Series Review – Kochinpa!

Kochinpa! is possibly one of the more unusual ‘anime’ I have watched owing to its exceedingly short episode length. It’s a series of 15 second episode shorts which has now had 2 seasons. The two seasons are pretty similar, so I’ll be talking about both seasons together. It’s hard to give a detailed analysis of something like this, but I thought that I’d still highlight this show as I found it quirky and fun.

Firstly, here’s my review of the series typed in 15 seconds for you.

Kochinpa is very short and while it is ostensibly about idols it is really advertising slot machines.

To go into some more detail; the anime follows 3 idols: Aira, Shima, and Hana, and each episode has a simple gag. Sometimes the gags are dialogue based, or at other times they are visual, including things like an episode where the screen was really tiny, and an episode where it was implied that the idols were actually just full-body idol costumes worn by real people. There’s a mention of ‘Island’, a pachinko and slots parlor in Akihabara who sponsored the series in each episode. I found some jokes missed the mark a little but I found others quite amusing!

It’s really hard to assess whether something of this nature is actually good or bad, or to compare it to other anime. There was no real plot and we didn’t get to see much of the character’s personalities, but the fact that anything at all could be put together with 15 second episodes is somewhat impressive! I liked it because it was unique, and that would be the basis on which I could perhaps recommend this to other people. You may like to watch Kochinpa if you enjoy watching things based solely on novelty value! In the time that it took you to read this review, you could have watched several episodes of Kochinpa. Perhaps that’s all the justification you really need.