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⏎Yumeiro Patisserie Professional ⏎ Rating: 3 ⏎ Yumeiro Patisserie is a series with 50 episodes under its belt and the second season, Professional, acting as a direct sequel to those events. If you're a fan, you will watch this, and if you're not, you won't. Still, the show is worth covering due its premiere's marked change in tone from all that came before. Our troupe of best friends from Team Ichigo, who won numerous confectionary competitions together and are now the best of friends, have little-by-little returned to Japan. So how do they celebrate all the great times they've had and the start of a new year of studies? ⏎ Most of them split up and go their separate ways, leaving Ichigo sad and reminiscing in the courtyard, never wanting things to change…well now, that's a downer! It's no stretch of the imagination to say that Professional will focus on Ichigo's transition from a novice to a “professional,” but also her transition from a little girl into a young woman…after all, love interest Makoto Kashino is one of the few characters who has decided not to go anywhere. ⏎ The episode actually begins with Ichigo dreaming of owning her own patisserie shop…nothing new, except a few key components: a husband and child. (She's not very creative, her progeny looks exactly like Vanilla except bigger and de-winged.) The husband's face is never clear to her, but we can naturally assume it's Makoto because of the hairstyle and all that awkward subtext in season one, right? ⏎ Well, that's the other thing Professional has added to the mix here: a spunky good-looking American professional named Johnny. As the screenshot may indicate, he's every bit the anime-styled westerner…even initially appearing as a cowboy spouting Engrish. Makoto is exceedingly jealous of this good-natured pretty boy, and it only becomes worse when he learns Ichigo and company will be running a shop adjacent to his on the block. I'm not sure I can recommend this to Yumeiro newbies, but it's not at all confusing and just as benign and charming as before. Professional seems to offer a fresh, however slight, turn on Ichigo's pursuit of her dream. ⏎ MM! ⏎ Rating: 2 ⏎ It's hard to chide Sora no Otoshimono for not trying hard enough with its crazy, silly, pervy premise when you turn around and see a show trying plenty hard to milk its setup and falling on its face just as hard. Can we just learn from these new ecchi titles that a show can't run on one joke alone?  Particularly when that one joke is “This guy gets off on hot girls beating him senseless!” ⏎ (Psst! That's the one gag running MOST harem shows, folks, they just don't come right out and say it.) ⏎ Tarou Sado is a masochist (does Jun Fukuyama ever get to play normal people?) who wants to be cured of his fetish before confessing to the love of his dreams, so he relates his problem to the head of a school volunteer club who appears to be the peanut butter to his jelly, something of a sadist herself. She decides the best way to resolve the issue is to beat Sado so close to the brink of death that his survival instincts will kick in and involuntarily lock away his urges, sort of an inverted-Clockwork Orange thing, I guess, but even then it makes no sense. Her friend, the VP presumably, finds the whole display mortifying and is reduced to tears throughout while Sado desperately tries to control his ravenous—oh god, this is grody. Sado has just put himself in a world of hurt with no escape, and presumably, so have the viewers. ⏎ Okay: it's not that bad. Personal tastes being what they are, if I was held at gunpoint and had to choose between the first three ecchi offerings of the season, MM!, shockingly, is the lesser of the evils…between painfully boring, painfully foul, and painfully stupid, just give me stupid, and as other reviewers have mentioned, there's a genuinely nice little twist in the middle of the episode that gives room for pause. MM! has a laudable amount of energy while still maintaining a comfortable pace that would certainly result in good comedy if the premise itself wasn't (literally) self-flagellant. The idea itself may be too terrible to result in any good material but it's trying, so, like PSG, if what you've read doesn't immediately repulse you, just taste a bit, and it might not make you sick…might. ⏎ Sora no Otoshimono Forte ⏎ Rating: 2 ⏎ We...