Let there be a hot spring!

What They Say:
The Hackadolls go to a mountain hot springs resort to relax both their minds and bodies. However, the resort receives an inauspicious notice, taking things in the wrong direction…

The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With the last episode swinging into territory that while it had some amusing moments didn’t do too much for me overall. The whole video game/virtual reality side is done to death and it’s just not something that in the context of this series that works for me. Which, of course, is why I feel weird about saying that I was looking forward to this episode since it takes place at a hot spring resort. If there’s something that’s done to death, it’s certainly that. But with this series having played well with most of the other clichés so far and finding good ways to rework them, I went into this with a bit of hope and anticipation – on top of the potential for fanservice fun that the show has worked well with so far.

And they do have fun with it from the start, being more overt than a lot of other shows and actually feeling like they went a bit further in some ways. A decent chunk of the early part of the episode is just all the gratuitous skin showing where it’s all pans and “ahhhs” from the actresses as they savor the hot spring. This can’t be the whole episode – though it could certainly try it – and it instead delves into a murder mystery that they get caught up in. It works the familiar tropes as you’d expect with the detective and even some of the other guests at the inn, reminding me of both Kindaichi and Detective Conan as it should. The girls get excited, eventually, at the prospect of helping and becoming assistants. They definitely have some fun with it doing the whole good cop bad cop routine and more, even if there’s no real meat to the episode itself. It’s all about the humor and parody here that’s well executed.

In Summary:
Hacakadoll has some fun here as it sends up the detective storylines with some good fun and nice homages to what’s come before (and what’s in most shows). It aims itself mostly at Detective Conan and it certainly works well enough. The hot spring material at the beginning is certainly in the shows wheelhouse as well and that’s largely well executed too, though some of the character model stuff looked a bit off early on. All in all, a pretty fun episode, especially if you are a fan of the mystery model and how it works.

Grade: B+

Streamed By: Crunchyroll

Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Apple TV via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.