Ah, the match is over, and Cross Game is back to what it’s best at: Slice of Life. After sitting through an entire baseball match that lasted for three full episodes, even though it was just a practice match, showed me that that was the flaw of this series: during these matches, there simply is no room for this series to show what it’s really good at, and when this continues for three episodes in a row, it does get annoying. And I think that that was the main difference with Touch: Touch excelled in its matches, while its slice of life moments are vastly inferior to Cross Game’s.

And that’s why I’m really glad to see the slice of life back, because it really is as witty as ever. We get introduced to a new character, one of Senda’s childhood friends. It’s good to have this guy growing into something more than a comic relief character, and this episode definitely portrayed him as a real person. Definitely a plus. Anyway, that friend of his keeps bugging Aoba for a match, even though Aoba really doesn’t care. It’s also interesting that Aoba has no intentions of joining a high school with a girl’s baseball team. I really wonder what’s behind that, if she’s so much into the sport.

Another running thread through this episode was Wakaba’s birthday, and Kou and Aoba are the ones who still remember it, both in their own ways. Aoba has bought some flowers to put on her grave, while Kou seems be completing a list of birthday gifts that Wakaba compiled when she was still alive, apparently. The problem however is that he doesn’t have enough money, and so we see him throughout the episode accompanying the baseball manager and her friends in order to get his hands on the item Wakaba wanted.

What this episode also did was make the town this series plays in feel alive. They’re these nice touches, like when Daiki came out of Wac Donalds and saw Kou as a passer-by, or how there are at least two high schools in the area. Alone they may seem pretty insignificant, but when all combined together, they give a pretty good feel of the place that Kou and the others live in, and you can see that when characters aren’t the main focus of the screenwriters, they still are doing things on their own, instead of waiting for the camera to focus back onto them.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
Thankfully the baseball match is over and this show has returned to where it’s best at.

I’m noticing something pretty weird with this series. Scenes that were nearly the same as in the first season suddenly turn out to have much more impact when compared to when I watched them for the first time. I should be getting bored right now, for having to rewatch the same thing all over again, and yet I’m not…

So yeah, this episode tells the Izumi arc. It’s pretty similar to the original series one, with again some notable differences: Ed and Al never went back to the island they were dropped off at (I’m not really sure why they wanted to go back there so badly… probably nostalgia), and so they never met Wrath. We also learn that in Brotherhood, Ed hates his father even more than he did in the original series, and Hohenheim in his turn looked nothing like the caring yet stupid father who simply was too long away from home for some reason.

But the scene that hit me the most was where Izumi discovered that Ed and Al had tried to revive their mother, and the way she related their hardships to her own loss of her dead-born child. She didn’t bash them into the ground, like I remember her doing in the original series, but instead she immediately recognized that she should have told the two of them about how one should never attempt to revive the dead.

It’s interesting how the homunculi have played such a small role so far. At this point in the original series, we had Wrath wreaking havoc, there was Greed (who also didn’t show up yet), and they were much more involved with the storyline. Here, all they did was preventing people from getting too close to the philosopher’s stone. At the same time I’m also wondering whether Izumi’s teacher still is the same person, and whether she still also is the one behind the homunculi like she was in the first series (if you’ve read the manga, please don’t spoil, because I’d like to find that one out through watching the series ;)).

Rating: ** (Excellent)
Izumi’s proper introduction, and despite the lack of action a great addition to this series.

I was pretty excited when I first saw Koukaku no Regios, or Chrome-Shelled Regios as it’s called in English. It promised a grand setting with many different sides to it, a large cast of different characters and a really interesting sense of mystery that all seemed to lie behind it. That’s why it’s such a shame to see what kind of an utterly mismanaged mess it turned into.

Take the following analogy: suppose you have a beautiful multi-layered birthday cake. Koukaku no Regios, instead of focusing on this entire cake just keeps staring at one of the candles, while hardly having any attention for the delicious rest of it. It presents a post-apocalyptic world, in which people can only live withing walking cities. It’s full of strange creatures like glowing goats, mutant bugs, who all have their own role and purpose, and behind the world seems a grand complot by people with dog-faces. And what does this series decide focus on? An inconsequential harem that never really gets anywhere! Talk about a let-down.

If the love polygon was good, it would have been able to excuse at least something, but unfortunately it even screws up there. Basically we have our lead character Layfon, and a bunch of girls who are in love with him. Layfon has a ton of girls swarming over him, but in the end none of these relationships get any substantial development, with perhaps the exception of Nina, who only gets blander as the show goes on.

This blandness syndrome by the way can be found in more characters in this series. Felli starts out as a nice wise-cracking and witty girl, but only gets more and more generic as the series goes on. Dalsiena turns from a past-driven character into a generic side-kick, Naruki gets turned from a headstrong policewoman in useless harem-bait, Salinvan turns from a skilled mercenary into an emo kid who can’t forget the past, Harley Sutton turns from an interesting side-character into an incredibly generic one devoid of any personality, and DO NOT get me started on Savaris.

So yeah, because the main storyline pops up so late in this series, the finale simply becomes a disaster. The creators start pulling random powers out of their asses, characters who were in one episode very badly wounded are completely fine in the next one, the plot twists really come from absolutely nowhere and because the main storyline received so little attention, none of it really makes an impact and therre are SO MAY questions that are left unresolved after that final episode.

The salvation for this series that I can see is if a second season got announced. Regios has potential, and I still remain convinced of that. If a second season would come, and make optimal use of the building up that this series has provided, then it’s going to rock beyond belief. The characters who didn’t turn into paper bags were interesting enough to watch and there were definitely good parts in this series. It’s just that there was too much crap that overshadowed it. The creators never knew how to properly pace and outline their series and in a way, the one behind the series composition seems to be the one to blame for this. Yes Mamiko Ikeda, shame on you.