I've started watching Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu (idiots, tests and golems, to be known from this point forward as "Baka Test") today. Decided I'll go with Mochi for subs, since they seem to be keeping some form of schedule on their releases and their group isn't under constant threat of implosion. However, fansubbing groups aren't what I had in mind for this post, so allow me to continue.

Baka Test is centered on a somewhat futuristic school with some pseudo-magical (lol advanced technology) themes. Students fight for supremacy using some kind of spirit being that gets its power from their latest test scores. Right. It's an easy story to get into, as it has all your favourite characters right from the beginning. We have: Akihisa Yoshii the unremarkable lead (THIS IS YOU LOL), Mizuki Himeji the idiot savant (THIS IS THAT GIRL YOU ALWAYS WISH YOU KNEW), Minami Shimada the tsundere (THIS IS THAT OTHER GIRL), Yuji Sakamoto the "old before his years" friend to the lead, Hideyoshi Kinoshita the cross-dresser/ambiguously non-threatening pretty boy and Kouta Tsuchiya the pervert. You'll feel right at home if you've seen... Well, any Anime in the last 3 years or so.

We enter the first episode with our lead and love interest sitting in class. Sure there's other people around but they're grossly unimportant. Unexpectedly our idiot savant does something completely unbecoming of her and begins to lose consciousness. Our hero quickly defends her honour (and face) by catching her as she falls from her chair. How nice. The exam they are taking determines which class they are to be placed in. This is a prominent part of the story. To make it simple, there's 6 classes labeled from A through F. Smart kids go in class A and "our special children" go in class F with the remaining demon spawn spread somewhat evenly between the rest. Class A is blessed with an absolute wealth of resources covering the cornucopia of educational possibilities, with class F operating with the lowest of budgets and again classes B through E fleshing out the creamy center. Of course, Himeji-chan is a bonafide genius so she should go in class A and reap the benefits of her bountiful, carefully crafted, shapely, firm, er, mind... However her little stint with our friend "reduced cranial blood flow" puts her out of the running for that one. Where should she end up but in class F, ready to serve as a plot device and oh-so-convenient comedic fallback.

This sets the stage for our band of merry misfits to form a (your) dream team of idiots. With magical powers. Magical powers that don't seem odd or strangely under-utilised in their current capacity. The basis for the first complication of the series is that classes can challenge each other in a kind of "test war" to improve their learning conditions. The victor of the challenge can choose to switch places with the loser. Though technically the less impoverished class could choose to swap with their less endowed friends, for obvious reasons this isn't a common choice. Somewhat unsurprisingly, bakatachi end up challenging the class above them and narrowly defeating them, partly through timing and partly through strategy. This finds us at the end of the first episode, feeling at home with our new friends and thoroughly engaged in the ground breaking, value questioning, boundary smashing story.

All in all, I actually enjoyed the episode as I was looking for exactly what it delivered. Something I could watch in the time I was waiting for sphinx to regenerate indexes every time I changed a config setting.