First Look: Kiddy Girl-AND

Title: Kiddy Girl-and Genre: Science Fiction

Summary: Twenty-five years after Éclair and Lumière, (from the flagship Kiddy Grade series), rescued the galaxy from destruction's doorstep, the GTO (Galactic Trade Organization), created after the defeat of the GOTT (Galactic Organization of Trade and Tariffs), act on behalf of universal peace by combating criminal activity. Their special ES division mirrored after the GOTT's ES (Encounter of Shadow-work) force, now includes publicly acknowledged ES member candidates. The series follows three such trainees, Ascoeur, Q-feuille, and Di-air as they work their way to ES membership.

First Look: Kiddy Girl-AND isn’t what most people have tagged it as. Yes, the first 7 or so episodes are simply fan service and to help “get to know the characters”. After watching a few episodes in (on episode 12) there is actually a story-line, a rather good one actually. The series is a sequel to the famous Kiddy Grade, and they do a pretty good job keeping the two related. Kiddy Girl-AND takes place in the future, and as the summary says GOTT has now turned into GTO. They did go back into the old GOTT building in the earlier episodes which brought a pretty cool flash-back for anyone who has seen Kiddy Grade. I was happy that the characters didn’t happen to stumble upon the information about Eclair and Lumiere by coincidence, but instead you see them in one of the background. This shows that the anime has some realistic sense to it, and that the new characters are bringing a fresh scene to the organization. The main characters of Kiddy Girl-AND Ascoeur and Q-feuille are in a world of their own it seems. They aren’t top rank ES members, and actually just recently graduated from trainee due to complications. I like how the anime is taking you through a growing-up phase like Kiddy Grade, helping the viewer feel more attached to the main characters. As I said before, the first few episodes are purely fan service and comedy, but if you get past the beginning I think it will be worth the watch. There are fillers after the main story line takes shape so be prepared! I don’t see this anime being longer than 24-episodes, so I do hope that they don’t rush the ending because they had too many fillers in between.

Final statements: Kiddy Girl-AND is a more comedic version of Kiddy Grade but still shows potential to match its prequel which I enjoyed quite a bit. One can only hope they cut back on fillers and focus more on the main storyline/characters.  On watch.