Wagaya no Oinari-sama: a fox-spirit and a shrine maiden move into the family of our lead character and hi-jinks begin. It’s a premise that shouldn’t be good. It’s been done so many times in so many variations. Still, somewhere along the line the producers must have done something right, because it’s been a very enjoyable series from start to finish.

Everything seems to fit somehow, both the main- and side-characters are well-fleshed out and developed and very enjoyable to watch, the story is divided into a number of arcs, ranging from one to four episodes, and the creators make sure to keep every one of them interesting, with a story that’s complex enough to keep the viewer’s attention, yet remains simple and far away from convolution. The background music is very subtle, but also very effective. The only bad part I can think of is the lead character’s character-designs, but even that annoyance disappears once you get used to it.

…and that’s pretty much it. This isn’t a series you need to analyze from top to bottom, it’s a series where you just need to shut up and watch. All you need to know is that if you’re looking for a series that combines slice of life with supernatural stories, then you’ll like Wagaya no Oinarisama. It’s an enjoyable series, in both the light-hearted as the serious aspects. What else is there to say, really?

Short Synopsis: In the city, Porfy works at a local car mechanic.
Highlights: Talk about striking when you least expect it!
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
Okay, so I’ve gotten a lot of varied feedback on the new episode rating scale, some positive and some negative reactions. As a result, I’ve changed the scale a bit yet again, where anything above or equal to 7/10 means that I liked the series, as opposed to 6/10 (which was too low) or 8/10 (which meant me handing out only 8/10s for 95% of the cases). I’ll probably repeat this message in my next post, because only three people seem to read my entries about Porfy.

In any case, this episode of Porfy managed to surprise me yet again. As for the reason, here’s the summary. There’s a lot of talking in this episode again, so I hope I got everything right.

We never get to see the woman from the previous episode again, but Porfy managed to find his job, and is working at a local car repair shop along with another guy, who seems to be slacking off quite often. He tells Porfy about a local legend of a female thief roaming around one of the town’s buildings. He doesn’t like his boss either, but it seems that that day he tells Porfy that rumour turns out to be his last day of work.

That night, when Porfy’s trying to sleep, he can’t, because said guy makes too much noise. He then goes to sleep in one of the cars that they’ve been repairing. Unfortunately for him, said female thief has set her eyes on that car, and drives off with it, unaware that Porfy’s also in it. When he wakes up, he obviously tries to stop her, and through the chaos they crash into a tree, with Porfy unconscious.

When Porfy wakes up, the woman put some band-aid on him, and run into her hiding-place along with him. It’s a place in the sewer that was used as a hideout for the resistance during the war. Now for the complicated part: the woman is named Marianne, and she has a daughter Kristel. Apparently, she had her from a German soldier. Because of the hate between the French and the Germans, Marianne wasn’t welcome in her town anymore, and went off to work abroad, leaving Kristel in the town to be cared for at the local church. The townspeople, however, betrayed Marianne’s requests and sold Kristel off to a rich family in Germany. At least, that’s what makes the most sense. I’m not sure how exactly the woman became an escaped prisoner, but I suspect that she was put into prison because she sided with that German officer, and escaped because she heard of her daughter. A strong mother who’s willing to do anything for her kid.

We then switch to two policemen who are apparently on the case of getting Marianne back to prison. Porfy meanwhile has agreed to help Marianne meet Kristel, and they go to the local church, where the German couple is coming to pick her up. Porfy acts as a decoy for these policemen, while Marianne finally gets to see Kristel, though this turns out to be a bit different from expected. It seems that the people from the church have told Kristel that her mother is currently in a foreign country, and that her mother is going to come back to her soon (referring to her release as a prisoner, probably). What’s more: Kristel’s new parents are very rich, and she’ll be able to live a much better life than living as the daughter of an escaped prisoner who’s constantly on the run. At that point, something snaps at her.

Porfy has meanwhile succeeded in shaking off the policemen a bit by using the local goats of the Church. Marianne then runs into him, and from out of nowhere she starts attacking the guy, and blames him for taking Kristel away from her, even though he isn’t the one to blame. I’m not exactly sure what she said because she talked nonsense, but it definitely made a huge impression on Porfy to see a once strong woman change so suddenly.

And just when you think the episode is over Porfy runs into the owner of the car repair shop who comes to collect a part of Porfy’s reward for catching Marianne (he did use the car in the repair-shop for that, after all) and to deliver the message that the other mechanic-guy robbed his place, INCLUDING Porfy’s rucksack. After a bit of searching, he finds the rucksack shredded and his father’s tools gone.

