Review for Heaven's Memo Pad: Collection

Introduction

When in doubt, pick a detective show. That’s good advice for the odd night when you have an hour or so free, and can’t make up your mind just which DVD from your extensive collection you wish to watch. The bigger your collection, the likelier it will take you longer to decide what to watch, than to actually watch it. The solution is to turn on your TV, and search through the listings for a detective show, or a police procedural. It’s the mystery that attracts us, and the entertainment comes in seeing that mystery solved, while the joy comes in the quirkiness of the characters. You only need two out of three to work to get your money’s worth out of a detective show, but get that quirky factor right, and you’ll be putting your money down for a boxset, despite the utterly formulaic and routine nature of the genre. All it takes is an episode of Columbo, or Monk, and that is an evening’s viewing sorted.


The same is just as true of anime, although detective shows are surprisingly light on the ground when it comes to this medium. But if the story involves a mystery that someone has to solve, then regardless of the show’s actual quality, you can in most circumstances consider that twenty or so minutes, time well spent. And just as in live action, the quirkier the detectives, the more fun it is to watch. In Heaven’s Memo Pad, the detectives would give Monk a run for idiosyncratic money. For in Heaven’s Memo Pad, the detectives are NEETs, those who are not in education, employment or training. In this show, it’s society’s detritus that actually wind up solving major crimes, mostly because their antisocial tendencies, their geek pursuits, and their personalities are not conducive to contributing to the mainstream drudgery of the workforce.


Narumi Fujishima probably thought that he was reclusive. After all, he lives alone with his sister, his father barely home for a few days each year because of work, and because his family is always moving, he never has the chance to settle down at school and make friends. As such, he keeps mostly to himself, trying not to be involved, that’s despite his first day in the big city bringing him face to face with the unsavoury practice of schoolgirl prostitution, and the mayhem that ensues. Despite his best efforts though, he does get noticed at school by a bright and peppy girl named Ayaka Shinozaki, and Ayaka in turn introduces him to her friends at the ramen restaurant where she works.


It’s here that Narumi learns of the true power of the recluse, the dropout, and the shut-in. For above the restaurant are the premises of the NEET Detective Agency, run by the opinionated and hyper-intelligent Alice. She relies on a trio of dropouts to be her eyes and ears in the city, but with her deductive skills and fingers reaching out through the Internet, she’s able to solve the most perplexing of crimes. In Narumi, she has her latest assistant (useful for opening cans of soft drink), while her other employees see a NEET poised to break out of Narumi’s shell of conformity. Despite himself, Narumi winds up getting involved, and that leads him and Ayaka straight into danger.


12 episodes of Heaven’s Memo Pad are presented across 2 discs from MVM, although the first episode is a double length episode running to almost 50 minutes.

Disc 1

1. Two, Three Things I Know About Her
2. You and the Travel Bag
3. What Can I Do For Those Two
4. A Full Account on Hanamaru’s Soup
5. He Knows Who I Am
6. It Looks Like I’m About to Lose

Disc 2
7. All I Can Do
8. I Don’t Believe in Fate
9. That Summer’s 21st Ball
10. About You
11. Fragments of Me
12. About You, Me & Her

Picture

Heaven’s Memo Pad gets a 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer, which despite going through the localisation process from Australia’s Siren Visual, is still presented in the same NTSC format as Sentai’s US release, although on two discs instead of three. The image is clear and sharp throughout with bold and striking colours. Of course being a native 480i source played back on 525 line sets, or even up-scaled to an HD panel, there is greater degree of softness than you’d expect from a native PAL transfer, but you do get progressive playback with compatible equipment, and you get the show in the original frame rate. It’s a quality animation as well, rich in world design and detail, and with characters fluidly animated and engaging to watch. It’s a show that is very much set in the real world, and that comes across without issue on this set. As always, it could be improved with a Blu-ray release, but unfortunately the only English language Blu-ray is Sentai’s Region A-locked release.

Sound

You have the choice between DD 2.0 English and Japanese, with optional translated English subtitles and a signs only track. There’s a fair bit of on-screen text to translate too, so a fast finger on the pause button will be of use. I went with the Japanese audio and was very happy with the cast performances, and the way the stereo brings across the show’s action, ambience and music. I gave the dub a try, and unfortunately Heaven’s Memo Pad suffers from Sentai’s fast track localisation, with a lacklustre, and wholly forgettable, by-the-numbers dub. This also shows up in the translated subtitles, which definitely needed proof-reading before being committed to disc. There’s nothing that actually damages the experience, but silly typos keep creeping in.


Incidentally, I had a brief, intermittent couple of drop-outs at around the 7 minute mark in episode 3, the Japanese audio only. I’d skip back and the scene would play back without issue, skip back again and the dropouts would be back. It also only happened on my Sony DVD player. It’s the sort of niggle that comes from a bit of dust getting onto the pressed disc, not an authoring issue, and I would guess that retail copies of the show will be fine.

Extras

There’s nothing to see here, but all we are missing out on in comparison to the US release are the textless credits.

