My First Time Watching "Yamada's First Time" And Visiting the "Arcade!"

NOTE: I have been dreadfully negligent with my blog lately. This post was originally supposed to be published back on February 23! I spent most of the day watching "B Gata H Kei: Yamada's First Time." B Gata H Kei revolves around 15 year old high school student Yamada whose lascivious nature causes her to aspire to one day achieve sexual relations with 100 different guys. However, her insecurities as a virgin herself lead her to reject every guy that attempts to make a move on her. In order to hurdle this mental barrier Yamada goes on a search for her "cherry boy", an inexperienced guy upon whom she will bestow the right to be her first. One day while perusing a bookstore for the replacement of a dictionary she had defiled by highlighting all the sexual terms, Yamada has a fateful encounter with classmate Takashi Kosuda. Believing that Kosuda is the boy she is looking for Yamada goes to great lengths to try to seduce him. All the while, she discovers the difficulties in making that first important step towards reaching her goals, not to mention, finding out her true feelings for him. Hilarious! 2 thumbs up!!!!!!!!!!!! I wish I could say the same for "Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi." After less than 5 minutes, I was tempted to turn it off, in spite of the presence of 2 of my favorite voice actresses (Monica Rial & Jessica Boone, who both had voice acting roles in "Angelic Layer!"). I did, however,make it through the first episode before I decided to turn it off and watch a movie to conclude today's anime marathon! Childhood friends Arumi and Sasshi are residents of the Abenobashi commercial district in Abeno-ku, Osaka. After an accident, they find themselves transported to an alternate sword and sorcery world. Their attempt to get back to reality finds them traversing a series of nonsensical worlds built on science fiction, war, fantasy, dating sim games and American movies. Each alternate Abenobashi is a surreal manifestation of Sasshi's otaku interests, populated by analogs of the protagonist's relatives and acquaintances and a blue-haired stranger known as Eutus. Their quest to return home is at core a bildungsroman because the Abenobashi dimensions are mostly hobby worlds of increasing sophistication. Sasshi does not want to go home, and in fact is the sole force propelling them between worlds. While chasing the cat in the first episode, Arumi's grandfather fell off the roof and was hospitalized. With this new trauma pressuring him in addition to his apprehension about the destruction of the shopping arcade and the Asahina's moving away, Sasshi was no longer willing or able to cope with reality, and unbeknownst to even himself, he had caused their dimension to rewrite itself into worlds echoing his escapist obsessions. It doesn't sound bad, but as I said, it wasn't my cup of tea. I ended up turning it off to finish today's anime marathon with one of my favorite movies. Maybe I'll try to watch "Abenobashi" at some point in the future....Maybe!