Amazing Nurse Nanako is not, you might be surprised to hear, an anime about an amazing nurse. Quite the opposite in fact. Nanako Shichigusa, 16-years-old, is a complete klutz who lives on a military base. She is something of an all-around assistant for the ethical science team there, who often doubles as a spare test subject.
Each of the show’s 6 episodes sees some experiment go horribly wrong. Monsters go on a rampage through the facility, Nanako gets lost during a training regimen in the mountains, or a scientific rival decides to just attack the military base with his own inventions. It’s a chaotic comedy-action anime, with a boatload of fanservice to it.
What ruined the comedy for me personally are the characters. Nanako is frantic and wildly incompetent. Always rushing from one thing to the next, messing up everything in the process. If she cooks it, it gets burned. If she makes it, it’ll break. She is also incredibly dense. In spite of all that, she doesn’t deserve being stuck with the rest of the cast.
The scientists act like a found family on the surface, but will gleefully break that façade when given the opportunity to sexually harass or even torture Nanako. She is constantly subjected to experiments or threatened with body-altering operations. She can’t leave because the military base is all she knows, but she’s also so easily manipulated that she quickly forgets about any harm done to her. It brought to mind Mr. Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show, which I highly doubt is the kind of tone they wanted for a comedy anime.
The worst of these scientists is Kyouji Ogami; a young man who is obsessed with operating on Nanako. He is consistently cruel towards her and has the flimsiest ego imaginable, sending him into deranged tantrums at the tiniest signs of insubordination. He is an abusive freak, yet constantly vindicated by the plot because—in the end—he always comes to Nanako’s rescue. Just ignore that he’s usually the cause of her distress to begin with.
Dubious characters aside, Amazing Nurse Nanako doesn’t have much to get excited over. The action scenes are only passable, none of the comedy got a laugh out of me, and watching Nanako’s breasts wobble around chaotically gets old fast. The English audio mixing is also complete rubbish, with some actors being way too loud while others are barely audible.
My only praise is that the visuals are quite decent and some of the standalone stories were amusing. Suffice it to say, Amazing Nurse Nanako is an anime you can safely skip.
