Ugh, recap.

So yeah, most of this episode was just clips from previous episodes. Thankfully this is one of my favourite shows, so I didn’t mind to rewatch all of the great stuff that happened so far, but still. There was some new material that played three months after the previous episode. Apparently, Reiji was hit, though not in his fatal areas and he managed to recover, and now he seems to have gone back to Inferno. Scythe meanwhile has fled the organization, but he doesn’t seem to have fully given up on destroying them. Oh, and McCunnen seems to have lost a younger brother a few years ago.

So yeah, that’s pretty much it. I’m very much looking forward to the next episode now, and how Drei is going to fit in everything.
Rating: (Enjoyable)
Yeah, recap.

Ah, finally it’s time for Raven to reveal how he ended up with the Nightray family. This episode mainly talks about his past, and again it was quite an enjoyable episode. But something is bothering me. Some of the comments on last week’s entry talked about how this chapter was supposed to be one of the best of the series, but I don’t really see why; there have been much more impressive episodes so far. This one felt more like a solid build-up. And besides, even if this was supposed to be the best part of the series, then what does that mean for the rest of the story?

Still, I was pretty surprised to learn that Vincent is Gilbert’s younger brother, that was pretty random. Another surprise is that he also seems to have made contact with a being called “Raven”, probably in an attempt to get Oz back. Which apparently failed since Oz found a way to get back on his own. It also turns out that Vincent isn’t like Break in that he doesn’t age. Instead, ten years ago he was just a child as well, which begs the question of who was with Alice when she was younger. My guess now would be Oscar.

This episode also marks the return of Oscar, which at least also answers the question of where he went, although I am still curious as to what happened to Oz’s father. It’s going to be interesting if the two of them ever got to meet each other again. I’m interested to see how this guy changed over the past ten years.
Rating: * (Good)
Not among this series’ highlights but a solid episode on Gilbert’s past nonetheless.

Well, you can really see that the animation director has changed, because the animation really is abysmal. Seriously, this episode was full of horribly distorted faces and rushed drawings. I think there were only two or three shots where you could see that time was spent on making them look good. The animation was very shoddy (just take a look at Dan and his basketball: physics don’t work that way!). Only the CG didn’t suffer from his influence.

As for the change of directors, you can also notice that, but at least this guy isn’t as much of a disaster as the new animation director. This guy thankfully is competent at what he does: he knows how to build up and flesh out characters, and the characters act natural enough. But something is definitely missing: the chaos and the randomness that made the first bunch of episodes so enjoyable.

In the first couple of episodes, there really was so much going on at the same time: every character had his or her own agenda. This episode… just concentrated on the little princess and Dan walking around town and Sera visiting the grave of her mother. The rest of the characters only had one or two scenes in which they really didn’t do anything and were… sleeping through the major part of this episode I guess. Oh, we did have Iceman who paid a visit to his rival again, but that also pretty much was a pointless visit.

All in all though, it’s a bloody shame that the staff was fired in the middle of the production. Satelight already is understaffed this season with no less than three series they’re working on at the same time. Guin Saga already showed that they lack the man-power to animate everything correctly, and this really isn’t the best time for them to create a production goof-up. The worst thing is that they’ve had this before with Kiss Dum, and even though this doesn’t look to be as big of a disaster as Kiss Dum turned into, it does show that the producers haven’t really been learning from their mistakes of keeping all of the staff-related business going smoothly.

It’s going to be really difficult for this series to surpass itself now. It’s now all going to matter whether the creators can develop the characters right, and plan out the basketball matches correctly.
Rating: (Enjoyable)
Really bad animation, though an enjoyable build-up nonetheless.

Okay, so I was wrong in last week’s impression: this episode of Eden of the East was definitely an excellent one and a step above the previous episodes about Pantsu. This episode explained a lot, and I have to admit that these revelations were well worth it. Mr Outside was nowhere near the evil overlord I thought him to be, Mononobe didn’t turn out to have the motives of simply destroying the world. It turns out that this show really likes to use red herrings.

So as it turns out, Mr Outside was a rich businessman called Ato Saizo (har har har), who himself had a part in reconstructing Japan after the second World War. He then however started to wonder whether the society he helped to create was the right one, and so whimsically created Juiz and enslaved 12 people apparently against their will in his quest to improve Japan. Mononobe and another Selecao we meet in this episode simply want to escape this plan, and the only way to do so seems to be to win the game. Apparently it involves sending a whole bunch of missiles to Japan. The only one I didn’t like was Number 10. He really was an emo kid who hates the world and therefore decides to blow it up. I’m glad that he’s going to die soon.

Juiz turns out to be an AI, probably modelled after Ato Saizo’s secretary. Ato may be dead right now, but the real Juiz seems to be working behind the scenes, and she probably is the one who maintains the AI Juiz. In the meantime, it also turns out that number 12 is either the supporter, or another Selecao who doesn’t agree with Mononobe, and something tells me that he’s going to be the main villain of this series once the movie starts.

There’s one part I didn’t quite get though: what was up with the boat-load of NEETs that suddenly returned on the ship? Wasn’t one of those NEET shown as he managed to become active in the society again? Why is the rest of them still naked and captured? Didn’t they get the chance to pick up their lives or something?

Rating: ** (Excellent)
Finally some answers, and satisfying answers they are.