Arriving this month is a reissue of the card battle anime Fantasista Doll from Sentai with new cover art. Is this one worth checking out or will you want to trade in your cards for a new deck? Only one way to find out!
Uzume Uno is a bright young high school student who was once a pro champion of a trading card game but gave it up as she grew older. One day she is approached by a mysterious stranger who gives her a device that holds what appears to be trading cards. What sets these cards apart from your Magic: The Gathering or Pokemons of the world is that they can summon these girls called dolls that are then pitted in fierce combat. Uzume is tasked with winning a tournament where the stakes are higher than one might expect. Meanwhile she has a shady organization trying to get her cards for their own mysterious means. Will Uzume triumph over the forces of evil? Will friendship overcome all?
Right off the bat, no one is going to be accusing this anime of being original. It feels heavily lifted from Angelic Layer and Pokemon with a more prominent trading card game premise. Uzume as the lead is pretty likable if a bit one-dimensional (like pretty much every other character in this series, especially the dolls). The art style is bright and cheerful and seems to generate the feel of a spunky magical girl series like Cardcaptor Sakura (another point of reference to this show). Unfortunately, this series just doesn’t create something engaging or meaningful. Perhaps the most odd thing about it is how it doesn’t actually seem to care about the central trading card tournament gimmick. It’s extremely vague and at times even contradictory about the rules of the game and rarely gives much attention to how it actually works. That’s a pretty big failing of a series that has built its entire premise around this game. This wouldn’t be a total make-or-break kind of situation if it weren’t for the fact that the plot that has been built around the game is also very simplistic and predictable. If Fantasista Doll could’ve built up a compelling narrative around the game, some liberties taken with the nature of the game could be excused. But as it is, they give nothing but cute girls to distract from the shortcomings. While that might be enough for some, it definitely isn’t for me.
On the technical side, it looks like the same 1080p transfer and Japanese DTS-HD Master 2.0 audio track was ported from the previous release, and it looks and sounds fine. The show does pop visually with lots of bright colors (each of the dolls have a color theme). The series probably could have taken advantage of a 5.1 audio track if one were provided since it does feature combat sequences in most episodes that could’ve used some depth. But still, what’s there is sufficient. On the extras side, we have the typical clean OP and ED animations and that’s about it.
On the whole, frankly this series really didn’t impress me much beyond some cute visuals. With a generic plot, ill-defined characters and a slapdash implementation of the central TCG the whole series is based around, this probably isn’t one I’d recommend unless you just really love card battle anime and have to see all of them.