Idolmaster Xenoglossia - Penguins to Tokyo (上京ペンギン)

This latest anime from Sunrise has idols, xeno, and mecha! It is one of the coming spring anime that has the most interesting name. While it's scheduled to air on April 2007, a promotion resulted in a limited web release a few days ago.

Idolmaster Xenoglossia Official site
For those of you who are wondering, this anime has nothing to do with Xenogears. Instead, the anime is based on an arcade game which was released early this year on Xbox 360. The anime takes these character and gives them their own mecha. However, the game itself does not have the mecha aspect and deals more in raising an idol/popstar.


The episode starts with our main protagonist, Amami Haruka attending an audition in January to become an "Idolmaster". Despite her clumsiness and awkwardness at the start of the audition, she must have done well since a letter in February informs her that she passes the audition! The letter even comes with a key-like thing to run her robot!

There isn't much happening in the first half of the episode, it pretty much deals with our two idolmaster coming to Tokyo for the first time. You can probably regard this segment as country girls going to the big city :b.


Eventually though, we are shown glimpses on what the role of the robots are - destroy incoming asteroid before they enter the earth atmosphere. However, there is definitely more than that as there seems to be human anthagonists as well. Or is it just opposing idolmaster factions? I am not too clear on this.
I guess there is only so much plot twist you can generate from an asteroid.

Ending theme: Traveller's Eternity~Dear boy by Snow
(Yuukyuu no Tabibito~Dear boy / 悠久の旅人~Dear boy)


Impression:
I kinda like the ending theme, hopefully the rest of the insert songs are good as well.
While the first episode does not have the same attraction of say, Code Geass, it does not really disappoint either. For me, Mai-Hime which was also made by Sunrise, have a rather abysmal start too, and I am still amazed how good it turns out to be.

Pondering:
If you are wondering where the penguins in the title come into place, I am guessing that the clumsiness of our heroines on their first day in Tokyo is worthy of the penguin tag :/.