Holy crap, the creators really picked a nice time for that. Throughout the entire series, Porfy had continued to run into people who tried to go after his rucksack for various reasons, but every time he managed to pull through and got it back. I should have KNOWN that this of course was just another part of a build-up, just like the rest of the series. Of course the creators wouldn’t just let him keep it like that if they kept showing small hints over and over again that showed that Porfy shouldn’t take his rucksack for granted.

This series is really getting interesting, now that the building-up is finally over and it can start using all the things it built up for. There are ten episodes left with this, so there really isn’t much time left for this series to just goof off with random stories anymore, and something tells me that the real meat of the series is about to arrive. There are at least three major events that are about to happen: Alecia’s return, the explosion of Carlos, the walking time-bomb, and the reunion of Porfy and Mina. Then the creators are also probably going to use Apollo for something, and I’m going to eat my hat if the owl-carving isn’t going to come into play at some point.

The thing I also like about this series: Porfy was devastated at the loss of his tools, that’s what the end of this episode showed pretty clearly. And yet, I know that he isn’t going to keep on angsting about it. He’s a strong guy, and in the next episode, he’s just going to continue travelling, and has just become a bit stronger. That’s INDEED how good angst should be used.

The thing with Bones is that their works are either excellent or complete flops. The Mars Daybreak is a flop; probably the biggest flop they’ve produced. Still, at least it’s a fun flop… sometimes.

In any case, it takes an entire washing-list to fully summarize all that’s wrong with this series, so here we go:
- It’s got a bad main character-syndrome (without any prior experience whatsoever, the guy only needs ten seconds to fully master the complex machinery of his personal super-mecha, for goodness’ sake!)
- There’s hardly any character-background whatsoever (we never know how the crew of the Aurora joined the ship in the first place)
- The background that’s there doesn’t make any sense (if Gram, said lead-character, grew up in the slums, then where did he learn to cook so well?)
- Junior will make people punch their screen out of annoyance.
- Vess will make people toss their screen out of the window and burn the remains out of annoyance.
- It fails to flesh out the setting well enough (why are people living underwater if they can also do that above? Where do these people get their food? How come it never rains?)
- It fails at properly introducing its characters (one particular crewmembers of the ship that most of the series takes place on take twelve episodes to get mentioned)
- It’s got a “screw the plans I’m impulsive/horny/whatever”-mindset.
- There’s an incredible amount of plot-holes through the entire series.
- Trivial plot-points are never explained (how did Gram get his necklace? Where did his super-mecha come from? Especially that last one is just jarring. It’s just… there.)
- Characters behave inconsistently (I’m looking at you, Kubernes; we also never learn exactly why Yagami got his nickname. He’s freaking useless throughout the largest part of the series)
- The overall storyline is shallow at best, and the end reward is uninspired.
- There’s a pointless love triangle in which Gram managed to conquer the two daughters of the most influential men you can imagine.
- The show thinks it’s good at drama while in fact the drama sucks with the power of one thousand vacuum cleaners.
- The setting has so much potential and yet the series never uses it.

So, with all these flaws, is there really anything left on this series that’s good? Well somehow through some kind of magic, the light-hearted chemistry between the characters ended up pretty nicely. It’s not always the case, but if the stars are aligned in a particular way, the scriptwriters feel inspired and they’ve gotten their coffee, then this show might actually be able to deliver an enjoyable and fun episode to watch. Especially the cat and the dolphin are great side-characters. In fact, this series would have been much more enjoyable if the focus fell on the side-characters a bit more, but instead someone on the production-team found it a good idea to turn this series into “The Adventures of the Almighty Gram (and his Crew)”. Gram’s just too perfect, for goodness’ sake.

Through all the flaws, the biggest one is that this series doesn’t know what it’s good at. At heart, this is a fun-filled adventure to search for treasure on a fantasy-version of Mars. Unfortunately, it too often lapses into pointless drama, gets way too serious or puts too much attention on Gram, rather than letting the entire crew get involved into some exciting chase-sequence or something. The episode where the crew meets Enora is a good example: it was light-hearted, fun and creative. If only the rest of the episodes was like that… In the end, this series biggest strength now is that it doesn’t ask anything from the viewer. You can just watch it and turn your brain off, without being forced to sit through anything difficult. That’s nice and all, but you can achieve the same effect by watching paint dry.

