Level E

Currently, hundred of different alien species come and go, living their lives on the Earth. Species that come in peace, aggressive warlike species... Aliens with all kinds of personalities live among us, maintaining a precarious balance.

—Opening Narration

Contrary to the belief of its native inhabitants, Mankind isn't the only sentient species living on Earth. Actually, individuals of about five hundred alien species call Earth home for reasons as diverse as their biological peculiarities. The Diskun and Erald, for example, come to Earth because Humans Are Special to them; others are refugees, like the cursed inhabitants of the dead planet Conwell; some come looking for love, like the future Mucbak Queen; and not everyone has a choice on the matter, like one of the last mermaids of Horn. Their existance is a secret to the average human citizen; however, with so many aliens around, it's inevitable some humans eventually get tangled in their bizarre stories. These humans are said to have entered the Level E.

Level E is one of the least known works of Yoshihiro Togashi, of Yu Yu Hakusho and Hunter X Hunter fame. Prone to Art Shift, Genre Shift and Mood Whiplash, it can go from a wacky parody of Pretty Freeloader shows to a tragic Horror story without missing a beat, and it lacks a definite protagonist, having an Ensemble Cast whose most recurring character is a certain Prince from the planet Dogra.

An 13-episodes Anime adaptation by Studio Pierrot aired in 2011.

Tropes used in Level E include:

Manga-specific

• Affably Evil → Evilly Affable -- The Prince, though he's not completely evil, just a jerk.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot -- Sometimes the Prince is just too smart.
• Alien Among Us
• Aliens Are Bastards -- Some species are said to have exterminated others for the pettiest of reasons. And individuals don't fare better, acting as ruthless, greedy and fanatical as the worst of humans.
  • And then there is the Prince.
• Aliens Speaking English -- Actually, what they don't speak is Japanese. Not even their universal translators come with it.
• Amusement Park of Doom -- Calvary, planet-sized.
• Arranged Marriage -- Meet Princess Luna.
• Batman Gambit -- The first arc was all orchestrated by the Prince
• Becoming the Mask -- Tachibana-sensei feels pretty comfortable in her new job.
• Bee People -- The Mucbaks: an insectoid One-Gender Race, but lacking a Hive Mind.
• Berserk Button -- For Kraft, everything The Prince does.
• Bittersweet Ending -- The mermaid story.
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction -- His mother died long before he was born.
• Black Widow -- both Interspecies Romance stories feature a version of this
• Blatant Lies -- Captain Kraft didn't want to harm the prince. Sure, not one bit.
• But Now I Must Go -- She belongs to the sea, even if it is an alien sea to her.
• The Caligula -- The Prince.
• Calling Your Attacks
• Cast of Snowflakes
• Close-Call Haircut
• Creepy Child -- Aliens come in all sizes and ages.
• Cute Monster Girl -- Tachibana-sensei
• Cute Sports Club Manager -- Fujii.
• Decoy Protagonist -- If this were a typical Pretty Freeloader series, Yukitaka would have been the Ordinary High School Student protagonist.
• Delinquent -- Yukitaka is often mistaken for one, though his argument with Kraft proves he just may have been one.
• Depopulation Bomb -- By Synthetic Plague. What the Mucbak drop onto the species from which they take mates. Just for jealousy.
• Did Not Do the Research -- Togashi named this series Level E because he thought alien starts with an e in English. He associated it with extraterrestrial.
  • Probably doesn't help that when 'alien' is transliterated into rōmaji, it becomes 'eiriyen'. Or something like that. Point is, it starts with an E.
• Did You Just Romance Cthulhu? -- Kyoko doesn't realize what that cute foreign girl is and what dire consequences dating her might have for Mankind.
• Distant Finale
• Does Not Know His Own Strength -- A local street gang tries to pick up a woman. The Dogran Prince goes Dulcinea, taking kicks long enough for the woman to escape, but the gang goes too far, so he took one of them by the head and proceeds to smash it onto the ground, fatally wounding him. Not. Unfortunately, these guys are Hair Trigger Tempered, Hot-Blooded Disconians in human disguise.
  • As told by the Prince...
• Downer Ending -- The Conwellian story. Nope, the show was trolling you.
• Dude Looks Like a Lady -- The Prince, he is as good-looking as he is annoying.
• Dying Race -- The Conwellians
• Eastern RPG -- The asssociated tropes are invoked and Played for Laughs by the Prince in one of the stories.
• Easy Amnesia
• Evil Blonde Prince -- Not neccessarily evil but he is still a full-on Jerkass
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep" -- The Prince of Dogra, real name Baka Ki El Dogra. Really.
• Everything is Worse with Princes from Dogra
  • Jerk with a Heart of Jerk -- The guy he helped out turned out to be part of his plan.
  • Jerk Stu -- Averted. Everybody hates him but can't really do anything about it.
• Everything's Better with Princesses -- Luna Mi Mad of Magra and Saki of Mucbak.
• Fan Boy -- The Disconians are big fans of baseball.
• Five-Man Band -- Color Coded for Your Convenience, as classical sentais they are.
  • The Hero -- Shimizu (Blue)
  • The Lancer -- Akagawa (Red)
  • The Big Guy -- Yokota (Yellow)
  • The Chick -- Momochi (White)
  • The Smart Guy -- Mayuzumi (Black)
• The Game Plays You
• Genetic Engineering -- With Lego Genetics.
• Genre Busting -- The mermaid story is at heart an SF Film Noir Fairy Tale.
• Girl Next Door -- Miho.
• Government Conspiracy
• Hair Antennae -- Kraft, Princess Luna (Hers looks like a spider)
• Happy Ending -- It took breaking about a hundred galactic laws, but in the end Earth is safe and Kyoko finally has a body to match his/her mind.
• Healing Factor
• Heroic Comedic Sociopath -- The Prince does try to help the Earth... while having fun (from his point of view).
• Honor Before Reason -- Kyoko won't date lesbians; she wants girls to love her as if she were a guy, hoping to eventually find someone who feels If It's You It's Okay for him/her.
• Horror Hunger -- The "invisible stomach".
• Hot-Blooded -- Hotheads Yukitaka and Captain Kraft. The former gets hypertension from the Prince's wacky antics. The latter, well... he's just irritable.
  • The Disconian race, of the Hair-Trigger Temper kind. Hinted to be bloodthirsty, revengeful beings. Picking a fight with them is more or less like asking for a full-scale interracial war. The Prince accidentally kills one of them... NOT!!
• Human Aliens -- Dograns, except for being Made of Iron and having Alien Blood.
• Humans Are Special -- For the Diskun and Eralds, humans are off limits. Who knows which human might be a potential baseball star or parent to one?. The Mucbaks think humans have great genetic potential.
• I Am a Humanitarian
• Inferred Holocaust: Subverted. After Yukitaka accidentally blows up the Prince's ship, a clip show plays of the funerals of those caught in the blast. Double subverted when it turns out that there were no casualties, much to Yukitaka's relief.
• Interspecies Romance -- Two of the stories are about this. Things get really messy because of the Bizarre Alien Reproduction involved.
• It Amused Me -- The Prince is apparently unable to do anything without twisting it into some convoluted prank.
• Kansas City Shuffle
• Kid Hero: Both lampshaded and subverted in one of the stories. The kids who the Prince dragged into one of his crazy anti-boredom schemes completely called him out on actually picking kids to fight monsters. They eventually go along with it kicking and screaming, sometimes literally.
• Klingons Love Shakespeare -- Baseball is Serious Business for Diskun and Eralds.
• Last of His Kind
• Laughing Mad: Captain Kraft when The Prince pressed his button WAY TOO MANY times at once.
• Living Lie Detector -- It comes handy if your species evolved in a planet where your predators look just like you.
• Long-Haired Pretty Boy -- The Prince
• Love At First Sight
• Malaproper -- Captain Iwata's "porngays" phenomenon.
• The Masquerade
• Massive Multiplayer Scam
• Our Mermaids Are Different: Alien mermaids with two tails and a deadly reflex.
• Monster Sob Story -- The Conwellians history is a dire tale.
• Mood Whiplash: Constantly. This show can and does transition from dramatic to tense to comedic in the span of about 60 seconds, all with the same characters.
• Mucbak Needs Men
• Offscreen Teleportation -- Good golly, Prince! Don't show up in front of us like that!
• Older Than They Look -- The kids are in 5th grade (11-12 years old) and Yokota already has a tween Perma-Stubble, but Shimizu and Mayuzumi look younger than their grade suggests.
• Oh Crap -- ...is not enough to describe the look on Kraft's face, when he thought that his Prince killed a Disconian.
• Organic Technology -- Dograns and Mucbaks.
• Out-Gambitted -- The Prince eventually finds someone even sneakier than him.
  • And is absolutely thrilled by the fact.
• Playing Possum -- The dead Disconian isn't really dead after all.
• Poltergeist
• Plaguemaster -- All Mucbak royalty.
• Pretty Freeloader -- Thats what Yukitaka finds as he enters the living room of the flat he has just moved to. Hilarity Ensues.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy -- Diskun and Eralds. The Diskun have exterminated species for insulting a single member of its race.
• Psychic Powers -- One of the team is a Reality Warper. But which one?
• The Reptilians -- Tachibana-sensei is one of these.
• Scheherazade Gambit -- The PrincePrincess uses a variant to delay hisher wedding night. Long story.
• Seinen -- Despite having been published in Weekly Shonen Jump, this series is Seinen to the core.
• Sentai -- The Prince just throws them in his JRPG.
• Shout-Out -- To ET the Extraterrestrial
  • "Clive from the planet Jacqueline Ess" is a reference to the Books of Blood. Come to think of it, the whole series might have been inspired by that famous horror anthology, given the episodic structure, some of the themes explored, the black humour and occasional forays into the weird and macabre.
  • Professor Edogawa from Konan Laboratory?.
  • Yukitaka Tsutsui is a one of protagonists?
• Sour Supporter -- Kraft, who has been a bodyguard for the Prince for ten years, hates his guts intensely but keeps protecting him solely out of loyalty to the King and Queen of Dogra.
• Spell My Name with an "S" -- Diskun/Disc(k)on, Mucbak/Makubaku/Macbac, Dogran/Doguran.
• Stalker with a Test Tube
• Standard Hero Reward
• Stern Teacher -- Tachibana-sensei.
• Story Within a Story -- One of the stories turns out to be just a Very Loosely Based on a True Story manga written by the Prince.
• Take Me Instead! -- The mermaid agreed to become an assassin so her sisters were spared.
• They Look Like Us Now
• Touched By a Vorlon -- The grade school Five-Man Band.
• Transsexualism -- Kyoko has felt like a man at least since she was 4 years old.
• Trapped in Another World
• Troll -- The Prince is currently in competition with Izaya for the ultimate fictional troll title.
  • The Prince isn't the only troll, in fact, the entire show trolls its viewers.
• Twist Ending -- What do you know, humans aren't the only sentient beings native to Earth. Good news for a certain Woobie mermaid.
  • Regarding the Conwell story: Apparently, the entire arc was just Prince Baka pitching a story to an executive which gets rejected for being too dark. Even though the Prince suggests that the Conwell aliens exist, it's hard to know if he's telling the truth knowing his usual habits.
• Uncanny Valley -- All the "inhabitants" of Calvary live deeply in it.
• Unlucky Childhood Friend -- Princess Luna.
• Unreliable Narrator -- Take anything the Prince says with a grain of salt.
• The Un-Reveal -- After discovering that he had a minor McGuffin all along, the Prince proceeded to use the Mc Guffin to reveal the suspenseful truth about him to Yukitaka. Yes it was about him... having a weird pet, that is. He claims to have never said that the truth was all about him, though, much to Yukitaka's dismay.
• Unusual Euphemism -- In some translations, Miho is a *+0x* who probably likes to *+0x+*. In others the translator uses Symbol Swearing for same effect.
• Villainous Crossdresser -- The Prince looks good as a Princess, of course.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting -- The Prince's pet.
• Walking Shirtless Scene -- Captain Iwata has a hard time keeping his shirt on.
• Watch Out for That Tree
• Welcome to Corneria: During the RPG arc, one of the NPCs would keep saying "Welcome to Tarsting Town."
• What Measure Is a Humanoid?
• With This Ring -- Even Dogran wedding rings are beyond Earth's technological level.
• Wrong Genetic Sex: Kyoko.

