This episode was another intermezzo. In the meanwhile, a few months have passed, and it’s in the middle of the winter. I didn’t understand every part of the episode, but the parts that I did understand were great to see.

Apparently, Shiurei has to wait a bit more before she gets to take the exam, as nothing is shown about this issue. We start with Shiurei chasing one of the children she teaches (Ryuuji). Apparently, he wanted to play, but this goes too far and Shiurei winds up falling in a river. That is not good in such cold weather, and she indeed ends up with a cold in bed.

Seiran then decides to stay near Shiurei’s bed. Shiurei apologizes for being a bother, though Seiran tells her not to worry. We then get to see a flashback from when Shiurei was a very small child, and her mother was still alive. Apparently, she was sick at that time too, and Shiurei being sick reminds him of that time. Small Shiurei looks too cute, by the way.

Then Shouka arrives at home. He’s startled that Shiurei’s sick, and he carries some weird items. A bit later, the two of them try to take care of Shiurei. Do I still have to tell you what happens when Shouka offers to make Shiurei some food ^^;

A flashback later, and Seiran managed to view the battlefield that Shouka left behind. Then Ran and Kouyuu, who apparently heard that Shiurei was sick, pay a visit. They’re startled as well by Shouka’s actions. ^^; Seiran quickly sends Shouka to some other duty.

Seiran, Ran and Kouyuu then talk a bit about some thing I didn’t understand, and the two of them get a bit annoyed. Shiurei gets even more guests when Reishin and Kijin decide to pay a visit, for god knows what reason. Reishin gets a bit startled by his big brother. It really seems that he looks up to him. The two of them also enter through the window. I have no idea why, but it looked funny :D

The two of them seemed to have brought some medicine. The three of them (Shouka, Kijin and Reishin) pay Shiurei a small visit, and then they run into Seiran, Ran and Kouyuu, who are all quite startled. Especially Kouyuu. Then Ryuuji’s father pays a visit, in order to tell Shouka that Ryuuji’s gone missing. Seiran, Kouyuu and Ran go to look for him. Reishin refuses for some reason, and he gets slapped by Shouka. The interesting thing is that, even though it looked like Shouka gently slapped him, Reishin really looks hurt. Kouyuu, Ran and Seiran notice this, and begin to suspect something.

Shouka and Reishin then are alone and have a very long discussion. What the heck were they talking about? In any case, the guests don’t stop coming when even Ryuuki pays a visit to Shiurei. And he does something stupid again. ^^; He tries to take care of her, though when she asks for water, she won’t drink it. His solution to this made Shiurei quite angry when she found out. Haha. So funny. ^^;

Ryuuji is meanwhile found. He tried to make it up for Shiurei by picking one of her favourite flowers. (Any Fantastic Children-references, anyone?) The parties talk for a bit, Shiurei gets some rest and she does appreciate Ryuuki’s effords. Overall, this anime’s going pretty fast, just skipping from summer to winter like that. That could promise to become something great. Still, I have yet to see any subtle changes in Shiurei, or any of the characters. You never see that in anime, by the way, characters subtly aging. Only when three or more years have past, you can see the difference. The Law of Ueki attempted to do this, but never got farther than just letting Rinko’s hair grow, while keeping all of the other characters the same, and from what I’ve seen from screenshots on other blogs, I believe that Haruhi’s doing the same thing as well. But then again, I’d be surprised if she wasn’t the only one whose hair started growing.

The past three episodes have really been messing up the overall pacing of Tsubasa Chronicle. What once was arc-filler-arc-filler-arc now got turned into arc-filler-filler-filler-possibly even more fillers-arc. The overall pacing of the second season now seems way faster than the first one, which took its time in telling the stories it had to tell. I hope that I’m not smelling budgeting problems.

There are shows at which fast pacing is the best option, for example Noein, Ergo Proxy, xxxHolic. There are also shows which benefit more from a slow pacing, like Mushishi, The Third, Saiunkoku Monogatari. And Tsubasa Chronicle. This show isn’t meant for arcs which only last one episode. It needs to build up a bit.

