time, he is introduced to a number of characters who are all working for a NEET detective named Alice.

Somehow finding himself pulled into her world, Narumi joins those who are working as her assistant as she investigates the mysterious disappearance of a high school girl who went missing after it was revealed she was working as a prostitute.

Good and the Bad

Before this series even started I was getting an image that I was going to be watching GoSick only without the cute Victorian loli character and I was right. This is exactly that only with more people working as assistants to the genius detective. This is both good and bad. While it’s bad for the obvious reasons, it’s good in its own way for the turns that it takes as it presents its opening mystery.

The unique approach here is that this is a series that isn’t going to be afraid to explore some much darker issues. In this first episode, a high school girl loaded down with pressures from real life forces horrible things onto her body and goes missing because of it. Other story tidbits from around the internet indicate that in the future this series will also be exploring the rarely used theme of drugs within the Japanese society. This is a series that is promising things for its future that few series ever do.

The issue here is that the presentation of the first episode isn’t particularly gripping. While all of the usual motions are made, the longer runtime did not play positively for this series. The pacing for the episode felt slow the entire duration and really drug the episode down as the episode was slowly played out. You could almost compare the workings of this episode to an episode of House; “Have we wasted enough time? Good, here’s what really happened…”

Overall

I wasn’t as impressed with this episode as the creators obviously wanted me to be. While a nice attempt at the mystery genre, this first episode feels a little too clunky to get me excited about watching more. I am hopeful for the next couple of episodes but I fear this one is going to end up in the dropped column before long.