_Armor Shop For Ladies and Gentlemen_
Chainmail Bikinis and more!
This micro-anime* has no legitimate streaming source that I have been able to locate.
Your friendly neighborhood pirates will hook you up though.
It also looks like someone uploaded it to YouTube. (No promises.)
* micro: the episodes are 5 minutes long.
In a scene that looks like an 8-bit video game, our boy, Kautz, is saved from a slime attack by a mysterious beauty.
Opening credits have chiptunes and various characters mugging for the camera.
Kautz (looking for work) and his pet Mokuku (occupation: cute) enter the town.
The animators are leaning in to the Dragon Quest vibes, as blue and white text boxes pop up on the screen to tell you what's what.
Kautz wanders in to the armor shop and sees his rescuer in what appears to be a compromising position.
Well, some of it may be a misunderstanding.
His rescuer is Lilietta, the clerk at this armor shop. She's testing the merchandise for quality control purposes.
Narden, the shopkeeper is helping. His life's work is to get every female adventurer to wear risqué equipment.
Lilietta seems to misunderstand this.
Kautz has come to return a bag of money that Lilietta dropped while rescuing him. Good thing too, as the shop is in dire straits.
Kautz takes a look at their account book and it's a disaster. He practically volunteers to fix their bookkeeping.
He gets hired on.
So, what's the problem?
Well, everything is priced super cheap. An Archer picks up an agility-boosting bikini, and profits actually go down.
Kautz tells Narden he needs to have more faith in the quality of his armour.
Narden is moved by Kautz' passion for risqué armor.
Lilietta models a new product. It's an armor with a charm effect.
Kautz has no mana, and is instantly smitten. Narden offers him a protective ribbon (as any who plays Final Fantasy understands,) but he rejects it as too feminine and picks up a completely ineffective one instead.
Lilietta has massive strength; she has to wear enchanted gloves to restrain herself.
Kautz takes the second spare room above the shop. Upon realizing that he and Lilietta will be living together, he has all kinds of fantastic delusions.
Lilietta makes a wonderful meal.
Kautz dies of happiness. The credits roll. Wait! We can't stop now, there's more armor to sell!
Narden gives Kautz his first paycheck. Kautz tries to refuses because the shop is in trouble, but Narden insists.
Lilietta spends too long in the bath and passes out.
When Kautz sees her, he also passes out. It's too much for him to handle.
Flearika, a fighter, comes to the shop. She's a regular.
She asks for a recommendation, then teases him mercilessly.
There's a chain gag, where he passes out, then wakes up with Lilietta and Flearika standing over him, and seeing them causes him to pass out again.
Narden tells how, when he was young he was an upcoming Genius Wizard, until he was defeated by the Sexy Knight, Rose Löhe, and became her apprentice. He worked diligently for twenty years to craft the Genuine Armor.
(The story is all lies, unfortunately.)
When monsters attack the shop, Kautz is unsure how to actually use any of the equipment.
Okay, this is mostly an excuse to draw the girls with slime all over them.
Flearika starts working at the shop too.
The animators tease you by having a bath scene with Flearika and Lilietta, but focussing the camera on Mokuku the whole time.
The Demon Lord, in the shape of a young girl, arrives and demands that Narden return the Angel Wings he stole from her.
Can the Demon Lord be appeased with cookies and headpats?
Only for a limited time, until she realizes she's been distracted from her goal.
She unleashes the demon world around them. The village is gone!
Unfortunately, Narden used the angelic wings as a crafting component already.
He tries to distract the Demon Lord while the others flank, but they don't pull the maneuver off.
Kautz dives in front of the Demon lord's attacks to protect Lilietta.
Lilietta dons the genuine armor: by combining the softness of an angels feather with the softness of a girl's breasts, it overflows to maximum hardness: complete impenetrability.
With the power of the genuine armor, Lilietta tames the Demon Lord.
Narden buys he off with schoolgirl armor instead.
The world is saved! The armor shop is saved.
I think this show was Direct to Web, so I don't know how there are OVAs, but there are.
Kautz receives magic glasses that strip away coverings.
People's clothes, yeah, but also the backgrounds and pretensions.
Most of the episode is set against the Photoshop transparency background.
Things get even less explainable when the gang investigate a giant anime store that has opened in town, get sucked into a featureless room, cosplay, and fight a man with a cube for a head.
I think this is a reference I don't get.
Kautz does wear the boomerang panties though.
A copy of the shop opens up and outcompetes them!
Clearly the appropriate response is to challenge the owner to an idol contest.
Singing the OP doesn't really work, because it isn't sung. Or maybe that's good?
Their enemy fades away with vague words of wisdom.
Season two opens, like so:
While adventuring for reagents, a mysterious talking armor falls from the sky. After calling everyone in the store a pervert, she makes her home on Lilietta's head.
They name her Mamori.
A windy day gives Kautz a lot to think about. (By which I mean panty shots.)
Mina, a dangerous wizard comes by.
Celas, an Elf and Rune Fencer comes visiting. He's going to help Kautz improve his defense against sexy armor. By crossdressing.
Flearika accidentally drinks a magic potion and changes form over and over. (Chunibyo Flearika is the funniest one.)
Lilietta accidentally puts on some cursed armor, because it's been 20 episodes and we haven't had a dominatrix joke yet. Gotta fix that.
The animation quality drops so low that they break the fourth wall to lampshade it.
Lilietta is trying to figure out what Mamori does.
A rash of wholesomeness consumes the town. The team runs around with a ray that turns ordinary armor sexy.
Narden's old master returns, but she's dressed as a nun. And not even a sexy nun. She has abandoned sexiness.
She steals Mamori and uses her time manipulation power. Everyone is de-aged to childhood.
It's now _Armor Shop For Boys And Girls_.
Kautz uses the sexy ray to turn everyone back into an adult again. Flearika evolves for an arbitrary reason. They spend all the animation budget for the season on a battle. They break the fourth wall to acknowledge it.
Mamori puts herself in the way to save the others.
Mamori evolves into her final battle form. Taking control of the opening, she and Lilietta literally fling the credits at the villain until her spell breaks and the world is restored.
Narden determines this was never his real master, but was Mr. Wholesome all along.
Mamori it too damaged to survive. But it is revealed that she was created in the future and sent back in time to save them.
They vow to see her again in the future.
The end.
there's also _Armor Shop: The Movie_ which plays as a B plot to the main show throughout season two.
Flearika is sucked into a movie and has to chase her lost remote across movie genres.
I won't go into any more detail.
So, that's the show.
What's my takeaway?
It's probably not worth it.
Season one is okay, playing its premise basically straight. The OAVs and Season 2 just lean on meta to prop up their lack of execution and it doesn't really help.
People regularly make the joke of them spending the entire budget on one scene, but I can believe it here, with large parts of Season 2 looking like a visual novel, except for the big fight at the end.
The payoff is not worth it.
Also, for a show that claims to be ecchi, they do a bad job of it. One mildly sexy pinup shot per episode isn't worth the investment. (And remember, the episodes are only 5 minutes.)
The plot, such as it is, is weak.
I mean, with five minutes and a show about sexy armor, I can see <a windy day gives us an excuse to draw panty shots> as an episode plotline.
But the only gag they have is Kautz passes out from blood loss after getting a nosebleed.
Mokuku's Professional Cutie work is similar to a YouTube creator, It seems.
Mokuku's crowd funding saves the armor shop and they move into a giant new building. Except that was a lie.
A new armor shipment reminds Mamori of her past.