Anyway, about the episode, it was pretty interesting to see how Fye reacted. He got put in the same situation Kurogane was in the third episode and Syaoran in the fifth episode of the second season. Fye reacts better than Syaoran. Where Syaoran was heavily convinced of the fact that his father was his real father, Fye did understand that Chii wasn’t the same Chii as his Chii. Still, you do see that he’s having trouble remembering this. Still, I do believe that his Chii managed to transport her feelings to this Chii, in order to tell Fye that she wanted to go with him. He gets the message in the end, and then comforts this Chii, hoping that his words will reach his Chii.

It was also great to see all of the Chobits-cameos again. Especially Sumomo and her dances were awesome. I liked the way this world was designed, by the way. It’s an interesting goverment system at which at a certain night, once a year, everyone has a dream about who is to become the next king. This king will reign for a year, until his or her replacement comes. In order to ensure the king’s purity, his or her memory gets temporarily removed. Though indeed, at times, this can backfire when a totally incompetent king gets chosen. Logic is indeed missing from every possible direction, as people should be abl ot do great things with their given magic, though there are absolutely no signs of brilliant ideas, but whatever. Like I said: when you think about it, the show doesn’t make any sense. Solution: don’t think about it.

At first, this episode seems a filler, though it’s everything but a filler, as both Pietoro as Narcia/Kai as Hyuu all got a healthy dose of character development. The episode also features one of the funniest scenes of Popolocrois yet. And that has to say something! I’m not going to spoil that one, but I have to say that when you really get to know brilliant characters like Gamigami, the way his inventions fail half of the time, his unique voice-acting and his personal taste in aesthetic design, the creators can really achieve some utterly brilliant scenes. I almost fell of my chair from laughter.

There’s also something that I noticed at that particular scene: the PopoloCrois OST Rocks! The dreamy tunes really set the mood perfectly, they’re wonderfully composed and the overall effect they have is amazing.

About the episode: as this was the first episode on PopoloCrois which had such an ugly character in it, who was supposed to be pretty and Pietoro looked like he fell in love with her, I kept fearing that this would be a disaster. Alas, I had no reason to fear at all, as the robot ends up pretending to blow herself up, which leaves Pietoro and Narcia together again. They were SO CUTE at the end of the episode! The list I made on my last post in .Hack//Roots gets another entry: Pietoro and Narcia. Kawaaiiii!

I am SO looking forward to the next couple of episodes. Mostly because of Hyuu. The last episode finally made her realize that she’s been wasting her time, and we close the episode with an image of her, flying to some unknown place. Where will she fly to? And what kind of impact will this have on the other characters?

I also just loved the fact that this humanoid-robot-girl had such an incredibly long name: “Gamigami The Great Tenter Shion Version 1.5″ (do I still have to tell who gave this name to her? ^^;). As Pietoro was the only one who bothered to shorten her name, the results were just hilarious. Every time a bad guy tried to call her, he’d call ehr in her full name, when you combine this with tension, it works perfectly. ^^;

And here’s another batch of the spring-season anime which were horribly ignored by the fansubbers. All of them are low-budget. They’re all incredibly cheesy. And when I say cheese, I really mean cheese. The OPs all are ridiculous, though catchy. Strangely enough, despite all this, I enjoyed watching them.

Hime-Sama Goyoujin

This certainly is a low-budget comedy anime. Was it funny? Yes, it was. I had some good laughs, which could easily compete with Ouran High School Host. The show knows how to use utter randomness, along with a couple of horribly wrong jokes. Still, this certainly won’t be one of the smart anime out there, as each member of the cast has the same intelligence of a dog, chasing its own tail. This show knows what it is: a comedy-anime and nothing more. Overall, I liked it. The jokes were funny, and I’ll be recommending this to anyone who’s in for a few good laughs.

