TAB: Tom's Anime Blog

I have an interesting love/hate relationship with Hanaukyou Maids Tai: La Verite. I'm a big fan of the original manga and the original anime by PC-Moe. The only problem I had with that anime was that it was overly short, ending before it resolved the relationship between Tarou and Mariel. I was happy to see a new series coming out, but that happiness turned into dread when I found out that it was going to be a retelling of the story by a new team, rather than the continuation I thought the first series deserved.

Let me break here for a second to bring people up to speed on the premise of Hanaukyo Maids. Tarou is a middle-school student who's lost his mother. (His father abandoned them earlier in his life.) He gets a call from his grandfather asking him to come to visit. When he gets their, he finds that he is now the head of a rich and powerful family dynasty, and that he's inherited a mansion that makes the palace of Versailles look like a dump. This mansion is staffed by hundreds or thousands of maids, many of whom are specialists in areas like construction, mecha design, security, IT, and so on. Of course, there are also maids who clean the house, but they tend not to be very interesting.

Main characters include Mariel, the head maid, extremely nice and devoted to Tarou. At least in the original series, he has a crush on her, but she's very much an enigma to him. Ikyou is the mecha-creating maid whose inventions never work. She serves as sort of a big sister to Tarou, with the non-talking Cynthia fulfilling the role of a little sister. Konoe is the strict head of security. The triplets (the names they have vary by series) provide much of the series' fan-service. Lastly, there's Ryuuka Jihiou, the head of the rival Jihiou family, who alternates between being a pain and trying to get Tarou to marry her.

Anyway, back to discussing La Verite, the second series. My dislike of it was confirmed by the first two episodes. Many of the characters felt significantly meaner in La Verite, as compared to the first series. For example, in the first series, Ikyou would always harass Tarou... but it was normally to try to teach him some sort of lesson. In this series, she has him wear a stripper-mecha as a hat... just as some sort of sick practical joke, damaging his reputation among the poor unfortunate victim-maids. The second episode also wasn't that good.

Then, after a long delay, episode 3 was released on fansubs today. (I'm writing this on Tuesday, but you won't read it until Thursday thanks to powerblogs delayed posting feature. I want to spread out these reviews over an entire week, rather than bunching them up on Monday and Tuesday.) And, much to my chagrin, it was really good. It was a new story featuring Tarou, Cynthia, and Grace (who's a bit of a spoiler). And it was well executed and interesting. It gives me new hope that this series, while being different from the stories of the manga and the PC-Moe anime, may not be all that bad.

I'll call this episode good, and point out that it significantly improved my opinion of La Verite.