Yumekui Merry 4

Merry finally stops turning her nose up at Yumeji’s offers to help and embraces the title “Yumekui Merry”, agreeing to destory the dream demons he detects. Heck she even moves in with him, like some kind of dream-world Ika Musume. This week, someone close to Yumeji, his class prez, is possessed by a nightmare. He makes her text and pine obsessively, as if he were her unrequited love.

The personal stake makes this more interesting than last week’s random little girl, in my opinion. Once he daydreams, Yumeji tries to pull a Kamijou Touma and punch the guy in the face. It doesn’t quite work, but fortunately Merry shows up right when he needs her to. They could make a good team…but it’s still not clear why Merry is doing this, and why Yumeji wants to help her, other than they’re both nice. An aside: the brief instrumental tune played during the previews is very pretty. Rating: 3

Yumekui Merry 3

I’m really liking Yumekui’s visual style; the way it handles dreams and the diversity of facial expressions and all, but so far it still seems a little, i dunno, disjointed and disorganized. It’s clear this series is going to introduce new character with a “mumi” problem just about every episode, in which Merry and Yumeji help them out, but I just can’t help but feel like these main character’s stories are being sidetracked by the girl-of-the-week.

Merry randomly wanders around and comes across a girl with a needy mumi. Yumeji, resolved to help Merry regardless of her opinion on the matter, goes looking for her, and somehow finds her. Could it be he’s somehow drawn to her? Perhaps, but a city is a big thing. It seemed like too much of a coincidence. Also, the lonely clumsy girl? A tad too cliche.

Also, Yumeji appears in Minato’s dream, but why is Yumeji there? He has nothing to do; Merry really only needs to yell at and bitch-slap Minato’s mumi and call it a day. Yumeji stands around. What is he? And one more disjointed bit: the episode shows us a young woman in a grody apartment, but explains nothing. I know from the preview she’ll have a role next week, but her very brief appearence wasn’t necessary here. Rating: 2.5

Yumekui Merry 2



This week sets up what’s going to go down for this series: Yumekui wakes up in “reality”, at Yumeji and Isana’s house. She experiences their kindness and some of what life in the real world is like (like donuts). It’s nice, but she knows she needs to go back to the dream world.

She’s convinced that the only one she can depend on for this is herself, she doesn’t want help. But Yumeji, doing a fair impression of Kamijou Touma (albeit with a less extreme power), resolves to help her all the same, even though he doesn’t even know what to do. Seems a little hasty of him, but he does have that dream-predicting power. There’s definitely a use for him; he just has to convince Merry.

We’re also introduced to Chizuru Kawakami, the mysterious, aloof transfer student, as well as Yumi, a girl who has allowed a dream demon, Serio, to “possess” her, only to see Serio callously destroyed by the hands of another demon. I got the impression this was Chizuru’s demon, but we’ll have to see. So far, Yumekui is off to a good start. Rating: 3

Yumekui Merry – First Impressions

This series is going to be about the dream world and the real world, and what happens when the two meet. It’s protagonist is a kid, Yumeji, who is dreaming about an army of cats chasing him, led by some dude who wants to take over his body.

Yumeji also crosses paths with a girl called Merry Nightmare (ah, Engrish) who somewhat resembles Black Rock Shooter; by that I mean she’s cool-looking. But other than that, there’s not much we know about her, because there’s not much she knows about herself.  She’s cool-looking and she can fight, though.

This looks to be another J.C. Staff series in the vein of Ookami-san and Index, which is to say, solid visuals, solid action,  soundtrack, but story-wise, well…we’ll have to see. I do like dream-based stuff, so I shall keep watching for now. Rating: 3