The latest NHK-series: Telepathy Shoujo Ran, a charming mystery shoujo series about the titular character who is blessed with the gift of telepathy, among others. With Yoshiiro Ike’s soundtrack, it features an adaptation of a set of children’s novels; it had the potential to be either a fun little series or a gigantic flop. Thankfully it became the former.

However, you do need to realize that you do not want to watch this series because of its mystery part. The different stories that are presented throughout the series aren’t exactly bad, but they don’t stand out either. They’re often cheesy, involve Ran&co mostly by coincidences or suffer from overmoralistic confession speeches. They’re just… there; in order to support what really makes this series stand out.

What really made me return to this series for every single week is the cast of characters, and then especially the banter that occurs between them. The four lead characters form an excellent team that’s always fun to watch. While this series is not strictly a comedy, there were enough hilarious moments between them, and this remains through the entire length of the series. Hardly any attempt at a joke falls flat. Overall, the point where this series excels at is in fleshing out its characters. Even when there’s no comedy, the creators and the lead characters manage to keep everything going along smoothly to prevent the viewer from getting bored.

The graphics in this series are also pretty decent. Even though there’s lots of epilepsy-inducing CG, characters move smooth and their facial expressions show a very wide range of subtle emotions. It makes use of very bright and varied colours, which makes for a very aesthetically pleasing series. Ike Yoshihiro’s soundtrack also brings this series to life, even though it may not be among his best works.

Overall, expect anything from the story here and you will be disappointed, but nevertheless this series managed to achieve what it set out to do: despite the storylines that usually fail to capture, it’s a continuously fun series from beginning to end. Ran, Rui, Rin and Midori are a set of wonderful characters, with especially wonderful banter between them.

Short Synopsis: Ran and Midori use the power of love to get rid of the fox deity (hey, what else did you expect? An “Everyone dies”-ending?)
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7/10 (Enjoyable)
Ah crap. Of course, I should have noticed. That’s one major headdesk moment. Remember the episode where Midori met the old lady who was abandoned by her grandchild who turned out to have powers? Yeah. That child turned out to be the evil teacher. Duh.

In any case, it does turn out that the creators decided to safe the story with the cheesiest ending for last. Ran literally managed to win with the power of friendship, turning everyone from animals back into humans. This episode definitely was one of the cheesiest of the series yet, so I’m not going to talk about the storyline.

What I do want to praise in this episode are the visuals. The animation wasn’t exceptional, but nonetheless this was one pretty episode with lots of subtle touches and nice ideas. That floated-city-scenery for example: it was really nice to look at, with an excellent use of CG for the water. The growing tree also looked really nicely.

And I’m also really impressed that the creators managed to get away with actual blood on an NHK-series, even though a bite by a real army of tigers is going to be a bit more severe than just a simple cut. What I especially liked is that the blood here actually looks like blood. I swear, there are just too many anime that stuff their characters with galleons of ketchup.

Overall, I really don’t often blog fun shoujo series like this one. It’s not because I hate the genre, but with these kinds of series it’s very hard to guess whether or not they can remain fresh for their entire airtime (something which Shugo Chara showed me the hard way). With Telepathy Shoujo Ran, I decided to give it a whirl, though. What especially attracted me in the beginning was the colourful characters, and the amount of attention that was put in the slice of life scenes. Always good to flesh out your characters, and indeed: the characters never turned boring. Okay, so the stories for the different episodes were just too cheesy for their own good, the real fun of this series comes from the excellent chemistry between Ran and Midori. For that I’m glad to have watched and blogged this series.

Short Synopsis: A loser who works part time at a swimming pool “tries” to access Jigoku Tsuushin.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 9/10 (Uhm… yeah…)
The best episode of Jigoku Shoujo Mitsuganae yet. This episode was awesome, but god… it is SO for the wrong reasons. This episode featured the single biggest idiot we’ve seen on Jigoku thus far, and his stupidity really reached epic levels in this episode. This guy is really the typical case of an emo teenager.

To give you a bit of an indication… he’s hiding a poster of a cute girl in swimsuit behind a picture of “the scream”. Every time someone pisses him off, he adds a sticker somewhere on this girl’s body, starting from her feet. The person that reaches “goal” (come on, it’s easy to guess where “that” is) first is the one he’s going to send to hell. In the end, when three people are about to reach the “goal” he chickens out and wants to savour the moment. And indeed: soon his mind becomes distracted by something entirely different and he completely forgets his plans with Jigoku Tsuushin in his enthusiasm.

And to think that in the end, he managed to find himself a date in a way that actually makes sense: simply asking the girl he likes! Dear harem leads: you can learn A LOT from this little idiot, remember that. And to think that in the end, he was the one to end up in hell because one of the girls he looked up to turned out to be even more emo than he was.

I also loved the little self-parody by Studio Deen, as the Magazine that was crazy enough to publish the work of this idiot. Also, I absolutely loved the “Tatanic” with “Hiroshi Watanahe” as the lead character. Could that be the creators’ way of saying “… yeah thanks.”?

