AngryJellyfish

Story

Primary school girl moves from Tokyo to Hokkaido on account of her single father deciding to go there to train as a baker. Cute slice-of-life scenes ensue! And for the majority of each double-length episode, that's all there is to the story – Tsubasa goes to school, plays sports, does homework assignments, watches cows being born and stuff like that, all the while accompanied by her liquid-based alien doppelganger 'twin sister'. I kid you not.

As well as the innocent slice-of-life side to Figure 17, there's also a sci-fi action 'protect the world from evil alien invaders' story running in the background. Tsubasa gets mixed up with it all in the first episode, ends up merging with a living liquid called a Riberus, and for reasons unknown Hikaru is born. But aside from this initial major event, and the final showdown in the last episode, the battles against the Maguya were very much a sidestory, making up less than a quarter of most eps. The Maguya were terrifying plant/insect/nightmare hybrids, all teeth, tentacles and eyestalks ('Family friendly tag'? You sure about that?), and they continually evolved and got stronger, forcing the heroes to come up with new attack methods of their own. Though these parts of the ep weren't boring, they did feel a bit rushed, and the contrast with the moe-cuteness made it seem like I was watching two different series!

Figure 17 aired one episode per month, as opposed to the usual weekly episodes, and the series itself reflected this passage of time - a year goes by in-series between the first episode and the last, starting and ending in the winter, and the changing seasons determine what events the characters take part in at school or in their free time in each episode. I love little details like that!

Characters

Tsubasa is a very shy and quiet main character at the start of the series, whereas Hikaru (despite sharing her looks and memories) is far more confident and active. As the series goes by, she helps build her 'sister's confidence and encourages her to do things that she wouldn't have done before. Their classmates were also brilliantly introduced and developed as the series went by, each with very different personalities. This made the happy, fun times enjoyable to watch, and the sad or dramatic times far more emotional than I'd have expected at the start.

The main reason I didn't give it a full 10 is, again, the alien-fighting subplot. Agents DD and Ordina just didn't receive anywhere near as much character development, so were a bit boring.

Animation and Sound

The animation in Figure 17 was of fairly high quality, which I assume is down to the fact it aired monthly instead of every week. Unfortunately, it was produced in 2001 at a resolution of somewhere around 360p – I'm not going to deduct points for that, but if you're planning on watching it, bear in mind that it's not going to look amazing on a 1080p screen (especially given the quality of fansub encodes back then as well!)

I really loved the opening and ending themes, a lot. The background music was nice enough, though there wasn't a lot of variety, the same two tracks or variations on them kept cropping up over and over, hence the lower rating.

Overall

As a slice-of-life series, Figure 17 was one of the best I've ever seen, likely due to its longer running time and great character development. I'm just not sure it needed the aliens, their cover-story that they were twins raised separately would have worked just as well as a plot.