Conclusion

Heaven’s Memo Pad is quite good. It’s actually a fair bit of fun, telling varied stories over its 12 episodes, little arcs, and a couple of standalone stories, it has a cast of interesting characters, and puts its main character on an engaging arc of growth and development. I certainly enjoyed watching it, and didn’t begrudge any time spent in its company. The problem is that it’s not hard to draw comparisons to other shows, especially Gosick, and in every respect Gosick does it better. This isn’t helped by Gosick coming out six months prior to Heaven’s Memo Pad, so the suspicion is always there, that the latter is cashing in on the former’s success, aping its formula.


It’s easy to see the parallels between Narumi and Alice, and Kujo and Victorique. Narumi is the hapless young transfer student who unexpectedly ends up the investigating dogsbody for haughty and diminutive Alice. Alice prefers to exist in her NEET isolation, a figurative ivory tower of Internet connectivity and a high tech Aladdin’s Cave. She’s prone to arcane pronouncements about her detective craft, her world has to be just so, yet she’s prone to blush and take things the wrong way if Narumi should show even the vaguest interest in her. In Gosick, Victorique lived in a more literal ivory tower, albeit one that was an early twentieth century library, and she too has the brains and the arcane pronouncements, and she too relies on Kujo to do the actual dirty work of investigating. She’s also small, doll like, and were it not for her haughty personality, adorable.


But that’s really where the similarities end. When you come down to it, Gosick was a love story, and it really centred on Kujo and Victorique. Heaven’s Memo Pad doesn’t go down that route, despite Alice’s blushes and obvious affection for her servant. This is really Narumi’s story, about how he becomes more responsible as a person, more involved in the world around him, although ironically through becoming associated with a group of people who most would have considered as society’s dropouts. Alice’s character isn’t central to the story, even though her Detective Agency is at the heart of it. In many ways she’s a totem, a maguffin to drive the narrative. Something mysterious happens, Alice is wheeled out to set the hunt for the truth in motion, and her minions go about solving the mystery. She doesn’t really have an emotional presence in the story, although it would be harsh to describe her as a gimmick.


As mentioned, it’s really about Narumi’s development as a person, an isolated and introspective student when the show starts, a boy with family issues, and who’s never stayed in one place long enough to form friendships. It’s the gregarious Ayaka who latches onto him in school, co-opts him into her gardening club, and introduces him to her NEET detective friends. She also winds up getting him a part time job at the restaurant where she works. The mysteries start rolling in straight away, Ayaka’s brother is missing, as is the father of Min, who owns the ramen restaurant, and these threads run through the series.


The first mystery lasts just one episode, but as it’s a double length episode, it certainly gets room to introduce, and develop the main characters. Narumi’s first encounter with the NEET detectives is through running into the aftermath of teenage prostitution, although in this case things aren’t as they appear to be. It’s a rude awakening for a new arrival to the big city, especially when it turns out that the girl goes to the same school as him. The story is actually about another girl, one that has gone missing, and Alice is hired to find her. It’s a case that takes Narumi into the underworld, and he gets acquainted with some unlikely characters, finds himself adopted by a local gang, and there’s a nice mix of lightness and drama that informs the style of the rest of the series. The story doesn’t have the happiest of endings though, and that really should have served as warning to him.


He continues to get involved with Alice and her Detective Agency though, and the next two episodes recount the tale of a young girl on the run with a bag full of cash, looking for her father who’s in trouble with the Yakuza. This is another strong story with an appealing mystery at the heart of it, and Narumi shows his worth as a NEET Detective minion to Alice.


But it’s around here that Heaven’s Memo Pad loses momentum, first with a comedy stand-alone episode that offers a bit of fan-service and silliness when it comes to Min’s Ramen Restaurant and a stalker. Then there is a four episode story that looks at the gang that Narumi is adopted by. The Hirasaka gang is trying to go straight, legit, and are doing so by serving as promoters and security for an up and coming indie girl band. The problem is that there used to be two leaders in the gang, Renji Hirasaka, and Souicihiro Hinomaru. Things went bad, typically over a woman, and the two friends split up, Renji leaving the city. Now Renji’s back, and he’s even befriended Narumi, but his real aim is to sabotage his old gang, throw a spanner in the works of their going legit, and get his revenge on Souichiro. It would be an interesting story, but the problem is that it telegraphs the solution to its mystery in the middle of the second episode, so the viewer remains ahead of the game for the second half of the story. In a detective show, that becomes tedious pretty quick.


There then follows a comedy baseball game episode, which while fun to watch, doesn’t really add much to the show’s reputation as a detective anime. Fortunately things pick up for the final story, and do so in a big way. It brings us back to Ayaka and her missing brother, and it turns out that he’s involved with drugs. It starts off in the first episode like the typical story, a bit of mystery, some NEET antics with Alice’s comedy minions (the boxer, the military otaku, and the pimp) and with Narumi thrown into the mix, but at the end of the episode things get dark pretty fast, it gets real, and it’s no longer the fun and games that it was before. It’s personal, and Narumi becomes the driver of events, not just Alice’s assistant.


Heaven’s Memo Pad has a mid-season slump that lasts for almost half of the season, but it starts off very strongly, and the final story is one of the best dramas that I have seen in anime in a fair while. It’s no Gosick, but you can’t get Gosick in the UK. You can get Heaven’s Memo Pad though, and at its best, it’s a really strong detective show, and even when it slumps, the quirkiness of its characters keeps it entertaining. It’s well worth a watch.