Ben-To Final Thoughts--Food is Serious Buisness

If you're looking for a crazy fighting fanservice anime unlike any other, then you've come to the right place.

  
I was initially drawn into this by the promise of comedy, but I was also curious to see how it would keep up with it's strange premise: people known as "wolves" gather every night in the areas various supermarkets to wait for the expensive bento boxes to be marked for a discount, and then engage in a free-for-all fight with the winner taking the food and the glory. For the most part, the show succeeds in keeping that "this is crazy yet awesome" feeling going throughout its run. The fanservice is kept to a surprisingly realistic minimum (if supermarket fights could be considered "realistic" in the first place) and mostly plays off of the dirty mind of Satou, the main character, serving more as his characterization in a comedic sense rather than trying to drag in viewers using T&A (although I'm sure that was a consideration as well). But the main goal is obviously the fights, and Ben-To almost never loses sight of that. The fight scenes are well choreographed and also well animated, with no dips in quality coming from those scenes as is often the case with shows that have fights nearly every episode. A perfect example of this balance between fanservice and not losing sight of its goal is the pool episode, which is probably the best swimsuit episode that I've ever seen in anime, since the show went on as usual, using the pool itself as a new stage for the food fights.

  
But while I would love to say that this was true for the entire show, this isn't the case. Right after the pool episode is an almost completely pointless episode, introducing two new characters while they drape themselves all over the main character in nurse outfits. To say that I was disappointed would be an understatement, since Ben-To had just proved that it could rise above blatant pandering only to succumb to the stereotype anyway. There are also side characters who I'm not really sure what point they serve other than to pad the episode length: there's the token lesbian character and the token klutz character, both of whom add basically nothing to the show. They could've easily been cut and the show would've been fine without them. The twin characters also had a lot of buildup in the show that led to almost nothing in the end, since for whatever reason we're only shown the beginning of the final showdown. But while it does have extremely large faults, Ben-to does get credit for staying true to its spirit until the very end--a crazy anime with a premise so ridiculous that it somehow actually works. If any of this sounds even mildly entertaining, I recommend that you check this out. It does require that you leave any serious logic at the door, though, since Ben-To is all about fun. And food.

Images from Random Curiousity.