This episode mostly followed the original series again, with only a few subtle differences here and there. The most notable event of course being Hughes. I remember, when I watched the first series that his death didn’t make that much of an impact, so I didn’t expect much of this episode. But damn… seeing his daughter at his funeral nearly got me a bit teary-eyed.

So again Hughes dies because he learns too much. I’m not exactly sure how Lust knew exactly when and where he would find this out (are uber-stalking powers also among the arsenal of the homunculus skills or something?), but in any case he realizes what the homunculi are planning, and also that something is very fishy with the Fuhrer, and thus gets killed off before he can spread the word.

One of the differences with the first series is that the creators here don’t try to hide the fact that the Fuhrer is a bad guy at all. In the first series, he looked more like a nice grandpa than anything else. That’s nice and all, but on retrospect I do have to wonder how that guy became a Fuhrer in the first place, and ended up ordering the Ishbal massacre.

Ed and Al meanwhile are busy with completely different things as they travel to their teacher in the search for answers to the Philosophers’ Stone. Unfortunately Winry ends up inviting herself again. I was hoping that she would have gotten to stay home this time, but let’s hope that she’s at least going to be more useful than she was in the first series. I never really understood her popularity. All she did was fix Ed’s limbs at the beginning of the series, and then just continued on in pointless adventures that didn’t really matter in the end.

Rating: * (Good)
Mostly the same as the first series, nevertheless it had one particularly touching scene.

Well, the baseball matches really are like the rest of this series: very slow paced. This entire episode was simply focused on the baseball match between the good team and the bad team, and the next episode will probably see its conclusion. It was really meant to show that Kou is still inexperienced, despite his talents, and Azuma is just very talented since he just keeps hitting home-runs off the guy.

But yeah, the entire good team really deserves its reputation: even Akaishi can’t get a hit out of that pitcher. This episode also was about the third years: even though they weren’t talented at all, they just want to make some memories during their final year of high-school. Quite charming.

This mostly turns out to be an episode in which we see different sides of everyone. Kou no longer is that confident as we thought him to be, Lisa now that she has lost her lackey suddenly starts behaving entirely different, Senda is becoming less of a loser, and instead just becomes arrogant now that he’s found something he’s good at. Definitely a great building-up episode, though I don’t have a lot to say about it.

Rating: * (Good)
Nice build-up and subtle character-development.

I have no idea how horrifically bad the original Futakoi was, and I really don’t want to find out. Still, having heard that its sequel, Futakoi Alternative was nothing like it, completely different and story-wise had nothing to do with it; that it was supposed to be a really random and experimental series, my interest got sparked. After watching it, I do have to say: Futakoi Alternative was indeed a fine attempt to add some originality into the harem genre. But it’s in NO WAY perfect.

The show tells about a 21-year-old guy whose father resembles Nabeshin and whose yakuza friend looks like that guy from Getbackers, who works as a private investigator and has two cute 15-year-old assistants/girlfriends (pedophilia, anyone?). But those two girls aren’t just two regular cute girls; no, they’re twins. In fact, this show is full of them: they’re all identical twins (on a side-note: have there EVER been twins in anime that aren’t identical?), they even dress the same, have the same hairstyle, hair-length and love interest. The only things at which they differ are their personality and one accessory that they have different. And that’s the case for every single one of them. Seriously, it feels like the designers simply went through a checklist to create all of them.

Futakoi Alternative can really be classified as one of those series that are just… weird. It basically consists out of two subplots: one is a quiet character-study between the lead character and the twins; the second one… is about the quest to destroy an evil mutant squid who breathes fire. Yeah it’s like combining Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann with True Tears in one show. Especially that first episode is very misleading: it’s extremely fast paced. full of explosions and awesome animation, only for the pacing the next seven or so episodes to slow down completely and the show taking itself much more seriously.

But there’s one thing that this series does really well: the narration. Basically, the narrator is the lead character himself, but his lines are inspired and quite a significant amount of time is spent on the history of the different characters: to show how they were a couple of years before the start of the story. That really helped to prevent these people from turning into a bunch of paper bags and they’re quite enjoyable to watch.

In the end though, this is a series that you don’t want to be taking seriously. Not just because of the evil squids and all, but also because of the huge amount of plot-holes. Especially in the second half, this show likes to take huge leaps through its logic and some of the most urging questions are never answered: why did the twins choose the lead character, of all people, to go to (no really; they’re just there… no explanation whatsoever)? Why did nobody object to such a ridiculous arranged marriage? Why did that awesome cop get so little screen-time!?

It’s really strange: this show really had a surprisingly solid middle part; I was really taking this show seriously when the evil Nazi squids suddenly popped up from out of nowhere and turned out to be the source of all evil (no, seriously). It’s definitely different and original which is something that the harem genre really needs, but I feel that even without the weirdness, it would have been an even better series.

There are a lot of things wrong with this series. For example, if the creators weren’t obliged to insert cameos from the original series that really have absolutely NOTHING to do with the story at all, they could have used this extra time to fill in the plot-holes left. We’ve really got ourselves an enjoyable show here, but because we never know why the three lead characters got together in the first place, it lacks foundations a bit.