Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		3.0

Date A Live: Season 1 Blu-ray Movie Review

Is this how Match.com got started?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman June 13, 2014

A by now somewhat politically incorrect anecdote about Asian restaurants has a customer ordering “one from Column A, one from Column B”, and so on, finally arriving at whatever the Eastern version of a smorgasbord might be (dim sum, maybe?). While tropes like this may have fallen out of favor in daily discourse (or even innocuous enough joking), they’re still alive and kicking in the world of anime, where various ideas and plotlines are often cobbled together from preexisting parts, kind of like an animated Frankenstein monster. Date A Live is a middling series that features a post-apocalyptic setting, certainly one of the more traditional contemporary anime tropes, and then works in everything from mecha to harem to lots of fan service just for good measure. In a few fairly tangential ways, Date A Live manages to occasionally offer a few relatively distinctive features. For example, unlike a lot of post- apocalyptic anime, we actually get to see the apocalypse, though it’s clearly labeled as having happened some thirty years previously. A huge “spacequake” envelops large portions of Japan, seeming to erupt downward from the heavens and then mushrooming out like an oily looking hydrogen bomb cloud. Though narration tells the viewer that hundreds of millions of people died in the ensuing carnage, Date A Live segues seamlessly into its perky and bouncy credits sequence, where a host of teenagers are plopped down in what look like pretty nicely developed urban environments. When even the apocalypse turns out to be kind of lackluster, it may not exactly augur well for any dramatic momentum, but then Date A Live takes the first of several fairly radical turns and indulges in a kind of smarmy sequence featuring the series’ hero, a teenage boy named Shido Itsuka, whose little sister Kotori is attempting to wake him up, evidently by flashing her panties at him as much as possible. Fan service between brother and sister is certainly nothing new in the somewhat morally questionable world of some anime, but after having seen cities fall and countless people perish in Date A Live’s opening gambit, it’s a fairly strange change in tone that may catch some viewers completely off guard.

Date a Live is a series (based on a light novel series by Kōshi Tachibana) that struggles mightily to put the pieces in place for what turns out to be a fairly rote harem show, albeit with a few extraneous trappings. By the end of Date A Live’s first episode, it has been revealed that the so-called spacequakes are actually being caused by incursions of Spirits from another dimension, and that the goofy Kotori is actually a high ranking commander of a secret organization tasked with keeping the Spirits’ powers “sealed”. Kotori recruits Shido to be the bait (so to speak) for the (of course) improbably buxom and scantily clad Spirits. The catch is that Shido must get any given Spirit to kiss him before her power is sealed and the world remains safe from that particular trigger of a spacequake. Doesn’t that seem to be an awfully contrived mechanism to get a teenage boy surrounded by a coterie of sexy females? One’s tolerance for such proceedings will probably determine exactly how much enjoyment Date a Live will provide to each individual viewer.

Shido’s shock at realizing his goofy little sister is actually a more or less highly competent defense commander is only heightened by the fact that yet another one of his friends, a gorgeous classmate named Origami, also turns out to be a secret fighter attempting to keep the world free from Spirits and the resultant spacequakes. Shido of course does join the forces and despite all odds (in typical harem fashion) finds himself the object of quite a bit of rapt female attention, even by non-Spirit women. Truth be told, Shido isn’t the most hopeless young male to inhabit a harem anime, and he even exhibits some decent reasoning skills in certain crisis situations.

While Date a Live occasionally ventures into some back stories and memories courtesy of some flashbacks, it's notable that this supposedly post-apocalyptic show doesn't seem to care all that much about the apocalypse, and in fact that whole element of the plot is almost completely disposable. It's at least arguable that the series might have had less baggage had it simply let things start to unfold in "present" time, with spacequakes being a new phenomenon rather than some long feared anomaly that only a few seemed to know the hidden truth about.

What’s also a bit odd about the particular harem formulation in Date A Live is that the women who ultimately become part of Shido’s harem start out as his nemeses. That said, there’s not really a traditional tsundere among them, and so the show simply posits Shido and his cohorts fighting against the Spirit, subduing them one by one, and then watching as they matriculate into Shido’s everyday life, where the show attains more of a shōnen air. Date A Live has both fairly goofy comedic elements as well as a fair amount of action, but it tends to be a bit bland quite a bit of the time, to the point that some may be thinking of another long ago adage about Asian restaurants that may now be politically incorrect—namely, some viewers may be hungry for more nutritious anime an hour after they devour this one.

Date A Live: Season 1 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Date A Live is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of FUNimation Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. While just a tad on the soft side some of the time, especially with regard to some of the backgrounds, Date A Live benefits from a nice blending of traditional and CGI animation as well as a very colorful palette that pops quite nicely in high definition. While some of the character animation isn't especially innovative, line detail is sharp and crisp. While backgrounds can look soft, they're also quite colorful at times, with some especially lovely orange and purple hues in the skies providing some visual allure. Some of the CGI elements are quite cool looking, including the huge bowling ball sort of globe that erupts from a spacequake, as well as some of the whirling and twirling helixes that characters appear in once Spirits start showing up in greater numbers.

Date A Live: Season 1 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Date a Live is a typically rambunctious harem/action romp and therefore provides both the English Dolby TrueHD 5.1 mix and Japanese Dolby TrueHD 2.0 mix plenty of opportunity for a fairly crowded soundfield. For that reason, even original language purists may prefer the noticeably more opened up English dub, a track which also offers more convincing accounts of the foley effects in the action sequences. Dialogue is very cleanly presented, albeit in a kind of chaotic fashion some of the time due to the general "noise" level of the series. Fidelity is excellent and dynamic range is very wide.

Date A Live: Season 1 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Episode 4 Commentary features Joel McDonald (ADR Director), Tia Ballard (Yoshino and Yoshinon), Michelle Lee (Origami), and Michelle Rojas (Toka).


• Episode 7 Commentary features Joel McDonald, Josh Grelle (Shido), Bryn Apprill (Kotori), and Felecia Angelle (Mana).


• Promotional Video (1080p; 3:14)


• Season 2 Teaser (1080p; 00:17)


• Textless Opening Song: "Date A Live" (1080p; 1:45)


• Textless Closing Song: "Save the World" (1080p; 1:32)


• Textless Closing Song: "Strawberry Rain" (1080p; 1:51)


• Textless Closing Song: "Save My Heart" (1080p; 1:32)


• U.S. Trailer (1080p; 1:13)


Note: There's a minor but still somewhat annoying authoring error on the supplements, where only some of them have the ability to chapter skip through to the end.

Date A Live: Season 1 Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Date a Live is an agreeable enough enterprise, but it's over convoluted attempt to hook Shido up with a bevy of buxom beauties just seems too ridiculously overwrought for the small scale pleasures it ultimately delivers. The show is neither laugh out loud funny nor adrenaline pumping exciting, and tends to exist in a kind of middle ground that's okay, but rarely much more than passably interesting. This Blu-ray boasts generally very good technical merits, so fans of the series should be well pleased with this release.