I liked this episode. A lot. It was intriguing, the fight was really tense, it made sense, and there was A LOT of character-development in it. Claymore may be dull in its introductions; it’s brilliant in its conclusions. While this does mean that the next episode will be another dull one, I’m glad enough that this episode turned out good.

First of all, Jeane. Not only is her new hairstyle much better than her old one, she showed that you can go back from awakening, even though you haven’t put your mind to it, though that may be because of Claire and Galatea’s ability to manipulate Yoki so well. I can imagine that Claire will pick Galatea’s technique of manipulating Yoki up as well in the future somehow.

I think I also finally realize what makes Claire so special. Half-awakened beings already are rather rare among Claymore, but the Claymore it happens to usually don’t notice the difference. The only reason Miria noticed this was because they were with four Half-awakened ones in one group, so this just had to stand out. I think the reason that the Organization sends the problematic Half-awakened ones to get killed off as a precaution, as the awakening-process seems to have made them more curious, and easier to question the Organization (after all, fully awakened ones tend to go berserk, so I wouldn’t be surprised at some subtle effects on the characters of Half-awakened ones). Claire is probably one of the few who survived such an attempt to kill her off, along with Miria, Deneve and Helen, and because of her rather impulsive and ignorant nature, she probably is the first of them who left the organization willingly.

It will be interesting to see where she’ll go now. She now has another companion who’ll follow her around, no matter what (although I do think that Raki won’t be doing that anymore, as something major seems to have happened to him, according to the manga-readers). The fact remains, though, that it’ll take a long time for Claire to defeat Priscilla without Riful’s help.

I wonder how many comrades Riful managed to gather. The guy up in the north seemed to have at least three huge awakened beings, as seen at the end of the episode, if you add Priscilla, that makes four. (The organization is losing a lot of Claymore lately, isn’t it? If the party we saw there didn’t survive, they’re going to have to recruit ten new members, quite a significant amount and I suspect that more Claymores have died off-screen).

This probably is the anime with the biggest amount of different names. Every website I run into seems to classify it under a different one. 100 Stories, Kousetsu Hyaku Monogatari, Requiem from the Darkness and Natsuhiko Kyougoku’s Worldly Horror Stories all refer to the same anime. It basically tells horror-stories, as told through the eyes of the beginning writer Momosuke Yamaoka, as he follows a peculiar threesome go after demons.

100 Stories (as I’ll call it in this review) is basically a case-based horror show. Through the course of 13 episodes, we see 12 different horror-stories told. I love case-based series, as well as horror anime, so I was looking forward to this one. I guess that that’s why it disappointed a bit, since I’ve both seen much better case-based and horror shows. The problem lays with the fact that this anime tried to limit itself a bit too much. The stories are not just random stories, they’re all about some individual, gone insane, involving a monster in some way. After six or seven of these stories, they do begin to look like each other.

Another problem lies with the main character: Momosuke. He’s by no means a bad character, and the anime is a perfectly fine coming-of-age story of him, but he limits the side-characters from getting attention. It’s especially annoying because they are the really interesting ones. But they never get the chance to really develop because of Momosuke, resulting in incomplete backgrounds and a love-relationship that just feels forced.

Still, despite the flaws, 100 Stories remains a nice watch. The horror that is used is Japanese Classic Horror, which tries to captivate its audience not by gore of surprises, but with a creepy mood and storytelling. This especially works well in the early half of the anime. And even though the characters lack development, they’re all really interesting to watch. My favourites were Mataichi and especially Nagamimi, voiced by the god-like Norio Wakamoto.

The graphics fit the horror-mood perfectly, apart from the CG-perhaps. Sceneries are always dark, with few and dark colours used. The CG, however, showed that the creators weren’t really gifted in that part. One particular episode featured a really strange sea, in the middle of a storm, that just didn’t work well. The music contributes enough to the mood, but it isn’t anything special, although I do need to note that the OP and ED are not what you’d expect from a horror-show.

Recap. Strangely enough, though, I didn’t mind it at all. It was the perfect chance to get a bit nostalgic over all the characters that lost their lives throughout the show, and it sure as hell reminded me why this is one of my favourite shows of the season. Especially seeing the first episode back, when everyone was still alive with Kokopelli had impact. I also loved the use of insert songs throughout the episode. As far as recap-episodes go, you can’t get any better than this one.

Another thing is that we only really understood that people were really piloting the other robots since Maki’s fight. Seeing the other children beat up the enemy robots, and knowing that they were actually destroying planets also was really creepy. The only thing that I didn’t like about this episode was how it yet again didn’t focus on Kirie, for the third time since he got assigned as the next pilot, and I’m really interested to see some more attention focused on him.

Gonzo’s productions may be either a success (Red Garden, Master of Epic), or a failure (Getsumen to Heiki Mina, Kaze no Stigma), and Bokura no is one huge success. :) (Oh, and in case you wondered, yes I’ve recycled screenshots from previous entries, since I got lazy and this is a recap anyway ^^;)