Another very solid episode from Himitsu. Though it wasn’t among the best episodes of this series, it still had me glued at the screen during the tense moments. This episode kept a lot of things unmentioned. It never went into detail as to what Kinoko’s father, three friends and family did to her. All that we saw confirmed is that she was once abused by her father. Her father turned out to be obsessed and in love with her, and Kinoko knew this, so she used him as a scapegoat to take all the blame, which is why Kinoko didn’t kill him. He’d be sentenced to death anyway.

Still, I like series that assume that their viewer has a brain. There’s of course a fine line between left-out information and plain laziness, but I suspect that the creators knew full well what they were doing in this episode.

I think the reason why this episode wasn’t as good as the previous ones was that there were times in which we didn’t follow Aoki’s thought-pattern, but just jumped right to his conclusions, while the thing that made me fall in love with this series was the seemingly endless search for that one clue that helped to push the case closer to getting solved.

Hah, I don’t care about the general opinion: this show rocks! It may be the most neglected series of the season, but for me it definitely belongs in the top-10 of the series that aired this season.

In this age of big budgets, it’s good to see that a relatively unknown company as Studio Fantasia is also trying its best to put down a classic. One of the things I don’t like about this season is that nearly every good series is done by the big animation studios, as Madhouse, Gonzo, Deen, etc. The studios that are relatively unpopular don’t seem to be even trying (for example A.C.G.T with its questionable Monochrome Factor).

I’m really glad to see that Studio Fantasia is trying to improve itself. Just take a look at their previous work. Before 2006, they only worked on silly shows which only seemed to focus on fanservice, though they pretty much surprised me with their solid work on Souko no Strain, and now they again managed to create a very enjoyable series that goes right where many other series have gone wrong. So yeah, there are a few low-budget parts in this series, mostly the art, but the rest really shines. This should send out a good message to the other lesser-known studios: you can create a good anime, even on a small budget.

Really, this is what a 12-episode series should be: no scene is wasted, quick development and good characterization. A 26-episode can afford to slowly build up for 10 episodes, but series like this one need to deliver quickly. Seeing a series that builds up for eleven episodes, with a climax of only two episodes is nice and all, but it remains mostly boring.

What’s more: the villains actually have some background to them. This episode actually gave the two of them some depth, beyond their stereotypes. It seems that the guy is obsessed with his own work, and is fascinated when he sees how HW-09 has managed to not turn into glass. The woman meanwhile reveals that she knew HW-09 before she became a glass maiden, and as it turns out: she loathed her.

Also, is it me or do the more low-budget series have a bigger tendency to feature good fights than high-budget series? Seriously, I can confidently say that the fight in this episode was better than what I’ve seen from Soul Eater and Macross Frontier so far, even though these series overflow with budget. It’s the same with Gunslinger Girl - Il Teatrino: the animation was bad, and yet the fights were amazingly directed. Somehow, it feels to me that the creators try to make up for the lack of budget by detailed direction, and it really works!

To call Real Drive unconventional would be a bit understatement. When I went into this series, I expected a huge focus on technology and heavy terms, but the focus on Minamo ended up much bigger than I thought. This yet again was another episode without diving.

In this episode, a book that Minamo’s reading turns out to have parts cut off. She initially believes that this is some kind of message or love-letter. Holon, however, corrects her, and says that it’s probably a protest made when all the books got digitalized. Obviously disappointed by this, Minamo tells her grandmother about it (wasn’t she on Haru and Eiichiro’s team before Haru got his accident?) and her grandmother suggests her checking out a certain book called “love letter”.

Minamo starts reading the book, and although it’s a bit too “mature” for her, she’s quickly drawn in. Then, when she just reached the end, t turns out that the final page is missing. Haru then explains that that missing page has been blank all along, and the original purpose of the ending was for the reader to make his or her own conclusion. Apparently, this page was ripped out to write a letter. I’m not sure about the details (Holon is just too much of a walking thesaurus when she starts talking!), but I think that it was meant to preserve a message and to prevent it from getting lost in the digitalization of the books. I that that book kept its final pages blank on purpose, so that who read it could use these pages to write a letter to his or her loved one…

In the end, Minamo finds a name on that book. She’s died now, but as it turns out, she was a former colleague of Haru and Eiichiro as well, before the accident. In the end, I think that Minamo’s grandmother told her about the book, and she rented it herself. She then got inspired to write a small letter to Haru, though she never delivered it. The book then remained in the library for forty years until Minamo picked it up again.

I must say that this was a very interesting way to show something about the people that Haru left behind when he went in coma (at least, I assume that she wrote that letter after Haru’s accident, but I’m not sure. I can’t seem to find the exact date of it). As it turns out, that woman died two years before Haru woke up again. This yet again proofs how the director is a master of characterizations: he knows exactly how to develop them and make the audience care about them, as he showed in Tsuiokuhen, Chevalier and the recent Amatsuki.

I really must say that this is the series I look forward to the most each week. This really is different from your usual mystery-series, as we still hardly know anything about the concept beyond the basics. The thing with this series is that it likes to reveal its mysteries as little as possible. And personally, I love the way the creators decided to handle this.