Short Synopsis: Porfy meets an old dog who stubbornly keeps following him.
Highlights: An episode for the animals, and what a lovely episode it is!
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
Awww, that was such an adorable episode. It was incredibly cute and at the same time the conclusion was so powerful and awesome. What an adorable dog. What an absolutely adorable dog. To prevent myself from repeating myself even further, here’s this week’s summary:

Porfy is camping out again, wondering why he didn’t take a bus. Apollo meanwhile catches himself a mouse, and suddenly a huge dog appears, and cuddles up to Porfy. The two fall asleep that way, and the next day the dog continues to follow Porfy on his journey, even though Apollo doesn’t like it. When he sees a passing vehicle, he manages to get the driver to ride him to the next village, but the dog won’t move out of the car’s way until Porfy gives in and lets him ride as well, with Porfy obviously having to explain that the dog isn’t his.

Then, when the driver drops him off, Porfy gets hungry and buys a sandwich. He at first doesn’t want to give the dog anything, but eventually he shares his second sandwich with the animal. A local pastor then arrives, and takes interest in the dog. He notes that it’s already quite an old do, and how it could be following Porfy because it’s also travelling around. Apollo, while watching, meanwhile runs into a pretty female owl, which he begins to follow around and try to appease. When it starts raining, the two spend their time inside a hollow tree, while the female starts to like Apollo more and more.

The dog meanwhile decided to show Porfy around a bit, and takes him to a local stream where he could fresh him up a bit. While he’s taking a nap, Bernardo runs off with his bag, and Porfy chases it over and over. When Apollo hears Porfy, he decides to leave his new lover for Porfy. Porfy meanwhile is very angry at the dog for takng away his bag (including the tools from his father; always a touchy subject for the guy). But as it turns out, the dog just wanted to show Porfy a beautiful scenery (and beautiful it is!).

Porfy then looks around, and the dog has died. He creates a proper grave for it, and continues on with his journey with Apollo and the episode ends.

The creators made clever use of Apollo in this episode. Uusally, he’s the voice of reason for this series: whenever he’s freaking out, something bad is about to happen. In this case, he just didn’t like the dog, period. That did give the feeling that something was fishy about that dog, which the creaotrs really used to make it look a bit ambiguous. While in fact, the dog just knew it was about to die, and wanted to do this with some great scenery, next to someone who treated him well until the end.

I also finally noticed the pattern of this series: arc-climax-arc-climax-arc, where the arcs mostly are long, and the climaxes are short and powerful, although the first climax did take up quite a few episodes. What’s more interesting though is that each successive arc takes a different focus. The first one was slice of life, the second multi-episoded travel arcs, and now the third one features single-episoded travel arcs. I think that around episode 40 or 43, the next climax is going to come, where the final arc is going to wrap everything up.

My prediction is that the next climax will feature the bomb finally exploding between Isabella and Carlos. It’s probably going to be an arc where he finally had enough of Mina. In the final episodes, Porfy will then finally meet her (I get more and more the feeling that this will happen as late as possible) and run into Alecia.

So yes, something tells me that the final quarter of this series is going to be an amazing one. :)

Well, it’s time to review the latest Gonzo-series. It really is a production-studio with its ups and downs: some of its series are amazing (Bokura no, for example), while at other times they screw up completely (Dragonaut). Strike Witches is a very strange combination between those two extremes.

Basically, this series follows Sky Girls in the mecha musume franchise, but it did put some more effort into creating its setting, both in the good ways and the bad ways. To start with the latter: for some unfathomable reason, every girl in the show doesn’t wear any pants. Throughout the entire series, everyone walks around in panties, without any explanation whatsoever of how this came to be. After one episode revealed that all these girls only have one single pair of panties, you have to wonder what those creators were smoking when they came up with the concept for this series.

However, there are a lot of good things about the setting of this series when you look at the cultural aspects of the series. It attempts to put the traditional Japanese concepts of kemonomimi and mecha-musume in a European setting, with a lot of references to European war heroes and machinery. Basically, the series attempts to unify the east with the west, and succeeds pretty well at it. The cultural references from both sides are very interesting to watch, much more than I expected when I started watching this series.

Through the series, our heroes need to take care of so-called “Neuroi”, which are wreaking havoc and threatening to destroy the world. Overall, it’s not that special and often boring, with a rushed conclusion, but what it does is give enough support for the cast of characters, which thankfully is much more interesting. There’s quite a large cast of major characters for such a short series, and the most impressive is that they’re surprisingly genuine throughout the series. They often say what they think, and never really feel forced.

It’s just a shame that there seems to be one guy on the production-staff who kept yelling “I WANT FANSERVICE” over and over again, which resulted into a bunch of very questionable fanservice-episodes. These episodes don’t only ignore much of what makes the series enjoyable, but the general stupidity of the characters increases ten-fold in these sorts of episodes, so that it becomes even embarrassing to watch. And frankly, this happens way too often.

So overall: this series shines when A) there’s not much focus on the story and instead on the characters and B) when it manages to take its mind out of the gutter and stops focusing at fanservice. At these times, it’s a real gem. Whenever it’s not the case… its quality decreases drastically, though. It’s a real series with its ups and downs. If you can stomach the downs, then the ups are well worth it.

Short Synopsis: The final assault on the Vajra home planet begins. You don’t want to read this entry before watching this episode, so be warned.
Highlights: Not going to spoil that here.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
Oh, okay. I admit Kawamori: you have me. I give up, and I was in the wrong.

Ah, the irony. I was about to give up hope on this series. I kept rambling on how the creators had the guts to kill off Ranka, and that they’d just go with the predictable paths. And then this episode comes and kills of none other than Alto! That’s just about the best plot twist that you can think of at this point. I mean, how often do you see the main character getting killed off before the final episode of a series?

Seriously, that twist is made of nothing but win. I’ve actually never seen Alto as a well-written character. All of the best moments in this series were either about Ranka, Sheryl, Kuran, Michel, Ozma, etc, but Alto never managed to impress me. In a way, he’s the dullest character in this series, especially when compared to the amount of screen-time he got. In a way, it’s quite ironic: my dislike for Ranka comes from the way that she was used, but her actual character is pretty good. I really wonder what would have happened if she got more screen-time than that she actually got, and Alto would be more reduced to the background.

In any case, now that that annoying factor is gone, I’m actually looking forward to that final episode a lot. But Satelight: if you’re planning to revive the guy, then I’ll kill you!