Common Name: Cheating Craft
Alternative Names: Zuobi Yishu
Score: 6/10, 2/5
Length: 12 Short form episodes
Genre: Action, Comedy, School Life
Summary: In a world where your place in the world is determined by your academic abilities, only the smartest students will survive. Smarts doesn't only apply to academics though. For Cheating-Type students who don't have the brains to succeed you just to be smart enough to pair up with and protect their Learning-type partners while avoiding being detected by teachers who are masters at revealing and disposing of these cheaters. Will Shokatsu Mumei and his L-type partner, Koi Oh (Koh), be able to get through their classes and save Mumei's father?
Review: Oh boy, this is a tough one for me. On side, I really don't want to bash on an underrepresented media--adaptations of manhua (Chinese manga) in this case. On the other side, titles like these just don't reach that same level of quality I've come to expect from traditional anime or even american cartoons. More often than not, these manhua adaptations seem to exist on the same level as anime back in the 80s and 90s, and that might just be because they're still catching up with the rest of the world's media. I realize that might sound offensive, but I can't draw any other conclusion. But believe me when I say that I'd love to find out that I'm full of shit and that just don't get the beauty that is manhua. Based on what I've seen though, I'm just not impressed with the cracked out comedy and poorly-paced plots I've seen thus far. To be clear though, these criticisms don't stem from just my experience with Cheating Craft. There have been a few other titles I started but have since dropped because I simply couldn't stand watching them. So, I suppose I should offer some praise to Cheating Craft for being the first manhua adaptation that kept me interested in it's bizzare and tonally inconsistent story.
After all, it is a show that discourages cheating while also making it look cool.
Just because it kept my interest doesn't mean it was particularly good though. If anything, it was tolerable at best and batshit insane at worst. To elaborate, Cheating Craft exists as a short form, episodic series that usually follows a repetitive formula: there's a test to take, the examiner has some weird characteristic that defines them, Mumei fights the examiner and wins, Koh completes the test, and then Mumei copies her answers. Here's the thing though, when I say the examiners are weird, I'm not talking about them have buck teeth or some kind of defining fetish.
I'm talking about hyper-intelligent sharks with plans for world domination kind of weird.
That's not even the part of the show that's batshit insane though; those moments are reserved for when the show deviates from the formula. When the show gets really weird, we're given plot lines that are strangely avant-garde or render the actual story utterly pointless. In all honesty, there is some value to these bizzare deviations from both the plot and the norm. If not for the avant-garde moments, this show wouldn't stick out in my mind as it does. If it didn't work to discredit it's own story, I'd probably look at this show like a standard shounen series that tries to take it's inherently bizzare story lines seriously. In short, this show is well aware that anime, and shounen series in particular, are inherently strange and uses that knowledge to tell a story that might not be good, but is certainly unique and entertaining. The art and music aren't anything special, but they do set a tone that assists in obfuscating the fact that this show doesn't take itself seriously. I will say that I hope to see more shows like this, and maybe one day I'll see a manhua that legitimately impresses and engages me with it's story. Until then, I'll settle for these weird anime parodies that aren't all that great in their own right but are worth a few good laughs.