Gun Doh Musashi

From now on, the term extremely corny samurai-show” gets to be the equivalent of Gun Doh Musashi. If I didn’t know that this show came out this spring, I would’t have guessed it at all. The show follows the life of Miyamoto Musashi. It’s based on history, though the creators made thankful use of artistical freedom. It’s also entirely directed at children. I mean, Musashi likes to use weapons that hurt, but don’t kill. He’s a brat who’s an expert swordsman and he’s able to take down entire armies if he wants to. Still, why am I so drawn to this incredibly cheesy show? Despite they look incredibly corny, the art of the main characters somehow looks very interesting, and the OP is just totally awesome, in a funny kind of way. No other show would attempt to include an OP like that. Overall, if you’re into cheesy japanese samurai-shows, I might recomment this. ^^;

Spider Riders

This show was so unknown that the dubs got out even sooner than the subs. Okay, this may be an extreme case in which an american company and a japanese company joined together to make it, but still. In any case, what we have here is a standard show for six-year-old boys. Think guy-gets-transported-to-other-world-and-gets-to-fight-alongside-giant-creatures-sort-of-plot. Still, the bad thing is the dubs. I totally agree with the people who say that english dubs don’t fit anime, and this show proves it. The voice-acting has experienced yet another horrible miss-cast, everything sounds horribly ugly, especially in american accents who show absolutely no signs of emotions. The jokes also fail 50% of the time because of this. Still, the show remains interesting. I think I’ll continue watching this when the subs get out, as it certainly beats shows like Kiba, Elemental Gerad and MAR, despite it being horribly cliché.

I think that people already know that I despise poorly executed romances. Especially between main characters. It’s so easy to just make two characters love each other. Though at the same time, it looks horribly fake. Nevertheless, I have to admit that I absolutely love the better executed romances. Firiel and Roux, for example. Yuu and Haruka. And starting from this episode: Haseo and Shino.

I finally realized .Hack//Roots brilliance: at certain points, it realize that characters don’t need to talk in order to make clear what they want to say. It finally realizes the importance of body language. Unfortunately, this does not happen often. Only the third episode managed so far. And the eleventh one! Haha!

Finally .Hack//Roots understands what an MMORPG is about: interacting with other people and fighting monsters. And that’s exactly what it does. The entire episode is an intermezzo, though I just loved it. Especially the fact that characters are actually disappearing, and quitting the game! Goad and the entire TaN-guild will be history! Talk about development!

At the same time, we get more and more hints about what is going to happen at the second half of the show, and thank god it’ll involve some supernatural stuff, instead of conflicts against players who somehow managed to buff themselves to admin-level. I have no idea what exactly it’ll be, but it will involve the Signs and the weird dude who looks like .Hack//Dusk’s main character.

And I haven’t even started talking about Sakisaka and Tabby! I mean, before, I always thought Tabby was a stupid, obnoxious little brat whose only purpose was to create some conflicts between other characters. But now it seems that she actually has a reason to be acting the way she does! I couldn’t imagine it when I first saw the last part of this episode but still, the creators suddenly removed one of the major flaws of the anime.

Still, the other major flaw remains. Even though it’s great to see TaN disbanded, why the heck did it get disbanded? And what happened to Ovan? I mean, the admins must’ve been the ones to disband TaN. Or did Naobi hide Ovan somewhere? And why did Naobi go through the trouble of contacting Phyllo. It’s probably because he knew how fast rumours would travel, which means that he wanted the Twillight Brigade to know about Ovan. And why did Phyllo get so shocked when he heard it?

I’m also having some problems with Ovan disappearing. Of course, it’s great that he’s gone, and I’m hoping for him not to return for a while, but at least show some subtle shots of him in the real world, collapsing. He has, of course, been data-drained. His mind is now trapped in the game, just like Tsukasa, otherwise he’d just log out. In fact, I just wish for any shots from the outside world to be shown right now. I’m curious about the real lives of all of the characters. I’m hoping that these’ll come later in the series, as they were one of the many things that made //Sign so great.

Tawaraya was also great once more. He also used the power of rumours to give the strange markings the name “Sign” (just like how “pwn” managed to get in existance). He managed to leave a nice signature before his departure. I wonder if any of the guys who left will ever get back.

Overall, .Hack//Roots is a strange series. Last week it had me ranting about the lack of quality on the show, but this week totally made up for it with a brilliant episode. I think that .Hack//Roots kindof loses itself in the large climaxes, which makes me a bit worried. Still, I feel that this episode made some very nice moves in order to prevent this.