January 12, 2008

True Tears - 02


And the time has come for me to choose which shows to blog. In case you’re wondering: no, I’m not going to blog Hatenkou Yuugi. Basically, the only thing that stands out for that series are the characters and the complicated dialogue, and I didn’t like how the second episode placed Rahzel and her companions “above the system”. It’s an interesting series, but I’m going to wait for the subs to come.

As for True Tears, it’s looking quite solid so far, and it’s definitely something different from the series I usually watch. There are a few stereotypes here and there, but so far the writers have made something interesting out of the first two episodes, not to mention that the series is being directed by the guy from Simoun. I often dislike high-school romances for their shallow characters or just boring plot, but the creators are showing signs that they’re building up with the slow pacing of the past few episodes. The show also only has 13 episodes, so it’ll be nice and short. It’s a good replacement for Shugo Chara with its fifty-one scheduled episodes.

This episode mostly developed the three main characters a bit. If I understood things correctly, Shinichiro lives together with Hiromi, after her parents died or something. Shinichiro likes Hiromi, but they hardly talk to each other. In the previous episode, he ran into Noe and started hanging out with her, and it seems that Noe has come to like Shinichiro, though Shinichiro has problems getting used to Noe’s strange character. Hiromi, meanwhile, also isn’t ignorant about Shinichiro either, and in this episode she tries to find out why the guy spends so much time with Noe. Really, it sounds like a bad soap-opera when I write it down like that, though the episode was quite decent. This isn’t the first time where I liked a series with a flawed storyline.

Saiunkoku Monogatari - 71


Whoa, after the confusing previous episode, the current one totally makes up for it with probably some of the best scenes ever since the end of the Eigetsu-arc. We finally see Juusanhime and Shun together, and we finally learn a bit more about them. Shun’s original name was Shiba Jin, and he lived together with Juusanhime at one point, where she fell in love with him, even though the age-difference between the two was quite large. Then, at one point something happened that caused Jin to change his name, become a prisoner/delinquent/bandit/something and foresake the Ran-clan.

The woman who was with him was indeed Shusui, and only now we see how serious her headaches of the previous episodes were. I didn’t quite catch how he did it, but the fact remains that Shusui lost herself and tried to kill Juusanhime in this episode, if it wasn’t for Ensei, she’d be dead by now. And to think that Shuuei was right there as well, finding out that the woman he longed for tried to kill his own sister.

In the second half of the episode, Shuurei gets basically taken off the case of Juusanhime, because well, she rather failed to protect her. We also see Shuuei, who now really says farewell to Ryuuki. If I had to guess, then there were more things that happened in the past with him, and I guess that he just can’t keep on living like he did for the past two years. I assume that the future episodes will show us more about the guy’s past.

There were a few things I didn’t understand, though. Like, why was the prison with Tantan attacked? And what was the purpose of the match between Ran and Ryuuki?