So, as a palette-cleansing anime after the extremely SRS Gundam SEED, I went back to watch a season of my favorite palette-cleansing series to date: Koihime Musou, which I most briefly described as "The unholy love child of Dynasty Warriors and the Touhou Project."
For those of you who don't know what either of those means, I shall elaborate. Koihime Musou is, at its core, a retelling of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a piece of literature which is the East Asian equivalent of the Iliad, both in terms of its historical accuracy and its general heroic flavor. It covers the end of the Han dynasty and the conflict leading up to the foundation of the Jin dynasty, the "Three Kingdoms" period, and deals with a number of characters who are archetypes whose very names carry deep meaning in the East due to their treatment in the fictionalized Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a historical novel written almost 800 years after the fact.
Koihime Musou takes these legendary warriors, tacticians and generals and makes them into cute anime girls, and has them do various silly, fan servicey things together in the name of fan service and comedy.
Due to the incredibly tongue-in-cheek nature of both the comedy and the fan service, along with the overall high-quality animation and how much of a loving rip-off of the classic from which it is derived make it genuinely fun to watch, if you're the sort of person who can forgive the lengths to which the series will go to get the protagonists to flash their underwear, take their clothes off and get into compromising positions, mostly either protesting or commenting on the fact that they're doing it.
Is it good? I could not say that with anything like a straight face. But it is funny, and the girls are fan servicey in their personalities as well as their outfits, and the series will often jump directly from barely-justified panty shots to extremely classy, clever wit and wordplay. For me, it is a guilty pleasure.
For anyone who can bring themselves to appreciate fan service with a knowing grin and humor on top of it, you might find yourself really enjoying it.
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