February 17, 2009

Casshern Sins - 20



Short Synopsis: Casshern finally meets Luna
Episode Rating: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
Casshern Sins has just been a string of awesomeness for the past few episodes. Especially this episode was one of those where everything comes together. Casshern finally gets the chance to meet Luna, and because the entire series has been building up to this moment, the results were nothing short of awesome.

So as it turns out, Luna doesn’t turn out to be such a sweetheart after all. In this episode, she shows that she hates things that are about to die, so because of that she simply kills them off. Dune’s reasoning seems to be that if they’d die, they’d make Luna sad, so it’s just better to kill them off so that this doesn’t happen. In the end, Luna’s just someone who’s been obsessed with her own status: she never dies, and if she were to, everyone would go with her. She continuously needs to heal others, and eventually she changed from a nice healer to some sort of obsessive guru-type person.

This episode also seems to explain why there are so many of those angry robots fighting. Before the ruin, they basically lived in a world where they couldn’t die: if they got hurt, they’d simply visit Luna in order to get healed. Because of that, they grew up in a society in which there was no fear of death, and the morals must have been pretty low on each other’s mind: nobody had to struggle for survival, because Luna was there anyway! Now that the ruin started, and everyone’s going to die anyway, they still can’t remember what it means to have your life lost, or to take the lives of others, since it’s so new to them.

She really is symbolic of the sun, in a much less overglorified fashion as usual: she’s there. Without her, everyone will die, but she never grants wishes, cares for anyone or helps those in need.

But damn, this series has now accumulated quite an army of villains: we already had Dio, Leda and Braiking Boss, and now Luna also joined their ranks. All four of them have their own agendas, and with only four episodes left in this series it’s going to be very interesting to see how all of their story-lines are going to be concluded.

Natsume Yuujin-Chou - 20



Short Synopsis: Natsume loses something as he and Taki try to get rid of the evil youkai.
Episode Rating: 7,5/10 (Good)
Ah, another adorable episode. It’s a good thing that Taki seems to be a recurring character, because there’s still so much potential left in her even though her story already took up two episodes. I’m especially hoping for a bit more romance (which really doesn’t happen often). It’s going to be interesting how she’s planning to make up for the time she lost, and spent without any friends whatsoever.

I was surprised when it turned out that the youkai had no intention to keep its promises. You don’t usually see that: most of them act very much according to a pattern, and promises are usually very important to them, but I guess that the malicious ones are different from that.

Now that the first half of the second season is over, I do have to say that I still like the series, but it does seem to be missing something when compared to the first season. I just can’t exactly put my finger onto what that is. Of course, the Tama-chapters and some others were awesome, but I don’t know… I just can’t call the second season on the same level of goodness as the first season…