The power of formula

I made the mistake of watching Masou Gakuen Hx H and Sacred Rider Xechs back to back last night and something struck me. Both are garbage shows, but Masou Gakuen Hx H still managed a level of coherence beyond Sacred Rider Xechs, even if it was borderline porn and in its broadcast form little more than an ad for the BD version. What the former did that Xechs didn’t, was sticking rigidly to the first episode formula for a “only boy in magic school” series. In his first day at school the protagonist runs across several girls, makes a bad impression on one of them, then saves her during an enemy attack as his power is revealed. Which in this case was molesting an unconscious girl, egged on by his sister, until her power meter was filled. It’s dull, predictable and you’ll have seen it dozens of times before, but at least it’s coherent.

Coherency isn’t something Scared Rider Xechs seems to believe in, if the jumble of scenes that makes up the first episode is anything to go by. There’s some guy with a guitar brooding on top of a ruined high school building, some scientists going down one of those elevator platforms from Akira where the lead scientist ends up murdering somebody because he disagrees with her decision to activate the dirigent, which is Dutch for conductor, but here obviously means something ominous. Then the opening plays, the scene shifts through some ditzy blond girl with Dutch flag hair ties missing her bus before running into broody guy. Another scene shift and we’re with a bunch of high school blokes excited that they may go to war, then the aliens attack the school (?), military base (!) and turn out to be a bunch of mud men, a military transport attempts to land, the guys from before transform into generic sentai dudes, while broody guys moves in on the dumbest looking bike I ever saw, he’s transformed to another world with the plane, opens the box and out tumbles a girl.

Whereas Masou Gakuen Hx H is dull and predictable and formulaic, Scared Rider Xechs manages to even screw up being formulaic. You can see what it wanted to do: provide a bit of setup for the rest of the episode before the opening, then cut back and introduce the characters before the threat from before the opening would materialise and the boys get to strut their stuff. But because it was done so cackhandedly, it failed. Mostly because it switched viewpoints too much and tried to introduce too many elements, some of which, like ditzy girl, ended up not mattering to the rest of the episode. Masou Gakuen Hx H on the other hand stuck to the protagonist’s point of view, which meant we got a good grasp of his personality (such as it is) and some hints on that of the girls he encountered. While both therefore are crapfests, Masou Gakuen Hx H at least shows the power of sticking to a formula. At least it got that.