Warning: This review contains spoilers for All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku.

I just finished watching the first six episodes of All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku. I've heard a bit about it and it sounded interesting. Although I must say, I was a little disappointed in what I saw.

The series starts out with a kid taking a leak in an alley. While his father is calling from his car to hurry up, the kid finds a stray cat and decides to keep it. He gets into the car and they start to drive off, when a helicopter comes up and starts shooting at them. While they're trying to escape, they have a pretty nasty crash, which leaves the kid and the dad unharmed, but the cat is soaked in blood. The dad takes a look at the robot skeleton in the back seat, for which the helicopter was presumably pursuing them, and he gets a brilliant idea. The next scene is some time in the future, and now they have a robot girl with a cat's brain living with them. Meet Nuku Nuku.

When I first learned the plot, I was expecting to see some sort of development progress from Nuku Nuku like I saw in Chobits. However, the very scene after the car crash, she already speaks fluently and more or less knows how to behave in public. That was definitely a downer, but I suppose that wasn't the point of the series. Instead, we get a simple two dopes use giant robots and missiles to try to kill the superhuman girl, but she always wins plot. They pretend that she's trying to be human, but you don't really see that there's any sort of progress.

I thought that we would get lots of comedy and conflicts from the fact that Nuku Nuku has a cat brain, but that doesn't even play much of a role in the series. She isn't nearly as playful with people as you would expect (except for a short while in episode 5 when she is attacked with cat nip, which is one of the few scenes with a cat-related situation), and she isn't afraid of water at all. In fact, once she gets a device that allows her to swim rather than sink like a rock, swimming seems natural to her. That just doesn't fit the cat role that you expect.

One thing that bugged me was that character roles aren't consistent. In one episode, the kid demands that Nuku Nuku takes responsibility for her mishaps and the father is more forgiving, and the very next episode they act in a completely opposite manner. That's about when I gave up on the possibility of any sort of character development, because they didn't really have character roles in the first place.

Another android, Amy, appears in episode 4. At first you don't know that she's an android, and she claims that she's fleeing from some unknown enemy. As you find out later, she's afraid of a bug in her programming that could cause her to explode if she participated in a heated battle for too long. She decides to try to take Nuku Nuku's body in order to remedy the situation. Well, big surprise, they end up in a fight. Near the end, Amy starts zapping Nuku Nuku with energy that makes them both glow a cool blue. At about this point, you expect Amy to blow up, giving that the infamous anime X-vein is about ready to blow. However, she doesn't blow up. And the episode ends with Amy and Nuku Nuku pulling at each other's faces and stuff. That episode kind of left me thinkg, So... what was the point of that whole episode? There was no point. They introduced a character that shows up again in episode 6, but in episode 4 itself nothing happened. There was no climax. Just lots of shots of Amy in her underwear. Oh, by the way, I was also amused by the fact that, when she had her panties pulled down about a centimeter you could see the serial number that went halfway up her back, but then in every scene after that it was nowhere to be found.

This series was mildly entertaining, but nothing great. The initial plot could have been carried out much better than it was, and it could have been better directed. There was nothing about it that made me really into the show. Oh well. I'm still looking forward to seeing the rest of Fruits Basket.