See, this is precisely what the series is all about…ok maybe not.

Vividred Operation tells a story about an age of peace, as for the past five years, thanks to the Manifestation Engine, everything has gone smoothly, with little strife and bad things taking place on Sagami-nada. Our main character, Akane, is just a normal middle school girl who lives with her grandpa and her younger sister, and who plans to meet up with a friend later in the day. Needless to say that doesn’t happen, as a state of emergency has been declared by the city, and she is soon tasked to prevent the Alone, which may just be killer robots and machines but that was never explained in the episode, from reaching the engine located at Blue Island. If they do so, they’ll cause the world to drift into chaos.

So, obviously, the episode was enjoyable enough — it looked pretty great, the characters are archetypes you’ve seen before, but manage to be cute and enjoyable enough so you won’t be terribly bored by them, and the sound was good — but needless to say, the writing’s all over the place. The first thing I literally want to address is who the heck is the girl that appears in the first 30 seconds of Vividred? Let’s just say she never shows up in this episode again. She’ll obviously appear in the later episodes, but I’m going to assume it was intended to sneak a butt shot early in the anime. Why? Because they can.

Now, the most obvious fault is the story. There’s no point in getting into a debate about how believable it is that peace has been easily achieved without some sort of a fight or whatnot, since anime tends to get away with this. But we ended up going the whole episode without an explanation of who the Alone are, there was a flashback scene where it shows the mother of Akane and Akane 7 years ago apparently falling to their doom — except the only thing that we know of is Akane became afraid of heights since then and her mother is in the hospital. It’s not explained if that incident put her mom in the hospital, but needless to say, that was never talked about. So instead of explaining that, we have a scene where a kid tries to climb a tree to put a bird back into his nest, fails, but then Akane decides to climb the tree in his place instead. So this is what we get next:

Needless to say, the butts are shoehorned into the anime instead of an actual plot. In order to gain any enjoyment out of this anime, you’ll just have to appreciate it for what is: magical girl, robot, and butt entertainment. Because it does have an interesting transformation sequence:

And it has a grandpa turning into a ferret. Surely that’ll be the best reason to watch Vividred right? And also hope that they’ll A)explain how Akane was able to transform aside from “I must save my friend from her doom!” B) How Aoi is also important to the plot and C)What docking is

…Docking?

This series is streaming on Crunchyroll.