2.5-jigen no Ririsa

This is (so far 3 episodes in) a watered down version of my dress up darling.

It is a show with a cosplay theme, a nerdy girl and an otaku fan of the anime character that the cosplayer is portraying.

The fact that this cosplay is a magical girl gets a bonus point out of me ♥️

I really enjoy it so far. The music is catchy, the premise is ok and I will finish watching this for sure.

It's hard to beat Wakana Gojo and Marin from dress up darling, but this one is absolutely worth a watch.

... ---

MAL forces me to write more so here we go:

Artstyle: Good but not great.
Intro: Cathy, fits the theme
Characters: Both female and male MC are likeable, yet no dress up darling level of great yet.

Here we go. First of all, a point I have to emphasize right at the beginning: ANIME IS CENSORED! The manga is much more explicit, very much. J.C Staff did the favor of removing the only interesting point from the work.

Fine, but if it’s bad, why did you mark it as mixed feelings? Simple, I definitely hate censorship. For me, if it’s adapting something, it has to be the same way as the original or improve what already has changing some things. However, there are some points that make me like this work: Traits of the characters are beautiful, the characters are beautiful, the ... plot does not appear to be dragged (so far), removed much of the ecchi but another small part remained... Given that it has studio that removes everything, then I would say it is a plus point.

Overall, I give my AVERAGE SCORE a 7. But depending on it, it can go down to 3-4.

A moment of silence for every manga fan who's heard an announcement that a beloved manga of theirs is getting an anime adaptation only to hear that J.C. Staff is the studio adapting it. A truly heart wrenching realization that it's going to be completely sullied beyond recognition.

I'm not typically one to rate things this early on and especially not to write a review on it but I feel obligated to in this case as a big fan of the source material who's watching this abomination of an adaptation. J.C. staff might be the biggest joke of a big name studio to still be ... producing anime in 2024. As if what they did to my believed OPM wasn't enough, they had to ruin another great manga.

For those unfamiliar with the source material, 2.5 dimensional seduction at it's core is pretty similar to the impression you would get reading the plot description and watching the first 3 episodes. An ecchi manga revolving around a hopeless otaku who only finds 2D girls attractive but starts to question this after seeing real life girls cosplay as his favorite characters. The key part of that missing in the anime is 'ecchi'.

The manga is true to the title of 'ecchi'. Uncensored and quite generous with the amount of fan service such as the usual panty shots, revealing clothing, changing scenes, and skimpy cosplay with the occasional full nude panels. The anime however doesn't deserve to be titled as such. Every ecchi scene is completely watered down to the point if I didn't know the source or see the tag, I would assume this was just a regular anime with very light fan service. Every revealing shot is basically completely out of frame or has convenient placement to not see so much as a slip of skin. Each scene meant to be the pinnacle of fan service in the source is watered down to a slight shot of skin and a little moan as if that makes things the same. Even the base design of Lileil's cosplay is completely censored down.

I will give credit where it's due. As far as the regular scenes go, it's a solidly produced show. But for a show tagged with 'ecchi', that alone doesn't cut it.

Being tame and vanilla is fine and I'm sure most people don't mind watching stuff like that. But chances are if you're willingly watching an ecchi anime, you're here for the goods. And I'm here to tell you, they're not here. Do yourself a favor and go read the manga for the real stuff. I've seen Cartoon Network Y-7 shows that are less vanilla than this so-called 'ecchi' anime.