Anime: Hayate no Gotoku! (Hayate the Combat Butler)
Genre: Comedy

Initial Thoughts:

This was just another one of those animes that I went ahead and picked up without having any initial expectations. All I knew was that the female character in the show was a tsundere type character. It’s always a good story to watch when it comes to these types of characters. Other tsundere type characters? Rin Tohsaka, Shana, Louise (Zero no Tsukaima) to name a few.

Anyway, the story starts out really weird, where we meet the main character Hayate who has had bad experiences with Santa himself. This Santa refuses to give him any presents and Hayate decides early in life that he’ll earn everything in life. His parents are unemployed as they pursue impossible dreams and wasting all their money and in the end they run off leaving Hayate with a huge debt to pay off to the Yakuza. Hayate, not knowing what to do, finds a girl by herself in the park and decides to kidnap her for ransom. He confronts her, but she misunderstands what he’s saying. In the end, he can’t go through with his plans and instead saves her from other kidnappers. She turns out to be super wealthy and she employs him as her butler.

Some funny stuff after three episodes so far. Could it top School Rumble? No, but it’s still funny. It’s all about misunderstandings, and this show’s internal plot is driven by it. So it should be interesting.

So what do I think so far?

I say pick it up and give it a shot. This series has potential for 26 episodes, but chances are it’s going to be a short 12 episode series. I’ll definitely stick with this series because it’s been a while since I’ve last seen an acceptable anime comedy. Hopefully it doesn’t let me down.