Short Synopsis: The target of this week: a girl with her pet bat.
Highlights: Enemies get stronger and smarter as the series goes on.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10
I’m not sure who on Anime News Network found it a good idea to lump all of the staff of Mission-E all together as directors, but that information is obviously wrong. It takes some credibility away from the site, doesn’t it? In any case, it’s very interesting to see a series with so many high-profile people working on it (the original creator of Scrapped Princess and the directors of Simoun, True Tears, Niea, Shion no Ou and Full Moon wo Sagashite are all working on this thing), that doesn’t aim to be the best in any field, and instead just wants to put down a fun series.

In any case, this episode was clearly one of building up, especially meant to develop the bad guys a bit. They were faceless goons up till now, but this episode added a bit of personality to them, which is always nice. The main guy in charge of capturing the people with Type-E also seems to have a personal history with Chinami, as we see through a flashback in the beginning of the episode, where he got some sort of scar on his back from amongst the rubble. My guess is that this happened when that resort exploded, back at the end of Code-E.

Maori is also getting more used to her job, and isn’t afraid to talk to random people anymore. She’s still pretty much the outcast of her class, though, but that’s obvious, because she still hasn’t stopped distancing herself from everyone. The type-e case was rather mundane (I mean, a bat with type-E isn’t what you’d call exciting), but it did serve the purpose of showing that animals also can get type-E.

Watching Persona - Trinity Soul is like walking through a desert, complete with mirages and all, only to end up at an oasis. It’s a supernatural mystery-series, based on the persona-games, and its favourite habit was teasing the heck out of its viewers.

And I’m not kidding when I say that. Despite the fact that this series is full of mecha-like personas, the pacing is sloooooooow. It takes ages for something to actually happen, and when something interesting does happen, a cliff-hanger follows and the next episode acts like nothing happens and starts building up again.

Even after the first half ends, there’s still no sign of a speed-up in the plot, and the pacing even becomes even slower than it already was, as it reveals more and more of the mysteries that lie behind this series. And I must say that the overall plot is definitely interesting; you can see that a lot of imagination went into it. If only the pacing wasn’t so god damn slow.

Another flaw that pops up after the second half is the obligatory background for the main characters. A major problem with them is that these play around with coincidences a bit too much. Seriously, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a character that grew up normally, and didn’t lose his/her parents in some sort of gruesome way.

In other words, as the series went on, my interest in it became pretty low, and I had almost given up hope on it, and then those final five episodes arrived. And it’s exactly here where the quality of this series increases dramatically: the pacing finally kicks in, and everything that the entire series had been building up for finally comes together and delivers a very enjoyable finale that changed my entire opinion of this series.

Overall, I’m not going to recommend this series, but if you’ve started it, then you might as well finish it because of the excellent finale. I think that this series suffered from two major problems: it’s too long and it could have fleshed out its characters a bit more. If this series was just one season long, it would be a total roller-coaster ride, and even if there were only 22 episodes, this series would already have been much more enjoyable due to the lack of quiet parts. The characters can be blamed for these lacklustre quiet parts as well. I don’t mind a slow pacing at all, but if that’s the case, then the creators do need to keep the viewer interested during these quiet parts. I just didn’t feel like I could care about these characters. Persona is a good anime, but it could have been so much better if it weren’t for these small annoying flaws.

Short Synopsis: Ayakashi can be… quite obnoxious at times.
Highlights: The extra depth given to Natsume’s desire to find someone like him.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
Okay, so for those who were wondering: there’s no Blade of the Immortal this week. The second episode of it airs next week, after which it’ll go into yet another hiatus. Ah well, I’m glad that these hiatuses are around the beginning of the series, and not the end.

In any case, without Blade of the Immortal, there’s no doubt that Natsume Yuujin-chou is my favourite series this season. It knows how to tell an excellent story and the cast of characters is also absolutely lovable. From the outside, it just looks like “Ayakashi of the week” (not that there’s anything wrong with that, but such a formula can get stale very easily), but every episode so far has added so much more than that. Since giving the name back to an Ayakashi is nothing special and just takes a few minutes, the creators can really start to colour outside of the lines.

This episode added quite some funny comedy to the mix. A couple of gods come and bug Natsume in order to get rid of some nasty Ayakashi that were bugging their shrine, and even though he refuses, they keep harassing and annoying him. What caught my attention the most, though, was the focus of Natsume, trying to find someone like him. And this is where this series sets itself apart from Mokke and xxxHolic: Watanuki had Yuuko, and Shizuru had her grandfather, but Natsume is all alone in his ability to see and sense spirits. At one time, he thought he had found a woman who could also see them, but she too turned out to be an Ayakashi. The only support he’s had so far is from other Ayakashi.

This episode changes this, by introducing two characters who finally understand him a bit. One monk who is looking for his daughter if I understood correctly, and one high-school student who can also see spirits, just like him.