But the real icing on the cake was the single best punishment scene that Jigoku Shoujo has shown us up till now aside from the one that took up the entire action. I mean… seeing the guy getting tortured in LIVE ACTION cardboard cut-outs! Brilliant!

On a more serious note, during the last episode I started to wonder what the second half of Mitsuganae would be focusing on. Of course, I should have known: it’s going to flesh out and develop Yuzuki’s classmates. This episode already made a small start with the shy girl in glasses, and this would also mean that there’s a very good chance of Tsugumi returning.

Short Synopsis: Porfy tries to find out what happened to Mina, while the creators are having the time of their lives teasing the hell out of us viewers.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
OMG! OMG OMG! This was such an awesome episode! Oh, the irony, this episode really showed the big strength of the World Masterpiece Theatre series: you SO want these kids to meet each other again, and time and time again, the creators find some thing that gets in their way.

Porfy is really excited as he brings Rose to the poster he found at the end of the last episode. Her hair changed, but he’s nearly sure that it’s Mina, though Rose doesn’t believe it (after all, what would she be doing in a movie?). She tells him that he’s going to be disappointed if it doesn’t turn out to be her, but in the end he manages to convince her to accompany him in order to watch the movie.

After watching the movie, Porfy’s sure: that Mina is his sister. Rose can still hardly believe it, and manages to convince him to get some sleep before trying to find her. Mina meanwhile gets complimented by Tiffany at her singing ability, and Tiffany assures her that she’ll once get the chance to sing in front of a large crowd. The manager then arrives, carrying a box of fan letters. Most of them are for Tiffany, but there also are a few for Mina among them. Unfortunately, none come from Porfy. But then again, the movie just premiered, so there’s plenty of time left.

The next morning Porfy is very early to bother Rose, who wants to sleep. So instead, she tells him to go and check out the movie studios, where she might be. When he arrives, he however is just taken as an ordinary fan by one of the guards, and even telling the guard about his sister obviously doesn’t help. Porfy tries a bit more, but eventually he gives up when the guard is distracted by other people.

Meanwhile, Natalie is happy for Mina for the amount of fan letters she received, but Mina is still feeling down because she didn’t see Porfy. Natalie then asks whether her brother was the only reason for her to start acting, and that she doesn’t seem to realize how special it is to be able to act with Tiffany. The fans might become disappointed when they learn about that.

Rose meanwhile didn’t realize that Porfy would take her seriously to go to the movie studio, and she’s really worried when he leaves. When Porfy fills her in about what happened, she offers him to contact a few former friends of her who still might know a thing or two. However, then she asks Porfy what he’s planning to do once he finds Mina. Porfy then answers that he’s going to return to Greece. This however is something that Rose didn’t anticipate, and even though Porfy doesn’t have anything he left behind there, he still wants to return, and she immediately starts acting all strange.

When Rose meets her friend Amelie, she really finds out that the child is called Mina. Instead of telling the good news to Porfy afterwards, though, she tells HIM THAT HE WAS WRONG, and the girl turned out to be SOMEONE ELSE! This was in the hope to get Porfy to stay with her, but in the end, it just means that he’s going to continue to search for her. Mina meanwhile is still thinking about how blunt Natalie was to her, and she’s beginning to take joy in acting, and is beginning to understand what Natalie told her.

The episode ends with Porfy, running into none other than ZAIMIS. Yes! Zaimis is back!

Really, I first thought that Rose would be able to get Porfy and Mina back together, but instead, she turned out to be getting in his way. This is why it was so important for her to be well developed, and for her to create a genuine bond with Porfy: her whole affair with Tiffany didn’t just make her to hate acting and Tiffany, but it also made her afraid to lose any more close friends, up to the point were she made such a foolish claim to Porfy. And also: Zaimis’ return has to have some sort of meaning. What exactly is his role in these final two episodes?

And holy crap! It only occurred just to me, but Porfy’s wishes to go back to Greece and Mina’s wishes to continue acting don’t go along together at all. The two may meet each other again, that’s for sure, but it’s a whole different question about whether the two of them are actually going to reunite, and live together. It would mean that Porfy would just follow Mina around, unable to do anything. I know this series at this point, and the creators wouldn’t have spent so much effort on Mina, accepting the acting business if there wasn’t some sort of hidden meaning.

Short Synopsis: While away from Manji, Rin runs into a certain someone.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10 (Excellent)
You know, this wasn’t exactly the episode you’d expect as a semi-final one of a series. Even though it involved the main villain, it was just a standalone episode. If the creators plan to wrap up the series in the next episode, it’d all have to happen in one episode. But then again, that’s also what I said of Amatsuki and I’m still waiting for that second friggin’ season announcement. The thing that’s interesting here is that the only times at which Bee-Train left their series unfinished, another studio jumped up at the chance to finish off what they started (namely .Hack//Roots and Tsubasa Chronicle). Who knows? The fact remains though, that this series needs to be continued so badly.

