to a supremely happy and peaceful future title card at the very end of the series. For a series that technically starts with a bus hijacking you could be forgiven from assuming from its first episode that PUNCH LINE is a fun loose FLCLinspired romp about a teenage boy who gains superpowers upon seeing panties and is knocked out of his body and into the past as a ghost to right some great evil or another. Its kind of a weird premise but at first blush a bit of an aping and nothing onthesurface special. This is half true but theres a lot more to PUNCH LINE than merely a pastiche of one of the greatest anime ever made. Theres a lot to PUNCH LINE in general really. How else would you describe a series that starts as a fanserviceladen actioncomedy digs into a rabbit hole of conspiracy paranoia and time travel loops and then dovetails into an excellent superhero show in its final two episodes? Really if PUNCH LINE has a major flaw its actually that it tries to do too much in its short runtime just the standard singlecour twelve episodes. No more no less and its many moving parts lead to a bit of clash. But were getting ahead of ourselves here what exactly is PUNCH LINE? The simple answer is that its a MAPPAmade Yuri on Ice Kakegurui Teekyuu animation that seems to have kind of arisen from nowhere. Directed by Yutaka Uemura a man whose credits in the industry are sparse and since PUNCH LINE ended have included only the adaptations of the utterly noxious Tanya The Evil franchise and written by Kotaro Uchokishi an unknown within the anime industry but responsible for a good deal of video game writing outside of it most famously he is the writer behind Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors there is precious little to be found online at least in English as far as what prompted PUNCH LINE being made so its origin is something of a minor mystery. My own best guess is that it may have been put forward to ride the wave of renewed interest in Daiconlineage anime prompted by the success of Kill la Kill not unlike the contemporary Rolling Girls but a guess it remains. Regardless of the why the what of PUNCH LINE can be cleanly separated into the storys two major acts. In the first Yutaour protagonistis knocked out of his body and into the past after essentially going super saiyan and overpowering a terrorist during a bus hijacking. How did he power up like this? Well he saw one of his fellow passengers panties. 880https://i.ur.com/PadcJuE.png yes that is really why this happens Again you could be forgiven for thinking that this show is exactly as screwball as it seems on the surface but this actually does go somewhere. The first six episodes of the series revolve around Yutas ghost attempting to avert the end of the world to be caused by an Illuminatilike organization called the Qmay Group who wish to destroy the planet via asteroid strike and start human society anew. Thus the first half of the series is a blend of Yuta trying to solve the mystery of how this is going to happen in the first place and thus try to stop it with the help of a snarky cat spirit Chiranosuke and some character development for the remainder of the cast. Going over every in and out of the residents of Korai Housewhere Yuta lives and now hauntswould take a lot of time but in brief these characters are Mikatan an idol who moonlights as the magical girl Strange Juice Meika her manager both in idol and hero life who turns out to be a robot in the first of many many plot twists Ito a shutin with a pet bear cub who was bullied out of her school after she was seen being driven home by a teacher and Rabura an unluckyinlove fake medium with a gyaru look about her. Lastly there is Kenji a mysterious super sentaistyle masked superhero with powers similar to Mikatans but he is something of a special case. 880https://i.ur.com/9UL3mn8.png oh and Ito dies at one point. Dont worry it sticks for about ten minutes. Each of these characters gets enough fleshing out often via flashbacks interlaced with narratives in the here and now that when the shit hits the fan in the series second act you genuinely worry for all of their safety. Yuta notably observes these narratives but due to his nature as a spectre is not really a part of them. This as it turns out is by design as its also in this second act that the plot starts to tie itself into knots for both good and bad. The very very broad stroke is that Kenji turns out to be Yuta from the future and at the end of the sixth episode Yuta actually fails to prevent the end of the world and with the help of Kenji he goes back in time once again. Everything resets to the beginning of the series and Yutanow in possession of his body once againmakes a second pass at staving off the end of humanity this time in an active and present way and despite the pesterings of Chiranosuke who tries to insist that he repeat his past actions almost exactly. This doubling back on the narrative lets PUNCH LINE pull off an interesting trick. Things that seemingly made no sense the first time around are given additional context on the second and its here that the show starts foregrounding the mystery element even as the comedy remains a constant throughout most of the episodes. Were introduced to the idea of uberfication the super mode that several characters have the virus that causes it the motives of the Qmay Group secret lab facilities and bodyswapping. Yuta is even revealed to biologically be a girl rather: his male soul has been swapped into a womans body its complicated. As an aside the show should be praised here for not making this into the subject of much jest or angst. The only person who really gives him any shit about it is Meika who comes around eventually. Its no progressive masterpiece but this is the sort of thing its very easy to get wrong. This style of storytellingrevelation on top of revelation and twist on top of twistis undeniably not to everyones taste but the rapid clip makes every episode countPUNCH LINE has zero fillerand by the time the show is in its 11th hour starting in the 11th episode natch youre seriously rooting for the characters. Here PUNCH LINE flips again into a straightahead superhero show. The residents of Korai House become Justice Punch and each plays a part in taking down a joint attack on the house by the US Army The JSDF and a battalion of supersoldiers called Ws all controlled by The Qmay Group. Theres a real super robot feel especially to Itos scenes where she pilots a squat mecha created by Meika her piloting ability hilariously being attributed to her skill at mecha sim video games. 880https://i.ur.com/iVTOkxv.png more shows should have a side character kick ass in an orange robot in the penultimate episode The ending is maybe a touch predictable. There is a heroic sacrificeYuta or at least an incarnation of him dies. To save the main villain no lessbut life goes on for the surviving members and Rabura now somewhat inexplicably a genuine medium is able to commune with his spirit. PUNCH LINEs story both in a literal and meta sense couldve ended there. Spectacularly though this bizarre underrated lovechild of FLCL and Zero Escape has managed to spawn a tiny franchise of its own. There is a sequel mangaunknown in the west but apparently a direct continuation of the story from the anime and by sheer coincidence and mere days before I sat down to watch the show a visual novel. Available officially in English on the PlayStation 4 courtesy of translation company PQube. PUNCH LINE is far from a perfect animethe humor in particular is very much a hit or miss sort of thing and will depend largely on how much humor you can still wring from panty gags but there is a clear and apparent amount of love poured into every frame of it and even though its ambition to be everything to all viewers outstrips what it actually pulls off thats not really a knock against it in this case. If more anime aimed this high PUNCH LINE would maybe be merely average but most do not. To be sure its not exactly thoughtprovoking. But as far as anime that aim to hit you in the gut in just about every way possible and succeed at just that and for the sheer effort PUNCH LINE deserves a watch. That it manages to be as good as it is is just icing on the cake.