Golden Boy

Summary: >

Kintaro was once a college student who just about had a law degree when he suddenly left. Kintaro now travels around Japan on his bike in order to study the human condition. While he doesn't look particularity smart.. or good at anything; there's more to Kintaro than meets the eye. He's got a lust for life, and anything female. Where his bike will lead him next is anyone's guess.

Thoughts: >

Golden Boy is actually quite an interesting title. I mean you have this guy who wanders around through six episodes meeting various women. It is fairly sexually oriented. Seems like a cut and dried hentai title, yet it's not. In fact there isn't any sex in this series. So what exactly IS Golden Boy? I guess it's a comedy with very adult themes. While that indeed sounds rather stupid and you could see how this would suck 10 ways from Tuesday, it comes as a surprise that it's not even half as bad as you would think. Actually, it's rather decent.

The setup is pretty simple. You have wandering guy Kintaro who happens upon whatever random job he can get. Throw in a situation with a random attractive female. Stuff happens. Kintaro goes off in search of another job, and only after he leaves does the attractive female discover she has the hots for Kintaro. More often than not I usually like this sort of setup with smaller self contained episodes. It's usually done to death in anime with small episodes, then later on building to some engrossing thing with the last few all tied together. Golden Boy never actually gets that far in its six episodes, so it's much more self contained.

If you have a taste for the perverse, or preferably relish it; then you'll find Golden Boy a pretty good fit. If you don't like sexually oriented titles, avoid it like the plague. All things considered keep in mind that it's adult oriented but with no sex. And being mostly a comedy, it comes down to a lot of sexual humor. Strangely enough it actually pulls it off quite well and is damn funny at times. At other times some such as myself weren't all that intrigued with the toilet humor.

The story lines were actually decent considering they only go on for half of an hour. One of the biggest strong points of this series would have to be the artwork. The character designs are certainly something to drool over.

As far as recommendations go, I will fence sit on this title. I honestly cannot think of who to recommend it to, yet I can't think of a good reason to tell someone to avoid it.

Screen Caps: >