Short Synopsis: The seven stars put Makina and Hokuto in one room. Fighting ensues.
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
I’m still amazed at this series. I keep having these fears, for the huge amount of pitfalls that this series can fill into. And here it comes, and proves me wrong time and time again. The characters just keep saving this series whenever it’s about to fall apart. When boob-sama first appeared, I feared that she was just going to prove to be a source of annoyance, in the same veins of Saji and Louise in Gundam 00, and how she’d come back as a Shikabane Hime in order to form Ouri’s harem when she ‘died’. And here it turns out that she couldn’t be saved, and actually died for real with a pretty impressive finish. In the last episode, I remember noting how the rest of the seven stars looked like they were going to simply fight Makina in standard shounen fare, and this episode comes and it continues to provide very interesting back-stories for these guys. Heck, even the simple bash-fest between Makina and Hokuto turned out to be awesome somehow. I really didn’t see this coming when the second season started, but at this point, this series can hardly do anything wrong for me anymore. That’s how much I’m already caught up in this series’ pace.

So as it turns out, there’s a whole lot more to that simple flashback scene of Keisei and his former comrades than just them being at the same spot at the same time. It turns out to be a very important scene, having to do with Ouri’s origins. I didn’t understand it completely, but there seems to have been a shikabane that collected children, presumably this was Ouri’s mother. In their attempts to rescue them, Keisei and the others failed, and every child except for Ouri got killed off, and Ouri was brought to the orphanage. Also, did I understand this correctly and did Ouri’s mother turn into the cat? In any case, the biggest revelation in this episode was that one of these dead children was Hizuchi.

What I now want to know is why it’s so important for the Seven Stars to have Hokuto fight Makina, though this will probably get clearer once the creators start on her background.

It’s only a pity that the animation doesn’t feel as rich as in the first season. While it’s still much more than a bunch of still frames, and I can’t exactly put my finger to the big difference. I guess that the animation in the second season feels more standard and less inspired than what we saw in the first, if that makes any sense.

Short Synopsis: Ouji returns.
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
I’m not getting my hopes up. I’m NOT going to get my hopes up this time. There is no way that this cliff-hanger is going to be real. This series is going to be one of the best things since sliced bread if Casshern DOES end up dead, but I’ve seen too many cliffhangers like this one in which the main character supposedly gets killed off before the final episode. The next episode is probably going to feature some kind of plot twist that is going to keep Casshern alive. It’s going to be an awesome one, that’s for sure, but as much as I’d like to hope for a series to kill off its main character before its final episode, it ain’t gonna happen.

But that’s enough ranting, because this still remains such an excellent series. In this episode, it becomes clear that Luna indeed is very different from your guardian angel. In the time before her supposed death, it was so bad that anyone who met her met with death. When Braiking Boss ordered to kill her, he basically ended up killing his own subordinates, it seems. Still, since Luna was seen as the sun, nobody seemed to either bother or notice. Still, Casshern for some reason wasn’t affected by her death-rays, he stabbed her, and got in touch with her blood, and that’s why he became immortal. Nothing to do with love, like I originally suspected. This however, still leaves a truckload of questions yet to be answered:
- Why didn’t Casshern get himself killed?
- Why did Luna’s powers change all of a sudden?
- Where did the ruin come from?
- How come Casshern got pulverized at the end of this episode, without regenerating?
- Did Dune get his nickname really from his own actions, or were all the rumours of the people the original Luna killed delegated to him?

And here’s one thing I’ve been wondering:: every single recurring character has his or her own purpose in the series, except for Friender. Seriously, what was the last thing that it ever did? Try to dig out Casshern from a bunch of rocks. Apart from that, it’s just… there. Is Friender going to be more than just a simple cameo fro the original Casshan series, or will it have an important role in the end?

Short Synopsis: For whatever reason, Japan, Germany and Italy end up stranded on a desert island.
Episode Rating: 7,5/10 (Good)
Easily one of the most nonsensical episodes of this series yet. Again, it emphasized on how Italy only thinks about food. In this episode, he offers Germany some of his local dishes in order to seal the alliance between him and Germany, and builds a castle of Spaghetti (as a reference to the tower of Pisa, of course ^^;). Next episode, the rest of the countries should arrive, so that should prove to be fun.

Still, with this entry I’m going to stop blogging this series. It’s not because of the political incorrectness of the series, the stereotypes or the negative comments I’ve gotten about it. I still like this series a lot, but I hardly have any inspiration to write about it for every single episode, so I thought that I’d better quit while I’m ahead, before I burn out completely. It was a nice experiment definitely, and when I started blogging this series, I hoped that it’d be like Master of Epic (which was a lot of fun to blog for me when it aired), but the episodes are just too short for that. Perhaps I’m going to do some compilation posts along the way, but I’m not going to promise this.