Dual! Parallel Lun-Lun Monogatari

You can sum up Dual in one sentence: 'It's Evangelion but not too far up it's own ass"

I know it's a flameworthy summation, but it's true. It's a not-very-well-disguised clone of the series with some harem aspects. For christ's sake, the annoying, overbearing chick who's secretly into the protag even runs around in a red mech. You cant buy that kind of blatancy. But what does it have that NGE doesn't? Why a protag that you ACTUALLY like. Or, at the very least, you don't hate him for bitching and moaning every three seconds and masturbating to comatose girls!
(wow, ... didn't even get through the first paragraph without mentioning that. a new low XD)

Okay, now that i got that little bit out, story time!!

The show centers around a boy named Kazuki Yotsuga, a regular dude(don't they all, though) who everyone at school laughs at because he keeps seeing these giant mechs fighting in the street. He sees this so frequently he's even started a little website where he chronicles what he sees. Well it all goes tails up for him when the school queen, Mitsuki Sanada shows an interest in the boy, telling him that she believes that he sees these things. More importantly her father believes him too. He has a theory about there being a parallel world with events and a time line similar to theirs, and that Kazuki has the unique ability to peer into it. Since this is an anime the Professor immediately straps the poor schmo into the deus ex teleporter he already had made up, complete with comfy chair and arm straps, and BAM!! Kazuki is now in the other world.

He soon meets up with the Mech he is always seeing in his psychotic episodes and, through serendipity and overly obvious plot devices, he ends up piloting it; defeating the generic mech it's pilot, now unconscious, was fighting. It is through here that young Kazuki learns that he is in the other world when he runs home to find that his parents have no idea who he is(NOT when he was piloting the mech he's seen so many times in his hallucinations that he's actually given it a name... which i am not even going to TRY and pronounce, let alone spell. i just started calling it "Harpsichord"). Eventually he is swept up by the Giant Mech Military, ran by this Earth's version of the loon who sent him there(just go with it), because he is the only male who has ever been able to pilot a mech, previously only women could for some reason. He soon runs into Mizuki, who decided to follow after him into the Chair of Spatial Impossibility shortly after he disappeared but got there a month earlier for some reason(SCIENCE!!!), and she turns out to be a mech warrior as well, along with the 'Rei' character of the story who is actually explained in the first appearance as an alien-clone-robot-thing.
you read that right, they ACTUALLY flat-out told you that she was a alien clone-robot-thing instead of making it painfully obvious but never even really alluded to in the bulk of the story. And she's a very interesting character, i always liked Tabula Rasa characters, their humor may be obvious(i.e. when looking for a character who ran away they tend to look in the trashcan for some reason) but they're always enjoyable and usually give me a smile.

And all this brings up a really important point, why the crap can only children pilot giant mechs of death? does puberty not compute with the OS or something? but at least this show altered that a bit, the pilot originally controlling Harpsichord was 23, so at least there was that.

After the establish the main cast the episodes went kinda basic, they met the Team Rocket-inspired villain who seems more concerned about the the spectacle of invading rather then the actual winning of the battle. The also have all the old songs of anime here: They go to school, everyone is jealous of/hating on the protag because the school queen is always hanging around him, everyone wants a piece of him, there's a stray dog somewhere along the line that the alien-clone-robot-tabula rasa-Priscilla: Queen of the Desert grows attached to. It doesn't really try to push any boundaries as a show, its more like the people who created the story were given a big box of what all anime before it did and was told to pick two good concepts to play with and three bad concepts to try and fix and to make a show out of those 5 things and they said 'to piss with that' and took the whole box and ran with it.

And, to me, that's not a bad thing. It's a good view if you're bored off your rocker and want to just enjoy yourself for 12 episodes. There's nothing really to take away from it in the end, but is that really a bad thing? Eva tried shoehorning some depth into itself near the end and it turned into one of the few shows that i stop watching before the last 4 eps.

also: congratulations for actually reading through this horribly paced, segueing nightmare. kudos, reader. kudos

well, after watching all the Episodes, I think its like a happy version of
Neon Genesis Evangelion, as for story goes there probably stuff that didn't make sense but i didn't care much. overall it was enjoyable despite the outrageous storyline, its one of those anime where you're enjoy it or not.

overall as for animes goes, its more watchable than some other animes, like for example..Gate Keepers.. which didn't make f**k sense to me. but then again, someone might not think Dual Parallel makes any sense. well at least its a "happy" anime.

This series proved to be quite a bit of a mixed bag for me. Another harem comedy made by Tenchi Muyo creator Masaki Kajishima, Dual Parallel Trouble Adventure looks to also be parodying mecha anime in its run considering it makes enough nods to Evangelion with its premise, mecha and character designs and some notable moments from the mentioned series. The Evangelion parodies did get me giggling as Dual Parallel's creators seemed to know enough about the show where Eva fans could spot certain elements from the series that Dual Parallel decided to poke fun of at points.

The series also features Kajishima's style of comedy ... featuring male lead Kazuki putting up with his unwanted harem of gals and having unexpected moments of comedy from details on events that characters fail to mention (quite often happening via Misaki's father). The latter element effectively delivers well with Dual Parallel, while the focus on the harem didn't get me as amused since Kazuki and the girls are pretty much cut-out archetypes you likely would see at one point or another in other anime titles and to a great extent, these characters don't get much in the way of depth or growth. This makes them kind of bland and hard to relate with when the series later gets more serious in its plot developments.

Speaking of plot, Dual Parallel's premise on mecha fights and alternate dimensions was a bit of a disappointment for me. While the premise seems promising at first when Kazuki finds himself adjusting to life in a different world and piloting a mecha, the later mentioned serious developments in Dual Parallel's plot lead to the anime's biggest weaknesses to come about. It gets in enough of a bad habit of dropping hints and brief details over elements to the world of the series or characters that get introduced just to advance the anime's plot and it never bothers to elaborate on how these elements are important or why one should care for them. It felt like the second half was cobbled together in many areas to try creating something more serious without bothering to go into depth on how and why things were happening.

Visually, Dual Parallel sported clean details and a bright color palette in the designs of scenery and characters, while sporting Kajishima's drawing style in said character designs. The show makes frequent use of CG animation at points (such as the use of deploying mechas, camera pans of scenery and the ED sequence) which while it is well detailed, it sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the hand-drawn animation. Animation in battle scenes for Dual Parallel is nothing out of the ordinary for a TV anime with hand-drawn sequences, but it gets the job done.

Overall, Dual Parallel seemed to wow me with its comedy more than its plot and characters. The comedic delivery for the anime was spot-on for me in most areas, but the bland main cast and the messy second half did hurt its quality to a good extent for me.