This episode’s purpose was to remind that not all action of this series lies in swords and other sharp weapons. The majority of the action in this episode went on in the characters’ minds: Rin was incredibly unfortunate to run into Kagehisa while Manji was assuming that she was taking a bath, and of course she tried to attack him by herself. Kagehisa easily overpowered her and she spend the rest of the episode, unable to do anything against the killer of her parents.

It’s a great move: to actually be able to talk to the one you hold a grudge against, and have this person explain his reasons, rather than blindly charging at each other without listening to what the other has to say. It also was different from when a character suddenly stops mid-fight in order to spontaneously blurt out his life story: Rin really wanted to do something against the guy, but she was paralyzed, while Kagehisa kept looking down on her, and never found her worthy enough to kill.

Short Synopsis: “It” has happened. I’m not going to spoil here what exactly “it” is, but you can pretty much guess.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
After the previous episode, I already had some suspicion that this episode would be awesome, and indeed it did deliver wonderfully. This episode formed an amazing climax of the first season, and really brought out the best in the characters. Does Keisei’s end beat Kamina’s? In my opinion, it does, but that may also be because I’m a much bigger fan of Shikabane Hime than that I was of Gurren Lagann. ^^;

My suspicion is that the second season is going to be a lot more linear than the first one: after all, we now have an established main couple, we have six enemies that need to be taken care of. Still, on the other hand it is going to benefit from really fleshed out characters. If it manages to use this build-up well, then we can expect something amazing from that second season.

Anyway, about the episode: it really was action-packed from beginning to end. Keisei went down like a real man: he knew his end was coming, and yet he tried to protect Ouri and Makina till the end, while trying to get rid of the human bad guy (name?!) at the same time, and at the same time Ouri has matured enough to realize that in these sorts of situations, he needs to take responsibility and grab his chance to protect others (in this case preventing Makina from turning into an ordinary Shikabane), even though it involves him getting hurt in the process.

Short Synopsis: Keisei’s background gets revealed while the seven enemies finally attack.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10 (Excellent)
Holy crap! I knew it. I freakin’ knew it! The series had already been hinting at it with the Minai-arc, and the ED really confirmed it as we see Ouri standing next to Makina with Keisei’s staff. What I didn’t suspect was that it looks like that it’s going to be none other than Ouri himself who gets to have the honour of killing him. Yeah. That’s one sure way of getting the guy at the centre of the storyline, and it indeed looks like the first season was just one big build-up for the second season.

But before he’s going to kick the bucket, I’m glad to see that the creators have found enough time to tell a bit about his back-story. I originally assumed that he and Makina were good friends when she got murdered, while in fact they hardly even knew each other, and instead they got together when he was ordered to take up Makina as his Shikabane Hime. It also turns out that the human bad guy (what was his name again?) was sort-of as an upperclassman to him, rather than just a random colleague and the cafe owner also grew up with the two of them for a bit, before he got his own Shikabane Hime assigned (not sure if that was already mentioned before).

Short Synopsis: A young teen kills people based on what he read in a novel.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
Haha! Best episode of the third season yet! It’s episodes like this one that remind me why I originally fell in love with this series. Sure, the normal episodes are entertaining, but the real gem of this series is the collection of stories in which the creators really start playing with the concept. This episode also wasn’t awesome in the overblown way that we’ve come to get used to from this series: everything was wonderfully written, and you could see why the people wanted to send others to hell.

I must say that it was quite creative of the creators to come up with a topic that has been such a recent news item kids who commit murders because they’re inspired by their favourite anime, novel or movie. It’s been a subject debated heavily, and I really liked the different sides to the problem that this episode showed: to the overblown image that the mass media provides, to the feelings of the original author, to see people influenced by his works in that way, to the victim’s relatives, who go and blame the original author. It all fits so well, and I loved how the three main characters of this series came to the conclusion of sending the involved people to hell. It was basically their way to make peace with the whole affair.

On a different note: I’m beginning to get curious about the second half of this season. It’s subtle, but the overall mood and direction did change in the past two season: in the second half of the first season, Hajime and Tsugumi really became main characters, and the cases became more extreme. In the second half of the second season instead, the cases became less extreme, and instead that half focused on fleshing out the different important characters. I really wonder what the direction of the second half of the third season is going to be, with such an extreme first half. Are things going to be even more extreme? Will Tsugumi come back? Will Yuzuki actually get to DO SOMETHING?

Short Synopsis: Kuro attempts to get rid of the final two villain-henchmen.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10 (Good)
This is going to be a short entry, since it was a minor episode anyway: it just meant to set the stage right for the finale of the show. Thankfully, most of the episode was spent on the fight with Kuon, and the “evil overlord” went down pretty quickly. His fight was fun and didn’t drag, thankfully. And yeah, like predicted: everyone dies apart from Kuro and Kuromitsu. What I also liked was that the kabuki-players at the beginning seem to have an actual role in the series. They’re like, the real evil overlords it seems, but what I especially loved was the way Kuon met his end. Such a befitting death for him. ^^;

My one disappointment was that this was THE time for the animation to get back up to those awesome levels of the first episode, but unfortunately it’s still of the same level. It’s a shame, I would have loved to see what the director can really do, without him having to resort to epic chips-bag-opening-scenes.