Anime Recommendations: "Asobi Asobase"

Asobi Asobase might not look pretty, but it is probably one of the funniest anime that I've ever seen.

I'm not ashamed to say that I like slice of life anime, especially series about cute girls doing cute things. At first glance and after reading the description on MyAnimeList, it would seem like Asobi Asobase is an anime about cute girls doing cute things. Even after watching the opening theme, I was starting to think that this series was about sweet and innocent girls hanging out and going on fun everyday adventures together. That turned out to not be the case at all.

Asobi Asobase is about the strange and twisted daily school life of three middle school students. Hanako Honda is a good student and a gifted athlete, but she's also an idiot who can easily be tricked and she is almost clueless to the absurdity of her life. Kasumi Nomura is a studious and shy girl who can in an instant become terrifying and almost murderous. And Olivia is an American student who cannot speak English and pretends to not understand Japanese just to mess with Hanako.

Together, these girls for a Past-Timers Club where they spend their free time hanging out in an empty classroom playing classic past time games and getting themselves into really odd and random situations. In one episode they get into a contest with the Shogi club to see who can kick their shoes the farthest, and the game ends with one girl getting her entire body mangled. In another episode, Hanako puts Kasumi on a witch trial because Hanako believes that Kasumi kissed a boy.

The series also has some hilarious and sometimes terrifying reaction images. While a lot of slice of life anime have brief moments where the main characters become chibi versions of themselves in order to convey humor and the adorableness of the characters, Asobi Asobase presents ugly and terrifying versions of the characters that, for a moment, make you think that you're watching a horror anime.

Asobi Asobase continues to just get stranger and stranger with every episode and whenever I thought that the show couldn't become anymore ridiculous or hilarious, I was quickly proven wrong. Out of all the series that I watched this past Summer season, Asobi Asobase was the one series that I wanted to watch as soon as a new episode came out. While I'm not sure if a second season will be released, I do know that there will be some specials and an OVA, so I'm looking forward to those.

So, if you're looking for a slice of life series that defies all the typical conventions that have come to define this genre, or if you just really want to laugh at something absurd, then I suggest that you check out Asobi Asobase.