The Winter 2015 Anime Preview Guide

The Testament of Sister New Devil

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Nick Creamer

Rating: 1.5

I always have to vaguely wonder if shows like this are actually “written” instead of just “produced.” Is there a factory somewhere where “guy walks in on girl changing” is welded to “guy falls on girl and gets called a pervert”? Does that hunk of proto-show then move down the assembly line, stopping briefly at “main character and love interest share a superficial bonding moment” before being grafted onto “secretly: demons and heroes!” Whatever the system, when you get an end result like this, it's difficult to imagine a human hand graced any element of the process.

The Testament of Sister New Devil is exactly what you see on the cover - generic main character Toujou suddenly gets two new sisters (in busty and tiny varieties), those sisters act lewdly in that “we're self-consciously in an anime” way modern characters often tend to, and then it turns out the sisters are demons and he's a hero. There's not a common trope it doesn't embrace, not a facile plot beat it won't tag, and not an ounce of creativity to be seen. It's standard enough to almost feel like the characters themselves are doing time, running through their required gags and then punching the clock. Busty sister Mio grinding on Toujou to wake him up segues directly into trip-fall-“pervert!” - there's no consistency of character here, it's just hitting old harem favorites. The most entertaining part of the episode is the reveal that the sisters are secretly demons, and that's largely because the show's attempts to cram in exposition make the scene even less graceful than the rest of the premier.

In spite of the plot being a whole lot of nothing, the aesthetics here are pretty reasonable. There's not much real animation, but the character designs work well enough - in fact, the show's one element of subtlety is the fact that Toujou has lots of unexplained scars from the very beginning, foreshadowing his heroic nature. And the backgrounds are decent, and the episode moves through its plot quickly enough once it moves past the early harem beats. There's no reason to recommend this show, but if you're looking for a completely typical, low-grade, sister-focused harem-fantasy-thing, Testament of Sister New Devil achieves its own very modest goals.

Testament of Sister New Devil is available streaming on Crunchyroll.

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Rebecca Silverman

Rating:  2.5 (out of 5)

I have a confession to make: after having read the manga (available on ComicWalker), I was kind of looking forward to this show. In some respects, it did not disappoint me. The story follows Basara, a teenage boy whose father one day at lunch announces that he is remarrying and that Basara's lifelong goal of having a little sister is about to be fulfilled. Since Basara doesn't remember having this goal, he's pretty shocked, and not a little upset. He promptly walks in on Mio, the girl who would be his sister, in the bathroom, and his efforts to quiet her look like they're having sex. Ditto for her waking him up the next morning while younger sister Maria cooks breakfast wearing not much. At this point it feels very much like standard harem pseudo-incest fare.

That's just what it wants you to think.

As it turns out, there's a very different story here, one that is far more interesting: Basara is from a race of supernatural beings known as “heroes.” Mio is the daughter of the Demon Lord and Maria is her succubus attendant. Each side thinks they're using the other until Dad gets called out of town on non-hero business and the kids decide to work together rather than trying to kill each other. While it still has harem trappings, the story itself has just gotten a lot more interesting. It will, if it stays true to the manga (itself based on the original light novel), still be very sexy and fanservice heavy. What's interesting about this particular episode is the way that if you know, or suspect, what's coming, you can see little hints in the character designs, such as the scars covering Basara and his father's bodies or Maria's male and female hair ties. Apart from that the visuals are not terrific, and there's something that feels very off about the way the males' faces are drawn. Even with the necessary misdirection, the episode's pacing is a bit clunky, but the conceit is different enough – or at least twisted to feel different from the run-of-the-mill supernatural harem show – that it looks like it will be worth giving the series another episode or two to see if it can get on its feet.

Testament of Sister New Devil is available streaming on Crunchyroll.

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Hope Chapman

Rating: 1

There's bad anime, there's really bad anime, and sometimes there's just plain soulless anime. The Testament of Sister New Devil may revolve around spirits from beyond the mortal veil, but it's firmly in the just plain soulless category. (Also, someone really needs to convince Japan to have a native speaker approve these official English titles. And I thought The File of Young Kindaichi Returns was bad!)

