Probably my last "first impressions" post of the season, here are my thoughts on the first episode of Fractale, a show that may or may not have to do with fractals. It is kind of depressing how all of these people choose terrible-looking avatars. An iPod with a SD slot... would be nice but you know it'll never happen in our world. Summary of the first episode: In the future, a young boy named Clain lives in a house near the sea more or less by himself. Under the current Fractale system, Clain's parents along with many other people represent themselves using weird looking avatars called "doppels" which can be made to disappear by real people, and these days Clain sees more doppels than real people. How is aerodynamically possible for that twin-blimp thing to catch up to a sleek plane-bike? Clain is such a gentleman, even going out of his way to break the girl's fall. While out looking for some antique electronics, Clain spots a girl in a small plane being chased by a weird airship. The girl spots Clain and jumps off her plane and seemingly falls into the sea. After the airship leaves, Clain climbs down the seaside cliffs and finds the girl injured, and Clain leads the girl back home to get her patched up despite never having seen a real girl before. After learning that the girl's name is Phryne, Clain wonders why she was being chased by decides to let Phryne take her time. At this moment, the people chasing Phryne, a young girl and two men, barge into the house to look for Phryne, but Phryne manages to elude them and sabotages their airship so the the girl and her two cronies fly off uncontrollably into the sky. Smile!!! The girl and her cronies might not be the brightest trio around, but Clain ain't all that smart either by answering the door so many times. Afterwards, Clain leads Phryne up to his favorite spot which is the ruins of a church, but he falls asleep while Phryne is talking about the moon. The next day, Clain wakes up and discovers that Phryne is gone but she had left her brooch on him. Back home, Clain realizes that the brooch is some sort of data storage device and tries to access it, and to his surprise a red-haired young girl materializes on his computer desk. Once you see one girl, girls just can't stop appearing. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ An interesting first episode. The episode mostly took things easy, but it did a nice job introducing a world that looks utopian on surface but has some problems and mysteries underneath. I'm not sure why people choose to represent themselves using weird avatars instead of... say a hologram of themselves, but it's one of the things that define the world. The character art is simple, but the overall visual effect is very nice and is reminiscent of Studio Ghibli movies. Everything looks (for the lack of a better word) "cute", including all important characters introduced so far. They just seem like a cheerful and likable bunch. Overall I thought the premiere of Fractale was kind of refreshing, and I'm not really sure why. It's might because it's been a while since I've watched anything without a lot of violence and/or fan service, but I'm not sure if that's even true. Anyways, I liked the debut of Fractale more than those of Infinite Stratos (second episode was better, but still not that good) and Freezing. I'll see if I have the time to episode-blog any of these shows though. From the feed of A Product of Wasted Time
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