Short Synopsis: “Krauser II” and his friends go on a date to make up for what went on in the music store.
Highlights: Half of it was already showed at the introduction.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7/10
Wait, am I missing something here? The first half of this episode was exactly the same as the first half of the introduction. Does that mean that the first episode contained the second half of the introduction, along with more original content? Talk about a confusing episode order.

In any case, the second half of this episode was less exciting than the introduction, with as highlight the sudden appearance of the band “Tetrapod Melon Tea”. The introduction got away with the huge stereotypes, but they’re already getting dull in this episode. Especially that drummer didn’t work too well. Although I do admit that it was interesting to see the split personalities of the DMC-members.

In the realm of strange series, Battle Programmer Shirase obviously can’t be missing. It’s a very short series with only fifteen episodes of ten minutes each, and it tells about the adventures of a legendary hacker. Those who are expecting a series that explores the ins and outs of the hacking-business can just shut down this window and look elsewhere, because at heart, BPS is just another romantic comedy.

The realism in this series is like some distant legend. We’re talking here about hackers who can crash satellites into earth’s atmosphere and little girls who can single-handedly take care of the security of the ministry for defence, and that’s just the tip of the ice berg. Everything computer-related is over the top on purpose, and that makes for a fun watch, especially if you’ve got something with computers (which I guess is the case with most of the people who visit this site). But oh boy, this series does have its issues.

Its biggest problem is that it doesn’t seem to really know what it wants. The result is comedy that feels like a shot of a shotgun shell: it shattered all over the place. There’s no real central theme or message that keeps the series together and each arc feels more ad hoc than that some real thoughts were put behind them. It makes you wonder why the creators went with such a bizarre series length of fifteen episodes to begin with, because the series also ends when the overall storyline is about to get started. Why couldn’t the creators just have gone with a regular airing of 13 or 26 episodes?

Then there’s the romance, with is just like the rest of this series: weird and hit or miss. We here have a couple that consists out of a ten year old girl and her twenty-five year old great uncle. Obviously, the fanservice jokes that result from that are rather predictable, but admittedly, their relationship, how weird it may be, does remain fresh through the series.

There’s also a lot of repetition in this series, even though it already was incredibly small. Each episode has at least a minute of recap about what happened in the previous episode, and there’s one particular minute-long sequence that gets repeated for FIVE TIMES through the series. What went on in the creators’ minds to approve of that, I don’t know…

Still, despite all this, the creators actually know that this series is rubbish, and just try to make the best of it. You can really see that the creators are critical of their own anime. This is one series that makes fun of itself, and actually succeeds, which I guess is where the short airtime comes in: it’s a short and fun series to watch if you’re stuck at home on a rainy day and need something light to watch. This is a series with style, no matter how strange it may be.

Short Synopsis: Haru’s letters reach Akiyuki, and a possibility for the two of them to meet pops up.
Highlights: Another building-up episode, but this time the Xam’d and humanforms got some extra depth.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
Another solid and enjoyable for Bonen no Xamdou. I think that this is the pattern we can expect for much of the rest of the first half of this series: mostly fleshing out the characters and building up the storyline, with your occasional action-sequence like the attack on Sentan-island and the Xam’d going berserk. The question is now whether the second half of this series can effectively make use of all the time that was spent on building up in the first half, but we still need to wait a couple of months before we get the answer to that. In any case, so far the first half has been wonderfully down to earth, and that’s why I like this series so far.

In the meantime, Haru’s still very worried about what happened to Akiyuki. As it turns out, the Xam’d was killed relatively easy, but the real purpose of it going berserk was to show that it wasn’t looking for trouble, it was just a pregnant woman who wanted to live, and at the same time show a strange pillar in the sky that only the Xam’d and Haru could see. The question is obviously: why could Haru see it and everybody else not? It’s probably got something to do with Akiyuki.

I also wonder what Haru’s going to do when she finally meets Akiyuki. Will she continue to stay with the military? Will she desert it and join the crew of the Zanbani (that would be rather lame, by the way)? Meanwhile, Akiyuki’s little adventure alone reminded me of the time when Renton went off on his own in Eureka7, although their reasons are totally different. There hasn’t been any real tension so far between Akiyuki and the crew, unlike with Eureka7, where the crew of the Gekko-go kept teasing Renton over and over again. Bonen no Xamdou is much more a coming of age story for Haru than that it is for Akiyuki.

This episode also again blurred the line between the Xam’d and the humanforms. It’s like humanforms are a lesser form of the Xam’d. The guy that Akiyuki meets in this episode: we’re still not sure whether he’s a humanform or a Xam’d, since his symptoms looked exactly like Akiyuki’s. But on the other hand, when even these common people are able to at least gain their senses back after having been Xam’d, then why is Sentan Island’s military having so much trouble to deal with just one of them?