Where most fanservice shows, even the laziest and trashiest of the bunch, might attempt to spend time building character or fleshing out an unusual premise to prop all those giant boobs up on, this series just shrugs its shoulders and throws a basketful of laundry-list cliches over the audience's heads in a mean-spirited assault of naughty shots barely strung together with an underwritten "this bland guy has sexy stepsisters" excuse. The question of "Why not just watch porn?" looms large with these kinds of anime, but this is one of the most egregious examples I can think of, where there seems to be no point in watching this without the payoff of raunchy, rough, fantasy sex the show is constantly and pathetically dancing around. There's barely a story here, in the way that many porn titles barely have a story, but all the sex is missing. (Not that they could afford to animate it, because the production values here are bottom-shelf too.)

Anyway, the show's real gimmick pops up at the halfway point, and it does little to beef up the bland, gross, unsexy bones of all that came before. Our hero is a literal "hero of legend" blessed by the gods, and his new stepsisters are demons from hell. There's no real reason to care about any of this, and even the show's threadbare attempts at stakes are tossed off with no weight or earnest investment. That's the biggest problem overall. Fanservice shows can be funny, or titillating, or stupid, or even entertainingly bad or bizarre, but all of these emotional responses require some underlying sincerity, and Testament has not one drop of that. It feels like a cynical creation made to scrape around for the lowest common denominator with joyless contempt. The show seems to hate its own existence, angry that it has to put even a minimum effort into itself to accomplish its job of selling a product, and spiteful toward its own barely-present story and characters.

Oh, and of course it hates women, not much of a shocker there. Most of the fanservice revolves around sexual assault, objectification, derision toward women, and all that other lovely garbage. Not a female-friendly show. Not a basic-human-decency-friendly show, frankly.

This anime belongs where its story starts: in a public toilet, with its stupid mouth sealed shut.

Testament of Sister New Devil is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

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Theron Martin

Rating: 2 (of 5)

Review: The first half of the first episode of this light novel series adaptation is thoroughly awful. The premise – a father remarries and brings to his teenage son a pair of new little sisters, then leaves the house on a business trip – is a tired one and the scenes are mostly an assortment of the most worn-down elements of the establishment episodes of such stories (walking in on one of them in the bathroom, the boy rescuing the sexy one from ruffians, one of the sisters waking the boy up by pouncing on him in bed, and so forth) all crammed into about 14 minutes. The execution is incredibly awkward, with one of the two sisters’ personalities being all over the place. Even the artistry is substandard. The only two minor plusses are that the male lead and his father both having extensive scars is curious and that the seemingly younger and more petite sister is sexually precocious enough to tease the male lead into thinking that she is pulling a “sexy apron” when she's actually not.

Much of that changes once the father is out of the house and the girls, the buxom redhead Mio and silver-haired Maria (depicted in the screenshot), reveal their true natures: they are actually devils, and Mio is the sole heir to the king of the devils. (Maria is indicated in other reference material to be a succubus, which explains a lot of things about the way she acts here.) Their efforts to take over Basara's house as their new base of operations are thwarted when Basara reveals that he's also more than he seems: he and his father are members of the hero clan who traditionally opposes devils. After showing off his power and kicking them out, Basara learns that his father really did know exactly what he was doing and took them in because Maria's recently-deposed father was from a peace-favoring faction and now members of the new, not-so-peaceful faction in charge are after her. That, of course, causes Basara to reverse his decision and come to their aid when they are later attacked.

So the opener, which is buried 15 minutes into the episode, essentially marks the turning point where the episode actually becomes watchable. Maria is also a major plus here, as she shows that she can fight and sass as well as being sexy. I am still concerned about how sloppily the first 60% of the episode is handled, though, and by the end of the episode the story still has yet to settle on Mio's personality. (She is definitely a rip-off of High School DxD’s Rias Gremory in appearance, though the latter has a vastly better and more stable character.) If the series sorts itself out and gets the fan service it seems to be striving for to work then this could eventually become a decent series, but at this point it has far enough to go yet that I cannot give it even a qualified endorsement.

Testament of Sister New Devil is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.