Short Synopsis: Kurou suddenly finds himself in a strange neon-lighted city.
Highlights: Talk about a change of setting…
Overall Enjoyment Value: 6,5/10 (Interesting)
Well, so this series suddenly got a whole lot weirder with this episode. What started out as a rather extreme samurai-show suddenly turned into a post-apocalyptic amnesiac vampire action horror… thriller… something. Well, it’s definitely original. If I understood things correctly, then somehow Kurou has become an immortal being, and lived together with Kuromitsu for what seems like centuries, until the world got eventually nearly destroyed by a meteor and the nuclear(?) missiles that attempted to destroy these meteorites but failed. Then something happened that caused him to get separated from Kuromitsu and suffer from amnesia.

The bad guys haven’t changed, though, apart from the fact that they’ve become even more extreme than they already were, and have resorted to killing everything that’s in their path. I can understand that this is an action-series and all, but I do hope that the rest of the series will at least shed a bit more light into who the heck they are and what they’re after. I mean, it has to be pretty damn important if they’re still around, killing people.

I’m also wondering: what exactly do the Japanese find so fascinating about Vampires? It’s a bit of Western Folklore that seems to have caught on really well, with the result being tons of series that try to toss in some sort of vampire legend.

Short Synopsis: Yoriko calms down a bit and contacts the detective again.
Highlights: Too many to just list here.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10 (excellent)
With this episode I’m convinced: Mouryou no Hako is going to be THE hit of the Autumn 2008-season. It’s already a very good season, but none of the new shows matches up to it, and in three episodes it accomplished what usually takes three times that length. I’m already engrossed with the characters so far. At first, I was a bit worried about the short airtime, but this series has definitely shown that it knows how to tell a story. The director hasn’t directed a series before, but he’s definitely shown so far that he knows what he’s talking about.

As usual, my Japanese isn’t perfect so I might have missed certain parts (especially that letter that was sent to Yoko. But it seems that the episode starts with Kanako, being brought to a strange hospital that might be able to save her. The detective, Yoko and the guy with glasses whose name I can’t seem to find accompany her. Meanwhile, we get some flashbacks about Shuutarou’s past, when he was still involved with that war that’s still giving him nightmares.

What caught my attention is that there’s a surprising amount of police guards around the place when Shuutarou comes back a few days later. It seems that the explanation for that is that strange letter that Yoko received, though unfortunately my Kanji’s pretty much crappy. What I understood was that someone’s after Kanako. The entire hospital is pretty much strange and unconventional, looking more like some sort of military base. Joshino Suzaki seems to be the most talented doctor around the place.

Yoriko meanwhile has her own problems after wishing her mother do die, while caught up in her emotions. After that, her mother started seeing spirits (Mouryou), and even hires a priest to get rid of them. After that part has calmed down a bit, she remembers how Kanako had some sort of boyfriend. She contacts Shuutarou (who right before that moment sees Kanako’s acquaintance with glasses, who disappears right afterwards). This boyfriend could quite possibly be the one who sent the threat letter.

Yoriko is then brought to see Kanako, who seems to have regained consciousness. It’s faint, but she can recognize her (although the room in which she’s stored is really creepy. What kind of hospital is that anyway?), and she tries to talk to her, but sound doesn’t come out. Yoriko is removed to give Kanako some more rest, but apparently, one of the main detectives in the hospital can lip-read, and it seems that Kanako said something pretty disturbing. When two doctors come to examine her afterwards, Kanako somehow disappears and turns to stone, with two butterflies flying above her bed.

So, there are three people in here that definitely have something to hide: Kanako, her boyfriend and the guy with glasses. I think the latter is merely obsessed and confused with everything that happened, but that boyfriend could possibly form the key to a lot of the mysteries that happened. Although there’s also the matter of Kanako’s body simply disappearing. I think that her boyfriend was the one who introduced Kanako to these strange beliefs, of wanting to ascend to heaven.

I just want to ask one thing: whose idea was it to do with CG? The art in this series is absolutely amazing, and yet there ugly CG-trucks ruin the entire mood. Can’t these people just stick to ordinary drawings or something? CG-trucks are something you’d expect from Gonzo, not from Madhouse.

What also seems strange for this series is that the manga has only been running since past December, and there are only two volumes complete at this point. Will there be enough material to fill this series, and will there be a second season once the manga gets ahead enough? But then again, this is Madhouse, not Studio Deen, and they very rarely go for sequels if they can also go for new concepts. In a way, that’s also admirable, to see that the studio continues to seek out new and fresh concepts instead of milking its own cash-cows, but in this case it remains a pity to see this series end so soon.