Conception

Summary: >

Itsuki and his cousin Mihiru are teleported to another world. For them to return, they must vanquish the 12 impurities from within a dungeon. Itsuki can't do this alone, so he must win over the 12 maidens, which can each bear a star child allowing him to overcome the challenges ahead. If you're wondering how that relates to the title, it's about as tacky as you're thinking.

Thoughts: >

I'm not sure if it's possible for this kind of show to work, especially not in 12 episodes. Take a pile of weak concepts, then sloppily shovel them together until they form a heap... of something. I have this issue were I feel sorry for an anime I rate very low, then try to look for the good points. In the case of Conception there are multiple fatal blows which cause it to sink so low.

Transported to a fantasy land, then defeat "evil thing"™ so they can return. Rehashing this countless times since the 90s, I'd think this time they'd add some kind of depth to that, but nope; it just goes through the motions on autopilot. The maidens are (mostly) known, so Itsuki just needs to conquer their hearts. Nothing to say about the maidens themselves, they're the usual anime girl grab bag so everyone can pick their favorite. Each girl has their problem, it works out, then Itsuki.. "gets with them".

Bear with me, because it's hard to type and face palm this much. Conception does its best to skirt around the weird, tacky and very bad idea where the girls need to "birth" star children. Conception kind of eludes to what happens on a special bed (see title), then the children immediately pop out like the maidens are anime girl toasters. I'm joking. That actually sounds kinda cool. Instead this stuff isn't especially sexy and is fairly tedious, wasting time that could be used to develop the story. Worse still are half assed attempts to stuff in each girls' situation as "character development". These are very bad at first but improve slightly for what that's worth. Most puzzling of all, Conception has MMO style dungeon grinding. Seriously an anime with grinding.

Not good, but the worst is yet to come; in the form of a mascot bear character who is so fucking obnoxious, it would make a normally good show hard to watch, never mind whatever Conception was supposed to be. This bear would drop any rating by at least two ranks. It's that bad.

And so that is the anime Conception: Switching between tedious and painful. The concept could perhaps be simple, dumb, yet weird enough for a quirky low budget video game (which I'm assuming this was). Clearly the studio had no clue how to make this into an anime, and I can't blame them. With so many fundamental flaws, Conception is a total waste of time and lacks the spunk to get the job done.

Screen Caps: >