You know, I didn’t really notice this among underlooked series as Shangri-la, Konnichiwa Anne and Natsu no Arashi, but Guin Saga also is starting to move under the radar this season. I mean, for as far as I know I’m the only one who’s still blogging it, and you hardly see anyone talk about it anymore. It’s a shame, because this series is pretty darn good.

This episode was an intermezzo between two big battles against the mongol army, and the biggest focus is Guin, as he tries to go after his past in a gamble that might give him the key to victory. We finally learn a bit about who the heck he was before his mind-wipe, although it’s still a bunch of vague hints. I especially liked that dream sequence of his. It was totally psychedelic, but it was nice to watch. At the end of the episode, we also encounter someone who looks surprisingly much like Guin himself, or at least in terms of clothing.

In the rest of the episode, the rest of the cast is fleshed out a bit. Remus gets finally a bit of confidence when he succeeds in making an arrow, while Amnelis is shown to be the stuck up princess that she is when she’s wasting precious water in the middle of a desert by washing her hair.

Though I do have some things that I’ve been wondering: why did the ape-men have an armour that perfectly fitted Guin? How did they get him a horse when they don’t use those animals themselves? It remains a bit strange. Also, I’m not really sure why Guin chose this moment to chase after his path. I didn’t exactly pick up what exactly he felt was so important about his past that made him so confident about winning.

Rating: * (Good)
A building-up episode, but it had a very good air of mystery.

Aha! And now we’ve really gotten to the good part! At the second half of this episode, the storyline finally completely diverges from that of the original series, and this is really the point I’ve been waiting for. And I must say, that something really strange has to happen in order to cause me to like the original series better. Even though at the same point, the original series had the advantage that it had already better fleshed out characters due to the bigger episode count, I still consider this episode to be better in every single way than its counterpart in the original series.

This episode really shows that this series was made for those who watched the original series. The point at which the story-lines diverge came at a point at which the fighting in the original series completely stopped, and instead Lust appears from out of nowhere and kills the armor that Ed had been fighting. And I must say that Envy also made a pretty large impression on me. In the original series, I never really knew what to think of him: he was there, he probably was the strongest of the Humonculi… and yet he never was involved in anything that important. For me, it just felt like he was a character for which the creators had no inspiration what to do with, yet had to include somewhere due to manga obligations.

This episode also saw the introduction of the Bomb Alchemist Kimblee, who in the original series felt rather annoying to me so I hope that this time he’s going to be better. In fact, the more I write about this series, the more I wonder why the heck I rated it so highly in the first place. The more I watch this series, the more flaws that seem to stand out (but then again, it did have a few parts it was great at).

But in any case, the thing I loved in this episode was the way it wasn’t afraid to quickly switch between tension and comedy to break up the mood. Especially Barry was hilarious, but even during the big climax, we quickly saw Ed’s arm failing and Envy joking around. These tactics are obviously very bad if a series doesn’t have a sense of humour, but in this case it really works well. There were many points later in this episode in which I had no idea whether to laugh or sympathize.

Rating: ** (Excellent)
We’ve finally arrived at the point where the series diverges from the original, and it’s starting off really well.

The more I watch of this show, the more I’m convinced: Cross Game is bloody brilliant. It’s really hard to put to words why, but I know of very few shows hat have such a dynamic sense of storytelling as this series has. Every single scene, even the most seemingly unimportant one, feels creative and fresh. Even though no major plot twist has happened at all since Wakaba’s death in episode one, there’s just such an awesome dynamic chemistry between the members of the cast. Not just the important characters, but even the simple side-characters feel like they have their own life. If it goes on like this, then it really feels like this series is going to raise the bar for high school dramas here.

This series is so full of these simple ideas that at the same time show how well the creators understand their characters. For example at the beginning of this episode, Akaishi sees Momiji for the first time, who is currently at the same age of Wakaba when she first died. And it really strikes how similar the two of them are now that the creators mention it. And it’s like Akaishi said: it’s still hard to believe that Wakaba was such a small girl when she died.

This episode also showed some epic spying skills by Kou and Akaishi. It’s so weird and stupid when you look at them, knowing that they’ve hidden themselves, and yet you really wouldn’t suspect it if you simply were training. The match in the upcoming should prove to be very interesting, because it’s going to feature to teams with a number of talented players (and one disaster of a pitcher) that don’t come together as a team. It’s probably going to come down to Kou’s pitching versus Azuma’s batting, but I’m really curious what the creators can make of it when they’ve already done such a fine job with the building up. I remember how you were hardly ever able to predict how a match in Touch would end, so who knows that Cross Game also has these sorts of nice surprises up its sleeve. ^^;

Rating: ** (Excellent)
Still carefully fleshing out its characters, but it’s subtlety and wit still continue to shine.