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... room, making for a unique conversation piece. ⏎Sket Dance Episode 2 ⏎ Rating: 3 ½ ⏎ Review: Episode one relied on a one-time trick (a fake main character) to pull off a surprisingly sneaky standalone mystery. Doing so showed spunk and no small measure of smarts, but left open the question: how will Sket Dance perform on its own merits, sans trickery? The answer, given this episode: just fine, thank you very much. The Sket Club will help anyone with just about any problem. If a living anachronism asks them to help him find out why he can't perform as well now that he's the captain of the kendo team, they'll drop everything to help. Not that there's anything to drop. Mostly the Sket Club just spends their spare time squabbling. And when an, um, unconventional cheerleader asks them to baby-sit her monkey (no, that's not a double entendre), they gladly accept. Okay, maybe not gladly, but they accept. Their club advisor drops by soon thereafter to ask them to dispose of a bomb that he may or may not have accidentally made. Bomb + monkey...not a good combination. ⏎ For its second episode Sket Dance shortens the stories, cranks up the color, and pumps out a half an hour of the purest, dumbest fun of which it is capable. If you thought the Sket were odd ducks, wait until you meet their schoolmates. The world's homeliest cheerleader, say, or their school's samurai-loving, sword-toting, mint-chomping, arcane-speaking, seppuku-committing kendo team captain. There's also their evil scientist of a club advisor and a softball coach with a seriously girly throwing stance. The series crams them all into tiny half-episode stories that unfold at a giddy, Coyote-and-Roadrunner pace and culminate not in dramatic denouements or climactic uplift but in goofy punch-lines. It's all very frivolous, even by the standards of the opening episode, but also hugely enjoyable. The humor never flags, and neither does the pace or the cast, especially Bosson and Hime, who have a priceless comedian-duo thing going on pretty much non-stop. And if the dearth of substance irks you, the next episode looks like it'll start mixing things up with Sket Club back-stories. Good stuff, and still good-looking too. ⏎ Sket Dance is available streaming at Crunchyroll. ⏎ A Bridge to the Starry Skies ⏎ Rating: 1 ⏎ Review: And another bishojo game makes the leap to our televisions (or computers or whatever). There is such a thing as a good bishojo-game adaptation, but searching for one is like playing Russian roulette with all of the cylinders loaded and hoping for a misfire. A Bridge to the Starry Skies isn't the miracle we roulette players have been looking for; it's just one more time that the maid'll be using the spatula to clean the ceiling. ⏎ Meet Kazuma Hoshino. He's your run-of-the-mill ordinary dude with a god-like aptitude for getting into compromising situations with pretty girls. Take his latest day. He's just arrived in the countryside, where he'll be staying at a local inn with his sickly little brother Ayumu. He takes the bus the wrong way, gets off with Ayumu, and has to run into the woods to catch a monkey that has stolen Ayumu's hat. This naturally leads to him slipping as he jumps across a river, falling on top of a girl, and accidentally playing tonsil hockey with her. When he gets to the inn, he walks in naked on the cleaning girl and runs away straight into the owner, giving her a panoramic view of his genitals. ⏎ Kazuma's adventures continue, but you get the idea: lots of girls, lots of hideously fake girly behavior (bring on the speech affectations!), lots of dumb, contrived, and cruelly predictable "romantic" hijinks. In of sheer pain, the show is a good match for this seasons other eroge stinker, We, without Wings. However, unlike We, which was a mixture of decent characters and moderately ambitious writing brought down by some vile content, Bridge comes by its crappiness the old-fashioned way: by being crappy. It is one enormous, Frankensteinian conglomeration of crappy clichés played out by crappy characters given crappy character designs and delivering crappy dialogue while crappy music diddles around in the background. The monkey that steals Ayumu's hat could get together with a couple of his monkey friends and make a better series than this, and for much cheaper I'll bet. ⏎ A Bridge to the Starry Skies is available streaming at Crunchyroll. ⏎ Toriko ⏎ Rating: 2 ⏎ Review: An outrageous...