AKA: ベイビー・プリンセス 3Dぱらだいす0[ラブ]

Genre: Harem Comedy

Length: OAV, 50 minutes

Distributor: Currently Unlicensed in North America

Content Rating: PG to R for fanservice...and LOTS of it.

Related Series: N/A

Also Recommended: Love Hina and, if you must, Sister Princess

Notes: Based on a novel by Sakurako Kimino. Oddly, this same author was also responsible for Sister Princess, a series with many similarities with this one. Although commonly credited as 3D, the actual version I saw was "2D". Maybe a proper 3D version exists?

Rating:

Baby Princess 3D: Paradise 0 [Love]

Synopsis

"Yotaro is a high school senior who, for a long time, believed himself to be an only child. However, his world is turned upside down by the revelation that his mother also had nineteen daughters of seemingly every age from 18 down to newborn. Now he lives with them and must adapt to the new surroundings..."

...is how it went in the novel, but here, the mother comes in and wants to do a promotional video of the family and wants Yotaro to do camera.

Review

My closest friend probably offered the quote that best begins this review: did I like it? Quite honestly, yes I did.

It was a very good Hot Pocket.

If incest is the whole point of an anime, is it too much to ask that the anime handles the subject with some form of class or some ability to understand the reasoning? Koi Kaze was the best example of a series actually taking the right steps and pulling off a great piece of art. Even if you're just going for the laughs, could you still try to make the show a must-see? Compared to that, Baby Princess is an utter failure. Where does it even begin?

Maybe it should begin with the fact that those fifty minutes this runs for are just too long. For a show with so much happening at just about every point, boredom had set in before any of the "excitement". Could the problem be that the character development (what little there was of it, see below) was only about eight minutes long followed immediately by the plot point followed immediately by the opening (which had a ton of scenes that had NOTHING to do with this plot and would have been more fun, no doubt) followed immediately by the family at the river followed immediately by having to rescue two of the sisters from a raft about to tumble down a waterfall followed immediately by a hot spring scene followed immediately by a romantic interlude (non adult) followed by the unveiling of the video then the ending. I know Pia Carrot: Sayaka's Love Story and Iriya no Sora: UFO no Natsu also suffered from pacing, but the former moved slow enough to follow everything and the latter tried tying everything together in the end. As a result of those points, I liked both of them. Baby Princess, on the other hand, never spent enough time on any one spot for me to get interested before the trapdoor opened up on me to drop me into the next story level.

Not to mention, the plot is too little for a spin-off anime. Shouldn't there have been effort into trying to bring anyone not familiar with the original novel into the fold instead of VROOM PROMOTIONAL MOVIE VROOM? Yes, some anime have taken place right in the middle of their respective games or series, but even here they still shine when needed, and here's one that leaves too much to the viewer to figure out. Plus, it's amazing that the promotional movie is about...oh...5% of the screentime? All you see of it otherwise is bathing suits galore with Yotaro holding the camera and giving us fanservice (thankfully, nothing from the younger members, who need him to help them with the bathroom...once again, in a non-fanservice way).

If I had to say I liked something, I guess I admit the art was OK. It was quite well done, but it still tended to fall in places. It's also quite an animation-style masterpiece...no wait, it was just OK too. Perhaps it had good music? Err...the music was so negligible I may have forgotten it. I do remember a rather poppy opening theme, but it wasn't that good. Just...average. Maybe the 3D water? Now that was nice, but it was one of only two scenes where the 3D was ever at work, and considering the other was a panty-shot...rrrrriiggghhhttt. Well, looks like the water is about all I liked of this one. That and the kiss scene at the end between Yotaro and the only sister who I actually liked beginning to end (well, NEAR beginning, considering it was her underwear we got a depth shot of).

I guess it's here that I should begin my rundown of the characters. I'll start by saying that what development we get at the beginning is a picture of them with a background and a robotic female voice giving out their number in birth order (1 for the oldest, 19 for the youngest, 0 is the mother. I'll use the numbers here for description's sake). I'd follow that with character details, but there's a problem: there's just too many characters. I don't crave full character development, but if you're working with such numbers as these, I'd at least want something to hang my hat on. As it is, however, only three characters at least made me smile a bit: Hikaru (the fourth sister and the aforementioned sister who I liked), Fubuki (the second-grader twelfth sister who seems a bit curt) and Watayuki (the first grader at number thirteen who seems a bit off, has ferret-esque things running around her, and who seems to have borrowed clothing selections from Pangya's Arin). Sadly, among the other sisters, anything in the range of liking them is quite off, and two of them (#6 Tsurara and #9 Urara) are both tsunderes with so little positives that whenever either were on screen it was like the monitor sucked all the energy out of my face.

But in the end, you may think "I'm being too serious! I need to relax!" I want to relax at an anime as much as I want to be drawn into it, but as I pointed out, it feels like this whole anime existed solely for the purpose of fanservice, and while it may make plenty of sense to fans of the novel, as a standalone, it occupies fifty minutes that, sadly, were better spent by several other things that could use the time and make me laugh, cry, smile, and enjoy myself. This had about as much of a plot as a desert has water, and this anime probably should be left surrendered to the sands of time. As an incest anime, it failed. As a "sit back and relax" anime, it failed. As a harem anime, it failed. And as an anime in general, not only did it fail, it actually made me feel depressed, both watching it and writing the review for it. If there's one courtesy I can extend this thing, it's that it's not a zero-star anime, so although a one is standard minimum, it at least deserves it for having something decent, even if it's one coin in the piggybank.

The lone star comes from Hikaru and a few other things (art and animation), but even those things didn't help make this anime to be anything other that a low-end title. If you enjoyed this, you might want to add three to four stars. — Jake L Godek

Recommended Audience: It's much too risque and suggestive for anyone under the age of about 17 and especially under the age of 13. Still, those who like stuff like this wouldn't be deterred.