Anime-specific

• All Just A Story -- The fourth episode, which was just one of the Prince's attempts to convince humans that aliens exist.
• Amusing Injuries -- I mean, come on, people! Yukitaka punished Prince with a reverse roundhouse kick, Slo Mo and all!
  • Not to mention Captain Kraft doing the same thing only with a Repeat Cut and then throwing the prince in the air, kicking him multiple times while falling and ending with a piledriver.
  • And later Shimizu gives him a Megaton Punch followed by him and Momochi using the king as a hammer.
• Bait and Switch Credits -- The OP presents the series as an actioner with a blonde alien bishie hunting uglier aliens.
• Casting Gag: This is the second series where Daisuke Namikawa has played a prince while Takehito Koyasu has played his primary attendant. However, their roles in terms of character interaction are completely reversed.
• Cliff Hanger -- Of the surprise reveal variety, complete with To Be Continued.
• Conspicuous CG -- All over the place, to the point where it's even used to animate hand puppets.
• Early-Bird Cameo -- Yukitaka's baseball team captain, Iwata, and Yokota and Shimizu are seen briefly in the first episode.
  • The video game Yukitaka plays in an early episode features the Color Rangers.
• Fan Service -- The animated Tachibana-sensei gets Non-Mammal Mammaries and a Shower Scene.
• Glasses Do Something Unusual -- Kraft's subordinate, Sado, can Stat-O-Vise a dead human body. Which turns out to be a Disconian.
• Hey, It's That Voice! -- Yukitaka is one of the three idiots, Kurosaki.
  • Prince Baka Ki=El-Dogra is Italy, Ulquiorra, Rock and Jellal/Mystogan.
  • Captain Kraft is, well, everybody.
  • The Narrator narrated Arakawa Under the Bridge, Gintama, Black Jack (2004), Kaiji and a segment from Hidamari Sketch.
  • Ranzo is a lot of people from One Piece.
  • Miho is Futaba and Henriette/Arsene.
  • Chiaki Kuriyama (Go Go Yubari from Kill Bill) sings the OP.
  • Kyoko is played by Yuu Kobayashi.
• Hyperspace Wardrobe -- Where does the Prince keep those Cosplay outfits?
• Pragmatic Adaptation -- The animated version adds Fan Service and action sequences to some arcs and removes some scenes from other in order to make them fit into the tv episodes.
• Saying Sound Effects Out Loud -- Prince is a regular offender (this may be due more to Actor Allusion than anything, though).

"Boink!" "Kapow!"

• The Stinger: After the end credits of the final episode, it is revealed that the cat was a spy all along.
• The Unmasqued World -- At the end of the anime, Prince was outwitted and married the princess of Magura, removing under observation status from Earth - and revealing the entire alien armada to the entire planet.